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Tuesday, 16 May 2017
Can an Election be stolen?
The
live demonstration in the Delhi Assembly last week of how an Electronic Voting
Machine (EVM) could be tampered made tangible and credible a threat that most of us thought to be a
conspiracy theory muttered by losing parties after an election defeat. Now
before I go forward let me underline that despite great doubt and suspicion we
have no evidence that EVMs were tampered in the recent assembly elections, and
with the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) current posture I doubt it will ever rise above
the level of suspicion and doubt. I’m not writing this piece about what might have happened in the past but the possible vulnerabilities our electoral process currently faces now that we know EVMs can be tampered in order to manipulate the vote tally by such stealth that no election official from the high and mighty Chief Election Commissioner all the
way down to poll booth officials would even be aware of it.
I
am a novelist, a political novelist to be specific, and in my novels I try to
construct credible political scenarios for India in a parallel universe,
similar to ours but not quite. Let’s create another parallel universe now where,
to make it interesting, suppose that Arvind Kejriwal is Prime Minister of
India. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking, but this is my creation and you
don’t get a vote! Now let’s say Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal, drunk with
power and hubris as all PM’s become sooner or later, makes use of his
considerable knowledge about EVMs and orders his aides in the PMO to do whatever
is required to tamper EVMs in order to insure electoral success for the
conceivable future. Could the PMO pull it off? Possibly. How? Keep reading.
The
two PSUs that manufacture EVMs are Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), which comes
under the Defence Ministry, and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL),
which comes under the Department of Atomic Energy whose minister is the PM
himself. Chief executives of PSUs are not generally known to ask too many
questions when orders come down from the PMO, and even if some brave soul did
show some spine the PMO could appoint a new CMD to either PSU in the blink of
an eye.
There
would be no need for the PMO to interfere at the level of manufacturing the
EVMs which would require the involvement of more people in the conspiracy and an
unnecessary risk. In between election cycles the EVMs undergo maintenance in
their storage facilities across the country, for which BEL and ECIL are
responsible. But the story is not quite that straightforward. Let me allow GVL
Narasimha Rao, renowned for his expertise on EVMs and also incidentally a
ubiquitous BJP leader/spokesman, explain in his own words taken in full from a
Rediff interview in March 2014:
“To begin with every EVM needs to be kept
in a secure environment so that it is cannot be tampered with. However, what we had found is that these
machines were dumped in an open yard which made it vulnerable to tampering.
As a result of dumping these machines in the open, many had gone missing and the ECI has not yet revealed these
details to us. The most important part of this machine is the chip, which
contains the source code. We suggested that since these machines were kept in
the open, it would be advisable to at least change the chip. These chips cost
not more than Rs 100 each.
“The other
suggestion that we made and was not taken was regarding the maintenance of the
machines. These machines are manufactured by Bharat Electronics Limited and
Electronics Corporation of India. These companies send engineers to carry out a
maintenance check or a first level check. Shockingly,
these are not employees of the above mentioned two companies. They are
agents hired on a contract basis and they conduct the inspection of these
machines before the elections. We suggested that the job of the first level
check be given to the National Informatics Centre so that the person doing the
job has accountability. We had pointed
out that some of these persons who were hired to conduct this check belonged to
software companies that were being run by politicians. The chances of
tampering are higher in such cases. However, the ECI did not agree with
us. The problem is that there is a leap of blind faith in technology and
the ECI blindly trusts everything that
the manufacturer does. We have always pointed out that elections cannot be
based on trust.”
Quite
an indictment of our electoral process by Shri Rao. So all the PMO would have
to do is nudge the two PSUs to give EVM maintenance contracts to private
entities of their choosing and over time these engineers would have access to
an ever increasing percentage of the EVMs and do as they wish with machines.
I’m informed that changing the motherboard of the EVM, which contains the chip,
would take no more than a minute. Not that these engineers would be in any
hurry, since they would be legitimately doing their jobs and have no time
limitation. The Election Commission would be utterly oblivious to what was going
on. They would seal and lock the EVMs shortly before the next round of
elections without the slightest clues that the EVMs had been tampered and done
so through routine maintenance that they themselves had sanctioned. Election
Commission would genuinely keep parroting that “our EVMs cannot be tampered”
and do so while fully believing it.
After
this on polling day the ruling party would send their people, as bona fide voters,
to the polling booths with the tampered EVMs and the deed would be done,
whether by punching in a code, as demonstrated in the Delhi Assembly, or even
by sending a signal from a mobile phone to the EVM if the tampering is of a
higher order. The EVMs that seemed normal up till this point would thereafter
start manipulating the vote tally as instructed. For a more detailed explanation
read this eye-opening interview with Professor Poorvi Vora of George Washington University
in The Hindu.
