Armoured vehicles rumble along rural roads as Central Armed Police Forces patrol bazaars. Checkpoints dot highways, stopping cars and buses to search for cash or liquor meant to influence voters.
Days before Bengal heads into a crucial election, the unprecedented deployment by the Election Commission is meant to curb violence and “vote buying.” Yet the “war zone” optics obscure a quieter, more consequential contest—one unfolding in tribunals deciding who gets to vote, and by implication, who counts as Indian.
Nearly 91 lakh names have been removed from voter rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Of these, about 27 lakh were struck off after being flagged by an artificial intelligence filter for “logical discrepancies.”
Such discrepancies can be as minor as variations in surname spellings—Rai versus Ray, or Chattopadhyay versus Chatterjee. For Bengali Muslims, many of whom do not use fixed surnames, entire villages have found themselves excluded.
Researchers say the deletions have disproportionately affected minorities, women and the poor. Border districts such as Malda, Murshidabad, North and South 24 Parganas—home to large Muslim and Dalit populations—have been hit hardest, with deletions ranging from 2.2 lakh in South 24 Parganas to 4.6 lakh in Murshidabad.
But the impact has not spared the privileged.
At Joka, where an appellate tribunal set up by the Supreme Court hears cases arising from the deletions, stands the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Nandita Roy, a 39-year-old faculty member, discovered her name missing from the rolls.
“I submitted all the documents, assuming it was a clerical error, but my name is still not there,” she said. “If someone like me faces this, imagine the plight of poorer, less-educated people trying to navigate the bureaucracy.”
Others share her predicament. Members of the family of the last Nawab of Murshidabad have also been struck off. “What crime have we committed?” asked 82-year-old Syed Reza Ali Mirza, a descendant of Bengal’s Nawabs.
The political fallout is complex. In Muslim-majority districts such as Malda and Murshidabad, where the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) faced anti-incumbency, the deletions have triggered consolidation of Muslim voters around the party. The Congress and smaller Muslim parties may still win some seats.
A counter-consolidation among Hindu voters appears less certain, particularly because Scheduled Caste communities have also been affected. The Matua community—estimated at 2.5 to 3 million—has seen significant deletions.
“We have protested and will decide our next steps after the elections,” said Dileep Matua, a community leader who claimed 200 names were removed from his village alone.
Critics argue the exercise oversteps legal bounds. “The Citizenship Act does not empower the Election Commission to determine citizenship,” said Jawhar Sircar, a former IAS officer. “Yet, in practice, the machinery appears to be doing just that.”
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, defends the SIR as a necessary clean-up. “Authorities are removing dead, duplicate and fake voters,” said party ideologue Swapan Dasgupta.
The TMC sees it differently. Leader Debasish Kumar called it a “concerted attack,” alleging that the Centre has “let loose a wild horse” to weaken opposition-ruled states by shrinking their voter base.
Last month, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee appeared before the Supreme Court, alleging that the Election Commission was “targeting” Bengal and “bulldozing” its people.
The gender dimension has added another layer of complexity. Women form a crucial support base for the TMC, which leads the BJP by about 10 percentage points among female voters. But data from the first phase of polling suggests a dip in the women-to-men ratio—from 952:1000 to 950:1000 after the SIR.
“Surprisingly, the exercise has challenged women’s voting rights,” said Samata Biswas, a scholar of gender and migration.
A study by the Kolkata-based Sabar Institute indicates that women are disproportionately affected in constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In 67 SC seats, women account for 52.4 percent of those impacted; in 16 ST seats, the figure rises to 53.4 percent.
For many analysts, the SIR has upended electoral calculations. “If there is one move that has unsettled the electoral apple cart and made this election difficult to predict, it is this,” said political theorist Ranabir Samaddar. “The BJP hoped to benefit, but the TMC may yet have the last laugh.”
As Bengal votes under the shadow of security deployments, the more decisive battle may lie not in visible shows of force, but in the invisible process of determining who gets counted at the end of the polling season.