Given the size of India’s electorate, EVMs are possibly the only way for free and fair elections
The seemingly constant rumble that one hears in the background is the sound of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah operated steamroller, which is paving the road ahead for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is undoubtedly the most successful election-winning machine in Indian political history. State after State and election after election all the way from civic polls to General Elections, the success of this behemoth is frightening opponents, who like cartoon characters in a 1980s animated television show, are flattened into pancakes. While Mamata Banerjee heads a rearguard defence against the BJP, other opponents have been flattened and various political entities have seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet.
But has this all been achieved as some defeated opponents vociferously claim by the miracles of hacked Electronic Voting Machines (EVM’s) of the Election CommissionIJ One Aam Aadmi Party legislator Saurabh Bhardwaj purported to show how a machine could be hacked in the Delhi Assembly, albeit with a fake machine which had to be physically manhandled, a proper ‘hack’ job so to speak. Others like Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav use the data of seats where voting was conducted with EVMs and without EVMs to ‘demonstrate’ that EVMs favour the BJP. Worse still, seemingly literate senior journalists brazenly lie about EVMs; one noted BJP-baiting journalist claimed that EVMs could be hacked over Bluetooth! It appears that political parties, and several political journalists, sadly some of them with decades of experience covering elections, have forgotten the bad old days of politics.
The advent of the EVM has not completely stopped electoral fraud by musclemen, a case in point being West Bengal a State where a truly ‘free and fair’ election has possibly never taken place, but it has kept fraud in check. It is impossible to ‘stuff’ ballot boxes like in the bad old days when bahubalis in the northern States came out to run their writ at the booth. Elections in India are on the whole relatively free and fair, and coupled with a level of Hindu revivalism and the caste-arithmetic of the BJP, it has enabled their run of success. Sore losers always blame something other than their own ineptitude for failure, bad refereeing in a football match or EVM’s hacked to give every vote to the BJP’s ‘lotus’ symbol in this case.
It has to be admitted that it was BJP leaders lK Advani and GVlN Rao who first raised the EVM bogey in the aftermath of the 2009 General Election. They were not right back then, but as a result of the noise they raised, the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) system was developed. And to keep complaints down in the present the VVPAT system should be rolled out across EVM machines in the country. Going back to the traditional paper ballot and ballot box would make elections in India not only logistically near impossible, hugely expensive and environmentally unfriendly but will almost certainly lead to greater electoral violence and the return of muscle-power across the board. Thankfully, while the Congress initially fed these claims about ‘doubtful’ EVM’s, they have become more responsible. Possibly thanks to their irresponsible friends in the media. The Election Commission has a duty towards busting all these myths and it should actively persecute those who question democracy in India. Because despite the noise created by the haters, we are still a Republic. Indeed an imperfect one, but a Republic nonetheless.