In West Bengal, the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of voter rolls is not just about numbers, but also about reconfiguring power equations and generating narratives about who has the right to participate in the country's affairs.
Citizens are fighting through a morass of mismatched documents and India's paper bureaucracy, encountering the ad-hoc nature of inclusion and the fogginess of 'discrepancies' severe enough to cost them the right to vote.
The murkiness around exclusion has engendered polarisation and fundamentally altered notions of citizenship, with no clear understanding of why neighbours were struck from the electoral rolls.
The connection between citizenship and voting has led citizens to seek redress from ill-fitting, contradictory documentary procedures, with some Hindus achieving legitimacy through political patronage, while Muslims are forced to 'document their legitimacy.'
As a result, a differentiated citizenship between Hindus and Muslims is emerging, with the State keeping Muslims on a tight leash, asking them to prove their identity again and again to live in the country.
