 "A polling officer puts an indelible ink mark on the finger of a voter during the second phase of the general elections, at a polling station, in Nagaon, Thursday, April 18, 2019 | Photo: PTI")
I voted for the first time in the 1984 elections when Rajiv Gandhi rode the sympathy wave following his mother’s assassination. As a 22-year-old casting a paper ballot in what was then the Calcutta South constituency, I had an awful binary to consider. I could vote for the Left Front, which ran the state very badly, and regularly indulged in violence and murder. Or, I could vote for the Congress, which had just carried out a monstrous genocide.
Every election since then has presented similarly terrible choices. My ideal political party would combine an ideology of being socially liberal and inclusive,
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