Sorry for Interruption- Another Memoir

ISB is having ‘SOLSTICE- The Alumni Reunion’, beginning from today. I am back from the party to keep my promise, i.e. to blog on the party night. The DJ was playing some dull numbers when I was there and now he is playing some good songs (my Quad is closest to the new events lounge). So here is another of the memoirs, a long one, before I continue on the PDS in my next post.

Amit entered into the premises of the Cinema Hall. He was to conduct the training of the enumerators for the voter list revision work. The work at hand included revision of voter list of over 1000 polling stations of the Subdivision. Since hundreds of primary school teachers were being trained, the Cinema Hall was the only suitable infrastructure available in the town to conduct such a huge training in such a short duration.

During the training Amit explained to everyone that he would make it a point to visit each of the polling station area. So enumerators should ensure that they actually visit door to door to record the voters. After the training some of the teachers complimented Amit for the clarity in his Bangla and the pleasant surprise it caused. Some of them even requested Amit to visit their schools and address the students.

Very soon the enumeration work started. The initial few days were eye-opener. School teachers walking from house to house in the burning sun was a sight that made Amit appreciate the efforts his team was putting in that work. Political pressure and restlessness had started as rival groups had started commenting on the unexpected things that the revision could unearth.

However, the enumerators soon learnt that Amit was not only visiting their areas but also checking some of the houses for the accuracy of the enumeration work done. One of the visits was especially exciting. One of the enumerator had her polling station area close to her house. Once she saw Amit visiting her polling station area, she called her son from her home. ‘Babai, Dada ke paon choo’, was the order. By the time Amit could realize anything, the six feet tall Babai (who was in class XI as he told) was pushing the people around to reach the feet of Amit. That was embarrassing, some 6-7 years back Amit himself was in Class XI and here this boy was struggling to touch his feet. Though Amit tried to stop him, it was useless. The instruction of a mother to the son was the ultimate order for him. He would have beaten Amit had he tried to stop him from doing so.

The expected findings of the revision were written on the wall. Kalipur being an industrial town, people had been shifting across the housings once they got promoted or someone got transferred. There was huge duplication of names since people had not deleted their names from previous address. There had been some large closures of industries in the past and many people had left the place. But as the work was reaching its conclusion, it was clear that Kalipur had about 200,000 people on electoral rolls not present at their given address.

Once teachers had done their job, data was being entered into the computers at the SDO Office and a storm had been unleashed even before the draft roll was out. Rival political groups were accusing each other of large scale manipulations in the past and present. Senior leaders were giving interviews that they would not accept that severely truncated voter list. Senior officials were worried what that chaos was all about and if such a list could be published.

Amit had in the mean time been warned about possible constitution of a HC inspection committee against him for depriving some 200,000 voters of their right to vote. It was not clear how correct those rumours were. Then some people were arguing that roll revision was done every year, so how could 200,000 people vanish in one year. Others were laughing at the quality of the past work, when revision was done sitting under a tree and no one moved from house to house, and were congratulating Amit for his courage.

Some well-wishers suggested Amit to roll back the deletion and seek permission to revert back to the older roll and suspend the election clerk for the ‘mistakes’ and save his own skin. Amit’s election clerk was an old person, a perfect ‘bhadralok’, who had invited Amit some days back on his grandson’s birthday. Every evening he would remind Amit to go back to his home while he would volunteer to stay back at office during night to supervise the data entry. Ultimately both used to stay back and supervise data entry.

‘And they are advising me to suspend this person who has done nothing wrong, just as they are threatening me for an action for doing nothing wrong’, Amit would think.

‘Idi***’, he would smile.

He had also been called by senior officials to seek explanation on what was happening in Kalipur. Some of them were very generous and had advised to stick to his actions if he was convinced that there was no large scale blunder in the enumeration work. However, as the Electoral Registration Officer, the responsibility would be his and implications would be drastic if he were proved wrong.

‘Be very sure there is no error in your work, there is no harm in admitting a mistake if you have committed one’, some one would say.

‘I wonder you are still ok, it is not 500 or 1000; it is 200,000 voters gone in four Assembly constituencies’, some one else would remark.

After all the hard work in enumeration, those were weeks of sleepless nights. But Amit had done audit of all the booths where the deletion of non existent voters was huge. He was sure that whatever had been done was right. And there was no reason to betray all those teachers whom he had motivated so hard to visit each and every house thrice and who looked towards him. He only told people that if deleting 200,000 people was tough, to bring back the missing 200,000 people was impossible. They did not exist on those addresses, so there was no point of retreat whatever may befall.

Amit gave his charge as SDO of Kalipur on 1st of April upon his transfer. As a result of work of some 6 months, the final voter list of Kalipur was published on 7th of April, with some 200,000 voters less than the previous one.