Writing began in Southern Mesopotamia sometime in 3,500 BC, when a group of Sumerians living in the Euphrates Valley found that recording data is crucial to affairs of state. Until then, numbers were stored inside Sapien’s forager brains, which had limited processing capacity. The Sumerians changed the game by drawing squiggles representing numbers on clay tablets; one doodle was translated into “signed Kushim”.
Kushim—the first human name recorded in history—had recorded a trade transaction about measures of barley. His scrawls and scratches are the first examples of data in the world. Linguists call Kushim’s script partial writing which is of no help in writing poems, essays or emails. This partial writing enabled imperial economies to tax subjects according to their sales and earnings. In today’s electoral go-backwards context, Kushim’s writing has made anything other than numbers redundant.
The irony is that Kushim was not a great statesman, emperor or seer: he was just a bureaucrat. Rajiv Kumar, the current chief election commissioner is not a Sumerian, but he knows numbers speak for themselves; or not. Kumar and his colleagues know data is the brick and mortar of elections. He has, maybe, found himself in a pickle after a report by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) concluded that someone has played cute with the ballot count.
To be fair to Godi media, they did report it, but unlike serious national issues like Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide or UFOs kidnapping cows, there were no non-stop coverage, judgment calls, media witch hunt or scurrilous debates on why, in 347 Lok Sabha seats, there were discrepancies in counting nearly six lakh votes, and why votes counted in some constituencies were either less than votes polled, or more votes were counted than polled.
Perhaps in the interim, counting the votes and making the total public, there lies some karmic mysticism that reflects ancient Indian culture and heritage because after all, it was Hindu mathematician Aryabhata who discovered zero and another Hindu scholar Brahmagupta, who used it in calculations. The EC must have included zeros here and there in tribute to our glorious arithmetic past. ADR hasn’t matched the discrepancies to any party; hence none can be blamed for rigging the elections.
Remember that anti-national Ashoka University prof who suggested possible manipulation of results in some seats by the BJP in 2019? Of course he was sacked, since the reputed university upholds academic freedom to send such truants packing. Kumar knows the enemies of the nation are at work and he must be eternally vigilant to pay the price of his liberty to not explain why his office didn’t release the polling numbers in the seventh phase; who doesn’t like strong silent men?
Looks like a conspiracy afoot by the Opposition to discredit nationalists. The allegation that BJP buys legislators doesn’t launder, er, I mean wash, since it was whole states that were bought with taxpayer’s largesse. Institutions, and the personalities involved, leave a legacy for posterity. TN Seshan, India’s most upright Election Commissioner, set the benchmark for protecting the ECI’s integrity from political machinations. He discovered over a hundred electoral malpractices and reformed the election process. Manipulating democracy is not a new phenomenon by august institutions worldwide, but treating it with contemptuous insouciance does not befit the position of the office bearer. But elections are for the party, by the party of the party. There, that’s settled.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com