Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Thursday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of “hijacking” the election process by tampering with electronic voting machines after it recorded a landslide win in the Lok Sabha elections on Thursday, ANI reported.
“The whole country was opposing EVMs and after today’s results, the remaining faith of the public will also vanish,” Mayawati said. She had made similar allegations after the BJP’s win in the 2017 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP won 62 out of 78 Lok Sabha constituencies it contested in Uttar Pradesh. Mayawati’s party had formed an alliance with Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party and Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal to keep the BJP out of power in Uttar Pradesh. But they won only 15 seats out of the 78 they contested from – 10 of them went to the BSP.
The former chief minister said she was not expecting “such a bad performance” from the mahagathbandhan. She urged the Supreme Court to return to the ballot paper system instead of voting machines, and said that without this, power will be in the hands of capitalists and casteist political parties.
“All the institutions of the nation are kneeling before the authoritarian government,” the BSP chief said, urging people to “stand up to fight for their rights”.
Opposition parties have repeatedly expressed doubts about the credibility of electronic voting machines in the last two years. Two days before the counting of votes, representatives of 22 Opposition parties had met the Election Commission to reiterate their demand that Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail slips of randomly-selected polling stations be verified before votes are counted. The Election Commission, however, refused to change the process of the counting.
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