If electronic voting machines (EVM) have been hacked and are being used by the ruling party to subvert our democracy, then they should be replaced with ballot papers. It is about the very integrity of our republic. There can be no argument or quarrel about this. But there are two central questions that need to be answered here.
One, is a good majority of the electorate, the largest stakeholder, convinced that their vote has been stolen? Two, has it been convincingly and conclusively proven before a competent authority, like the Supreme Court of India, that it has been hacked? There is a sea of difference between saying EVMs can be hacked and have been hacked. Elections take place in a complex environment, under the gaze of millions. The question then is, have EVMs been hacked under such hypervigilance?
The hacking of the EVM in a somewhat static lab setting is very different from its manipulation in a dynamic public setting. Of course, EVMs are man-made machines; they can be made to behave differently by smart professionals. But can this be done publicly in the midst of several things at simultaneous play? If they can, evidence will have to be in real-time, not in retrospect.
This is also the nature of a commonsensical question that haunts an ordinary voter. It may be a stupid query for intelligent folks in the Congress, the biggest doubters of EVMs at this juncture (the biggest doubters before 2014 was the BJP). But they must answer it with patience and real-time evidence. Or else the party’s credibility may be eroded, and its base may shrink further.
The credibility part is somewhat understood. But why will the party’s base likely shrink if it continues to discredit EVMs? We will come to this later, but first take into cognisance that the Congress has said it wishes to take out a nationwide yatra against EVMs and seek the return of ballot papers. If it follows through with its threat, what will the party tell people during the yatra? In 1971, when the Congress party under Indira Gandhi won a big election, the then Jan Sangh leader Balraj Madhok had accused the Congress of using ‘chemicalised ballot papers’ to rig the elections. This was ballot capturing, not ‘booth capturing’ that was familiar to the times.
At the proposed EVM yatra, will the Congress make it about their word against that of the Union government, Supreme Court, Election Commission, all the winning candidates (including of their own party), the millions of activists and supporters of political parties? Or will we see Rahul Gandhi standing at street corners educating his audience with a dummy machine, discredited as Congress’s machine? This exercise may end up being seen as an effort to provoke a civil strife.
The BJP has cheekily asked if the EVM yatra route will include states and constituencies where the Congress has won. But not so funnily, even in constituencies that saw the BJP win, it is not that the candidate received 100 percent votes. In most cases, the sum total of votes garnered by all losers would be higher.
Ours is a first-past-the-post system, and the margins of victory may be small or moderate. Most winning candidates do not get 50 percent of the votes polled. No general election after the first one held in 1952 has ever seen a winning party get over 50 percent vote share. Given the enormous size of people that the losers may bring to the streets, it may automatically become an invitation for a civil strife, if not a full-fledged civil war.
If there is indeed such a provocation, does the Congress expect Prime Minister Narendra Modi to invoke an internal emergency, just like former PM Indira Gandhi did? Is this actually a trap the Congress is trying to set for Modi? After all, Indira Gandhi had also alleged that Jayaprakash Narayan was causing civil unrest across India and he was provoking even the police and armed forces to rebel.
Is the Congress capable of such a game now? Will Modi allow things to come to such a pass? Can the narrative about hacked EVMs be read as a strategy for this civil strife and not a genuine grievance? Or is this high-decibel EVM talk of the Congress being done in anticipation of something that may strike the party soon? Does this become another conspiracy theory in conspiratorial times?
There may be a diagonally opposite outcome from this obsessive EVM talk, which is that it may lead to the shrinking of the party’s base. It may provoke greater communal polarisation of votes. It may be read by the majority as intolerance to a mandate that ensures majoritarian interests. It may be seen as a clandestine foreign agenda or a minority agenda. Both these narratives are anyway already in circulation.
Plus, the logic in people’s minds may have another twist. They may ask, why did Modi not manipulate the machines to get a simple majority in June 2024? Why would he be so carelessly honest when he is himself on the ticket, but will risk everything to make someone a chief minister in Haryana or Maharashtra? Hence, this EVM talk may finally end up making Modi even stronger.
For the 2024 general elections, the Congress developed a ‘save democracy’ and ‘save Constitution’ campaign. But Modi has crafted an elaborate institutional response to the Congress’ campaign. He has celebrated the 75 years of the making of the Constitution; pushed for a memorialisation of the emergency; placed B R Ambedkar at the centre of his regime’s adulation and introduced other measures. This has somewhat robbed the Congress of what it thought was its exclusive electoral plank. The absence of any other cultural narrative had made the Congress embrace the ‘save democracy’ narrative by default, just before 2024.
The Congress in the last five decades has also suffered from the guilt of having imposed the Emergency. But with Rahul Gandhi’s self-righteous pitch and positioning, the party had thought it had unloaded the guilt. But they may have come to realise that history haunts the present because of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s continuous presence over the last 50 years. And dynasty was, after all, an emergency idea.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi
(Views are personal)
(sugata@sugataraju.in)