Adjudication cloud over West Bengal candidates

{ S.I.R. OF ELECTORAL ROLLS

- Joydeep Thakur

Kalita Majhi, 38, is the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) candidate from Ausgram assembly constituency in East Burdwan, West Bengal in the coming elections. She was the party's candidate from the same constituency in the 2021 assembly polls also, but lost to the Trinamool Congress's (TMC) Abhedananda Thander by around 11,800 votes.

Swati Khandoker, 59, is the TMC candidate from Chanditala in Hooghly and a sitting legislator. She has been contesting elections since 2006 and won four of them. In the 2021 election, she defeated Debashish Dasgupta of the BJP by 41,347 votes

Yet, Majhi and Khandoker are bound by something that spans the political divide — and in West Bengal, there is none as deep as the one between the BJP and the TMC — and also the gap between the elected and the defeated. They are among the six million voters whose eligibility to be part of the electoral roll is “under adjudication”. That translates into roughly 8.57% of the electorate. A simple extrapolation, assuming four candidates (conservatively) for each of the 294 assembly seats in the state, suggests that 100 could be “under adjudication”.