This time around in West Bengal, the ECI has reneged on even the most basic of promises it had made to the Supreme Court for the Bihar SIR – turning the disastrous and traumatic exercise into a population-level calamity. In the West Bengal SIR, the ECI refuses to be satisfied even if a voter is able to map themselves to the 2002 electoral roll. They may still be required to produce additional documentation.
Besides forcing individuals to carry out the onerous task of mapping themselves to the 2002 election, the ECI invented a new category for disenfranchisement: “logical discrepancy”. The ECI admits to using algorithms that are a black box to the public, with the aim to purge voters from the list for having mismatches in name spellings across documentation. With no standardised way to transliterate Indic scripts to the English alphabet, such “inconsistencies” are bound to occur. At the scale of millions, they are not logical discrepancies, but merely logistical vagaries of bureaucratic procedures.
Ostensibly then such an “algorithm” would produce near equal rates of exclusion via this category for Hindus and Muslims. The ECI deliberately obfuscated their public data to make such analysis difficult. But, Alt News and the Sabar Institute have painstakingly digitised records and concluded what the sane feared: Muslims represent a wildly disproportionate of those placed ‘under adjudication’ and disenfranchised.
Alt News digitised and analysed 12 lakh voter records across six constituencies. From the 3 lakh voters were placed ‘Under Adjudication’, 92.6% are Muslim whereas Muslims only make up 51.7% of voters. The overall Muslim adjudication rate for Muslims in this constituencies is an astounding 42.2%, i.e, a Muslim in West Bengal is nearly a coin flip away from being purged from the voter list. The adjudication rate for a Hindu? 3.5%.
The Sabar Institute’s analysis of the voter rolls in Nandigram – part of the assembly constituency where BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Suvendu Adhikari is contesting a seat – yielded a similar trend. Muslims make up 25% of the population in Nandigram, but 95% of the deletions. The Sabar Institute rightly called these patterns in deletions as “structural” across West Bengal.
From Samserjang to Mothabari, from Bhabanipur to Manikchak, more than half of all Muslim voters in the constituency were placed ‘under adjudication’ (compared to 2.3% for Hindu voters). These numbers are not just enough to radically alter the course of elections, but they will actively deprive voting rights of entire communities.
Turns out that the opaqueness of the system and the invention of the ‘logical discrepancy’ classification is simply a new excuse to disenfranchise Muslims at an unprecedented scale. Oppression in the name of religion is not just a part of this exercise, the analysis of data suggests that it might be the point of it.
And what does the ‘under adjudication’ status mean for the 91 lakh excluded voters? 59.8 lakh such cases have been recklessly and hurriedly signed by judicial officers, who found 27 lakh voters as “excludable” – stripping them of their constitutional right to vote in a matter of days.
There is little recourse in reality now. The 27 lakh individuals that can argue their case in appellate tribunals. Only 19 of these tribunals have been set up and they’re all in a single building in Kolkata. Newslaundry found people from all over the state – labourers and single mothers forgoing their daily wages, and the elderly – arriving there to argue their case and fight for their most basic rights, only to find themselves barred from entering the premises without an official summon. Newslaundry rightly suggested that these tribunals are a “black hole” and hope for an actual appeal is being dealt a swift death in Kolkata.
By April 22nd, the ECI had only added 136 people out of the 27 lakh back to the voter rolls. It had heard 138 cases, proving not only its abysmally slow rate of adjudication, but the fact that the majority of those effective have been unjustly excluded from a decisive election. 27 lakh people have to suffer the consequences of the ECI’s decision to enact a mass destruction of rights rather than complete a routine revision that was its mandate.
With this SIR, the ECI’s veneer of “independence” lies completely stripped off. Not that they are trying to hide it: the official ECI account on Twitter posted a thinly-veiled threat to the Trinamool Congress, and the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar told their party delegation to “get lost” when they posed some questions.
The response of the Supreme Court of India to such grave injustice is also illustrative of its general decline and subservience to the executive. On April 13th, it completely abdicated its constitutional responsibilities and refused to provide interim voting rights to those who were purged from the rolls. Thus, the judiciary has acquiesced to the largest single coordinated voter roll purge in the world in at least the past 30 years - and likely since universal suffrage became a global norm.
Innocent until proven guilty has been turned on its head, and now one is “under adjudication” until proven a citizen – effectively enabling mass repression and rewarding the BJP and ECI for their fascist tendencies.
With the mass disenfranchisement exercise complete, the BJP is keen to declare a premature victory. In an interview, Suvendu Adhikari seemed to be proud to have consolidated the “Sanatani” vote. When pressed about BJP’s losing seats from West Bengal in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, he shared an eerie analysis of Muslim votes versus Hindu votes, and gloated that “after the SIR, the contest is over.”
It is important to tackle the hubris of the BJP by contesting the polls. Even though the Hindu nationalist party is hellbent on turning elections into sham rituals, some local polls still suggest a defeat for the BJP. The SIR itself has become a focal point for the upcoming contest, and we must continue to fight for the hard-won rights of people to a representative democracy.
The urgency of the restoration of voting rights for lakhs in West Bengal cannot be understated. The mass disenfranchisement is right in BJP’s ideal “chronology” of events – the invalidation of a key identification document, for many, portends exclusion from other state programs and darker threats looming around the corner. In the West Bengal elections, we are not just advancing a front that upholds India’s most basic rights, but fighting to dismantle the BJP’s brazen bigotry and ploy to hollow out Indian democracy.
SIR: Joint Left Protest in Kolkata against Attack on Voting Rights
Left parties including CPIM, CPIML and CPI organised a joint protest march in Kolkata on 11 April from Dharmatala to the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, protesting against the Election Commission’s move to curtail voting rights in the name of SIR. The protest saw participation of leaders and activists from various Left organisations, who condemned this organised attempt to disenfranchise large sections of voters in West Bengal.
Addressing the march, CPIML State Secretary Abhijit Mazumdar said that the developments in West Bengal are shocking, with voting rights of millions being taken away without any fault on their part. He pointed out that nearly twenty seven lakh voters who had exercised their franchise in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections are now being denied their voting rights.
He said that the principle of eligibility has been turned upside down, where voting is no longer being treated as a basic democratic right but is being reduced to a matter of privilege and uncertainty. He said that any election conducted after removing millions of voters from the electoral rolls will be nothing but a farce at the most fundamental level.
He asserted that the people of West Bengal will give a fitting rebuff to those who seek to purge the electors to grab power.
