As polls knock, why is Bengal’s SIR in a state of chaos with no end in sight?

On Saturday, the Election Commission of India published the electoral roll for West Bengal three weeks after its original deadline to do so had lapsed. This list excluded over 61 lakh voters.

But the special intensive revision is still not over in the state. The fate of 60 lakh voters hangs in the balance as they have been placed in a new “under adjudication” category.

The prolonged special intensive revision process has led to fears of disenfranchisement and even disorder in West Bengal. Scroll tracks the chaotic nature of the Bengal SIR and explains how matters have reached such a stage that even Assembly elections are now under question as the state still does not have a final electoral roll.

Uncertainty and chaos

It is unclear how many of the 60 lakh voters, who the Election Commission has labelled as “under adjudication”, will be allowed to vote in the upcoming polls, if at all. At a news conference on Saturday, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, the chief electoral officer of West Bengal, simply said their “cases are not in our jurisdiction now”.

Ordinarily, the state would have been gearing up for Assembly elections by now. But the Election Commission has not even announced the timeline for it so far.

The term of the current Assembly ends on May 7. If the next government is not in place before that, the state will have to be placed under the President’s rule for the first time in nearly half a century.

“The Bharatiya Janata Party does not want an election,” Abhishek Banerjee, the national general secretary of the Trinamool Congress, alleged on Sunday, estimating that it would take “four months” to adjudicate all the pending cases. Mamata Banerjee, the party’s founder and chairperson, will hit Kolkata’s streets in protest on March 6, he announced.

Mohit Ray, a member of the BJP’s state executive, saw this as nothing but brinkmanship from West Bengal’s ruling party. Dismissing the possibility of President's rule in the state, he expressed confidence that the judiciary would wrap up the SIR in the “next three weeks”.

How did the judiciary get involved in an exercise being conducted by the Election Commission?

On February 20, the Supreme Court took the “extraordinary” step of transferring the responsibility of completing the SIR from the Election Commission to the state judiciary to try and get a handle on the chaotic exercise, which has gone on for four months now.

However, even that was not enough to meet the deadline of the Assembly elections: the Calcutta High Court said it would need nearly three months to perform the task. The Supreme Court then allowed it to call in judges from neighbouring Jharkhand and Odisha.

Meanwhile, life in courts across the state has virtually come to a standstill with only urgent cases being heard because most judges are on SIR duty. The judiciary taking over the process has got politicians and activists worrying as well.

“The judiciary has a very different pattern of functioning,” explained Sujan Chakraborty, a state committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). “It depends only on paperwork. If the judiciary decides to exclude somebody’s name, that will make him a D voter, a doubtful voter.”

Activist-politician Yogendra Yadav agreed that concerns about lakhs of voters being declared doubtful were “understandable”. For this, he squarely blamed the Election Commission which, in his view, had carried out the SIR “in league with” the BJP.

“The purpose seems to be to delete the names that could not be deleted in the first round of SIR,” he added. “The whole point was large-scale deletion of potential Trinamool Congress voters. The political project failed in stage one. The name of the game is somehow we have to achieve what we set out to achieve.”

Moving the goalposts

The first phase of the SIR that Yadav was referring to had led to the names of around 58 lakh out of West Bengal’s 7.6 crore voters getting listed for removal. Most of them were people who shifted homes, were registered to vote in more than one place or passed away after 2002, the last time such an exercise was carried out in the state.

Notably, analysts found no particular demographic pattern in the deletion of voters. After the first phase ended on December 16, the Election Commission summoned nearly 32 lakh voters for hearings because they were unable to establish their link to the 2002 voter list.

But these so-called unmapped voters also belied the BJP’s allegations that the names of over one crore “Bangladeshis, Rohingyas” were on West Bengal’s voter lists. The Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research organisation, found that Hindi speakers and Hindu refugees from Bangladesh – seen as supporters of the saffron party – were overrepresented among such voters.

Then, the Election Commission began summoning voters for what it called “logical discrepancies”. Even those who had established their connection to the 2002 voter list could now be summoned for differences in spelling, errors in recording gender, the number of siblings they have or because their age gap with their parents or grandparents is seemingly unusual. The number of voters deemed suspect for “logical discrepancies” suddenly ballooned to over one crore in West Bengal.

Experts such as the researcher Sabir Ahamed from the Sabar Institute say that the “logical discrepancies” category was improvised specially for West Bengal and extended elsewhere subsequently. The phrase, they point out, had found no mention in the Election Commission’s initial orders regarding the SIR.

The result of this, Ahamed’s data analysis showed, is that the list released on Saturday disproportionately targeted Bengal’s Muslims. Districts such as Murshidabad, Malda, South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas, where Muslims are either in majority or have a substantial presence, are home to a large number of the “under adjudication” voters even as they did not have very many unmapped voters after the first phase of the SIR.

“They [the Election Commission] have tailored different mechanisms just to harass citizens,” Ahamed claimed. “It is absolutely clear now that the exercise turned on its head between the first phase and the second phase. Districts with a large number of Muslims are the worst affected.”

Muslims make up nearly a third of West Bengal’s population, according to the 2011 census. In recent years, they have largely backed Mamata Banerjee in election after election, drawing the ire of Trinamool’s principal opponent, the BJP. The arbitrary, chaotic SIR has sparked fears of disenfranchisement in the community.

The role of the Supreme Court

When it comes to deciding whether or not the name of a person is to be included in the voter list, constituency-level officers should be the final arbiters as per law. The Representation of the People Act of 1950 is clear that this power vests in the electoral registration officer, who is usually an employee of the state government.

But in practice, the Election Commission inserted so-called micro observers into the process only in West Bengal and gave them veto powers over decisions made by electoral registration officers. This is what caused sharp disagreement between the state government and the Election Commission, resulting in a logjam that eventually found its way to the Supreme Court.

In the first week of February, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee herself appeared in the Supreme Court and asked why the Election Commission had made such appointments in her state alone. In response, the constitutional body claimed that it had been compelled to do so because her government had “failed to provide adequate manpower” for the SIR.

Then, the Supreme Court ordered the state government to ensure that an additional 8,505 state officials report for SIR duty. It also agreed with Banerjee and said that “the final decision” on the eligibility of voters would be made by Bengal’s electoral registration officers rather than the Election Commission's so-called micro observers.

Lawyer Gautam Bhatia had observed that the top court was acting like an “administrator” instead of doing its actual job: determining the constitutional validity of the SIR. This became starker at the next hearing, when it asked the Calcutta High Court to take direct control of the SIR.

Why BJP is still backing SIR

Political scientist Maidul Islam worried that Trinamool would launch “a massive offensive” if voters seen as its supporters do not find their names in the list published on Saturday. He blamed the Election Commission for letting the SIR get politicised to such an extent that things had come to this point.

“Basically, because the BJP’s potential voters were deleted first, now they are targeting Bengali Muslims to balance this,” Islam said. “It will be easier for them to say that these are essentially illegal immigrants, Bangladeshi infiltrators. That will match with the narrative of the BJP in this election campaign.”

Ray, the BJP leader mentioned earlier, countered the idea that Muslims were being “targeted” in the SIR. He wholeheartedly backed the ever-changing process. In his view, Muslims were overrepresented in the “logical discrepancies” list because 10% of the state’s population consisted of “Bangladeshi Muslims”.

“West Bengal has become a mini Bangladesh,” Ray alleged. “Both the killers and the victims are Muslims. From the beginning, Mamata was saying that she would not allow the SIR to take place. The state is running on the violence of one group and the ruling party is hostage to them.”