Specific View on Congress and EVM controversy: Ghost within the machine

Within the aftermath of the Maharashtra election outcomes, a clamour is rising within the Congress ranks with a few of its allies becoming a member of in. It’s the soundtrack of a sore loser. “We should always begin a motion for the return of paper poll,” says celebration president Mallikarjun Kharge. The EVM dunnit, Congress leaders say. It’s not that Congress hasn’t tried responsible its electoral defeat on the voting machine earlier than — it has, most not too long ago after final month’s Haryana consequence. However its complete drubbing by the hands of the Maharashtra citizens appears to have left it notably singed. The celebration is entitled to its bewilderment. However because the main celebration of the Opposition, it additionally has an obligation to be accountable in defeat. It should know that casting aspersions on the established technique of free and honest elections, and the foundations of the sport that anchor it, is a step too far — it can’t be taken flippantly. It have to be based mostly on verifiable proof, of which there’s none to date; not on “intestine really feel” or an injured sense of entitlement, or the determined need to discover a fall man.

The Congress’s fumbling for solutions that has now hit the conspiracy theorist’s dead-end started in 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led BJP first swept to energy on the Centre. Its return to the saddle in 2019 and for a 3rd time period in 2024, and a number of other meeting elections received by the BJP in between, have solely made Congress sink deeper into incoherence. This has even made it undermine its and its allies’ personal successes. Congress not too long ago received Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh, and humbled the BJP within the Lok Sabha election in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and UP. Even because it was routed in Maharashtra, its ally JMM has introduced it again to energy in Jharkhand — it’s mean-spirited, at finest, and absurd in actual fact, to say that the BJP “let JMM win” Jharkhand, all the higher to hijack the mandate in Maharashtra. This seek for straightforward and imagined villains, this politics of sticking pins into voodoo dolls, is taking a rising toll. It’s holding Congress again from an trustworthy reckoning. It must ask itself whether or not it’s giving the voters a motive to vote for it — or is it solely criticising the BJP? Is it evading the large questions due to its personal flawed document, or due to a scarcity of conviction and readability? Is its technique of going hyper-local in response to the BJP’s choreography of enormous, ideology-drenched narratives a cop-out? When its chief, Rahul Gandhi takes a robust view, does his personal weak CV are available the way in which, or the lack or unwillingness of native Congressmen and girls to take their cue from him?

On the similar time, it’s true that the conduct of the election monitor, the Election Fee, leaves a lot to be desired. On the subject of the ruling celebration, it wears child gloves; it’s been sluggish to take discover of its violations of the mannequin of conduct. The Opposition might have chosen intemperate phrases in its assault however the language of the EC’s official responses reads bitter and indignant, as if it have been the textual content of a political celebration, not of a constitutional authority. The election system has imperfections — any enjoying discipline is skewed when one facet is a three-term authorities with a formidable vary of assets, monetary to institutional — nevertheless it has served this huge and numerous nation properly, and continues to set an instance. Sharad Pawar has instructed his celebration’s candidates to seek for “proof” to nail the EVM conspiracy. That search ought to certainly proceed, no stakeholder would need in any other case, however the Congress would do properly to not undertaking on the system its interior disaster. A few of its allies have been extra even handed of their response. Different gamers, like AAP, which has began making conspiratorial noises forward of Delhi’s upcoming election, should additionally take a deep breath, take a look at the voter — and, most significantly, look inside.