Mystery deepens over suicide of West Bengal man due to NRC scare (Lead)

Kolkata, Oct 29 (IANS) Mystery seems to be shrouding further over the real reason behind the suicide of a 57-year-old man, identified as Pradeep Kar, at Panihati in North 24 Parganas district reportedly out of fear of being affected by a possible National Register of Citizens (NRC) in West Bengal.

Kar's name was in the voters' list in 2002, the year of the last Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI).

With the groundwork for the fresh SIR in West Bengal to start from November 4, the ECI had already made it clear that those having names in the 2022 voters' list will be automatically deemed as voters in the fresh exercise and such voters will not even have to submit any document to get their names.

There lies the question of why the NRC scare or even SIR would grip a person whose credentials as a valid Indian voter have been established automatically with his name being there in the 2002 voters' list.

The second mystery over the reason for his death has surfaced following a statement given by Uttam Hazra, the brother-in-law of Kar, to the media persons that the four fingers of the right palm of the latter were chopped off in an accident a few years ago.

Now the question that is surfacing is whether it was possible for any person, unless he was leftie, to write the suicide with the right hand with four fingers missing.

Hazra had told media persons that although Kar mainly used his right hand for some essential work like eating, he had never seen him writing.

Incidentally, the police, on Tuesday, recovered a suicide statement from near Kar's hanging body with a suicide note -- "NRC is responsible for my death".

The BJP had already raised doubts about whether the suicide note was actually written by the deceased person and also demanded a proper investigation into the actual reason behind the suicide.

On Tuesday, both the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress's General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee accused the BJP and the Union government of spreading a sense of fear and division by using NRC as a tool, where people are often made to doubt their own right to existence, the reflection of which was felt in the suicide of Kar.

Since the beginning, Trinamool Congress leadership had been describing the SIR as an indirect ploy by the BJP and the Union government to impose the NRC in West Bengal.

--IANS

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