Murshidabad: 54-Year-Old Man Ends Life Over Fear of SIR Process

Agnihotri Gupta, MP, 6 Nov 2025, Kolkata : "Fear of being erased from the state’s records, fear of being declared invisible in his own homeland. That fear did not appear overnight. It was manufactured, distributed, and sustained by BJP’s politics of fear," the Trinamool Congress (TMC) said in a strong statement following another tragic death allegedly linked to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists.

According to reports, Tarak Saha, a 54-year-old resident of Baharampur in Murshidabad, ended his life due to growing anxiety surrounding the SIR process. Locals said Tarak, a small shopkeeper and lifelong resident of Bengal, had become increasingly anxious in recent days, fearing that his name might be removed from the voter list. Family members shared that he repeatedly expressed concern that he would be treated as an outsider in his own homeland.

On Thursday morning, Tarak was found hanged in his room. His wife, Priya Saha, said her husband had spent the previous night in distress, speaking about how he lacked the proper documents that officials were reportedly demanding during the revision process. "He kept saying he didn’t have the right papers. He was scared they would erase his name," she recalled, tears in her eyes.

This tragic incident has reignited controversy surrounding the SIR exercise, which TMC has condemned as “silent invisible rigging.” Party leaders allege that the BJP-led Centre has turned a routine administrative process into a tool of intimidation, spreading confusion and fear through uncertainty.

The police have recovered the body and sent it for a forensic examination. A senior police official stated, “We are investigating the reason behind it.” This brings the death toll to 10 linked to the SIR process.

In response to the incident, the TMC posted on their official social media handle: "The Centre must answer: how many more lives before this politics of fear is called what it truly is—a war against India’s own citizens?"