Muslims 'disproportionately' affected as 9m names struck off voter rolls for polls in India's West Bengal: report

Nearly a dozen Muslim families said some names were struck off voter list despite their documents being in place

Muslims were "disproportionately" affected after around nine million voters were removed from the electoral rolls for polls in India's eastern state of West Bengal, according to Al Jazeera.

Millions of voters cast their ballots last week as two Indian states held provincial legislative elections. Voting began early in the morning in West Bengal and also in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, according to the Indian Election Commission.

In West Bengal, the voting was held in 152 of its constituencies in the first phase, out of 294 total seats. A second phase of polling is scheduled for this week.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) conducted an aggressive campaign in West Bengal to unseat the incumbent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who is eyeing a fourth consecutive term in the state with nearly 68m eligible voters.

The elections are also taking place amid concerns expressed by the opposition parties over the removal of voters in West Bengal during the special intensive revision exercise of electors conducted by the Election Commission. The commission has expanded similar exercises in other states of the country.

Around 9m voters were removed from the electoral rolls, with officials saying the exercise was aimed at removing "duplicate, deceased or otherwise ineligible voters".

Banerjee has criticised the BJP for attempting to “divide people” on religious and caste lines — a charge denied by the BJP.

According to an Al Jazeera report, West Bengal is home to nearly 25m Muslims, roughly 27% of its 106m population, according to the last census conducted in 2011, making it the community’s second-largest population among Indian states after Uttar Pradesh.

"The analysis of voter deletions across West Bengal shows that Muslims have been disproportionately affected by the SIR (special intensive revision) exercise, mainly in districts where they constitute a high percentage of the population and could sway the election, including Murshidabad with 460,000 deletions, followed by 330,000 in North 24 Parganas and 240,000 in Malda," the report said.

It added that it met nearly a dozen such Muslim families in Gobindapur, Gobra and Balki villages of North 24 Parganas who said some names were struck off the voter list despite their documents being in place, whereas many others were struggling to find proof of their residential status, change of surnames after their marriage or remarriage of their parents, discrepancies in the spellings of their names, proof of their migrations to other states, or just their names figuring in the last SIR list published in 2002.

The report said that an analysis found that "while Muslims make up about 25% of Nandigram’s population, more than 95% of the names deleted from the list were Muslims. Similarly, Bhabanipur has 20% Muslims, but 40% of voters deleted in the constituency are Muslim."

It quoted Sabir Ahamed of the Kolkata-based SABAR Institute, an independent research organisation, as saying: "Our studies find that Muslims from the mapped population have been disproportionately deleted.”

By Thursday evening, the voter turnout in West Bengal had reached nearly 90%.

Voting was also held in southern Tamil Nadu and the turnout was over 80% by late afternoon on Thursday, according to the Election Commission.

There were some 57m eligible voters in Tamil Nadu.

The BJP has tried to woo the voters during the campaigning in order to form the government in the southern state. So far, the BJP has never formed a government in Tamil Nadu.

Earlier this month, voting was held in the northeastern state of Assam and the southern Kerala state, along with the federally administered territory of Puducherry.

The results of all the elections will be declared next month on May 4.