‘Logical discrepancies’ in electoral rolls trigger notices to actors, MPs, Nobel laureate

Kolkata: Film and TV actress Manali Dey will have to take a day off from the shooting floor soon, as her right to vote has come under scrutiny, just because, believe it or not, a vowel somehow replaced another in her father’s name in the database of the Election Commission.

The actress has received a notice from the EC, which asked her to appear before the officials deployed for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in West Bengal and furnish documents to prove that Nitai De, her father, and Netai De, cited as her father in the 2002 electoral rolls, are in fact the same person, despite the ‘i-and-e’ mismatch.

Manali’s is one of the countless cases of “logical discrepancy”, a rather innocuous and hitherto little-known jargon, which has stormed into the everyday conversation in West Bengal over the past few weeks, since the EC published the draft electoral rolls on December 16 at the end of the enumeration phase of the revision in the state.

Errors that could have been dismissed as clerical – a mismatched age, a misspelt name, a missing letter – are now forcing people into long queues at block offices, scrambling for old documents, losing daily wages and living with the anxiety that a minor data glitch could jeopardise their right to vote.

“Why are they asking for so many documents from me? There is no fault on my part. I don’t know yet whether I will remain on the electoral roll to be published on February 14,” Shashi Panja, the minister for women and child development of the Government of West Bengal, said, after she too received a notice for the SIR hearing. “I was on the 2002 list. But they still sent me a notice for the hearing,” the senior TMC leader, who was elected to the state assembly thrice, said after appearing before the officials appointed by the EC. “This is nothing but harassment.”

Spandan Bhattacharjee, a resident of Hazra in Kolkata, has also received a notice from the EC for a hearing, as his father’s name was spelt as Ashok Bhattacharyya in the 2002 voters’ list, which has been taken as the baseline for the ongoing revision of the electoral rolls. The other documents had the surname of his father spelt differently. He will now have to turn up before the officials and explain the mismatch. Bayron Biswas, a legislator of the ruling Trinamool Congress, and his two brothers, Milton and Nippon, received notices for SIR hearings as their father, Babar Ali Biswas, had five other namesakes on the 2002 electoral rolls, and the EC’s software flagged all of them as one. The number of children of all six Babar Ali Biswases was more than what the EC considered logical.

Altamiz, a resident of Ballygunge in Kolkata, has six siblings, including two minors. The draft electoral roll has him, his four adult siblings, and his parents registered as voters. But he has now received a notice for a hearing, as the EC found that six other people cited his father as theirs, too. Dilshad Ansari, who has four siblings, has also been summoned to defend his right to vote at Bansberia in Hooghly, as the EC’s software found that he had six siblings.

The voter records were flagged for “logical discrepancies” primarily due to internal inconsistencies in the data, including implausible age gaps between parents and children, variations or spelling differences in names across electoral rolls, mismatches in dates of birth, incorrect gender entries, truncated or incomplete names caused by digitisation, faulty linkage with parents or spouses, and stray characters introduced during data migration.

The Supreme Court recently noted that the draft electoral roll of West Bengal published by the EC on December 16 at least 1.25 crore cases of logical discrepancies. The apex court ordered the EC to publish the lists of the voters flagged for logical discrepancies. The EC uploaded the lists on its website late on Saturday and started displaying the same in the Gram Panchayats Bhavans, public places in every Taluka and Block Office of every Taluka, as well as the ward offices of the cities in the urban areas.

Bidit Mukherjee, a college professor, also received a notice as the EC found that the surname of his father, Ashani Mukhopadhyay, a former chairman of a civic body, was different from his. So did Arunita Banerjee, as her father’s surname was mentioned as Bandopadhyay in the 2002 electoral roll.

What the EC’s software missed while scanning progeny linking is that many Bengali surnames acquired their shortened forms during the colonial period, when British administrators simplified longer Sanskrit names to suit English pronunciation and record-keeping. Mukhopadhyay became Mukherjee, Bandyopadhyay turned into Banerjee, and Chattopadhyay was rendered as Chatterjee. Over generations, these anglicised versions entered everyday use and official documents, even though both forms continued to refer to the same family line.

Even the parliamentarians were not spared. Samirul Islam, a TMC member of the Rajya Sabha, received a notice for a hearing. So did Deepak Adhikari, a film star better known as Dev, who is also a TMC member in the Lok Sabha. Swapan Dasgupta, a former BJP member in the Rajya Sabha, was also served a notice for an SIR hearing. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, too, had to explain the short age gap between him and his mother in response to an EC notice.