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Delhi Assembly Election 2020: Capital’s oldest voter Kalitara Mandal casts her vote
Mandal, who voted at SDMC Primary School in Chittaranjan Park, was welcomed by poll officials with flowers as they picked her up from her home. She will also be dropped back, officials said.
Kalitara Mandal, the oldest voter of Delhi at 110, cast her ballot on Saturday in Greater Kailash assembly constituency of Delhi, where elections are being held to elect the 70-member house.
Mandal, who voted at SDMC Primary School in Chittaranjan Park, was welcomed by poll officials with flowers as they picked her up from her home. She will also be dropped back, officials said.
Mandal, who hails from Barishal which is now in south-central Bangladesh, has said she remembered voting in pre-Independence India and in the Lok Sabha elections held last year.
She is among the more than 130 centenarian voters eligible to exercise their franchise in the Delhi assembly election on Saturday.
“I will vote till I am alive. I had first voted before the Partition while I still lived in Barishal,” said Mandal.
Mandal has said she did not remember whom she voted for before the Partition, but she recalled voting for former prime minister Indira Gandhi after Independence.
“After the Partition, we lived in a refugee camp for a long time. We were then given a place in Chhattisgarh and we moved there. I remember the hand (Congress’ party symbol) party coming to the doorsteps of the people who had just moved,” she said in an interview with HT.
Mandal came to Delhi when her eldest son moved here in 1978 and became a permanent resident after her second son moved here and set up a business in 1984.
When asked if she knows the current political leaders in Delhi, she said she only knows “hath” or hand and “phool” or flower - the election symbols of two political parties.
The office of the Delhi chief electoral officer (CEO) had identified 150 centenarian voters but the number was revised after physical verification was revised to 132–68 men and 64 women.
The highest number of centenarians, 21, was found in West Delhi district and the lowest, seven, in New Delhi district, the official said.
Bachchan Singh, 111, the oldest voter in the 2019 elections in the city who lived in Tilak Nagar, died last December.
Delhi poll officials had identified 96 centenarian voters in the city, and women had outnumbered men in that category, in the last parliamentary elections.
