Elderly Woman Dies Allegedly From Fear Of SIR Exercise In West Bengal

Kolkata: Another elderly woman died in Dankuni in Hooghly district due to alleged fear of SIR.

Hasina Begum, a 60-year-old woman, who used to stay with her daughter at Dankuni in Hooghly district near Kolkata on Sunday night collapsed on the road while she was returning from a shop.

When Hasina was taken to a local hospital she was declared dead.

According to the local residents and family members of Hasina, she was suffering from anxiety ever since the SIR exercise was announced for West Bengal.

A recent meeting was held at Hasina’s locality over SIR which the family members complained had triggered the anxiety.

Dankuni Municipality chairperson Haseena Shabnam met the family members and mentioned that the deceased's name was not there in the 2002 voters list.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) called SIR ‘campaign of terror’.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee taking to X wrote, “A stream of deaths on SIR. What we are witnessing is a deliberate campaign of terror whose predictable deadly fallout has now begun to show. SIR was never just about “cleaning” voter rolls. As Amit Shah himself has said, it is a tool to detect, delete and deport.”

TMC national secretary Abhishek Banerjee once again claimed that the TMC will protest at the national capital if any ‘genuine’ voters name is deleted.

Incidentally, last week within a day of the SIR’s announcement 57-year-old Pradeep Kar of Panihati in North 24-Parganas died by suicide over alleged ‘fear’ of SIR. A 95-year-old resident of Birbhum’s Ilambazar, Kshitish Majumdar, was the next to die by suicide over the same issue. A person in Cooch Behar’s Dinhata also consumed poison allegedly ‘fearing’ SIR and is undergoing treatment.