The Aam Aadmi Party will start a “save democracy campaign” from today and raise its voice strongly against Electronic Voter Machine tampering, party leader Gopal Rai said here.
He made the announcement during a press conference at the AAP headquarters.
Rai said that party legislator Saurabh Bharadwaj on Tuesday demonstrated in the Delhi Assembly that EVMs can be hacked just by “changing the motherboard”.
“This is a great danger to democracy. We will start a ‘save democracy campaign’ from tomorrow and under this campaign AAP MLAs and workers will stage a protest at the office of the Election Commission of India,” Rai said.
“The AAP brought the truth in public by showing how EVMs can be hacked. We want all future elections to be conducted only by using EVMs with Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT),” Rai said.
Rai also said that the AAP will stick to its viewpoint at the all-party meeting on EVMs called by the Election Commission tomorrow.
The AAP has been vocal in alleging that EVMs were tampered with in the assembly elections in Punjab and the civic polls in Delhi, both of which it lost.
Using a prototype of what looked like an EVM used by the poll panel, Bharadwaj on Tuesday claimed that codes embedded inside the voting machines can be used to manipulate results.
The Election Commission dismissed Bharadwaj’s assertions.
The Delhi Assembly in a day-long special session passed a resolution on Tuesday urging President Pranab Mukherjee and the Election Commission to ensure that EVMs with VVPAT are used in all future elections.
The resolution also called for tallying of votes polled in 25% randomly-selected booths with the paper trail generated by VVPAT machines.
Meanwhile, sacked Delhi minister Kapil Mishra yesterday began an indefinite hunger strike at his home here and threatened not to eat anything till Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal “reveals” who funded the foreign trips of five AAP leaders in the last two years.
In an open letter to Kejriwal, Mishra, suspended from the AAP after he alleged corruption by the chief minister, said he was on a “satyagraha” at his home.
Mishra also alleged that he was getting “life threats from international numbers.”
“I got the call from an international number, but I didn’t respond to that, then I received a death threat on a WhatsApp message,” he said.
Mishra said he was fasting “all alone in one corner of my house” and would not end his protest till Kejriwal made public the details of foreign trips of the chief minister’s “five friends – Sanjay Singh, Ashish Khetan, Satyendar Jain, Raghav Chadhha and Durgesh Pathak”.
He said he “won’t eat anything, will only drink water”.
Mishra said he knew Kejriwal was not bothered about his life and would persist with his protest till it was known “where they all visited, why they went, what they did (during foreign trips) and from whose money they did all these things”.
“Many people have said the amount of the hawala money, discrepancies in donations, cash transactions would be revealed in minutes if this information is made public.”
Mishra on Tuesday filed a graft complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against Kejriwal, his relatives and other AAP leaders. Mishra was earlier removed as Delhi’s water minister on Saturday.
Also yesterday, senior AAP leader Gurpreet Singh Waraich yesterday announced his resignation from the party two days after Bhagwant Mann was appointed as its Punjab convener.
Waraich, popular more with his screenname Ghuggi, was the Punjab convener for AAP for the last year. He remained in the post as the AAP contested the Punjab Assembly elections in February this year.
Comedian-turned-politician Waraich told reporters he was removed as the convener in an “unceremonious” way.
Waraich said he was not against the selection of Mann as the convener but against the manner in which it was done.
He lashed out at AAP national leaders for not taking Punjab leaders into confidence while taking major decisions.