West Bengal: record turnout after names removed from voter rolls
The first round of the legislative elections, held yesterday, was marred by controversy over the revised electoral rolls, which excluded millions of voters, mostly Muslims. The central and state governments have blamed each other, while those most affected belong to vulnerable groups.
Kolkata (AsiaNews) – The first round of the state legislative elections held yesterday in West Bengal saw a historic turnout of 92.03 per cent. The second phase is set for 29 April.
For Chief Justice Surya Kant, this showed the power of the people, a remark that comes at a time of extreme political polarisation after a controversial revision of the electoral rolls that reduced the electorate in West Bengal by more than 10 per cent.
This year's legislative election represents a test for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC), which is seeking a fourth consecutive term after 15 years in power.
For their part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have doubled their efforts to win a state where they have never governed.
West Bengal is home to approximately 14 per cent of India's Muslim population of around 172 million, and so far, Hindu extremist rhetoric has failed to gain traction.
But the lead-up to this election has been marked by a bitter clash between the state and central governments over the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of voter rolls.
Although the Election Commission claimed the goal was to "cleanse" the lists of deceased voters or duplicate names, West Bengal is the only state where the review was conducted a second time, resulting in the deletion of 9.1 million names, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims.
The political rhetoric surrounding the SIR has been incendiary in recent months. India's Home Minister, Amit Shah, justified the operation as essential to national security, using the term "infiltrators" to derogatorily refer to illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh.
For Shah, this "cleansing" was necessary to prevent the democratic system from being "polluted”.
The TMC and various critics, however, condemned the deletions as a "constitutional crime" and a "bloodless political genocide”.
TMC MLA Sagarika Ghose said that the government had “taken away” the right to vote from the poorest, the vulnerable, and minorities.
To complete the operation, an artificial intelligence algorithm was used to identify "logical discrepancy” in the electoral list. But according to some experts, such as former election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, this tool is unfit, because the errors reported included, for example, slight spelling variations of Bengali names or families with more than five children, which were removed from the lists.
Even high-profile individuals, like Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, saw their names struck from the register and forced to prove their Indian citizenship. This process disadvantages rural populations, who often lack the necessary documents, leaving some families in legal limbo.
In the Murshidabad, a district where voting took place yesterday and which is home to nearly 1.1 million people, migrant workers, approximately 455,000 people were removed from the register.
A report by the progressive news website The Wire describes how migrant workers rushed back to their villages from other Indian states, fearing that removal from the electoral rolls could lead to them being labelled "foreigners" or "enemies of the nation”.
One man said his employers in Odisha threatened to fire him if he couldn't prove he had voted, telling him, “if we are not voters, then we must be Bangladeshis.”
In other states bordering Bangladesh, Indian citizens have been deported, accused of being foreigners simply for speaking Bengali.
Although the Supreme Court ordered the establishment of 19 tribunals to hear appeals, the system has not been able to cope with the volume of requests.
Of more than 3.4 million appeals filed, only 136 to 139 people were allowed to vote in the first phase.
Commenting on the political clash between the central and state governments, Justice Joymalya Bagchi quoted a Bengali proverb: “Kings fight and the poor men suffer and die.”
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