Entire family in Murshidabad deleted from Bengal voter list in SIR ahead of polls: ‘What more proof do we need?’

Tariq-ul-Alam is 27.

Like other residents of Housenagar village in Tinkapuriya panchayat of Samserganj, he is desperately waiting for 21 April.

The Election Commission of India is expected to release additional names in the voter list who have been cleared by appellate tribunals and can vote in the upcoming polls.Samserganj, the assembly seat where Alam lives, recorded 74,775 deletions and is thus the worst-affected of the 22 assembly seats in Murshidabad, where polling is being held in the first phase on 23 April.Murshidabad recorded the highest number of deletions during the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise across poll-bound West Bengal, with a total of 4,55,137 names removed.Human impact of deletionsMint travelled to Samserganj to understand the human impact of deletions.

During interviews, the residents in different villages told Mint that their names were deleted despite valid documents.Almost every household in Samserganj, a Muslim-majority seat in Murshidabad near the India-Bangladesh border, has one or two members deleted from the voter list.Alam’s case is, however, unique.

All eight members of his family have been struck from the rolls.

These include – Alam, his five brothers, Haider Ali, Saddam Hossain, Musavir Hossain, and Mudasir Sheikh.

Their father, Sohidul Islam, and Alam’s two sisters-in-law.“We have been living in this village for several generations.

Our 65-year-old father, who is unwell, was born here.

His name is in 2002 list as mandated.

Still, no one from our family made it to the voter list,” Alam, who works as a painter, told this reporter in his village.Overall, the Samserganj seat saw 32 per cent deletions compared to the pre-adjudication voter list.

The deletions have left lakhs of people in West Bengal, including Alam, with an uncertain future.

The residents say that while they are worried about not being able to vote, their bigger concern is: what happens next?“Most of the people who live in Samserganj are poor and do menial jobs to make ends meet.

Suddenly, in a poll year, you ask them to get documents as old as decades.

These are marginalised people.

Their worry is beyond the ballot.

They are looking at a deportation from their ancestral villages in days to come,” said Md Alauddin, who contested the 2021 assembly polls from Samserganj seat as a candidate of Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).

Alauddin said his name, along with seven others from his 9-member family,....