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Nearly 27.16 Lakh people will not be able to vote in the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections, as per official numbers cited by the Election Commission of India. This, after deletion of their names from the electoral rolls following adjudication by judicial officers.
A data analysis of these deletions, however, shows that they aren't evenly distributed. More than half of them are concentrated in just a handful of districts.
Murshidabad alone accounts for 4.55 lakh deletions, the highest in the state. It is followed by North 24 Parganas (3.25 lakh), Malda (2.39 lakh), South 24 Parganas (2.22 lakh), and Purba Bardhaman (2.09 lakh).
Together, these five districts make up over 53 percent of all deletions in West Bengal.
At a late night press conference on Monday, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), announced that the voters’ list for the first phase would be frozen at midnight.
"Voters whose names have been deleted by judicial officials can approach the appellate tribunal. If their names are cleared by the tribunal, they will be included in the voters’ list and can cast their votes later, but not in this election," he said.
For context, nearly 60 Lakh electors were marked as 'under adjudication' after the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls in West Bengal. These were electors who were marked 'doubtful' by Election Officers during the revision process.
Numbers alone, however, don’t tell the full story here.
A Clear Geographic Pattern
A closer look at districts which top the deletions reveals that many of them are either border districts or densely populated electoral zones with significant minority populations.
Murshidabad and Malda, both bordering Bangladesh, have some of the highest Muslim populations in the state.
North and South 24 Parganas include large minority belts, especially in areas like Basirhat and Diamond Harbour.
Uttar Dinajpur, another high-deletion district, is also nearly evenly split between Hindu and Muslim populations.
Absolute Numbers vs Deletion Rates
Interestingly, while minority-heavy districts dominate in absolute deletion numbers, they do not always top the list in deletion rates.
For instance:
Murshidabad, despite the highest deletions, has a deletion rate of around 41 percent.
Malda is even lower, at roughly 29 percent.
In contrast:
Nadia (78 percent)
Hooghly (70 percent)
North 24 Parganas (55 percent)
show far higher proportions of people being declared ineligible.
This suggests that while minority-heavy districts are seeing the largest volume of deletions, the intensity of deletions varies sharply across districts.
Who Dominates These Districts?
Once we overlay this data with West Bengal’s political map, and another pattern becomes clear.
Most of the districts with the highest deletions, Murshidabad, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Howrah, Hooghly, and Purba Bardhaman, have been strongholds of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in recent elections.
Only a few among the high-deletion districts, like Cooch Behar and parts of Nadia, have shown stronger BJP performance in recent electoral cycles.
This means that a significant portion of deletions is occurring in areas where the ruling party has historically had strong electoral footing.
The Caste Question
Several high-deletion districts, Nadia, South 24 Parganas, Hooghly, and Cooch Behar, have large Scheduled Caste (SC) populations, in some cases exceeding 25–30 percent.
For example:
Cooch Behar has over 50 percent SC population
Nadia and South 24 Parganas hover around 30 percent
By contrast, districts with high Scheduled Tribe (ST) populations, like Purulia and Jhargram, show relatively low deletion numbers in comparison.
This suggests that the impact of deletions may be falling more heavily on SC-heavy districts than ST-heavy ones, even though both are socio-economically vulnerable groups.
So, Is There a Correlation?
A district-level comparison suggests a clear positive relationship between Muslim population share and total deletions. That is, districts with higher Muslim populations are seeing higher absolute numbers of people being removed from the rolls.
What This Means
What this data tells us is that deletions are:
Geographically clustered
Concentrated in electorally critical districts
Overlapping significantly with minority-heavy and SC-heavy regions
Largely occurring in areas dominated by one political party
None of this, on its own, establishes intent. But it does raise important questions about how uniformly the adjudication process has been applied across the state.
Beyond The Data, What Next?
For many electors in the state, the challenge begins even before adjudication. With all 19 tribunals not fully functional and entirely located in Kolkata, voters from districts like Malda and Murshidabad, where the bulk of deletions and “unaccounted” cases are emerging, are effectively being asked to travel hundreds of kilometres simply to prove their citizenship.
For large sections of rural and economically vulnerable populations, this is not just inconvenient, it is exclusionary.
The uncertainty doesn’t end there. There is no clear timeline for appeals to be decided, leaving voters in prolonged limbo, and more crucially, no clarity on whether those eventually cleared will be allowed to vote in time for elections.
(Flourish charts by Aditya Menon)