Two days after the Election Commission of India (ECI) released the district-level electoral roll data after the segregation exercise, it also released more detailed and politically salient figures at the electoral district (AC) level in West Bengal.
The statistics only serve to magnify the skew in voter removals in the judicial adjudication process compared to the pre-adjudication Special Intensive Review (SIR) exercise in the state. For context, 13 states and union territories have undergone SIR so far (although the final list is awaited in Uttar Pradesh), and Assam has undergone the Special Review (SR) exercise. But West Bengal is the only state that underwent a special arbitration process after the SIR process.
The state saw a net deletion of 6.2 million voters between pre-SIR and pre-separation exercise, and another 2.7 million were deleted in the segregation exercise, bringing the total net deletions to 8.9 million. To be sure, the state’s final voter count before the election could still change due to the addition of new voters and the fate of 22,163 voters, who have yet to be adjudicated.
However, how does the arbitration process differ from the pre-adjudication SIR process in West Bengal? Here’s what the data shows.
Provisional deletions are more skewed at the advisory committee level
West Bengal saw 8.1% of its pre-SIR voters deleted in the pre-separation SIR exercise and another 3.9% from the pre-separation list during the separation exercise. However, the degree of skewness in these two rounds of deletions is quite different, and adjudication-related deletions are significantly concentrated in fewer advisory committees than those that existed before adjudication. A look at the decile deletions – from the bottom to the top 10% across ACs – shows this clearly. The lowest 10% deletion before separation was less than 3.59% (D1) and the highest 10% deletion was higher than 15.2% (D9), giving a ratio of 4.2 between D1 and D9. D1 and D9 for deletions from the pre-separation list to the post-separation list are 0.31% and 7.93%, i.e. a ratio of 25.8. (See chart 1)
One of the main reasons for the greater skew in deletions during adjudications is the disproportionate deletions that occurred in ACs that are likely Muslim-dominated. Hizb ut-Tahrir has compiled a list of 67 electoral boards that saw at least one Muslim MLA elected in the 2011, 2016 and 2021 Assembly elections in West Bengal. This would indicate the presence of a large number of Muslim voters in the capital. The pre-2011 boundaries cannot be compared with the current ones because the demarcation process in 2008 led to a change in the AC boundaries. These 67 committees had a 23% share in the state voter list before SIR. They saw a 19.1% pre-SIR state share of pre-separation electorate removal, which is somewhat in line with their pre-SIR share of total voters. But they captured a 46% share of voters placed under judicial segregation and now account for 40.5% of segregation removals. These electoral commissions have certainly not seen a sharp decline in their electoral share in the state, which remains at 22.6% so far. (See chart 2)
However, neither pre-separation deletions, nor post-separation deletions, appear to indicate a relationship with PAC-level margins of victory in the last (2024) state election or with party-level winners. (See charts 3a, 3b).
