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Kolkata: The controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the Indian state of West Bengal has intensified, with opposition leaders raising serious concerns over large-scale voter deletions ahead of the Assembly elections, terming the process a threat to democratic rights.<\/p>\n
According to Kashmir Media Service, Communist Party of India (Marxist) chief M A Baby, in a letter, expressed strong protest over \u201clarge-scale deletion of voters\u201d during the Election Commission\u2019s SIR exercise. He cited reports claiming that \u201cover 90 lakh voters, roughly 12 per cent of the electorate,\u201d had been excluded from the rolls.<\/p>\n
He said that the process amounted to \u201csystematic mass disenfranchisement,\u201d driven by \u201carbitrary criteria\u201d and increasing reliance on algorithm-based exclusions instead of transparent verification.<\/p>\n
He further highlighted the human impact, saying the exercise had caused \u201cmonetary loss, inconvenience, mental trauma and even deaths.\u201d He also raised concerns over transparency, stating that voter lists were released in formats that did not allow public scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Baby argued that the deletions disproportionately affected marginalized groups, particularly Muslims, women, and economically vulnerable sections, amounting to a denial of the constitutional voting rights.<\/p>\n
Echoing similar concerns, CPI- ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya described the SIR process as an \u201cunprecedented saga of mass harassment and targeted exclusion\u201d, adding that millions of voters have been removed across several states, with West Bengal facing the most severe impact.<\/p>\n
He said that in some constituencies, exclusion among Muslim voters had risen to 40\u201350 percent, calling it part of \u201cthe biggest electoral purge.\u201d He also said appellate tribunals existed \u201conly on paper,\u201d leaving lakhs of affected voters without remedy ahead of elections.<\/p>\n
Bhattacharya warned that if elections were held under such conditions, it would be \u201can unprecedented farce,\u201d arguing that the right to vote was being reduced to \u201ca matter of privilege rather than a fundamental right.\u201d<\/p>\n
The West Bengal election is scheduled to be held in two phases \u2013 on April 23 and April 29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kolkata: The controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the Indian state of West Bengal has intensified, with opposition leaders raising serious concerns over large-scale voter deletions ahead of the Assembly elections, terming the process a threat to democratic rights. According to Kashmir Media Service, Communist Party of India (Marxist) chief …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":192855,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/assests\/2026\/01\/CPIM1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198208,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198207\/revisions\/198208"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}