Sardar Manawar Hussain, 53, a resident of Gulshan Colony near Kolkata’s Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, is relieved and angry -- but not surprised -- that everyone in his family features in the first draft of the electoral rolls published as part of the special intensive revision (SIR) being carried out in Bengal, along with 11 other states and Union Territories in India.
Bengal is scheduled to have the state elections later this year, and the SIR exercise has angered many residents in the state.
Mirroring the 2019 National Register of Citizens (NRC) update in Assam that led to fears of statelessness among Bengalis in the state and even led to many deaths by suicide, the SIR exercise hasn’t been much different.
Unlike Assam, the effective consequence of the exercise includes not just those being enumerated but also those involved in the verification count. In Bengal, there have been 39 deaths and this includes at least four booth-level officers (BLOs), who have been under tremendous stress to check forms under severe deadline pressure.
Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress has officially announced compensations for the “victims”. It has put the SIR process down as a ploy to engineer a victory for the BJP in the state elections: The BJP has been in power at the Centre since 2014; Bengal is among a handful of states it hasn’t succeeded in winning.
The SIR exercise, weaponised by political parties like the BJP, has witnessed terms like “illegal migrants”, “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingyas” being used pejoratively and generously, particularly against Bengali and other Muslims in Bengal.
At the centre of that political narrative is Gulshan Colony, home to approximately 150,000 people, the majority of whom are Muslims.
The BJP calls residents of Gulshan Colony illegal migrants from Bangladesh, or Rohingyas who escaped from Myanmar after a genocide against them in 2017. Such labels have been a source of great anxiety for many in Gulshan Colony and have also angered them.
Most of the residents say they migrated originally from different parts of Bengal, as well as from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Hussain is one of them.
Video Editor: Joy Das
