CPM general secretary M.A. Baby has in a letter to chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar demanded that the Election Commission ensure the right to vote, which the party said had been jeopardised by the SIR in Bengal.

Around 90 lakh names have been struck off the Bengal electoral rolls through a process that has been widely questioned at many levels.

Baby reiterated the CPM’s opposition to the “logical discrepancy” category — undefined in law — and the apparent reliance on algorithms over field verification of voters.

He said: “Unlike earlier exercises, the voter was treated as a suspect and the burden to prove otherwise rested on them. We are not going into the tremendous monetary loss, inconvenience, mental trauma and even deaths that this obnoxious exercise has led to.

“The continued non-functioning of adjudicatory mechanisms even admitted by the ECI in the Supreme Court has effectively denied them any meaningful remedy. Equally troubling is the opacity of the entire exercise. Lists were released in non-analysable formats, preventing public scrutiny. Independent analyses indicate that marginalised communities, particularly Muslims, women and economically vulnerable sections, have been disproportionately impacted.”

Baby added: “The removal of these voters from the list amounts to a denial of the right to vote guaranteed under Article 326 of the Indian Constitution.... Its large-scale denial, particularly to marginalised sections, constitutes a serious assault on the precepts of the Constitution itself.... At any cost, the constitutional right to vote must be guaranteed by the ECI.”