Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has demanded a Joint Parliamentary Committee investigation (JPC) into the exit poll-driven market rally ahead of the Lok Sabha election results last month.

“On May 19, the PM said the stock market is going to move fast, so invest. Then the home minister also asked people to invest in the market. After the exit polls were released on June 3, the stock market broke all records, but after the election results were released on June 4, the stock market fell, investors suffered a loss of Rs 30 lakh crore,” Kharge wrote in a post on X.

The Congress leader said that a Joint Parliamentary Committee investigation will determine who benefited and for whose benefit this was done. “Once SEBI releases all the data, everything will become transparent,” he added.

Soon after the election results were announced on June 4, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also levelled serious allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and sought a JPC investigation into what he described as the “biggest stock market scam”.

Gandhi questioned why top BJP leaders, including PM Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made comments about the stock market just days before the announcement of election results.

An average of all exit polls predicted that NDA was getting more than 350 seats after which the Sensex and Nifty saw massive gains above 3% on June 3. The exit polls were way off mark as the BJP-led NDA won 293 seats leading to a market crashing by 6% on June 4. The markets are now on a recovery path as Narendra Modi is set to return as the prime minister for the third time with the help of allies, specifically TDP and JDU.

The India Today-Axis MyIndia poll predicted 361- 401 seats for the BJP-led NDA. The INDIA bloc would win 131-166 seats, it said.

Trinamool Congress leader Saket Gokhale wrote to the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to conduct a regulatory probe into alleged stock market manipulation via exit polls, particularly by Axis MyIndia.

“The exit polls were clearly manipulated to rally the stock market. Lakhs of crores of investors’ money was later wiped off after the markets crashed. There must be an investigation to determine if pollsters like Axis MyIndia intentionally inflated the exit polls for the BJP. This is important because Axis MyIndia also had BJP as a client,” the Rajya Sabha MP added.