Sadre Alam went to war for India. Suprabuddha Sen’s grandfather illustrated its first constitution. For decades, both men exercised their rights enshrined in that document to vote in the world’s largest democracy.
Days before polls opened in crucial state elections in April, they found out that their right had been taken away from them. There was little or no explanation.
Alam, 62, opens a thick maroon binder that holds the 30 or so documents he says he took to local officials to try and convince them of his right to vote: his grandfather’s land deeds from the 1920s; evidence his parents had voted decades ago; his army discharge certificate. To no avail.
“It feels strange to think my country is not mine today,” the former soldier told CNN at his home in West Bengal state, where votes from the election he was barred from are now being counted. “That’s my pain. Everyone is asking me: ‘How did your name get excluded despite being in the army?’”
Alam and Suprabuddha are among more than nine million names to have been culled from West Bengal’s voter roll. Millions more were deleted nationwide just before a clutch of state elections across India that will decide whether the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can make inroads in state houses in the country’s south and east, where it has traditionally struggled to gain power.
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