M.G. Devasahayam 
Observing the hectic work going on the electoral front – expediting One Nation One Election (ONOE), discussing the delimitation process and reviving the e-voting proposal – one cannot help linking them with 2025, the centenary year of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its ideologue M.S. Golwalkar.
Dhirendra K. Jha’s new book, Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine says this:
“Golwalkar’s promise of denying Muslims citizens’ rights is being lived out, from the legislature to the rhythms of their daily lives. Politically, they have been virtually invisibilised… All this enjoys such widespread approval in the Sangh Parivar because it corresponds to Golwalkar’s ideas and the historical destiny he set out for the RSS—to convert India into a Hindu Rashtra…”
Then comes the commentary on Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts, with this finding:
“…A fact that stands out is that the idea of ONOE closely resembles the vision of Madhav Sadashiv Rao Golwalkar, the second chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Golwalkar was a strong advocate for a country with a unitary form of government…In his famous 1966 book Bunch of Thoughts–which is considered as the bible of the RSS-Golwalkar, who at the time was the sarsanghchalak of the RSS, had lambasted the federal structure of India, with the word “One Nation” figuring multiple times in the book.”
Note this latest on ONOE:
“Former Chief Justice of India (CJI) UU Lalit told a joint parliamentary committee that he supported the larger plan of simultaneous elections but added that it cannot be rolled out in one go and would require several phases, according to people aware of the matter.”
This comes close on the heels of the arbitrary appointment of a Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) who has worked closely with the Union home minister. To facilitate this, his illustrious predecessor has weaponised India’s election system and has now retired to the Himalayas to ‘detoxify’ himself. And recent steps have brought Election Commissioners totally under the control of the political executive and government of the day thereby destroying whatever was left of the independence and integrity of the EC.
It is the universal adult franchise, guaranteed under Article 326 of the constitution of India that grants the right to vote to all adult citizens, irrespective of their caste, creed or religion. It is this right that makes the minority communities at par with the majority and lower castes equal to higher castes. But the recently weaponised election system threatens this very core by making possible large-scale spurious injection of votes making it possible to steal people’s mandate.
The Electronic Voting Machine-centred election system has four critical components. Microchips to record the votes as cast by the voter, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPATs) to audit and verify that the votes are counted as recorded and Symbol Loading Units (SLUs) meddling with the EVMs. These are to comply with essential principles of democracy. The fourth component is electoral rolls or the voters’ list.
Integrity of the microchips is suspect because only a select few from the EC, government and BJP directors on the board of public sector undertakings BEL and ECIL know about their design and source. According to technical experts, EVMs contain multiple labile memories that record each vote as it is cast. They also have the key to candidate mapping in labile memory since this varies in each constituency and is needed to print the contents of each VVPAT slip. The presence of labile memory implies that those values can be manipulated if access is available in any manner. Some manipulations may not leave any trace and will not be visible in a forensic investigation. What is worse, SLUs are not subject to any security protocol.
While hearing a petition by the Association for Democratic Reforms, on whose plea the court had given its April 2024 order to verify the microchips in 5% of EVMs in an assembly constituency, theSupreme Court asked the ECI to ensure that no data is deleted from the EVMs.
After the court order in April 2024, the ECI came out with its standard operating procedure for checking and verification in July that year, which states that a mock poll of up to 1,400 votes per machine will be conducted and the result tallied with the VVPAT slips. If the results match, the machines would be considered to have passed the test. ADR has argued that the SOP does not provide for actual verification of the microchips installed in the EVMs and VVPATs. The entire thing appears to be a farce and ECI is hell-bent on protecting the microchips that seems to have been compromised.
To make the EVM system auditable and voter-verifiable, Supreme Court had ordered introduction of VVPATs in 2013. But in defiance of this order, in February 2018, CEC A.K. Jyoti (who was chief secretary of Gujarat when Narendra Modi was chief minister) directed state chief electoral officers to mandatorily verify VVPAT slips in only one randomly selected polling station in each assembly constituency. This pathetically low 0.3% sample size defeated the very object of installing VVPATs in all EVMs and was tantamount to non-implementation of Supreme Court order. Inexplicably, the EC, through bluff and bluster and with the full blessings of the Supreme Court has reduced the VVPATs into meaningless bioscopes.
According to experts, this deliberate denial of verifiability and auditability has facilitated spurious injection of votes in various constituencies by hiking of vote percentages in all phases of polling. There are astounding mismatches or spikes between the figures of votes polled and made available immediately after polls and before counting in the 2024 Lok Sabha as well as to the state assemblies of Haryana and Maharashtra. This, coupled with the failure of the ECI to provide 17-C forms – the ultimate arbiter/proof of votes polled – to all candidates/their agents have triggered suspicions.
In July 2023, Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University published a report called ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’ which outlined two manipulations that were carried out in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
1) Registration manipulation i.e. the padding of the electoral roll by adding and deleting voters strategically and manufacturing fake voters, most, if not all, of whom vote for the BJP, and
2) Turnout manipulation, which is the addition of voter tallies after the polls have closed – most, if not all, of whom vote for the BJP.
Examples were given and claims supported. Soon afterwards, Ashoka University was raided and given a strict warning by the government. Das was fired, giving a clear signal to all universities and institutions in India to not pursue any research pertaining to the electoral system in India. I have myself experienced this in another leading private university.
It is believed that in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Das’s findings came true and electoral manipulation had been pursued in a systematic manner.
