Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad says Monday’s controversial press conference on electronic voting machines (EVMs), held in London, was sponsored by the Congress and designed to defame Indian democracy.
Syed Shuja, a US-based cyber expert, told the conference via Skype that the 2014 general election was rigged.
He also said Reliance Communications has helped the BJP hack EVMs.
Syed Shuja made a number of other claims, including a couple of particularly explosive ones:
First, that he worked at the Electronics Corporation of India Limited.
Second, that he fled to India and sought political asylum in the US because he felt threatened here.
Third, that senior BJP leader Gopinath Munde — who died in an accident days after joining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet — was killed because he was about to “expose” EVM rigging.
Fourth, that senior journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was murdered in 2017, had agreed to write a story about EVM tampering, and had filed an RTI regarding this.
However, Syed Shuja offered no proof for his claims.
Today, Ravi Shankar Prasad said Ashish Ray — who organised the press conference — was a dedicated Congressman, sponspored a trip made by Rahul Gandhi to London, and was an active contributor to the National Herald newspaper.
Prasad said Ashish Ray had praised Rahul Gandhi in tweets.
Ravi Shankar Prasad also pointed out that the UPA was in power when the 2014 election took place, and that critics of EVMs — like Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party — have won elections featuring them.
The Election Commission of India said yesterday that it stood “firmly” behind the “empirical facts about foolproof nature of ECI EVMs deployed in elections in India”.
It said it was “wary of becoming a party to this motivated slugfest”.
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