A fourth of the electorate. Ninety-five per cent of deleted voters.

A study has flagged an alarming disproportionality between the Muslim share of the electorate and the community’s share among deleted voters in Nandigram, the East Midnapore Assembly seat represented by BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari.

The Election Commission published the first post-SIR supplementary list on March 23. Ten such lists have been released until Sunday, identifying both deletions and approved voters.

A total of 2,826 names have been deleted from the electoral rolls in Nandigram in the supplementary lists. Of these, 2,700 are Muslims — a staggering 95.5% of deletions.

Muslims made up about 26% of the electorate in the constituency during the 2021 Assembly elections.

In the post-SIR rolls published on February 28, more than 10,500 cases in the Nandigram Assembly segment were marked “under adjudication”.

“The staggering rate of deletion of Muslim voters raises serious concerns about the SIR process and its impact,” said Sabir Ahamed of the Sabar Institute, a Calcutta-based research organisation studying religion and gender patterns in the ongoing revision of voter rolls in poll-bound Bengal.

“This analysis suggests the SIR process was conducted with a political agenda — to purge Muslim names to secure electoral advantage for one party. The deleted voters are unlikely to be able to vote this time, as the appeals process will take time,” he said.

The SIR exercise began on October 27, 2025, when the EC announced a special revision of electoral rolls in nine states, including Bengal, and three Union territories.

In Bengal, draft rolls published on December 16 excluded over 58 lakh registered voters marked as dead, duplicate, shifted or absent (ASDD).

Muslims accounted for around 33% of those on the ASDD list, closer to their share in the electorate.

When the preliminary post-SIR list was published on February 28, around 60 lakh more names were placed under adjudication.

The share of Muslims among those marked “under adjudication” is not yet available. Researchers said technical constraints have slowed analysis. “Each name under scrutiny carries an ‘under adjudication’ watermark. We are using a machine learning tool; if it cannot read a name properly, it cannot be analysed further,” said Ashin Chakraborty, a member of the research team.

Nandigram was the most high-profile contest in the 2021 Assembly elections, between Mamata Banerjee and Suvendu Adhikari. The BJP leader led a campaign that mostly relied on religious polarisation. Suvendu won by a margin of just under 2,000 votes. Mamata alleged irregularities in the result. A legal challenge is pending before Calcutta High Court.

In 2021, Nandigram had over 68,000 Muslim voters, about 26% of the electorate. The total electorate stood at about 2.57 lakh then, rising to 2,68,378 after the publication of draft rolls in December.

Jafar Hussain, 39, from Nandigram, is among those whose names have been removed. The BLO informed him on Saturday that he had been deleted from the rolls. Hussain has filed an online appeal seeking restoration of his voting rights.

“No one can say if my case will be decided in time for me to vote. There are many in my neighbourhood with the same plight,” said Hussain, a farm labourer.

A previous study by the Sabar Institute found that Muslim-identifiable names were overrepresented in “logical discrepancy” lists in four Assembly constituencies in Calcutta — Ballygunge, Bhabanipur, Kolkata Port and Metiabruz — relative to their baseline population share.