Senior BJP leader and former Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar, who indulged in a debate over EVMs with Tesla chief Elon Musk, on Monday reiterated his claim that Indian voting machines can’t be hacked.

Speaking to a news agency, Chandrashekhar said the remarks of Musk on EVMs were ‘huge sweeping generalisation’ to be left unchallenged.

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“…Therefore, I pointed out to him that Indian EVMs are very different from what Americans know of EVMs because the US and the Western world use connected devices. They are using traditional compute platforms that are connected to the Internet as EVMs. I pointed out that the Indian EVMs are architected and designed to be safe and secure because there is no connectivity. If there is no connectivity to Wi-Fi or 5G or the Internet in general, there is no way to get it,” he said.

The BJP leader said that while he respects the Tesla chief, the latter was factually incorrect when he said everything can be hacked.

“While I respect Elon Musk and what he has achieved. I think he is factually incorrect in saying that anything can be hacked. A calculator or a toaster cannot be hacked. Therefore, there is a limit in terms of where this paradigm of hacking can extend,” he added.

Asserting that Elon Musk has not understood the Indian EVMs, Chandrashekhar said that if what Musk claimed was true then every Tesla car can also be hacked.

“Elon Musk has not understood what the Indian EVM is. Indian EVMs do not lend themselves to being hacked because it is precisely a very limited intelligence device…He is factually wrong…To claim that there cannot be a secure digital product in the world is to then say that every Tesla car can be hacked…,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, Elon Musk had called for elimination of Electronic Voting Machines, saying there is risk of them being hacked by humans or Artificial Intelligence.

“We should eliminate electronic voting machines. The risk of being hacked by humans or AI, while small, is still too high,” he wrote in a post on ‘X’.

His claim met with strong rebuttal from BJP leaders, including Chandrashekhar. However, the Tesla chief remained firm on his assertions and responded to Chandrashekhar’s counter, saying “everything can be hacked.”