Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived here on Saturday for a visit to West Bengal’s Nadia district, where he is scheduled to inaugurate national highway projects and address a public rally, amid heightened political tensions over the ongoing SIR exercise in the state.
This is Modi’s first visit to the state since the draft SIR rolls were published, and the third in the past five months.
“The PM arrived at the N S C Bose International Airport at 10:33 am and boarded a helicopter for Nadia,” an official said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived here on Saturday for a visit to West Bengal’s Nadia district, where he is scheduled to inaugurate national highway projects and address a public rally, amid heightened political tensions over the ongoing SIR exercise in the state.
This is Modi’s first visit to the state since the draft SIR rolls were published, and the third in the past five months.
“The PM arrived at the N S C Bose International Airport at 10:33 am and boarded a helicopter for Nadia,” an official said.
In the process, Modi is likely to sound the BJP’s bugle for the assembly polls, which are due in the state early next year and finalise the roadmap for the party’s big push for the crucial elections.
“The people of West Bengal are benefiting from numerous pro-people initiatives of the central government. At the same time, they are suffering due to the TMC’s misgovernance in every sector,” the PM posted on X on Friday evening while announcing his visit.
“The loot and intimidation of the TMC have crossed all limits. That is why, the BJP is the people’s hope,” he added.
The PM’s visit comes at a time when the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has mounted sustained opposition to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, alleging that the exercise is being carried out in “haste” and that a large number of genuine voters, particularly refugee Hindus, risk disenfranchisement on its account.
In the draft electoral rolls published after the enumeration phase, 58,20,899 names have been excluded, reducing the electorate to 7.08 crore.
Around 1.36 crore entries have also been flagged for “logical discrepancies”, while 30 lakh voters have been categorised as unmapped – a significant percentage of whom are likely to be called for verification hearings over the next 45 days.
For Matuas, a Dalit Hindu community that migrated from Bangladesh over decades due to religious persecution, this exercise has revived anxieties over identity and documentation.
Political observers widely believe that the community members hold sway in as many as 80 of the 294 assembly seats in the state.
Speculations are rife that significant numbers of Matuas have already been excluded from draft rolls. Many more are likely to follow suit in the final rolls on account of the unavailability of the EC-specified indicative documents they need to produce in the eventuality of receiving hearing notices during the verification phase.
Over the past years, poll results have indicated that the BJP gained significant inroads within the community, promising them formal Indian citizenship.
