NEW DELHI: An end-of-the-session protest march to the Rashtrapati is par for the course for the Opposition. But what stood out loud on Thursday, more than the leaders at the Bhawan forecourt, was the central point — the tampering of electronic voting machines, in the use for polling for the last three decades.
That a former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Congress president Sonia Gandhi were part of the delegation, seemed to raise the hackles of the Election Commission rather than the Union Government.
The EC issued a counter-statement. In the memorandum submitted to President Pranab Mukherjee, the Opposition leaders — of the Congress, the Left Parties, SP, BSP, TMC and DMK — demanded that the clock be set back and the elections be conducted on ballot papers once again. At least, 50 per cent of the polling should be on ballot paper and the rest on VVPAT (paper trail EVMs), was the specific demand.
The 16-party opposition’s ‘no confidence vote’ on the EVM, does put the Election Commission in a bind.
It, however, is not batting defensive yet. The doubts about the EVMs first arose out of BSP chief Mayawati’s disbelief about the BJP’s landslide victory in the UP Assembly and her party’s abysmal downslide. This was followed by AAP chief and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal voicing the same doubts about the Punjab results.
The Congress won the Punjab polls convincingly, still the party decided to champion the cause of ‘replace EVM with ballot paper’ after the vice president Rahul Gandhi picked up the issue. This was after media reports surfaced from Bhind and Dholpur about malfunctioning VVPAT machines through which only BJP symbol could be voted, whichever button was pressed.
The Election Commission team’s investigation report on the two incidents failed to wipe the opposition’s perception. Congress leader Veerappa Moily appeared to be the lone voice among the Opposition ranks, to say that it was a defeatist attitude to blame the EVMs for the results.
But the rest of the Congress leaders do not seem to be bothered that the move to find fault in the EVM, appeared a bit like a search for a fig leaf by Rahul Gandhi whose party won a meager five seats in UP.