Deleted, But Dutybound: Bengal’s Voteless Poll Workers

Mughal emperor Shah Jahan ordered chopping the hands/fingers of the masons who built the Taj Mahal. This claim has repeatedly been debunked as one without any evidence. A widespread rumour that refuses to die. The story has found a new meaning in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, the one with India’s largest Muslim population, though as an allegory.

Here, the victims are all schoolteachers. As booth level officers (BLO), they carried out the on-ground duty of booth-wise verification for the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter roll. From the ‘purified’ list, they found themselves purged—“kicked out” in their words.

Worse was yet to come. They have now to play gatekeepers in the festival of democracy from which they have been banned.

They are not voters—not unless and until the supreme court-constituted tribunals clear their names, which is not happening too soon. But they will have to manage the voter assistance booths (VAB) where their responsibility includes identifying eligible voters and handing them their voter slips.

“We were curtly told that, as government employees, we are bound to carry out what we have been ordered,” says Jaber Ali. Whether he has to be a voter to carry out polling duties is the concern of the authorities, not his.

He never saw such humiliation coming. Not even in his scariest nightmares. According to him, voting is not just about democratic rights, it’s also about emotions. He feels betrayed by the entire mechanism. His voice chokes as he speaks. He knows, his tears are not reaching the supreme court. That makes him feel all the more helpless.

If there is any consolation, if at all, it’s that he is not alone. His polling booth, part no 245 in Samserganj assembly constituency, had 1,345 voters prior to the SIR. Now it has 746. Anxiety over the future of deleted voters has gripped the village.

Jaber’s Ali booth is no exception. When the final roll was published in January, the total number of registered voters in Samserganj assembly constituency was about 2.36 lakh. Roughly 81% of them were Muslims.

Thereafter, 74,000 voters were excluded for ‘logical discrepancies’. That’s 30% of Samserganj’s pre-revision roll. And 95% of this 74,000 are Muslims. Therefore, the electorate has nearly halved in booth after booth.

Locals say Samserganj has about 30 government officials whose names have been deleted for logical discrepancies but have been assigned different poll-related duties, including presiding officer, polling officer and law and order duties for those who work in the police.

“Doesn’t it sound strange that even lawyers and police personnel have been deleted from Samserganj’s voter list? What kind of verification was it?” asks an angry high school teacher from Chachanda gram panchayat area.

After four gruelling months of working overtime as a BLO since last November—to collect, verify, digitise and upload documents, often multiple times—with additional leg work, mental load and frequent sleep deprivation, Anjarul Islam finds it difficult to digest that he himself has no voting rights but will have to carry out electoral duties.

Islam was the BLO of part 109 in Samserganj. As many as 391 of the 963 voters in their booth have been deleted for logical discrepancies. The deleted include 14 members of his family, including a nephew holding the Indian passport.

He points out that all their details went through verification before they were appointed as BLOs last year.

The BLOs received Rs 13,000 each for the entire work. “But the toll that the process and its outcomes has taken on the BLOs cannot be compensated with or compared in terms of money,” Islam says.

Imran Hossain, the BLO of part no 206, has been a schoolteacher since 2006. He has been carrying out electoral duties since then, first as a designated officer (DO) and then as BLO since 2019. He holds a passport and has thrice travelled abroad.

In his booth, the final roll had 952 voters. Of them, 565 went under adjudication by tribunals for logical discrepancies. Only 105 names get cleared. Hossain and three other members of his family remained among the 460 deleted. That’s almost half the voters.

“I, whose democratic rights remain suspended, must carry out my responsibilities to ensure democracy feels like a festival. I’m still dreading the hours I’ll have to spend at the voter assistance booth,” Hossain says.

Similar cases have happened in the assembly constituencies of Farakka and Lalgola in the district.

Several BLOs in other districts, too, have met similar fate. Mohammed Safiul Alam, a BLO of Basirhat Uttar assembly constituency and Dipanjan Biswas a BLO of Bongaon Dakshin assembly, both in North 24 Parganas district; Manik Kundu, a BLO from Gazole in Malda district; and Nabin Chandra Sadhukhan from Shibpur in Howrah district; among others.

The booths where government staff like BLOs have found their names off the list have usually seen a higher number of deletions on an average, says a BLO from Malda district.

“It mostly reflects very poor adjudication at the tribunal level after the ECI’s AI-based translation of the voter roll messed up the entire roll revision process,” says the BLO, who is unwilling to be named, fearing punitive action from the ECI.

Such mass scale deletion has spread anger, anxiety and frustration in large parts of the district. Yet, there is no way those who made it to the list could boycott the election in a show of solidarity with the others—an idea that some aggrieved locals in different such areas had initially floated.

“That would be suicidal. Those whose rights survived must exercise it,” says another BLO, who is afraid to speak on record. People would visit the booths with broken hearts, as most of them have one or another family member excluded, he says.

In many such booths, those who have their voting rights alive are being urged to keep the deleted in their mind while exercising their rights. “If the survivors of the process use their votes to speak for the victims, we may see some ray of hope from this dizzying darkness.”