The residents of Samserganj in Murshidabad district of West Bengal are used to seeing their homes, farmlands and marketplaces getting washed away into the hungry Ganges. This summer, the blow has been of a novel nature: the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. In a single stroke, 74,000 voters have been wiped off the rolls—that’s roughly 30 per cent of the constituency’s pre-revision electorate. About 95 per cent of the 74,000 are Muslims. Samserganj’s case may sound like an extreme example, but it’s not. Of the 27.16 lakh names deleted for logical discrepancies from the rolls across West Bengal, 4.55 lakh, or one-sixth, are from Murshidabad alone. Muslims make up 67 per cent of the district’s population; however, 92.5 per cent of the 4.55 lakh names of voters deleted are Muslims.
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 Mehbub Alam (in black) and Afajul Hoque were told their names were excluded because their fathers had six children. Both are from Milangarh in Malda and work as daily wagers in Kerala. | Photo: Sandipan Chatterjee
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