Gitikantha Mazumdar’s voice was crisp. “Will the Bharat Ratna citation work as an SIR document?”

The Election Commission officials looked embarrassed.

A little skit seemed to play out on Friday at Pratichi, Amartya Sen’s home in Santiniketan, when poll panel officials arrived for his SIR hearing and encountered a pointed query from Mazumdar, a family friend of the Nobel laureate.

“I asked them whether the Bharat Ratna citation was enough to establish that Professor Sen is an Indian citizen and deserves to be enlisted in the electoral rolls,” Mazumdar said.

“The officials were visibly red-faced as they had no answer. They smiled and said the Election Commission would take the decision and they were only following instructions.”

He added: “I was being sarcastic (in asking the question): I wanted to send a message to the Election Commission that it was harassing a person who had been awarded the country’s highest civilian honour.”

Election Commission officials had earlier visited Pratichi on January 7 and served an SIR hearing notice on Sen over a “logical discrepancy” in his enumeration form entries. The notice said the hearing would be held on January 16.

As Sen is 92, the commission said the hearing would be conducted at his home. Since he is abroad, it said, any person authorised by him could submit the necessary documents.

A three-member commission arrived at Pratichi around 12.45pm and left 15 minutes later after collecting the documents.

According to the poll panel, the notice was issued because the age difference between Sen and his mother Amita Sen, as calculated from the data entries on his enumeration form, was less than 15 years.

However, the 2002 electoral rolls — an Election Commission-authorised document — suggest an age difference of 19 years.

Mazumdar has been handling Sen’s legal affairs ever since the economist was served with an eviction notice by Visva-Bharati in 2023.

“We don’t expect any further controversy or notices on him (Sen) in connection with the SIR, as we have submitted all documents, including his passport,” he said.

Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, was awarded the Bharat Ratna the following year by then President K.R. Narayanan. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister.

A source in the Election Commission suggested a Bharat Ratna citation might not be acceptable as proof of a person’s eligibility to be a voter, given that it did not figure among the 11 documents specified by the poll panel.

In all bureaucratic seriousness, he underlined that two foreigners — Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1987) and Nelson Mandela (1990) — too had been accorded the honour.

“Since 1954, around 50 people have received the Bharat Ratna. Therefore, such a citation cannot be treated as a general document for SIR verification,” he added, without explaining his logic.

Sen’s cousin, Shantabhanu Sen, submitted four documents on the economist’s behalf on Friday: an authorisation letter from Sen, a photocopy of his passport, the death certificate of the economist’s mother Amita Sen, and a copy of an extract from the 2002 electoral rolls.

“We knew that submitting even a single document, especially (a copy of) the passport, was sufficient to satisfy the commission,” a source close to the Sen family said.

“However, we deliberately provided the (copy of the) 2002 electoral rolls to demonstrate that the Election Commission was incorrect in claiming that the age difference between Professor Sen and his mother was less than 15 years.”

The 2002 rolls, reviewed by this newspaper, record Amita Sen’s age as 88. Amartya Sen’s age, as mentioned in the post-SIR draft electoral rolls of 2025, is 92. This means he was 69 in 2002, which puts the age difference at 19 years.

“The issue has been resolved,” a source in the Election Commission said.

The notice to Sen had incensed many residents of Santiniketan and academics in Bengal, who questioned the necessity of the step given that the Nobel laureate’s personal details were widely available in the public domain.

“We don’t know whether this stemmed from administrative ineptitude or was a deliberate attempt to harass a great scholar like Amartya Sen,” academic Pabitra Sarkar said.

“Our foremost responsibility is to ascertain the reason behind the summoning of the Nobel laureate for a hearing. It is deeply unfortunate.”