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Bengali lecturer at University of Manchester removed from electoral rolls
15 Apr 2026

Mehebub Sahana, a 36-year-old lecturer at the University of Manchester, who was looking forward to visiting West Bengal this April and cast his vote, found out at the last minute that his name had been removed from the electoral rolls.

He had planned to vote in the upcoming assembly elections and visit his ancestral village in Purba Bardhaman district.

However, days before his trip, he discovered that his name had been deleted from the voter list.

Sahana's name was kept 'under adjudication'
Family impact

"The list was published on 31 March. I came to know about the deletion on 5 April," Sahana, who is a Leverhulme Fellow and Lecturer in Geographic Information Systems at The University of Manchester, told LiveMint.

Sahana's name was kept in the "under adjudication" category without any proper explanation.

"When we came to know....I decided to cancel the tickets. We wanted to travel for vote and finish some pending tasks in our village. But now everything is canceled," he said.

'They did not even give us a proper reason'
Family

Sahana's family members, including his father Abdul Qudoos Sahana, brother, and sister, also found their names missing from the electoral rolls.

"They did not even give us a proper reason. My father gave all documents. He has voted in the same village since the1980s. But there was a mismatch with 2002 voter list. He even has an arms license that he inherited from his father. He gave all documents—passport, Aadhar, election card and whatnot," he said.

91 lakh names deleted from Bengal voter list
Voter list purge

The ECI's SIR exercise has so far deleted 91 lakh names from West Bengal's voter list. The process started in February with 58 lakh deletions, followed by another six lakh.

The final adjudication list published on March 31 saw around 27 lakh more deletions.

While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supports this move as a way to cleanse electoral rolls of "illegal infiltrators," all other political parties in West Bengal oppose it.

Bengal poll details
Election schedule

The West Bengal assembly elections will be held in two phases: the first on April 23 and the second on April 29. The results will be declared on May 4.

Recently, the Supreme Court refused to grant interim voting rights to West Bengal voters whose names were deleted during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process and whose appeals are still pending before appellate tribunals.