Shikha Mukerjee:‘Detect, Delete, Deport’: SIR Battle Of Perception

His confidence in his ability to discover the truth, separate it from past mistakes, and deliver solutions that fix the problem is as intimidating as it is extraordinary. When Union home minister Amit Shah declared in the Lok Sabha during the debate on electoral reforms that the purpose of the Special Intensive Revision now underway is “to Detect, Delete, and Deport” infiltrators, that was his truth.

In the past, the Opposition’s purpose, he claimed, was to “normalise infiltration, grant it recognition, and formalise it by adding them to the voters’ list”. The solution, after the SIR, said another minister, was “there will be arrests, and then (people will be sent) straight to detention”.

The larger purpose is clear; revive memories of the chaos and conflict over the idea of “Muslim majority”, constituencies reserved on the basis of religious identities to strengthen the narrative about the danger of “ghuspaithiyas”, or infiltrators, mostly from Bangladesh. Mr Shah’s explanation was simple: “SIR is necessary so that future generations do not have to face the same situation again”. The reason, Mr Shah elaborated, was that “the country has already been divided once on the basis of demographics”, an obvious reference to Pakistan’s formation on the basis of Muslim majority districts. The implication was to emphasise that infiltrators, all Muslims, had settled in India, changing the demographics of the Hindu majority in some places.

The Special Intensive Revision, therefore, is not about weeding out “ASD” (Absent, Shifted, Deceased) voters. The SIR is about the perception that infiltration or illegal migrants skew the results in elections by voting against the BJP and thereby stealing the verdict.

If that is so, the question Mr Shah lobbed at the Opposition in the electoral reforms debate, “We won 44 elections since 2014, and they also won 30 elections in all. If the voter list is corrupt, why did you take the oath?”, can be re-directed at him. How did the BJP win 44 elections since 2014 if the verdict has been systematically skewed against the BJP? The only reasonable answer is that Mr Shah was not defending the SIR as a clean-up exercise against Muslim infiltrators across India, including states where the BJP has won multiple times. His concern is about why the BJP had failed to win in West Bengal.

Using the SIR for detection is being challenged by the Opposition, including the ruling Trinamul Congress, CPI(M) and Congress. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has consistently railed and rallied against it; the SIR, she claimed, was a tool to “capture West Bengal by trickery”. She has vowed that names of eligible voters will not be deleted.

Her warning to the EC and the BJP is that New Delhi will feel the heat when the TMC mobilises the masses against the BJP’s policy of “Detect, Delete and Deport”.

These are two perceptions and two narratives. The release of West Bengal’s draft voters list on December 16 will be the start of phase two in the continuing confrontation between the BJP, its mastermind Amit Shah and supreme leader Narendra Modi and the Opposition. Since both sides claim to represent the people’s will, it’s up to the voter to decide which perception and complementary narrative to trust more.

The EC’s original purpose was to hold free and fair elections based on universal adult franchise, that is an inclusionary principle and not the current exercise that is intentionally exclusionary. The EC’s present purpose is limited; it serves as the institution that facilitates the political confrontation over the politics of identity, division and legitimacy. In other words, its role is that of an event manager for the forthcoming West Bengal contest. The deviation from its original purpose of holding free and fair elections reflects a malaise: succumbing to the prevailing discourse instead of holding aloof.

Once the SIR is done, the deletion of lakhs of suspect voters has been done, what happens next?

The Union home minister’s answer that after detection, there will be deletion and followed by deportation is rhetoric. Mr Shah knows full well that the errors of deporting Indians, for example, Sunali Khatun of West Bengal’s Birbhum, to Bangladesh, forced the Supreme Court to issue orders for her return which the external affairs ministry had to implement. There is no host country to which Indian voters like Sunali Khatun can be deported. It may be the RSS-BJP street/social media solution that believers of a faith not born in India have another homeland, but that’s not how a government aiming to be “Vishwa Guru” and preach to the world can do things.

After the SIR, where will the deleted go? Into detention centres, seems to be common understanding.

West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee made it clear there will be no detention centres in her state. She has warned she will sit on dharna if a single eligible voter is deleted.

This is political posturing, as Mr Shah knows; the detention centres in Assam, after the National Register of Citizens exercise, are a disaster. If he is unsure, he can always ask the United States or Britain about the cost and associated problems with maintaining detention centres for illegal aliens. He can also ask these countries about the legal complexities of dealing with suspected aliens. Or he can ask around in his own government about the likely cost to the exchequer of litigation and, while he is at it, he can ask about the cost of litigation for victims of deletion, in case he has no idea.

The BJP under Mr Shah and Mr Modi has been a vote-winning machine. The odds are that the BJP cannot win every election in a free and fair contest. There are some states like West Bengal that have failed to be charmed by the BJP’s ideology, rhetoric, politics of religious polarisation and its fervent advocacy of Hindutva in the hope of building a Hindu vote bank. What is the BJP’s Plan B should the SIR exercise fail to send Hindu voters scurrying for cover under the party’s wings?

The BJP has used the same playbook for West Bengal in both Assembly and parliamentary elections from 2011 to 2024. It hasn’t updated the narrative; it has merely dressed up the details for scare-mongering. It is blind to any other affiliation or conviction among voters, like the peculiarly non-communal ethos of significant numbers of voters. Pumping up the Hindu majority through the SIR is a gamble; but Mr Shah is a master in election management and he may pull it off, if the TMC fails to mobilise and organise its vote base in the 2026 Assembly election.

Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist