New Delhi, Oct 17 (IANS) As the Election Commission prepares the groundwork for a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, political parties in the state are construing the process in ways that suit their own means where Assembly elections are likely to take place around March-April next year.

Like Bihar, allegations include apparent intent at removal of specific voters’ names, targeting minorities, among others.

This despite no significant red flags being raised in Bihar since the poll body shared draft electors list more than a fortnight ago.

Now, in West Bengal, leaders of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) have raised similar concerns, alleging “backdoor entry for National Register of Citizens (NRC)”, and even threatened with “rivers of blood” flowing in the state in retaliation.

The verbal onslaughts are being seen as reaction to Union Minister Shantanu Thakur’s recent statement that around 1.2 crore “illegal voters” could be removed from the state voters’ list through the SIR.

Union Minister Thakur, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from West Bengal’s Bangaon Lok Sabha constituency, hails from the Matua community.

The community, spread across regions in West Bengal and Bangladesh, are part of the Scheduled Caste group.

Millions of Matuas have migrated to India before and after the 1971 war that created Bangladesh, fleeing religious persecution.

In 2019, Union Minister Shantanu Thakur defeated his aunt, Mamata Thakur, who now represents the Trinamool Congress in Rajya Sabha.

The Minister was underscoring the fact that an intensive screening, involving knocks on doors for verification and revision are bound to identify bogus voters, along with those deceased, or repatriated.

Meanwhile, BJP leader Arjun Singh has written to the Election Commission about a Pakistani citizen from Karachi being a voter in the Naihati Assembly constituency in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district.

According to reports, the local TMC MLA, Sanat Dey, has admitted that the woman, Saleha Khatoon alias Saleha Imran, is indeed from Pakistan.

Saleha’s husband, Md. Imran, too accepted that his wife, from Karachi, is a Pakistani national, yet a registered voter in India.

Earlier, the Enforcement Directorate had launched a probe to identify the origin of documents based on which a Pakistani citizen named Azad Mullick secured an EPIC card.

He was found to have voted once in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly polls and then in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

It is no secret that the state’s electoral politics is shaped by a sizeable religious minority electorate concentrated in its border districts and certain urban pockets.

Political parties calibrate strategy, candidate selection, local alliances, and welfare messaging to secure this vote bank because outcomes in many constituencies turn on relatively small margins where minority voters are decisive.

The TMC has built durable majorities by combining populist welfare schemes, local leadership networks, and deliberate outreach to Muslim communities in the state.

The Left Front was also known to have exercised local influence where structural issues and schemes were designed to swing minority-dominated constituencies.

Muslims in West Bengal constitute more than 30 per cent of the electorate.

Minority voters are geographically concentrated in a number of constituencies near the Bangladesh border, especially in districts such as Murshidabad, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, Nadia, and others, where the demography has Muslim population ranging between 50 and 70 per cent.

For example, in Malda district, the last Census of India conducted in 2011 recorded Muslims constituting more than 51 per cent, which is now estimated at around 69 per cent.

In April this year, violence broke out in Murshidabad district following protests against the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025.

A gathering of protestors soon turned violent, vandalising and setting fire to homes, leading to an unrest where many Hindu families were forcefully made to vacate their homes.

The BJP seeks to erode minority consolidation behind TMC by combining development narratives with aggressive identity politics in other constituencies of the electorate, while the Left-Congress alliance attempts to position itself as a secular alternative appealing to both minority and non-minority voters.

–IANS

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