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Kolkata: Last year, Samserganj in Murshidabad’s border belt made national headlines after communal tension over the Waqf Bill left three people dead. This year, the constituency is in the news again, for a different but allied reason. In the special intensive revision (SIR), 91,712 voters – more than one in three names – have been deleted from the rolls of Samserganj. The highest number in West Bengal. When the Election Commission uploaded the appellate tribunal supplementary lists for 247 polling stations in the early hours of April 22, not a single name was cleared.

Samserganj was never supposed to be the epicentre of a democratic controversy of this scale. It was, until recently, just another politically sensitive assembly constituency, shaped by familiar Bengal faultlines of party rivalry, poverty, out-migration and local patronage. But on the eve of polling, the constituency has become the site of something far more serious. The electoral roll revision here has been so sweeping and so uneven that it raises a disturbing possibility that the most decisive battle may already have been fought before a single vote was cast.

At first glance, Samserganj is a conventional high-stakes seat. It is assembly constituency number 56, part of the Maldaha Dakshin Lok Sabha segment. The seat has changed hands with Bengal’s shifting political tides. After delimitation, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) won it in 2011, Trinamool Congress captured it in 2016 by a narrow margin, and then strengthened its hold in 2021 with a victory margin of more than 26,000. In this election, TMC, Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party are once again locked in a triangular contest.

But the numbers behind the voter list suggest that the electoral field itself may have been altered before campaigning reached its final stretch.

To compare the constituency with others in Bengal, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.

To compare the constituency with others in Bengal, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.

Samserganj is one of the most Muslim-majority seats in West Bengal, with the social composition of the seat deeply intertwined with its political outcomes. Out of 247 booths, 180 have Muslim populations of 80% or more. When the threshold is broadened to 50% or more Muslim voters, that number rises to 207 booths, leaving only 40 booths below that mark. In other words, the “high Muslim” category is........

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