Gandhinagar, Dec. 13: That even a lone voter is an eventual master on the election day became evident when Guru Bharat Das exercised his right to franchise at a nondescript Gir forest village today.
“Das cast his vote exactly at 9.30am. We had set up an eight-member polling booth equipped with an electronic voting machine at the Sapnesh Biliyat village in the Gir,” Junagadh superintendent of police Dipankar Trivedi said, adding: “We are happy that our efforts have paid off.”
Fifty-nine-year-old Das, who is also referred to as “Bapu” or “Baba” by local people, however, showed it to the officials, including a presiding officer and a polling officer, that he was the “king” of the day. The polling officials had set up their booth in the remote forest, about 500km from here, around 7.30am, half-an-hour before the actual polling began.
The Sapnesh Biliyat polling station falls under the Una constituency, which the BJP’s K.C. Rathor represents in the Assembly. Asked if he had approached Das to vote for him, Rathor said: “The model code of conduct is still under operation. I cannot speak anything right now.”
According to sources in the polling party, Das lived in an ashram with Shiva temple in what is known in the local parlance as “nesh” (marshy and shrubby) forest area, which is virtually inaccessible. “We had to trek almost 20km to reach Sapnesh Biliyat polling station to set up the booth and enable Das to cast his vote,” said a polling official, adding: “It was a difficult task to do.” Officials were unable to explain clearly why the polling station in question had only one voter.
But Das kept the polling party waiting for over one-and-a-half-hour till 9.30am when he, escorted by a security personnel, turned up.
Sapnesh Biliyat is the only polling station in India that has only one voter which chief election commissioner V.S. Sampath mentioned while announcing the election dates in October.
“It was 100 per cent polling at Sapnesh Biliyat with Das casting his vote,” giggled a senior election official at the Gandhinagar election office though the election was going on in a slow process with only about 20 per cent voting recorded till about 12 noon.
