Left News Wire

Over 9 million voters have been removed from the voter roll in West Bengal after a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to its electoral list was conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI), days before the state legislative assembly elections.

The names removed constitute a 12% reduction in the state’s total electorates of over 76.6 million, with a potential to affect results in the majority of the constituencies, allegedly favoring ultra-right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) running the union government in Delhi.

The state legislative elections are scheduled to be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29.

All major opposition parties, including the Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has been ruling the state since 2011, and the Left Front, a broader coalition of the left and progressive parties, have accused the ECI of indulging in electoral manipulation to help the Hindu-supremacist BJP to win the elections.

Opposition parties and independent experts have claimed that the mass exclusion of the voters is based on a fraudulent, selective process that defies people’s constitutional right to vote.

Most of those who have lost their right to vote belong to the minority Muslim community or the socially deprived and poorer sections of society, conventionally opposed to the BJP’s core political line in the state.

West Bengal, with a population of nearly 100 million, is a crucial state given its location bordering Bangladesh and its large Muslim population (around 27% of the state’s total population).

Because of the lack of support among minorities and socially-deprived communities, now heavily disenfranchised, the BJP has so far failed to win any election in the state, despite emerging as a major political force there in the last decade.

Reacting to the development, Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary M A Baby wrote a letter to India’s Chief Election Commissioner on Thursday, underlining how the SIR in Bengal was an “exclusionary exercise” which has disproportionately impacted the “marginalized communities, particularly Muslims, women and economically vulnerable sections.”

The “large scale denial [of the right to vote], particularly of the marginalized sections, constitutes a serious assault on the precepts of the constitution itself,” Baby said.

Attack on minorities and socially-deprived population

The SIR measure is claimed to be a periodic revision of voter lists done by the ECI in order to address any discrepancies. However, experts dispute its legality, with a case pending in the country’s top court over the issue.

The latest round of SIR, initiated late last year in various states, has also invited strong objections and popular protests.

The opposition has questioned the hurried manner in which the process was done this time around, with deliberate and unprecedented requirements of documentary proof of citizenship placed for voter registration.

The ECI has also allegedly refused to pay any attention to the socio-economic conditions of the people while listing the documents as required and removing the names who fail to produce them, as most of the voters disenfranchised have been poor, illiterate, or migrants living away from their electoral constituencies.

After the first round of SIR in West Bengal was completed in February, 6.3 million voters were removed. An additional 6 million voters were put under “adjudication” pending final revision.

In the final list released on April 7, nearly half of these voters, over 2.7 million, were additionally deleted from the electoral list, taking the total number of deletions to over 9 million.

A large number of the state’s population belongs to minority Muslims and socially deprived sections, such as Matuas and Rajbanshis. Most of these communities are also poor and work as migrant workers.

Due to their social and economic conditions, it is often very difficult for them to obtain the legal documents on time necessary to establish their citizenship.

Independent analysis of the deletions reveal a clear pattern of targeting voters from Muslim and socially-deprived communities, mostly from districts such as Murshidabad, North 24 Pargana and Malda, with their high concentration of Muslims.

Most of these people who were deleted from the electoral list now have no time to appeal against the deletion and will fail to vote in this month’s elections because the 60 days given for adjudication expired on Thursday.

Neutrality of the ECI in question

The failures of the ECI to pay attention to the objections raised by the people has caused strong popular resentment and raised doubts over its neutrality.

There are 294 seats in the state assembly and whichever party wins more than half of the seats will be able to form the government. In the outgoing legislature, the BJP has 77 seats while TMC has over 215 seats.

It is speculated that the BJP may win a high number of seats in the districts of Murshidabad, North 24 Pargana, and Malda, due to the exclusion of voters from minority and socially-deprived sections, which may help it win the state elections this time.

The ruling TMC and other parties have raised the issue and had appealed for a stay on the process before the state legislative elections. However, India’s Supreme Court, on April 6, refused to stay the process.

TMC leader and chief minister Mamata Banerjee has reiterated the accusation that the ECI is manipulating the electoral rolls on the basis of social and sectarian bias to help the BJP win the elections.

The left parties, which ruled the state for over three decades until 2011 and were now looking for revival in these elections, have also maintained that the ECI has carried out a dubious SIR.

CPI (M) state secretary and the leader of the Left Democratic Front (LDF), Mohammed Salim, had expressed deep concern over the fact that the state’s administrative resources have been turned into a weapon [by the BJP] “to selectively victimize religious minorities, the economically disadvantaged, migrant workers and even party activists,” just to win elections.

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Most other opposition parties have also accused the ruling BJP of using the ECI to manipulate the voter list, targeting their voters.

Indirect implementation of the NRC

The Left has also accused the ECI of implementing the BJP’s dubious agenda of the National Register of Citizenship (NRC), under the guise of the SIR.

The BJP has always maintained, without any substantial proof, that most Muslims and people from socially-deprived communities are “illegal migrants” from Bangladesh and has demanded the NRC identify and deport them.

Its union government amended India’s citizenship laws in 2019 with similar intent. However, due to months-long nationwide protests at the time it was forced to abandon the idea.

The opposition parties have claimed that in a country like India, where a large number of the population is still illiterate and lives in rural areas, the implementation of a process such as the NRC can create chaos and public harassment, apart from being discriminatory.

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