14 Panicked Voters End Lives Over SIR in Bengal

Kolkata: The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to clear the voter list ahead of Assembly elections in West Bengal next year has created a spell of fear that has so far resulted in 14 deaths, eight of them due to suicide.

This has led to a dangerous trend that the state has never seen before. Reporting all these losses from the counties revealed poor awareness and confidence among rural voters of such a massive advance in three months.

The dead include Pradip Kar (57) and Kakoli Sarkar (32) from North 24 Parganas, Khitish Majumdar (95) from West Midnapore, Hasina Begum (60) and Bithi Das (49) from Hooghly, Zahir Mal (30) from Howrah, Bimal Santra (57) from East Burdwan, Sheikh Sirajuddin (70) from East Midnapore, Sahabuddin (70) is taking. Paik (45) and Safiul Ghazi (35) from South 24 Parganas, Tarak Saha (52) and Mohul Sheikh (45) from Murshidabad, Biman Pramanik (37) from Birbhum and Laluram Barman (80) from Jalpaiguri.

While Kar, Sarkar, Majumdar, Das, Mal, Ghazi, Saha and Sheikh ended their lives by hanging themselves or drinking poison in panic, others died of heart attacks due to anxiety, according to family members. Meanwhile, there were other suicide attempts.

A farmer named Khairul Sheikh (63) tried to kill himself by consuming pesticides in Dinhata in North Bengal’s Cooch Behar. He was taken to a hospital. In Khardaha in North 24 Parganas, a youth named Akbar Ali was poisoned but was quickly rescued by his wife.

However, the increase in deaths occurred from the day after the EC announced the exercise in New Delhi on October 27. Family members said they were worried about the future of the deceased as they could not find their names in the last SIR voter list and could not find their identity documents, which they had to apply for in the current list within a month.

They also feared losing their citizenship and facing deportation as the existing SIR was tied to the citizenship issue by the two main political rivals, the Trinamul Congress and the BJP; These opponents had already turned this move into the main agenda of the election wars.

While TMC chief and chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her MP nephew Abhishek Banerjee termed the SIR a “backdoor” to the National Register of Citizens, Nandigram BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari predicted that the names of one crore voters would be deleted in the app.

Interestingly, the last time the state saw this was in 2002, when the CPI(M)-led Left Front was in power and scrutiny of the voter list was not a poll issue for either the ruling or Opposition parties. The duration was also longer than this time.