Seventy-year-old Subhash Chandra Roy of Nadia was on Friday shocked by the sudden emergence of a “son”, courtesy the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.
While going through the six enumeration forms handed to him by local booth-level officer (BLO) Asha Mondal, Roy discovered that the sixth form belonged to Santanu Roy, a “son” he never knew existed.
Roy’s is a BJP-leaning household of five — made up of himself, his two sons and their wives — in Nabla village of Santipur.
The BLO insisted he fill out and return the form. But Roy, a keertan singer by profession, was assailed by anxiety and embarrassment, fearing society might take the document at face value and accuse him of hiding an illegitimate son.
Determined not to let the mysterious Santanu turn into a social or legal headache, he informed the Santipur BDO and decided he would return the form only in front of a government official or the media.
“This is most likely an entry about a fake voter, made by some political party or the other using my name as the father’s,” Roy said.
“When I came to know about it, I was worried and embarrassed at the same time. So I decided not to return the form instantly.”
Roy had initially refused to accept the form at all. After the BLO insisted, he took it home.
His son Govinda Roy, a BJP booth-level agent and an e-rickshaw operator, was the first to flag the possible dangers arising out of a bogus entry in the voter list.
“Until Friday, we knew that I had only one brother apart from two sisters. If someone now turns up claiming to be Santanu Roy, my father’s ‘son’, on the basis of the electoral entry, we’ll all be in trouble,” Govinda said.
“So, I told my father not to return the form except in front of the administration.”
Govinda accused the Trinamool Congress of creating such entries, alleging several fake voters had been enrolled citing real people as their fathers.
“Had there not been this SIR, we would have never known about the ‘brother’ I have — on paper. This ghost voter has presumably been voting for years,” he said.
“If we had returned the form quietly, he would have stayed on the voter list. We don’t know how many such fake entries are there.”
BLO Mondal maintained that she had simply followed procedure and accused the family of exaggerating the issue.
“I’m not aware of the actual identity of the person, which is subject to verification. I handed over the form only because it showed Subhash Chandra Roy as the father,” she said.
“When the family denied the person’s existence, I asked them to return the form but they made a mountain out of a molehill.”
Santipur panchayat samiti member Sagari Das of the BJP supported the Roy family’s decision.
“If the form for this unknown person is submitted, the Roy family might face legal or administrative complications,” Das said.
“We advised them to inform the administration and submit the form with proof. So he decided to first meet the BDO and clear the matter.”
Local Trinamool leader and gram panchayat chief Sudeep Pramanik dismissed the concerns as overblown. He said it was “just a simple error” that would be fixed by the authorities.
“The family members baselessly accused us of making a fake entry,” Pramanik said.
“One of the members is a BJP activist; why did he not object in the past about the name, which has been on the voter list for a long time?”
He did not elaborate on how long the name has been on the list or whether he knew it was a bogus entry.
An official from the district election cell in Nadia acknowledged that the entry might indeed be fictitious.
“If the person is non-existent or cannot be traced, his name will automatically be deleted from the voter list,” he said.
“One of the purposes of the SIR is to find such non-existent voters, and one should not be panicky about being linked to voters who do notphysically exist.”