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.
When the first draft list came out, Imtiaz’s name was marked as ‘Under Adjudication’.
“I think I was at home [when the list came]. I was really shocked to say the least. I then thought that this process was going to be cumbersome and time consuming. Instead of arguing for my clients I will now have to waste unnecessary time in pursuing my own case,” he told The Leaflet. By the end of February, post-claims, nearly sixty lakh persons were placed under adjudication.
Almost overnight, people found their existence rendered uncertain. And it did not only sideline those from marginal backgrounds – many across social lines, including those with significant contributions in civil society and polity were disenfranchised overnight. Among those affected were a former High Court judge, the descendants of the man who illustrated the Constitution, and a second-generation flag maker whose hands have long embroidered the national emblem. Alongside them were activists, professors, former defence personnel, journalists, and even poll officers.
And now there was Imtiaz and other lawyers, practising across Kolkata’s many lower courts and its 163 year old High Court – members of one of the country’s oldest bars – all effectively confronted with the suggestion that their existence, and their decades of work as officers of the court, did not belong.
In roughly five weeks, around seven hundred judicial officers heard close to sixty lakh cases. The outcome was a deletion rate of nearly forty-five percent. However, behind these numbers were twenty lakh individuals, racing against time, with elections scheduled for April 23 and 29, to navigate an opaque and underdeveloped appellate system.
The problem was not just exclusion, but the absence of a clear path back in.
“The 19 appellate tribunals that have been constituted, they are only on paper,” former Calcutta High Court judge Justice Sahidullah Munshi said in March, speaking to Bar & Bench, “There are no guidelines as to how those tribunals can function and what they can do. I do not know whom to approach.” His name, along with that of his family members, was restored later, after the Election Commission released a second supplementary list in late March.
For many others, however, there had been no such reversal.
Round II: Existence Struck Off, No Relief by SC
By the end of March, Imtiaz’s name had been deleted altogether – without any reason being provided. He has filed an appeal, but before tribunals that remain, by most accounts, only partially functional.
The excluded voters sought urgent relief before the Supreme Court on multiple fronts including allowing excluded voters to cast ballots while appeals are pending, reverting to previous electoral rolls, and creating supplementary lists to reinstate those who succeed in appeals before polling. On April 13, despite acknowledging the millions of appeals, the Supreme Court denied any interim voting rights to those who have been excluded but are still in the process of appealing and refused to impose strict deadlines on the 19 appellate tribunals.
“Those of us who have been mapped should at least be allowed to vote for now,” said Imtiaz. “I have done everything they asked of me. I appeared before them, they took my photograph, and I submitted all my documents. What more am I supposed to do? My family’s records are not missing or unclear. My parents appear in the 2002 electoral list, which directly connects me to it. My own name was not in the 2002 list because I was only 16 at the time. And yet, despite all of this, I am the one being asked to prove that I exist – as if I am somehow presumed dead,” he added.
On April 17, less than a week away from the phase I of elections, the Court indicated that electors purged from the voter list, but subsequently cleared by Appellate Tribunals by April 21 or 27, must be allowed to vote in the Assembly election.
However, reports indicate that the tribunals are not functioning and the possibility of the names being cleared off from the list began to feel increasingly theoretical.
Round III: Supplementary Lists, Same Exclusion
“In the tribunal if you go and say that I want to enter, they'll throw you out. It's all guarded by the police and the CAPF [Central Armed Police Forces]. So how do we enter? Where will I go?,” Imtiaz had remarked earlier in April, before the lists came out, “Right now, if I go to the Supreme Court, they'll say it's a matter to be decided by the tribunal and here we see the tribunal is practically non-functional. This is just a way to frustrate voters, nothing more.”
On April 20, Senior Advocate Devadatt Kamat told the Supreme Court that lawyers too were not being allowed inside the tribunals suggesting that they were effectively non-functional. “They are only taking internet and computer-based applications,” Kamat said. While thousands risk being excluded from electoral rolls, CJI Surya Kant expressed displeasure that almost everyday, the matters related to SIR in West Bengal were being mentioned before it. When the machinery that determines who counts as a citizen falters or acts arbitrarily, can urgency ever be excessive?
That day, the CJI had orally stated that a report from the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court regarding the functioning of the tribunals will be sought. What followed this direction, whether the report was submitted, what it revealed, and whether it altered the functioning of the tribunals remains unclear in the public record.
On April 22, the Election Commission added 136 voters to the electoral rolls through a supplementary list, following successful appeals before appellate tribunals ahead of the first phase of Assembly elections. A second list was released earlier today, on April 28, which added 1,468 more names. “I can’t find my name here. Can you?”, Imtiaz asked, as he spoke to The Leaflet in the afternoon.
His name wasn’t there.
It remains unclear how many names the tribunals were actually able to process before the supplementary lists were published. Given the scale, running into several million cases, and the limited number of tribunals, the process is expected to take years to fully resolve – a timeline that would stretch across multiple election cycles.
In the meantime, some have asked for individual relief through petitions before the Calcutta High Court. The Supreme Court has declined to entertain such challenges.
“I am completely certain about what is happening, I understand it fully. But even then, I keep asking myself, how is one supposed to deal with this?,” Imtiaz wondered aloud, “And then I think, what if I were illiterate? What if I were just a farmer, working in my field, with no access to legal knowledge or resources? If someone came and told me, “Your name has been struck off the list. You’ll be sent to Bangladesh,” what would that do to me?”
Earlier this month, six residents, including a headmistress of a government-aided school, filed what they describe to be a ‘suicide petition’ to President Droupudi Murmu, after their deletion from voter lists, stating that they would rather choose voluntary death than be sent to a detention camp.
Over ninety lakh names (11.9% of Bengal’s electorate) have been removed in the course of the SIR exercise, of which, more than twenty-seven lakh have been struck off through adjudication alone – a figure comparable to the population of Jamaica and more than three times that of Bhutan.
The Court is yet to deliver a final ruling on the constitutional validity of the process. Everything now hangs in suspension.
“What if the Court, three or six months from now, declares the process unconstitutional?,” Imtiaz posed a weighty question, “Where does that leave everyone who has already been subjected to it? Do we return to ground zero, as if nothing happened? Does the earlier electoral roll regain its validity overnight, restoring names that were struck off?”
The manner in which the 2026 West Bengal elections are being contested, shaped by a fraught history and a rushed process, points to a growing anxiety about what democracy looks like in practice.
The modern nation-state has long rested on the assurance that birth secures belonging. That to be born here is to be recognised as a citizen. But when that relationship is called into question by establishing ad hoc irrational norms, which swiftly pushes lakhs out of the electoral rolls, and the courts of law remain silent about it – ahead lies the abyss of a life stripped off of political rights, legal standing, or social significance.
“I feel exhausted…This issue does linger in my head. When working I try not to think about it. But this is impossible,” Imtiaz said, “Sometimes I feel I wish I could simply vanish for a few minutes so as to stay away from all [this] mess that Supreme Court judges have bequeathed to the nation.”
For more on the life and legacy of Mohammed Amin, read ‘The World Within Me’, published in 2026 by LeftWord Books.