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Lok Sabha 2019 Elections: Opposition unite for No-EVM polls, Shiv Sena silent
Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee has been meeting several political leaders across the country. Now as the country is inching towards the 2019 elections, a lot of alliances and political permutations and combinations are being tried in the country. Mamata Banerjee in the past few weeks has met NCP’s Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray, NC’s Omar Abdullah, Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut, Congress leader Ahmed Patel, Congress Chief Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan, JD (S) leader HD Deve Gowda and will soon meet Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
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Her meets with the politicians has resulted in a political mutiny, whereby the political parties have united on a crucial point – ballot papers instead of EVMs for next year’s general elections. Fifteen opposition parties have decided to raise the issue with the Election Commission, according to sources. However, Shiv Sena, fractious ally of the BJP, has not yet joined the bandwagon, raising questions about which side it would choose next year. Shiv Sena had previously chosen to remain absent on the day of No Confidence Vote in the Parliament.
Currently, the political parties batting for the ballot paper elections Congress, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, Mayawati’s BSP, Sharad Pawar’s NCP, Lalu Yadav’s RJD, IUML, Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, YSR, south parties DMK, HD Kumaraswamy’s JDS, Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, Kerala Congress Mani, Left parties CPI and CPM and Ms Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Sources said the opposition parties came to a consensus after Mamata Banerjee went out for a string of power meetings after landing in Delhi on Tuesday. Banerjee also met, three of BJP’s sharpest critics — Shatrughan Sinha and former union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Ram Jethmalani.
With pushing for a joint consensus on the matter, Mamata Banerjee has again indicated that she is ready for a bigger role on the national stage. However, a source close to the Opposition parties has revealed that there are no plans of making Mamata the face of the United Opposition.
The dumping of EVMs is a subject on which many parties have been unanimous since the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and a few other states last year. The Electronic Voting Machines, they contended, had been tampered with to favour the BJP. Several members of the AAP party had alleged that the EVMs used to accept votes only for the BJP. They even cited the examples of the US elections and several others elections of the first world countries which are still using ballot papers for votes. Most of the first world countries have infact put a ban on EVM machines and are choosing the age-old method of ballot papers to usher in democracy in their respective countries.
Their combined protests had pushed the Election Commission to throw an open challenge – asking parties to “tweak” the machines. There were no takers.
Still, Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav – who suffered huge losses in the UP state elections – had maintained that ballot papers and not EVMs be used in the future elections in the country. The battle for ballot papers is the next big initiative of the opposition, which is busy crafting a stable alliance to take on the BJP inside parliament and out. The draft citizens’ list in Assam has already led to a huge confrontation in parliament. Anurag Thakur, BCCI Chief and BJP politician said that the demand for ballot elections is a desperate attempt by the Opposition parties to salvage their parties on the national arena. THe BJP has also proposed the idea of ‘One Nation One Election’ followed by several countries in the world. However, this initiative of theirs was met with a lot of contempt from the regional parties.
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