Kolkata, April 23 -- West Bengal is set to vote in the first phase of the assembly elections on Thursday, amid an increasingly polarised battle in which issues such as corruption and jobs have ceded space to identity, citizenship and the controversy over deleted names from electoral rolls. The opening round of the two-phase election covers 152 of the state's 294 seats - including all 54 in north Bengal's eight districts and several in Murshidabad, Nadia, Birbhum and Hooghly. The first phase could determine whether the BJP can still rely on north Bengal as its principal gateway to power or whether the TMC has managed to claw back lost ground. More than 3.60 crore voters, including nearly 1.75 crore women, are eligible to exercise their franchise on Thursday. The Election Commission has deployed a record 2,450 companies of central forces, with more than 8,000 polling stations identified as highly sensitive. For the BJP, the first phase is virtually synonymous with north Bengal. The party's hopes of challenging the TMC statewide depend on retaining dominance in the region that powered its rise in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and helped it emerge as the ruling party's principal challenger in the 2021 assembly election. The BJP had won 59 of the 152 seats in 2021 against the TMC's tally of 93. For the saffron camp, therefore, this phase is its best opportunity to offset Mamata Banerjee's enduring strength in south Bengal. For the ruling party, preventing a BJP surge in the north is critical to shaping the political mood for the rest of the contest. The phase is being fought across sharply different landscapes - the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar, the hills of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, the Rajbanshi belt of Cooch Behar, the border districts of Malda and Uttar Dinajpur, and the minority-dominated pockets of Murshidabad and Nadia. Yet, despite these differences, one issue has cast a shadow across almost every district - the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. More than 9 million names were deleted from the state's voter list during the exercise, shrinking Bengal's electorate by nearly 12 per cent. In Murshidabad alone, over 7.48 lakh names were removed. Nadia saw more than 4.85 lakh deletions, Malda 4.59 lakh and Uttar Dinajpur 3.63 lakh. Almost overnight, the vocabulary of the election changed. The campaign ceased to be only about alleged corruption in school jobs, unemployment or welfare schemes. The most politically charged words became "citizenship", "infiltrator", "bogus voter", "deleted name" and "foreigner". The BJP has tried to turn the SIR exercise into a referendum on infiltration and citizenship, while TMC has framed it as an attempt to disenfranchise genuine voters, particularly minorities, migrant workers and poor. The result is that by the eve of polling, the central question in Bengal is no longer simply who governed better. It is whether a person who has voted for decades still finds his or her name on the electoral roll. Nowhere is that anxiety more visible than in Malda and Murshidabad, where the issue of deleted names has eclipsed almost everything else. In Malda's Mothabari, protests erupted after names were allegedly struck off the rolls, turning the area into one of the most politically charged pockets of the phase....