Chandrasekhar, while speaking to news agency ANI, said that Musk’s suggestion about ‘all EVMs being hackable‘ was too broad and inaccurate. “To claim that there cannot be a secure digital product in the world is to then say that every Tesla car can be hacked.He is factually wrong,” he said.
“Musk was commenting in the context of some EVMs in the US, specifically in Puerto Rico,” Chandrasekhar explained. “He made this sweeping comment that all EVMs can be hacked. I am nobody to get into an argument with somebody like Elon Musk. But that statement or that generalization was far too sweeping for it to be left unchallenged.”
Chandrasekhar stresses the distinctiveness of Indian EVMs compared to their Western counterparts, particularly those used in the US. “Musk has not understood what the Indian EVM is. Indian EVMs do not lend themselves to being hacked because they are precisely very limited intelligence devices.”
“Indian EVMs are very different from what Americans know of EVMs because the US and the Western world use connected devices. They are using traditional compute platforms that are connected to the Internet as EVMs,” the former Union minister elaborated. “I pointed out that Indian EVMs are architected and designed to be safe and secure because there is no connectivity. If there is no connectivity to Wi-Fi or 5G or the Internet in general, there is no way to get it.”
Chandrasekhar further emphasizes the robustness of Indian EVMs, saying, “If there is a country that can design an EVM right and show the world, it is certainly India.”
In his earlier dig at Musk, Chandrasekhar had said that India “would be happy to run a tutorial” for the same.
Sketching out the example of the Indian EVMs, the former Union minister said that they are “custom-designed, secure and isolated from any network or media.”
In India’s recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, several opposition leaders had alleged that there was a possibility of EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) being hacked.
However Chief Election Commissioner, Rajiv Kumar after the results emerged said, “Now, it (result) is in front of everyone. Let the EVM rest till the next elections… It is a trustable thing which keeps on doing its work…”