'The Narendra Modi government has revoked the Overseas Citizen of India card status held by journalist and author Aatish Taseer, in what can be held as the direct fallout of his election-time cover story on the prime minister for TIME magazine. This could mean that Taseer can be banned from visiting India in the future, reported PTI... His father’s identity as a liberal politician in Pakistan has not only been an enduring subject for Taseer’s essays and novels, it also finds mention in the writings of his mother Tavleen, who is often vocal in support of the Modi regime.
'Former Indian Administrative Service officer Kannan Gopinathan, who recently quit the service citing growing disillusionment particularly over the restrictions imposed on Jammu and Kashmir, has now raised serious questions about the electoral process having been compromised with the introduction of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines. VVPATs were inducted into the process to provide an additional buffer against the manipulation of the electoral process by allowing physical tallying of votes.
'The Election Commission and manufacturing companies are reluctant to place detailed information about the working of EVMs and VVPATs beyond what they decide that the citizenry must know... In June, 2019 I had sought detailed information about electronic voting machines (EVMs), voter verified paper trail (VVPAT) units and symbol loading units (SLUs), from Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) by filing identical requests under the RTI Act.
[The interesting thing about this piece is that the BJP alleges EVM tampering. In other words the BJP does not seem to hold the line that EVM tampering is not possible.]
'Within a week of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections coming to a close, the Election Commission (EC) constituted working groups headed by senior functionaries to review specific areas of concern. The EC need not have bothered with this post mortem; it is clear to everyone that this election was dominated by three ‘M’s: money, machine and media. The fourth ‘M’ – the model code of conduct – was reduced to waste paper.
'Election results decoded: The last decade has seen the return of the upper castes and the erosion of OBC representation... What does the new Lok Sabha look like in terms of its caste composition? We are responding to this question using data that a team of researchers from the Trivedi Center for Political Data (Ashoka University) and the CERI (Sciences Po) have collected, coded and compiled in the framework of the SPINPER project – The Social Profile of the Indian National and Provincial Elected Representatives.
'...The ECI’s responses to a public interest litigation (PIL) petition on EVMs in the Bombay High Court over the past 13 months are perhaps illustrative of its approach to the issue. The PIL filed on March 27, 2018, by Manoranjan Roy, a right to information (RTI) activist in Mumbai, was about the processes involved in the procurement, storage and deployment of EVMs and VVPATs by the ECI and State Election Commissions (SECs).
'There is a crude certainty to this Narendra Modi victory that no amount of talk about governance, delivery or economics can hide. Search the map of India for those states where the percentage of non-Hindus approaches or crosses a majority, and you find that this is where the supposed juggernaut of Modi’s governance comes to a halt—Punjab, where the only seats the BJP won were the state’s two Hindu-dominated constituencies; Kerala; the Kashmir Valley; and a few of the states in the northeast.
'RTI queries have revealed, among other things, that the micro-controller used in the current elections is not one-time programmable, as consistently claimed by the Election Commission... Free and fair elections form the bedrock of our constitutionally guaranteed democracy. As vigilant citizens, it is desirable to adopt the stance – “In God we trust, everything else requires evidence”. Given the heightened anxieties over EVMs and VVPATs, it is time to publicise some information I obtained from the ECI and the EVM+VVPAT manufacturers – Bharat Electronics Ltd.
'Even as analysts continue to point out various discrepancies in the exit poll results, reports of possible security breaches in EVM strongrooms have started pouring in. The Election Commission of India has been quick enough to post its responses but not many, including a former Chief Election Commissioner, are convinced. In many places across north India, workers of opposition parties alleged that unauthorised vehicles were allowed to enter the premises of the counting centres where EVMs are currently stored.
