Under Adjudication: A lawyer’s exclusion from the West Bengal SIR reveals the democratic rot of electoral rolls revision
As the Supreme Court keeps the SIR in suspension, lawyers across the West Bengal bar, including the grandson of a former Rajya Sabha MP, have had their names struck off electoral rolls, with many appellate tribunals still in complete dysfunction.
Tanishka Shah
Published on: 29 April 2026, 09:06 am
WITH THE ONSET OF THE SPECIAL INTENSIVE REVISION, in November 2025, people across West Bengal found themselves pulled into a procedural maze to prove to the bureaucratic machinery their existence and belonging. That month, Imtiaz Akhtar, thirty-eight years old, an advocate practicing in the Calcutta High Court, was handed an enumeration form, one of seven crore distributed to people across the state. Imtiaz prudently filled it out and got it verified and signed by the Booth Level Officer (‘BLO’). On January 26, while the nation celebrated 76 years of the Constitution’s enactment, Imtiaaz was called a second time for personal verification, where his photograph was taken to further authenticate what had earlier already been established on paper.
Imtiaz’s grandfather, Mohammed Amin, born in 1928 in Shibpur in the Bengal province, had been part of India’s Freedom Struggle. In 1946, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Communist Party of India. The violence of 1946 altered the course of his life. After the Direct Action Day riots, party leadership instructed members to move to East Pakistan, where Amin and his family lived as refugees in Dinajpur. Even there, he organised peasants, and drew the hostility of a local zamindar who once had him captured and nearly killed. He survived only because the police intervened, choosing imprisonment over execution.
After twenty-six months spent in the Rangpur and Rajshahi Central Jails, Amin returned to Kolkata in 1953 and threw himself into the labour movement, spending years organising jute mill workers and peasants. He would go on to occupy positions of influence, like General Secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, and as the Minister of Transport, Minister of Minority Affairs, and Minister of Labour in the West Bengal government. Imtiaz’s grandfather also served two terms in the Rajya Sabha, from 1988 to 1994 and again from 2007 to 2011, and was even called upon to act as Chief Minister in the absence of Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
Against his grandfather’s legacy, Imtiaaz’s present appears as a rupture. His own parents were on the electoral rolls and he himself had casted his vote in the past elections, including the 2024 Lok Sabha Election. By every visible measure, his belonging to the polity and to the electorate seemed unquestionable. Until, it was not.
West Bengal – one of the states with consistently high voter turnout, higher than the 80 per cent mark over the last three assembly polls – also gave credence to the conviction that to live in the world’s largest democracy was to be seen, counted, and to belong. But that participation, once seen as a right, has somehow become a privilege to be negotiated.
Round I: Prove You Exist
Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben says that modern politics increasingly operates through biopolitics, where power manages and controls life itself, deciding who is fully included in the political community and who is reduced to ‘bare life’ – reduced to its biological existence, without political rights or meaningful legal protection. Regulations and norms are applied so extensively and modified so frequently in the process of defining inclusion that they can become irrational, dehumanizing, and fanatical.
In December, for the first time, the Election Commission introduced something called ‘logical discrepancy,’ to identify voters with apparent issues, such as a mismatch in the parent's name or an impossible age difference (e.g., less than 15 or more than 50 years) between a voter and their parent. But, in practice, even minor inconsistencies in names flagged voters. By January 2026, ECI had issued nearly 1.25 crore notices.
