Within 100 days of winning the West Bengal Assembly election, the BJP government has raced ahead with remodelling municipal constituencies in Kolkata and Howrah. Impatient to get on with it, the Suvendu Adhikari government has been using the voters’ list post its special intensive revision, even as the first phase of house-listing for the much-delayed census is underway.
The Chief Minister is correct that populations within Kolkata and Howrah have shifted, hollowing out the more congested areas and moving to what were once ‘fringe’ areas. Therefore, a redrawing of electoral constituencies is necessary. Unfortunately, using the post-SIR voters’ list makes the exercise problematic.
There are two reasons why such basis is neither sufficient nor logical. First, if West Bengal could vote in April to elect a new government based on the existing delimitation of constituencies that were last revised in 2006, why does the Kolkata and Howrah municipal corporations need a separate and dubious delimitation of their own constituencies?
Second, even though the delimitation of the two municipal corporations’ constituencies are fait accompli, there are ongoing cases in both cities being heard by the tribunals set up by the Supreme Court to sort the cases of voters deleted from the electoral rolls by the SIR because of discrepancies.
Thus, using incomplete data of electors as the basis for redrawing the constituency maps in the two populous cities makes no sense. By the Election Commission’s own account, nearly 29.6 percent of voters were struck off the rolls in the north and 27.5 percent in the south of the state capital—among the highest rates in the state.
The commission also admitted that there were 38 lakh cases pending with the 19 adjudication tribunals. Of particular note is the fact that of the 83,000-odd appeals disposed of, the tribunals ruled in favour including 75,000 cases on the rolls—thus reinstating over 90 percent of those who appealed and could not vote at the latest Assembly polls.
The purge of so many eligible voters begs serious questions of the entire post-SIR list. It’s surely not the soundest data to use for redrawing constituency maps in Kolkata. It also flows from the observation that a key feature of the West Bengal SIR in detecting “ineligible” voters was targeting ‘ghuspaithiyas’ or illegal immigrants, deemed to be from Bangladesh and presumed to be masquerading as Indian citizens with falsified documents.
Impatience over delimitation is a BJP affliction, as is evident from the party’s efforts to push through the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill—along with the Delimitation Bill and Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill—in Parliament in April that was defeated by the opposition, and its recent move to table it during the tumultuous monsoon session of the House.
But for West Bengal, it’s the Suvendu Adhikari government—not the BJP high command—that needs to explain why the number of municipal wards needed to be increased, which triggered a redrawing of the ward maps and a cascading effect on voters and their choice of representatives.
The dissolution of the elected corporation in Kolkata and the resolution of the legal issues vis-à-vis the Howrah Municipal Corporation certainly set a timeline for elections.
Quite apart from the inconvenience and confusion that the redrawing of constituencies will cause for voters, there is the complaint by all opposition parties that there was a political purpose behind the alteration of the territorial boundaries and the numbers of voters within them. Even the so-called ‘rebel’ Trinamool Congress leaders—such as long-time Kolkata Corporation councillor Javed Khan—felt compelled to point out that some constituencies would have 7,000-8,000 voters while others would have 15,000-25,000.
The uneven distribution of voters, based on an incomplete voters’ list, has provoked the Congress, the Left and the loyalist Trinamool Congress to accuse the BJP of redrawing maps to give the ruling party an advantage by redistributing votes and breaking up the concentration of Muslim voters.
The exercise, then, becomes tantamount to gerrymandering, a practice that gets its name from the US where ruling parties use a heavy hand to put rivals at a disadvantage. It also reflects an odd similarity with the contentious delimitation exercise in Jammu and Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, and the equally disputed delimitation exercise in Assam in 2023 based on the 2001 Census.
If the BJP continues to use the post-SIR list as its preferred data base for ‘managing’ elections, it could become a model of sorts with consequence in other states, too. Experts have estimated that the SIR process across the country may end up deleting about 10 crore voters. The exclusion of eligible voters by a hurried revision process, followed by a delimitation exercise based on it, is doubly problematic.
The ethical and practical validity of an election using truncated voters’ lists—just because the Election Commission’s machinery could not resolve “logical discrepancies” like categorising misspelt names, addressing suspicious age gaps between parents, grandparents and children, and the number of siblings—ought to be an issue concerning all political parties. It could pose a challenge to the legitimacy of any elected representative of any political party, and to the fairness of the electoral process.
Shikha Mukerjee | Political commentator based in Kolkata
(Views are personal)
