On the Bengal Electoral Roll's Erasure of Nandalal Bose's Grandson...

Today, in West Bengal, nearly nine million names of voters have been removed from electoral rolls following the special intensive revision. The highest volume of deletions occurred in Muslim-majority Murshidabad district, where over 40% of voters under adjudication were ruled ineligible. This administrative purge, finalised just weeks before the first phase of polling on April 23, has effectively shrunk the state’s electorate by over 11%.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Among those excised are the grandson and granddaughter-in-law of Nandalal Bose. Bose not only pioneered modern Indian art but also gave the Constitution of India its visual identity through 22 illustrations, spanning Indian history from the Indus Valley Civilisation to the freedom struggle.

Suprabuddha Sen’s appeal now lies before an appellate tribunal; a complex administrative cycle where an 88-year-old’s lifelong residency is weighed against the cold logic of an ‘intensive revision’.

In most of history, we have seen how state power enables systemic dehumanisation by navigating the well-equipped structures of legal systems. Through the SIR in Bengal, the Election Commission manufactures ‘ghost citizens’. Millions of people from Bengal who pay taxes, inhabit lands, born and die here will now live in a state of civic death.

In this entire process of exclusion and dehumanisation, the burden of proof is shifted entirely onto the individuals to justify their existence to an indifferent system in place. By rendering millions ‘ineligible’ the state replaces the lived complexities of the human lives with mere numbers and concocted logic.

As names disappear from the rolls, the democratic landscape is being redrawn by the stroke of a red pen.

These illustrations try to serve as a witness to these systemic and unprecedented erasures, at a time when the very idea of citizenship in this country is getting ‘redefined’.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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