“Right if we win, Wrong if we lose!”
Maha Vikas Aghadi parties are not ready to accept the recent electoral mandate in Maharashtra. MVA leaders are now planning anti-EVM protests to demand replacing Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) with ballots. NCP founder Sharad Pawar and Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray met all defeated candidates on Wednesday and instructed them to file election petitions for matching EVM results with those of VVPATs. Plans are afoot to set up legal teams in the state and in Delhi.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge has already demanded that all EVMs should be replaced with ballots, with BJP leaders accusing that the Congress is now desperate and should rather replace Rahul Gandhi as its leader. Congress leaders argue that in June this year, MVA had won 30 out of 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, but five months later, MVA won only 48 out of 288 assembly seats. How can this be possible, they ask.
Probably Congress leaders forgot that in June, 2019, BJP had won all 7 Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, but eight months later, BJP could win only eight out of a total 70 assembly seats in Delhi. If we go backwards, in 2014, BJP had won all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi by a huge margin, but a few months later, when assembly elections were held, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party registered a historic landslide win (67 out of 70 seats).
How voters can change their minds after such a short time gap can be illustrated from this year’s Lok Sabha results. BJP’s tally was 240 in this year’s Lok Sabha election. At that time, for the Congress, EVM was a boon. Nobody questioned about EVM battery, nor demanded matching with VVPAT results. Had BJP crossed the 300-mark, Congress would then have blamed its defeat on EVMs. Rahul Gandhi would, by now, have started his ‘Bring Ballots’ Padyatra.
Questions began to be raised after BJP’s victory in this year’s Haryana assembly election. Questions were raised about EVM batteries that were displaying 99 per cent charging. The Election Commission responded with a 1,500-page long reply. When questions were raised about VVPATs, EC replied that nearly 4 crore votes were matched with VVPAT results, and not a single result was found incorrect.
One interesting point to note is that, when the first complaints were raised about EVMs, Election Commission organized a Hackathon challenging anybody to come forward and hack an EVM. None came forward.
The issue was raised several times in the Supreme Court and every time, the apex court dismissed every petition. Anybody having any concrete proof or genuine grounds, can file petitions. Those who went to courts without any solid proof and put forth arguments based on surmises, had to return empty-handed.
To argue that EVMs worked correctly in Jharkhand and were fudged in Maharashtra is not a good thing for democracy. Seeding baseless doubts in the minds of people about the electoral process can create a situation as is being witnessed in neighbouring Pakistan.