Parmod Chhabra is deeply invested in the Indian general election that gets underway on Friday, with almost a billion people eligible to vote, but he won’t be casting a ballot.
Nor will the vast majority of the overseas Indian community in Canada.
The reasons are simple. India requires overseas citizens to travel back to their home electorates to vote in person on polling day. There is no option for postal or electronic voting for the general overseas population, and people like Chhabra lose eligibility because they also have foreign citizenship.
“I will suggest there’s a very small number of people who are going to go back to vote,” said Chhabra, president of the India Canada Association community group in Ottawa, citing the roughly 14-hour flight from either Toronto or Vancouver and round-trip fares around $2,000.
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