The run-up to elections in West Bengal has been anything but normal. The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has led to the exclusion of nearly 90 lakh voters from the electoral rolls. Of these, 27 lakh were excluded after being placed “under adjudication” over “logical discrepancies” in their documents, a criterion the commission has never used before. In this ground report, Sreenivasan Jain and his team unpack the chaos the SIR has unleashed. 

The deletions do not appear random. Mounting evidence suggests that the design and implementation of the SIR have disproportionately affected Muslim voters. In Basirhat, in North 24 Parganas, Jain finds scores of voters queuing outside government offices, desperately trying to get their names included in the voter list. Excluded voters describe their disbelief and anguish at the surreal........

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