How to Plant Vegetables

At
present, the EC’s VVPAT auditing is restricted to one randomly chosen
polling booth per constituency. In a recent essay, K. Ashok Vardhan
Shetty , a former IAS officer, demonstrates that this sample size will
fail to detect faulty EVMs 98-99% of the time. He also shows that VVPATs
can be an effective deterrent to fraud only on the condition that the
detection of even one faulty EVM in a constituency must entail the VVPAT
hand-counting of all the EVMs in that constituency. Without this
proviso, VVPATs would merely provide the sheen of integrity without its
substance.

The third criterion is secrecy. Here too, EVMs
disappoint. With the paper ballot, the EC could mix ballot papers from
different booths before counting, so that voting preferences could not
be connected to a given locality. But with EVMs, we are back to
booth-wise counting, which allows one to discern voting patterns and
renders marginalised communities vulnerable to pressure. Totaliser
machines can remedy this, but the EC has shown no intent to adopt them.
So,
on all three counts — transparency, verifiability and secrecy — EVMs
are flawed. VVPATs are not the answer either, given the sheer magnitude
of the logistical challenges. The recent track record of EVMs indicates
that the number of malfunctions in a national election will be high. For
that very reason, the EC is unlikely to adopt a policy of hand-counting
all EVMs in constituencies where faulty machines are reported, as this
might entail hand-counting on a scale that defeats the very purpose of
EVMs. And yet, this is a principle without which the use of VVPATs is
meaningless.
Unjustified suspicions
Despite these issues, EVMs
continue to enjoy the confidence of the EC, which insists that Indian
EVMs, unlike the Western ones, are tamper-proof. But this is a matter of
trust. Even if the software has been burnt into the microchip, neither
the EC nor the voter knows for sure what software is running in a
particular EVM. One has to simply trust the manufacturer and the EC. But
as the German court observed, the precondition of this trust is the
verifiability of election events, whereas in the case of EVMs, “the
calculation of the election result is based on a calculation act which
cannot be examined from outside”.

While it is true that the
results come quicker and the process is cheaper with EVMs as compared to
paper ballot, both these considerations are undeniably secondary to the
integrity of the election. Another argument made in favour of the EVM
is that it eliminates malpractices such as booth-capturing and
ballot-box stuffing. In the age of the smartphone, however, the
opportunity costs of ballot-box-stuffing and the risk of exposure are
prohibitively high. In contrast, tampering with code could accomplish
rigging on a scale unimaginable for booth-capturers. Moreover, it is
nearly impossible to detect EVM-tampering. As a result, suspicions of
tampering in the tallying of votes — as opposed to malfunction in
registering the votes, which alone is detectable — are destined to
remain in the realm of speculation. The absence of proven fraud might
save the EVM for now, but its survival comes at a dangerous cost — the
corrosion of people’s faith in the electoral process.
Yet there
doesn’t have to be incontrovertible evidence of EVM-tampering for a
nation to return to paper ballot. Suspicion is enough, and there is
enough of it already. As the German court put it, “The democratic
legitimacy of the election demands that the election events be
controllable so that… unjustified suspicion can be refuted.” The
phrase “unjustified suspicion” is pertinent. The EC has always
maintained that suspicions against EVMs are unjustified. Clearly, the
solution is not to dismiss EVM-sceptics as ignorant technophobes.
Rather, the EC is obliged to provide the people of India a polling
process capable of refuting unjustified suspicion, as this is a basic
requirement for democratic legitimacy, not an optional accessory.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Jagatheesan Chandrasekharan, [Dec 30, 2022 at 9:05 AM]
A
/ One cannot describe Bhakti movement in a single category. The Bhakti
movement has several aspects. On the one side, there was dissent against
the established order of things in relation to the Vedic practice. At
the same time, there was considerable conformism to the Puranic kind of
religion. If you look at the songs of these saints — Saiva Nayanars and
Vaishnava Alwars — most of them are addressed to Puranic deities, who
are consecrated at temples.
A / In a paper which I along with my
Professor M.G.S. Narayanan published some 45 years ago, we argued that
the Bhakti movement was propagation of the temple cult, which meant the
propagation of the kind of ideology represented by the landed magnates
who were managing the temples. So, a new social formation was coming
into existence and this was the ideological justification for that. The
Bhakti movement was not this or that but it was this, that and the
others. You cannot give a single explanation for the movement. But the
Bhakti movement further developed more conformists. Brahminical
orthodoxy is also the child of Bhakti movement. What began by breaking
fences eventually ended up building walls.
Q / What is your view on
the argument that the writing of the history of India should start from
the south and not from the north?
A / This question comes only when
you accept the notion of India. If you accept the notion of India, you
could ask whether it should start from north India or south India. When
does this notion of India come into existence? Let us say in the 19th
century, with the Indian national movement during the British rule.
Before that, there was no India. Then, what Indian history are you
talking about?

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