Why was BJP so vocal against EVMs till 2011? Three answers that only the party has

BJP leaders have reacted with righteous indignation at allegations levelled by a self-styled whistleblower in London this week. The whistleblower claimed that EVMs in 2014 were rigged by interfering with radio frequencies and that the beneficiary was the BJP.

The indignation among BJP leaders is understandable because the whistleblower went on to claim that BJP gunned down his team members when they tried to blackmail the party, that senior BJP leader Gopinath Munde was actually killed because he knew what had happened and that an investigator from the National Investigating Agency (NIA) who was inquiring into Munde’s mysterious death, was also killed because he had stumbled upon the links to EVMs and hacking.

Any other party would have reacted in the same way and described the murder of a senior leader, an investigator allegedly looking into the murder and a journalist who was apparently about to publish the allegations as unrelated and an unfortunate coincidence.

BJP leaders have also indignantly pointed out that in 2014 the party was not in power and therefore it could not have rigged the election. Elections can only be rigged if ballot papers are used and not machines and only by the ruling party of the day, they have argued.

What, however, they have not cared to explain is why BJP itself was so vocal against EVMs till 2011. Not only was BJP vocal but its present spokesman GVLN Rao in fact wrote a book on how EVMs were hackable. The party represented to the Election Commission of India against EVMs, held press conferences, gave sound bytes and vociferously demanded that EVMs be done away with. All this is in the public domain.

Why then did the opposition suddenly stop in 2011? Not just Rao but all other BJP leaders suddenly went silent on the issue around that time. And now of course they are wedded to the opposite view, that EVMs just cannot be hacked.

But there is another aspect on which no explanation has been offered and that is on the use of the VVPATs. Till 2017 the Election Commission of India had maintained that the Centre had not released funds to place orders for VVPATs. It took a rap on the knuckles by the Supreme Court for the Government to eventually release funds and for the ECI to commit that 100% of the EVMs in the 2019 general election would be accompanied by Voter Verifiable Paper Trail. Why was the Centre so lukewarm to the use of VVPAT units in the first place?

The third riddle relates to the Election Commission’s strange reluctance to match the EVM count with the paper trail. Unless 30 to 40% of the randomly selected EVM counts are matched with the paper trail, the whole purpose of having the costly unit is defeated. And who should have any problem with that? And why?

The only argument against such an exercise is that it would take a lot of time. But this logic fails to wash because the ECI itself takes six weeks or longer to complete the electoral process. In some of the state elections, it has counted votes as many as three weeks after actual polling. If that is acceptable to all stakeholders, surely a week’s delay in matching the EVM counts with VVPAT in the presence of candidates or their representatives should not be a problem?

But the ECI’s insistence so far to do the matching in one booth or one per cent of the booths decided by the Commission makes VVPATS an ornament of very little use. Why have VVPAT if only one per cent of the EVMs are to be matched?

There is another aspect that begs for an answer and that is BJP and the Government’s opposition to the use of Totalisers. It was the Election Commission of India which had recommended the use of Totalisers which would be used for counting votes of not just one booth but of 14 booths simultaneously. This ‘cluster counting’, the ECI had argued, would make the counting faster and keep voter behavior in specific booths ‘secret’ and ensure privacy of voting pattern.

But the Modi Government turned down the proposal on the ground that it was important to know the voting behaviour in every booth—so that accountability of local workers and leaders could be fixed. Convincing? You decide.