Independent Indian: Work & Life of Dr Subroto Roy

Our cook said she would be gone for three days next week. No leave was due so she faced the risk of having her wages docked. It did not matter to her, she would be going anyway. It transpired she was going home to vote for the local “panchayat” elections, so she would in fact be going at full pay. Her home is in the Sunderban jungles, where there are tigers; she said she had heard of four villagers being lost to man-eaters over the years. Bee-keeping and honey-making are among the many crafts and trades besides farming and fishing there. It takes her five hours to get home from Calcutta, two hours by train, two more hours by bus, then an hour walking along unpaved roads. One day to travel each way, and one day to cast her vote for the local government that will hold office for the next  five years.  The politics are split two ways: there are the official communists versus a coalition of the unofficial communists allied with non-communists. The local offices of both sides had recently telephoned her residence in Calcutta urging her to come back home and had canvassed for her vote. One vote among many hundreds of thousands. She is confident her vote will be secret (by electronic machine) and the political parties do not know who voted for whom. But they do try to pressure people in informal exit polls afterwards to figure out who voted which way if they can. What does her vote matter, she was asked. Suppose she went on holiday for three days instead, what would happen? Well, she said, I would be in trouble with the panchayat if I needed their signature on something and they knew I had not come back home to vote; they would say, well, you live in the big city, why do you need our decision in your favour? Indian democracy at work. A committed free thinking electorate. She makes about Rs 4000 per month and lives comfortably; she is a widow with a son in his twenties; she put him through a post-graduate college studying Bengali literature in which he has a Master of Arts. But he is also training to be an auto-mechanic which will have better job-prospects. India’s political economy at work.

Subroto Roy