All six members of Altamish Faraz Khan’s family from Ward 61, Kolkata, have received Election Commission (EC) notices for hearing under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Four were flagged because they linked themselves as sons or daughters of a person claimed by six others. Mr. Khan and his siblings attended the hearing. “We realised that this was nothing but an arbitrary exercise, even though we had linked ourselves with our mother whose name was in the 2002 electoral roll,” Mr. Khan said. Thousands have received SIR notices due to linking with people having “unusually high numbers of children.” West Bengal Congress President Subhankar Sarkar wrote an open letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar pointing out that 2,06,056 electors have six or more children linked to them, based on an EC affidavit to the Supreme Court. He said if the threshold was 10 children, only 8,682 would be accused, showing how EC’s numbers vary sharply with the chosen cutoff. The Trinamool Congress also criticized the notices sent for such reasons. Mr. Sarkar stated, “We feel that the ECI has arbitrarily chosen age-thresholds to maximise the number of suspected electors on the basis of so-called ‘logical discrepancies’ criteria based on age relationship mismatches, multiple claims of parentage, spelling inconsistencies etc.” Over one crore electors have received such hearing notices. After the first SIR phase, 58 lakh names in West Bengal were deleted, reducing electors from 7.66 crore to 7.08 crore. The process sparked violent protests. About 1.36 crore notices citing “logical discrepancies” have been issued. The Congress leader said a Supreme Court order from January 19 modifying these discrepancy rules has not yet been implemented. He demanded suspension of all hearings on such notices and called for an all-party meeting before moving further.