At seven in the morning on Thursday, Mar Gregorios College of Arts and Science in Mogappair West was just beginning to get crowded. Policemen stood at the gate to welcome the voters, asking them to park their vehicles at least 200 metres away from the booth. The two security guards offered assistance to anyone who looked uncertain. The temperature sat at 30 degrees Celsius, but the college’s tree cover held the heat at a distance. Water was available. The queue, then, was short.
The first sign of friction came before anyone had even cast a vote. Several voters arrived at the gate looking for the party-issued token slip, which they needed to find their specific booth number. The slip distribution counters were nearly 400 metres away, set up by party workers outside the college perimeter.
Ann Hepzibah Niraja, a former professor and principal of the College who has voted at this booth twice or thrice, had already navigated this. “I live in a gated community, so I got the slip early. But people living in independent houses may not know where to find that. It is necessary to help them out,” she said. The confusion sorted itself out quickly. Polling officers guided the early arrivals, and those voters, in turn, started guiding those who came after them.
For nearly half an hour after arriving, this reporter could not get anyone to stop and talk. Voters walked in briskly, voted, and left. Then a family of four paused. Dr Siddique, his wife Aisha, and their daughters Reena Fathima and Reema Fathima had driven in together. Reema and Reena, twins who just turned 18, cast their first vote. Both of them were beaming.
Dr Siddique said he has voted in every election since his first in the 1980s, when booths were crowded, identification was inconsistent, and the procedures were far less organised. He started coming early years ago, partly to avoid the heat and partly because election day, for his family, is a holiday they spend together. He said, “We are going back home and celebrating by eating biriyani. Since it’s a holiday for the kids, we can spend more time with each other.”
Reena said she had made her choice after watching reels on social media that encouraged her to vote but stay apolitical. Reema had a different approach. She voted based on what she believed her elders would prefer, out of respect for their experience. Aisha, who had woken at 5 am to pray before leaving, was pleased to celebrate the voting experience as a family and told that the domestic load of getting up early and the merriment often falls on her.
Another voter, Lakshmi, has been voting for 30 years. She cast her first vote in Walajapet, at her mother’s house, and now came to the booth with her daughter, Sanjana Sri, who was voting for the first time. Sanjana said her school had already told her about the importance of voting, and that awareness had made the decision an easy one. The mother-daughter duo walked out together, and Lakshmi said she planned to post about it on Instagram afterwards.
The combination of the two of them, one voting in her third decade and one for the first time, said something about how civic habit travels between generations when it is spoken about at home and taught in classrooms.
Ashok Kumar has been voting since 1985. His first vote went to the Janata Party. He now lives in Adyar but came to Mogappair for his daughter, whose allocated booth was in the area. He arrived early for the logistics as after his daughter finishes voting, he and his wife had to rush to Adyar to vote.
In the 1980s, he said, party workers would swarm voters outside booths, fake votes were common, fingers were inked and cast fraudulently, and cameras were nonexistent. “Now there is nothing like that. The process of casting a vote is more structured and easier,” he said. However, he was not entirely satisfied with the present either. He worried that last-minute party slips, being handed to voters by different party offices just before the people entered, still shaped the choices of voting. He shared, “These slips shouldn’t be delivered by party people separately, as it can influence people. And the confusion on where to get the slip should be avoided.”
At a polling booth in Koratur’s Vivekananda School, on the same morning, M Sadagopan offered a different version. He first voted in the 1980s, arriving at nine in the morning when polls opened later than they do now. He has missed only a couple of elections, times when work had taken him to other states. He said the change over the decades was substantial and appreciated the discipline. He noted that this year, all booths at his venue were on the ground floor, an accommodation for elderly voters that had not always been made. His daughter had come with him that morning to escort him.
Narayan Shankar came early for a practical reason. “I just want to finish early in the morning so I can go about the rest of the day,” he said. He wakes at 5.30 am every day, regardless, and sees no reason to wait. He added that early morning voting also reduced the risk of technical delays; if a machine glitched later in the day, the early voter had already gone home.
Ann put it differently. “When you are responsible for something, you have to give it the first priority,” she said. She had set her alarm for 6.30 am, freshened up, and arrived before the queues formed. She planned to post about it on WhatsApp afterwards. “As a citizen, I strongly believe it is my responsibility to cast hope for my country.”
By eight o’clock, the shade at Mar Gregorios College was still holding, but the sun had begun to press through. The queues had grown. The traffic on College Road had thickened. But the voters who had come at seven were already home.