NEW DELHI: A key opposition Indian politician has threatened legal action against the election commission after millions of people were struck off electoral rolls, the latest flashpoint over a contentious voter clean-up drive.
A sweeping voter registration overhaul -- known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) -- meant to remove ineligible voters but which critics say is skewed against marginalised and minority communities, kicked off last year in several states and territories.
Many of these regions voted Thursday to elect local governments, with two other states slated to go to polls later this month.
That includes West Bengal, a state with roughly 100 million people led by Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress party, where it has run into furious opposition.
West Bengal is also a crucial election battleground, which Prime Minister Narendara Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never governed.
- Move to court -
Banerjee, the state's chief minister, accused India's Election Commission of "working at the behest of the BJP" to strike off her supporters from the state's electoral rolls.
"We will move court again to resist the exclusion of names," she told her supporters at an election rally on Wednesday.
A previous challenge by Banerjee, one of Modi's most formidable opponents, is pending in the Supreme Court.
Members of Modi's BJP have long claimed that large numbers of undocumented Muslim migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh have fraudulently entered India's electoral rolls. West Bengal shares a 2,217 kilometre (1,378 mile) long border with Bangladesh.
The Election Commission, in its defence of the SIR, has said it is in part to avoid "foreign illegal immigrants" from voting.
The SIR drive in West Bengal was carried out in two phases.
In the first, around 6.3 million names were deleted, with officials citing routine reasons such as deaths or voters having moved out of the state.
A second, more controversial phase, flagged another six million voters for "adjudication", a category introduced for the first time in West Bengal, which relied on software to identify anomalies such as spelling mismatches.
Muslims, who make up a quarter of the state's population, were disproportionately flagged for this extra scrutiny, according to at least two independent analyses of Election Commission data.
Of those flagged, about 2.7 million were finally found to be ineligible to vote, the Election Commission's data released earlier this week, raising the total number of exclusions to over nine million -- or roughly 12 percent of the electorate.
The 2.7 million left out after the second phase can still appeal their exclusion. But with the tribunals set up to adjudicate such matters still not fully operational, a decision is unlikely before voting begins on April 23.
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