Logistical comparison of the EVM and the ballot paper | Faraz Ahmad

Elections were “looted” in the era of ballot papers also, no doubt but it was a cumbersome process, requiring substantial logistical support. For instance if a candidate fearing that voters in a particular area were casting their votes overwhelmingly in favour of his political adversary and thus undermining his prospects, he would engage at least half a dozen musclemen, arm them sometimes with even firearms and provide them a jeep or in today’s era a SUV to capture a couple of targeted polling booths, prevent the voters outside, forcibly enter the polling booths snatch the ballot papers, stamp these with their candidate’s symbol and flee the place.

All this took them at least 15 to 20 minutes at the minimum to succeed in manipulating the election if at all in favour of their candidate. If the candidate was targeting more than one or say a number of polling stations in a particular area where he or she apprehends the people are voting against him or her, so much more of the same expenditure was called for.

Contrast this with the present day situation. The BJP swept not just in Maharashtra, which considering the high stakes involved in giving Gautam Adani the Project Dharavi involving several lakh crores for Modi’s dear friend and trusted companion on most foreign tours. It was a matter of lie and death more for Gautam bhai than even Narendrabhai Damodardas, but in Assam, Bihar Rajasthan, in every BJP ruled-state that went for bye elections this November, how come the BJP won all the by elections? Such was presumably the sudden love for Modi sprang just four months after his defeat in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year! Mind you the BJP was as keen on winning Jharkhand as Maharashtra, because Gautam bhai had as much if not more stakes in this mineral rich state. The BJP had set the venomous communal leader from Assam Himanta Biswa Sarma and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath upon the Adivasis of Jharkhand. Both Sarma and Yogi swept their respective states, in these by elections, but failed to cut much ice in Jharkhand. Why? Because the official machinery was not under their command to manipulate the evm.

Remember the BJP won only 240 seats. But if we go by the Opposition charge and see even those seats with some political understanding, for instance if the Maharashtra voter chose to teach a deserter like Ajit Pawar a lesson causing him to fall flat on his nose in the Lok Sabha polls, how come in Bihar they rewarded Nitish Kumar who from all available news reports had lost all his shine following his desertion of the secular INDIA bloc to go and literally touch Modi’s feet, which was widely criticised even by former Nitish admirers. Yet Nitish won as many seats as the BJP which has a strong base among the upper caste, in particular the Bhumihar, Brahmin and Lala voters of Bihar. It made little sense to me for Nitish to win as many seats as the BJP or Chiragh Paswan winning five out of six seats his party contested on the Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP) ticket, where the media reports suggested that except for himself and his close relative he had no other candidate and made a neat sum selling tickets to a few aspirants.

The Supreme Court may reject petition after petition against the use of Electronic Voting Machine (EVM). But it needs to sit back and ponder over how election after election the credibility of the evm is brought into question, and the critics holding several live performances to show the susceptibility of the evm starting with one time front rank leader of the Congress party and former Punjab chief minister Capitan Amrinder Singh to BJP leader G.V.L. Narasimha Rao on behalf of veteran BJP leader L.K. Advani post 2009 polls to Congress president Mailkarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and a host of present day Opposition leaders. Supreme Court may rhetorically dismiss all petitions questioning the evm.

Even if we accept the efficacy of the machine per se, the recent results first in Haryana and now in Maharashtra show how the numbers have been hiked much after the polling closed at certain polling booths. Moreover, if the policemen can raise guns at Muslim women voters to shoo them back to their homes without casting their votes, what does it prove? That if the bureaucracy were working as the hand maiden of the ruling BJP in its states, then its rival has no chance to win for the votes will only be cast in favour of the BJP candidate. Isn’t that manipulation of the machine?

As I mentioned above, earlier you required a lot of paraphernalia, involving huge costs to capture polling stations to manipulate results in your favour, specially in the Hindi heartland, but now all you need is to post your choice of men as polling officers as polling staff who just had to press the machine before or after the polling time began or ended, which ever might be the case. It has become so much simpler and foolproof for the Election Commission and the higher courts to just sneer and dismiss the opposition plea. Has the Election Commission stopped polling in Kundarki assembly constituency and order repoll under its special supervisor after witnessing the blatant misuse of UP police to prevent anti-BJP voters from casting their votes? Wasn’t this the usual whenever the reports of booth capturing or manipulation of polling reached the EC prior to the advent of the evm?

Lastly, it is worth remembering whose idea it was to introduce the evm, T.N. Seshan. And when? After the 1994 Bihar assembly elections when despite his best efforts and for all his animus against the then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad, he failed to unseat the Mandal leader, whom he despised badly, as many urban upper caste across the country did and still do.