Highest adjudication cuts from voter rolls in Murshidabad, Malda in Bengal

All five assembly constituencies with the highest percentage of deletion from the pre-adjudication stage to post-adjudication in West Bengal were in the Muslim-majority districts of Murshidabad and Malda, an analysis of the removals in the controversial “logical discrepancy” category in the poll-bound state showed on Thursday. Voters show their voter-ID card. (Representative photo/ANI)

Nearly 2.71 million of the six million people flagged under the “logical discrepancy” category were removed from the rolls, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced earlier this week. These people could appeal their exclusion in front of tribunals but most of these 19 forums weren’t fully operational by the time the rolls were frozen for the second phase of the elections on Thursday. The rolls for the first phase were already frozen earlier this week.

Bengal goes to the polls in two phases on April 23 and 29. The Trinamool Congress is hoping for a fourth consecutive term by defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress and the Left.

Which are the 5 Seats with highest deletions? The seats with the highest deletions of electors from the pre-adjudication roll to the post-adjudication roll were Samserganj (31.7%), Lalgola (23.2%), Raghunathpur (18.4%), Mothabari (18.3%), and Bhagabangola (17.4%). With the exception of Mothabari in Malda, all other seats are in Murshidabad district. The TMC led in two of these seats and Congress in three in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the election closest to the special intensive revision (SIR). The TMC led in 190 of 294 seats in the state in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, not a very different result from the 2021 assembly polls, when it won 213 seats.

The seats with the lowest deletions from the pre-adjudication roll to the post-adjudication roll are Manbazar (0.03%), Onda (0.04%), Kashipur (0.1%), Jhargram (0.1%), and Chhatna (0.1%). These seats were spread across Purulia, Bankura and Jhargram districts in the western part of the state. Four of these seats were led by the TMC and one by the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This showed that deletions were not correlated with party-wise winners. To be sure, this is to be expected when a single party wins almost a two-thirds majority.

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The overall percentage of deletions in the pre-SIR to post-adjudication process was higher than the victory margin of 2024 Lok Sabha elections in 154 assembly constituencies. But the two numbers are not correlated. In other words, percentage deletions in the SIR process cannot be predicted from the AC-level victory margin in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This holds true even when looking at deletions only at the adjudication stage, where deletions exceeded 2024 victory margins in 48 seats.

To be sure, these rankings can vary from the deletions under the adjudication process as a share of electors put under this process. However, just looking at this number can be misleading as far as SIR’s net impact on the elector strength in assembly seats is concerned, because unlike the pre-adjudication part of SIR, adjudication was not applied uniformly across seats in the state.

A more granular data analysis showed that seats which had elected at least one Muslim MLA in 2011, 2016 or 2021 assembly election, had a much higher share in voters put under adjudication. Given the fact that there is no seat-wise demographic composition of electors, extrapolating these numbers to SIR’s impact on voters of a particular community is only an indicative rather than a definite indicator.

Number of voters deleted in Bhabanipur? In chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s seat of Bhabanipur, at least one out of every four voters was deleted. There were 206,295 voters in the seat before SIR. While 44,470 names were dropped in the draft roll, another 2,342 names were dropped in the final roll after the hearing process. ECI data showed that another 3,893 names of voters were deleted after the adjudication, taking the total number of deletions in Bhabanipur to 50,705.

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Banerjee had won the seat in a by-election with a margin of 58,832 votes. She is now facing Suvendu Adhikari of the BJP.

ECI officials said that 6,006,675 doubtful voters’ claims were under adjudication, and judicial officers appointed by the Calcutta high court disposed of 5,984,512 cases. The fate of the remaining 22,163 people was still unknown at the time of going to print.

People whose names were deleted after adjudication continued to queue up at government offices in the districts to submit documents, even though the 19 appellate tribunals are yet to become fully operational. “The tribunals are yet to become functional. The infrastructure, from where the retired judges, would function is almost ready. Stenographers need to be appointed,” said a senior ECI official. The official mentioned above also said that some cases referred to the tribunals by the Supreme Court have been disposed of on an urgent basis.

“One of them was Suprabuddha Sen, the grandson of Nandalal Bose, who decorated the original Constitution of India with motifs and illustration. Mehtab Sheikh, the Congress candidate from Murshidabad district’s Farakka seat, whose name was deleted was also restored,” said the official.