I
admit I have oversimplified the scenario slightly for the benefit of coherence
because in addition to the actual tampering getting the tampered EVMs
positioned in polling booths likely to give maximum electoral advantage would
require some manipulation at the level of the Election Commission. But I have
little doubt our Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal, sneaky little fellow that he
is, would be able in due course to appoint Election Commissioners owing loyalty
to him and the Election Commission would become suitably pliant. And in the
meantime if any EVMs ‘malfunctioned’, having been observed voting only for the ruling
party, they would be whisked away by the Election Commission before any neutral experts could
run diagnostics on them. If opposition parties ever raised genuine objections about
EVMs the Election Commission would refuse to hold a proper hackathon and instead agree to a
‘challenge’ where experts would be expected to hack the EVMs using
extra-sensory powers because they would actually be forbidden from touching the
EVMs. All this while, the credibility of EVMs was increasingly questioned in
other continents like Africa to where they were exported.
This
is all hypothetical, of course, I’m sure the current government would never be
as underhanded as the fictional Prime Minster Kejriwal in my scenario. But my
point is a larger one, that when the Election Commission is blind to advances
in technology and leaves loopholes in its processes that any ruling party can
feasibly take full advantage of, the Election Commission is letting us all
down, because no Prime Minister ever attained his high office and no ruling
party ever won a general election by following their sense of fair play. Going
forward we are told that VVPAT EVMs which leave a paper trail will put all
doubts to end. At the same time we now hear of this magic cable that can be
used to connect the ballot unit and the control unit of an EVM and thereafter
manipulate the vote tally without having to tamper with the EVM’s circuitry at
all. If you build it, someone will hack it. As I sit writing this piece, computer
systems across the world are reeling from the worst ever hack in the form of a ransomware
attack. That’s the world we live in today while the Election Commission is
living in denial.
I’ll
leave it for you to decide whether the scenario I described above is feasible.
But I must conclude with due apologies to the real life Arvind Kejriwal who was
the driving force behind the EVM tampering demonstration in the Delhi Assembly,
overcoming many naysayers and who, I assure you, is not a sneaky little fellow
at all.
Monday, 13 March 2017
AAP's Punjab post-mortem...
The
problem with most post-election analyses is that suddenly the victor is said to
have done everything with omniscient perfection and the defeated party’s
campaign is described as a total train-wreck. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) got the
benefit of this phenomenon after it swept to victory in Delhi two years ago and
now it is feeling the bitter end of the equation after being vanquished by the
Congress Party in Punjab. AAP got it badly wrong. And, yes, I got it badly
wrong as well. No AAP tsunami materialised this time despite my prediction,
quite the reverse in fact. You have every reason to demand an explanation for
how this miscalculation happened. Let’s begin the post-mortem.
In mid-January of 2016 all the main political
parties were assembled en masse in the city of Muktsar in the Malwa heartland
of Punjab to hold rallies on the day of the Maghi Mela. It was an annual ritual
but this was the day AAP announced its presence as a serious player in the
state with a massive show of force. The Congress had made the mistake of
holding its rally too close to the AAP rally and found that people arriving on
their buses were herding to hear Kejriwal speak instead. The Congress pandal
was naturally rendered quite empty. The shrewder Akalis had anticipated this
eventuality and held their rally at a comfortable distance away. What followed,
as recounted to me by a senior Congress leader, was that newly minted Punjab
Congress President, Captain Amarinder Singh, accompanied by the entire state
leadership of the party had arrived in the area but did not dare show up at the
still largely empty rally site. While emergency measures were taken to fill the
rally with people Amarinder Singh and his entourage decided to take shelter in
the house of an unsuspecting farmer in a nearby field. Two MLAs were dispatched
to record the AAP rally. Until this point Amarinder had considered AAP’s
surprise victories in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as a fluke, but after
suffering this indignity I imagine he had a re-think. Despite what he may have
said in public it was clear from his actions thereafter that the Captain now
believed AAP would be his main adversary in the upcoming campaign. An SOS went
out for Prashant Kishor.
Shortly after the Maghi Mela rallies I met AAP’s
campaign manager Durgesh Pathak for the first time. After I got past the fact
that he was so young he looked like he must have been barely out of college I
quickly realised that underneath the youthful façade lay a hardcore political
operative who knew exactly what he was doing and had travelled to every corner
of Punjab in the previous six months. He was also very clear that the only man
who could stop AAP from victory in Punjab was Amarinder Singh. Battle lines had
been drawn.
