Black flags, ‘go back’ slogan greet EC in Kolkata, fate of over 50 lakh West Bengal voters still undecided

Protesters waved black flags and raised ‘go back’ slogans, as the Election Commission arrived in Kolkata on Sunday to assess poll preparations in West Bengal, amid uncertainty over the fate of over 50 lakh voters, who were placed in the “under adjudication” category after the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in the state.

Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, and Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, along with senior commission officials, will meet representatives of the state's political parties in Kolkata on Monday. The EC had already visited poll-bound Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, with West Bengal being its last destination before the announcement of the schedules for the assembly elections in the four states and one Union Territory, expectedly by the middle of this month.

The EC is visiting Kolkata even as the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal sharpened its attack on the commission over the SIR of the electoral rolls. Just hours before the CEC and the two other ECs landed in the city, the state’s chief minister and the TMC supremo, Mamata Banerjee, called the poll panel “vanish commission” and accused the Bharatiya Janata Party, the principal challenger to her party, of misusing it to make the legitimate voters disappear from the electoral rolls.

As the CEC, ECs and other officials of the commission left the airport and drove to the city, some protesters from the leftist parties raised slogans against the deletion and the “under adjudication” categorisation of a large number of voters. They waved black flags and raised “go back” slogans, but the security personnel stopped them from blocking the road from the airport to the city. Some protesters also waved black flags near the hotel where the EC delegation checked in.

As many as 63.66 lakh voters – around 8.3% of the electorate – have been struck off from the electoral rolls since the special revision of the lists was launched in November 2025, bringing down the size of the electorate from about 7.66 crore to over 7.04 crore. Besides, more than 60.06 lakh voters have been placed in the “under adjudication” category.

Their eligibility to vote is now being determined through legal scrutiny by over 500 judicial officers, under the monitoring of the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court.

The leaves of the judges engaged in the process have been cancelled. Nearly nine lakh cases have been adjudicated so far, leaving the fate of over 50 lakh “under adjudication” voters still undecided. Nearly 200 more judicial officers from Jharkhand and Odisha will be deployed across West Bengal soon to expedite the process.

Mamata led her TMC in launching a sit-in at Esplanade in Kolkata to protest the deletion of voters through the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal.

Suvendu Adhikari, the frontrunner for the chief ministerial face of the BJP in the West Bengal polls, however, called the TMC’s sit-in protest a drama to save the illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh and Myanmar from disenfranchisement.

The Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have already stated that the schedule of the assembly elections in the state should be declared only after the process of deciding the fates of the “under adjudication” voters would be completed.