Why and how does one pretend not to know how to read and write?

Istanbul is especially beautiful in Ramadan, and all the more so in the spring climate we are in now. Iftar and suhoor tables, tarawih prayers and book fairs offer good occasions for people to blend their worlds and horizons together, to knead them into one another and enrich them.

Of course, the repetition of the Istanbul elections also gives Ramadan sociability a dynamism all its own. Reckonings with the self are shifting toward the party's reckoning, and the party's reckoning toward racking head and heart over the future of the Islamic nation.

The most important item on the agenda in the field is the Istanbul elections. Some have a very clear mind and stance on this; others are confused. In an election in which 9 million of Istanbul's 16 million people voted, with the votes this close to one another, nothing could be more natural than an objection. To regard this as a refusal to accept the election results only shows that a propaganda running in the opposite direction, and in fact devoid of conscience, has worked very effectively and succeeded. Then we need to dwell on how such an unreasonable propaganda, contrary to reason and conscience, manages to work so effectively. If criticism is to be made, if self-criticism is to be made, it must proceed along this line.

Think the opposite. Suppose the votes were again this close, but the AK Parti were ahead. Would the CHP candidate not object? When errors capable of affecting the election results are detected, what power could have prevented the annulment of that election?

There is an election here that has not yet ended. Because objections are part of the election. It is so everywhere in the world, and in all the election experiences Turkey has ever had it has always been so. In the US, in many states, when the vote margin is below 1 percent, a recount is a rule. Had the counting of all the votes in Istanbul been accepted, perhaps there would have been no need to renew the election. Even in this election there were places where the result changed upon objections. So why should anyone give up the right to object, and for what reason?

During a conversation someone says: "We should have let it go; let them win a little too. The country would be at ease, and they too would take on the responsibility of having put their hands under the stone."

I said, as I have written before, that if the election truly and definitively ends this way, we too will say nothing other than this. We would even continue to be proud of Turkey's democracy for it. Turkey is a country where the chance of the opposition winning is this high and where such results are accepted with maturity.

Yet everyone enters an election to win. It has never been seen that anyone enters elections so that their rivals may win. Have you ever seen a team that has entered a match give up its right to play the last ten minutes and hand the game to the opposing team just for the sake of sportsmanship? AK Parti executives may make an individual gesture of generosity on their own behalf, but where do you invent the right to make such a generosity on behalf of the people they represent?

Moreover, the votes are very close to one another, and from the recount of the invalid votes, initially announced as 29 thousand, we saw that 16 thousand votes were identified as having been deliberately made to go against one party. When those votes were put back in their place, the difference dropped to 13 thousand. It is impossible to dismiss this much movement of votes as coincidence, impossible not to look for intent behind it, and to look and fail to find it is possible only by being a part of this theft.

If votes were deliberately moved from their place, the name of that is theft. It is customary for the thieves, who are all too ready to raise a clamor, to make an uproar over the campaign launched with "The elections are being repeated because they stole the votes." But if presenting the absence of words like "theft" or "stealing" in the YSK's decision as proof that there was no theft is not a piece of cunning, then they very much deserve to be likened to the situation in this joke.

I told a similar case in this column on another occasion; let us repeat it. However, we are changing the animal named in that joke, because we saw that, even though that animal appeared in another role in the joke, some people identified themselves with that role and took offense. Our aim, of course, is not to hurt anyone on this Ramadan day, but to get our point across.

Once upon a time, of two people who applied for the vacant imam post of a village, one was to be chosen by the villagers themselves. The people of the village, facing this procedure for the first time, try to determine a method. After consultations they decide to examine the candidates. For this purpose a jury is first determined. The jury first subjects the candidates to a reading-and-writing test. Subject them it does, but the jury itself can neither read nor write. Even so, following a method that works by ear, they ask the candidates to write the word "cat" on a board. One of the candidates promptly writes "cat" with a know-it-all, mocking air. What would you expect? The illiterate villager cannot liken it to anything, of course. They ask the other to write. He, perhaps because he did not know how, or perhaps because he instantly noticed the villagers' weakness, instead of writing the word on the board quickly and sloppily draws a picture of a cat. As soon as the villager sees the picture, he says: "Aha, this is it!"

How else is the YSK to show them the cat? It has said it plainly: it has established that the invalid votes, the ballots, the ballot-box voter lists, the ballot-box result record, and the count tally sheet that should have been in their place were "not found in their place." What is found missing from its place, particularly in such a process, can be expressed in no other way than as "stolen." Should it draw you a picture of a thief too so that you can read?

It is no small thing: in order to turn the situation to their advantage, they will pretend not even to know how to read and write. The worst of it is that this illiteracy, as it is shared around, is turning into an ideological conviction.