The Rig Veda of elections

Jug Suraiya

Two saffronites up in righteously indignant arms over the Opposition’s allegations that the Lotus party has rigged electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the past elections and is likely to do so again in the crucial, make-it-or-break-it Lok Sabha elections scheduled for later this year.

1st saffronite: The cheek of these oppositionwallahs! How dare they say that we’re capable of rigging EVMs? Or that we’d even ever want to do so. How dumb can you get?

2nd saffronite: Yeah, we should sue them for slander.

1st saffronite: Don’t worry. These charges of rigged EVMs have got the Election Commission so worked up that it might well sue these fellows for slandering the EVMs, which the EC has repeatedly certified as being unriggable.

2nd saffronite: They probably are unriggable. In any case, there’s absolutely no need to go about fiddling with these gadgets and rigging them when we can go on step better and rig the voters themselves.

1st saffronite: Right. Voters are so much easier to rig than EVMs. And there are so many different ways of rigging them, bakwas rules like the Election Code notwithstanding.

2nd saffronite: Moreover, unlike a rigged EVM, a rigged voter is impossible to detect. The rigged voter, who doesn’t even realise being rigged, is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

1st saffronite: You can bet your ballot box on that. And the best and most effective way to ensure that the voter is well and truly rigged without knowing it is called pauperism.

2nd saffronite: Surely you mean popularism?

1st ssaffronite: No, I mean pauperism. And the way it works is that before the elections we offer all sorts of sops — like pension-for-life, and universal basic income, and all sorts of other goodies — to voters. Right?

2nd saffronite: Right. As we just did with the so-called interim Budget presented by our Interim Finance Minister.

1st saffronite: Exactly. Now, do you think there’s enough money in the national coffers to make good on all these promised sops?

2nd saffronite: No, of course there isn’t. Everyone knows that.

1st saffronite: OK. So then what happens is that the voter, duly rigged with promised sops that the country can’t afford, votes us into power. And what do we do once we’re back in power?

2nd saffronite: What?

1st saffronite: What we do when we are voted back into power by sop-rigged voters is that we divert all available funds from footling things like education, and health, and family welfare, and bijli, and paani, and roads, and funnel everything into providing at least some of those sops which got us voted back into power. And the result is the pauperisation of the national economy. That’s why winning elections through sops is called pauperism.

2nd saffronite: Wow. Pauperism seems to be a really cool way to rig voters and win elections.

1st saffronite: It sure is. And the best part of it is that pauperism is a self-perpetuation condition.

2nd saffronite: How do you mean, self-perpetuating?

1st saffronite: Simple. Pauperism ensures that many, if not most, voters continue to remain poor, and so are susceptible to being rigged by even more sops in the next election, and so on, in perpetuity.

2nd saffronite: Awesome. But tell me one thing. With all this sop-induced rigging and the pauperism it generates, isn’t our body politic in danger?

1st saffronite: In danger of what?

2nd saffronite: In danger of rigger mortis setting in….