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.
