A senior schoolteacher who has been a presiding officer at polling booths for over two decades has been appointed to the role once again. Only this time, the man entrusted with overseeing the voting process is himself an invalid voter.
Mir Abdul Rofik, headmaster of Haral United High Madrasah in Pandua, Hooghly, will still go ahead with his election duty. On April 28, he will go to a polling booth in Dhaniakhali in the same district, where he will serve as the officer in charge on polling day, April 29.
“The State has disowned me. But I have not disowned the State. I will diligently perform my duties to ensure free and fair elections at my booth, as I have done for the past 25 years,” Rofik said. “I will continue to do my best as a citizen and a government employee.”
Polling officers are required to undergo training ahead of elections. At a recent camp, the trainer asked Rofik to explain Form 17C to younger personnel because of his extensive experience. The form, filled by the presiding officer on polling day, records the total number of votes cast at a polling station.
“I later asked the trainer why I had been assigned election duty if I am an invalid voter. He had no answer. He told me to seek clarification from the higher-ups,” Rofik said.
Rofik became a government teacher in 1998 and has been on election duty since 2001, covering panchayat, Assembly and Lok Sabha polls. “In my first assignment in 2001, I was the first polling officer. Since then, I have always served as a presiding officer,” he said.
“Until the SIR, I never imagined, even in my wildest dreams, that my Indian identity would be questioned. I take a lot of pride in the identity and will do my best to regain my voting rights, which are central to that identity,” he said.
Rofik is a voter in Orgram village, part of the Bhatar Assembly segment in East Burdwan. He and his 74-year-old mother are among those whose names have been deleted from the electoral rolls in their village.
Rofik’s name was flagged for a logical discrepancy because of a minor mismatch between its Bengali spelling on his voter card and its English spelling on other documents, including his passport and Aadhaar. A Bengali phonetic symbol, written as two vertical dots, has replaced his first name on the voter card.
His mother’s name is Noor Modina Begum on some documents and Noor Modina Begum Mir on others.
At an SIR hearing on January 24, Rofik represented both himself and his mother. He submitted his passport, land deed and educational certificates, including a master’s degree in English literature from Rabindra Bharati University in Calcutta. For his mother, he produced her passport, Aadhaar and bank documents. She had also travelled to Saudi Arabia for Hajj using the same passport.
Rofik said his grandfather had donated a large portion of the land on which the local high school now stands.
Despite all of this, Rofik found his mother’s and his own names on the supplementary list of deleted voters on April 5. Both have since filed appeals before tribunals, seeking restoration of their voting rights.