West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | 'Systematic exercise in mass disenfranchisement': CPI(M) writes to CEC as 90 lakh names deleted in SIR

New Delhi: With nearly 90 lakh names deleted from West Bengal electoral rolls, CPI(M) General Secretary MA Baby on Thursday wrote to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to register the Left party's "anguish, grave concern and strong protest" while recalling that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was a "systematic exercise in mass disenfranchisement".

In his letter, Baby highlighted that roughly 12 per cent of the voters have been excluded from the rolls. He said a significant number were placed under an "impervious category" of 'under adjudication' only to find that the promised mechanisms for redressal were "inaccessible and non-operational".

"We have since the outset held that contrary to a routine administrative updating of electoral rolls, the SIR represents a systematic exercise in mass disenfranchisement, marked by arbitrary criteria such as 'logical consistency' and the increasing reliance on algorithm-driven exclusions rather than transparent, field-based verification," he said.

Unlike earlier exercises, Baby said, the voter was "treated as a suspect" and the burden to prove otherwise rested on them. "We are here not going into the tremendous monetary loss, inconvenience, mental trauma and even deaths that this obnoxious exercise has led to," he said.

The continued non-functioning of adjudicatory mechanisms even admitted by the Election Commission in the Supreme Court has effectively denied them any meaningful remedy, he said, adding that equally troubling was the opacity of the entire exercise.

Emphasising that lists were released in non-analysable formats that prevented public scrutiny, he said, independent analyses, indicate that marginalised communities, particularly Muslims, women, and economically vulnerable sections, have been disproportionately impacted.

"The removal of these voters from the list amounts to a denial of the right to vote guaranteed under Article 326 of the Indian Constitution. The right to vote is a core democratic right integral to equality and dignity. Its large-scale denial, particularly to marginalised sections, constitutes a serious assault on the precepts of the Constitution itself," he said.

Reiterating the CPI(M)’s strong protest against this "exclusionary" exercise conducted by the EC that has led to "large-scale disenfranchisement and denial of the constitutional right to vote", he said the constitutional right to vote must be guaranteed by the EC at any cost.