With barely three months left for the Lok Sabha elections, the Indian Journalists' Association (Europe) is all set to demonstrate how to hack electronic voting machines (EVM) today (January 21). The event will be held in London and would be demonstrated by a US cyber expert who is an EVM designer.

It is a huge event but the Indian Election Commission (ECI) is not aware of the development.

As per Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, "We are not aware of any such demonstration, and we have always maintained that the EVMs used by the ECI in India are not tamperable."

The event is likely to have a significant impact on Indian politics as politicians here continue to debate the merits and demerits of the machines.

Now, let's take you one year back to the time when an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj, also a computer engineer, claimed to have successfully hacked a replica of an EVM.

Many politicians attended the session including Congress' VV Rao and Tehseen Poonawalla, RJD's Manoj Jha and CPM's Nilotpal Basu. They found the demo convincing.

The party leaders then challenged the Election Commission to give them the real EVM so that they could show how to hack them.

The Election Commission, however, squashed the hacking claims and said that the "so-called demonstration of tampering of a prototype of an EVM cannot be exploited to influence intelligent citizens and electorate to assail or vilify the EVMs used by the commission."