Millions of voters in West Bengal, a large state in eastern India bordering Bangladesh, have been removed from the electoral register ahead of state assembly elections beginning on Thursday, in a controversial process critics are calling a "bloodless political genocide" and a threat to democratic rights.

A total of 9.1 million names — more than 10% of the state's electorate — have been deleted under a programme known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which the central government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has framed as necessary to remove "infiltrators," a term that primarily refers to undocumented Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh. Approximately 2.7 million people formally challenged their removal but were still deleted. In some Muslim-majority constituencies in districts such as Murshidabad, near the Bangladesh border, close to half of all registered voters have been struck off the rolls. Researchers monitoring the process say religion has been the clearest common factor among those removed, with Muslims disproportionately affected.

The revision was carried out at unprecedented speed over roughly three months, aided by an AI-assisted algorithm deployed by the Election Commission of India to flag so-called "logical discrepancies" in voter data. Critics, including former election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, say the algorithm failed to account for the absence of a standard system for translating Bengali names into the Roman script, meaning minor spelling variations across family documents triggered wrongful deletions. "It took us 30 years to achieve 99% accuracy in the rolls. They expect to exceed this in three months," Quraishi said. "The SIR is completely unnecessary, it is designed to harass." Among those flagged was Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. A retired paramilitary officer with 35 years of service, a government schoolteacher listed as a polling officer for the same election, and thousands of others with full documentation have also found their names missing.

The political stakes are high. West Bengal has been governed for 15 years by the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and the BJP is seeking to unseat it. TMC lawmakers have accused the BJP-aligned central government of using the electoral revision as a tool to suppress minority votes and tilt the outcome. "What has happened in Bengal is a constitutional crime," said TMC MP Sagarika Ghosh. Legal challenges against SIR have been filed on constitutional grounds, and opposition parties have accused the Election Commission of abandoning its role as an independent arbiter — a charge the commission has not directly addressed publicly. The BJP did not respond to requests for comment on the disenfranchisement allegations.

With voting for the first phase of the election starting Thursday across 152 constituencies, tribunals set up to hear challenges are still ongoing, and thousands of voters will go to the polls without having their cases resolved. The episode has intensified a broader debate about institutional independence, minority rights, and democratic backsliding in India's largest democracy, raising questions that will extend well beyond West Bengal regardless of the election's outcome.