RMN Foundation

Protests Against Electronic Voting Machines EVMs Fail in India

Modi’s BJP has such a confidence in EVMs that it aims to win more than 400 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

By Rakesh Raman

Some very weak protests have been happening for the past couple of weeks in Delhi and other cities of India against the use of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in Indian elections.

Such sporadic protests with a handful of people will not make any impact on the Election Commission of India (ECI) which is hell-bent on using EVMs despite enormous complaints against them.

People complain that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister (PM) Narendra Modi selectively manipulates EVMs to win Lok Sabha elections and certain key state elections.

However, the ECI officials and the judges of the Supreme Court of India are reluctant to stop the use of EVMs mainly because they cannot take any decision that may displease their boss PM Modi.

Although the opposition parties led by Congress have willy-nilly raised the EVM issue in their Twitter posts, they are not interested in taking their protests to the streets. The Congress party mainly speaks against EVMs when it loses elections and the dying party has lost most elections including Lok Sabha elections and state elections that were held on EVMs. 

A Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who is the de facto chief of the party has no interest in politics and he keeps running on roads aimlessly in his futile Yatras (journeys) which have no social or political purpose.

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Instead of openly opposing EVMs, Congress and Rahul Gandhi easily accept defeats from BJP and start waiting for the next election defeat. In fact, naive Rahul Gandhi has almost destroyed Congress. 

And if the Lok Sabha election 2024 is held on EVMs, Modi and BJP will certainly win. In the 543-member Lok Sabha (parliament), only  272 candidates of a party need to win to form the government. 

But despite the Modi government’s glaring failures during the past 10 years, Modi’s BJP has such a confidence in EVMs that it aims to win more than 400 seats in the 2024 election (see photograph given above). If this happens, Congress and other opposition parties will be responsible because they allowed election on EVMs.

It is certain that if any election is held transparently on ballot papers, neither Modi nor BJP can win. In an ongoing RMN Foundation poll, more than 85% people prefer to vote on ballot papers. 

Now in the absence of support from Congress and other opposition parties, a couple of small groups of people are holding protests against EVMs. These protests are not covered by regular media outlets and only some informal YouTube Hindi channels repeat videos of these insignificant protests. These YouTube videos have hardly any credibility.

The protesters fail to realize that no protest can succeed in the Modi regime which uses police brutality to terrorize the protesters. In the past few years, major protests such as the women wrestlers protest, farmers’ protest, anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests, and Agniveer protests against the Modi government were crushed by the complicit police force.

Therefore, in all probability, the small protests being held by a few citizens will soon disappear and Modi’s BJP will easily win the 2024 Lok Sabha election with the help of EVMs.

By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society. He has also launched the “Power Play: Lok Sabha Election 2024 in India” editorial section to cover the news, events, and other developments related to the 2024 election.