It is unnecessary to recount the entire course of
the campaign over the last year in great detail. While AAP led by Arvind
Kejriwal and Bhagwant Mann unleashed an onslaught on the Badals the Congress
was trying to get its house in order with Prashant Kishor and his team
overseeing the operation. Until, of course, Sardar Chhotepur was removed as the
convener of AAP Punjab and civil war ensued for a few weeks with charges being
flung from all directions. Amarinder took full advantage of this period of
turbulence for AAP. But the tide soon reversed again when it seemed the entire
leadership of Punjab Congress was stranded in Delhi for weeks as the high
command took forever to decide on their list of candidates. While AAP
campaigned relentlessly before the announcement of elections it seemed Congress
had left it till too late by giving some of their candidates as little as two
or three weeks before the election. But the Congress had a trump card to play
in the end and that was the entry of Navjot Singh Sidhu as a candidate from
Amritsar. The pictures of Amarinder and Sidhu smiling and chatting together at
their press conference was very effective and major setback for AAP.
In the last forty-eight hours since the election
results a flurry of newspaper articles have been postulating a myriad of
reasons why AAP electorally under-performed. Let me try and address some of
them. It is true the Hindu and urban vote coalesced behind the Congress, but
they were traditional Congress voters who had drifted to the BJP for the last
decade and were now coming home anyway. Though, I must admit, even as a Sikh,
the excessive religiosity of the AAP campaign made me distinctly uncomfortable
at times and the mysterious bomb blast in Bathinda on the eve of voting fed
into the unhelpful narrative of AAP consorting with extremists. The inability
of AAP to clinch a deal with Sidhu was a missed opportunity, certainly, because
he could have provided a pan-Punjab face that the party sorely required, but
agreeing to his demands would have almost certainly led to the exodus of at
least two senior leaders, thus making the entire exercise self-defeating. Then
there was the ever-present bogey of the threat posed by outsiders from Delhi
remote controlling AAP’s Punjab unit, all the while Congress leaders were
sitting in Delhi for weeks on end to find out if they made the cut in the
candidate list approved by the Gandhis. Of course, there is a kernel of truth
to all these observations by the media but I am not convinced they were
decisive in causing voters finally backing the Congress.
AAP’s success in the state during the 2014 Lok Sabha
election also has to be properly understood. At the time AAP represented
everything to everyone and provided the perfect vehicle for a protest vote
across central and eastern Malwa, a region known for its rebellious streak. By
the time Sanjay Singh and Durgesh Pathak were deputed to the state in the wake
of the expulsions of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan the state unit was in
complete anarchy, with at least two of the four Members of Parliament in open
revolt. It took them six months just to calm everything down and start building
anything resembling a party organisation that could compete against the
Congress and the Akalis. By the time the election came along AAP had never
really garnered much support in Majha and only lukewarm support in Doaba, thus
staking it all in sweeping the Malwa heartland. To sweep Malwa AAP was reliant
on Akali Dal suffering a complete meltdown, something I expected given the
environment of strong anti-incumbency, but surprisingly they managed to
maintain their 2014 performance and Congress took full advantage of the
three-way split in the region.
So you could reasonably posit that the 2014 AAP
surge was an ephemeral occurrence caused by voter anger at both a deeply
unpopular UPA Govt at the Centre and equally unpopular Badal Government in
Chandigarh. In the Punjab assembly campaign as AAP made its stand clear on
issues and stated its preferred policies it now asked voters to look at it from
the perspective of a government-in-waiting and not just a faceless vehicle for protest
votes. This change of perspective form the point of view of voters provided the
crux of how this election was decided. The question voters needed to decide on was
if AAP was ready to rule Punjab.
The turbulence in Delhi between the Centre and Delhi
Governments may have earned some sympathy for AAP amongst younger voters but
also may have worried risk-averse and older voters who feared Punjab’s
interests would pay the price in the clash between the Prime Minister and Chief
Minister of Delhi. Then there was the lack of a Chief Ministerial candidate
when faced with Amarinder Singh who was unlike any leader AAP had faced so far
because he fits the profile of a powerful regional satrap who has absolutely no
national ambitions beyond the state and played the sympathy card of this being
his last election to the hilt.
AAP was successful in convincing voters of Punjab
that it would jail Majithia, that it would safeguard the holy scriptures
against sacrilege, that it would import its successful educational and health
policies from Delhi, that NRIs would never have it so good, and it would launch
a war on drugs. But in the end none of those things mattered. Punjab voters
looked at the line-up of AAP candidates, most political newcomers with little
or no government experience, and could not visualise a Government-in-Waiting.
They looked at Captain Amarinder Singh and saw a safe pair of hands, past his
prime and flawed though he might be. End of story.
As the main opposition party in the Punjab
legislative assembly the twenty-two AAP MLAs, as well as the larger party
organisation, will have five years to prove to voters that they are indeed
ready to govern. They must do this by being a responsible but ever vigilant
opposition party. You can rest assured the Congress Government will provide ample
opportunity to showcase these qualities. I’ll be keeping a close watch on the
antics of the Captain and his durbar too. Stay tuned.
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