On 28 November, senior bureaucrat and a veteran election observer Vinayak Azad wouldn’t have expected anything different in Aizawl, Mizoram’s picturesque capital.
Azad is used to a one-room office overflowing with a sheaf of papers, outlining the Election Commission’s basic standard operating procedures to conduct free and fair polls. And the ubiquitous phone — perched on the corner of the glass-top table — that would ring loudly incessantly, registering complaints about poll anomalies. Mizoram stood out as an exception to the prevailing electoral pattern in the rest of the country. Azad’s phone didn’t even ring once on the polling day on 28 November.