A fundamental mistake is being made by many well-meaning people with respect to the West Bengal election results, For instance, many people are comparing the votes deleted in the farcical “SIR” exercise with the loss of roughly that same amount of votes in TMC’s “final” tally. The closeness of these two figures – 27 lakhs in the case of deletions (under the logical discrepancy category, though the actual figure should be much higher), and the decrease in TMCs vote – still falls far short of the BJPs 2.92 crores or so. If one goes by the “final figures” provided by the ECI, the TMC got only 2.60 crores in comparison suggesting that the BJP would have won hands down, even without “SIR”.
Of course all those trying to normalize the big fraud that elections have progressively become since 2019, intentionally or innocently, also routine resort to such so-called “final figures”. The Godi Media is the biggest player in this heist of the public mind and it has been ably playing this role this time too.
The Fiction of “Final Figures”
So let us rewind to 2019. Here is the full story of the 2019 elections for those interested, but let us focus only on the “final figures” right now. Remember that in 2019, at the close of counting there were 373 seats in which there was discrepancy between “votes polled data on EVMs” and the “votes counted data on EVMs”. It was there on the ECI’s website and when then The Quint journalist Poonam Agarwal sent an email query, asking for an explanation, the figures were removed from the website. “Early on 27 May, The Quint had emailed the EC questions on the discrepancies in all 373 constituencies . An EC officer even contacted us saying that they will send a reply soon. By afternoon, on the same day, we found that the ticker mentioning ‘final voter turnout’ mysteriously disappeared from the EC’s website eciresults.nic.in”, said Poonam Agarwal in her article linked above.
The “results” were declared WITHOUT ANY explanation as to the discrepancy. In fact, the whole dispute about Form 17 (C) not being given to the Opposition party polling agents, was raised in a petition filed by Mahua Moitra in the Supreme Court, with respect to those elections and followed up by the Association for Democratic Reform, which filed an interim application within the original petition, for the 2024 elections.
“Form 17C Part 1 is filled out by a Presiding Officer. A copy of it is provided to the polling agent of a candidate. The polling agent and the Presiding Officer have to sign this form, which is then stored in a separate cover in a ‘Strong Room’. The ‘Strong Room’ is a protected vault of sorts, it is also the place where EVMs are stored after polling”, explains Advay Vora in the article in the Supreme Court Observer (linked above).
In the 2019 elections too the voting figures jumped significantly after the close of polling, which explains the discrepancy. This happened in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections at a much grander level. Those interested may see the detailed reports of the Independent Panel for Monitoring Indian Elections.
The tampering with the voters’ lists on a massive scale has now been going on for a pretty long time and these include mass deletions as well as fraudulent additions. The latter had been effectively exposed by Rahul Gandhi in September 2025 but the deletions went unnoticed and unchallenged for a very long time. Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Odisha, Delhi and Bihar (all in 2024 and 2025) have seen deletions of tens of lakhs of voters – even before it came to be suddenly, fraudulently, called “Special Intensive Revision”. Transparency activist Anjali Bharadwaj’s RTI query to the ECI revealed that there was no record of the ECI’s decisions as to when and how this process came into being!
In every state assembly elections since then it was noticed that not only did the EC not give the final voting figures, the figures miraculously jumped 6, 7 or 8 percent in the dead of the night. With regard to Andhra Pradesh, Prabhakar Parakala showed the there was a massive increase of votes polled well into midnight. These are his words in an interview to The Federal – Voice of the States,
“Let me explain step by step. Until 5 pm, polling was 68.04 per cent. By 8 pm, it rose marginally to 68.12 per cent. But then, between 8 pm and 11:45 pm, polling jumped by 8.38 per cent. And from 11:45 pm to 2 am, it increased by another 4.16 per cent.”
We know that after 2019, in every election, and especially since the 2024 LS elections, where Modi himself was trailing behind Congress’ Ajay Rai in Benaras, that the scene of action thereafter shifts to the counting process. It has been noticed that slowing down or the virtual stopping of counting is followed by a totally changed picture after resumption. In Benaras, in fact, some BJP activists had made video statements to the effect that they had to save Modi from defeat and make hurried interventions to get extra votes. We do not know the veracity of those statements or how it was done – but we do know the result. So, does the deliberate slowing down or even stopping of counting in select centres have anything to with EVM swapping?
