Shampi Chakraborty

Motab Shaikh, one of the two Congress legislators elected in the recent Assembly elections in West Bengal, says he is “the luckiest man on earth” — and he has good reason to believe so.

In the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, Shaikh won from the Farakka Assembly constituency by defeating his nearest rival, Sudhir Chowdhury of the BJP, by nearly 8,000 votes.

The victory was remarkable because the 57-year-old businessman had almost lost his own right to vote before the election. His name had been deleted from the electoral rolls during the Summary Intensive Revision (SIR) process due to a discrepancy in the spelling of his name in earlier voter records.

A former Gram Pradhan, Shaikh had been nominated as the Congress candidate from Farakka, but the Election Commission of India disqualified him as a voter after identifying inconsistencies in his documents.

Shaikh challenged the decision in court. The matter was eventually referred to the Special Appellate Tribunal headed by retired Justice T. S. Sivagnanam. The tribunal accepted his passport and other supporting documents as valid proof of identity and directed the Election Commission to restore his name to the voters’ list.

The order came on April 5, just hours before April 6 — the final date for filing nominations. With little time left, Shaikh entered the fray with only 14 days to campaign.

His victory has acquired larger political significance in the backdrop of the SIR exercise in West Bengal, during which nearly 9.1 million voters — around 11.9 per cent of the electorate — were reportedly removed from the rolls. Opposition parties sharply criticised the process, describing it as “undemocratic,” “non-transparent,” and a case of “mass disenfranchisement.” Several legal challenges related to the exercise are still pending.

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Against this backdrop, Shaikh’s win is being seen not merely as a personal triumph but also as a symbolic assertion of voting rights. The tribunal’s observation that a citizen cannot be excluded from the electoral rolls because of a technical discrepancy may influence similar cases in the future.

Despite the political controversy surrounding his election, Shaikh says his priority is governance rather than confrontation.

“I am not interested in quarrelling with the BJP,” he said. “My constituency faces severe water scarcity, and I want to focus on solving that problem.”