बंगाल के SIR ट्रिब्यूनल में वोटर इंक्लूजन के लगभग चालीस प्रतिशत अपील चुनाव आयोग के अतिरिक्त मुख्य अधिकारी ने दायर की

'Four in 10 Appeals Against Voter Inclusion Came From Election Commission,' Says Bengal SIR Tribunal Judge

Kolkata: Voters of 11 assembly constituencies in Murshidabad are having their cases heard at Appellate Tribunal 11 – from 55-Farakka to 65-Nabagram. Between them are 6,35,983 appeals that arose out of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls in Bengal.

Of these, around 2.54 lakh, about four out of every 10 appeals challenging the inclusion of electors before the tribunal, were filed by the Additional Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Bengal. These were not appeals by voters seeking restoration of their names to the electoral roll but by election authorities seeking the exclusion of electors whose names had already been included.

The figure comes from retired Justice Indrajit Chatterjee, the former Calcutta high court judge presiding over the tribunal, who spoke at length to The Wire for this report.

How commission pushed to remove voters

On September 16, 2026, the Election Commission of India (ECI) presented a statistical breakdown of the West Bengal tribunal appeals to the Supreme Court. The data revealed a total of 38,31,429 appeals, comprising 22,21,118 petitions from excluded electors and 16,10,311 appeals contesting voter inclusion. The ECI did not disclose the origin of the appeals made against the inclusion of voters. The court’s August 25 directive had not mandated this information either.

Internally, the origin of these appeals was already a matter of contention. The Indian Express reported that on August 12, Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu formally inquired about the authorisation of the appeals in West Bengal. He stated that senior officials, including himself, fellow Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi, and the state’s Chief Electoral Officer, were uninformed on filings made by the state-level Additional CEO.

As The Wire had noted in its September 27 report, public records from Justice Indrajit Chatterjee’s Appellate Tribunal Number 11 created as per the order of the apex court and, specifically, his notices dated May 8 and 11, 2026, concerning electors in Farakka and Raghunathganj had said that the Additional CEO had filed the appeals against inclusion.

Speaking to The Wire, Justice Chatterjee confirmed that the 2.54 lakh appeals against inclusion in his tribunal were filed by the Additional CEO.

“Such appeals were already on the Commission’s portal. I ordered the inclusion of many voters against whom appeals were filed by the Commission, as well as of voters against whom appeals were filed by individuals,” he says.

He says that every appellate authority must be "careful while dictating the order" – be it an exclusion or inclusion – as the excluded or included party may approach a higher forum against the orders of the tribunal.

Justice Chatterjee’s recent statements provide the first quantification of an administrative effort at the removal of names by an official with file access. His crucial note that these state-driven appeals make up approximately 40% of his docket aligns almost seamlessly with the 42% statewide figure reported in the ECI’s affidavit.

By the numbers: Adjudication and discrepancies

The scale of the adjudication across Murshidabad’s constituencies reveals significant disparities in removal rates and pending appeals, as detailed below:

Statistically, these 11 constituencies account for only 3.7% of West Bengal’s legislative seats, yet they generate 17.2% of all pending electoral appeals across the state.

Judicial officers put 9,02,351 electors in these 11 constituencies through the process of adjudication and marked 4,00,681 of them 'not eligible', a rejection rate of 44.4% against a statewide figure of 45.4%. The Muslim-majority Murshidabad constituency lost 75.8% of everyone it sent to adjudication, Samsherganj, 69% and Lalgola, 55.9%.

A critical discrepancy emerges in the ratio of appeals to removals. Each of the 11 constituencies currently has more pending appeals than total removed electors. While the statewide ratio stands at 1.40 appeals per ineligible elector, the ratio across these 11 constituencies rises to 1.59. Raninagar presents the most extreme deviation, reaching a ratio of 3.29, where 17,140 removals have produced 56,323 appeals. Based on these figures alone, it is mathematically impossible that these appeals consist entirely of individuals contesting their own removal.

Taken together with other removal routes, the rolls in these constituencies contracted sharply. Between the pre-draft roll of 2025 and the final roll of February 2026, they fell from 29,10,219 electors to 23,57,325, a loss of 5,52,894, or 19%, against a statewide contraction of 15.2%. Samsherganj fell 36.2%, Lalgola 26.1% and Raghunathganj 24.8%.

Demographic impact of the roll revisions

The demographic breakdown of these 11 constituencies adds a stark dimension to the administrative purge.

Ten of the 11 have a Muslim majority, averaging 63.7% and peaking at 79.6% in Bhagabangola. The voter deletions followed these fault lines with striking precision. 97.6 per cent of the electors marked ineligible in these constituencies were Muslim. In fact, this small cluster alone accounts for a fifth of every Muslim voter struck from the rolls across West Bengal.

In six of the 11 constituencies, Muslims made up over 95% of those declared ineligible.

Samsherganj lost 39.1% of its entire Muslim electorate during adjudication, while Lalgola lost 30.7%. As previously reported, of the 49 booths statewide where at least half the roll was wiped out, 38 were in Murshidabad. It is exactly here, in the very constituencies holding 20% of the state’s disqualified Muslim voters, that the Additional CEO’s office directed its aggressive campaign of anti-inclusion appeals.

An impossible caseload and judicial exits

For the tribunal, this unprecedented caseload is a mathematical impossibility.

Justice Chatterjee observed that adjudicating a single appeal takes a minimum of 30 minutes to hear and to write a reasoned order, allowing a maximum disposal rate of 10 cases per day.

On the Commission’s own figure for his 11 constituencies, at a pace of 10 cases a day, every single day of the year, it would take roughly 174 years to clear the backlog. Today, 6,34,156 of his 6,35,983 appeals remain unresolved.

The Supreme Court held on April 13, 2026, that the mere pendency of an appeal does not entitle an excluded person to vote. West Bengal polled on April 23 and 29. The Bharatiya Janata Party came to power.

In a letter dated September 25, Justice Chatterjee informed the Chief Justice of the Calcutta high court of his intent to step down as a tribunal judge, effective November 2. The primary reason he cited was the commute between his home in Salt Lake and the tribunal premises in Joka, roughly 70 kilometres a day.

Nine days before that letter, in the same reply to the Supreme Court that disclosed the 16,10,311 appeals, the Commission proposed a solution. At paragraph 25 it submitted that the software it has developed “is location-agnostic which enables the Learned Judicial Officers presiding over the Appellate Tribunals to conduct hearings and undertake other proceedings from anywhere, including from their respective places of residence, wherever considered appropriate,” and that this would assist disposal “by minimising the time lost in conveyance.” In the same filing it proposed raising the number of tribunals from 19 to 42.

Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, a former Chief Justice of the Calcutta high court, had resigned as an appellate tribunal judge in May.

For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.

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