West Bengal Accused of Excluding 538,320 Voters Over Minority, Refugee and Lower-Caste Identities

The names of 538,320 voters have been removed from West Bengal’s final electoral roll through the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) ERONet software, without any specific reason being shown. The incident occurred during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, in which no specific legal ground was cited for the deletions.

The most startling aspect is that the name of the electoral registration officer (ERO) who was adjudicating the removal of a voter’s name appeared on these forms as the applicant, or the person raising the objection. In other words, the officer raised the objection himself and also delivered the verdict on it himself.

The matter of this vast number of names being dropped from the roll came to light when it was found that, in the period between the publication of the draft electoral roll and the final electoral roll, 538,320 “Form 7” applications were processed automatically, without any individual’s personal objection.

Under the law, when an objection is raised to have someone’s name removed from the electoral roll, a specific reason must be stated, such as death, being a minor, having moved elsewhere or lacking citizenship. But for these 538,320 forms, the reason column in the “Form 10” register has been left completely blank. As a result, the affected voters cannot learn exactly why their names were removed from the roll.

Earlier this month, a report by The Reporters’ Collective stated that in Uttar Pradesh too, when a voter is declared ineligible at a hearing, the Election Commission’s software automatically generates a Form 7 bearing the election officer’s digital signature. The same method was followed in West Bengal, but its scale and scope were about six times greater than in Uttar Pradesh.

Such reasonless deletions were most frequent in North 24 Parganas and Nadia districts, which together accounted for 39 percent of all deletions. The impact was seen most heavily in constituencies dominated by the Matua community and alleged refugees, such as Bagda, Bongaon, Gaighata, Kalyani and Santipur, as well as Dabgram-Fulbari in Jalpaiguri.

The analysis says the blow was twice as severe in urban areas as in rural areas. In addition, among the six assembly constituencies where the number of voters removed without reason exceeded the winning margin of the respective assembly seat, there are seats won by both the BJP and the Trinamool Congress.

West Bengal’s Additional Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Arindam Niyogi said that Form 10 had no option for entering detailed reasons. Meanwhile, the Election Commission has advised the removed voters to apply again by filling out Form 6, but former election commissioners S Y Quraishi and Ashok Lavasa have said that Form 6 applies only to the inclusion of new voters.