It’s not just EVMs, the whole electoral process is compromised

In my tiny village above Shimla, the only sounds one hears in the total stillness of the nights are the howling of jackals, the calls of a barking deer, the rhythmic hooting of a barn owl, or the rare coughing of a wandering leopard. But now I am back in the NCR and what I mainly hear, post the declaration of election results on 23 November, is a familiar lachrymose chorus from opposition parties who got the short end of the stick: the election was stolen from us.

They probably were. There is no direct evidence of this, of course; there rarely is in an inside job, and when the government and ruling party themselves commit the heist, who do you think is interested in collecting the evidence? But there is plenty of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, apart from the ECI’s studied inaction on hate speeches, seizure of bribe moneys and convenient delay in notifying the elections in Maharashtra to enable Mr Shinde to announce hundreds of concessions and freebies:

How did the voter percentage increase by almost 8 per cent over the initial count in Maharashtra, when historically this figure has never exceeded 1 per cent? An astounding 76 lakh additional votes were added by the ECI to the initial count reported at 5 p.m. This translates to 26,000 extra votes per constituency, which assumes significance when it is revealed that 100 seats were won by a margin of less than 26,000, most of them naturally by the BJP.

How is it that wherever the final voting numbers are increased, the benefit, as many analyses show, invariably accrues to the BJP and its strike rate goes up dramatically? This is a phenomenon that first surfaced during the last parliamentary elections and has become entrenched since the Haryana election last month.

How is it possible for some EVMs to display a 99 per cent battery charge after a full day of polling and many days of storage? If this is normal, then CEC Rajiv Kumar should be conferred a Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering an inexhaustible source of power, beating all those nuclear scientists who have been labouring for decades on atomic fusion.

How could the BJP’s strike rate jump from 32 per cent to 90 per cent in just six months? Almost ditto for the Shinde and Ajit Pawar factions, who would have been overjoyed with a 25 per cent rate, going by their Lok Sabha performance and own pre-poll statements?

How come no one — NO ONE — picked up even a hint of the impending NDA tsunami, not the journalists on the ground, not the pollsters, not even the political parties themselves? It has been suggested, satirically, by veteran journalist Deepak Sharma that the tsunami was not in the polling booths but in the EVMs!

How come the Election Commission took no action to investigate allegations of mass deletions of names from voter lists, removal of Muslim and Yadav officials as polling officers, and police forcibly preventing voters from accessing their polling booths (this last has been extensively documented on videos, including by the portal Newslaundry)? News reports and videos suggest that this was particularly rampant in UP. Why was no repolling ordered in these booths?

How come the NDA tsunami was limited to only those two states where the BJP is in power, whereas it was not even a ripple in Bengal, Jharkhand, Kerala and Karnataka? Does control of the state machinery have anything to do with this phenomenon?

How come the Election Commission is doggedly silent on these questions and offers no explanations, instead spouting terrible ‘shayari’ that would have Ghalib and Khusro writhing in their graves?

The bullet points above are in the nature of grave doubts that trouble the average citizen. It is possible that there are valid explanations for some of them. But the Sphinx-like silence of the Election Commission raises these doubts to suspicion and a presumption of wrongdoing. As Parakala Prabhakar notes in an interview with Karan Thapar, this puts a question mark on the very legitimacy of the mandate for the winning party and its government.

There’s even a name for this electoral phenomenon — it’s known as the Haryana model. The BJP tested this prototype in Haryana earlier this year, found it worked, and has now rolled it out on a larger scale. In future, it will form the main pillar of the ‘One Nation, One Election, One Party’ edifice. So, how come the INDIA parties never anticipated this?

My guess is they did, but got complacent after their Lok Sabha showing.

Civil society, both organisations and individuals, have been warning them of this danger for years, and urging them to take urgent political and legal action to check the institutionalisation of the Haryana model. One hopes the Congress and its allies realise now that they shall never be allowed to win an election of any consequence in future; they will be ‘given’ just enough seats to maintain a semblance of credibility for the election process.

They may win, for some more time, the few states where they have a government, but that will be an inevitably declining number. They should take no comfort from the southern states holding out against the BJP: the impending delimitation of parliamentary seats will ensure that the South will lose whatever little leverage it currently has. And no one will be sympathetic to the Opposition’s whining — all institutions have been silenced or coopted in the Reich, the media has been bought over and the public is tired.

Only Ms Mayawati seems to have realised this, with her uncanny instinct for survival.

What is now increasingly suspect is not only the EVM–VVPAT apparatus, but the entire electoral process, including the superintendence of the Election Commission of India — notification of election schedules, rationale for multi-phasing, implementation of the Model Code of Conduct, preparation of voters’ lists, suppression of voters, the counting process, the opacity in releasing figures of polling data, the distribution of Form 17C...

The INDIA bloc and other opposition parties should realise that the battlefield has moved far beyond just the EVMs. It’s not a single-front war any more: even if the EVM was to be replaced with the ballot paper tomorrow, there are other arrows in the government’s quiver whose poison has to be removed.

Bharat Jodo Yatras and petitions in the Supreme Court will not do any more. These may work in a non-polarised and democratic society, which we no longer are. The INDIA bloc must take the battle to the people, and raise the stakes. It should, first, move a motion for impeachment of all three election commissioners. This will fail, given the numbers in Parliament, but it will draw international attention to the rot that has set in in what used to be the world’s leading such institution.

The INDIA bloc should simultaneously announce two non-negotiable demands: (1) replace EVMs with ballot paper and (2) scrap the present selection committee for appointment of Election Commissioners and revert to the one ordered by the Supreme Court, with the CJI as a member. It should also boycott all elections until these demands are conceded. They will not be, we can rest assured, but the easy options are no longer available.

The ballot paper system has its drawbacks, including booth capturing and stuffing of false votes. But then we at least knew about these incidents, accepted they were illegal and could take corrective action to rectify them. But with the EVMs, the same thing is being done on a much larger scale, much more efficiently, and in a manner so sophisticated that it is undetectable, with no accountability.

By boycotting elections, the Alliance risks its marginalisation for some time, and may offer the BJP a free hand to do what they wish, but continuing to participate in these farcical elections means they will keep losing, and just as important, legitimise the farce and the BJP’s victories and misrule.

Hoping that things will improve or change with the passage of time is forlorn wishful thinking. Precious time is running out. As the poet said: Yeh jo beet raha hai/ Woh waqt nahi, zindagi hai (What you’re witnessing is not the passage of time/ but the ebbing of life itself).

Views are personal. Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of The Deputy Commissioner’s Dog and Other Colleagues. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com. More of his opinions can be read here.