Congress leader Pawan Khera took to social media to sharply rebut the allegations. The controversy began when BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya insinuated that external forces, specifically USAID, were attempting to influence voter turnout in India. On Sunday, the Bharatiya Janata Party criticised a now-defunct US-funded initiative aimed at increasing voter turnout. This spat was further fuelled by a statement from the United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an agency led by billionaire Elon Musk, which recently declared that it had cancelled a series of international funding projects. Among these was the $21 million allocated for voter turnout, according to the DOGE statement. In another tweet, he further accused George Soros, a financier with alleged ties to the Congress party, of being behind this interference. He pointed to a 2012 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the ECI and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organisation funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which had also received backing from USAID. S Y Quraishi, who served as the Chief Election Commissioner during that period, responded by stating that while there was indeed a MoU signed in 2012, any claims regarding funding were \”completely false and malicious\”
