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 all I can hear, post the declaration of election results on the 23rd of this month, are loud wailings and the familiar whining emanating from the Congress headquarters on Akbar Road; I am sure similar sounds are issuing from Matoshree in Mumbai and Saifai in U.P. And the lachrymose chorus of the Opposition quartet is the familiar one: the elections were 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, in any case? But there is plenty of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, apart from the EC’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% over the initial count in Maharashtra, when historically this figure has never exceeded 1% ? An astounding 76 lakh additional votes were added by the EC to the initially reported count of 5.00 PM. This translates to 26000 extra votes per constituency, which assumes significance when it is revealed that 100 seats were won by a margin of less than 26000, most of them naturally by the BJP.
* How is it that, many analyses show, wherever the final voting numbers are increased the benefit invariably accrues to the BJP and its strike rate goes up dramatically? This is a phenomenon which 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% battery charge after a full day of polling and many days of storage? If this is normal then the CEC, Rajiv Kumar, should be conferred a Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the Holy Grail of energy and power- an infinite, unending and 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% to 90% in just six months? Almost ditto for the Shinde and Ajit Pawar factions, who would have been overjoyed with a 25% rate, going by their Lok Sabha performance and own pre-polling 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 steadfastly silent on these questions and offers no explanations, instead spouting terrible “shayari” which would have both Ghalib and Amir Khusro rotating in their graves in agony?
The bullet points above are in the nature of grave doubts that trouble the average citizen. It is possible that there can be valid explanations for them, or some of them. But the Sphinx like silence and constitutional arrogance of the Election Commission which works for the people but rejects any accountability to them, raise the doubts to suspicion and a presumption of wrong-doing. As Parakala Prabhakar has noted in an interview with Karan Thapar, this raises a question mark over the very legitimacy of the mandate of the winning party and its governments.
Of course, we all knew that this was going to happen; there is 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 that it worked, and have 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 Alliance never anticipated this?
My guess is that they did, but that they were lazy, uncoordinated, complacent after their Lok Sabha showing. At worst, they could always fall back on their comfortable, whining, default mode and wait for the tide to turn. 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 that the Congress and its allies realise now that this is a flood, and not an ebb, tide and that they shall never be allowed to win any election of any consequence in future; they will be “given” just enough seats to maintain the credibility of 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 impressed by the Opposition’s continued whining- all institutions have been silenced or coopted in the Reich, the media has been bought over, and the public is fatigued. 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- the notification of the election schedules, the rationale for multi phasing, the implementation of the Model Code of Conduct, the preparation of voters’ lists, the suppression of voters, the counting process, the opacity in releasing figures of polling data, the distribution of Form 17C. The India Alliance and other Opposition parties should realise that the battlefield has now moved far beyond just the EVMs to encompass all the other areas mentioned above. Their battle is not a single front war any more, but a multi-pronged one: 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. These may work in a non-polarised and democratic society, which we no longer are. The India Alliance has to take the battle to the people, and to raise the stakes beyond being merely politically correct. It should move, firstly, 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. It will also bring on record for posterity the hollowness of these men of straw and how diligently they laboured to destroy the world’s largest democracy. The Alliance should simultaneously announce two main non-negotiable demands- replace EVMs with the ballot paper, and 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 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, and with no accountability. A case in point is the fraud perpetrated in the Chandigarh Mayoral election some time back: had this polling been conducted on EVMs we would never have known that it had been hijacked in favour of the BJP by the Presiding Officer. By boycotting elections the Alliance risks its marginalisation for some time and may offer a the BJP a free hand to do what they wish, including amending the Constitution. But I’m afraid the India Alliance has no other option but to bite the bullet. By continuing to participate in these farcical elections it will continue to lose and, just as important, provide a legitimacy to them and to the NDA’s victories and rule. Even a doomed soldier must make a last stand; it’s time for the Congress and allies to do so now, before it’s too late.
Hoping that things will improve or change with the passage of time is forlorn wish thinking. Precious time is running out. As the poet said:
Yeh jo beet raha hai
Wo wakt nahi, zindagi hai
[ What you are witnessing is not just the passage of time But the ebbing of life itself]
This article is re-published here by kind permission of the author Avay Shukla. The original article can be found here – View from [Greater] Kailash: STOP THE WHINING , MR PAWAN KHERA, AND SMELL WHAT’S COOKING !
