Around 1,000 residents of the erstwhile Bangladeshi enclaves went to the office of the Dinhata subdivisional officer in Cooch Behar on Monday, protesting that most of their names were in the “under adjudication” category in the preliminary “final” list of the Election Commission released on February 28.

“We became Indian citizens on August 1, 2015, and have exercised our voting rights in every election since then. But in the SIR process, we find ‘adjudication’ stamped on most voter names from former enclave areas,” said Jainal Abedin, a resident of Madhya Mashaldanga, a former Bangladeshi enclave that is now an Indian village under the Nazirhat-II panchayat in Dinhata.

On the midnight of July 31, 2015, 51 Bangladeshi enclaves, landlocked in the Cooch Behar district of India, merged with the Indian mainland according to the land boundary agreement between India and Bangladesh.

Altogether, 15,856 residents of these 51 enclaves were granted Indian citizenship. In due course, they received Aadhaar, ration and voting cards.

Since then, they voted in Assembly, Lok Sabha, and panchayat elections. Some of them were even elected as panchayat members.

However, uncertainty has resurfaced in the former enclaves spread across the Dinhata, Mathabhanga and Mekhliganj subdivisions of Cooch Behar district. Most of the 51 enclaves were located in these three subdivisions, around 25 in Dinhata alone.

The “under adjudication” status for most former enclave dwellers on February 28 voter list has left them deeply worried. “People are apprehensive about their voting rights and even their citizenship status,” Abedin said.

According to him, the total number of voters from former enclaves now stands at around 15,000.

In booth 29 of the Dinhata Assembly constituency, for instance, there are 1,250 voters, of whom 347 belong to the former enclave of Madhya Mashaldanga. “Out of these 347 voters, more than 90 per cent have been marked ‘under adjudication.’ We are noticing that many names from the Muslim community have been tagged this way,”
he said.

Saddam Mian, from the erstwhile enclave of Poaturkuthi, claimed that most voters have been marked “under adjudication”. In one of the Poaturkuthi booths, 555 out of 895 voters are facing adjudication. In another booth of Poaturkuthi, out of 1,015 voters, as many as 807 are marked “under adjudication”. Also, in Batrigachh, another enclave in Baro Shoulmari panchayat, 724 out of 1,005 voters have been similarly marked.

“Everyone is uncertain whether they can vote in the 2026 Assembly elections,” said Maheruddin Ali, a panchayat member from Poaturkuthi.

On Monday, nearly 1,000 residents staged a protest in front of the Dinhata SDO office and submitted a memorandum demanding immediate rectification.

While the administration assured them that the matter would be looked into and raised during hearings, the residents warned that if the issue wasn’t resolved quickly, they would launch a larger movement, including a march to the district magistrate’s office.

“We have spent decades as stateless subjects before we got citizenship. As the special intensive revision (SIR) process was initiated, administrative officials had promised that our issue would be duly considered as we neither had our names in the 2002 voter list, nor old documents,” said Nur Nabi Mian, a panchayat member from Batrigach.

“But now that the list has been published, most of us are facing adjudication. This is disappointing,” he added.