TMC alert on EC voter verification campaign: A backdoor NRC?

New Delhi: The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Saturday expressed grave concerns over the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) planned Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. While speaking to the media persons in the national capital, top TMC leaders and MPs accused the action, purportedly to cleanse voter rolls, of being a surreptitious bid to implement a National Register of Citizens (NRC)-type exercise. The party criticised the ECI of acting on behalf of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and cautioned that the suggested verification process threatens disenfranchisement of vast segments of Indian citizens, especially the poor, marginalised and migrant communities.

TMC leader Derek O’Brien questioned the timing of the exercise, linking it to what he described as the BJP’s desperation to alter its electoral prospects in West Bengal ahead of Assembly polls scheduled for next year. Under the proposed rules, voters born before January 1987 would have to provide proof of their birth and birthplace. These would include details of their own birth and one parent’s details for those born between 1987 and 2004, and their own and both their parents’ documents in the case of those born after 2004. Names would be removed from the electoral rolls if they weren’t provided within a month. TMC leaders say the conditions are unreasonable and discriminatory. They point to the woes of poor citizens, migrant labourers and undocumented workers, wondering how common citizens can provide birth certificates for their parents. Internal BJP polls indicate that the party would obtain a mere 46-49 seats in Bengal if Assembly elections were to be conducted today, leading to the present push for voter verification, O’Brien notes. The TMC’s contention is that the pilot initiative to start in Bihar and extend it to West Bengal shortly is part of a grand design to reorient electoral results.

O’Brien charged the Election Commission of India with not taking into account complaints about duplicate and fake voters, voiced months ago by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, while giving preference to an exercise that, according to him, has the resemblance of the Nazi period’s “ancestor pass.” TMC’s Rajya Sabha members Sagarika Ghose and Saket Gokhale also seconded these fears, terming the move as an unconstitutional bid to alter electoral rolls in West Bengal initially and ultimately throughout India. Ghose noted that while ECI was turning a blind eye to complaints about bogus voters purportedly brought from BJP-governed states, it is now targeting real voters via Special Intensive Revision. Gokhale characterised the push as a perilous exercise not just to erase names from the rolls but also to subvert citizenship itself. The TMC members of the Upper House, meanwhile, urged the rolling back immediately of the measure with a vow that the Opposition parties’ INDIA Bloc would also raise the issue aggressively within and outside Parliament. Aside from the policy criticism, O’Brien reminded that over the last year, TMC has won seven of the 11 bypolls that were conducted in Bengal, repeatedly widening its victory margins over 2024. In seats where the BJP had previously maintained comfortable leads, the TMC has now surpassed its Opposition. These outcomes, O’Brien contended, indicate public confidence in Mamata Banerjee’s incumbent government, including recent moves such as the TCN scheme, and demonstrate that Bengal is still strongly resistant to polarising politics. The party intends to further focus on these issues in future programmes, such as a “Bengal Means Business” campaign in the next Parliament session. For TMC, the battle against what it perceives as an NRC-by-stealth is not only a matter of voter rights protection, but also a battle for defending the constitutional principles of democracy and inclusivity, they asserted. The struggle over voter verification is set to be a make-or-break issue in the approach to the 2026 Assembly polls and beyond and Opposition parties are all to initiate public outreach campaigns.