Special Intensive Revision: A Covert NRC to Snatch Citizenship
The opposition parties neither speak of how Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is a covert NRC that threatens the citizenship of those opposing the BJP and RSS forces, nor do they speak of how the government, the Election Commission, and the Supreme Court are engaged in a fascist collusion
Prior to the elections taking place in West Bengal, around 91 lakh names were removed from the Electoral Rolls through SIR (Special Intensive Revision) process. This amounted to more than 10% of West Bengal’s electorate. 34% of the overall names removed, amounting to just over 31 lakh removals, were of Muslims, who only make up around 27% of West Bengal’s population. In other words, Muslims were removed at a disproportional rate from the voter lists. Compared to West Bengal’s 70% Hindu population, 63% of the removals through SIR were of Hindus.
Several facts point that the SIR procedure played an important role in BJP’s unprecedented first-time victory in the West Bengal elections. In 150 seats, the total number of voter deletions was greater than the victory margins. BJP won 99 of these 150 seats. It had won only 19 of the same 150 seats in 2021. In some Muslim-majority constituencies, more than half the voters were deleted from the voter list, leading to completely unexpected BJP victories.
According to The Wire, in 49 constituencies with UA (under-adjudication) voter deletions outnumbering the winning margin, where the Muslim population share was higher than the state population share by 7%, the BJP won 26 seats when it had only won 1 seat in the 2021 election. The TMC, which had won 48 of these 49 seats in 2021, only won 21 seats in this election. Evidence shows that a majority of the constituencies affected by SIR voter deletions were places where power shifted from the hands of TMC to BJP.
According to an interview conducted by The Guardian, in the district of Sherpur, majority of Muslims, who “proved” their citizenship by providing the documents demanded from them, were still removed from the voter lists. Even Jaber Ali, the person who was officially appointed to collect documents and make records for households in this district, was removed from the voter list!
If our perspective on the situation is limited to these facts alone, it would appear that the purpose of SIR was to facilitate electoral victories for the BJP by removing opposition voters from the electoral rolls. In other words, it would appear merely as a revoking of voter rights. The INDIA bloc puts forth this exact perspective, raising concerns against SIR only from the perspective of a concern for voter rights, and that too, only when SIR affects their own election outcomes. They do not heed to calls made by revolutionary forces and bourgeois intellectuals alike to boycott elections. The extent of their actions taken against the SIR is limited to filing cases in the Supreme Court, which continually ruled in favour of the BJP and the ECI. In order for our perspective to correspond with the true nature of SIR, we must take into account the way in which the government and the ECI classify and handle the deleted voters, and the deportations and “Hindu Rashtra” projects of BJP and RSS.
Also Read: Hindu Assertion and Fragmentation of Muslim Votes: How BJP Won West Bengal
During the West Bengal election campaigns, Home Minister Amit Shah and the current Chief Minister of West Bengal Suvendhu Adhikari, as well as all of the BJP’s electoral candidates, propagated to the ‘Hindus’ of West Bengal that “illegal immigrants and refugees in the state will be deported” following which “the Uniform Civil Code will be implemented.”
Reflecting on the 91 lakh voter deletions during BJP’s campaigns, Narendra Modi stated that SIR had “removed illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators from the voter list.” Amit Shah, in turn, stated that SIR “protects India’s democratic system from being polluted.” He also promised that “when BJP comes to power on May 6th in West Bengal, we will identify every infiltrator in the state and deport them.”
Aiming to fulfill this promise, Suvendhu Adhikari announced on May 20th that the government will undertake “Detect, Delete, and Deport,” a procedure to target Muslims, strip their citizenship away, and force them out of the country. On May 23rd, Home and Hill Affairs Department’s Foreigners Branch directed all district administrations in West Bengal to identify the "illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya residents" in their regions and prepare a detention camp for them according to the instructions given by the Home Ministry.
In less than 48 hours following this order, a three-storied commercial building in Murshidabad, a district bordering Bangladesh, was converted into a detention camp, and three individuals were immediately placed there as “suspected infiltrators awaiting deportation.” Another detention camp was opened up in Malda, and nine “suspected Bangladeshi citizens” were quickly placed there as well.
West Bengal’s rapid and large-scale preparations for deportation are made possible by SIR, which has already completed the “detecting” and “deleting” for Suvendhu Adhikari’s government. As Adhikari himself stated during the campaigns, when the SIR deletions had just been completed, “first they were removed from the voter list, now they will be deported.”
The very people removed from the electoral rolls by the SIR are the people the BJP government intends to classify as “infiltrators” and “suspectful citizens,” throw in their new detention camps, and quickly deport them to their alleged countries of origin. A perspective which takes these facts into account sees SIR as a mechanism to snatch away the citizenship rights of minorities and anti-fascist forces (including Hindus who oppose the RSS-BJP), not just as a distorted and unjust form of voter verification.
