Within four hours of its launch on Tuesday, Kanhaiya’s crowdfunding bid had fetched Rs 7 lakh in donations. By Wednesday afternoon, the amount had crossed Rs 31 lakh. The crowdfunding site, www.ourdemocracy.com, had to be taken down for a security upgrade after it suffered numerous cyber attacks.
Patna: “Like every drop of water fills an earthen pot, (your) donation of Re 1 to my campaign fund will help me to fight the election and take the voice of the marginalised and exploited to Parliament,” Kanhaiya Kumar, fighting from the Begusarai Lok Sabha seat in Bihar, had said in an appeal.
Kanhaiya Kumar also launched an online crowdfunding platform on March 26 to collect money to contest the elections.
He had been receiving overwhelming support to his online crowd funding initiative. Within four hours of its launch on Tuesday, Kanhaiya’s crowdfunding bid had fetched Rs 7 lakh in donations. By Wednesday afternoon, the amount had crossed Rs 31 lakh.
Then, a source close to Kanhaiya said the CPI candidate and many of his party colleagues had been “flooded with calls from people whose donations are not going through online”.
Kanhaiya posted on Facebook, “On one hand we have got your support, on the other, as always, we are facing the conspiracies of those who do not want the voice of the exploited and the dispossessed to reach Parliament. For the last two days, we have faced repeated cyber attacks to shut down our donation website.”
The site, ourdemocracy.in, has now been taken offline and engineers are probing whether the glitch was the result of a cyber attack.
An integral member of Kanhaiya’s team, Varun Chauhan said that the funds that have been raised are not at risk or exposed to any security concerns. “We have raised Rs 32 lakh in less than 24 hours that the site was properly live for. The money goes to a payment gateway and not to a particular account directly. Once the campaign is done, the ourdemocracy.com team will transfer the funds or hand over a cheque. We will set up an account in accordance with the EC rules and regulations and then transfer the money there,” he said in a report by edexlive.com.
The attacks, Varun said, started within an hour after the site went live. “I don’t want to name anyone directly. But certain IT cells have been working hard to flood the site with various forms of cyber attacks. We have a team from the USA and the site IT professionals working on the security upgrade of the site at Delhi. It will take a day to get it back up,” he said in the report.
Bilal Zaidi, the co-founder of the website, in a report by the Telegraph, said, “We are working to make it more safe and secure with a team of senior technical experts. Until then, the website is closed for contributions…. From the volume of traffic on the website, we estimate that had there not been problems with the website, he would have touched Rs 50 lakh to 60 lakh by now.”
The Telegraph reported that Kanhaiya and his supporters are continuing what communist parties have been doing for long. “After songs and skits, our cultural squads pass around a red cloth in which the people of Begusarai drop their donations,” a source said.
In his appeal, Kanhaiya spoke about Gauri Lankesh, M M Kalburgi, Rohit Vemula and missing JNU student Najeeb. “At a terrifying moment like this, we all share the struggle to protect the values of our constitution and of humanity. It is often that people who raise genuine issues have to face vile schemes on one hand and resource crunch on the other. We really hope that you will make a financial contribution to the best of your ability and strengthen us in this shared struggle.”
Kanhaiya Kumar is the Left candidate and will take on Union Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Giriraj Singh in Begusarai.