NEW DELHI: The Trinamool Congress is miffed over the deletion of around 54 lakh names from electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal.The political climate is set to heat up in West Bengal as the All India Trinamool Congress has instructed party workers to carry out fresh door-to-door scrutiny of deleted voters’ names in Bhabanipur — West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s constituency — after nearly 45,000 electors were struck off following the Election Commission’s poll-roll purification drive, news agency PTI reported, citing sources.This comes after the Election Commission of India published West Bengal’s draft electoral rolls following the special intensive revision, deleting the names of more than 58 lakh voters on various grounds, including death and migration, and redrawing voter profiles across districts and border belts ahead of the 2026 assembly polls.The TMC is miffed over a large number of voters being marked “dead”, “shifted” or “absent” by the poll panel.“The party leadership made it clear that no valid voter’s name should be deleted under any circumstances. Every deleted name must be physically verified,” a TMC source told PTI.With the hearing process on claims and objections expected to begin shortly, the party has directed local leadership to stand by affected voters during verification, it added.The party has also asked local units to continue running neighbourhood-level ‘May I Help You’ camps to assist people with documentation, form-filling and hearings, and said volunteers should visit homes if required. After the first phase of the SIR, four politically high-profile Assembly constituencies — Bhabanipur, Kolkata Port, Ballygunge and Rashbehari — together recorded over 2.16 lakh deletions, nearly 24 per cent of their combined electorate. When the SIR process began, these seats together had around 9.07 lakh voters.Bhabanipur comprises Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards 63, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77 and 82. Sources said wards 70, 72 and 77 recorded particularly high deletions, with ward 77, a minority-dominated area, flagged for special attention during scrutiny.Bhabanipur, a dense urban constituency, has a sizeable population of residents originally from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha.The SIR process began on November 4 after the Election Commission announced the schedule on October 27, when West Bengal’s electorate stood at 7,66,37,529.Enumeration forms were printed for all voters and delivered door-to-door by booth-level officers (BLOs). Officials said voters who submitted signed forms — even if partially filled — have been retained in the draft list, though their details will be subject to further verification.According to PTI, poll body data shows that a significant number of voters have been flagged during the process. Over 30 lakh voters have been placed in a “no-mapping” category as their names could not be linked with the 2002 electoral rolls. Hearings for this group are scheduled to begin on Wednesday.In addition, around 1.7 crore voters have been placed under varying degrees of scrutiny, with BLOs tasked with re-verifying their details through door-to-door checks after the draft rolls are published. At the same time, the scale of exclusions has begun to draw attention. Go to Source
