The SIR in West Bengal was a Special Impediment Removal exercise designed by the BJP, executed by the ECI and certified by the Supreme Court. Carefully designed to remove the demographic impediment faced by the BJP in its desperate bid to conquer Bengal, obediently executed by an army of outside officials deployed by the ECI, bypassing its established structure and processes, and repeatedly certified by the Supreme Court, not quite in control of, or fully aware of, the disenfranchising consequences of its orders.

Over the past 10 months, we have normalised the deletion of large numbers of names in the SIR. Even by those standards, Bengal is an extraordinary case of SIR-led disenfranchisement. It needn’t have been so. There was nothing unusual about the voters’ list in Bengal. Nothing that required special treatment. Unless you look at it from the BJP’s eyes.

Take the size of the electorate. In October 2025, prior to the SIR, Bengal’s electoral rolls had 7.66 crore names. Almost exactly the same number as the adult population in the state that month — 7.67 crore. Rarely does one find such a perfect electorate-population ratio. Clearly, there was no cause for alarm on this score. Nor is there any truth in the rumours that the TMC had used state officials to smuggle in massive insertions in the voters’ list just before the SIR. The total number of fresh inclusions in June-August 2025 was just 3.5 lakh, about 0.4 per cent. As many as 41 per cent of applications for inclusion of names during this period were rejected. This rules out the possibility of official complicity.

Or, take the first stage of the SIR. A........

© Indian Express