By D.N. Singh
After the counting on Thursday India shall be deprived of a big soap opera which had kept the 1.30 crore Indians intensely entertained. That will be over and a new episode, with a tinge of seriousness and complexity may replace it.
First, it was the campaigning which was an action packed potboiler, then the polling which was vibrant yet ridden off certain charms under an unprecedented spell of heat and humidity. Thank God, the time has changed and right from the bottom to the top, almost all now use Deo spray standing as an insulator between sweat and smell. Nevertheless, it was a good election campaign made more spicy by dramatics and septic insinuations, a few fresh polemics never heard before in Indian politics.
For a small stint, after the campaigns were stopped, there was a deafening silence making many of us feel the vacuumed moments, missing that boisterous carnival of democracy. The perfidious utterances gave way to pollsters have their say. And the most dreadful among them were the team of survey agencies out with bags to wreck the mullah.
Then the most frightening yet, for some, pleasing for others came in the name of exit polls.
Somewhere there were celebrations and somewhere there were sobbing epidemics and the opposition taking a serious note of the pattern of the exit polls. Some called it as a tactical hoodwinking by the people in power while the other dubbed it defeatist impulses of the opposition. It was really a dog-eat-dog situation when a downbeat non-BJP combo saw in it a balderdash that may die after May 23.
It was a sudden shift, post the period of gestation, when many antes were upped and radars set on not the sovereignty of the country but on the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM). A modern gadget that looks like a musical instrument but not so really.
Yet this speechless machine has today produced a silent tune to which the entire nation dances to. Everywhere, there is one talk, EVMs and EVMs. Are they safe or hacked or tampered ! have become the paramount concern for all.
Areas where the EVMs are in the safe enclosures or as they call ‘strong rooms’ are amid an air of a kind of civil war.
In and around such ‘fortress’ one could find people from various political parties fixing their eyes and some with lounging beyond the designated area of access using telescopes, with a pledge not to allow a fly even to hum around the machines.
There had never been such pedantic exactitude beforehand from people in politics. In television channels there was no lead story other than the safety of EVMs and the scepticism about their safety.
Day and night people remain on guard outside the strong rooms, raising questions on the credibility of the Election Commission. The scenes, as shown in TV channels, it bring reminiscences of the day when Mumbai attack took place, terrorists hiding inside Taj and an untold number of television cameras preening on with full zoom ! Are the EVMs today are so terrorizing ?
This scene on the earth must amuse the extra-terrestrials, if they are looking down, that what is going on in the name of elections, all engaged in a sort of brick-batting and the thing called EC showing a ‘finger with a stain of ink’. Was it a finger of being invincible or an warning when one remains above any challenge.
