More than 30 teachers at Aliah University, an autonomous university under the Bengal government’s department of minority affairs and madrasa education, are under adjudication in the ongoing revision of electoral rolls.

The teachers under scrutiny include departmental heads, a dean and a deputy registrar.

On February 28, the Election Commission published a preliminary “final” post-SIR list that included more than 60 lakh voters marked “under adjudication” and over 5 lakh listed as “deleted”.

Opposition leaders and critics have repeatedly alleged that the contentious SIR exercise was exclusionary at its core and designed to harass minority communities. The percentage of Muslims on the logical discrepancy lists in the SIR exceeds their share of the population in several Assembly constituencies.

Metro spoke to three voters employed at Aliah University who are under adjudication. All three have strong standing among students, colleagues and in their neighbourhoods and communities. All three hold PhDs.

A deep sense of dismay and anger unites them. Each said that more than anything else, they felt intense anguish at the “exclusion”. All of them genuinely fear losing their voting rights.

Sk Md Abu Nayeem, 46

Nayeem is a professor and head of the university’s department of mathematics and statistics.

He has been teaching at Aliah for 16 years. Before joining the university in 2010, Nayeem taught at Jhargram Raj College. He is a voter in Keshpur in West Midnapore.

Along with Nayeem, his elderly parents are also under adjudication. The logical discrepancy that led to the scrutiny is a spelling mismatch in his father’s name between the 2002 rolls and the present rolls.

His father’s voter card in 2002 had wrongly spelt his surname as Naim. The error was corrected, and the new voter card says Nayeem.

At the SIR hearing on January 24, the professor submitted his passport, Aadhaar and Class 10 pass certificate. His father, a retired schoolteacher, submitted his pension payment order and Aadhaar. His mother submitted her post office savings bank account passbook dating back to 1986 along with her Aadhaar.

The EPIC numbers of Nayeem and his parents have remained unchanged since 2002.

“I was stunned. If the EPIC number hasn’t changed, how were we put under adjudication? My great-grandfather voted in the first election in this country. Our legacy has remained untainted. Now questions are being raised about that. It is deeply humiliating,” said Nayeem.

“A detailed police verification preceded my appointment at Jhargram Raj College. If the verification was genuine, then why am I being questioned now?” he asked. “It seems the bias many people hold against minorities has affected the AI-driven software used in the SIR.”

Md Saifullah, 51

Saifullah is the head of the Bengali department and the dean of humanities and languages. He lives in Dariasudi village in Habra, North 24-Parganas and is a voter in the Habra Assembly constituency.

“Five generations of my ancestors are buried in the village graveyard. We have a history of 250 years. Now, suddenly, we must prove that we belong here. It is shameful,” said Saifullah.

“The EC is a constitutional body entrusted with protecting the voting rights of citizens. The same commission now seems to have a new agenda: to disenfranchise voters,” he said.

His Madhyamik admit card mentions only Saifullah. His headmaster omitted the prefix by mistake, he said. Since then, all his documents — Aadhaar, PAN card, passport and even his PhD certificate — have listed only Saifullah, without a prefix or surname.

The logical discrepancy flagged in his case relates to the name of his father, who passed away in 2014.

“In the 2002 rolls, his name was written as Md. Asaduzzaman. But my documents mention his name as only Asaduzzaman,” said Saifullah.

At the hearing in the first week of February, Saifullah submitted his passport along with his Madhyamik admit card and pass certificate. His elderly mother and younger brother are also under adjudication.

“I call this state-sponsored terrorism,” said Saifullah, who is part of a citizens’ protest against the SIR at Park Circus Maidan.

Sheikh Ashfaque Ali, 55

Ali is the deputy registrar of the university and the administrative head of the Park Circus and Talata campuses.

Aliah has three units: the New Town branch focuses on science and technology; humanities and languages are taught at Park Circus, while Talata offers courses in Islamic theology.

Ali lives in Picnic Garden and is a voter in the Kasba Assembly constituency. Before 2010, he voted in Dantan in West Midnapore.

Before joining Aliah, Ali was a professor of physics at Raja Rammohan Roy Mahavidyalaya in Hooghly.

“I have drawn my salary from government coffers for decades. I have paid taxes to the government for decades. Now, suddenly, I feel like I am being treated as an outsider,” said Ali. “I could understand if the governments of Bangladesh or Pakistan treated me with suspicion. But it causes unbearable pain to see my own government being suspicious about me.”

The logical discrepancy in his case also stems from minor mismatches in the spellings of his name and his father’s. Ali linked the mismatch in his name to the arbitrary translation of names from Bengali to English.

In the 2002 rolls, the prefix “Sheikh” appeared after his name. His father’s name is Sheikh Tabarak Ali, but the prefix was missing in the 2002 rolls.

Ali, too, submitted his passport during the end-January hearing.