Voices Erased: Meet Bengal’s Deleted Voters

Дата публикации: 28-04-2026 18:26:00

A whopping 2.7 million voters have been deleted from the electoral rolls in West Bengal after the controversial SIR exercise. Here are some of their stories.

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It is a haat (market day), Saturday, in densely populated Metiabruz, one of India’s largest wholesale markets for readymade garments in the eastern state of West Bengal. Located on the fringes of Kolkata, the manufacturing-cum-marketing hub operates from innumerable small-scale shop floors and cramped homes. It is virtually unwalkable over the weekends, the only two days when the market functions. 

Adjoining Metiabruz’s crowded market is a narrow lane housing several families. Here, 65-year-old Masooda Bibi worked deftly, stitching buttons and labels on the pink and powder blue shirts stacked beside her on the bed. Despite her advanced years, her dextrous, wiry fingers did not stop, even for a moment. The work order needed to be completed in time for the customer. 

However, there was palpable anger in her voice as she tried to come to terms with the fact that she has been denied her constitutional right to vote. 

A long-time voter, Bibi said she was shocked to find her name had been deleted from the electoral rolls. She is far from alone – a whopping 2.7 million voters have been deleted from the electoral rolls in West Bengal, the biggest revision in any state in India’s electoral history. The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise has led to millions of genuine voters losing their voting right in the name of cleaning up the rolls.

“Paanch peeri (five generations) of my family have been living here and this is our bastu bheeta (family home),” said Bibi emphatically. “Then why will I not be regarded as an authentic voter? How can they now question my entire identity?” 

Her husband, Belal Hussain Molla, 70, is a former tailor master who now helps Bibi with these “finishing jobs” on ready-made garments. He explained how they braved the long queues and scorching heat, hoping to get the issue sorted at the ECI-mandated hearing. Nothing came of it. 

Bibi confessed her greatest fear: that her disenfranchisement could impact her four sons. She worries that they might never get to access any government schemes in the future. 

Her husband interjected and reminded her that all four of their sons’ names have been deleted from the electoral rolls as well. Only Molla’s name figured in the voter list. The printed notice from the ECI simply stated for each of his sons that they “had linked (as father) someone who had been claimed by six others as father, giving suspicion of a likely incorrect match.” He read the notice as implying that his sons were illegal voters making fake claims. 

A livid Bibi shot back: “I have 11 children – four sons and seven daughters. I’ve struggled and worked hard to bring up my children in this 6 feet by 6 feet room. I never depended on the state for anything, so why is it a problem now?”

To make ends meet, Bibi still works on job orders whenever available, earning a meager 48 rupees (equivalent to 51 cents) for stitching four buttons each on a dozen shirts. A daily wage worker, on good days she earns about $3 a day. Her sons work in the garment workshops; her daughters are all married. 

And it is not her family alone that has been unfairly axed from the electoral rolls. Her husband’s relatives and their families – also Bengali Muslims like Bibi and Molla – live in the same three-story house. Of the 80-odd adult voters there, as many as 30 have been struck off the rolls on specious grounds. With her 9-year-old granddaughter embracing her tightly to comfort her, Bibi halted her work to raise a rhetorical question: “Do you see any Bangladeshis here among us?” 

***

The controversy-riddled SIR was unleashed on 12 states by the Election Commission and fully backed by the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government. Its intention was ostensibly to weed out fake voters, illegal immigrants, and duplicate voters. However, as opposition parties alleged and data analysts have found, the most adversely impacted in West Bengal have been Muslim minorities, women, and tribals. Bengali Muslims constitute 27 percent of the state’s population. 

Voters were asked to submit SIR forms with their personal details as well as details of their parents and, in certain cases, their grandparents, supported by documentary proof. Based on this, the ECI prepared updated voter lists and lists of deletions. It needs to be underscored that the ECI categorized the majority of the deletions under the “Logical Discrepancy” criteria – a classification created especially for West Bengal. Voters with mismatched name spellings or a single individual linked as a parent to more than six voters, or even where the age difference between voter and grandparent is less than 40 years – all these factors have been flagged as “logical discrepancies” that can get one’s name deleted from the electoral rolls. The majority of such voters found themselves deleted from the voter lists even after the ECI hearings that were supposed to clear up misunderstandings. 

As per news reports, of the 2.7 million names excluded across the state during the adjudication phase due to “logical discrepancies,” about 1.7 million are Muslims. Take for example the Muslim majority locality of Metiabruz itself. Muslims make up 60 percent of Metiabruz’s population, but a massive 87 percent of those excluded under the “logical discrepancy” criteria are Muslims. From the 105,947 names hauled up for logical discrepancy, Muslims account for 87,382 of them. 

