West Bengal: Voter roll purification or manipulation? That is the question

There was high drama at the office of the CEO (chief election officer), West Bengal when a delegation led by Trinamool Congress general-secretary Abhishek Banerjee arrived on the evening of Monday, 30 March to submit a memorandum.

Banerjee later released videos recorded inside the office which showed a BJP worker, who identified himself on camera as such and gave his name as Sanjay Das, admitting that he was there to submit forms filled by genuine voters left out of the electoral rolls. He also admitted that the bundles of forms (Banerjee claimed the number to have been 30,000) were Form 6, meant to register new voters.

The TMC raised a red flag. Voters left out of the electoral rolls following the SIR (special intensive revision), hearings and adjudication were required to appeal to judicial tribunals set up by Calcutta High Court on the direction of the Supreme Court. Voters left out of the roll, it argued, could therefore not submit Form 6 to register themselves as new voters.

And while the Election Commission of India (ECI) had clarified that there was no bar on ‘new voters’ submitting details in Form 6 for registration, the party wondered how such a large number of ‘new voters’ had emerged in the closing stages of the SIR and why BJP workers were delivering the bundles.

TMC MP Mahua Moitra took to X to claim that the CEO, when asked why he had allowed the forms in bulk to be submitted in his office, told the delegation that he was helpless, that anybody could visit the CEO office. She also claimed that the delegation checked the forms and found that the ‘new voters’ were not even from the state, that the forms were of voters in other states.

A viral video from Gujarat seemed to strengthen the allegation. A man holds up a voter ID card and asks a Gujarat resident (in green shirt, showing the voter card with an Ahmedabad address) if it was true that he would be voting in West Bengal. The man smiles and replies in Gujarati that he had no idea how his name had ended up on the West Bengal rolls.

As the slugfest between the ECI and all other parties in the state, barring the BJP and a new unrecognised party formed by Humanyun Kabir — the former TMC MLA who has rallied Muslims in North Bengal by promising to build a replica of the ‘Babri mosque’ — continues, the ECI has been busy cleaning up the state administration.

Not content with ordering the replacement of the chief secretary, DGP, the home secretary and the Kolkata Police commissioner, the commission has transferred DMs, SPs, BDOs and even police inspectors and SHOs. The purge has been spectacular and covered staff in the CEO’s own office, including a deputy chief electoral officer, suspected to be close to the ruling party. The TMC alleges that many of the replacements have come from other states, some with family links to the BJP and the RSS.

The ECI has also sought 2,000 companies of CAPF (Central Armed Police Forces) to maintain law and order, compared to 700 companies in 2021. It has also suspended a few jawans for 'playing carrom’ with TMC workers and a few others who had joined an iftar during the month of Ramzan.  

Angry TMC spokespersons have been asking why the ECI has failed to wield the stick in the case of jawans accompanying BJP leaders and helping the party put up flags and posters. Accusing the ECI of bias, the party has been busy sneering at it. As one wall graffiti reads, ‘Jotoi koro SIR/ Bangla abaar Mamata-r’ (no matter how many SIRs/ Bengal is still Mamata's).

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Biased or not, difficult to establish either way, but there is little doubt that the ECI has badly botched up the SIR in the state, deliberately or otherwise. The exercise has been nothing short of a theatre of the absurd.

While the avowed aim of the SIR was to clean up the rolls by deleting infiltrators, foreign nationals, fake voters and those long dead, there is no clarity on how many were found. On the other hand, several million voters — nobody is still sure of the number — find themselves dropped from the voters’ list for reasons unknown to them.

Among those dropped from the rolls happens to be Usman Ghani, the IAS officer who was CEO of the state between 2008 and 2010. Also left out was retired Calcutta High Court judge Justice Sahidul Munshi and Reshma Shirin Iqbal, a gazetted officer with the Accountant-General of West Bengal (AGWB).

Iqbal has served as a presiding officer in elections over the last three decades. Yet she found her name missing from the second supplementary list released on 28 March. Even more intriguingly, her name was in the final electoral roll published on 28 February. Yet she was placed ‘under adjudication’ in the first supplementary list and subsequently dropped in the second.

Justice Munshi (retd) attended a ‘hearing’ after finding his name missing from the final roll. He produced documents, his passport and his EPIC without disclosing his identity. The officials, he told Bar & Bench, seemed satisfied and sent him away. However, his name was listed as ‘under adjudication’ in the supplementary list before being dropped subsequently. His interview to the legal portal, however, magically restored his name in the roll in the third supplementary list.

Munshi pointed out that while his only recourse was to appeal to one of the 19 judicial tribunals set up on the orders of the Supreme Court, he did not know on what ground he could appeal. No reason for omission was given to him, he pointed out. He was given no receipt for the documents that he submitted. There was no evidence or record that he had attended the hearing either. He also questioned the functioning of the tribunals, which on paper began functioning on 30 March.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the high court, the retired judge added, had issued any standard operating procedure (SOP) for the functioning of the tribunals. There was no clarity on what they were expected to look into and how they would arrive at definitive decisions.

Muslims and women have borne the brunt of deletions due to misunderstanding, logical discrepancies or ignorance. Sofia Bibi found it impossible to convince officials that prior to her marriage she was Sofia Khatoon, the name that figured in her documents, that they were one and the same person.

Amrita Priyadarshinee, a bright biophysicist, suspects she was dropped because of her name and the ‘logical inconsistency’ of her parents being Muslims. Abdul Ghani, a retired university professor, and Mahua Islam, his schoolteacher wife, never set much store by religion and named their daughter after a character in the Bengali novel Na Hanyate, combined with their admiration for former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who was known as Indira Priyadarshini.

The outrage caused by such algorithmic anarchy has given rise to anger. What if her parents had named her Margaret Thatcher, how could the ECI take away her voting right, fumes Avik Saha, a lawyer and farmer activist who refers to data presented by Dr Biswanath Chakraborty a professor of Rabindra Bharati University.

In Cooch Behar Dakshin constituency, Chakraborty found 6,800 voters had been deleted, 93 per cent of them Muslims. Similarly, over 90 per cent of deletions in Uttar Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad and Raiganj affected Muslim voters, among them women. SABAR Institute studied a polling booth in Cooch Behar with 35 per cent Muslim voters. In the December list, it found, 34 per cent had been deleted. The figure had gone up to 87 per cent by the end of March.

The ECI has stoically faced the barrage of criticism without clearing the air. How many infiltrators were found? Ask the Ministry of Home Affairs is the answer. Why have so many voters ‘under adjudication’ been deleted despite having voted earlier and possessing valid EPICs? Ask the judicial officers who adjudicated. How can those who are left out appeal? Ask Calcutta High Court and the judicial tribunals. Why are officers from outside the state with overt political links being brought in? It is not our job to check their family tree.

The anger and anxiety on the ground are building up. Several villages have put up notices that no political party is allowed to campaign until the names of voters dropped are restored. In Shamsherganj (Murshidabad), all political parties protested at the BDO office and declared that they would not allow the election to be held.

Black-flag demonstrations are picking up in the state. Paramilitary forces will undoubtedly keep protestors at bay, but the legitimacy of the election is being questioned. The indifference and confidence of BJP leaders who are strutting around saying they will be forming the government is merely adding to the suspicion.

West Bengal is sitting on a powder keg.