Why Cong Was Quick To Distance Itself From EVM Petition?

It is really interesting that on a day the Supreme Court dismissed petitions that called for comprehensive cross-verification of votes cast using EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), the Congress  asserted  that  its “political campaign on the greater use of VVPATs to increase the public trust in the electoral process” would continue. This even after Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote on X that “Congress was not a party, directly or indirectly, to the petition on VVPATs rejected by the Supreme Court”. So what is the Congress compulsion to continue its campaign against EVMs, something that it introduced while it was in power? Well, the answer lies in its 2024 manifesto where under the heading “Defending the Constitution” the party speaks about a promise to restore the voters’ trust in the election process. “We will amend the election laws to combine the efficiency of the EVM and the transparency of the ballot paper. Voting will be through the EVM but the voter will be able to hold and deposit the machine-generated voting slip into the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) unit. The electronic vote tally will be matched against the VVPAT slip tally.”  Of course such a promise goes against the latest SC verdict. That’s why even if one accepts the Congress position that it had nothing to do with the petition before the SC, PM Modi  may not be surely off the mark when he dubbed the apex court  verdict as a jolt “to those who wanted to loot ballot boxes “. The court had clearly said the era of ballot papers shall not return.