“From the pattern it is clear that a particular community, which are the Muslims, is being targeted,” said Sabir Ahamed, researcher and co-founder of Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based research organization. It was the institute’s in-depth analysis of the voter exclusion data in the state that exposed the shocking communal tone of the SIR. 

The ECI is mandated to be a nonpartisan authority, but it is increasingly being perceived, both by opposition parties and the public, as a biased institution working to help the Hindutva supremacist BJP come to power in West Bengal. 

It is no secret that minorities and Muslims have been staunch supporters of the secular ideology of West Bengal’s ruling party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC). The BJP, which is desperate to overthrow the TMC’s three-time woman chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has welcomed the deletion of Muslim voters, labeling them Bangladeshi infiltrators and Rohingya foreigners. The ECI and the BJP are alleged to be working in collusion. 

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of anger and resentment on the ground in West Bengal, especially among those who have been wrongly branded as “illegal voters” and immigrants. 

***

Ordinary citizens are fighting back to ensure that the state does not rob them of their identity. Nayeem Mollah, a small-time garment trader, decided to demand answers from the authorities about his name deletion. Mollah has filed a Right to Information (RTI) application with the Election Commission. 

“There is no logic to these deletions,” said Mollah, pointing to the six sibling criteria stated in the ECI notice of his exclusion. In fact, Mollah has only three other brothers and not six as has been alleged.

Despite submitting every relevant document – including the pre-Independence era land records of his family – at the ECI hearing, it made no difference. He remained barred from voting.

Acutely aware of his rights and duties, Mollah stated clearly, “A legal voter is a citizen of the country. This deletion is an assault on my rights as an Indian citizen and I will do everything to have it restored.” 

Mollah is also a community volunteer and takes immense pride in exercising his constitutional right to vote without fail in every election. The forced inability to vote in these critical state polls has angered him. He is determined to persevere, however long it takes, and will seek justice in the courts, if need be. 

Equally upset at her name deletion is Arifa Begum, 35, an affluent home maker and the mother of a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old. Her husband, Sadik Ali, owns the popular Kids Care Academy school on Karbala Road in Metiabruz. While talking to The Diplomat, Begum prominently displayed all her documents – her birth certificate, her Aadhaar identity card and her existing Voter ID card. “This is my porichoy (identity),” she proclaimed. “We have been here for generations and I have a right to vote as an Indian citizen.” 

Begum said she presented all the documents at the ECI hearing, to no avail. With an obvious dig at the saffron right wing, she declared, “We are not Rohingyas or Bangladeshis.” 

For voters whose names figure in the list of deletions, it is not only the inability to vote in the ongoing elections that upsets them. It’s the serious apprehension of being branded as a “foreigner.” And their fears are not unfounded. 

For Mohammed Ayub, 49, a resident of the Muslim-dominated locality of Mominpore, the innocuous act of his name being printed as “Ayub Md.” in the earlier 2002 electoral rolls instead of “Md. Ayub” (as it appears on his Aadhaar Card) has robbed him of his right to vote. He said he could not even file an online appeal to the Appellate Tribunal since the software would not recognize his name. 

Ayub is without a regular source of income apart from the odd jobs with catering units. He said it has been an expensive affair getting the paperwork ready and travelling to the ECI office in Gopalnagar in person to file his appeal. Prior to this, he had also submitted all his documentary proofs, including his parents’ identity cards, at the ECI-mandated hearing. 

“The harassment I’ve experienced is unimaginable. I believe the SIR is the dreaded NRC [National Register of Citizens] through the back door,” said Ayub, nodding his head firmly. 

The controversial NRC is the pet project of the BJP government; it is a list of all people who are officially recognized as citizens of India, based on documentary proof. A scared Ayub now sees the way the NRC was conducted in BJP-ruled Assam as a glimpse of his potential future. With no voting rights, he could easily be labeled as a foreigner and might even lose his citizenship. 

In Assam, following the NRC, over a million people, the majority being Muslims, have not been recognized as Indian citizens. (Non-Muslims excluded from the NRC have recourse through the equally controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which offers a path to citizenship for non-Muslims from neighboring countries.)

While the Home Ministry’s attempt to implement the NRC in West Bengal was foiled by the TMC government in the state, the BJP has always maintained that Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh would be weeded out. The Islamophobic BJP, with little knowledge of Bengali’s multilayered cultural history, perceives Bengali-speaking Muslims as Bangladeshis. 

Significantly, researcher Ahamed also echoed Ayub. “The SIR exercise, in my view, is a proxy NRC,” Ahamed said matter of factly. “Please remember, this is a kind of door-to-door household mapping which can be used for the NRC to map out non-citizens.”  

