‘Live or die, we have to vote TMC’: How SIR has left Bengali Muslims with no political choices

Ramjan Sheikh was among the hundreds from Ahiran village who showed up for a public meeting organised by the Trinamool Congress in Murshidabad’s Jangipur on April 10. The main attraction: Bengali film actor Srabanti Chatterjee, who had flown down from Kolkata to campaign for Jakir Hossain, the local MLA.

But Sheikh was not impressed.

“I came here hoping that they would talk about SIR [special intensive revision],” complained the 28-year-old whose name was deleted from the voter rolls last month. “But nobody from Trinamool is saying that the rights of voters like us should be ensured before elections.”

Sheikh is not alone. The names of 91 lakh voters have been removed from the state’s electoral rolls as part of the special intensive revision. In stark contrast to other states, many voters in West Bengal had to attend hearings and produced documents to establish their bona fides in this SIR.

Analysts who studied the deletions found that the state’s Muslim voters have been hit the worst. A disproportionately large number of Bengali Muslims will not be allowed to vote in the upcoming Assembly elections.

Travelling through the Muslim-majority districts of Malda and Murshidabad, which elect 34 of West Bengal’s 294 MLAs, Scroll found Muslim voters seething with anger. Their disenfranchisement has become the main election issue even for those who made it to the final list.

Anger against the Trinamool Congress-led administration for governance failures has taken a backseat as the SIR has triggered fears of detention centres and foreigners’ tribunals, similar to those faced by Muslims in neighbouring Assam. This benefits Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has pitched herself as the sole protector of Bengali Muslims against efforts to question their citizenship.

“I believe that only Didi [Banerjee] can get our names included in the voter list again,” said Ramjan. However, in the same breath, he complained that the Trinamool had backtracked on its promises of not allowing the election to proceed if legitimate voters were left out.

Other Bengali Muslim voters also shared grievances with the ruling party, but added that they would vote for Banerjee because she was their best bet to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party out of power. Activists and researchers argued that this shows how the citizenship politics unleashed by SIR has restricted the community’s political choices.

‘We have no choice’

Muslims make up nearly a third of West Bengal’s population, according to the 2011 census. While some members of the community, especially in and around Kolkata, are Urdu speakers who trace their roots back to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the vast majority of them are Bengalis.

Bengali Muslims are among the most backward communities in India, faring poorly on crucial human development indicators. A sizeable chunk of their population is clustered in the backward districts of Malda, Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur and Dakshin Dinajpur, which have historically seen large-scale outmigration of labour to other states.

Over the past year, it is these Bengali Muslims that have repeatedly been mislabelled Bangladeshi as the BJP made a poll plank out of so-called illegal immigration. In some cases, migrant workers from the community have even been wrongly deported from BJP-ruled states on the mere suspicion that they were undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Mehebub Sheikh is one such Bengali Muslim who was picked up from a Mumbai suburb in June and pushed across the Bangladesh border, allegedly at gunpoint. Border Security Force officials subsequently brought him back after the government of West Bengal confirmed his Indian nationality.

“I thought I was done with NRC [National Register of Citizens],” Mehebub said at his home in Balia Hasennagar village of Murshidabad, likening his ordeal to Assam’s citizenship verification exercise in 2019. “When SIR began, the village pradhan [chief] had told me that my family would be ok because we had already been through NRC.”

As things turned out, the Sheikhs were put in the dock once again. Though some of their names were present in the 2002 voter list, Mehebub and his family were summoned for hearings because of so-called logical discrepancies in their documents.

When the final voter list came out on February 28, Mehebub’s father and his sister-in-law had been placed “under adjudication” along with half his village. His sister-in-law was eventually cleared to vote, but his father’s name was deleted. For this, he blames not only the Election Commission but also the state government.

“Trinamool has failed to protect its own voters,” Mehebub lamented, adding that most of the deleted voters in his village were Bengali Muslims who supported the ruling party. However, when asked who he would vote for, he named the chief minister. His wife liked Banerjee for her welfare schemes, he explained.

His brother Majibur, though, was more candid about why the family continued to support Banerjee. He had heard that if Trinamool lost the election and BJP came to power, deleted voters like his father would be placed in detention camps.

“We have no choice,” he said. “Whether we live or die, we have to keep voting for them [Trinamool]. No other party can win the whole state. Why waste our vote on somebody else?”

Spoilt for choice?

Contrary to this feeling of having no viable options, the political field in Murshidabad and Malda suggests that Bengali Muslims are spoilt for choice. Besides Trinamool and BJP, the Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are in the fray. Both parties have previously enjoyed considerable support from the community.

Then there are the smaller but more assertive Muslim parties such as MP Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party, which is rallying support for the construction of a Babri Masjid replica in Murshidabad. But even voters sympathetic to their politics don’t see them as having a real shot at power in these elections.

Ajijul Sheikh, a 63-year-old resident of Alinagar village in Malda who worked as a labourer in Delhi and Mumbai before retirement, claimed that seven members from his family would not be able to vote this time because of the SIR. He saw Owaisi as the only leader who would take up the issue in Parliament. Still, he said he could not vote for his party.

“The AIMIM has just started building its organisation here,” he added. “It will take time to grow. I will vote for it when the time is right.”

As far as the Congress party is concerned, it is busy fighting battles of its own while voters feel disconnected from it. Two of its candidates from the region also found their names on the deleted list, which rendered them ineligible to contest elections.

Eventually, they moved the Supreme Court and managed to get the appellate tribunals set up for deleted voters to hear their appeals on an urgent basis. The tribunal found their documents to be legitimate and their deletions were reversed in the nick of time. But this, too, left a bad taste in the mouth of ordinary voters, given that no such hurry was shown in entertaining their appeals.

Asadul Hoque, an e-rickshaw driver, was loading sacks of watermelons into his vehicle when Congress candidate Motakkin Alam’s cavalcade went past him in Baharal village of Malda. He did not even stop to take a look at the leader.

“He got his name included, but I cannot,” the 30-year-old deleted voter told Scroll. “I don’t have a big party behind me. All I have is my two hands and legs.”

An SIR election

This kind of resentment is fast gaining ground among Bengali Muslims, explained Saifulla Samim, a professor of the Bengali language at the state-run Aliah University in Kolkata.

For the last month and a half, activists and intellectuals like Samim have been protesting against the SIR in Kolkata’s Park Circus Maidan. Their protest has received little attention from the media and political parties. Fellow Muslims have also largely stayed away from it, Samim complained.

“Urdu-speaking Muslims and non-Bengali Hindus have not stood up for us,” he added. “Only some Bengali Hindus have.”

Part of the reason for the resentment among Bengali Muslims was the state government’s decision last year to remove several Muslim castes from Bengal’s list of Other Backward Classes. According to Samim, the access to reservations had “opened a big door” for the community, which did not sit well with many Bengali Hindus.

“Bengali Muslims were acceptable only as long as they sold vegetables and drove rickshaws,” he said. “That we started using reservations to get government jobs and live with dignity angered reactionary forces.”

Samim blamed the Trinamool government for succumbing to the pressure from Hindutva groups and withdrawing reservation benefits from many Bengali Muslim castes. It was able to do so, researcher Sabir Ahamed argued, because it can afford to take their support for granted. The SIR has reinforced this dynamic, forcing Bengali Muslims to set aside their grievances with the Trinamool and vote for it to keep the BJP out.

“Elections should be fought based on developmental indicators, not who is able to vote,” Ahamed said. “Unfortunately, this election is solely about the SIR.”