SIR in West Bengal: The deleted, the doubtful, and the disenfranchised

Sanjay Mahato, an elector from the Kolkata Port Assembly segment, has found his name deleted from the voter list during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal. Mahato (42) who is a truck driver by profession, says he was born in the area and had voted several times in previous elections. The electoral rolls say he has ‘permanently shifted’, a category along with three others by which names are removed from the rolls.

“Last month I was away to make a cargo delivery. I had to drive from Jammu to Guwahati. The fog and cold intensified; it took me longer than expected to bring the truck back. I was not here when the forms were given out. My wife didn’t fill her form either. Now both of us have been deleted,” he says.

He has made several visits to the District Electoral Officer (DEO) at the district headquarters at Gopalnagar in Kolkata, he adds. He was asked to fill form number 6, a fresh application to include a name in the rolls. “With the SIR hearings going on I am not sure how to go about it,” Mahato says. The hearings are taking place at 11 offices in each of the 294 Assembly constituencies.

Mahato says he was registered as a voter at the Sambhu Vidyalaya polling booth, under ward number 90 of the Kolkata Port Assembly seat. Here, deletions during the first phase of SIR have been unusually high.

The names of 732 voters were struck off in the draft electoral roll. That is 10 times the average of 73 deletions in each polling booth across West Bengal. Before SIR, there were 1,023 voters listed under the Sambhu Vidyalaya booth; now, the number is less than 300.

The Special Intensive Revision is the process of overhauling electoral rolls, now being conducted across 12 States and Union Territories in India. This is second round, after Bihar’s list was revised in mid-2025. SIR has been criticised by political leaders and civil society groups for procedural problems and for causing distress among voters who see themselves as being disenfranchised.

Besides West Bengal, other States that will see Assembly elections in 2026 are Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Assam. In the 12 States and UTs, there has been a 12-13% drop in voters on the lists.

After the first phase of SIR in West Bengal, from November 4 to December 14, 2025 the Election Commission of India (ECI) found approximately 58 lakh absent, shifted, dead, and duplicate (ASDD) voters in the State.

Among the approximately 58 lakh deletions in West Bengal, 24.18 lakh voters were marked dead, while 12.01 lakh were found absent from their stated addresses. Around 19.93 lakh have been found registered as voters in multiple places, and 1.37 lakh have been identified as fictitious. After the first phase of SIR the voter list of the State dropped from 7.66 crore voters to 7.08 crore voters.

Mahato’s polling booth, Sambhu Vidyalaya, is located on the Garden Reach Road in Kolkata’s industrial port area. It is an unassuming single-storey school on the vast property of The Hooghly Mills, a jute mill established in 1913. The jute mill and the compound are a shadow of a once-prosperous economic activity that was spread across both the banks of the river Hooghly.

Hundreds of workers live in shanties within a 1-kilometre radius of the school. Some are descendants of dead or retired jute mill workers, and many are first-generation migrants who moved here in the last three decades, for work.

“There are roughly 1,500 to 2,000 people working in the jute mill currently, including both permanent and temporary workers. Some of them work here, but have families living in a different State. Some live and work here with their families, and some have migrated elsewhere for good,” says Pappu Bharti, a booth-level agent (BLA) and teacher at Sambhu Vidyalaya.

BLAs are agents appointed by political parties to support the SIR process at the polling station level, where people cast votes. Bharati explains that the reason for the high number of deletions is a high number of migrants here. Most of those deleted from Sambhu Vidyalaya are in the category of ‘permanently shifted’.

Among those whose names have been removed from the electoral rolls is Krishna Rai who has been working at the jute mill for over 20 years. Although his family lives in Chhapra in Bihar’s Saran district, his identification documents are all based in West Bengal, Rai says.

“I have been casting my vote here for decades now. When the BLO (Booth Level Officer, an ECI representative) had come to distribute forms, I had gone back to my village to visit my family. When we go home, we stay for a few weeks to a month,” says Rai, who is worried about filling out Form 6 online, because, “I am not literate.”

The electors of the jute mill belt whose names have been deleted do not have any land records or property documents. There are many second-generation jute mill workers like Chandan Singh and Binod Rai . They say they have been called for SIR hearings, but worry that they do not have documents to present. The BLA says that out of the roughly 290 voters that remain, 115 have been called for hearing.

Kolkata Port Assembly segment has alone witnessed deletions of about 63,730 names after the first phase of SIR, which concluded on December 14. The constituency with roughly 2.28 lakh voters saw almost 26% deletions. While the constituency has a Muslim-majority electorate, an analysis by Kolkata-based research and advocacy group Sabar Institute, points out that in the Kolkata Port Assembly seat, 13.27% deletions are people with the surname ‘Singh’, which comprise the maximum, followed by ‘Khatoon’ at 8.41%.

Polling booths with abnormally high numbers of deletions are jute mill areas and places that see migrant workers. High deletions were recorded at polling booths at Meghna Jute Mills and Alliance Jute Mill Canteen, both in North 24 Parganas district, which also see a significant population of migrant workers from the adjoining States of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. At Meghna Jute Mills, 704 voters were deleted, while at Alliance Jute Mill Canteen, 677 voters were deleted.

The political rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been demanding SIR, was centred around illegal Bangladeshi voters, invariably Muslim. However, Kolkata registered the highest percentage of deletions in the State, not the districts bordering Bangladesh.

