A day before counting day, the Election Commission of India reacted to the various memes on social media on the lack of action against poll violators.
One meme that caught their attention was netizens terming them as ‘Laapata Gentlemen’, inspired by the title of a recent movie, ‘Laapata Ladies’.
Addressing a press conference on how the Lok Sabha elections went, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said, “Social media meme pages are calling us ‘ Laapataa Gentlemen’. But we never went missing, We chose to communicate through press notes of which 100 were issued during polling.”
“Now memes can say the ‘Laapataa Gentlemen’ are back,” the CEC added.
The Election Commission said that the 18th Lok Sabha elections created a world record with 64. 2 crore voters, including 31.2 crore women voters.
Over 68,000 monitoring teams and 1.5 crore polling and security personnel were involved in the election process. “The entire process was robust,” the CEC said.
The CEC said that only 39 repolls took place as compared to 540 in 2019.
Jammu and Kashmir recorded the largest voter turnout in the last four years at 58.58 per cent overall and 51.05 per cent in the Valley.
“Seizures of Rs 10,000 crore, including cash, freebies, drugs and liquor, were made during the 2024 polls as compared to Rs 3,500 crore in 2019,” CEC Kumar said.
Additionally, nearly four lakh vehicles, 135 special trains and 1,692 air sorties were used in conducting the polls.
Over 90% of complaints regarding the Model Code of Conduct were sorted.
“FIRs were filed against top leaders and polling officials involved in malpractice. Officials were transferred to sanitise poll process,” he said.
On accounts using deep fake and AIs, the CEC said, “We have by and large controlled the menace of deep fakes, AI generated synthetic content in this general elections.”
