EC’s ‘Aadhaar data plot’ to delete voters won’t work in Bengal, says TMC
Times of India | 14 November 2025
Kolkata: Any attempt to make living voters dead using UIDAI's Aadhaar data, evident during the Bihar special intensive revision (SIR), will be resisted in Bengal both in the courts and on the streets, Trinamool said on Thursday.
The party's sharp riposte came after reports that for the first time since the Nov 4 rollout of the Bengal SIR, the Election Commission said it will use Aadhaar data to weed out dead electors from the voters' list.
TMC spokesperson Arup Chakraborty said: "On Thursday, it was informed at the office of chief election officer Manoj Agarwal by Aadhaar authentication agency UIDAI that 32-34 lakh Aadhaar numbers have been deactivated. The same UIDAI said in Parliament that it does not store Aadhaar deactivation data state-wise, year-wise, or for any other category. The question is how is data that UIDAI itself does not store being given to the chief election officer?"
On Wednesday, Bengal CEO Agarwal said: "A senior UIDAI official met me on Tuesday and informed that they have records of 32-34 lakh dead Bengal residents since 2022 who owned Aadhaar and 13-14 lakh deceased persons who did not.
This data will now be matched with SIR enumeration forms and any mismatch will prompt the ERO (election returning officer) to send the applicant a formal notice for hearing."
UIDAI, in a written response to TMC's Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale, said on Feb 26, 2024, that it does not have state-wise, year-wise and reason-wise data for Aadhaar deactivation.
Trinamool, in a post on X, alleged that the Election Commission and BJP were orchestrating a "silent invisible rigging" by marking living citizens as dead.
Party spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said: "Take the example of Bihar—where the Election Commission declared thousands of people as ‘dead' in the draft voter list, only for many of them to be found alive later. If such incidents can happen there, there is a similar possibility of systematic removal of names in Bengal. We are worried that this data register, which is being operated without any transparent procedure or neutral verification, could become a weapon to disenfranchise a large number of voters."