Opinion | The Peril Of Manufactured Outrage: A Lesson From PV Narasimha Rao |
The argument put forth by the Indian National Congress is that the Election Commission of India, along with nearly all other major constitutional bodies, has been compromised. Rahul Gandhi has previously remarked that the BJP and RSS have captured “every single institution" in India.
The allegations against the Election Commission are the culmination of a sustained narrative of institutional capture. They claim that elections conducted by such a compromised body cannot be considered fair, and that the ruling party has effectively stolen the elections. Those who make this claim also seek to persuade Gen Z that they should bring the government down.
With this recent allegation, claims of EVM tampering have taken a backseat. The arguments against EVMs were a massive failure from the very beginning. Not only esteemed civil servants such as Navin Chawla, Congress sympathisers who served as Chief Election Commissioners in the past, rejected that argument, but the kind of machinery, human resources, and coordination required to run such a colossal scam made it unbelievable from the outset.
The people who were actually on the ground—those government employees assigned to election duty—knew very well that these arguments were laughable and simply an attempt to misguide the public. The election process’s systematic, carefully designed safeguards, combined with the technological simplicity of EVMs, ensure that EVM tampering is virtually impossible.
Allegations of EVM manipulation have their roots in the ballot-paper era. People who lived through and cast their votes in the ballot-era may recall post-election newspaper reports of numerous cases across India in which the party with greater muscle power would barge into polling booths, chase voters away, seize ballot papers, and vote for its own candidate, thereby distorting the mandate. Such booth capturing and election rigging were largely eliminated with the introduction of EVMs. The rate limitation built into the EVMs makes it impossible to cast large numbers of votes in a short period. Booth capturing then became pointless, as it offered no real advantage.
Nevertheless, the image of booth capturing and the seizing of ballot papers was extrapolated—or superimposed—onto EVMs, giving rise to a half-baked and ill-founded EVM-tampering argument.
Gradually, arguments against EVMs lost their credibility and sheen. And now we have a new argument: that the whole system, right from the Election Commission of India onward, is compromised. In stylish PowerPoint presentations, the claim is made that the entire system is rigged and compromised. The arguments, some stated explicitly and others rather implicitly, go like this: first, the election results are carefully manipulated.
Second, SIR, along with other major measures carried out and overseen by the EC, is a scheme to influence the results. Third, a voter’s choice does not matter, and the collective mandate has no genuine effect on the outcome. Fourth, one could even doubt whether those genuinely elected by the people are the ones who will be sworn in. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs they say, but we have yet to see any such evidence. The only evidence presented so far has been anecdotal.
On the day of Rahul Gandhi’s press conference about........