The ‘great leveller’: How SIR hearings blurred party lines ahead of Bengal polls

Kolkata: As West Bengal awaits publication of the final voter list on February 28 after the SIR, the state has been witness to an unusual spectacle over the past few months, with senior leaders and elected representatives from rival parties appearing at hearings to defend their names in the electoral rolls.

For a brief interlude before the 2026 assembly polls, the SIR emerged as an unlikely political leveller, feel observers.

Modest Special Intensive Revision (SIR) hearing rooms across the state turned into unlikely arenas of convergence during the past two months.

From TMC MP and actor Dev to ministers Shashi Panja and Tajmul Hossain, MLA and former IPS officer Humayun Kabir to party leader Debangshu Bhattacharya and MLA Nandita Chowdhury, SIR notices travelled without regard for party colours.

The BJP list was no different. Former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta attended a hearing over a spelling discrepancy, while BJP MLAs Swapan Majumdar and Ashis Kumar Biswas were also summoned.

The Left, too, featured, with former minister and CPI(M) leader Kanti Ganguly receiving the notice. ISF MLA Naushad Siddiqui was also called for the SIR hearing.

Eminent personalities were not spared either – Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, poet Joy Goswami, footballer Mehtab Hossain, cricketer Mohammed Shami, former BJP leader Chandra Bose and ex-Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee, former TMC MP and actor Mimi Chakraborty.

The SIR, the first statewide intensive revision of electoral rolls since 2002, was conceived as a statutory clean-up before a major election.

Draft rolls published on December 16 saw the electorate shrink from 7.66 crore to 7.08 crore, with over 58 lakh names deleted due to death, migration, duplication or untraceability. The second phase covered hearings for 1.67 crore electors, 1.36 crore flagged for “logical discrepancies” and 31 lakh lacking mapping.

The TMC alleged that large-scale objections and verification drives so close to elections risked selective deletions, especially in minority-dominated and border districts.

Elections to 294 West Bengal assembly seats are due in a few months.

The BJP, the principal opposition since 2021, backed the exercise as necessary to ensure a “clean and transparent electoral roll,” arguing that questionable entries had distorted past mandates.

Yet the irony was stark - the very exercise defended by the BJP and opposed by the TMC summoned leaders across the divide with equal indifference.

“The notice does not carry a party symbol. That is what made it politically symbolic,” political analyst Maidul Islam said.

BJP MLA Biswas had dubbed attending the SIR hearing as “politically humbling”.

“During elections, we demand voter verification booth by booth. Now, we are being asked to verify our own credentials,” he said.

A senior TMC leader likened the SIR to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was also described as a “great leveller”.

“In one sense, SIR has levelled everyone - political leaders, intellectuals, ordinary voters. But the question is whether it is becoming exclusionary. Suspicion cannot be the basis for disenfranchisement,” he said.

Islam traced the turbulence marking the 2002 manual rolls, when handwritten entries produced spelling errors and inconsistencies.

“Those manual errors are now being digitally mapped and filtered through AI. But, AI cannot resolve historical human mistakes without human intervention,” he said, noting that surname variations and incomplete entries are triggering discrepancy notices.

“AI does not distinguish between an MLA, Amartya Sen or a common voter,” Islam said.

Political analyst Suman Bhattacharya offered a sharper take. “You may call it a leveller. But in another sense, it is a political destroyer,” he said, citing discomfort within sections of the Bengali community.

“This has caused mental agony and political fever that Bengal has rarely experienced. It is both sides of the same coin - a leveller for some, destroyer for others.” The churn has been most delicate among the Matua community, a decisive Dalit Hindu refugee bloc influencing 40-50 assembly seats across North 24 Parganas, Nadia and parts of north Bengal.

For the BJP, which consolidated Matua support after 2019 with citizenship assurances under the CAA, SIR triggered discomfort. Protests erupted in refugee pockets over fears of deletions and mandatory hearings.

The BJP sought to distinguish illegal infiltrators from persecuted refugees, offering reassurance.

For the ruling TMC, the issue provided political ammunition, framing the SIR as potential disenfranchisement months before the polls.

The anxiety extended beyond the refugee belts. Hearings in minority-dominated districts such as Malda, Murshidabad and North Dinajpur triggered protests and sporadic clashes, with opposition leaders alleging that Muslim voters were disproportionately flagged under “logical discrepancies”.

The Election Commission denied any political party or community-specific targeting, maintaining that the process is data-driven and uniform.

In effect, SIR unsettled both ends of Bengal’s electoral spectrum, the BJP’s Matua stronghold and the TMC’s minority bastions.

As February 28 approaches, focus will shift to additions, deletions and corrections. Campaign narratives will quickly seize the numbers.

But beyond the arithmetic, the SIR has already delivered a quieter message. Before the battle for ballots begins, Bengal’s political class was reminded of a simple truth – in the electoral ledger, everyone stands equal.