Nabijan Mondal, 73, from India's West Bengal state, has voted in every election – national, state, or local – for the past 50 years. However, as the state heads for a two-phase assembly election on April 23 and 29, her name is missing from the voter list published by the Election Commission of India (ECI). While her husband, three sons, daughter, and their spouses remain on the list, Nabijan lost her voting rights because her voter card uses "Nabijan" (her nickname) and other documents use "Nabirul."

The ECI this month revised electoral rolls through a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process ahead of the election – a controversial exercise India's election authorities have conducted in over a dozen states and union territories. In West Bengal, more than 9 million people were removed from the rolls – nearly 12% of the state's 76 million voters. About 6 million of these were declared absent or deceased, while the remaining 3 million cannot vote until special tribunals hear their cases. India's Supreme Court this week said it could not allow those with pending tribunal cases to vote in the April election but permitted the ECI to publish supplementary voter lists.

Analysis of voter deletions in West Bengal shows Muslims have been disproportionately affected by the SIR process, particularly in districts where they form a high percentage of the population and could sway the election. Murshidabad saw 460,000 deletions, followed by 330,000 in North 24 Parganas and 240,000 in Malda. Al Jazeera spoke to nearly a dozen Muslim families in Gobindapur, Gobra, and Balki villages in North 24 Parganas, who reported struggles with proving residential status, surname changes after marriage, discrepancies in name spellings, or migration, leading to their names being struck off.

The ECI claims the SIR process aims to remove duplicate or deceased voters and add genuine people left out of voter lists. However, the process has faced extensive controversies and legal challenges, with opposition parties and Muslim groups accusing the ECI of a systematic effort to remove people unlikely to vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially Muslims – prime targets of the BJP's Hindu supremacist campaign since 2014. West Bengal BJP leader Bimal Sankar Nanda said no eligible Indian should be left out of voter lists, but there should be no ineligible voters either, accusing the Trinamool Congress (TMC) of keeping names of "dead and shifted voters" in the rolls.

Since 2014, India's Muslims have overwhelmingly voted for a party or coalition most likely to defeat the right-wing BJP. In West Bengal, this is the TMC, whose leader and state chief minister Mamata Banerjee moved the Supreme Court in February, accusing the ECI of being partisan towards the BJP after the SIR was launched in October last year. She alleged the SIR process was selectively applied in West Bengal to benefit the BJP and that the BJP is plotting to forcefully capture votes through fraudulent means as they lack the courage to fight and win elections democratically.

The Kolkata-based independent research organization SABAR Institute analyzed voter deletions in key constituencies Nandigram and Bhabanipur, where BJP opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari is contesting this year. The analysis found that in Nandigram, where Muslims constitute about 25% of the population, over 95% of deleted names were Muslims; in Bhabanipur with 20% Muslim population, 40% of deleted voters are Muslim. SABAR Institute's Sabir Ahamed noted the SIR process was hurried in high-stakes West Bengal, with micro-observers brought from other states and a lack of transparency, with lists published in the middle of the night.

Swati Narayan, an expert on law, poverty, and development, pointed out that women and the poor are at disproportionate risk of disenfranchisement, as they often lack required documents to prove citizenship rights. She highlighted the common use of nicknames in West Bengal, women's surname changes after marriage, and errors in translating names into English, leading to large-scale panic among residents. Psephologist Yogendra Yadav added that the SIR places an "excessive burden" on female voters, requiring documents from locations they don't live, resulting in mass deletions of women's names.

Source: www.aljazeera.com