West Bengal Chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday (January 22, 2026) said that ever since 2026 set in, she has already written 26 poems on the “harassment” being caused by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a process she alleged the Election Commission was using to decide the outcome of elections in India.
“Logistic discrepancies in SIR are being witnessed only in West Bengal. Every day people have to stand in queues for four to five hours. They are facing problems for matters like their surnames being spelt as Banerjee as well as Bandopadhyay, Mukherjee as well as Mukhopadhyay. In one case, officials wondered how five people can have the same parents. Come on, back then one didn’t follow the Hum Do, Hamare Do (two-child) policy!” Ms. Banerjee said while inaugurating the International Kolkata Book Fair, which will go on till February 3 with nearly 1,100 stalls and the participation of 20 countries excluding Bangladesh.
“How can we get our parents’ birth certificates? Many of us don’t even know when exactly our parents were born. Back then most people were cases of ‘home delivery’. Even (former Prime Minister) Atal Behari Vajpayee himself told me once that December 25 was not his birthday. There are many among us who don’t know their actual date of birth. But they are troubling people [with such questions], even people like Amartya Sen and poet Joy Goswami,” she said.
