But Pappu doesn't vote because... पर पप्पु वोट नही करता क्युंकि...

.. Because when the voter enumeration is done, all the villages are covered diligently, and all the flats are left out as diligently.. my entire condominium of 900+ flats was left flat out of the Pulse Polio campaign, and of the voter enumeration. Then i checked the voter lists of Gurgaon online.. (the link doesnt work any more) ... For the village, there were at least thousands of entries. The number was a few hundreds for all the condominiums in the area. Its as if these voters did not exist!

Then, we took the brave step of trying to enter our name in the Voter rolls. The first step, of course, was Jaago Re. Jaagore told us that the voter rolls will open on Jan 10 2009. We found out that the number of the RO listed on the website is wrong. The correct no. is 0124-2224047.
The place is in the Mini Secretariat, Gurgaon.

When we called in January, we were told that the rolls are closed till February. When we called in February, no one picked up the phone. One day, someone picked up the phone, and when we said "Voter roll mein naam jama karanaa hai" (need to enrol as a voter) the voice on the other end said "To karaiye. idhar aa ke form de do." (come here and give the form).

So off we went, with all the paperwork that the Jaago website had told us about, with two copies of the whole thing (you never know)

At the office, the "relevant person" was in a meeting. No clue when he will be back.
"The voter rolls are already closed. We cannot accept any more applications."
When we pointed to them that the Jaagore website and the ECI website indicates that voter roll correction is in progress, they said "Speak to the sir. As far as we know, it is closed. It was open in January." (Jaw dropped)

Another person said "But this form is all wrong. You need 2 copies each."
Smiling we said "But we have 2 copies each."
"You have not attached that English form. " He proceeds to take out a form. On top of the form, right in the header, is the word "Optional" . We point that out to him, and tell him that that form is for the Photo ID card. we just want our names in the voter rolls.
"Nahi, hum is form ke bina nahi le sakte hain." (No we cannot accept this form without the English form)

So we waited for about 2 hours. The relevant person did not come back from the meeting.

After that, we tried to get in touch with Jaagore. For all their weekly emails telling us that we should go out and enrol the whole family, not one response to our weekly emails asking them for help in raising this issue. We were denied an entry in the voter rolls. They refused to even take our forms!

In case you are wondering whether this is a one person story, its not. Quite a few of us faced this while trying to register as voters for the LS elections. Story after story later, I m convinced that this is a deliberate effort to keep educated voters at bay. Someone does not want us to vote if our names are not there already. Officials whose job it is to do door to door enumeration of voters cover thousands of voters in villages and skip all the thousands who do not live in the village.

Pappu doesnt vote because..