This seems to be a bug that has been fixed, possibly this one:
(from the bash
ChangeLog -- changes between bash-4.2-alpha and bash-4.1-release)
Fixed a bug in arithmetic expansion that caused the index in an array expansion to be evaluated twice under certain circumstances.
Worksforme:
$ echo "${BASH_VERSINFO[*]}"
4 2 42 1 release i586-pc-linux-gnu
$ i=4; echo "${BASH_VERSINFO[i++]}"; echo "$i"
release
5
$ i=4; echo "${BASH_VERSINFO[i++]%e}"; echo "$i"
releas
5