Madhya Pradesh result shocking, EVMs were rigged, alleges Congress

BJP has retained Madhya Pradesh managing to win 164 seats against the Congress 65 in the 230-member Assembly as the counting of votes in Assembly Elections took place on Sunday. Shocked by the defeat, Congress alleges electoral malpractice and claims the EVMs were "rigged", reports ETV Bharat's Amit Agnihotri.

New Delhi:The Congress on Sunday said it was shocked at the Madhya Pradesh assembly poll results and blamed the BJP for electoral malpractices. “It is a shocking result. Nobody expected it. The people were very angry with the BJP and actually fought the election. Till yesterday, we were meeting the locals and they were telling us that the Congress was coming back. How could things change suddenly,” AICC secretary in charge of Madhya Pradesh Shiv Bhatia told ETV Bharat.

“To me, this seems like a conspiracy. First, the exit polls were managed by the BJP to create a perception among the voters that the Congress was losing. Then the BJP leaders started saying that the Congress should not blame the EVM if it loses the polls. How did they know in advance? The Balaghat incident where the postal ballot boxes stored in the strong room were opened and counted before the result day was an indicator of the plan. The EVMs were certainly rigged. Otherwise, such a result was not possible. The election process has become meaningless,” he said.

The BJP won 164 seats against the Congress 65 in the 230-member Assembly. In 2018, the Congress won 114 seats against 109 of the BJP and formed a government headed by Kamal Nath. The Congress government was toppled by the BJP in 2020 when senior leader Jyotiraditya Scindia joined the BJP. According to the AICC secretary in charge of Madhya Pradesh CP Mittal, the result could not be explained by any normal electoral logic. “Anything is possible with EVMs these days. Nobody had expected this kind of result,” Mittal told ETV Bharat.

The AICC functionary said that the Congress had designed its campaign based on the feedback from the people and ran it well. “There was no problem with the campaign,” said Mittal.

However, party insiders said that state unit chief Kamal Nath often defied the directives of the high command and ran the campaign as per his wishes. Also, Kamal Nath, who had his own surveys done, interfered a lot with the AICC ticket distribution, the insiders said. Further, the party insiders said that the Congress made a mistake in announcing the candidates in bulk in the second list which created bad blood among those who were left out and presented the grand old party in a poor light.

“In hindsight, we should have done that in phases to avoid infighting in public,” said a senior AICC functionary. He added that the Congress announced its poll promises months in advance and actually gave the BJP a chance to correct its mistakes and copy the grand old party’s promises. “We actually alerted the BJP to correct their mistakes. If we could defeat them in 2018, this time it would have been easy as they gained power through corrupt means and failed to deliver,” said the AICC functionary.

A section of the state leadership said that coordination between the state and the AICC functionaries and between AICC functionaries and the high command was not smooth and often ended up creating communications gaps which hurt the party.