Border Rot

The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise has exposed the rot at the heart of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress–controlled West Bengal. What was long decried as ‘partisan scaremongering’ by the Opposition now stands revealed as a sprawling, institutionalised breakdown in which porous borders, forged documents and a carefully curated voter ecosystem have flourished under the West Bengal government’s indulgent gaze.

The exercise has thoroughly laid bare the vast vote-bank built by the Mamata government around illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. The Election Commission’s second phase of SIR, covering 12 states after Bihar’s dramatic clean-up, has unleashed a panic in West Bengal. The Bihar exercise deleted 68 lakh names from the rolls, many tied to forged documents. The results were evident in the recently concluded Bihar Assembly polls which saw the BJP-JD(U) led NDA coast to a landslide win.

That memory hangs heavily over West Bengal, where illegal Bangladeshi Muslim settlers have been quietly integrated into welfare schemes and then into the voter list – a factor central to the TMC’s minority mobilisation strategy.

Since the SIR was announced, the India–Bangladesh border has entered a phase of frantic activity. In districts such as North 24 Parganas, the veritable ground zero of long-term undocumented settlement, massive spikes in late-night cross-border movement have been reported. These illegal residents now fear that house-to-house verification during the SIR drive will expose the uncomfortable truth that many have lived for years as ghost citizens, without papers and without scrutiny but with full political utility.

In many border blocks, the sudden surge in population, the proliferation of identical addresses and suspiciously uniform documentation have been an open secret.

The TMC’s reaction is as revealing as the exodus it has triggered. It has questioned the very need for the exercise, demanded ‘clarifications’ from the Election Commission and insinuated political motives. Yet the SIR is neither unusual nor partisan as it is the Commission’s statutory obligation. The Mamata regime’s unease stems from the fact that an honest audit of the rolls could delete lakhs of names that the ruling party has long relied on, especially in Muslim-dominated constituencies where demographic shifts have altered electoral outcomes.

An IIM-authored paper offers a more forensic estimate on the rot in West Bengal, suggesting that the state’s 2024 electoral roll may contain a whopping one crore excess voters. If even partially accurate, such a discrepancy would confirm what sceptics have long alleged: that the state’s voter base has been artificially swollen in huge numbers.

West Bengal is now on the verge of its own reckoning. The demographic engineering that has long underpinned the TMC’s minority politics, particularly the politically convenient absorption of illegal Bangladeshi Muslim settlers, faces its first serious institutional scrutiny. The chorus of objections from the State government is no defence of ‘democratic rights’ but a defence of an odious system of political opportunism.