West Bengal Congress leader moves Supreme Court for time-bound, independent inquiry, stay on SIR implementation

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The application said the entire claims and objections process in West Bengal warranted an independent inquiry. File. | Photo Credit: The Hindu

An application was filed in the Supreme Court on Monday (September 28, 2026) to constitute an independent committee comprising former judges of the apex court, retired Chief Election Commissioners/Election Commissioners and experts to conduct a time-bound inquiry into the implementation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) across 20 States and Union Territories.

The plea by Prasenjit Bose, petitioner in the West Bengal SIR case and chairperson of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee’s SIR panel, sought a stay of further proceedings pursuant to the SIR undertaken in these States and Union Territories during the period of the proposed inquiry.

Mr. Bose, represented by advocate Neha Rathi, sought to restore in the electoral roll the names of electors who had preferred appeals against their deletion before the Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal. The plea urged a judicial direction to the Appellate Tribunals to accord priority to the disposal of appeals filed by voters/restoration of names in the poll-bound constituencies in West Bengal, namely, Rejinagar and Nandigram, before October 6, 2026.

The recent Election Commission of India (ECI) press note on a ‘special drive’ to re-enroll deleted electors through a different version of Form 6, in effect, nullifies the SIR process, the application said.

Moreover, the ECI has failed to clarify whether the 22 lakh-plus aggrieved deleted electors in West Bengal, who have filed appeals before the Appellate Tribunals, would also be eligible to apply for re-enrolment.

“The parallel operation of the Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal and the process of re-enrolment through Form 6 applications are also not tenable. Re-enrolment of deleted electors should therefore be undertaken through either the Appellate Tribunals or the process directed by the ECI,” the application argued.

It said the exclusion of lakhs of eligible electors during the SIR in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala deprived them of an opportunity to exercise their vote in the Assembly elections held in April-May 2026. Of the 22 lakh applications filed by deleted electors in West Bengal, only 1,607 electors had been reinstated in time to vote in April.

The 19 Appellate Tribunals in West Bengal are suffocating under a massive backlog, with 37.05 lakh out of 38.31 lakh appeals currently stuck in limbo. At the present pace, clearing the backlog will take more than 12 years, Mr. Bose argued.

Over 16 lakh appeals against inclusions have clogged the tribunals, he said, and the “manner and authority under which these 16.10 lakh appeals were filed, and their legality, remain unclear”.

So far, the Appellate Tribunals, according to ECI statistics, have disposed of only 3% of the total appeals filed, and 93% of these disposed appeals have resulted in the inclusion of electors in the electoral rolls. This revealed that the ‘logical discrepancies’ criteria applied by the EC resulted in large-scale wrongful exclusion of eligible electors in West Bengal.

The application said the entire claims and objections process in West Bengal warranted an independent inquiry. Unlike other States, where additions heavily outpaced removals from the voter list, West Bengal saw widespread Form 6 (inclusions in the electoral roll) rejections and Form 7 (objection to inclusion) purges.

As on August 7, the application said, only 7.07 lakh fresh enrolments had been made out of the 34.13 lakh Form 6 applications received in West Bengal, while 7.26 lakh applications had been rejected. Nearly 20 lakh Form 6 applications were either under process or remained unprocessed.

In contrast, 5.72 lakh out of 6.39 lakh Form 7 applications had resulted in deletions, while only 14,500 such applications had been rejected, Mr. Bose said.

“The outcomes of Form 6 and Form 7 applications show a stark divergence. While only 20.7% of Form 6 applications resulted in enrolment and 21.3% were rejected, 89.6% of Form 7 applications resulted in deletion, with only 2.3% being rejected,” the application said.

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