Election Commission strikes off over 58 lakh voters in West Bengal after SIR

Kolkata: The Election Commission has struck off over 58 lakh voters in West Bengal after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls of the state, bringing down the size of the electorate from 7.66 crore at the beginning of the year to 7.08 crore.

The EC published the draft electoral rolls of West Bengal on Tuesday after conducting the SIR from November 4 to December 11, provisionally deleting 58,20,898 voters.

The officials of the commission, however, said that the voters could challenge the deletion of their names from the electoral rolls by filing Form 6 along with a declaration form and supporting documents till January 15.

Bhabanipur, the constituency of the chief minister and ruling Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, saw the deletion of 44,787 of 2,06,295 voters from the electoral rolls.

Nandigram, the constituency of her bête noire and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari, on the other hand, had only 10,599 of 2,78,212 voters removed from the list.

Adhikari, now the Leader of Opposition in the state assembly, had defeated Mamata in Nandigram in the 2021 assembly elections by 1,956 votes, despite the TMC’s landslide victory across the state. Mamata had later contested the bypoll in Bhabanipur and won by 58,832 votes.

Adhikari on Tuesday said that the SIR of the electoral rolls had effectively eliminated the vote difference between the TMC and the BJP in West Bengal.

Abhishek Banerjee, the TMC general secretary, said that the TMC would secure more seats and votes than its 2021 score, notwithstanding the SIR.

Of the 58,20,898 deletions, 24,16,852 voters were marked by the EC as dead, while another 19,88,076 as permanently shifted, and 12,20,038 as missing or untraceable.

Another 1.38 lakh voters were identified as having duplicate entries, while 1,83,328 names were flagged as so-called 'ghost' voters. Over 57,000 names were deleted under other discrepancies detected during enumeration.

The EC, however, is also likely to summon nearly 1.36 crore voters for hearings, Manoj Agarwal, the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal, said.

The ones who will be summoned for hearings include not only the people challenging the deletion of their names from the electoral rolls, but also the ones still on the draft rolls but have logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms. Besides, nearly 85 lakh voters, who submitted enumeration forms during the SIR with name mismatches with the 2002 list, would also be summoned.

The ruling TMC said that the draft electoral rolls published dismissed the claim of Adhikari and other BJP leaders that the state’s electoral roll had “one crore illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Rohingyas from Myanmar”.

The ruling party pointed out that only 1,83,328 voters had been identified as dubious. The BJP, however, said that it was just the beginning and that it would soon be proved that the TMC had been winning the elections in the state, largely due to the support from the illegal migrants, whom it had helped settle in West Bengal after crossing over to India from Myanmar or Bangladesh.

The TMC had earlier alleged that the EC had conducted the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal to ensure an advantage for the BJP in the assembly elections next year. The BJP, however, dismissed the allegation.

The TMC had also alleged that at least 40 people, including the Booth Level Workers engaged by the EC, had died – some by suicide – due to the anxiety and stress caused by the SIR.

Surya Dey, a TMC councillor of Dankuni Municipal Corporation, went into a crematorium near Kolkata on Tuesday, asking priests that his last rites should be performed as the EC had listed him among the ‘dead’ in the draft rolls.