DC Edit | Cong needs major rethink, not blame EVMs for defeat

The Congress is busy organising protests against the electronic voting machines. The party and its allies in Maharashtra are unwilling to accept the verdict in the state Assembly election, though in Jharkhand they have no such opinion. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wants ballot paper voting back and has called for a nationwide agitation to press for the demand.

The party had also created a big brouhaha on the subject after the publication of the Haryana Assembly election results. A delegation met the Election Commission of India complaining about what it perceived as anomalies to the entire process. However, it did zero follow-up and unprotestingly participated in the next round of elections. So what if it is now upset with some of the results?

The EVMs were first put to use on an experimental basis in an Assembly byelection in Paravur, Kerala, way back in 1982. In its wake, the Election Commission and EVM manufacturers have taken 44 years to address various technical and legal issues on their widespread use. The 2004 general elections were conducted exclusively using EVMs, and since then, the machines have been used in every election to the Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies.

As Elon Musk would declaim, speed is no criterion for relying on EVMs as a nation of 140 crore people can wait a week or two for the counting of the votes that they have cast to decide who will rule them for the next five years if there are no alternatives. The real reason they are being preferred is their reliability. Every bona fide challenge that has been thrown at EVMs has in fact been convincingly addressed.

So, the Congress should ideally look elsewhere if it requires explanations for its shock defeats in Haryana and Maharashtra. The party must introspect into what narrative it presented before the people when it faced elections. It was “saving the Constitution”, creation of jobs and caste census during the Lok Sabha elections; they worked with the people as the ruling party had asked for a majority that would enable it to amend the Constitution. Rural distress and unemployment were the concerns of the people and they chose to make the rulers answerable.

But the Opposition cannot play the same tune over and over again.

The saffron machine has a number of tricks up its sleeve. It has no compunction in peddling patently divisive campaigns and with impunity. It does have cadres on the ground and technology in hand to ensure that its message reaches the last man. It also has a unified command structure to move them all with optimum efficiency.

The Congress, meanwhile, has been infested with nasty internecine fights in Haryana while the Maha Vikas Aghadi partners looked at one another with suspicion and had no declared CM face nor future agenda.

The grand old party of Indian politics must be realistic now, instead of expending all its energy on finding excuses.