Reporter’s diary: Notes from an extraordinary election in Bengal
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“So you made it to the voter list!” exclaimed a middle-aged resident of my locality in Kolkata.
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He was addressing the man standing next to me in the crowd that had gathered to vote in the polling station in the government school in our neighbourhood.
“I thought you were from another country,” this person added, before the two of them shared a laugh. Their interaction would have amused me more had I not been busy looking for my parents. I was done with voting and had been trying to locate them – we did not have our phones with us.
Thanks to the Election Commission’s chaotic special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal, my polling station was different from that of my parents. Though we live in the same house and stepped out together to cast our votes, we had to go to different places to do so. This was not the case the last time we voted in 2024.
But then ours was hardly the only family to get caught up in this mess. In the voting queue, I heard similar stories from several others. Election Commission officials described this as booth rationalisation. On the ground, it appeared to be anything but rational.
This was among the many bizarre...