Muslim voters in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura constituency claim that their votes were denied by the booth-level officers, while Hindus in the city bear no complaints, Scroll reported.
Jamrul Nisha, 74, claimed that ahead of the second phase of the Lok Sabha Elections on April 26, not even one of her nine family members received a voter slip for the first time. However, upon reaching the booth on the polling day, she found that her name was mentioned in the roll but was still not allowed to vote.
“In the booth, they told me that my name in the roll was only mentioned as ‘Jamrul,’ and not Jamrul Nisha,” she said.
The report termed this “odd consistency” because the electoral roll on the Election Commission website mentioned her full name. “I tried to reason with them, but the police officers there taunted me, saying, ‘Aren’t you too old to stand here and argue all day?’ So I left,” she said further.
Noting that the voter turnout in the constituency was only 49.9%, the report said that it was the lowest recorded turnout in the last two decades. Moreover, it was also the lowest among the 16 constituencies in Uttar Pradesh that went to the polls so far.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the turnout in Mathura was 60.7%, and it was 64% in 2014, excluding postal ballots.
Meanwhile, the low turnout was attributed to Muslim voters’ claim that they were ineligible to cast their votes due to unforeseen reasons, including the poor distribution of voter slips, missing or misspelt names in the electoral roll at the polling booth, and hurdles in getting voter IDs issued.
On the contrary, almost all Hindu residents of the city said that they “did not face such problems,” the report said.
Jamrul’s neighbour, a Hindu man named Moolchand (47), said that his family did not face any hurdles and that all six members of his family received the voter slips right before the elections began.
In the temple town of the city, which garnered attention all over media after the Hindu supremacist legally barred Muslim’s from praying at the Shahi Idgah mosque there, Mohammad Sabu was unable to vote.
“I could not vote this time because the manager at the station said that my name is not on the roll. He went through files for 30 minutes, but he could not find my name,” he said, adding that “This has never happened in a Lok Sabha or a Vidhan Sabha election before.”
“We have five voters in our family. But only three of us could vote,” he said further.
Another Muslim man from Mathura’s Govindpur, Shabir Ali said “We have eight voters in our family. But two of my daughters and two sons could not find their names in the list. We went to the polling station at 8 am and spent an hour looking for their names. The roll seemed mixed up.”
