Between July and November 2025, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee hit the streets of Kolkata twice to protest against the policies of the Union government. While it is unusual for Chief Ministers to descend on the streets and protest in other parts of the country, it is not an uncommon sight in West Bengal, particularly when elections are round the corner.
On November 4, the street protest by Banerjee, who is also the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chairperson, was against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.
With a similar exercise being carried out in the neighbouring State of Bihar a few months earlier, the TMC leadership had warned of massive protests, including laying siege to the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, if the exercise was carried out by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the State. At the end of her march, Banerjee accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre and the ECI of using the SIR as a political tool to intimidate voters.
During the annual Martyrs’ Day rally in Kolkata on July 21, 2025, Banerjee had, while highlighting the plight of migrant workers from the State to other parts of country, touched upon SIR. “Over 40 lakh voters’ names were removed in Bihar. Now, you [EC] plan to do the same in Bengal. If they try that here, we will launch a gherao of their offices. We will organise a massive protest,” she had said before lakhs of supporters.
However, after October 29 when the ECI announced SIR in 12 States and Union Territories, including West Bengal, covering over 51 crore voters, the TMC reconciled with the idea of holding the exercise. In fact, senior Ministers of the ruling party participated in an all-party meeting called by the ECI’s West Bengal CEO.
A QR-coded voter list in Kolkata’s Sealdah area, where people can check if their names were included in the 2002 electoral rolls.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu
While the TMC has opposed the SIR, the BJP, which is the principal Opposition party in the State, has been demanding it. Months before the revision of the voter lists started, BJP leaders have been making statements such as “People of the State want SIR” and “No SIR, no votes”.
Tug of war
Ever since the 2021 Assembly polls when the TMC came to power for the third consecutive term, the BJP’s vote share has been on a decline. After the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the TMC vote share stood at 46% and the BJP secured about 38% of the votes.
The BJP has been blaming the votes of “illegal Bangladeshi immigrants” for the growing support base of the TMC. Its stance has been that the SIR was necessary to disenfranchise such voters.
Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly Suvendu Adhikari has claimed that after the exercise, one crore voters will be deleted from the electoral rolls of West Bengal. Now, before the SIR process has ended, the number of electors in the State is about 7.6 crore.
The BJP leader said four kinds of voters will be deleted from the State: those who are dead but still on the rolls, double or triple entry voters, fake voters, and “Bangladeshi Muslims and Rohingya who are illegal voters”.
During the first three weeks of the ongoing SIR, Adhikari has cited several discrepancies in the voters’ lists. On November 12, the BJP leader arrived at the office of the CEO with a large volume of papers claiming it contained names of 13.25 lakh bogus voters, and demanded prompt action. He also charged a section of Booth Level Officers (BLOs) engaged in the ongoing SIR process with working in connivance with the ruling party to retain the names of those “fake voters”.
While the TMC and the BJP kept trading charges over SIR, a 57-year-old in Panihati on the northern fringes of Kolkata triggered a fresh controversy. Pradeep Kar died, allegedly by suicide, on October 29, a few days before the SIR process started. His family members said that he left a note blaming the NRC (National Register Of Citizens) for his death.
The very next day TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee visited the family and spoke to the media about how the death was due to fears of SIR. The TMC has often described SIR as an attempt to implement NRC from the back door in the State. “The whole of Bengal is now saying one thing: ‘Justice for Pradeep Kar’,” the TMC leader said. This echoed the emotion from ‘Justice for R.G. Kar’, a slogan that rocked the State a year ago when a postgraduate trainee doctor was raped and killed inside Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Hospital and Medical College.
Meanwhile, Kar’s neighbours said he didn’t have several fingers on his right hand, so it was not possible for him to write a note. After Kar’s death, the TMC linked several suicides to fears related to the SIR. While the son of a migrant worker claimed that his father died at a hospital in Tamil Nadu, the local TMC MLA claimed the death was due to suicide.
On November 20, the Chief Minister wrote to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar urging him to halt the SIR in West Bengal, pointing out that the “human cost of continuing with the exercise has become unbearable”. By then the TMC leadership began to claim that suicide deaths due to the ongoing SIR, including those of two BLOs, had climbed to 28.
The fear of some
While people in West Bengal are confused and anxious, within certain communities, fear prevails. The members of the Matua community, a sect of Hindu Namasudras (one of the most downtrodden castes) who migrated from Bangladesh to India, and thus lack legacy data and, in some cases, documents, have been feeling the heat. At Thakurnagar in North 24 Parganas, the headquarters of the All India Matua Mahasangha, TMC MP Mamata Bala Thakur is on a hunger strike with 20 others.
“The government had assured that slowly Matuas who came to this side (from Bangladesh to India) will be given citizenship. Most of us came with nothing. It took us ages to get documents made. Now they are questioning every document?” says Bala.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) amends the Citizenship Act of 1955 and aims to offer relief to undocumented migrants belonging to six non-Muslim communities — Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian — who have fled religious persecution in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh and entered India on or before December 31, 2014.
