The fire in the Kolkata building which burnt down the EVMs was entirely to be expected, just one of those vile things from the ruling party. We don't know if there was any hacking of the EVMs but we do know that since they are not online, if the machines were indeed 'fixed' to deliver victory to a particular party , 'unfixing' it would involve two steps. First 'fix' each machine individually by introducing malware and then unfix the bug again individually on each machine after the elections. This is a tedious process and fraught with complications. Till the time the bug is removed each machine carries evidence. Anyone with access to the EVMs can detect that it has been tampered with. A fire could be the easy way out to destroy evidence. It is also (not) surprising that the fire started on the 3rd & 4th floors of the building housing the EVMs, conveniently skipped the 5th & 6th floors then spread to the 7th floor to burn down 4,000 EVMs. It burnt down democracy, not that there is anything much left of it to destroy anymore.
