West Bengal SIR row: How the right to vote affects the right to contest

Within this larger dispute over voters deleted from the electoral rolls rests a narrower problem—what happens to candidates, people who had filed their nomination papers and publicly campaigned, when their own names turn out to be among those deleted?

The SC rejected a petition last week (April 10) by a Tamil Nadu candidate to restore her to the electoral roll before the election, illustrating this bind. The court had agreed to the ECI’s argument that the challenge to the deletion had come too late.

The right to vote vs the right to contest

The point of distinction that courts have consistently drawn between the right to vote and the right to contest an election was reiterated by the apex court on April 10 in the case of Ram Chandra Choudhary v Roop Nagar Dugdh Utpadak Sahakari Samiti Ltd, which held that “It is well settled that neither the right to vote nor the right to contest an election is a fundamental right.”

The judgment draws a line within electoral rights: The right to vote “enables a member to exercise franchise in accordance with the statutory scheme”, while the right to contest is “a distinct and additional right which may legitimately be made subject to qualifications, eligibility conditions and disqualification.”

The court also distinguished between eligibility and disqualification, saying that eligibility is the “threshold condition governing entry into the electoral arena” and that “the absence of eligibility does not attract any penal or stigmatic consequence; it merely postpones the right to contest until the prescribed conditions are fulfilled.”

This framework was reiterated in the context of cooperative society elections, but maps directly onto what has happened to candidates caught in the SIR deletions. While their deletion from the electoral roll is not a disqualification in the legal sense, they have lost the status of an elector. Without this threshold condition, they cannot activate the right to contest. Under the Representation of the People Act, a candidate must be enrolled as a voter in a parliamentary constituency or an Assembly constituency in the relevant State, though not necessarily the specific constituency they seek to represent.

This position is not new. The SC established in Jyoti Basu v Debi Ghosal (1982) that the right to contest an election is purely statutory. K Krishna Murthy v UOI (2010) reiterated that “rights of political participation are not absolute in nature and are subject to statutory controls.”

What is new here is that there is a large-scale administrative exercise that has swept up candidates in deletions they often did not know about.

The two cases

The petitioner from Tamil Nadu, C Geetha, had filed her nomination papers on April 2, 2026, paid her security deposit and was actively campaigning as an independent candidate when she discovered her name had been deleted from the electoral roll. She learned that officers conducting the SIR exercise had visited homes in her area but had appeared to have skipped her house.

In her petition, she argued that this was not a clerical oversight but deliberate, a view the circumstances of her omission had “further strengthened”. The ECI’s response before the court was that the challenge had come too late, and that with the nominations closed and rolls frozen, there was no mechanism left to include her before the polling day.

In the electoral law framework, a name can be added to the roll after this point only through a supplementary list, and such a list can only be published if an appellate tribunal has already allowed an appeal and directed an inclusion.

The SC agreed with the ECI’s view and rejected her plea on April 10.

Rule 23(5) of the Registration of Electoral Rules 1960 provides that if an appeal is allowed, the electoral registration officer must immediately amend the roll. But this provision requires the tribunal to have actually decided the appeal.

Consider the case of Motab Shaikh from the Fakka constituency in West Bengal, who was nominated by the INC.

His name had been deleted from the rolls because of inconsistencies in his name across different records. An appellate tribunal examined his Aadhar card, passport, driving licence, and family records and found they all pointed to the same person. The tribunal ordered his name to be included in the supplementary list by 8 PM that day. His appeal was successful because it was addressed on time.

Monday’s proceedings show why courts find it difficult to provide a blanket remedy. The appellate process itself had departed from the standard procedure under rules 19 and 20 of the Registration of Electors rule, which require notice and an opportunity to be heard before a name is removed.

The court also took note of Rule 23(3), which does not permit an interim suspension of an exclusion while an appeal is pending. This means that even if a court were sympathetic to a deleted voter or a candidate, it cannot simply order them back on the roll mid-process.