New Delhi:

The BJP Wednesday lodged a complaint with the Election Commission against Rahul Gandhi for his “fight against a shakti” remarks at a recent rally in Mumbai, and urged the poll panel to take “stringent action” against the Congress leader and issue directions for lodging an FIR against him.

In a memorandum to the poll panel, BJP leaders Hardeep Singh Puri and Om Pathak alleged Mr Gandhi’s “fight against a shakti” remarks were rendered with “malicious intention” of insulting the religious values associated with ‘shakti’ and creating enmity among religions to appease “some religious community”.

“The statement made by Gandhi wherein he says that the fight is with Shakti was made with a malicious intention to hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindus. A large section of Hindus in India offer prayers to Shakti in Hinduism to the extent there exists a Shakti sect who refer to the Devi as Shakti,” the BJP leaders charged.

“Gandhi’s call to fight against Shakti in Hinduism, directly implies that the Congress supporters should fight against the worshipping deities of Hinduism, which creates hatred against Hinduism,” they added.

A day after his remarks at the Mumbai rally, Mr Gandhi on Monday clarified that he was not talking about any religious power but the ‘shakti’ of unrighteousness, corruption and falsehood.

He accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of twisting his words and said he was speaking about the power of which Modi was wearing the mask.

The BJP leaders also alleged that Mr Gandhi made “false and mischievous” claims with regard the authenticity of electoral voting machines (EVMs) while addressing the Mumbai rally and raised questions on the Election Commission as well.

They demanded that the poll panel take action against Mr Gandhi for his remarks about EVMs, contending that such kind of “disinformation and misinformation” without verification of facts was “prejudicial” to national integration.

Mr Gandhi made such remarks about EVMs and the poll panel with an “intention to create public disorder”, the BJP leaders charged.

“By raising these kinds of allegations, the Congress and Rahul Gandhi, in a way, are insulting the electorate of India. Furthermore, it is pertinent to mention that in the same event, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah blatantly denounced EVMs as a thief,” the BJP leaders said in their petition to the Election Commission.

The BJP leaders demanded that the Election Commission take “stringent action” against Mr Gandhi and also “prosecute” him for his remarks.

“Take stringent action and direct lodging of an FIR and prosecute Rahul Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi may be instructed to offer an unconditional public apology and retraction for his utterances at Shivaji Park event in Mumbai,” they urged in their petition.

“Issue a direction to INC and Rahul Gandhi to refrain from posting, publishing, advertising and propagating the said false information through any and all means of communication either spoken, written, audio/virtually representation or otherwise,” it said.

The BJP leaders also urged the poll panel to direct social media platform X to take down the video of the event, addressed by Gandhi, and “subsequent tweets and similar tweets” on the same content by other Congress leaders.

They also demanded that the poll panel direct the platform to suspend the official handle of the Congress “for spreading fake news”.

“Take cognizance of this egregious violation of the Model Code of Conduct and the Representation of the People Act, 1951 and ensure that such offences are never repeated in future,” they added.

The BJP leaders said that “misinformation propagated by Gandhi, including lies about the EVM machines despite authoritative pronouncements by the Supreme Court” can have significant consequences with respect to the trust of the citizen in the election process.

“These threats are especially perilous in today’s age since these falsehoods have the capacity to spread rapidly on social media, with platforms unwilling or unable to intervene, fuelling threats to election systems,” they said. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain a PIL seeking an independent audit of source code of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used by the Election Commission, saying no “actionable material” was placed to indicate that the poll panel was in breach of its “constitutional mandate”. Observing that it will not venture into the “policy issue”, the Supreme Court dismissed the PIL which had also sought a direction to the poll panel to put in the public domain the audit report, if any, of EVM’s source code.

“The Election Commission of India (ECI) is entrusted constitutionally with superintendence and control over the conduct of elections. Presently, the petitioner has placed no actionable material on the record in this court to indicate that the ECI is actually in breach of its constitutional mandate,” a bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said in its order.

The bench said the manner in which the source code should be audited and whether the audit report should be placed in public domain falls within the domain of the poll panel.

“On such a policy issue, we are not inclined to issue a direction of this sort which has been sought by the petitioner. There is no material before this court at this stage to indicate that the Election Commission is not taking suitable steps to fulfil its mandate,” the bench said while dismissing the PIL filed by an individual named Sunil Ahya.

The source code is a set of instructions and statements of a programmer using a computer programming language.

The ‘Hash functions’ are used to digest or condense a message down to a fixed size which can then be signed in a way that makes finding other messages with the same hash extremely difficult.

During the brief hearing, the bench referred to certain things related to the functioning of the Supreme Court and said it recently allowed electronic passes for entering into the Supreme Court. “If I start putting out what is source code in public, you know, who will be able to hack that,” the CJI said.

Before filing the petition, PIL petitioner Ahya had made representations to the Election Commission seeking an independent audit of the source code of the EVMs.

“The source code is the brain behind the EVM and it is about survival of democracy,” Ahya said.

Ahya had earlier moved the petition before the general elections in 2019. The court had then said in view of the announcement of the general elections it was not possible to go into the issues raised in the PIL.

It had, however, granted Ahya the liberty to file a fresh plea if a new cause of action arises.

After that, another fresh PIL was instituted and the bench had permitted Ahya to make a representation to the EC.

In the third plea, the PIL petitioner said he also made some representations to the poll panel and was still in the dark on what steps have been taken on the issue.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)