Speaking at a meeting, the Union minister, Shantanu Thakur — he heads the faction among Matuas that favours the Bharatiya Janata Party — stated that the names of nearly one lakh Matuas could be excluded from the electoral rolls. This, Mr Thakur argued, was necessary to disenfranchise 50 lakh Muslims. The minister packaged this clearly polarising sentiment as a form of a ‘sacrifice’ by the Matuas and stated that the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act was the only instrument available to resolve the challenges faced by the community, most of whose members had emigrated from Bangladesh and lack the requisite documents being demanded by the current special intensive revision of electoral polls. What appears to be an attempt by the BJP minister to assuage the concerns of an electoral bloc could, however, backfire. This is because the possibility of exclusion at this scale and the resultant attendant anxiety could breach the community’s trust in the BJP. If that were to happen, an electoral backlash against the saffron party on part of the Matuas cannot be ruled out. This, in turn, could dent the BJP’s electoral prospects in the assembly election that is on the horizon. Already, the Trinamool Congress, the BJP’s principal obstacle on the road to power, has pounced on Mr Thakur’s remark: a mobilisation of Matua voters in Thakurnagar was planned by the TMC in response.
The BJP’s other rhetoric related to the SIR — Mr Thakur’s remark echoed it — that of the deletion of a large number of illegal Muslims from Bengal’s poll rolls, may not mirror the ground reality either. This is because an illuminating study by the Sabar Institute, a research foundation, has revealed that most voters in Muslim-dominated constituencies near the Bengal border have been able to link themselves to the 2002 electoral rolls: in other words, the percentage of unmapping has been low. On the other hand, a higher percentage of unmapping has been reported from Hindu-dominated assembly constituencies — in Jalpaiguri’s Dabgram-Fulbari, to cite one example, the unmapping rate is as high as 9.98%. The electoral implications of these findings have their own significance. But an additional question must be pondered. What kind of anxiety makes the minorities emphasise on securing crucial documents pertaining to birth or voting rights in an ostensibly pluralist polity that does not discriminate, in theory, between people?