Verification or Disenfranchisement? People in Bengal, Tamil Nadu Struggle With SIR

Kolkata/Vizag: Software professional Jagita Panda spent her Sunday (November 9) trapped in a bureaucratic loop. Hailing from Sambalpur, Odisha, she relocated to and settled in New Town, the satellite township adjoining Kolkata, fifteen years ago. “I was trapped in a perfect loop,” she told The Wire. To comply with the government’s new voter verification drive, she had to link her mobile number to her voter ID.

The system directed her to a form, which she submitted. The catch? The verification cannot proceed until her mobile number is updated, leaving her stranded. “You get a reference number,” she adds, “but it's a key with no lock – nowhere to enter it, no way to track your request.”

This is not an isolated glitch. It is a citizen's frontline experience of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a nationwide audit of electoral rolls that has sparked political backlash and widespread confusion in the electorally crucial states of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. With state elections looming in 2026, a process meant to ensure accuracy is now denounced by opposition leaders as a tool for disenfranchisement. Their claim is echoed by a rising number of citizens caught in its flaws.

In West Bengal, the problems take many forms. Arjun Dasgupta, a senior medical practitioner from South Kolkata, had his application rejected due to a simple OTP mismatch. “If ten crore applications are verified within a month, it's only natural that this would happen,” he observed, pointing to the system’s fragility.

For Shovan Das, another doctor from Pahihati in North 24 Parganas, the loop was historical. “The ECI server still has the saved name with spelling mistakes from my old voter ID card, even though I corrected it almost ten years ago!” he told The Wire. To proceed, he must first fix a problem he already solved a decade ago.

The anxiety crosses national borders. Saheli Pal, living in Krakow, Poland, described her elderly mother’s distress back home in Jalpaiguri in North Bengal. While a local connection helped her mother submit a photograph, a relative's family in Kolkata, residents for decades, “cannot find their names in the 2002 voter list,” causing immense worry.

This public frustration is fueling the state’s political leaders. On November 10, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declared the SIR a “super emergency”. Likening it to the 2016 demonetisation, she dubbed it “votebandi”. “Just like demonetisation was notebandi, SIR is votebandi,” she told journalists, demanding an immediate halt to the process.

Accusing the Union government of a “deliberate attempt to malign people,” Banerjee also targeted the Election Commission. Her party, the Trinamool Congress, has linked over a dozen recent deaths to anxiety over the process.

Also read: Backstory: ECI’s Information Strategies to Make SIR and Unmake Indian Democracy

Hundreds of miles south in Tamil Nadu, the story is much the same. Here, the process is also plagued by errors and logistical failures. T. Rakesh, a physical trainer from Chennai, highlights the confusion. “In my area, many received forms printed only in Tamil,” he told The Wire. “We were told verbally it was okay to fill them in English, but who knows if an electoral officer will reject it later?” He added that some booth-level officers, pressed for time, are “just sending forms via WhatsApp to meet targets, which defeats the point of a house-to-house check.”

For others, the main obstacle is verifying identity with decades-old data. “We’ve voted in every election, but couldn’t find my parents' names in the 2005 rolls,” said Vijay Siddharth from Erode. “The photos they have on file are 20 years old, black and white, and blurred. How can anyone verify identity with that?” His words capture a widespread fear: “It feels less like cleansing a list and more like creating obstacles,” Vijay told The Wire.

This sentiment is echoed by the state’s chief minister. M.K. Stalin has publicly branded the SIR a “political weapon.” “Our enemies use the Income Tax Department and CBI to threaten us. Now they have taken up the SIR as a weapon... it will never work in Tamil Nadu,” he declared on Monday.

Stalin dissected the form itself, calling its ambiguous questions about relatives a “bundle of confusion” that could cause genuine voters to be struck from the rolls for minor mistakes.

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