Opening another point of friction with an important ally, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah has dismissed the Congress party‘s vehement objection to electronic voting machines, and echoed BJP‘s defence – you can’t accept election results when you win, and blame EVMs when you lose.
“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 then 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 told PTI in an exclusive interview on Friday.
The chief minister emphasised that electoral machines remain the same regardless of the election outcome, and parties should not use them as a convenient excuse for defeat. “One day voters choose you, the next day they don’t,” he said and gave his own example of facing defeat in Lok Sabha polls while winning a majority in the September assembly polls. “I never blamed the machines,” he said.
