As West Bengal heads to the polls, six million voters don't know if they will be able to vote

Tensions are heightening in West Bengal, which is due to head to the polls in just over a month's time, as a large-scale revision of the electoral rolls is underway.

Since November 2025, the Election Commission of India has been conducting a sweeping revision of electoral rolls ahead of the 2026 assembly elections, across 26 states and union territories. According to the commission, the intention is to remove doubtful voters in light of rapid urbanisation and migration.

To carry out the exercise, known as the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, booth level officers visit homes across the targeted states to verify voter documents and eligibility.

Critics, however, argue that the process is a move by the ruling BJP party to consolidate electoral power and disenfranchise marginalised groups, paticularly migrant workers and Muslims.

Nowhere has it proven more controversial than in West Bengal, where it is having a disruptive impact on everyday life, particularly for the state's sizeable Muslim population. State authorities have cited concerns over illegal voters from Bangladesh - part of a much wider political rhetoric that frames Bengali-speaking Muslims as "Bangladeshi infiltrators." Critics have called the SIR process "the NRC through the backdoor," linking it to a longer history of citizenship contestation bound up with the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress party has governed the state against sustained BJP pressure, has been unequivocal. "Through the Special Intensive Revision exercise, a veiled attempt is being made to disenfranchise genuine voters and implement NRC through the backdoor. We will not tolerate this," she wrote on X.

In West Bengal, the SIR process has relied heavily on the 2002 voter list as a reference document, rather than the most recent 2024 electoral roll, a decision opponents argue is both arbitrary and exclusionary.

A particular problem has emerged around what officials call "logical discrepancy" - where there is an inconsistency between a name on the 2002 list and the details submitted by the voter today. These discrepancies often arise from spelling variations in names, differences in recorded ages, or inconsistencies in family records. Abdul, from Malda town, explained how his father's name was recorded as MD Wahid Ali on the old list, while all his more recent documents record it as MD Wayed Ali.

"If there is a discrepancy like this, you are placed on the adjudication list. Then you must wait for a hearing, where you are called to prove you are the same person. But no one knows if they will accept our documents"

If they cannot, or if the hearing officer decides the discrepancy remains unresolved, their name is deleted from the electoral rolls.

There are currently around 60 lakh - six million - names under adjudication, concentrated mainly in the northern districts of the state such as Malda and Murshidabad. In polling stations with majority Muslim populations, adjudication rates are as high as 15%, while in comparable Hindu-majority booths the proportion is much lower.

The revision is also hitting migrant workers hard. Many work outside West Bengal in daily wage work and have been required to return to their home villages for hearings. Although an online SIR provision exists, the migrants spoken to for this article were unaware of it. The fear is that if their names are deleted from the rolls, workers will be ineligible to vote both in their home state and in the places where they work - where they are often already politically marginalised. Travelling back to the village to submit documents takes days and is costly, and so many have chosen not to. “We cannot afford to miss five days of work to attend the hearing”, Rehman Ali, working as a mason in Gurgaon told me.

The impact is spreading beyond the electoral rolls into everyday administrative life. Tarik, who lives in Itahar, recently tried to have his OBC-A caste certificate revalidated. He was told that because his parents' names are under adjudication, the certificate cannot be processed. In Malda, the Land Revenue Department is not issuing land registrations for those whose names appear on the adjudication list.

West Bengal goes to the polls on 23 and 29 April. For the six million voters still under adjudication, many of whom are yet to receive a hearing date, the question of whether they will be allowed to cast a ballot remains unanswered.