Former BJP MLA Subhash Guttedar and his son Harshananda Guttedar have been named as the prime accused in a charge sheet filed by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) which is probing alleged voter fraud in Aland Assembly constituency ahead of the 2023 Assembly elections.
The charge sheet, filed recently, also names six other accused. One person has been arrested in the case, while Subhash Guttedar and his son were granted anticipatory bail by the special court for elected representatives in Bengaluru on October 31.
In September this year, the Karnataka government formed a Special Investigation Team headed by Additional Director General of Police BK Singh. The SIT has submitted a preliminary chargesheet.
The chargesheet names Subhash Guttedar and his son Harshananda as the prime accused behind the conspiracy to illegally delete the names of nearly 6,000 voters between December 9, 2022, and February 20, 2023.
It was allegedly on Subhash’s instructions that his son Harshananda and their associate Thipperudra acted. Father and son also allegedly directed Akram Pasha, his brother Aslam Pasha and another relative Ashfaq Ahmed, to carry out the conspiracy to delete voters’ names from the electoral rolls. The chargesheet also names Bapi Adya, of West Bengal, for providing mobile numbers and OTPs to carry out the alleged fraud.
Investigators found that on the instructions of Subhash Guttedar, who was the MLA of Aland, Harshananda and Thipperudra went door-to-door to collect documents and other information while falsely claiming to be carrying out government-authorised verification. They helped to identify voters who might not vote for Subhash, who had won the Aland seat in 2018 with a margin of a few hundred votes. They handed that information to Aslam and Ashfaq through Akram.
Akram, Aslam and Ashfaq allegedly carried out the online submission of fraudulent Form 7 applications on the National Voter Service Portal which is run and maintained by the ECI.
They realised that they could use any mobile number, even a number unconnected with the actual voter, to create a user ID and log in to the NVSP. They also realised that they only needed a password to log in and that they would not be logged out automatically after a fixed time period. Once logged in, they could submit any number of applications through a single user ID. The original voter does not receive any notification when a deletion application is submitted, the chargesheet said.
The three accused submitted 5,994 fraudulent applications on the NVSP after creating unauthorised login IDs using mobile numbers and OTPs bought from Bapi Adya, who provided them through a service called OTP Bazar.
They were allegedly paid Rs 80 per application, and the SIT suspects that a total of Rs 4.8 lakh was paid to carry out the illegal deletions.
Akram and his relatives also gathered Aadhar cards, mobile numbers and personal data from voters by misrepresenting themselves.
Background
Aland MLA BR Patil had filed a complaint with the Election Commission of India alleging that there had been concerted attempts to illegally delete the names of voters in his constituency.
The ECI then lodged a complaint with the Aland Police Station in Kalaburagi on February 21, 2023. However, the CID probe barely made any headway, with the ECI refusing to share technical data despite the CID writing 18 letters asking for it.
The Election Commission issued a press release on September 19, 2025, saying that the ECI had received 6,018 applications for deletion online. Of these 5,994 were rejected as they were found to be “incorrect” and only 24 were approved.
The SIT raided the houses of Guttedar, his sons Harshananda and Santhosh, and their chartered accountant Mallikarjun Mahantagol in October 2025.
Days after these raids, heaps of burnt voter records were found near Subhash Guttedar’s residence in the district. Guttedar told reporters that the documents were burnt as part of a cleanliness drive ahead of a festival and denied any malicious intent. “If we had some ulterior motive, we would not have burnt it in front of our house,” he said.