As West Bengal prepares to vote in the second and final phase of its assembly elections on April 29, a tribunal has approved the addition of 1,468 voters to the final electoral roll while removing six further names — the latest development in a controversy over mass voter deletions that has defined this election cycle.
Across the 142 constituencies voting tomorrow, approximately 12.9 lakh voters were deleted during the Special Intensive Revision process — a house-to-house verification exercise conducted by the Election Commission of India to identify dead, shifted or absent voters and remove what it called logical errors from the database.
What the SIR process did
The SIR removed around 90 lakh voters from the rolls across West Bengal — approximately 12% of the entire electorate. Over 60 lakh were categorised as absentee or deceased, while the status of 27 lakh remained pending before tribunals. Observers noted that roughly 65% of those in the undecided group were Muslims, while Dalit Hindus — particularly from the Matua community — were also significantly affected in certain districts.
In Phase 1, which covered 152 constituencies and was held on April 23, approximately 40.46 lakh names were deleted following the revision. The 12.9 lakh deletions in Phase 2 areas bring the total scale of the exercise into sharp relief.
The Supreme Court’s intervention
On April 13, the Supreme Court, invoking its extraordinary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution, directed the Election Commission to issue supplementary electoral rolls, allowing voters cleared by SIR tribunals to cast their votes. The court ruled that those whose appeals were decided before April 21 and April 27 would be eligible to vote in the first and second phases respectively.
The court also clarified that the mere pendency of an appeal before the appellate tribunals does not entitle a person to exercise their right to vote, and that over 34 lakh appeals had been filed — not only against wrongful exclusion but also by objectors aggrieved by the inclusion of certain persons in the revised rolls.
As of the first phase, only 136 voters had managed to get their names reinstated through the tribunals — a number that underlines the practical limitations of the appeals process against the scale of the deletions. The 1,468 reinstatements for Phase 2 represent a marginal improvement, but still a fraction of the 12.9 lakh affected voters in these constituencies.
The political fault lines
The TMC has argued that the SIR exercise risked disenfranchising genuine voters, while the BJP defended it as a necessary purge of bogus entries and illegal migrants. Phase 1 recorded a turnout of 92.88% — the highest ever in the state — which both the TMC and BJP claimed as a mandate in their favour, though their interpretations differed sharply.
With results due on May 4, the voter deletion controversy is likely to remain a live legal and political issue well beyond polling day.