The month-long, rather draggy, assembly election in Bengal commenced on Saturday.

Starting at 7 in the morning, we started receiving alerts, from both the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, about incidents of disruption and violence taking place across the 30 constituencies voting in the first phase. These alerts were coming on WhatsApp groups created by the rival parties for journalists.

We were on our way from Jhargram to Nandigram, where chief minister Mamata Banerjee is the Trinamool’s nominee when we got an alert about one such incident in Dantan constituency. It sounded serious given that the paramilitary CRPF was involved.

The alerts were all basically allegations made by one party against the other. It was not possible for us to check all the flurry of claims and counterclaims, so we decided to focus on the seemingly most serious one.

Thus began our 150-km detour to Datan, West Medinipur. We went straight to Booth 27, in a small village called Khandrui.

Here's what we found.

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