KOLKATA: With the removal of around 63.66 lakh absentee, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) names, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Saturday released the final voter list following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal ahead of the assembly polls.
Addressing a press conference, Manoj Agarwal, West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), said on Saturday, “More than 63 lakh voters have been deleted from the final voters’ list in the state while another 60 lakh electors belong to the ‘under adjudication’ group and their voting rights will be decided by judicial officers.”
He said, “The number of total voters, which was 7.08 crore as per the draft electoral rolls in the state, has come down to 7.04 crore in the final rolls after the SIR exercise. Three lakh seventy-five thousand voters have been deleted from the draft rolls in the first phase of the SIR process,” adding, “1.82 lakh new voters have been included to the final list.”
More than 1.5 crore voters belonging to the logical discrepancies and unmapped categories out of the 7.08 crore were summoned for SIR hearings at different centres.
In the draft roll published last December, the names of over 58 lakh voters were deleted. The number of deleted names will rise further once the fate of the 60 lakh electors in the ‘under adjudication’ category is decided by the judicial officers.
“We have done a few undesirable mistakes during this huge exercise but all these are minor. The Commission has intervened promptly to rectify these mistakes,” Agarwal said.
Sources said that in districts across the state, physical copies of the list were being distributed from Saturday noon onwards and by evening the list is likely to be available online.
With the official release of the post-SIR list of voters in West Bengal, the three-month-long SIR process launched from 4 November last year has come to an end after being marked by political mudslinging, street protests and legal battles across the state.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s constituency of Bhowanipore in south Kolkata recorded the deletion of 47,111 ASDD voters, while the names of 14,154 others in the same constituency have been marked as ‘under adjudication’, awaiting clearance of judicial officers.
The deletion of such a large number of voters from Bhowanipore with an electorate of 1.61 lakh poses a threat to the Trinamool Congress supremo ahead of the upcoming assembly elections scheduled for the end of April. Mamata has already held several meetings with Trinamool Congress leaders and Booth Level Agents (BLAs)-2 in her constituency.
On the other hand, Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari's Nandigram constituency in East Midnapore district has recorded the deletion of around 11,000 voters. In the last assembly polls in 2021, Suvendu had won against Mamata in Nandigram by a margin of only 1200 votes.
Union Minister of State for Education and former Bengal BJP president Sukanta Majumder told media on Saturday, “The post-SIR draft rolls recorded 24 lakh dead out of the 65 lakh deleted voters so far. The Trinamool Congress wins elections with false votes against these dead voters. This time, it will be difficult for the ruling party to apply this machinery.”
More than six lakh voters have been deleted from the final electoral rolls in two important electoral districts -- Kolkata North and Kolkata South that includes Bhowanipore.
In Kolkata North, the names of more than four lakh have been removed, while in Kolkata South, the number of deleted names is two lakh fifteen thousand.