A Congress worker has reportedly died after being outdoors for long hours guarding the strong room in Kunkuri district, Jashpur, Chhattisgarh, where the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were kept after Chhattisgarh completed its two-phase voting here on November 20.
According to reports, a room in a Government high school, which is situated 4 km away from the main city has been converted into strong room where the machines are securely kept post polls. Fearing machine tampering, Congress worker Pankaj Minj, a resident of Kaliba, along with few other Congress workers were reportedly guarding the room.
Pankaj was taken to the district hospital after he suddenly fell sick on Saturday. After reaching the hospital his condition deteriorated and later he died. It is believed that Pankaj died because of the cold.
The Congress party has been alleging possible EVM tampering and have also claimed that professional hackers have been employed to influence the poll results. Adding further to these allegations, Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) Chief Bhupesh Baghel instructed the workers to monitor EVMs outside the Strong Room on Thursday.
BJP hit out at Congress for this ludicrous remark saying that these were all excuses of the Congress party who are fearing their possible defeat in the elections.
State Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Dharamlal Kaushik said, “By making such baseless allegations they (Congress) have accepted their defeat even before the result was out”.
Since last year, after the five state assembly elections concluded, various political parties accompanied by several media houses have maliciously built up this paranoia and propaganda about the alleged tampered EVMs (Electronic Voting Machine).
On 11th March 2017, as the election results were being declared and the BJP alliance swept the Uttar Pradesh polls, Mayawati was the first politician who had come out and blamed the EVMs for BJP’s victory. Slowly, other political parties too started raking up the EVM issue and AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal took it to the next level after spreading an outright lie about the machines that were equipped with the VVPAT system.
Congress soon joined the bandwagon and created the controversy about EVMs in Bhind, Madhya Pradesh, which turned out to be a lie. However, that did not deter the party, which went ahead and demanded an immediate ban on the EVMs.
However, many Congress leaders have also come out and spoken against its own party’s malicious attempt to weave such conspiracy theories and even the Election commission had explained in detail why EVMs can’t be hacked.
A general consensus on the use of EVMs was arrived at twenty years ago in 1998. The Congress party was an integral part of this process throughout. Today when it is retracting its own support to EVMs, and continuously building false agenda’s over tampering of EVM’s, one can probably understand, that this is only due to its failure in successive assembly elections.
Unfortunately, now these conspiracy theories have claimed a life.
