60 lakh cases, 7 lakh appeals: scale of Bengal voter roll revision strains tribunals and courts

The sheer scale of West Bengal’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is coming into sharper focus, with around 60 lakh claims and objections examined, over seven lakh appeals being filed, and political parties scrambling to help anxious voters navigate a process that is increasingly testing the capacity of tribunals, courts and administrative machinery.

The Congress has begun setting up help desks across the state to assist people seeking to challenge exclusions, signalling both the intensity of the dispute and the complexity of the process confronting voters unfamiliar with legal procedures.

Congress leader Ashutosh Chatterjee said a help desk has been opened in Kolkata’s Rashbehari Avenue area, with more centres planned to help people file appeals online, assemble documents and understand whether their names can be restored before upcoming polling phases.

“It’s a good start, but we need door-to-door camps,” Chatterjee said, pointing out that daily wage earners, rural women and other marginalised groups may struggle with paperwork, travel and formal requirements involved in filing appeals.

New appellate tribunals, set up in 10 districts including Salt Lake’s high-powered bench following Supreme Court directions last month, are intended to provide voters with a faster mechanism to challenge deletions from electoral rolls. Party workers say the help desks are expected to function as a bridge for voters unable to easily travel or interpret legal processes on their own.

The matter again came up in the Supreme Court on Monday, 6 April, where the bench directed that names of verified voters be included in the supplementary list “by tonight”, even as it stressed that the appellate process should not be reduced to a mere procedural formality. Justice Joymalya Bagchi noted that the “peculiar circumstances” and “logical discrepancy” surrounding the revision exercise in West Bengal warranted careful scrutiny of objections.

“Those who have cleared would be in the supplementary list. The others can file an appeal in the appellate tribunal, and we do not want to compress the appeal hearing. The hearing should be held in full in the appellate tribunals,” Justice Bagchi observed.

Senior advocate Shyam Divan submitted before the court that roughly 55 per cent of cases involved exclusion from voter rolls — a proportion he described as unusually high — while also noting that around seven lakh appeals are now being filed. He pointed to long queues forming outside tribunal offices, indicating the volume of applicants attempting to challenge their exclusion.

The Election Commission informed the court that approximately 26,000 objections from the first polling phase were pending before tribunals earlier in the day, with 20,000 to 25,000 objections pending in the second phase. “Appeals are trickling in. Those filed online are getting acknowledgements/receipts. I will check physically,” said senior advocate D.S. Naidu, appearing for the poll panel.

At the same time, the Calcutta High Court chief justice told the Supreme Court that by 12.04 pm on 6 April, more than 59.15 lakh of over 60 lakh objections had already been decided by judicial officers as part of the SIR exercise, underscoring the unprecedented scale of scrutiny underway.

The Supreme Court also asked the chief justice of the Calcutta High Court to constitute a three-member panel of former senior judges to frame uniform procedures for all 19 appellate tribunals, suggesting that institutional mechanisms governing appeals are still being standardised even as thousands of fresh cases continue to arrive.

Solicitor-general Tushar Mehta argued that new documents should not be introduced at the appellate stage, but Justice Bagchi reiterated that all relevant records must be made available before tribunals so that appellants can present their case effectively. Advocate Divan questioned how supplementary lists could be frozen before appeals were heard, while senior advocate Kapil Sibal sought interim relief for excluded voters who had already been mapped.

Senior lawyer and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee argued that voters cleared before polling phases should be reinstated in the rolls, and raised concerns that receipts had not been issued for documents submitted during the objection stage, raising questions about whether all filings were properly recorded.

On the ground, the tribunal process has already translated into long queues outside hearing centres, with many applicants arriving before dawn carrying identity documents and application papers in the hope of restoring their names to the rolls. For several voters, the appellate mechanism represents the first opportunity to challenge deletion without approaching constitutional courts directly.

One of the early high-profile outcomes emerged in Salt Lake, where a bench headed by retired judge T.S. Sivagyanam directed the Election Commission to restore the name of Congress leader and Farakka candidate Mehtab Sheikh, whose name had reportedly been removed during last year’s revision exercise.

“I feel lucky that my case got heard thanks to the Supreme Court’s push,” Sheikh said. “But lakhs of ordinary folks are still in limbo — their future hangs by a thread. They can’t all rush to the Supreme Court, and I’m worried how many from marginalised backgrounds will even make it to these tribunals.”

For many voters, especially daily wage earners, elderly residents and women in rural areas, even attending a tribunal hearing can mean losing a day’s income, arranging transport and locating documents that may not be easily available.

The controversy has rapidly evolved into a political flashpoint ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections. According to figures cited in the debate, more than 80 lakh names were deleted statewide during the SIR process, though the Election Commission maintains that the exercise is intended to remove duplicate or outdated entries from electoral rolls.

Protests were reported in Murshidabad, Malda and South 24 Parganas, with demonstrators alleging “vote theft”.

TMC leader Chandrima Bhattacharya blamed the BJP for the deletions. “Lakhs deleted in the SIR mess — it’s the BJP’s dirty game to grab Bengal by hook or by crook,” she said at a rally in Kolkata. “They’ve hit minorities and women hardest, knowing these are our dedicated TMC voters. But mark my words, they won’t win here.”

With appellate tribunals now operational, central forces deployed and political mobilisation intensifying, the dispute over voter names appears far from settled. For the lakhs of applicants still waiting in line with files of documents in hand, the SIR process has become less a technical revision exercise and more a high-stakes test of access to the electoral process itself.

With PTI inputs