Mumbai/IBNS: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has responded to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's claim of "match-fixing" in the 2024 state assembly elections and said the "one whom the public rejects, rejects the mandate."

His response comes a day after Gandhi, in an op-ed for The Indian Express, questioned the way the Maharashtra Assembly elections were conducted.

In the polls, the alliance of the Congress, the Sharad Pawar faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena suffered a humiliating defeat.

"If you cannot convince people, then confuse them. This is the policy that Rahul Gandhi is adopting," Fadnavis wrote in a Marathi daily on Sunday.

He said the Congress has been rejected by the people, which is why they are now tarnishing the image of democracy by blaming the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM).

"It has now become a habit for the opposition parties to raise questions on the EVM in every election in Maharashtra. All petitions against the EVM have been dismissed by the Supreme Court," Fadnavis wrote.

He also said that Gandhi is a leader "who cannot accept failure".

"Are EVMs right in the elections in which the Congress government wins?" he asked.

"Respect the mandate. The public is watching everyone. Now, excuses will not work, and the accountability will be fixed," he concluded.

The alliance of the Congress, Sharad Pawar faction of the NCP, and Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena, known as the Maha Vikas Aghadi, managed to win only 46 of the state's 288 assembly seats between them in the November 20 elections.

Meanwhile, the BJP-led alliance, Mahayuti, which comprised the then Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, secured 235 seats. The BJP alone won 132 seats, its best performance in the state's history.

Fadnavis' criticisms of Gandhi come after the Congress MP alleged electoral irregularities in the Maharashtra polls in a five-step manner.

What did Rahul Gandhi say?

"Step 1: Rig the panel for appointing the Election Commission, Step 2: Add fake voters to the roll, Step 3: Inflate voter turnout, Step 4: Target the bogus voting exactly where BJP needs to win, Step 5: Hide the evidence," Gandhi wrote in a post on X that accompanied a cutout of his June 7 op-ed.

In the article, the Leader of Opposition said he has "doubted the fairness of Indian elections, not every time, not everywhere, but often enough".

"I am not talking of small-scale cheating, but of industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of our national institutions," he wrote.

"But if some earlier election outcomes seemed odd, the outcome of the 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections is glaringly strange. The scale of rigging was so desperate that, despite all efforts to conceal it, tell-tale evidence has emerged from official statistics, without reliance on any nonofficial source, revealing a step-by-step playbook," he added.

He said that "rigging is like match-fixing - the fixing side might win a game, but irreparable damage is done to institutions and to people's faith in the result."

Match-fixed elections are a poison for any democracy," Gandhi said.

Following his X post, the Election Commission re-released a document it had issued in April this year and rubbished Gandhi's allegations as "completely absurd".