The percentage of Muslims removed after adjudication from the revised electoral rolls of Bhabanipur is double the community’s share of the segment’s population, a study has shown.
Bhabanipur, represented by Mamata Banerjee in the Assembly, is the hottest seat in the upcoming elections, where the chief minister is pitted against leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari.
When the Election Commission published the preliminary “final” post-SIR list on February 28, Bhabanipur had 14,113 names under adjudication. The subsequent supplementary lists showed that 3,875 of 14,113 names have been deleted. Among those deleted after adjudication, 1,554 are Muslims and 2,321 non-Muslims.
Mamata had won the Bhabanipur Assembly seat by a record margin of 58,832 votes in the September 2021 bypoll. However, Trinamool got just 8,297 votes more than the BJP in the Bhabanipur segment of the Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat in 2024.
Just a couple of days ago, the Sabar Institute had analysed the post-SIR electoral rolls of Nandigram. Muslims make up around 26 per cent of the population of the East Midnapore seat, but a staggering 95.5 per cent of those removed from the rolls after adjudication are from the minority community.
Adhikari and Mamata faced off in Nandigram in 2021, with the BJP leader winning by a margin of less than 2,000 votes. Mamata contested the result, and her legal challenge is pending in Calcutta High Court. Adhikari is in the fray from two seats this time: Nandigram and Bhabanipur.
“The figures in Bhabanipur look relatively normal when compared to some other seats that show a massive mismatch between the Muslim share of the electorate and the community’s representation in the list of deleted voters. But 20 per cent of the population and 40 per cent of those deleted still translates to a strong disproportionality,” said Sabir Ahamed of the Sabar Institute.
Data of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections show that the BJP led from 149 of the 269 booths in the Bhabanipur Assembly segment, and five of the eight Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards there. In the September 2021 bypoll, Mamata had secured nearly 72 per cent of the votes polled and led in all eight wards.
She fought the bypoll after party colleague Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay vacated the seat for her.
In the 2021 Assembly polls, Chattopadhyay had beaten the BJP’s Rudranil Ghosh by 28,719 votes.
Bhabanipur had 2,06,925 voters in December 2025, according to the Election Commission.
The list of absent, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) voters published by the poll panel on December 16 had removed around 44,000 names in Bhabanipur. The Muslim share in the December 16 list was around 23 per cent.
On January 24, the Election Commission uploaded a list of around 30 lakh “unmapped voters” across Bengal whose records could not be linked with the last revision of rolls conducted in 2002.
That same day came another list, identifying nearly 1.2 crore voters with “logical discrepancies”.
The list of voters identified with logical discrepancies in Bhabanipur had a Muslim representation of 52 per cent.
The previous analyses were also done by Sabar. The researchers — Chakraborty, Ahamed and Souptik Halder — have now digitised and uploaded the data from two seats, Nandigram and Bhabanipur, on the Internet for free public access.
“December 16 was a wake-up call for us. The Election Commission is working under the instructions of the BJP. More names would have been deleted in the supplementary lists after adjudication, but our booth-level workers were alert and did not let that happen,” said a Trinamool leader in Bhabanipur.
