What Mr Rahul Gandhi demonstrated today in his press conference, is not only surprising but also shocking and disturbing. His arguments, evidence and narrative were all court room level and beyond reasonable doubt.
On the 7th of August he showed how a more than a lac votes were added in Mahadevpura and today it was about targeted deletions in Aland constituency of Kalaburgi district. But they are both poles apart.
Mahadevpura was about the abuse of process and machinery, about flexing enormous organizational muscle and Aland is about circumventing the system through technology. If Mahadevpura was about manipulating the loopholes of the process, Aland is about tearing the fabric altogether.
What Mr Gandhi said today can be seen through 4 major issues. First that Congress strongholds were chosen for strategic deletion of opposition voters by caste and community profile. Second that an organized machinery carried it out remotely through high end technology.
Third that all this happened in the complete knowledge and awareness of the election commission and lastly that the election commission is protecting the perpetrators by withholding information and obstructing investigation.
The Mahadevpura module was a challenge to the opposition to match up to their game, Aland is about criminal conspiracy, about the collusion between agencies with access to technology beyond the comprehension of the state machinery.
Software picking up the first names in voter lists and using them as complainants, using different mobile devices to break through OTPs and perhaps also to bypass the verification by BLOs, devices with automation capabilities that could submit two consecutive forms with OTP verification in 36 seconds.
The timings as early as 4 am suggests that the site might be in a different time zone, in some other continent.
The election commission has accepted that it was in know of the case and that it had restored 5994 out of the 6018 names deleted. It had also lodged an FIR in the case. Yet it never tried to get to the bottom of the case and expose the conspirators. It was satisfied by restoring 5994 names of the 6018 such cases accidentally caught.
No one knows the actual number of cases. The phenomenon may be nationwide. Only the election commission has the wherewithal to investigate the matter nationwide in each booth.
This was the real SIR it needed to carry out. It knew that its system had been breached, it needed to restore its integrity, but it’s busy searching for foreigners, which is not its job.
The most damning though is the proof of it obstructing justice. Not sharing the OTP generation process and the destination ports of the numbers used to generate them. Despite 18 reminders by the CID. The commission has wrapped an obstinate impunity around itself.
Recently it denied the Supreme Court, any authority to question its functioning. This is serious criminal culpability. It cannot be attributed to incompetence or negligence.
If war is too important to be left to generals, election integrity is too important to be left to the election commission. The people are its fundamental stakeholders. Their faith is supreme.
