Sujapur (Malda): With three weeks to go for the first phase of assembly elections in West Bengal, the town of Sujapur, located 13 km from the district headquarters in Malda, came to a grinding halt Wednesday. Angry residents blocked the stretch of National Highway-12 that passes through the town, with bamboo poles and tyres.
Protests first broke out in the morning over the ‘arbitrary’ manner in which the names of 1.35 lakh of the total 2.69 lakh voters in Sujapur were either deleted or put under adjudication as part of the EC’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive.
The anger on the ground was palpable, with men and women from almost every locality of Sujapur taking to the streets in protest.
Sujapur assembly segment falls under the Malda South parliamentary constituency.
Residents claimed there is not a single household in Sujapur unaffected by the SIR.
Among those whose names have either been deleted or are under adjudication is 69-year-old Mohammed Abdul Hannan, the Congress candidate from Sujapur, who along with his family has lived here for several generations. Hannan lives in Sujapur’s Bakharpur locality and is the opposition leader in the Malda zila parishad. He found his name under adjudication when the final voter list was published on 28 February.
With final date for filing nominations nearing and no clarity over whether his name would be included in the electoral roll, Hannan is agitated.
“Can you imagine my state of mind…What I am going through. If this can happen to me, can you imagine the state of affairs here,” he told ThePrint, sitting near the first blockade point, along with a several dozen others.
“The names of both the BLO (Booth Level Officer) and ERO (Electoral Registration Officer) of Sujapur have been put under the adjudication list,” he claimed.
Hundreds of others, who said they have been living and voting here for generations, now find their names missing from the electoral list. “What is happening here is a farce in the name of democracy,” said Jewel Hoque, a contractor who lives in Sujapur with his family of five. Hoque’s, his mother’s and younger brother’s names have been put under adjudication.
As protesters took to the streets Wednesday morning, central security forces were deployed in large numbers to prevent any untoward incident. A long row of trucks, buses and private vehicles with passengers onboard stood on the other side of the road, barred from entering the town.
Road blockades like the one in Sujapur are also playing out in other Muslim-dominated constituencies in Malda district, where residents are spending their days with constant anxiety, worried about whether they will be able to vote on 23 April since the Election Commission of India (ECI) has yet to release official figures on how many voters, whose names were put under adjudication, have been deleted from the electoral rolls.
‘No clarity’: District officials
District officials, who did not wish to be named, admitted that the annoyance of Sujapur residents is understandable because they have been forced to run from one office to the other to get documents verified. “There is no clarity in the administration also about how to go about the whole verification process,” said a state government official in Malda.
A second official added that it’s not just the public, even district officials have little clarity. Sujapur, for instance, has seen three Block Development Officers (BDO) in two months. “Even before a BDO figures out what is happening, he is transferred out,” the official said.
Malda has two parliamentary seats: Malda North and Malda South. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, BJP’s Khagen Murmu won from Malda North while Congress’ Isha Khan Choudhury, nephew of one of Malda’s tallest leaders, A.B.A Ghani Khan Choudhury, won from Malda South. In the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections, however, of the 12 seats that fall under the two parliamentary constituencies, Trinamool Congress won 10 and the BJP 4.
Isha Khan Choudhury, the Congress MP from Malda South, told ThePrint that the execution of SIR in West Bengal has been a failure. “It’s a mockery of democracy if people’s names are not cleared.”
“I will talk of my constituency Sujapur. How can you do an election with 1.35 lakh people’s name under adjudication? We are not against SIR but the politicisation and abuse of it,” Choudhury added.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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