Bengal SIR hits Muslims with genuine documents hardest, ECI silent

'My father’s name was spelt in 2002 as ‘Naim’ and not ‘Nayeem’ in the elector’s photo identity card. Not his fault but that of the data entry operators engaged by the Election Commission of India. But I was placed in the list of logically inconsistent voters in the SIR, because both my name and my father’s name are now correctly spelt as ‘Nayeem’. The question raised by the ECI: why was my father’s name spelt ‘Naim’ in 2002 then?

'Good question. In the hearing held on 24 January, I submitted my passport, Aadhaar and Class 10 pass certificate. My father, a retired schoolteacher, produced his Aadhaar and pension payment order. My mother produced her Aadhaar and her post office savings bank passbook dating back to 1986. The EPIC numbers for both my father and me have remained the same since 2002. Despite the ‘hearing’, explanations and documents, all three of us have been placed ‘under adjudication’ by the ECI.

'We are among the 60 lakh voters in West Bengal who have been placed in this category. Judicial officers from the state — around 600 of them — and another 150 from neighbouring states, we have been told, will determine whether we are valid voters and will be able to cast our votes in the Assembly election next month.'

This is the story of the head of the department of Mathematics at Aliah University, a state government institution. Sk Md Abu Nayeem has been teaching at Aliah for 16 years and taught in a college before that. While reporting his case this week, The Telegraph found that he was not the only Muslim teacher at the university to be categorised as ‘under adjudication’. As many as 30 staff members at Aliah, the newspaper reported, are similarly ‘under adjudication’.

The head of the department of Bengali, Md Saifullah, has been known as just Saifullah all his life because his headmaster forgot to add the prefix ‘Md’. His passport, PAN, Aadhaar and even his PhD certificate name him as ‘Saifullah’. His father, who passed away in 2014, was named Md Asaduzzaman in the 2002 voter card. While filling the enumeration form during the SIR, Saifullah wrote his father’s name as simply ‘Asaduzzaman’.

“Five generations of my family are buried in the village graveyard,” he fumes. “We can trace back our roots here to 250 years.” Yet he, his younger brother and his mother are all ‘under adjudication’, he told The Telegraph.

Sheikh Ashfaque Ali — or Ashfaque Ali Sheikh? The deputy registrar at Aliah also finds himself unable to explain to the satisfaction of officials that his father, named Sheikh Tabarak Ali in 2002 and simply Tabarak Ali in 2026, is the same person. Ali too submitted his passport, but to no avail.

Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was asked during his visit to Kolkata last week about the disproportionate number of such cases. How is the spelling of a father’s name — who in many cases is deceased — relevant in determining the son’s eligibility as a valid voter? No reply was given, and none is expected either from the ECI or the Supreme Court.

What it has done is confirm the suspicion that the exercise is designed to disenfranchise Muslims, who constituted 28 per cent of the state’s population in the 2011 Census.

The suspicion that Muslims — believed to vote largely against the BJP — have been targeted by the SIR is also borne out by analyses done by the SABAR Institute, a public policy research group focused on disadvantaged and minority communities. Researchers examined the Bhabanipur Assembly segment, known to be chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s seat, and found a disproportionately high number of Muslim voters either deleted or placed ‘under adjudication’.

Muslims constitute about 20 per cent of the voters in the segment. However, 56.65 per cent of the voters placed ‘under adjudication’ there happen to be Muslims.

“They are just being kept in a waiting room with no end in sight. Not ‘yes’. Not ‘no’ either. Just uncertainty,” a social media post by SABAR Institute says.

Curiously, only 7.66 per cent of the voters dropped from the electoral rolls in the segment are Muslims. In other words, most Muslim voters do possess documents and were mapped during the SIR. Yet nearly half the voters either deleted or kept ‘under adjudication’ in the segment just happen to be Muslims.

Another curious feature of the exercise is that the two wards in the segment that voted overwhelmingly for the Trinamool Congress in the past are the wards where Muslims appear to have been singled out the most.

Is it a mere coincidence that BJP leader and leader of opposition in the state Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, has declared his intention to contest from Bhabanipur against Banerjee?