As the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls unfolds across Bengal, CPIML Liberation and AIPWA have intensified their ground-level intervention to counter the deepening distress among marginalised women and the rural poor.
In North 24-Parganas, CPIML volunteers have turned a village volleyball court in Naihati into a people’s help centre, assisting residents who lack formal documents. “Since the SIR in Bihar, we have been raising the issue and how it is a project to exclude marginalised sections of society. With the SIR in Bengal, we are doing mass outreach to ensure that no voter is left out,” said Subrata Sengupta, CPIML North 24-Parganas secretary.
AIPWA teams working in Calcutta slums and villages in Hooghly, East Burdwan and North 24-Parganas report that the burden of documentation is falling hardest on women. “Whenever an exercise depends heavily on documents, those at the margins suffer most, and women are the ones most severely affected. We are intensifying our campaign so that the nefarious design of the SIR, which is aimed at exclusion, doesn’t succeed,” said Chandrasmita Chowdhuri, AIPWA Calcutta district secretary.
AIPWA notes that women are historically excluded from land deeds and family records. Women have far fewer documents than men. Most land papers are in men’s names, and many women were not born in hospitals and have no birth certificates.
Mitali Biswas of AIPWA, who has helped lead camps in tribal and working-class areas, said that apart from supporting people to fill their forms, they are also running a political campaign to expose the real intent behind the SIR process. She added that in Bihar, more women voters were removed from the electoral roll than men.
Hundreds of people are attending the CPIML–AIPWA camps, and the party has called for intensifying the outreach initiative to ensure no voter is left out and to protect the people’s hard-earned right to vote.
