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Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar


My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for.

Since the Block Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai.   

Just look at the Bihar Assembly election results that came out yesterday. Modi has proved that he is greater than Bharat’s ancient kings who invaded neighbouring kingdoms with impunity with the help of a religious ritual called Ashwamedha Yajna. All the lands on which the horse wandered became an extension of the king’s country. If any other king resisted, there would be war and subjugation.

Modi’s Ashwa [horse] is the Election Commission of India. This modern Ashwa didn’t have to go trotting all over Bihar to garner subjugation. Ashwa had only to sit in his airconditioned office in Delhi and sleep. Or pretend not to see anything. There was a whole army to do the actual job.

Like Cash for Vote, for example. INR 10,000 was given to each voting woman in Bihar to secure their votes for Modiji’s party. More than 25 lakh women received that bribe. Never mind the Model of Code of Conduct was in place. Ashwa pretended not to see such things.

Like my wife, many people went missing from the electoral rolls in Bihar. Foreign media reported that no less than 6.5 million names were removed from the electoral rolls ahead of the 2025 Assembly election. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has been shouting himself hoarse for months on this issue. “Vote chori,” he called it. Thieving of votes by BJP. Millions or real voters went missing from the rolls and millions of ghost voters emerged. Modern Ashwamedha.

I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election (2024) because I knew the results were predetermined. Predestined. By the Electronic Voting Machines [EVM]. Not in Kerala, of course. But in many other states where Ashwa had a free rein. My refusal to vote was my way of registering a protest against the corruption in the electoral system. I know it’s a very feeble, futile, protest. Yet, my conscience matters to me. My personal dharma is a lot more important to me than a cancerous Sanatan Dharma.

Anyone who knows about electronic systems that rely on chips will understand how easy it is to replace the Central Processing Unit of the EVMs with a tampered look-alike CPU. When the entire governance machinery is within one individual’s control, such tampering is child’s play.

We know that there are many security lapses taking place all over with regard to the electoral processes. Opposition parties have levelled many allegations about CCTV cameras being switched off or unauthorised persons entering the strong rooms where EVMs are stored between polling and counting.

Anything is possible. Modi hai to Mumkin hai.

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Comments

  1. JaiNovember 15, 2025 at 12:06 PM

    We have reached absolute rock bottom and we are up against a mammoth corrupt system. I wonder how we are ever going to get past this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 15, 2025 at 12:16 PM

      History has the lesson, Jai. It's always like this - entropy: evil keeps mounting until the system collapses internally, implosion. And then we begin anew. How many will perish in that implosion, we can't ever predict. But I assure you, an implosion is on the way.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanNovember 15, 2025 at 1:24 PM

    Hari Om
    Oh yes, indeed, anything is possible with Modi there...(was there ever such blatant propoganda?) I agree with your good wife; the vote was hard won so should not be wasted. I would like to think that at least a small portion of the many who accepted the 'incentive' still went in and voted against! I cannot help but think EVMs may also mean loss of the essential 'blind' ballot, however... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete

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