THE Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of West Bengal’s electoral rolls, the first since 2002, reduced the state’s electorate from 7,66,37,529 in November 2025 to 6,77,42,891 when the roll was frozen ahead of the April polls. Close to 89 lakh people, 11.6 per cent of the electorate, were removed in five months.

The Election Commission presents this as technical correction through the removal of the dead, the duplicated, the shifted and the absent. Rolls do accumulate errors, and some of these deletions are legitimate. The real question is who was made to carry the burden of proof, by what standard, and with what recourse. On each count, the SIR placed the weight on those least able to bear it.

The exercise reversed the ordinary presumption of enrolment. Every elector had to establish linkage, personally or through a parent, to the 2002 roll. Where the Commission’s data checks found a "logical discrepancy", a category with no statutory definition, the elector was sent to adjudication.

A documentary test of this kind is never class-neutral. A paper trail across 24 years presupposes stable residence, formal employment and property records, which the agricultural labourer, the seasonal migrant and the informal worker are least likely to have. To make documentation the condition of the franchise is to reintroduce, by administrative means, the property qualification the Constitution abolished.

THE ARITHMETIC OF SUSPICION

The criteria used to flag discrepancies deserve close reading, because this is where the class bias was written into the process. The largest single flag was a mismatch in the father’s name, raised against 84.5 lakh electors, 11 per cent of the pre-SIR roll. It touched 16 per cent of electors in Malda and 15 per cent in Uttar Dinajpur, but under 5 per cent in Kolkata. A father’s name entered in Bengali in 2002 and transliterated into English in 2025, or written “Md.” in one record and in full in another, is not evidence of fraud. It is evidence that the record was made by someone other than the elector.

The second flag, raised against 23.6 lakh electors, was a parent with more than six children linked to them. It applied to 7.1 per cent of electors in Murshidabad and 6.8 per cent in Malda and Uttar Dinajpur, against 1.4 per cent in Kolkata. Large families are a feature of rural poverty, not of illegality. To treat them as grounds for suspicion is to treat poverty itself as a discrepancy.

Age gaps were flagged too: 10.9 lakh electors whose recorded age differed from a parent’s by less than 15 years, and 8.6 lakh where the gap exceeded 50. Anyone who knows rural Bengal knows that ages in old rolls were often estimated by the enumerator at the door, because no birth certificate existed. The poor were made to answer for the guesses of officials.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF EXCLUSION

The distribution of deletions bears this out. At the draft stage, wholly urban constituencies lost 16.3 per cent of their electors, against 5.3 per cent in mostly rural ones. Kolkata lost 28.3 per cent of its pre-SIR electorate by the time the roll froze. Seats that receive migrant labour, the trading and industrial belts of Kolkata, Howrah and Asansol, lost 12.7 per cent, mostly recorded as absent, shifted or dead. The urban working poor live in rented rooms, bastis, mess houses and workplaces. One unsuccessful visit by a booth-level officer, to a worker on shift or at home for the harvest, was enough to mark him as moved.

The rural poor were caught at the second stage. In seats that send labour out, including the bidi belt of Murshidabad and the river blocks of Malda, 8.6 per cent of the entire electorate was placed under adjudication, the highest of any category. In Sujapur the figure was 52.5 per cent of all electors. In these seats men were over-represented among the adjudicated. 56 per cent in Sujapur and 58 per cent in Chopra, against roughly 51 and 54 per cent of the roll. That is the profile of the absent migrant worker, whose documents, issued by different offices at different times, rarely match in every particular. 

Adjudication was severe. Of 60,06,675 electors referred to judicial officers, 27,16,393, or 45.2 per cent, were deleted. In Nadia the proportion was 77.9 per cent, in Hooghly 70.3 per cent. Against this, fresh enrolment through Form 6 added just 1,82,036 names. The disqualification lists published with the final roll contain more than five lakh names, and in all but a few hundred the reason for deletion is left blank. 

THREE CONSTITUENCIES

Samserganj in Murshidabad is a centre of bidi production, an industry built on home-based female labour at piece rates, and a major source of out-migrant construction workers. At adjudication, 74,775 of its electors, 69 per cent of those examined, were declared ineligible. The seat was decided in May by 7,587 votes. Those excluded numbered nearly ten times the margin. Of 80,246 appeals filed from the constituency, 12 had been decided by mid-October.

