Bengal goes to the polls today, but lakhs of voters, including my family, don’t count

In January, the Booth Level Officer of my village in West Bengal’s Purba Bardhaman district rang me with a routine request: could I meet him to submit copies of my passport for verification under the Special Intensive Revision – the Election Commission of India’s sweeping audit of the state’s electoral rolls? I handed them over to him at the local tea stall.

Two weeks later, our family had our scheduled hearing at the Khandaghosh BDO office with the assistant electoral registration officer and the booth level officer about our names on the rolls. I attended by video call from Manchester, where I work. I had every reason to feel confident. I had submitted my passport, my father’s passport and land ownership records predating Independence. What more could the state possibly require of us?

Quite a lot, it turned out. As I made plans to return to India this month, intending to vote in the assembly elections before travelling onward for academic engagements, I discovered that my family of four – my father, two siblings and myself – had been erased from the electoral register.

We were not alone. According to the independent Sabar Institute, approximately 91 lakh names have been deleted from West Bengal’s voter list. This happened in...

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