Not just people who were “detected and deleted” by SIR in West Bengal, but all citizens of the country who participate in the SIR procedure can be subjected to the snatching of citizenship rights on the basis of failing to meet SIR’s requirements. The proof of this is the fact that the Election Commission declared that those whose names are removed by SIR will be listed out to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) as “suspectful citizens.”
The effort to remove minorities and those opposing the BJP from the country is not restricted to West Bengal. It is prevalent in all states, and even in coastal states like Tamil Nadu, where RSS and right-wing ideologues like J. Sai Deepak propagate that Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators from the sea are living amongst the local population, especially in growing industrial hubs like Tiruppur and Coimbatore. The Hindutva forces state that their intent is to deport these refugees specifically, but in reality they are eager to remove all Muslims, minorities, and anti-fascist forces from the country—SIR paves the way.
Why was Assam the only state where SIR was not conducted prior to the 2026 assembly elections? Because the NRC (National Register Of Citizens) had already been implemented in Assam. When implemented, NRC decitizenizes the entire population to which it applies. Each decitizenized person is then asked to “prove” his citizenship to the state in order to reclaim it. Those who fail to prove their citizenship according to the standards created by the saffron-fascist mob are declared “infiltrators,” “anti-nationals,” or “urban-naxals,” from which it becomes clear that the state plans to put them in detention camps or deport them.
The NRC failed to become law in all states except Assam due to the nationwide protests and opposition from Muslims and student groups. Now, in the form of a routine voter verification process, SIR delineates Muslims and genuine oppositions to BJP as infiltrators to be deported or suspectful citizens to be put in detention camps, fulfilling the purpose of NRC.
SIR, therefore, is nothing but the concealed reimplementation of NRC. Not just the exception made in Assam, but the ECI’s declaration that SIR removals will automatically be listed as “suspectful citizens,” and Adhikari’s statement “first they were removed from the voter list, now they will be deported,” which is reflected in the current construction of detention camps in West Bengal, thoroughly confirm this fact. SIR is a thinly veiled NRC.
It is futile to expect fairness from the ECI, or a robust opposition to SIR’s implementation from the opposition parties or the Supreme Court. Even bourgeois intellectuals like Parakala Prabhakar and Avay Shukla point out that the Election Commission is nothing but the BJP’s puppet. The SC also recently “upheld” the unconstitutional SIR process as “constitutional duty of the ECI”! What else can we expect from these two (ECI and SC) institutions!
The opposition parties reduce the problem of SIR’s implementation to an issue of voting rights, and only oppose it to the extent that it benefits their own election campaigns. They neither speak of how SIR is a covert NRC that threatens the citizenship of anti BJP-RSS forces in the country, nor do they speak of how the government, the Election Commission, and the Supreme Court are engaged in a fascist collusion. They abstain from presenting the true nature of the fascist onslaught because it only reveals that they are utterly incapable of resisting it.
Hence, we must start a non-cooperation movement today. We must tear off the veil of the Modi clique that is implementing NRC in a back-door, conspiratorial manner. We must roar that we will not comply with this conspiracy, we will not fill SIR forms. We must throw those forms in the face of the saffron fascist clique led by Modi.
Our beloved India has been built with the blood and sweat of farmers, workers, and working people like us. Our ancestors’ labour and blood are mixed in every building and institution of this country. In the freedom struggle against the British, Hindus and Muslims stood hand in hand and fought on the battlefield; we shed blood. But what right does the RSS fascist clique, which served as slaves to the British then and serves American imperialism today, have to ask us for documents?! Who are they to examine our citizenship?!
Let us declare that it is the saffron-fascist gang led by the RSS that are anti-nationals! Let us roar that we will never allow the Indian nation to be transformed into a Hindu Rashtra under any circumstances! Let us start our struggle as a non-cooperation movement against the SIR process and grow it into a prairie fire that burn saffron-corporate fascism into ashes!
Sources:
https://senkanal.com/index.php/en/2025/12/10/sir-is-here-to-snach-away-citizenship-tamilnadu-stand-defiant/
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/first-they-were-deleted-from-voter-list-now-they-will-be-deported-suvendu-adhikari-on-infiltrators-after-bengal-win-13923183.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/22/india-west-bengal-state-elections-millions-stripped-of-vote
https://progressive.international/observatory/2026-04-28-9-1-million-voters-deleted/en
https://www.thehindu.com/elections/west-bengal-assembly/of-90-lakh-voters-excluded-by-sir-in-west-bengal-63-are-hindus-34-are-Muslims/article70843569.ece
https://thewire.in/rights/sir-deletions-bjp-win-bengal-asdd-deletions-under-adjudication
[Originally published by Senkanal - a Marxist-Leninist magazine from Tamil Nadu.]
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