India’s newest citizens caught in SIR adjudication trap

Dinhata residents Manmohan Barman and Md. Mujjamel Khandakar are among India’s newest voters, with their citizenship recognised through an international agreement, but that has not stopped the Election Commission of India from putting them into the uncertain category of “electorate under adjudication” ahead of the West Bengal Assembly election.

Mr. Barman, 66, and Mr. Khandakar, 64, are both now residents of the Dinhata Assembly constituency, in the Cooch Behar district. Just over a decade ago, however, they lived in Dasiarchara, an Indian enclave located deep within Bangladeshi territory. In July 2015, they were among 989 people scattered across 111 such Indian enclaves who chose to relocate to India after the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) was signed, when the territory of those enclaves was absorbed into Bangladesh. At the same time, 14,854 residents of 51 Bangladeshi enclaves located within Indian territory also became Indian citizens as per the LBA.

Over the past ten years of living as neighbours at a settlement for those who relocated from the enclaves, Mr. Barman and Mr. Khandakar have voted in several elections, but they have little hope that they will be able to vote in next month’s Assembly poll, given the hurdle posed by the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Stateless existence before 2015

When the ECI kicked off the SIR process in West Bengal in October 2025, residents of the settlement camp were sceptical about participating in the process. Their families have no legacy data to trace their ancestry to the 2002 voter list, since they had an effectively stateless existence before 2015. Sure enough, their names cropped up in the “logical discrepancies” list after the first phase of the SIR.

Now, nine members of the Khandakar family and four from the Barman family have found their voter status “under adjudication”. Their names were not included in the ECI’s first list of those cleared through adjudication on March 23, so their right to vote still hangs in the balance. If their names are not cleared by April 6, the last date for filing nominations for the first phase of polling, they will not be able to cast their ballots.

“If we were to be denied voting, why were we brought here under the [bilateral Land Boundary] Agreement? By bringing in this SIR, we have been pushed towards uncertainty,” Mr. Khandakar said.

‘Are we outsiders?’

The 58 families that have been living in the Dinhata enclave settlement camp since 2019, who have been provided apartments by the government, insist that they came to India through a bipartite agreement and thus should have not been subject to the SIR at all. Most of their youths have migrated for work and the elders fear that if their names are not cleared off the adjudication list, the youth may not return to vote.

“We are scared that about 80% of the electors in the settlement camp have been marked under adjudication by the ECI,” said Md. Saraul, who runs a small grocery shop inside the camp. He pointed out that women like his own wife, who were born in India and have married erstwhile enclave dwellers now residing in the settlement camp, have also been marked “under adjudication” in the ECI’s electoral lists.

Hamida Begum, 60, and Namita Barman, 39, both residents of the settlement camp, are also angry. “Why did they put us under adjudication? Are we outsiders? The government brought us and now says we have no voting rights,” Ms. Barman said. “It is the administration that has failed us. We will go to the District Magistrate and protest if denied voting rights,” both the women said.

Communal pattern

Osman Gani is a resident of the Dinhata camp but works as a quack doctor at Madhya Masaldanga, an erstwhile Bangladeshi enclave that became part of India during the 2015 LBA-sanctioned swap of enclaves. He claims that that there is a communal design in the way voters from minority communities have been kept “under adjudication”.

“There are three enclave settlement camps for people who came from Bangladesh, located at Dinhata, Haldibari, and Meklhliganj. The camps at Haldibari and Mekhliganj have Hindu majority so most of the people have been cleared as voters during SIR. It is in Muslim majority areas that the names of electors remains stuck,” Mr. Gani said. Several other residents of erstwhile enclaves, such as Chhatar Ali from Dakshin Masaldanga, echoed the accusations of a communal pattern in the SIR’s results.

Mr. Gani says that Dinhata MLA and Minister for North Bengal Development Udayan Guha had insisted that they should attend SIR hearings and write ‘enclave residents’ on the SIR forms wherever legacy data was sought. Mr. Guha is contesting the election again as a Trinamool candidate, pitted against the BJP’s Ajay Roy.

“We had hoped for a better life, when we left everything behind. If they put me in a detention camp, so be it. We should never have gone for the SIR hearings in the first place,” Mr. Gani said, adding that he would not approach any official or politician if he is not allowed to vote.

‘Pushed into darkness’

The residents of Madhya Masaldanga say that since their right to vote is doubtful in the run-up to this election, no candidate has even reached out to them. Joynal Abedin, a youth from Madhya Masaldanga who was part of several movements demanding Indian citizenship before the agreement, has checked his status on the electoral roll several times, but is disappointed that his name is still “under adjudication”.

“We will not let any election-related officials or politicians enter our area unless we are granted the right to vote,” he said. Mr. Abedin feels that after a decade of citizenship, he and other residents of erstwhile enclaves whose names are under adjudication have been pushed into the same darkness as before. 

There were about 2.38 lakh electors that were put under adjudication during SIR from Cooch Behar. There is no clarity as to how many names have been cleared in the first phase of adjudication. According to the office of the Chief Electoral Officer, about 29 lakh cases of the 60 lakh pending under the SIR were cleared by the midnight of March 23.