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“It must be my ghost that casts my vote every election,” Riya Pal pauses, her voice breaking into a bitter laugh. On paper, the Election Commission of India has declared her dead. In reality, the 33-year-old widow is very much alive, working as a house help in other people’s homes in Bengal’s Domjur area, struggling to keep her small rented room, and raising her eight-year-old son alone after her husband’s death just ten months ago.
In the draft list released as part of West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, 33-year-old Riya Pal, has been marked as dead. The error has not has plunged her already precarious life into deeper uncertainty.
“I had submitted all the required documents,” she says, sitting outside her rented home, refusing to invite the media inside for fear of upsetting her landlord. “The Booth Level Officer came to my house, checked everything, took my papers. Then one day he called me and said I have been marked dead,” she lamented.
Riya has lived in Domjur for over two decades, since she got married. After her husband’s death, she informed the authorities and submitted his death certificate, assuming the process would end there. Instead, it appears that somewhere in the bureaucratic maze, her own existence was erased. “My husband died about ten months ago. We submitted his death certificate and asked the BLO to do what was needed,” she says quietly. “I don’t know what else happened after that.”
She has all the documents that are routinely demanded, Aadhaar card, voter ID, PAN card. Officials even verified her father’s records, linking her family to the 2002 voter list used as a reference in the SIR process. Her parents, both alive, feature on the draft list. Riya does not. “My name was not on the 2002 list because I did not have a voter card then,” she explains. “But I have voted in every election since my name was added. My parents are on the list. I am linked to the same parents. Still, I am the one who has been cut off.”
The consequences are not merely administrative. Since news of the error broke, whispers about her nationality have begun to circulate, a terrifying prospect for a woman with little money, no legal muscle and a child entirely dependent on her. “I work in houses,” she says, gesturing to the lanes where she earns her living. “If by their logic I am dead, then is my ghost working in those homes? Is a ghost earning money? Is a ghost raising a child?” Her employers, she says, have offered support and reassurance. But comfort is hard to come by at home.
During the interview, Riya’s phone rings repeatedly. It is her son, alone inside the house, growing increasingly anxious because he cannot see his mother. At just eight years old, the boy has already witnessed death up close. He performed the last rites of his father, a memory that still overwhelms him.
“He keeps crying if anyone talks about his father,” Riya says. “He hasn’t understood it yet.” When he finally comes outside, the child runs straight into his mother’s arms, clutching her tightly as though afraid she might disappear again, this time for real. As people around them mention his father, his grip tightens. Tears roll down his face, a child clinging to the only certainty left in his life, his mother, while the state records insist that certainty does not exist.
For Riya, the fear is twofold, that she may lose her right to vote, and that correcting the mistake may itself become an ordeal she cannot afford. “I don’t know if this will be fixed,” she says. “I don’t know if I will be able to vote. In their eyes, I am already dead. All I want is for this mistake to be rectified. We are simple people we don’t understand anything else.”
Although the Election Commission has maintained that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise is aimed at ensuring greater transparency and correcting errors in the electoral rolls, it has increasingly turned into an ordeal for ordinary citizens. Reports have emerged of people dying by suicide allegedly triggered by anxiety linked to the SIR process, others collapsing while waiting in long hearing queues, and elderly citizens and those with physical ailments being forced to step out repeatedly to prove their citizenship and voting rights.
For people like Riya, whose names have been struck off due to errors entirely beyond their control, the process has become a relentless cycle of hardship. She first struggled to have her name included on the voter rolls, and now, following what officials themselves describe as an error, she must once again submit documents to establish that she is a legitimate voter. The final SIR list is scheduled to be published on February 14.
