WEST BENGAL, India – As campaign rallies, television theatrics, and symbolic culture-war politics dominated headlines in India’s West Bengal election, millions of voters were dealing with a less visible crisis: their names missing from the electoral rolls.After more than a decade without a voter-roll-revision controversy of this reported scale in West Bengal, the latest exercise has triggered widespread political and administrative debate.In Sarishakhola village in Keshpur, forty-four-year-old Isratan Bibi was troubled by the fact that four names from her family’s household allegedly disappeared from the voter list ahead of polling.While election authorities say the revision was meant to remove duplicate, deceased, and relocated voters, the scale of the exercise has triggered alarm across West Bengal. Publicly reported figures and political estimates vary, but opposition parties and civil society groups have claimed that millions of names were affected during the revision exercise, raising concerns over the scale and transparency of the process.A group of men lined up waiting to vote in the election in West Bengal. (Sajad Hameed / Jacobin)Officials maintain that eligible citizens can still seek corrections. Critics counter that for workers, migrants, elderly residents, and rural households, the burden of proving the right to vote has become a barrier in itself.For affected families, the controversy is not abstract. In Sarishakala village, relatives of Bibi corroborate her complaint that four names from their twelve-member household were missing from the rolls before polling, including that of her husband, Sheikh Nawabjan Ali, a daily-wage laborer.In Murshidabad district, other residents reported similar shocks after finding names that had appeared in previous elections absent this time. Such accounts do not by themselves prove coordinated targeting, but they show how a bureaucratic exercise can quickly become a crisis of trust when voters discover the…
