‘Question for judge: What about the vote I missed? Who will compensate me for that?'
Telegraph | 29 April 2026
As the city heads to the polling booths on Wednesday, millions will not be able to get their fingers inked.
Fatima Anwar is one of them. A resident of Dr Sundari Mohan Avenue in the Entally Assembly constituency, Fatima is angry and confused, but not ashamed. “The shame is on them, the people who took away my vote without rhyme or reason. They should be ashamed, not me. I am not a Bangladeshi. I am not a Rohingya. I am an Indian,” the 30-year-old said.
Fatima works with an international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. As Calcutta votes, she shared her exasperation with Metro.
I have never skipped voting since I became a voter. I have voted in civic, Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. Being struck off the rolls came as a rude shock, something I was not prepared for.
I can’t vote this time. But my mother and some other family members can. When they do, they will vote keeping us in mind. I urge every other voter to do the same — to keep in mind the Indians who were robbed of their right.
The apparent discrepancy that led to my adjudication is entirely baseless. The hearing notice cited a mismatch in my father’s name between 2002 and 2025. But my father’s name is spelt exactly the same in all the documents. The same applies to all documents in my name — birth certificate, passport, Aadhaar, you name it.
The BLO assured me that producing my passport at the hearing would be enough to have my name restored to the rolls. I believed the BLO. But in the last week of March, a supplementary list showed that my name was among those deleted. My brother, father and grandmother were also deleted.
My grandmother is 86. She cannot make any sense of the SIR exercise. “Does this mean I am not an Indian? If so, then what of my life all these years?” she keeps asking.
I have filed an appeal with the SIR tribunal. I am confident that my name will be restored whenever my case comes up for hearing. There can be no other outcome because I have all the papers.
When that happens, I want to ask the judge a question: what about the vote that I missed? Who will compensate me for that?
I have a work permit for a Western European country. The nature of my work requires stringent and periodic verification of my Indian identity.
If I have been cleared in all such checks, how did I end up as a deleted voter?
I was born here. I went to DPS Ruby Park. I graduated from JD Birla Institute and completed my master’s at St Xavier’s College.
My name was struck off, possibly because of a larger political design. From what I gather, hundreds of thousands of people are in the same limbo.
An administrative exercise is faulty if it causes so much distress across such a large section of the population.
The lack of clarity around the entire process compounds people’s agony. Filing an appeal was a challenge in itself. There were no formal guidelines from the Election Commission on how to proceed. It was the least the EC could have done.