Because of accumulating evidence, therefore, before and during the 2024 elections, the question of handing over form 17 (C) to every polling agent, giving the final number of votes polled and uploading them to the ECI’s website was discussed at length in the Supreme Court. The ECI even lied that “there was no legal mandate to provide 17C to any other person than the candidate or his agent” to upload the data – though then, before the next hearing surreptitiously, it did do so. In more recent elections, there have been widespread allegations that even the polling agents have been refused their copy of Form 17C.
The Missing Link
So what is the game? Here comes the missing link that most people don’t see.
These lakhs and lakhs of votes that are added after the close of polling, in the dead of the night, cannot simply remain on the ECI website as figures. They have to be counted! They have to enter the counting centre. And how can that happen, unless the EVMs used for polling are replaced by these which have the enhanced numbers?
ENTER THEREFORE, THE EVM.
This exercise cannot be successfully accomplished until the original EVMs are exchanged with newer ones that reflect this miraculous jump of tens of lakhs of votes. Hence the regular drama of lights in the strong rooms going out, or the LED screens outside suddenly being switched off; of unauthorized people entering the strong rooms, and finally new EVMs with 98 or 95 percent battery charge being exchanged for ones that have been used all day for voting. Supreme Court lawyer Mahmood Pracha contested the Rampur constituency simply to legally get hold of the CCTV footage of the strong rooms as candidate – as per the SC directive during the 2024 LS elections. He released that footage on his twitter account in six instalments. But his is not the only evidence – there is actually no dearth of it.
Once this is done, the action then shifts to the counting centre. Now, in many instances, due to constant vigilance by the Opposition party, if the exchange becomes impossible in all the concerned strong rooms, the rest has to be accomplished at the counting centre. Slowing down serves a purpose here. But that is not all. If despite this you cannot accomplish your mission? Halt the counting, throw out the opposition counting agents and then get going. Lo and Behold! Mission accomplished.
Slow counting this time was unprecedented – barely three rounds were counted till noon, according to reports, where 15 to 20 remained to be counted. By midday, restless BJP counting agents and the central staff conducting the elections was getting impatient and reportedly, threw out counting agents in different places. Mind you this does NOT need to be done in ALL constituencies but only the select ones; and even within them not for all but only select polling stations. So from a large number of constituencies the reports started coming out that counting agents had been thrown out and their supporters stationed outside were dispersed.
That was the whole purpose of conducting this farce of a so-called election and counting process through central officials directly answerable to the Home Minister. In many places, where the counting agents managed to stay on longer, said Abhishek Banerjee, they could actually see that the machines numbers did not match the ones used for polling.
In other words, the polling data that is being dished out is hugely manipulated and fudged. There was effectively no counting in around a hundred seats if Mamata Banerjee and the TMC are to be believed. For in a large number of demarcated stations, “counting” was conducted without opposition agents, between the central staff and the BJP.
It was therefore, only in the fitness of things that Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, after meeting TMC leaders yesterday, demanded that the entire CCTV footage of the counting rooms between 12 noon and 6 pm be made public.
For Mamata Banerjee to have tendered her resignation would have been to accept the fraudulent ECI story and its conduct of the entire process. It would have meant going meekly to Raj Bhawan to submit her resignation so that thereafter this happy story that the ECI Coalition and the fascist-normalizers dish out, could become THE accepted story.
As we conclude, try and imagine doing all this with paper ballots where, unless you destroy them, there is no way of putting your and my vote into a black-box and forget about them. You cannot recheck EVM votes but it is the paper trail (of VVPATs) that makes the task of fudging difficult, even though the Supreme Court did not accept the demand of 100 percent tally of VVPATs. The Supreme Court held that accepting that all VVPATs should be checked would defeat the purpose of nurturing “a culture of trust and collaboration to strengthen democracy.” So the 2019 judgement holds that 5 random EVM per assembly segment may be cross checked with VVPAT.
If even this was carried out routinely, it would be a problem. No surprise then that in at least one constituency in West Bengal where they found it difficult to destroy VVPAT slips – the slips were found thrown away in a gutter a day before counting began. For lakhs of polling stations, destroying them or burning them would be impossible without attracting immediate attention.
Returning to paper ballots is crucial for Indian democracy to recover. Many countries have rejected EVMs and returned to paper ballots, and M.G. Devasahayam has made a strong case for India too, to return to paper ballots. We would do well to make this a nationwide campaign.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 