Millions in India’s Bengal risk losing welfare benefits after vote deletion

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 whom are 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.

Shortly after coming to power, the BJP government in West Bengal announced that those excluded from the voter list would no longer be eligible for subsidised food rations and other state-run welfare schemes. An order issued by West Bengal’s Food and Supplies Department on June 4, and accessed by Al Jazeera, said the ration cards of people removed under the SIR will be marked inactive, as authorities began a verification drive of the beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System (PDS), a government food security scheme that serves nearly 90 million people in West Bengal.