Beyond numbers, how West Bengal's voter roll revision is redrawing citizenship lines

IN a hamlet close the sir joseph banks of the Ichamati River in Taki constituency, an elderly moslem adult male tells us that one son and one daughter (but not the other children) from his family were deleted from the electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Review (SIR). The booth level officer (BLO) told him that their birth certificates were rejected and helped them re-apply online. The process has shattered his trust in the bureaucracy. His wife is too scared to come out and meet us, and warns her husband to stop talking to “educated” people. Despondent, he tells us, “At this point, we can only hope they put my children on the final list.”Just a couple of kilometers away, a middle-aged Hindu man working in Gujarat’s Bharuch has returned to cast his vote. When we ask about SIR, he raises his voice and declares, “The SIR had to be done; no one was cut in Hindu villages. I heard one Muslim man had 600 children in the electoral roll!” Another person chimes in with a chuckle, “I had heard a hundred, but this is even higher!”In the mainstream media, the focus has been on documenting the “counting” in SIR. How many names were struck off the rolls, and from where? Were only Muslims struck off the rolls or Hindus as well? But on the ground, SIR is not just about numbers, it is also about reconfiguring power equations and generating narratives about who has the right to participate in the affairs of the country.As people fight their way through a morass of mismatched documents and India’s paper bureaucracy, they encounter the ad-hoc nature of inclusion and the fogginess of “discrepancies” severe enough to cost citizens the right to vote. If SIR were carried out using well-defined, publicly-vetted procedures, then any exclusion could be understood and contested in a rule-bound manner. But the murkiness around exclusion has engendered polarisation and fundamentally altered notions of citizenship. No one really knows why their neighbours were struck from the electoral rolls, they can only speculate. Are they from Bangladesh? Are they harbouring fake voters? Do they have illegal documents? Or is it unfair targeting?There was an ugly Hindu-Muslim riot in Baduria, about 30 minutes from Taki, a decade ago — with a Facebook post and subsequent rumors fanning the flames of communal violence. While things have calmed since, everyone remembers the riot. The murkiness of SIR is made intelligible to those nearby by being grafted onto an existing Hindu-Muslim fault line.But it will be overly simplistic to just see this as narrative building. SIR fundamentally alters how citizens are connected to the State. While there is no technical connection between Indian citizenship and inclusion on the electoral roll, most citizens see their vote as one of the most fundamental rights — a guarantee of equality for each citizen. Moreover, it is not hard to see the similarities between the deleting voters with “discrepancies” to be adjudicated in “tribunals” and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in neighbouring Assam.This connection between citizenship and voting has led citizens to seek redress from a series of ill-fitting, contradictory documentary procedures. The Namasudras make up more than 16% of the scheduled caste (SC) population in West Bengal, according to the last census; they are particularly numerous along the border districts of Nadia and North 24 Parganas — as a majority have traditionally walked over across the border. A significant share of Namasudras are followers of the Matua Mahasangha, an anti-caste sect that once held Binapani Devi, the so-called Boro Maa (Elder Mother) as its matriarch. But as with so many things in Bengal, politics has torn the family apart. Boro Maa’s daughter-in-law, Mamata Bala Thakur, sided with the Trinamool Congress (TMC), while her grandsons Shantanu Thakur (the local member of parliament) and Subrata Thakur (a sitting legislator and a candidate in this election) sided with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).Right next to the shrine in Thakurnagar, the headquarters of the Matua Mahasangha, there is an office where people can apply for a “Hindutva Dharmiya certificate” adjoining another office labeled as the CAA assistance centre. Those at the CAA centre described a process requiring a Hindutva Dharmiya certificate and personal documents to apply for citizenship through CAA. Of course, there is no legal basis for such religious certification, nor is it an actual requirement for CAA. (Indeed, those at the centre quickly backtracked upon questioning.)It came as a big shock to the Matuas when many found themselves out of the voter list. Nonetheless, the CAA was a major political demand of the Matua community, and is the basis upon which it can claim legitimate entry into the electoral rolls. The above processes demonstrate how the murkiness of documentary procedures can be capitalised upon to develop political identities. While the TMC swept the 2021 state election, the BJP won five out of 7 assembly constituencies in the Bongaon region including the local assembly constituency of Gaighata. On the penultimate day of the 2026 electoral campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a rally in Thakurnagar to affirm his commitment to the community.The sum total of these complex documentary procedures of the electoral roll and citizenship has been to pave the way for a differentiated citizenship between Hindus and Muslims. Through political patronage to navigate this process, some Hindus who have recently come to India achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the State, whereas Muslims, even if they have been here for generations, are forced to “document their legitimacy.”In a conversation in tea gardens next to the Teesta River in Mal constituency in north Bengal, we met a Muslim shopkeeper who explained the issue clearly, “Now the State can keep on asking us for documents. Today, I may be fine, but my children will have to prove their identity again and again to live here.”Bhanu Joshi is visiting assistant professor at Ashoka University; Neelanjan Sircar is an associate professor at Ahmedabad University. The views expressed are personal..