On December 16, 2025, West Bengal found itself at the center of a political storm after the Election Commission of India (ECI) published the draft Special Intensive Revision (SIR) voter list. The release, which saw over 58 lakh entries deleted, immediately drew comparisons to Assam’s controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise from 2019. But what unfolded in Bengal was a story full of unexpected twists, political accusations, and personal drama—none more dramatic than the experience of Surya De, a sitting councillor who discovered he had been declared dead by the authorities.
Surya De, a ward 18 councillor of Dankuni Municipality and a long-time resident of the Chanditala assembly constituency, was left stunned when he checked the new voter list. The ECI’s records marked him as ‘deceased.’ “A few of my aides called me and said that my name is featured as dead. At first, I did not believe it and thought that they were joking. Then I checked it myself and was shocked to see that I was declared dead by the Election Commission,” De told reporters, according to local news sources.
It was a moment that might have been comical, were it not for the seriousness of the situation. De, refusing to take the error lightly, decided to stage a protest that was both symbolic and biting. Accompanied by his supporters, he marched to the Kalipur crematorium, demanding that the Election Commission perform his last rites since, on paper, he was no longer among the living. “I have walked to the Kalipur crematorium for my own funeral. I am a public representative, yet I have been shown as deceased. If a public representative, who is alive, can be declared dead like this by the joint effort of the Election Commission and BJP, then one can imagine what they can do in the case of ordinary people,” he declared at the Chanditala BDO office.
De’s protest wasn’t just about his own name. He pointed out that, while his family members’ names remained on the rolls, other cases of wrongful deletions were cropping up in his ward. He promised to meet with colleagues and pursue corrective action, and even announced plans to protest in Delhi outside the Election Commission’s office. “I ask the chief election commissioner to come and burn me at the crematorium,” he said, blaming chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for the blunder. De was already in talks with the Block Development Officer (BDO) to fix the mistake, but the incident quickly became a symbol of larger anxieties surrounding the SIR process.
The SIR exercise in West Bengal, much like Assam’s NRC, was intended to clean up the voter rolls—to add new voters and remove those who had died, moved, or were not citizens. But the political context in Bengal made it a flashpoint. BJP leaders, including Suvendu Adhikari, had long alleged that West Bengal was home to “one crore Rohingyas and Bangladeshis,” stoking fears of demographic change and illegal voting. The SIR, they argued, would reveal the true extent of illegal immigration in the state. According to India Today, the exercise even prompted some suspected Bangladeshis to cross back into Bangladesh after the revision began, with Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Krishanu Mitra citing BSF data that 4,000 such individuals had left through the Hakimpur border.
Yet, when the draft SIR list was published, it upended many of these expectations. Analysis by The Indian Express and PTI revealed that, in nearly 80% of Muslim-dominated constituencies, the average deletion rate was a mere 0.6%. In contrast, Matua-dominated regions—home to a community of Bengali Hindus who migrated from Bangladesh—saw average deletions of around 9%. The biggest surprises, however, were in constituencies with sizeable Hindi-speaking populations, where deletion rates ranged from 15% to a staggering 36%. Jorasanko (36.66%), Chowringhee (35.45%), and Kolkata Port (26.09%) topped the list.
District-wise, the numbers told a similar story: Murshidabad saw just 4.84% of names deleted, while Malda recorded 6.31%. In none of the Muslim-majority districts did deletions exceed 10%. Out of the 58 lakh deletions, only 1.83 lakh were flagged as potential “ghost” or fake voters. The rest, according to TMC spokesperson Arup Chakraborty, were largely “people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in Bengal, not infiltrators from Bangladesh.”
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the TMC were quick to seize on the data, accusing the BJP and the ECI of conspiring to manipulate the voter list ahead of the 2026 state elections. “Election Commission is making the entire thing into a mockery. The list was released yesterday, did they find any infiltrator? They said there are a crore Rohingya, but could they find even one,” asked TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee, as reported by PTI. The TMC argued that the results punctured the BJP’s claims of mass infiltration, and that the real victims of the deletions were legitimate voters, often from marginalized communities.
The comparison to Assam’s NRC exercise was inevitable. When the final NRC was published in August 2019, only 19 lakh people—about 12.5% of applicants—were excluded, far fewer than many had predicted. In Assam, too, the highest exclusions were not in border districts, but in places like Hojai and Darrang. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary had argued that “due to misuse [of legacy data], comparatively fewer people were left out of the draft NRC in those [Bangladesh-bordering] districts.” The BJP voiced disappointment, while the All Assam Students Union (AASU) believed the number of exclusions should have been higher.
Back in Bengal, the SIR draft flagged 1.36 crore voters for further legacy document verification, with the claims-objections window open until January 15, 2026. The process is far from over, and the final impact remains to be seen. For now, the SIR has become West Bengal’s own NRC moment—one that has confounded political parties, exposed administrative errors, and left ordinary people, like Surya De, fighting to prove they are alive and eligible to vote.
As the state heads toward a pivotal election year, the SIR’s fallout will likely shape the political narrative for months to come. With millions still awaiting verification and the specter of further protests looming, the story of West Bengal’s voter list revision is far from finished.
In the midst of statistics and political grandstanding, the ordeal of Surya De serves as a sobering reminder: behind every number in the electoral rolls is a real person, whose voice—and vote—matters.