Shweta Upadhyay

This has to be amongst the most sinister visuals of what is unfolding in Delhi. The police is informed by reporters about unidentified persons in a car with sticks/lathis and yet the car is allowed to drive away! Think about it for a second. A planned peaceful protest against election roll fraud is prohibited because the police cites the fear of violence and invokes a section of the law prohibiting gatherings of more than four people in central New Delhi. The police arrest individuals for speaking to reporters or looking like they are protestors even though they are not raising slogans, carrying placards or weapons of any kind. But when unidentified persons with a horde of weapons in their motor car are spotted hanging around in this prohibited zone, the police makes no attempt to establish who they are let alone detain them. Instead they are allowed, indeed, encouraged to escape! I do believe we are now at the public-private partnershipstage of fascism. With lumpens being given free reign to attack those standing up for democracy.

“Somebody – we don’t know who – decided that a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters had to be conducted. The Election Commission of India (ECI) told RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj that it did not have minutes of any meeting that decided upon the SIR.  “Somebody – we are now piecing this together – decided that Form 6 would be given to new voters to register during SIR but it would be altered so that they cannot do so without proving that their grandfather was also on the voter list decades ago.  “Somebody – and we don’t know who – invented a tool called ‘logical discrepancy’ and wrote algorithms to eliminate voters for 11 different reasons. More than 13 crore names were deleted from India’s electoral rolls thus. “But we do know who built the digital system which helped that somebody do all this. It’s not a government department or company. It is a private company – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – whose parent group had, in the very years that it was building that system, become the single largest identifiable funder of the party running the government the system serves. “None of that, by itself, proves wrongdoing. Companies build government software everywhere. In fact, TCS itself has done a tremendous job of building and running India’s passport system. “Companies donate to ruling parties everywhere the law permits it. What is unusual is the scale of the overlap, the choices made by TCS – or thrust upon it – in building the system, and how little of it has been publicly examined.” Truly outstanding piece by S Raghotham connecting the dots…