Tagore too would have been summoned for SIR hearing, says Mamata Banerjee

Kolkata: Had Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore been alive today, perhaps he too would have been served notice to appear before the officials engaged by the Election Commission in West Bengal to defend his right to vote, the chief minister and the Trinamool Congress supremo, Mamata Banerjee, said on Thursday.

Mamata said that the Nobel laureate polymath would have been possibly identified as a case of ‘logical discrepancy’ by the officials deployed by the EC for the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal and summoned to explain the difference between his surname ‘Thakur’ and its anglicised form ‘Tagore’.

The chief minister referred to the hypothetical situation while criticising the EC for issuing notices to a large number of voters after the publication of the draft electoral rolls following the first phase of the roll revision in West Bengal, asking them to appear before the officials to explain the “logical discrepancies” in the enumeration forms filled up by them at the beginning of the exercise.

Rabindranath’s ancestors had originally been known by the surname Kushari, although they had later started using ‘Thakur’, which had been subsequently anglicised as ‘Tagore’.

“They (the EC) are citing logical discrepancies and picking up issues, like mismatches in spelling of names and surnames, although such multiple ways of spelling them had been known and accepted for years,” the chief minister said, adding: “I am known as both Mamata Banerjee and Mamata Bandyopadhyay. In the same way, Chatterjee and Chattopadhyay are the same surname. Thakur also came to be known as Tagore during the rule of the British Raj.”

She was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the 49^th International Kolkata Book Fair.

The EC struck off over 58 lakh voters and cut down the size of the electorate from 7.66 crore at the beginning of 2025 to 7.08 crore in the draft list that was published at the end of the first phase of the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal.

In the second phase of the SIR, which started on December 27, 1.67 crore voters under scrutiny are being summoned for hearings, including 1.36 crore flagged for “logical discrepancies” and 31 lakh whose current electoral roll details did not match or link to the records from the 2002 voter list. The number of voters with logical discrepancies, however, subsequently came down to 94.49 lakh.

The ‘logical discrepancies’ include the mismatches in the spelling of the names of the voters or their parents, and differences between the ages of the voters and those of their parents.

In one of her letters to the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Mamata had pointed out that the voters had been issued notices purely because their names appear with minor spelling differences across official records. She cited examples such as two different ways to spell her name – ‘Mamta’ and ‘Mamata’ – to argue that phonetic or clerical variations were being treated as discrepancies.

She argued that such differences were common, and long accepted in electoral rolls and government databases and that using them as grounds for hearings or verification was arbitrary and unreasonable.

The Nobel-laureate economist Amartya Sen, Bengali film star Dev, cricketer Mohammed Shami, industrialist Swapan Sadhan Basu, and eminent litterateur Joy Goswami are among several well-known personalities who received notices from the EC for the SIR hearing.

The Supreme Court recently asked the EC to display the names of the voters who had been served notices for logical discrepancies in their enumeration forms.