Jorasanko in north Kolkata shows the urban side of the same process. Its economy rests on wholesale markets, head-load porters, handcart pullers, small workshops and migrant workers from Bihar and Jharkhand who often sleep where they work. At the draft stage, 72,900 electors were removed here as absent, shifted or dead. 

Howrah Uttar lost 60,418 on the same grounds. These populations did not disappear. Their forms of residence simply do not register as residence in a system designed around the settled and the propertied.

A REMEDY IN NAME ONLY

The Supreme Court’s intervention replaced Commission officials with judicial officers and created a right of appeal before nineteen tribunals headed by former High Court judges. In principle, a safeguard. In practice, the hearing itself became the barrier. A physical hearing in Kolkata required an elector from Farakka or Islampur to forfeit wages, pay for travel and lodging, and often rely on intermediaries. For a migrant worker employed in another state, it was out of reach.

Virtual hearings, conducted from BDO offices, shortened the distance but not the difficulty. The elector still had to reach the block office, lose a day’s work and wait for a slot. Once there, the hearing meant speaking to a judge on a screen, over a link that could falter, about records the elector may never have seen. For people unfamiliar with such technology, a video link is not a convenience but one more unfamiliar instrument of the state, and many had to lean on block staff or local agents to get through it. 

A hearing of either kind also means answering an official’s questions about one’s parents, age and marriage. For many women, particularly those who have rarely dealt with officialdom and whose records changed on marriage, that encounter is intimidating in itself, more so in a government office crowded with strangers. 

The disposal figures confirm this. Constituency-level data show around 38 lakh appeals filed and roughly 1.22 lakh decided by mid-October, about two per cent. In 170 of 294 constituencies, fewer than one per cent had been disposed of. Where decisions were made, about 91 per cent of appellants were restored.

It may be argued that a high restoration rate shows the system working, and that slow disposal merely reflects volume. But a remedy that arrives after the election is no remedy for that election. The Chief Electoral Officer had confirmed that electors restored on appeal would be enrolled only for future polls. For 2026, the franchise of every one of these citizens was extinguished irrespective of the merits.

Nor has inclusion brought security. Of approximately 27 lakh electors cleared by judicial officers, about 16 lakh, more than half, now face an appeal against their inclusion. Having proved their eligibility once, they must defend it again. 

CLASS AND COMMUNITY

Public debate on the SIR has centred on religion, with reason. By name-based estimates, roughly four in five of those rejected by the tribunals bear Muslim names, and adjudication loads were heaviest in Muslim-majority districts. The BJP’s campaign against "infiltrators" ensured the exercise would be read in those terms. But an analysis confined to community concedes the BJP’s framing. Nadia, with its large Matua refugee population, predominantly Hindu Namasudras, recorded the highest adjudication deletion rate in the state. Cooch Behar, with its Rajbanshi peasantry, lost half of those referred for adjudication. What unites the Matua refugee, the Rajbanshi peasant, the Muslim bidi worker in Samserganj and the Bhojpuri-speaking porter in Jorasanko is not faith. It is the absence of property, settled residence and the papers that come with them.

The pattern has a political economy. Bengal’s mass out-migration is the product of two decades of agrarian distress and industrial decline. The SIR converts the consequences of that dispossession into grounds for disenfranchisement. The worker who left because there was no work at home is struck off for not being at home.

The Trinamool government bears its share of responsibility. State employees carried out the enumeration, and years of routing welfare through local intermediaries had left the poor dependent on patronage for every certificate. When patronage could not deliver, they stood alone before the state.

The BJP has since formed the government with 207 of 294 seats, won on a roll from which nearly 89 lakh people had been removed. That fact belongs in any honest account of the result.

The immediate demands follow from the evidence. Tribunals must sit in every district, with fixed timelines and camps in the states where Bengal’s migrant workers are employed. Restoration must be possible on documents the poor actually hold like ration cards, MGNREGA job cards, Aadhaar, school and panchayat certificates. Every deletion must carry a recorded reason, and no appeal against inclusion should be entertained without evidence from the appellant. The Left must organise booth-level assistance so that no elector faces this process alone. The franchise is the one right the landless labourer holds on equal terms with the landlord. The SIR has shown how readily that equality can be undone through procedure. Restoring it will depend on organisation in every locality, not on petitions alone.