Listen to this article:

In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until observed. In contemporary Bengal, that paradox has acquired a bureaucratic form. The voter, too, can exist in a state of superposition, simultaneously verified and deleted, present and absent, until the system decides otherwise.

I know this not as metaphor, but as experience.

On March 30, 2026, I, along with lakhs of voters in West Bengal, discovered that my name no longer appeared on the electoral roll. When I checked the Election Commission of India’s website on March 31, my status was ‘deleted’. As of April 14, the website says that I am ‘excluded’. In many cases like mine, this followed compliance with the procedures laid out under the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise. I had filed the online enumeration form tracing lineage, submitted relevant documents, and duly initiated a request for address change. The ECI website still says that my field verification was satisfactorily completed on February 18, and on February 26, the status changed to ‘accepted’. Thus the field verification conducted in mid-February confirmed my presence at a given address, only for that same voter – me – to be marked ‘deleted’ by the end of March. ‘Logical discrepancies’ clearly come in many forms. 

This is not a clerical error in the ordinary sense. It is not the kind of mistake that can be dismissed with a shrug and a promise of correction. What is at stake is something far more fundamental: the quiet transformation of citizenship into a probabilistic condition. To be a voter is to be counted. It is to occupy a place in the ledger of the state, to be legible to the machinery that translates presence into participation. When that legibility breaks down, what remains is not merely inconvenience. It is a form of suspension. As of April 13, almost 34 lakh appeals pending at the tribunal in West Bengal occupy that liminal space – waiting for natural justice, waiting for........

© The Wire