About 50 m from where Bala and her supporters are on a hunger strike, a different scenario is unfolding. BJP MP and Union Minister Shantanu Thakur, who hails from the same family as Bala, has organised a CAA camp. Here, people from the Matua community can claim citizenship under the CAA. The camp charges ₹800 for every individual to get enrolled, a development highlighted by the TMC as an instance of “money-making from the plight of citizens”.
Saraswati Roy and her brother are both over 70 years old. In a state of confusion, they wait outside the CAA camp, but are turned away because they do not have any documents from Bangladesh, one of the main criteria to offer citizenship under the CAA. “We ran away from Bangladesh about 50 years ago in a state of distress and violence. We came with just the clothes on our bodies. We did not have time to carry documents. Even if they are offering citizenship, we have no way to prove how or when we came from Bangladesh,” Roy says.
To register under CAA, a person must declare their ancestry in Bangladesh. Since the SIR traces legacy data where names of parents in the 2002 voter list need to be recorded in the enumeration forms, many people are unwilling to say they have Bangladeshi origins and seek citizenship under the CAA. Amid the confusion, senior BJP leader and the party’s central observer for West Bengal, Sunil Bansal, has urged the State BJP leaders not to insist members of the Matua community to fill CAA forms if they are unwilling.
The problems of the marginalised
Residents of erstwhile Indian enclaves who became Indian citizens under the Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh in 2015 have no documents preceding 2015.
Joynal Abedin, a resident of Masaldanga in Cooch Behar which was a Bangladeshi enclave, says nearly three weeks into the process BLOs have started accepting enumeration forms by the country’s newest group of citizens who celebrated 10 years of citizenship in July this year.
There are people displaced by Ganga river erosion like Khidir Box from Malda, who visited the CEO’s office in Kolkata pointing out that their polling booth in 2002 went under the river. The SIR has also impacted marginalised groups like transgender people and sex workers who have left their homes and do not want to return to trace their name or the name of their kin in the 2002 voter list.
Political parties are setting up camps in several areas, including the minority-dominated areas of Malda and Murshidabad, which send a large number of migrant workers to other States. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has also set up assistance booths in different areas to help people navigate the SIR process. Supporters of the CPI(M) and other Left parties have held protests outside the office of the West Bengal CEO against SIR.
“We are in favour of a flawless voters’ list. For such a list, there was no necessity of the SIR. The responsibility of this lies with the Election Commission and it has failed the people of India,” CPI(M) State secretary Md. Salim said. The CPI(M) leader has also alleged irregularities on behalf of a section of BLOs and written to the CEO on the issue. The CPI(M) leadership has also announced a Statewide Bangla Bachao Yatra beginning November 29, traversing about 1,100 km in the State, and ending on December 17.
Congress activists protesting against the SIR exercise in Kolkata.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
The Congress party, which had opposed the SIR in Bihar, has set up a committee headed by economist Prasenjit Bose, who has experience of working in the neighbouring State when the exercise was being held. The committee submitted its proposal before the CEO suggesting at least 16 changes to the Bihar SIR model, in the context of Bengal. Like the CPI(M), the Congress leadership has accused the ruling dispensation of trying to influence the SIR by involving people who are close to it.
Over a border
The BJP leadership is trying to distinguish between “Indian Muslims” and “Bangladeshi infiltrators”. Over the past few days, the Hakimpur border checkpost at Swarupnagar in North 24 Parganas is brimming with people waiting to return to Bangladesh. West Bengal shares a 2,216-km border with Bangladesh out of which 450 km still remains unfenced. The BJP says that its demand as far as the SIR is clear: “detect, delete, and deport”.
“There has been a sharp increase in the number of people trying to return to Bangladesh over the past few days. Usually a few people cross the border daily, but now the numbers are in three digits (the hundreds) on a daily basis. We are not apprehending people if there are no criminal antecedents against them,” a senior Border Security Force official said.
Some of the people who have gathered at the border checkpost admit that they are Bangladeshi nationals. Masum Billa, a resident of Khulna in Bangladesh, says that he has been living in the New Town area on the outskirts of Kolkata for the past four to five years doing odd jobs.
While Billa says that he has no valid identity documents, Rokeya Bibi, who came to India 10 years ago from Satkhira in Bangladesh, claims that she has an Aadhaar card, a voter card, and a bank account. Rokeya says she was getting the benefits of the Lakshmir Bhandar scheme of the West Bengal government, which provides financial assistance to women. The BJP leadership has used the image at the border outpost to support its claims about the presence of a large number of illegal voters and justify the SIR.
Aside from what citizens are going through, the SIR has become a ground for political sparring. When strong tremors were felt across West Bengal on November 20 due to an earthquake that originated in Bangladesh, the BJP posted on social media: “West Bengal just felt earthquake tremors. @MamataOfficial, was it because of SIR?”
In response, the TMC wrote: “It’s actually the ground shaking beneath the feet of @BJP4Bengal as they stare at an imminent defeat in the 2026 Assembly elections.”
If you are in distress, please reach out to these 24×7 helplines: KIRAN 1800-599-0019 or Aasra 9820466726
(With inputs from Moyurie Som and Shrabana Chatterjee)
shivsahay.s@thehindu.co.in
