In the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of West Bengal’s electoral rolls, judicial officers heard 11 lakh voters in Murshidabad and found 4.55 lakh of them not eligible to vote. One district accounted for one in six of every name marked suspended to vote in the state.Abu Taher Khan, Khalilur Rahman and Yusuf Pathan represent that district. The three MPs were elected on Trinamool Congress tickets in 2024. They belong, now, to the Lok Sabha group of the TMC which has merged with the fledgling Nationalist Citizens Party of India. This month, the three skipped two consecutive National Democratic Alliance meetings, letting it be known they were uneasy about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s record on Muslims. Then they met Union home minister Amit Shah, and on August 7 were at breakfast with Prime Minister Narendra Modi among other 17 TMC-turned-NCPI parliamentarians. They were not joining the BJP, they explained, and were not in the NDA but had merely placed two issues before the people in power – relief for voters struck off the rolls and an assurance that microphone rules would not be turned against religious practice.Thus, it seems, that their objection was not to sitting with the BJP in a meeting or eating with leaders of the NDA. It was to being listed as the NDA.How Muslims were treated in the SIRWhat the MPs spoke of in New Delhi is worth setting out at the scale it actually happened. The revision, known as the SIR, drew about 7.8% of the state’s electorate into the adjudication process, where a voter had to satisfy a judicial officer that they were eligible to be in the rolls. In Murshidabad it held back 19.1% – nearly one in five of the district’s electorate. Among districts, only Malda and Uttar Dinajpur were exposed more heavily, and all three sit in the same belt.To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.The statewide gradient is unmistakable. Across the 160 assembly seats where Muslims are under 20% of the population, an average of 4% of voters were called in. In the 19 seats where Muslims are above 60% of the population, it was 24.8% – six times the exposure.What happened after the summons runs the other way, and the distinction matters. Those high-minority seats recorded a lower rejection rate, 35% against 50% in the least-minority seats, and lower routine draft deletion besides.Samserganj, 72% Muslim, had 42.9% of its electorate summoned and lost 36.3% of its roll. However, religion is not the whole of it. Statewide, 60 lakh voters were heard and 27 lakh were found not eligible. Add Malda and Uttar Dinajpur, Murshidabad’s neighbours in the same belt, and three adjacent districts account for close to a third of every name struck off in Bengal.This mattered in the polls. In 49 constituencies, adjudication deletions alone exceeded the winning margin, and restoring them on 2021 patterns flips 11 seats. While the SIR did not produce the BJP’s landslide win, it plausibly decided a cluster of close contests, and the closest were here.On the same day that the NCPI MPs met Modi for breakfast, the faction of TMC MLAs who now form the recognised opposition went to Nabanna, the state secretariat, and put the same two demands to Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Eleven of the 13 who went were from minority communities. Two delegations, one in Delhi and one at Nabanna, made a case for the same voters on the same two issues on the same day.They asked for tribunals at the district and block level, and for the filing deadline to be extended by six months. If the demand is refused, said Ritabrata Banerjee, the Leader of the Opposition in the assembly, “We will have no option but to launch a major movement on the streets with the affected people.”West Bengal Legislative Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose, left, with West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari and and Rebel Trinamool Congress MLA Ritabrata Banerjee, right, during a tribute paying ceremony to Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, at West Bengal Legislative Assembly, in Kolkata, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2026. Photo: PTI.Murshidabad’s Raghunathganj MLA Mohammad Akhruzzaman, the opposition chief whip, argued it with numbers. The chief minister had told them that 7 lakh people had applied. By the opposition’s count, close to 20 lakh still do not understand what the process requires of them. “We do not want any bogus voter to remain on the rolls. But in the process of identifying fraudulent voters, no genuine citizen should be excluded,” he said. “If necessary, we will seek the intervention of the courts.”The chief minister, according to sources, told the legislators to identify issues and play an effective role, and warned them against sitting back on the basis of his assurances. However, Adhikari can afford to be generous. He has just won an election in which the removal of names he has described as those of “illegal immigrants” was a central promise, and the men across the table were asking him to undo the part of it that had worked.On paper, anyone found not eligible can appeal to a tribunal and be put back. But that machinery was constituted under court direction, with the Election Commission administering it, which is why the tribunals rather than the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister are the whole of this issue. How many tribunals there are, where they sit and how long people have to file are not in the gift of the men either delegation went to see.They were also three weeks late. On July 17 the Supreme Court took the matter up. A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued notices to the Election Commission, the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal and the state government, on a petition filed by Prasenjit Bose of the Bengal Congress. It asks for a streamlined appellate process, disclosure of the data, publication of the standard operating procedure the tribunals are working to, and a time-bound mechanism for clearing the appeals. Which is very nearly the list the MLAs carried into Nabanna three weeks afterwards.The same hearing produced the figure that matters. The Commission said 34 lakh appeals were pending before the tribunals, against the “seven lakh” the chief minister spoke of at Nabanna. The two counts are not measuring quite the same thing, since the Commission’s total includes objections seeking to strike names out as well as appeals to put them back. But of those 34 lakhs, the court was told, roughly 38,000 had been heard.What Suvendu could have done – but did not doThere was one item, though, that a chief minister could have settled that morning without anyone’s permission. The same petition alleges that people struck off the rolls are being denied welfare benefits, and the court has asked his government to answer for it. Rations, pensions and scheme access are subjects of state administration. No tribunal has to rule before a district magistrate can be told that a missing name is not a reason to stop a person’s right to welfare. Of the two demands 11 minority MLAs carried into Nabanna, that was not one of them.The three MPs made no such request either. They came back from Delhi with a photograph.Why go at all? The answer has less to do with the rolls than with an arithmetic worked out in June. Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule shields defectors from disqualification where two-thirds of a legislature party agrees to a merger. Two-thirds of 28 Trinamool MPs is 19. Twenty went.Nobody resigned and nobody faced a by-election. The numbers in Delhi improved, and the three kept seats they had won with Mamata Banerjee’s face on the posters and her symbol on the ballot, two years after asking Murshidabad to vote for her against the BJP.And yet the same men will not say the word BJP out loud, because home is where the other arithmetic lives. Minorities make up something close to three quarters of the combined base across Murshidabad, Jangipur and Baharampur, and those voters did not send three NDA-friendly representatives to Parliament. At home, they have a lot to answer to their constituents.Abu Taher understands the danger best, which is probably why he keeps announcing that he will not join the BJP. He was a Congress MLA in Naoda for 18 years before switching in 2019, and his 2024 affidavit declares three pending criminal cases, including attempt to murder. A man in that position has a practical interest in good terms with whoever runs the central agencies.Khalilur Rahman’s problem is very different. He is one of the region’s biggest bidi manufacturers, in a trade that feeds some 20 lakh workers paid below the mandated rate, and has declared assets above Rs 51 crore. Income Tax department searches have covered more than 20 of his premises. Pathan is the most exposed and probably knows it least. He had no support base in Baharampur before the TMC dropped him there to end Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s 25 year hold on the seat. Yet, two years later he has left the party that built his career. The Gujarat high court has held that he encroached on state land in Vadodara, occupied for a decade without payment, with costs still to settle. Nobody should suggest his politics were bought with that case. But a politician with no base of his own in Bengal and a live legal problem in a BJP-run state has very little room to pick a fight.None of the three are likely to resign as they know how that vote would go. Nobody at that breakfast table with Narendra Modi could put a single name back on the electoral roll. Everybody sitting at it knew as much.