Two days after the Congress suffered a humiliating defeat in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly election, Congress Rajya Sabha Member Digvijaya Singh on Tuesday raised questions over the reliability of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
Mr Singh claimed on Tuesday that the Congress candidates were leading in 199 constituencies out of the 230 in the state, till the postal ballots were being counted.
He expressed shock at how the voting pattern changed so drastically on the EVM machines that the vote counting from them resulted in the defeat of the Congress candidates.
The former CM of MP claimed that any machine with a chip could be hacked. He maintained that he has been opposing the voting through EVMs since 2003.
Incidentally, the 2003 was the first time that the Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh were held completely through EVMs. This was the election when Digvijaya Singh was the Chief Minister of MP.
Uma Bharti had led the opposition BJP and the saffron party scored its biggest win till date in those polls. Digvijaya Singh-led 10-year old Congress government was ousted in those polls.
The BJP had annihilated the Congress by winning 173 out of the 230 seats. The Congress was reduced to merely 38 seats, while others won the remaining 19 seats.
In the 2023 assembly polls, the BJP won 163 seats, the Congress 66 and one seat went to the Bharat Adivasi party (BAP).
Meanwhile, MP unit Congress Chief Kamal Nath also raised questions over the shocking defeat of the Congress.
At a meeting of all 230 party candidates held at Bhopal today, Mr Nath expressed surprise saying that many losing Congress candidates had told him that either they lost from their own villages or even if they got bumper votes from their village, they still did not succeed in winning.
Mr Nath also alleged that possibly the exit polls were created by those who already knew what the results would be.
One of the party’s losing candidates from Burhanpur constituency, Surendra Singh ‘Shera’ who was an MLA till now, accused that the Congress organization did not help him as required for the poll.
Shera burst into tears and alleged that Kamal Nath did not take any poll meeting in his constituency and did not help him.