Bengal man dies by suicide allegedly over NRC, Mamata Banerjee blames BJP’s ‘politics of fear’

A 57-year-old man in West Bengal died by suicide on Tuesday, purportedly leaving behind a note saying the National Register of Citizens was responsible for his death, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said.

The man, Pradeep Kar, was found dead at his home in Panihati in North 24 Parganas district, PTI quoted Barrackpore Police Commissioner Muralidhar Sharma as saying.

Sharma said that a diary was recovered from Kar's house in which “NRC is responsible for my death” was written in one of the pages, The Indian Express reported.

Kar's family said that he had been “restless” since the Election Commission announced a special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state, Sharma told The Indian Express.

On Monday, the poll body announced that the exercise would be carried out in 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal, where Assembly elections are expected to take place in 2026. The draft rolls will be published on December 9, and the final list on February 7, 2026.

While Kar was born and raised in West Bengal, his father had migrated from Bangladesh, The Indian Express reported.

Banerjee accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of spreading fear about the NRC and said the alleged suicide was an indictment of “BJP's politics of fear and division”.

“It shakes me to the very core to imagine how, for years, BJP has tormented innocent citizens with the threat of NRC, spreading lies, stoking panic and weaponising insecurity for votes,” she said on social media. “This tragic death is the direct consequence of BJP's venomous propaganda.”

Banerjee alleged that those who “sit in Delhi and preach nationalism” had pushed ordinary Indians to such despair that they were dying in their own land, fearing they would be declared “foreigners”.

“I demand that the central government stop this heartless game once and for all,” she added. “Bengal will never allow NRC, and never allow anyone to strip our people of their dignity or belonging.”

Banerjee has repeatedly alleged that the special revision of voter rolls was an attempt to implement the National Register of Citizens “through the backdoor”.

The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to create a list of Indian citizens and to identify undocumented immigrants.

The register was updated in Assam in 2019, after a mammoth scrutiny of ancestral family documents to weed out “illegal immigrants”, and ended up excluding 19 lakh residents of the state. The updated list, however, has not been notified six years on.

Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party's social media cell chief Amit Malviya accused Banerjee of spreading panic for political gain.

Malviya said that Kar's death should be investigated by law enforcement agencies rather than being used for “political rhetoric”.

He added that there is currently no National Register of Citizens in operation anywhere in the country and alleged that it was the Trinamool Congress, not the BJP, that had “weaponised fear” among refugees and voters.

Malviya also claimed that Banerjee's remarks were timed to preempt the revision of voter rolls in West Bengal, which, he said, would expose illegal voters in the state.

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Source: Scroll
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