UNI SPECIAL
Jayanta Roy Chowdhury
Kolkata/Murshidabad, April 22 (UNI) Armoured vehicles rumble along rural roads and Central Armed Police forces patrol through bazaars. Checkpoints dot the highways, where cars and busses are stopped and searched for cash or liquor meant to influence voters.
A day before Bengal heads for a crucial election, and the unprecedented deployment by the Election Commission is supposed to curb possible political clashes and “vote buying.”
However, the "war zone movie set" scenario, belies the fact that the real battle for Bengal's ballot box may not be unfolding on these roads at all. It is being fought, more quietly but no less consequentially, in tribunals tasked with determining who has the right to vote in the forthcoming elections, and by implication who is an Indian.
Some 91 lakh people had their names removed from voter rolls, through an exercise called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Out of these 91 lakh, some 27 lakh had their names struck off after being placed under adjudication by an Artificial Intelligence generated filter which felt their entry had "logical discrepancies".
Deletions based on "logical discrepancy" could be on as flimsy a ground as why a son’s surname is spelled differently from his father’s, such as Rai and Ray, Chattopadhyay (Sanskriticised surname for Brahmins from the Chattal region) and Chatterjee (Anglicised version of Chattopadhyay).
For Bengali Muslims, most of whom have no fixed surname, this has meant whole villages have been left out of the voter list.
The deletions have impacted minorities, women and the poor the most say researchers working with the data officially available.
The border districts of Malda, Murhsidabad, North and South 24 Parganas, with huge Muslim and Dalit populations have been hit the hardest, with the number of deleted names ranging from 2.2 lakh (South 24 Parganas) to 4.6 lakh (Murshidabad).
However, the "privileged class" too have been hit by the role purification drive, often inexplicably.
In Joka, where the appellate tribunal set up by the Supreme Court is sited to adjudicate cases arising from the mass deletions, the most famous building is that of India's first 'Ivy League' management school – the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Nandita Roy who teaches at Joka's IIM, has discovered to her horror that her name is among those struck off. "I have given all the documents needed for what I assumed was a clerical error … but I still don't find my name on the voter's list," the 39-year-old IIM professor told UNI.
"I am from a privileged background, an academic, my father is a retired Air Force officer, and I am facing this … imagine the plight of poor, semi-educated people who have to struggle with the bureaucracy to get back their voting rights," said Roy.
She is not alone among the 'privileged set' to have lost their right to vote with a question mark placed on their Indian citizenship. Scores of people who belong to the family of the last Nawab of Murshidabad find themselves stripped of their right to vote.
"What crimes have we committed that our names have been struck off the voter list," asked 82-year-old Syed Reza Ali Mirza, also known as 'Chota Nawab', a descendant of the Nawabs of Bengal who were turned pensioners by the British 'East India Company' in the 18th century.
Famously, while the Nawabs of Dhaka traditionally supported the demand for creation of a separate Pakistan, the Murshidabad Nawab family had favoured being part of India.
The TMC, which was facing an anti-incumbency wave in Malda and Murshidabad, has actually benefited because of Muslim vote consolidation rallying around the “known devil,” even though the Congress and a Muslim party will probably manage to win a few seats this time round.
However, a reverse vote consolidation among Hindus who feel threatened by the rising Muslim population is unlikely given the way SIR has affected the scheduled castes.
Bengal's more than 2.5-3 million strong Matua community, many of whom come from the scheduled caste, have seen huge numbers of deletions and are up in arms against the SIR.
"We have already held protests and are waiting for the election to end and then we will decide our future course of action," said Dileep Matua, Secretary of the Matua Samaj, who says his village in South 24 Parganas alone has had 200 names deleted.
Those who have shifted to Bengal for work have similarly faced deletion by a bureaucratic machinery that refuses to accept the paperwork they have provided. Mohd Shamim Akhtar who shifted from Madhubani in Bihar to teach at the Alia University on the outskirts of Kolkata, and had voted in the previous elections starting with 206, has produced "every possible document that I have including my passport" but finds his name excluded.
"The Citizenship Act does not empower the Election Commission to determine questions of citizenship. Yet, in practice, Chief Election Commissioner appears to have steered the electoral machinery toward scrutinizing it," charged Jawhar Sircar, former IAS officer who resigned as an MP of the upper house protesting against TMC's policies.
The BJP defends the SIR as an exercise to "purify" the voter list. "Basically the authorities are cutting out all the dead, duplicate and fake voters who were there on the list," said Swapan Dasgupta, BJP idealogue and candidate for the Rashbehari constituency.
TMC leader Debasish Kumar is however convinced that the SIR is a "concerted attack," and claimed that the central government has "let loose a wild horse called SIR" across India to threaten regional parties and opposition ruled states by "reducing their voter base".
Last month, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had donned lawyer's robes to appear before the Supreme Court seeking relief alleging that the Election Commission was "targeting" her state and "bulldozing" its people through the SIR.
One of TMC's biggest support base is the women of the state. While TMC has a lead of 4 per cent in male voters compared to BJP, its lead among women voters is a whopping 10 per cent. Data crunching for the first round of elections due on Thursday, shows that in the 152 assembly constituencies where polling will be held, the women to men ratio has dipped significantly after the SIR: From 952:1000 to 950:1000.
"Surprisingly the SIR has proven to be a challenge to women's voting rights. It's odd that the move's ultimate result shows a certain gender bias," said Samata Biswas, who specialises in gender and migration studies and is on the Faculty of the more than 200-year-old Sanskrit University.
A state-wide analysis by the Kolkata-based Sabar Institute suggests that women are being disproportionately affected by voter deletions and adjudication proceedings, particularly in constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
In the state's 67 SC seats, women account for 52.4 per cent of such cases—2.4 percentage points higher than the overall average of 50.1 per cent. The imbalance is starker still in the 16 ST constituencies, where women make up 53.4 per cent of those affected.
"If there is one single move which has upset the electoral apple cart and made this election extremely difficult to predict it is the SIR. The BJP had hoped it would help it but frankly the TMC may still have the last laugh from the way its playing out," said Prof Ranabir Samaddar, former head of the Kolkata-based Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies.
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