The 11 Assembly constituencies of the metropolis accounted for 6.06 lakh deletions. Jorasanko Assembly Seat in Kolkata North district, the birthplace of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, has accounted for the highest number of deletions across the State, at 36.85%. The polling booth at Sri Jain Swetambar Terapanthi Vidyalaya, under Ward 42, has registered deletions of 718 voters.

Councillor of Ward 42, Mahesh Kumar Sharma, a Trinamool Congress leader, remains unbothered by the deletions. Sitting in his office down one the many narrow bylanes of Burrabazar, a busy part of north Kolkata with wholesale markets overflowing on each side, the councillor says, “Most of the deleted voters were either migrants or never existed. Anyway, they did not vote for me. So their deletions will not affect the party’s performance in the elections.”

The surname analysis of the deleted voters at Jorasanko found that ‘Das’, a common Bengali surname, accounts for 15.91% deletions, the highest number. Non-Bengali surnames like ‘Singh’ account for 11.88 % deletions, followed by Sharma at 6.33 %, and Gupta at 5.07 % deletions.

Now, it is the fear of being called for SIR hearings that is keeping people on tenterhooks. After the first phase of SIR concluded in the second week of December 2025, the ECI identified about 1.36 lakh voters with discrepancies. They are likely to be called to hearing centres.

The development enraged the Trinamool Congress leadership and Chief Minister (CM) Mamata Banerjee, who shot off her third letter to the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on January 3.

Banerjee said that the summons was issued without people being informed of the specific reasons for such hearings, thereby subjecting them to needless anxiety and harassment. The CM, in the letter, asked the CEC to rectify the glitches or halt the SIR.

West Bengal’s ruling party also questioned the rationale of the ECI’s appointment of Central government officers as micro-observers in the State. Leader Abhishek Banerjee led a delegation to the ECI office in Delhi to ask why this was done, when States such as Tamil Nadu had far more deletions in terms of percentages.

The ECI, which frequently issues new orders on the SIR, has changed its rules for voters marked ‘unmapped’. The ‘unmapped’ are those who could not establish their fathers’/grandfathers’ names in the 2002 voter list. However, several people who could, and were still summoned for hearings, now do not need to appear for them. It also said that elderly and ailing voters need not attend hearings in person.

It has been the 15 Matua-dominated Assembly constituencies of West Bengal, spread across North 24 Parganas and Nadia district, which have emerged as a political flash-point.

The analysis of these constituencies by Sabar Institute found that an average 33.95% deleted voters have been described as ‘permanently shifted’. The average number of absent voters across these 15 constituencies stands at 21.56%.

The Matuas are a social group largely composed of Hindu Namashudras, who have migrated from Bangladesh over the past several decades. They have been apprehensive of the SIR since they lack legacy data (names of fathers/grandfathers in the voter list). Matuas have been overwhelmingly voting for the BJP in the last few elections and the Union government’s The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, was a step to grant them citizenship.

The only discussion that people are having at public places in ward number 11 of Gobardanga municipality in North 24 Parganas is SIR and the summons for hearings. About 60 people from the locality have been called up, as they have been unable to establish connections with any relatives in the 2002 electoral roll. Those summoned for a hearing say that they do not have the documents to prove Indian citizenship.

Debdas Mondal (44), a resident of ward number 11 of the municipality remembers that his parents and sibling came to the area in the 80s. “We spent many nights below a tree. I have land and a house deed from 1985, but I am worried that may not be enough,” he says. His name has been deleted, along with family members’. He has been asked to show up for the hearing.

Lakhi Mondal Biswas (42), a relative of Mondal, says that her husband had a brain stroke and has become immobile. He struggles to speak, but has been called for a hearing at a government college at least 15 km away from their home. Her whole family’s name has not appeared in the draft rolls, even though her parents’ names were present in the 2002 list. “My parents voted in 1975 as well. We have all the documents. We have still been left out,” Biswas adds.

Mondal and Biswas are banking on the assurance of BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, that no Hindu refugee will be removed from the voter list. While the Prime Minister could not attend a public meeting in the Matua belt because his helicopter could not land, Shah said 10 days later, during a press conference in Kolkata on December 30: “We (the BJP) pledge that all religiously persecuted refugees will be accommodated in India. Even Mamata Banerjee cannot cause harm to the Matuas.”

Local BJP MP Santanu Thakur caused a stir when he said that it was a good deal for Matuas if “1 lakh of our own people (Matuas) are required to stop voting for a while, and if 50 lakh Rohingyas and Bangladeshi Muslims are removed from the voter list”.

Meanwhile, names of public figures such as popular Bengal actor and Trinamool Congress MP Dev, cricketer Md. Shami, and poet Joy Goswami, were left out. On January 7, a BLO reached the residence of economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in Santiniketan and issued a notice for hearing. The notice to Professor Sen says that the age difference between him and his parents is less than 15 years, and a hearing will be held at his residence on January 16.

Amid the outrage, the ECI came out with another notification directing that overseas electors (Sen is one), and those temporarily away from West Bengal, were exempt from in-person SIR hearings.

Under attack from the Trinamool Congress, West Bengal’s BJP leadership dragged out the name of Dwijen Mukhopadhyay, the last colossus of Rabindra Sangeet, who died in 2018. BJP leaders said he would come to cast his vote at what used to be his polling booth in Salt Lake, courtesy the Trinamool Congress leadership, who would cast votes in the names of every dead person on the voter list.

The BJP continues to insist that SIR is necessary to remove absent, shifted, duplicate, and dead voters.