16.1 lakh Bengal voters risk secret removal in SIR, two Election Commissioners lack knowledge
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted in West Bengal has allegedly placed 16,10,311 voters, representing about 2.50% of the state’s final electoral roll, under secret appeals seeking their removal, while two Election Commissioners were reportedly unaware of who authorised the filings or how the process was carried out.
Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu recorded that neither he nor fellow Commissioner Vivek Joshi, nor the serving Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal, knew the basis or process behind the appeals, even as the Election Commission disclosed the figure to the Supreme Court in September, describing the appeals as challenges to the inclusion of voters in the rolls, The Wire reported.
The human consequences of this opaque process are illustrated by the case of 26-year-old Sahinura Begum of Part 34 in the Raiganj Assembly constituency, as her name was marked ‘Under Adjudication’ when the Election Commission published West Bengal’s final electoral roll on February 28, following the SIR, only for her name to appear in the second supplementary list after being examined by a judicial officer on March 27.
Six days later, however, an appeal was registered against her inclusion. Begum did not file it. The Election Commission’s voter-service portal records an appeal lodged at 1.43pm on April 2, identifying her electoral identity number as the target. The application initially showed ‘Pending’, before being marked ‘Included in E-roll’ on April 18, after the tribunal declined to remove her name.
Begum therefore had to establish her entitlement to remain on the electoral roll twice, although the second challenge was brought after she had already survived judicial scrutiny. More significantly, she appears to have received no notification that another party had initiated proceedings against her inclusion.
According to the Election Commission’s affidavit before the Supreme Court, 38,31,429 appeals were filed before the appellate tribunals: 22,21,118 were lodged by voters seeking restoration after exclusion, while 16,10,311 challenged the inclusion of other voters.
The central unanswered question is who initiated the latter category of appeals and under whose authority. Sandhu raised that question internally on August 12, asking officials who had authorised the filings and who had actually submitted them on behalf of the Commission, according to The Indian Express reporting on his dissenting notes.
The disclosures have also exposed wider concerns about the Commission’s internal systems. Sandhu recorded in April that he was learning about new electoral IT modules and portals through media reports, while Joshi later raised concerns over the centralisation of the electoral-roll database. Sandhu subsequently endorsed those concerns.
With more than 37 lakh appeals still pending, the controversy now extends beyond individual voters such as Begum: it concerns transparency, institutional accountability and the unexplained mechanism by which hundreds of thousands of names that had survived scrutiny were subsequently placed under challenge.