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In the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of West Bengal’s electoral rolls, judicial officers heard 11 lakh voters in Murshidabad and found 4.55 lakh of them not eligible to vote. One district accounted for one in six of every name marked suspended to vote in the state.

Abu Taher Khan, Khalilur Rahman and Yusuf Pathan represent that district. The three MPs were elected on Trinamool Congress tickets in 2024. They belong, now, to the Lok Sabha group of the TMC which has merged with the fledgling Nationalist Citizens Party of India. 

This month, the three skipped two consecutive National Democratic Alliance meetings, letting it be known they were uneasy about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s record on Muslims. Then they met Union home minister Amit Shah, and on August 7 were at breakfast with Prime Minister Narendra Modi among other 17 TMC-turned-NCPI parliamentarians. They were not joining the BJP, they explained, and were not in the NDA but had merely placed two issues before the people in power – relief for voters struck off the rolls and an assurance that microphone rules would not be turned against religious practice.

Thus, it seems, that their objection was not to sitting with the BJP in a meeting or eating with leaders of the NDA. It was to being listed as the NDA.

How Muslims were treated in the SIR

What the MPs spoke of in New Delhi is worth setting out at the scale it actually happened. The revision, known as the SIR, drew about 7.8% of the state’s electorate into the adjudication process, where a voter had to satisfy a judicial officer that they were eligible to be in the rolls. In Murshidabad it held back 19.1% – nearly one in five of the district’s electorate. Among districts, only Malda and Uttar Dinajpur were exposed more heavily, and all three sit in the same belt.

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To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.

The statewide gradient is unmistakable. Across the 160 assembly seats where Muslims are under 20% of the population, an average of 4% of voters were called in. In the 19 seats where Muslims are above 60% of the population, it was 24.8% – six times the exposure.

What happened after the summons runs the other way, and the distinction matters. Those........

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