Bengaluru: Karnataka Assembly speaker and Congress candidate from the Ranebennur constituency, K B Koliwad has blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for EVM hacks after his defeat in the recently-concluded Assembly by-polls.

Addressing the media on Tuesday, December 17, he said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief and Union Home Minister Amit Shah are acting like dictators and are behind the hacking of the EVMs. When the results of the by-polls were out on December 9, I met former chief minister Siddaramaiah and he called for an engineer to test the EVM machines. When the engineer asked, how many seats the Congress was expecting to win, he had said Congress – 7 and BJP – 3. The result that the EVM showed was exactly that. That is when Siddaramaiah wondered if the EVMs were hacked.”

Meanwhile, Koliwad opined that 12 of the 13 BJP candidates (earlier disqualified MLAs) won by manipulating the EVMs. He also opined that the EVMs must be banned and ballot papers should be introduced.

It can be recalled that Koliwad lost to the BJP’s Arunkumar Guttur by a margin of 23,222 votes.