‘Bid to move us to Bangladesh’: At the Bengal poll booths where every second voter is gone

Gajol SK’s name was deleted from West Bengal’s voter rolls. Now he is afraid of what comes next.

“Our forefathers have lived in India. If the BJP thinks there are Bangladeshis and Rohingyas here then identify them. They are making poor people stand in the queue. People are going through so much. Isn’t it wrong?” SK, a truck driver and resident of Samserganj, told Newslaundry.

Samserganj is the assembly constituency with the highest deletion rate in Murshidabad – itself the worst-affected district in West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision exercise. As the state heads to polls on April 23 and 29, Newslaundry visited the booths within Samserganj where deletions have been the heaviest, to understand who has been struck off the rolls, and why.

Why Samserganj’s booths stand out

Across West Bengal, 60,06,675 names were placed “under adjudication” in the SIR list published by the Election Commission on February 28. Of these, 27,16,393 – or 45 percent – have been removed from the rolls. 

Murshidabad, which borders Bangladesh, has six of the state’s seven most-affected constituencies. Topping that list is Samserganj, which also saw the highest number of deletions among the state’s 294 assemblies. The constituency has around 80 percent Muslim voters and was won by the TMC in the last two elections. 

Nearly half of Samserganj’s voters were placed “under adjudication” in the final SIR list published by the Election Commission on February 28. Of the 2,36,040 total voters, 1,08,400 names were under review – 74,775 were eventually deleted in the adjudication process. That means the constituency lost 32 percent of its pre-adjudication list.

Of the constituency’s 247 booths, more than 200 have deletion rates higher than the state average. At many, the voter count has halved.

The highest number of deletions in Samserganj within a booth occurred at booth no. 106, where the voter count dropped 60 percent, from 1,361 to 551. The second-highest was at booth no. 200 at Nutan Luharpur Primary School, which lost 715 voters, falling from 1,416 to 701. Booth no. 11 saw the third-largest cut: 706 deletions, a 53 percent drop. In all three booths, an overwhelming number of the 2,231 deleted names appears to be Muslim.

Booth no. 103 recorded the steepest percentage fall – from 1,061 voters to 392, a drop of 63 percent. Across the 10 most-affected booths, every single one has lost half or more of its electorate.

At booth no. 200: ‘Who is EC to interfere?’

In January, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court that over two lakh electors were linked to more than six children, requiring “greater scrutiny”. These were part of “logical discrepancies” that triggered adjudication: name mismatches, abnormal age gaps between parent and child, or grandparent and child, and six or more electors linked to a single parent.

When Newslaundry visited booth no. 200 at the Nutan Luharpur Primary School in Luharpur, voters pointed to two reasons for their exclusion: their parents being linked to more than six children in the electoral database, and name mismatches.

Kadirul Islam, 32, was livid. All his family members made the list except his mother. “Whether there are six people in our family or 10, what business is it of theirs (EC) to interfere? They should have issued a notification or rules beforehand saying Muslims cannot have more than six children,” he said.

Dilawar Hussain, 29, a social activist at the same booth, has been excluded along with his wife, while his brother and parents remain on the list. “There is no rule in the Constitution or law that you cannot have more than six children,” he said.

Md Mubarak Hussain, 45, showed us his school certificates, identity cards, and 1957 land title papers. Among his nine siblings, only he and one brother were excluded even though his father was born in Samserganj. He alleged the BJP had cast its shadow on the Election Commission. “The BJP is trying to forcefully move us to Bangladesh. This is not right. This is just an attempt to break our mental strength,” said Hussain, a TMC worker.

There was fear and confusion in the other booths with high deletion rates too, including booth 106 at Chandni Daha Primary School in Jangipur and booth 11 at the Laxminagar Primary School in Dhuliya. Many were not even aware of the supplementary lists or the outcome of the process.

Nargis Khatun, a resident of Dhuliyan, said her husband was in Kerala for work.  

“Will anything happen? I haven’t been able to file any appeal because the number linked to my husband’s Aadhaar is wrong,” she said. “Some are saying we will be sent to Bangladesh, some are saying that we will be sent to detention camps. We are not sure what will happen and that is the fear.”

In Jangipur, Badrul Sheikh, carrying a list of identity documents, said he was unsure why his wife’s name was deleted. “People are saying that those whose names are not there will not get to vote.”

What comes next

Voters excluded through adjudication could appeal before 19 appellate tribunals. But the voter list was frozen last week. No names can be added or removed until elections conclude. West Bengal goes to polls on April 23 and 29.

The revision has become a sharp political fault line. The TMC has called the Election Commission a “B-Team” of the BJP. The BJP has said the SIR has weeded out “infiltrators”. West Bengal is the only state, among the 12 where SIR has been conducted, to have seen an “under adjudication” review of this kind.

The Election Commission of India and the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer did not respond to Newslaundry’s questionnaire.

With inputs from Shivi Chaudhary.

Correction: A previous version of this report had incorrectly named a voter who was not deleted in the adjudication phase.

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