India’s ‘newest voters’ caught in SIR adjudication trap in West Bengal

Dinhata residents Manmohan Barman and Md. Mujjamel Khandakar is among India’s newest voters whose citizenship has been recognized through an international treaty, but that has not stopped the Election Commission of India from putting them in the vague category of “trial voters” ahead of the West Bengal Assembly elections.

Mr Barman, 66, and Mr Khandakar, 64, are currently residents of Dinhata Assembly constituency in Cooch Behar district. But just over a decade ago they were living in Dasiarchara, an Indian enclave deep within Bangladeshi territory. In July 2015, they were among 989 people spread across 111 such Indian enclaves who chose to move to India following the signing of the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) and the incorporation of the territory of these areas into Bangladesh. At the same time, 14,854 people living in 51 Bangladeshi settlements in Indian territory became Indian citizens according to the LBA.

Over the past decade, Mr. Barman and Mr. Khandakar, who live as neighbors in a displacement community, have voted in many elections, but given the hurdle created by the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, they have little hope of being able to vote in next month’s Assembly elections.

Stateless presence before 2015

When the ECI started the SIR process in West Bengal in October 2025, residents of the settlement camp were skeptical about participating in the process. Because they were effectively stateless before 2015, their family has no inheritance data to trace their ancestors back to the 2002 voter list. Of course, their names appeared in the list of “logical inconsistencies” after the first stage of the SIR.

Now nine people from the Khandakar family and four from the Barman family have been found to have their voter status “under jurisdiction”. Their names were not included in the ECI’s initial list of those cleared by the verdict on March 23, so their voting rights still remain uncertain. They will not be able to vote unless their names are announced by April 6, the deadline for candidacy applications for the first ballot.

“Why were we brought here if we were going to be prevented from voting? [bilateral Land Boundary] Agreement? By bringing this SIR, we have been pushed towards uncertainty,” Mr. Khandakar said.

Hamida Begum and Namita Barman tried by ECI at Enclave Residential Camp at Dinhata in Cooch Behar

‘Are we foreigners?’

The 58 families living in the Dinhata settlement camp and provided flats by the government since 2019 insist that they came to India through a bilateral agreement and therefore should not be subject to the SIR at all. Many young people have migrated to work, and elders fear that young people may not return to vote if their names are not deleted from the voting list.

Md., who runs a small grocery store in the camp. “We fear that around 80% of the voters in the settlement camp have been marked under jurisdiction by the ECI,” Saraul said. He pointed out that women, like his wife, who were born in India and married people who used to live in the settlement and now live in the settlement camp, were also marked as “under jurisdiction” in the ECI’s election lists.

Hamida Begum, 60, and Namita Barman, 39, who live in the settlement camp, are also angry. “Why did they put us on trial? Are we foreigners? The government brought us in and now they say we don’t have the right to vote,” Ms. Barman said. Both women said, “It is the administration that has failed us. We will go to the District Magistrate and protest if the right to vote is not given.”

common model

Osman Gani is a resident of Dinhata camp but works as a quack doctor in Madhya Masaldanga, a former Bangladeshi enclave that became part of India during the 2015 LBA-approved enclave swap. He claims that there is a social design in keeping voters from minority communities “under jurisdiction”.

“There are three residential camps for people coming from Bangladesh, located at Dinhata, Haldibari and Meklhliganj. The camps at Haldibari and Mekhliganj have a Hindu majority, so most of the people were approved as voters during the SIR. In Muslim-majority areas, the names of the voters are stuck,” Mr. Gani said. Several other residents of old settlements, such as Chhatar Ali of Dakshin Masaldanga, also echoed accusations that there was a communal pattern in the SIR results.

Mr. Gani said Dinhata MLA and North Bengal Development Minister Udayan Guha insisted that they attend SIR hearings and write ‘residents’ in SIR forms wherever old data is sought. Mr. Guha is contesting re-election as Trinamool candidate against BJP’s Ajay Roy.

“We had hoped for a better life when we left everything behind. If they put me in a detention camp, so be it. We should never have gone to the SIR hearings in the first place,” Mr Gani said, adding that he would not approach any official or politician unless he was allowed to vote.

‘We were pushed into darkness’

Residents of Madhya Masaldanga say that no candidates have reached out to them before this election because their voting rights are in doubt. Joynal Abedin, a teenager from Madhya Masaldanga who was part of various movements demanding Indian citizenship before the agreement, checked her status in the electoral rolls several times but was disappointed that her name was still in the “decision stage”.

“We will not allow any election-related officials or politicians to enter our region unless we are given the right to vote,” he said. Mr. Abedin feels that after a decade of citizenship, he and other residents of the former settlements whose names are on trial have been pushed into the same darkness as before.

There were around 2.38 lakh voters tried from Cooch Behar during SIR. It is not clear how many names were cleared in the first stage of the trial. According to the Chief Electoral Officer office, around 29 lakh cases of the 60 lakh pending under SIR were cleared by March 23 midnight.

It was published – 25 March 2026 22:44 IST