Man found hanging in Bengal; TMC claims another death linked to SIR fear

Kolkata, Nov 14 (PTI) A 60-year-old man, who was reportedly worried as his daughter's name was missing in the electoral rolls, was found hanging in north Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district on Friday, police said.

The ruling Trinamool Congress claimed that his death was yet another example of people taking their own lives over fear linked to the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the state.

A senior police officer said that Bhuban Chandra Roy of Rajganj area went missing on Thursday night, and he was found hanging in the morning.

His family informed the police that the deceased had been under mental stress after finding that his daughter's name was missing in the electoral rolls, the officer said. Investigations are on, he added.

"Sixty-year-old Bhuban Chandra Roy was found hanging from a tree in the morning, driven to despair because his daughter never received an enumeration form. This is not a sequence of random misfortunes. This is the predictable human cost of a process that was rushed, politicised and rolled out without basic safeguards," the TMC said in an X post.

Rajganj MLA Khageswar Roy visited the house of the deceased and said that similar SIR-related deaths had occurred elsewhere.

The state's ruling dispensation earlier claimed that at least 11 deaths - including seven by suicide –linked to the SIR took place in the state since the last week of October.

"Who benefits from this engineered panic? Not the people of Bengal. Not the families left to bury their dead. The only beneficiaries are those who seek to manufacture consent by frightening citizens into silence.

“@ECISVEEP’s clumsy SIR rollout, aided and abetted by a party whose political desperation is now plain for all to see, has turned the entire process into an instrument of persecution," the party claimed.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has launched the SIR exercise in various states including West Bengal. SIR is a door-to-door verification drive intended to clean up duplicates, remove deceased voters and add new eligible voters. PTI SUS NN NN