Election Commission silent on Muslims ‘under adjudication’ in West Bengal

My father’s name was spelt in 2002 as ‘Naim’ and not ‘Nayeem’ in the elector’s photo identity card. Not his fault but 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 held in West Bengal, because both I and my father’s names are now correctly spelt as ‘Nayeem’. Question raised by ECI? Why was my father’s name spelt in 2002 as ‘Naim’ then?

Good question. In the hearing held on 24 January 2026 I submitted my passport, Aadhaar and class 10 pass certificate. My father, a retired school teacher, produced his Aadhaar and pension payment order besides his Aadhaar. My mother produced her Aadhaar and her Post Office Savings bank passbook dating back from 1986. The EPIC numbers of my own and my father’s have remained the same since 2002. Despite the ‘hearing’, explanations and the documents, all three of us have been placed as voters ‘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 150 more from neighbouring states, we have been told, will determine if we are valid voters and will be able to cast our votes in the assembly election in 2026 next month.

This is the story of the head of the department of mathematics at Aliah university under the state government. Sk Md Abu Nayeem has been teaching at Aliah for the past 16 years and taught in a college before that. While reporting his case this week, The Telegraph found out that he was not the only ‘Muslim’ teacher at the university to be categorised as ‘under adjudication’. As many as 30 staffers 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 put the prefix Md. His passport, PAN, Aadhaar and even his PhD certificate name him as ‘Saifullah’. His father, who passed away in 2014, was however named as Md Asaduzzaman in the 2002 voters’ card. While filling up the enumeration form during SIR, Md Saifullah wrote his father’s name as just ‘Asadudzamman’. “Five generations of my family are buried in the village graveyard,” he fumes, “We can trace back our roots here to 250 years”. But he, his younger brother and his mother are all ‘under adjudication’, he told The Telegraph.

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

The chief electoral commissioner (CEC) was asked during his visit to Kolkata last week about the disproportionate number of such cases. How is the spelling of the father’s name, who in many cases are deceased, relevant to determine the son’s eligibility as a valid voter? No reply was given and no reply is expected from either the ECI or the Supreme Court. What it has done is to confirm suspicion that the exercise is designed to disenfranchise Muslims, who constituted 28 per cent of the state’s population in the 20211 census.

The suspicion that Muslims, who it is believed vote against the BJP, have been targeted by SIR is also borne out by analyses done by SABAR Institute, a public policy research group focused on disadvantaged and minority communities. The researchers looked into the Bhabanipur assembly constituency, known to be chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s constituency, and found a suspiciously high number of Muslim voters either deleted or kept ‘under adjudication’.

Muslims constitute 20 per cent of the voters in the constituency. However, 56.65 per cent of the voters ‘under adjudication’ in this constituency 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. Curiously only 7.66 per cent of the voters dropped from the electoral rolls in the constituency are Muslims. In other words, most Muslim voters have the documents and were mapped during SIR. Yet, half the number of voters deleted and kept ‘under adjudication’ in this constituency happen to be Muslims.

Another curious highlight of the exercise is that the two wards of the constituency, which voted overwhelmingly in the past for Trinamool Congress, are the wards where Muslims have been singled out the most. Is it a coincidence that BJP leader and leader of the opposition in the state assembly Suvendu Adhikari has declared his intention to contest from the constituency against Mamata Banerjee?