A citizens’ campaign to support voters at the wrong end of the contentious SIR exercise is growing in scale.

Sara Bangla Bicharadhin Voter Mancha was born on Sunday, a day after the Election Commission published a preliminary “final” post-SIR list for Bengal, which included 60 lakh “under adjudication” and over 5 lakh “deleted” voters.

By Wednesday, the platform had reached 20,000 people across the state. They include deleted and under adjudication voters or their family members, neighbours or acquaintances.

“Our primary objective is to identify these people. The poll panel has been treating them not as humans but as objects. Many of them have voted regularly, even in the last election. Now, deleting their names or putting
them under adjudication questions their very existence. We want to identify these voters in flesh and blood,” said Safi Mollick, a college teacher and one of the founders of the platform.

A network of more than 200 volunteers have started taking the campaign deep into Bengal pockets. The team of volunteers includes data analysts who have been working almost around the clock. More than 20 district-specific groups have already taken shape.

“The growth has been organic. Most people want to discuss how the SIR is troubling them. We want to give them the platform to speak,” said Mollick.

“There have been many legal challenges to the SIR process. Yet, here we are. I think a mass movement by the citizenry is the only way forward,” he added.

The list published on Saturday has left people, parties and officials still confused about who and how many would eventually be able to vote. The spotlight is on the 60.06 lakh voters in the under-adjudication category — those with unresolved “logical discrepancies” — the luckier among whom are expected to be included in supplementary rolls on yet unspecified dates.

Tousif Haque, a painter and convener of the platform, said a preliminary analysis suggests that Muslims, Harijans, Matuas and Namasudras were among the sections hit hardest.

“The AI software that has been used suffers from human bias,” he said.

“We have reached out to many marginalised communities who have been deleted or kept under adjudication,” said Haque.

A cluster of voters from the Sundarbans and another from Bankura are among them.

Each year, their residences in the Sundarbans suffer from increasing sea levels and severe storms. Whatever few documents they had were washed away. A bulk of the voters in a tribal village in Bankura have either been deleted or are under adjudication, said Haque.

The platform has unveiled a series of posters to spread the campaign.

It has also called for a mass rally on March 7, from the Tea Board to the office of the chief electoral officer of Bengal.

Kasturi Basu, documentary filmmaker and one of the members of the platform, said: “Many had suspected that the SIR was an exclusionary exercise. The new list has confirmed that suspicion. The scale of the omission is unbelievable; the audacity is surprising. Political parties opposed to the BJP will do what they have to. But a mass movement is the best way to tell the authorities that their plans will be resisted, no matter what.”