As a kid I would listen spellbound to my grandmother’s endless, gripping tales of ghosts from her village in East Bengal. But of course there were no terrifying ghosts then. Nor now. But West Bengal’s allure for ghosts, reflected in literature and celluloid alike, continues – in electoral politics. These human spirits are what Ananda Bazar Patrika describes as bhoot or “ghost voters” who usually lie in wait in the state’s electoral rolls and make their earthly appearance on voting day.
As the controversy over the huge difference in voters’ numbers on April 4 – when 18 assembly constituencies in the western belt of Bengal went to the polls – rages on, the state’s Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Sunil Kumar Gupta, seems to have done a Houdini act – just as ghosts do in Bengal’s rural backwaters.
When polling ended across the 18 seats in West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura on April 4, Gupta’s office, acting as a subsidiary of the Election Commission of India, issued provisional figures, claiming that 80.92 percent voters had exercised their franchise. This was certainly encouraging information, which was initially interpreted as a human effort to exorcise “ghost voters” from the electoral rolls.