Linking Aadhaar with the voter ID also could facilitate ‘registration manipulation’ causing mass disenfranchisement. However, the root cause for registration manipulation is Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which allows for deletion of voter data without notice or an opportunity to be heard by the affected citizen. The Supreme Court also allowed this unconstitutional rule which violates the basic right of the citizen to stay in the statute book.
Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis are the main targets for this “electoral roll purge.” For the 2019 Lok Sabha election India had nearly 900 million registered voters and there has been reports of mass deletion of names from voters’ lists from Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Delhi. An initiative called Missing Voters estimates that a whopping 120 million Indians are not on the voters’ lists. Of these around 40 million are Muslims while 30 million are Dalits.
Christian voters have not been left in peace. A typical case is the Kanyakumari constituency in Tamil Nadu with about 16 lakh (1.6 million) voters 45% of whom are Christian and about 5% Muslim. In this constituency during the 2019 parliament election more than 30,000 votes were deleted
The outcome of such disenfranchisement is already visible:
“The eighteenth Lok Sabha (2024) has the lowest share of Muslim MPs in six decades. Less than 5% of its members currently are Muslims despite people from the community forming over 15% of the country’s population. In total, there are currently 24 Muslim MPs (4.4%) in the Lok Sabha. Notably, the record low occurred despite a considerable spike in the share of Muslim MPs from the Indian National Congress, the second-biggest party in the current Lok Sabha. The party with the most members in 2024, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has no representatives from the Muslim community currently. In fact, the decline in the share of the Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha, in the 1990s, coincided with the rise of the BJP, whose total MP tally crossed the 100 mark for the first time in the 10th Lok Sabha (1991-96).”
Across India’s 28 states, Muslims hold roughly 6% of the seats in state legislatures, which is less than half of their national population percentage. The representation of Christians is no better.
As of the latest available data, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure, there is almost total absence of Muslim and Christian ministers in the union cabinet.
K.B. Hedgewar, founder of RSS had openly declared that its aim was not to oppose the British and join the movement for independence but to oppose the yavana (barbarian) snakes (Muslims), who are our real enemies.
His lieutenant, M.S. Golwalkar, who, since June 1940, had been the sarsanghchalak (supreme leader) of RSS, went further and wrote in We or Our Nationhood Defined in 1938:
“The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, and must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture… They may stay in the country wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claim nothing, deserve no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens’ rights.”
Add everything to the near total caving-in of the political opposition, and this could be replicated throughout the country including the Dravidian fortress of Tamil Nadu. The way the electoral system is being weaponised was discussed and debated at the one-day Civil Society-Political Parties Conference hosted by Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) on August 13, 2022 where 11 opposition parties participated and resolved to fight against ‘misuse’ of EVMs, money power and media.
The conference claimed that EVMs cannot be assumed to be tamper-proof and resolved thus:
“The voting process should be redesigned to be software and hardware independent in order to be verifiable or auditable. The VVPAT (voter verifiable paper audit trail) system should be re-designed to be fully voter-verified. A voter should be able to get the VVPAT slip and cast it in a chip-free ballot box for the vote to be valid and counted.”
Congress assumed the responsibility to take this resolution to the EC and carry it forward. But it never happened. Nevertheless, the civil society did not relent and in August 2023 submitted a memorandum to the EC signed by about 10,000 voters making the same specific demand. There has been no response from ECI.
Civil society kept up the pressure on the INDIA bloc that had emerged and succeeded in moving them. Leaders of 28 opposition parties meeting at Mumbai in December, 2023 resolved:
“INDIA parties reiterate that there are many doubts on the integrity of the functioning of the EVMs. These have been raised by many experts and professionals as well…. Our suggestion is simple: Instead of the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) slip falling in the box, it should be handed over to the voter who shall then place it in a separate ballot box after having verified his or her choice. 100% counting of VVPAT slips should then be done. This will restore full confidence of the people in free and fair elections.”
The resolution was adopted unanimously and the task of conveying this to the ECI was given to the general secretary, communications, of the Congress, Jairam Ramesh. He kept on writing to EC, seeking an appointment which was never given.
Not conveying it to the EC and backing it up with mass action has cost INDIA bloc dear. I believe this is the main reason why they lost out in the 2024 parliament election wherein people have actually given the mandate in their favour.
Soon after this election, Vote for Democracy (VFD) brought out a report wherein it raised suspicion that in at least 79 constituencies across the country “people’s mandate” had been stolen. The opposition ignored this report.
On Constitution Day in 2024 (November 26),Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge called for a ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ like campaign to mark the return of ballot papers in elections. “We don’t want EVMs, we want ballot paper,” he said. Rahul Gandhi, former president of the Congress also spoke against EVM publicly on several occasions.
Yet when on February 2, 2025, the Congress formed the Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts, or EAGLE, to keep a “bird’s eye view” of elections in the country and “monitor the conduct of free and fair elections by the Election Commission of India,” directly reporting to Rahul Gandhi, there was no trace of EVM or the campaign announced by Kharge. In a subsequent press conference Gandhi dodged a question on the campaign and said they are seeking “judicial remedy”.
Accordingly, Jairam Ramesh rushed to the apex court challenging the amendment of Rule 93(2)(a) of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, by the Union law ministry on the recommendation of the EC, denying access to electronic materials such as CCTV footage, webcasting videos and recordings of candidates, citing concerns over potential misuse.
It looks as if the political opposition is keen on self-destruction. It is for ‘We, The People’ to save our democracy.
M.G. Devasahayam is coordinator, Citizens Commission on Elections. He is the editor of the book Electoral Democracy: An Inquiry in to the Fairness and Integrity of Elections in India (Paranjoy, 2022).