Omar Abdullah said, “One can’t accept election results when they are a win and blame the EVMs when they are a loss.”
The Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, has turned down his INDIA bloc ally Congress’s strong criticism of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), widening another area of contention between the two bloc allies.
After losing the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly polls, the Congress started questioning the EVM’s infallibility and the election results it presented. It demanded that paper ballots be reinstated.
“The people cannot accept the poll results when they are in favor and then shift the blame to EVMs when unfavorable,” Abdullah said.
“When you get a hundred plus members of Parliament using the same EVMs, and you celebrate that as sort of a victory for your party, you can’t, but a few months later, turn around and say, we don’t like these EVMs because now the election results aren’t going the way we would like them to,” Abdullah said in an interview with PTI.
He said parties should not contest elections if they do not trust the voting mechanism.
“If you have problems with the EVMs, then you should be consistent in those problems,” he said when asked if the opposition, in general, and Congress are wrong for focusing on EVMs.
He would react with ‘God forbid’ when pointed out that what he was saying was such that it made him sound like a BJP spokesperson.
