I awoke on polling day to see the newspaper filled with exhortations to vote. From celebrities urging fans to exercise their rights, to dubious discounts for people with the black mark on their fingers in a Delhi water-park (and what does having a good splash have to do with being a good citizen?) — there was little other news on the first few pages of my daily. I switched on the telly and groaned, for I found myself staring at Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi looking fresh as daisies at the polling booth. On another channel, Lalu Prasad and his family were casting their vote smiling at the camera.
I stood in my balcony with my morning cuppa, and found that the election officers were camping literally outside our doorsteps. The officers were courteous and efficient, they had an alphabetical voters’ list, as well as an address-wise one. As I drank my tea, I saw them hard at work, searching for names and handing out voter slips. “Things are looking really good this year,” I commented happily to my husband, “at least our polling booth looks very well-organised and efficient.”
My husband said that since we actually hadn’t been surveyed before this election, he was afraid our names may not be on the electoral rolls. “Don’t be silly,” I said bracingly, “we have faithfully voted in every election, we have voter cards — the only thing is, they haven’t been updated with our new address. Our names will certainly be there!” Maybe, he said, the survey took place when we were travelling early last month and our house was locked for fifteen days…I pooh-poohed him: “The rule is that if the surveyor finds a house locked, he must leave a notice saying that we should report to his office later. We received no such notice!” If the worst comes to the worst, I said, our name would then be on the voter list of the nearby colony where we’d lived earlier. My husband sadly lacks my shining faith in democracy, so he maintained a wise silence.
Sure enough, when we traipsed across to the tables festooned with posters across our house, our names just couldn’t be found in the lists. The courteous and efficient officers told us: “You should have updated your address with us, this is your fault!” We protested that our colony had not been surveyed, but it was obviously no use arguing with them. So we went to our old neighbourhood, where the courteous and efficient election officers informed us our names had probably been struck off when we moved. “Doesn’t my voter card with my photo-ID count?” I said desperately, “why can’t I vote just because my address has changed?” My plea fell to deaf ears, and we returned home shamefully hiding our unmarked forefingers.
That evening, I spoke to other neighbours who were unable to vote and that too for the same reason. A friend told me that there were scores of hopeful voters when she went to the polling booth, whose names weren’t on the rolls either. Then I read that, until 3 pm on the polling day, the voter turnout was 42 per cent. While some blamed voter apathy and others, the 36-degree heat — there were obviously many like me who went to vote, but couldn’t.
Someone please tell me why our government has spent crores issuing numbered voter cards with photo IDs — if a trivial change of address can prevent it from recognising us as citizens? In an earlier column, I’d said we need ‘smart’ biometric voter-cards, but maybe what we need before that is a smarter government.