***

Sabar Institute researchers say they have no doubts that the SIR design is biased not just against Muslims but against those with large families, like rural women, who often have many children. The SIR exercise also fails to recognize early marriages and women changing their surnames after marriage, again predominantly affecting women. 

The SIR is also heavily impacting the impoverished. One of the major factors behind the mass deletions is that poor and illiterate people often do not have proper documents, whether birth certificates, domicile certificates, or school records. 

Swapna Tripathy, a social worker associated with the West Bengal Domestic Workers Association, a registered trade union, has no doubt that women have faced the brunt of the voter deletions. Tripathy says of the 9,000-odd registered women members in their union, at least 10 percent have been excluded from the voter rolls. 

“We found both Hindu and Muslim women have figured in the deletion lists, but the latter appear to be in larger numbers,” said Tripathy. Of the 32 women domestic workers from Patuli Rail colony in south Kolkata whose names were deleted, nine were Hindus and 23 were Muslims. 

Most of these women are illiterate or semi-literate. They hail from rural areas and commute daily to work in Kolkata homes as domestic helpers. Faced with the double blow of disenfranchisement and potential exclusion from government welfare programs, many of them became desperate. Tripathy said that these women were being fleeced out of their meager incomes by unscrupulous lawyers and cyber-cafes promising to get them back on the voter rolls. 

“Many of our members have lost their jobs since employers wouldn’t put up with them taking frequent leaves to attend hearings and collect documents,” said Tripathy. 

Tripathy and the trade union stepped forward to help. The West Bengal Domestic Workers Association helped the majority of the women to engage lawyers for drafting affidavits and arranging the required paperwork. The association organized camps in the Patuli locality as well as in far-flung Patharpratima Assembly constituency, near the Sundarbans bio-reserve, to help such women.  

For Ganga Kayal, a domestic worker in one of south Kolkata’s upscale Ballygunje high-rise apartments, the past few months, ever since her name was struck off the voter lists, have been like a never-ending nightmare. 

Decades ago, her in-laws had gotten her voter ID card made with the name “Ganga Rani Kayal.” The mismatch between this name and all her other documentation – which lists her simply as “Ganga Kayal” – has now become her bane. 

“I’ve been working as a domestic worker since childhood and have recently managed to get my oldest daughter through college. But now all my struggles are on the verge of being rendered futile with this vote deletion,” Kayal bemoaned. She explains her desperation: “I may be a Hindu but with no voting rights, I’m afraid of being labelled a Bangladeshi.” 

Kayal remembers how those who had been branded non-citizens under the NRC in Assam were thrown into detention camps. “All four members of my family are dependent on me. If something like this were to happen, it would be a death sentence for all of them,” said Kayal in tears. 

***

When the mass and arbitrary voter deletions went to court, shockingly, the Supreme Court refused to intervene in any decisive way. It merely said that those whose names have been deleted can vote in the next elections. But the reality on the ground is far more grave, as Rehan Kamal, a 36-year-old businessman in the leather trade, discovered recently. 

Kamal’s name figured on the voter deletion list, and he filed an appeal along with several documents to prove his identity. At around the same time, the south Kolkata resident bought a new car on an EMI bank loan. He was shocked to find that his car insurance and registration were not going through because his voter ID card had been flagged on the system as deleted. 

“Despite what anyone might say, today, only the voter ID card and the passport are being recognized as proof of Indian citizenship. For those of us whose names have been deleted and we do not have a passport, it’s a tough situation,” said Kamal. 

With voter ID cards being de-recognized due to voter roll deletions, even operating personal bank accounts – which the majority of Indians now have – could become difficult. The voter card is one of three essential documents required, along with Aadhaar and the PAN card, for identity verification of bank accounts. Evidently, voter deletions are having a far more insidious and long-term impact on people’s lives than preventing their participation in the election. 

Nayeem Mollah described the deleted voters’ harrowing experience in colloquial Bengali: “Eta manusher odhikaar niye chhinimini kora”(It’s simply playing havoc with the rights of people.) 

Ironically, as Sabir Ahamed pointed out, the Election Commission has had a long history of encouraging voter enrollment. But now the ECI is solely focused on an “exclusionary exercise.”

On looking into the individual stories behind the mass voter deletions, I encountered too many heart-rending accounts, especially among the unorganized working class. There were also several people like Swapna Tripathy, who themselves figure on the voting list but have been appalled at the harassment that genuine voters have faced. They have vowed to seek revenge through the ballot. 

The vote in West Bengal this time will be more than a decision on the choice of candidate; it will be a referendum on a biased Election Commission and the BJP. For many voters, the West Bengal state polls in 2026 represent a vote against the SIR. 

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