Loss of any kind is often unexpected and always unwelcome. Therefore, the reaction of many candidates and their political parties to the loss they suffered in the recent assembly elections is understandable. Suffering is ordinarily a private affair. We would not have known the depth of the suffering of parties such as the AAP or BSP had they not gone public so openly.
While commiserating with them for their losses, one wonders why they should blame the voting machines to be the sole cause of their woes.
Success has only one father, namely, me while failure has many, mostly the others. How easy it is to assign my failure to a lifeless machine! It cannot protest and people might also believe those to be plausibly faulty. Even if some people believe that I lost because the electronic voting machines (EVMs) were tampered with, my honour is partly redeemed and I don’t have to find other reasons for my failure.
The recent campaign by some political parties against the EVMs that these had been strategically tampered with and fixed to record votes in favour of Congress in Punjab and BJP in Uttar Pradesh is to be seen in this perspective. Often people fail to muster courage to confront failure or loss, specially at a personal level and look around for alibis.
What is surprising is that the reaction of these political parties is so disproportionate to their losses. No one had seriously believed that AAP would form the government in Punjab or the BSP would win in UP. It is a different matter that these parties had nursed such grandiose ideas about their prowess and popularity. Now let’s see if their allegations carry any grain of credibility or truth.
The Election Commission has very categorically affirmed repeatedly that the EVMs are stand-alone machines, not networked and therefore are tamper-proof. During non-election months or years, these machines are stored in districts under the general control and supervision of the District Collector (DC), who is also the returning officer for the district concerned and is responsible for the safe conduct of elections under the overall supervision of the Election Commission of India.
During the recent elections in Punjab, the DCs were appointees of the Akali-BJP government and in UP they were appointed by the SP government. In fact, knowing how the state governments have been functioning over several decades now, not only the DCs but almost all key district-level officials are carefully selected and posted by the state government concerned after reasonably ensuring that they do not owe any allegiance or loyalty to the opposition parties.
Therefore, in Punjab or UP, the EVMs, majority of which were procured over long periods of time and possibly already used in previous elections, could have been accessed and tampered with in favour of the Congress party and BJP respectively only with the connivance of these district officials.
One would have to be either too naive or too clever even to think that the district-level officials in both these states surreptitiously went over to the opposition and tampered the EVMs to record votes in their favour.
For the sake of argument, therefore, even if the EVMs could be tampered with, they could not have been re-juggled across two large states and so comprehensively without anyone ever knowing about such action, including the obtrusive electronic media or opposition parties. We started hearing about these allegations only after the election results were declared.
Freedom of speech and expression allows us to make allegations of the wildest kind. But when such allegations are directed at institutions or objects such as the Election Commission or inanimate objects such as the EVMs, all those who make such allegations feel totally safe that no defamation will be charged against them, and that they can still persuade their disenchanted workers and supporters that not all is lost and the next time round they can possible win if the EVMs are replaced with ballot papers. The argument is similar to the colloquial saying that one who does not know how to walk properly blames the road for his fall.
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