Riding high on its plank of nationalism, Hindutva and a perceived improvement in the law and order, BJP registered a massive win in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls bagging 272 seats in a house of 403 with its alliance partners Apna Dal and Nishad Party and scripted history by becoming the first party to win a second term in the state after 35 years. The Samajwadi Party (SP),
Suman Lata’s family begged her to refuse a summons to monitor elections in Uttar Pradesh state last month but, worried about losing her job, the 49-year-old mother of three went anyway, just as India’s second coronavirus wave hit a peak.
Sprawling across north India and home to more than 200 million people, Uttar Pradesh is more populous than Brazil. Village-level elections are a huge exercise, with more than 1.3 million candidates vying for 800,000 seats in voting spread over four days in April.
Many teachers pressed into Indian poll duty became virus victims, say families
27 May 2021 Neha Sharma, 9, daughter of Lalit Kumar Sharma, shows a picture of her father on a mobile phone inside their house in the town of Jewar, Uttar Pradesh, on Thursday. Reuters
Suman Lata’s family begged her to refuse a summons to monitor elections in Uttar Pradesh state last month but, worried about losing her job, the 49-year-old mother of three went anyway, just as India’s second coronavirus wave hit a peak.
Two weeks later, she was dead, one of more than 1,600 teachers who died from COVID-19 in the weeks after working at the polls, according to the families of eight victims and mortality data supplied by a teachers’ union.