It had been a long day at work for Sumana, but she still decided to visit her booth-level officer’s home in a South Kolkata neighbourhood that December evening. The officer had not been answering her phone calls, making the 45-year-old restless.
She was worried because the Election Commission had categorised her daughter, 19, as an “unmapped voter” in the ongoing special intensive revision of West Bengal’s voter lists. This means her daughter was unable to show that either she or her close relatives were voters back in 2002.
Neither Sumana nor her late husband were registered to vote at that time so she could not provide their information in her daughter’s enumeration form. There are close to 32 lakh so-called unmapped voters across the state.
Starting from the last week of December, the commission has held hearings to examine their documents and determine their eligibility to vote in the future. Bengali war veterans, international cricketers and even former ministers have been summoned so far.
Sumana – who requested that her actual name not be disclosed in this report – wanted to save her daughter from this ordeal. So she scanned scores of voter lists from 2002 till she finally found the names of her in-laws, who live in north Bengal and are no longer in…
Source: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar
