For weeks now, Antu Sheikh has been going through a pile of documents stacked in a soiled plastic bag.
Ever since his name was deleted from the electoral rolls in India’s West Bengal state, the 40-year-old railway construction worker fears he could lose more than just his right to vote.
Sheikh is among 9 million West Bengal residents removed from the electoral rolls days before the state elections were held in April and May. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time in the politically critical state that is home to more than 100 million people, 27 percent of them Muslim.
The controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR), an exercise being conducted by India’s election commission across the country, was launched to identify deceased, duplicate or dubious voters. In West Bengal, a state that borders Muslim-majority Bangladesh, the SIR was defended by Modi’s government as a means to remove “infiltrators” or “illegal” Bangladeshi migrants.
But an analysis of the deletions by experts showed that Muslims were disproportionately affected by the SIR, especially in districts where they constituted a high percentage of the population and could sway the vote, including Murshidabad, where Sheikh lives.
Now, he fears that losing the vote was only the start of his SIR-related struggles.
This story was originally published in aljazeera.com. Read the full story here.