The line between leftist parody accounts and the actual utterances of India’s leftists is fast disappearing.
MK Venu, who is the founding Editor of leftist propaganda rag The Wire, has said that Indian should return to paper ballots because they’ll generate employment. “The one lesson for India from the clean, even if time consuming, process of US elections is that we should return to paper ballots. India must have faith in her ability to return to the transparency of the paper ballot process. It is also employment-intensive which is welcome!” he tweeted.
This could’ve been easy to pass off as an attempt at comedy, but it appears that MK Venu was dead serious about the claim. What’s more bizarre is that MK Venu’s support of paper ballots comes at a time when the US looks poised to be embroiled in a legal-electoral mess — with states like Pennsylvania manually counting postal ballots, the outcome of the Presidential Election could be unknown for weeks, and could plunge the country into unprecedented chaos. There are also videos going around of paper ballots going missing, and ballots turning up in trashcans across America.
But there are perhaps ideological reasons why MK Venu supports paper ballots. When postal ballots had been the norm, parties like CPM regularly “captured” polling booths. An India Today article from 2012 goes on to say that booth capturing was the secret behind the success of the CPI (M), with leftist goons taking over polling booths and filling out thousands of paper ballots at once. This practice was all but killed by Electronic Voting Machines, which require a time delay and a click from the official for users to be able to cast votes, and results for left parties had never been quite the same since.
And most bizarrely, MK Venu wants a return to paper ballots when he himself runs a digital-only publication outlet. If MK Venu really wants to generate employment, he can also start a paper version of The Wire which’ll provide employment to printers, ink manufacturers, and newspaper delivery boys. And why stop there? Maybe he can hire town criers who’ll go around cities shouting out his far-left propaganda. Maybe he can hire scribes who’ll handwrite his articles on papyrus in cursive. It’ll be a wonderful, wonderful world.
