West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday reiterated her claim that the Union government’s real intention behind the special intensive revision of electoral rolls was to create a National Register of Citizens, PTI reported.

The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to create a list of Indian citizens and to identify undocumented immigrants.

The register was updated in Assam in 2019, after a mammoth scrutiny of ancestral family documents to weed out “illegal immigrants”, and ended up excluding 19 lakh residents of the state. The updated list, however, has not been notified six years on.

The special intensive revision of voter rolls is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Assembly polls are expected to take place in West Bengal in the first half of 2026.

The draft electoral rolls will be published on December 9. Voters can file claims and objections between December 9 and January 8, and hearings will be held until January 31. The final electoral rolls are to be published on February 7.

On Wednesday, speaking to reporters in Kolkata on Constitution Day, Banerjee said that people’s citizenship was being questioned decades after Independence.

Earlier in the day, Banerjee said on social media that when democracy is at stake, secularism is in an “endangered situation”, and when federalism is “being bulldozed”, people must protect the valuable guidance that the Constitution provides.

On October 28, after a 57-year-old man in West Bengal died by suicide, purportedly leaving behind a note saying blaming the NRC for his death, Banerjee had said that the state would never allow the exercise and would not permit anyone “to strip our people of their dignity or belonging”.

On November 21, Banerjee urged the Election Commission to suspend the special intensive revision of the voter list in the state, saying that the “human cost of this mismanagement” had become unbearable.

In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Banerjee said that the process had reached an “alarming” and “dangerous” stage, emphasising that the manner in which it was being carried out was unplanned, chaotic, and putting citizens and officials at risk.

The chief minister’s appeal followed her earlier request to suspend the exercise after booth-level officers in the state died by suicide allegedly due to work pressure.

Also read: ‘In Bengal, SIR is NRC’: Why revision of the electoral roll has spread panic in the state