West Bengal: Mother Teresa’s nuns also in court to secure their right to vote
As many as 55 Missionaries of Charity had been removed from the electoral roll, as had thousands of other people – mostly Bengalis – in the controversial revision imposed by the central government in New Delhi. Exit polls suggest the BJP is in the lead, but there are many doubts about their reliability as the controversy has driven turnout up to almost 93%. Official results on 4 May.
Kolkata (AsiaNews) – In the Indian state of West Bengal – which yesterday completed the second round of voting for the local Legislative Assembly – the Missionaries of Charity also had to fight to cast their votes, after their names had been removed from the electoral roll, as happened to thousands of other people in the controversial revision decreed by the Electoral Commission.
It was only on 28 April, just hours before polling day, that a court upheld the appeals lodged by 55 nuns from the order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, allowing them to go to the polling stations. A nun from the Mother House told the Times of India newspaper that around 55 names of sisters across Calcutta had been approved by the court and reinstated on the electoral rolls. She thanked local MP Derek O’Brien for his help and the Electoral Commission for looking into the matter.
At least 35 nuns who had given the Mother House or Nirmala Shishu Bhavan as their permanent address had been removed from the registers following initial judicial checks. All were voters in the Chowringhee constituency. A local source reported that over 120 nuns had been summoned for an initial hearing in accordance with the Electoral Commission’s guidelines, as they were not linked to previous state electoral registers or could not provide documentary proof of their connections.
During the court hearings, the nuns attempted to present various documents, including passports, tax identification numbers, Aadhaar digital IDs and ecclesiastical certificates. However, many did not have birth certificates or documents relating to their parents, making it difficult to prove the required links.
Furthermore, having changed their names upon entering religious life, previous documents often do not match their current ones. When the electoral roll was published on 28 February, some names were included whilst others were removed. Many cases were subject to judicial review and subsequently struck off without explicit reasons being given.
This situation has also led Mother Teresa’s sisters to share the fate of the poorest in Calcutta: as we reported on AsiaNews a few days ago, the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in West Bengal has led to the removal of 9.1 million names, mostly belonging to people of Bengali ethnicity and language.
The political rhetoric surrounding the SIR has been inflammatory in recent months. India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, has justified the operation as essential for national security, using the term “infiltrators” in a derogatory sense to refer to irregular Muslim migrants from Bangladesh.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) – the local party of outgoing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who is running for a fourth term – has responded by calling this revision a “constitutional crime” and a “bloodless political genocide”.
With polling stations now closed, the official results of the West Bengal vote are expected on 4 May, alongside those from Tamil Nadu, Assam and Puducherry, the other territories affected by this round of elections. What is certain is that the controversy over the electoral rolls has led to an unprecedented turnout: combining the figures from the two days of voting across the various constituencies, almost 93% of voters cast their ballots, an unprecedented figure.
Once the polls closed, exit polls were also released; however, given the high turnout (as well as numerous previous inaccuracies in India), these should be treated with extreme caution. Most of these polls give the Bharatiya Janata Party, Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, a narrow majority in the Legislative Assembly, with Mamata Banerjee suffering defeat. However, two major agencies have not published their forecasts, citing precisely the high turnout, which they claim renders the data collected unreliable.
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