The Window Seat
India Election 2014
Supriya Sharma
Published Nov 22, 2015
The Window Seat
India Election 2014
In the last week of March 2014, as the country readied for a six-week-long election, Scroll.in journalist Supriya Sharma boarded a train in Assam, setting out on a 2,500-km rail journey that traced a Himalaya-like curve through northern India, ending a month later in Kashmir. This book is a collection of the dispatches filed in the course of that journey. Written on the run, they are neither comprehensive accounts nor measured election analyses. They tell the stories of the people she met on the way—refugees, sex workers, migrants, pilgrims, nomads, IT engineers, and of course, a few politicians. In the stories, there are glimpses of the sweeping electoral victory that would finally be delivered in May, and the reasons why it still remains impossible to make broad claims about a country as diverse as India.
