NDA 2024: Was it a stolen mandate?

We have been seeing ‘Russia-type’ elections since 2019, and 2024 was no different, says M.G. Devasahayam with a sardonic smile.

The 83-year-old former bureaucrat, a key member of the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) and Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE), believes that bureaucrats and the Election Commission of India (ECI) were complicit in stealing the people’s mandate to change the government.

“It was stolen with sophistication,” he says, adding that experts and civil society groups are poring over the data to unravel how.

What’s clever about it is the false sense of satisfaction, even the ‘victory’ that it affords to the Opposition and the people, he said in an informal conversation in Bengaluru.

“They have succeeded in hoodwinking the people, and the Opposition has only itself to blame,” he added bitterly, accusing political parties of not taking the work done by civil society groups like the CCG and the CCE seriously.

The Supreme Court’s ‘lazy’ judgments on the unreliability of EVMs allowed the ECI to manipulate the mandate.

Media reports now suggest that the ECI counted more votes than were polled. The Quint reported that in 176 constituencies, over 35,000 votes were ‘surplus’ and as many as 5.5 lakh votes polled in 362 seats were not counted.

There is indeed growing evidence that this is a stolen mandate.

The CCG has been seriously studying elections and the electoral system since 2018, the year both the electoral bonds scheme and the VVPAT unit were introduced—and a bureaucrat posted as deputy election commissioner. “Our sources alerted us about this gentleman’s RSS links. That was the year the ECI stopped responding and replying to our letters,” Devasahayam recalls.

The CCG brought out its first detailed report on electoral malpractices in 2021. Although it was shared with all political parties, at the time only West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee understood the danger, claims Devasahayam. The controversial deputy was stationed in West Bengal during the assembly election and it was Mamata Banerjee’s fierce resistance that led to him backing down.

It was the 2019 general election that confirmed the CCG’s initial misgivings. The pattern was repeated in several subsequent elections including last year’s assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

“We are suspicious about the BJP’s clean sweep in Madhya Pradesh. There are at least 60 Lok Sabha constituencies where manipulation is suspected; a technical group is studying the results. The findings will be shared with the people,” said the activist.

“We have completely lost our faith in both the judiciary and the commission,” Devasahayam states.

In the last six years, civil society groups have written innumerable letters to the ECI, raised multiple issues, brought out two reports and held national and regional conclaves.

Digvijaya Singh of the Congress did make a presentation at the Jaipur conclave, following which a study group was supposed to be formed. It never happened.

A people’s commission on electoral integrity has already been set up along with a technical group comprising international experts and representatives. A group of legal experts is looking at challenging the election on the basis of provisions in the Representation of People’s Act.

By resisting steps for verification and cross-verification through the counting of VVPAT slips, the ECI has anyway violated the basic principles of a democratic election. And by insisting that voters satisfy themselves by peeping through a keyhole to see the image of party symbols, it has reduced the election to a bioscope, Devasahayam quipped.

Besides blocking verifiability, the ECI’s failure to provide the total number of votes polled and the inordinate delay in sharing information that was available—it took 11 days to share the details of the first phase—has deepened the distrust. Both narrow and high victory margins need to be analysed, he pointed out, and referred to a paper by Prof. Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University that indicated the BJP’s knack for winning a disproportionate number of close contests.

Civil society groups will not ease the pressure on the commission, he added. For instance, by cross-checking if the ECI had implemented the Supreme Court’s directions to keep the symbol-loading units in strongrooms. The Supreme Court had also held that 5 per cent of the EVM units were to be verified and matched within a week of the results being declared, if the first and the second runner-up so desired (for a fee).

The electoral system is just not robust enough, he concluded, and the Election Commission neither transparent nor accountable.