More than 70 percent of the voters left in a “pending” state by the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in India’s West Bengal election are from the Muslim community. More than 90 percent of Muslims in West Bengal are Bengali, so it can be assumed that most of the excluded voters are Bengali Muslims. The Sabor Institute, an established West Bengal research organisation, said this in a recently published survey report.
Of the more than 2.7 million voters dropped in the SIR and left on West Bengal’s “pending” list, 70.17 percent are Muslim and 51 percent in total are women. Most were flagged for so-called “logical discrepancy,” a concept introduced in the West Bengal election that left this many people unable to vote.
Besides these 2.7 million, the names of about another 6.4 million voters were removed from the “supplementary” list, struck off as having moved, being absent, dead or duplicate. The details of these 6.4 million voters are also being re-analysed.
To bring transparency to the whole process, the Sabor Institute is working to publish an open database. Built for the general public, it will organise all the information by religion and gender, letting ordinary citizens and researchers easily see how particular communities have been affected by the cancellation of names from the rolls.
Various Muslim community publications in West Bengal have said this investigation is essential, because more than 2.7 million people were “removed from the electoral roll on highly objectionable and illogical grounds.”
For example, couples with six or more children generally had their names dropped. Voting rights were also taken away on such unusual grounds as a slight mismatch in the spelling of parents’ names, or an age gap of less than 15 years between parents and child, according to the Sabor Institute report.
When the final electoral roll was published in West Bengal, about 6.1 million names were dropped at the very outset. After the “supplementary” list was later published, it emerged that a total of about 9.1 million names had been erased from the rolls. As a result, the total number of voters in West Bengal fell by 8.09 percent at the last election. The total number of voters at the last assembly election was 70.4 million.
The Election Commission had claimed that mainly the dead, those who had moved, or those who could not be found had been struck off. The real picture was different, however. With many genuine and valid voters’ names dropped, intense tension and anger spread. To manage the situation, an SIR tribunal was set up and began work on the Supreme Court’s direction and under High Court supervision.
Both before the election began and after losing it, the Trinamool Congress has strongly maintained that it was defeated by the removal of people’s names from the rolls, particularly those of the Muslim community.
The BJP, for its part, says the Trinamool Congress won the last election by making electoral rolls to suit itself and inserting the names of countless fake voters, and lost this time because it could not do so.
The tribunal was formed while the electoral process was under way, and about 3.4 million appeals from cancelled voters were filed with it. Questions have already been raised about the pace of its proceedings, and no one has a clear answer on how long considering that many appeals may take.
There had long been allegations that names were selectively struck off in greater numbers in minority-dominated areas. For want of adequate evidence, no strong statement on this had become public. But the Sabor Institute’s report indicates that voters’ names were pruned specifically from Muslim-majority areas, at least in this election.
The reason is that a large share of Muslim voters had long voted for the Trinamool Congress, so it can be assumed that losing those votes is why West Bengal’s former ruling party was defeated. When these voters will return to the rolls and be able to vote remains uncertain.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report