West Bengal SIR : Can PM Modi's Nadia visit soothe the Matua community's voter list fears?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Ranaghat in Nadia district on Saturday aims to reach out to Hindu minority voters, the Matuas, who comprise 17 per cent of the population in the state. This is Modi’s first visit after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) draft list was released in West Bengal on Tuesday. The list saw 58 lakh deletions out of the 7.6 crore electorate. The Matua Community feared their names being left out of the latest SIR list due to the unavailability of relevant documents as required by the Election Commission (EC), with their roots being from Bangladesh.

The community made inroads into West Bengal after facing religious persecution. The Matua community electorate is divided between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC). The split is why Nadia also witnessed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's visit to Krishnagar last week to consolidate her party’s votes. Both parties have their members of parliament representing the community. Lok Sabha MP Shantanu Thakur from the BJP is also a junior minister in the Union government, and Rajya Sabha MP Mamata Bala Thakur represents the TMC.

A prominent aspect of the BJP’s rise in West Bengal in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections was due to their Matua community outreach. The Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) promise infused hope within the community of formally becoming Indian citizens. The 2021 Assembly elections too saw the community building more confidence in the BJP’s citizenship rhetoric. Fifty assembly seats are seen as Matua-dominant in Nadia, North and South 24 Parganas districts.

This is Prime Minister Modi’s third visit to the state in five months. With the SIR draft list casting questions on the future of the Matua community, the BJP will do whatever it can to ease fears of being left out.

“The trend so far is that the BJP will have an enormous challenge to address the Matua community, as a lot of Matua voters have been deleted. They are angry and anxious at the same time. This is something Modi has to address immediately,” said Professor Maidul Islam of the Political Science Department at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences.

“Both in the Matua and non-Bengali front, a lot of deletions have happened. So far, the BJP will lose in these constituencies if this is the situation. Of course, there are other issues of logical discrepancies and verifications which amount to more than 1 crore," Professor Islam goes on to reflect on the Bihar SIR data, where there were a total of 68 lakh deletions. However, there were 21 lakh inclusions, hence the net deletions were only 47 lakh.

“A large number of Matua deletions have happened as they were unable to establish a link with the 2002 list. Earlier, the law was that one had to stay for 11 years in India, which was later brought down to six years. Then, by naturalisation, they could apply for citizenship. Hence, their names were not in the 2002 list. Their children could vote when they turned 18, but could not prove their family tree on the 2002 list. As a result, a lot of Matua deletions have happened," said Professor Islam.

Meanwhile, both the BJP and Trinamool Congress camps, led by Shantanu Thakur and Mamata Bala Thakur, are offering evidence of Hindu identity. The Hindu identity will be used by members of the Matua community to prove they are Hindus and come under the six religions to be eligible for citizenship under CAA. The task, however, is to prove they migrated to Bengal after facing religious persecution. Until the final SIR list is out in February 2026, it is an uneasy situation for anxious Matuas who have called West Bengal their home, in the hope of finding security and a permanent citizenship identity with voting rights.