7 min readApr 23, 2026 01:48 PM IST
First published on: Apr 8, 2026 at 06:35 AM IST
The final figure came at midnight: 27,16,393. The Court order did not mention it. It simply directed the ECI to “publish a supplementary list tonight”. It did not spell out what the list was about. That was understood. One day, a historian might record this oddity. The Supreme Court of India put its stamp of approval on the deletion of 27 lakh voters in West Bengal without saying a word about it. The order of April 6 talks about the Appellate Tribunal, its composition, its process, its infrastructure and, thoughtfully, about the honoraria and incidental expenses of its members. But it did not name the act that was to be appealed against — disenfranchisement.
This was unlike other cases of large-scale exclusions in the SIR on the grounds of death, migration or absence. This case was about persons who had applied for inclusion under the SIR process and were listed on the draft SIR rolls, but whose names were deleted through a new and hasty process widely questioned for lack of procedural transparency. They had a right to appeal. But there was no way an appeal could be heard and decided in time for elections. As per law, voters’ lists were to be frozen from April 7. The apex court has to decide whether these 27 lakh names stand deleted for this election. Or, find a way to ensure that this does not happen, either by permitting them to vote this time or by postponing the election dates till the final disposal of these appeals.
The Court was presented with a heap of evidence — anecdotal, documentary, statistical — to prove that these deletions were deeply flawed. The adjudicators were not required to look at all the documents submitted by an elector. The names of a former judge, family members of the illustrators of the Constitution, a Kargil veteran, a decorated soldier, serving government officials, scores of people with Indian passports — all were deleted despite producing the required documentary proofs. It was also pointed out that these deletions had an odd pattern. One-third of all the cases put up for adjudication were from two Muslim-majority districts. As many as 95 per cent of the names deleted in Nandigram, for example, were Muslims.
In the face of all this, the Court, in effect, told these 27 lakh persons: Sorry, your name stands deleted. Now go try your luck with the Appellate Tribunals. Yes, you may not be able to vote this time. But your right to vote is not being taken away permanently.
The Court did not go into the dramatic implications of this order for the coming West Bengal assembly election. These 27 lakh voters translate into about 5 per cent of the expected voters in this election. Last time, the TMC won 36 seats with margins of less than 5 per cent. The impact will be higher this time if these deletions are concentrated in some areas. This one decision of the Court could flip the election’s overall outcome. The Court also did not seem to worry much about the implications of such a deletion, through a semi-judicial process, for the citizenship rights of the individual for entitlements other than voting.
Admittedly, the Court was dealing with a politically fraught and messy situation. The TMC has been alleging, right from the beginning, that the ECI was asked to carry out a hatchet job on behalf of the BJP: Somehow shave off about 5 per cent of its loyal vote bank, mostly Muslims, from the electoral rolls. Everything the ECI has done in the extraordinary saga of the SIR in Bengal has lived up to this alleged script. There was no reason to believe that the pre-SIR voters’ list in the state was inflated. Bengal had 7.66 crore names, almost exactly the same as the 7.67 crore adult population of the state at that time. Yet, besides the exclusion of 58 lakh names for non-submission of enumeration forms, the ECI insisted on strict verification of all “logical discrepancies”, which it took lightly in other states. It appointed an army of micro-observers and roll observers from outside the state to double-check the draft list prepared by the state election officers. Apparently, even their objections and the deletion of another 7 lakh names were not good enough for the ECI, which conjured a list of another 60 lakh names that needed further verification, leading to yet another deletion of 27 lakh.
The apex court faced the unenviable task of intervening in this messy situation. But in all fairness, the Court has had more than a due share in the making of this mess. It allowed the rewriting of the voters’ list just four months before the elections. It permitted the strange practice of issuing notices to electors based on software-generated “logical discrepancies”. It watched as the ECI invented new rules of the game for West Bengal. It allowed the ECI to get away with not publishing a machine-readable list of deletions. It passed an extraordinary order, using its special powers under Article 142, to bypass the statutory EROs in favour of a hastily put-together mechanism of adjudication that could only add to the confusion. It allowed this adjudication to go on for a period that would clearly impinge on the election schedule, leaving no time or forum for appeal. The end result is a mess with tragic consequences.
More than the electoral outcome, this order could affect the trajectory of electoral democracy. The Court’s final order in the main SIR case (ADR and Others vs Election Commission of India), awaited since the conclusion of the hearing in January, is of no more than academic value now (Full disclosure: This writer is one among the many “Other” petitioners in this case). The Court has made it clear in many other related and ongoing cases that it would brook no impediments in the path of the SIR. More telling is how the Court has allowed the SIR in Bihar to be extended to the entire country, while its constitutionality was still being adjudicated.
This is not just one legal battle, but a test case. Today the judiciary is the last frontier, the only institution that can prevent Indian elections from going down the Bangladesh or Pakistan route. The SIR case is to electoral democracy what ADM Jabalpur was to fundamental rights. That is why the apex court’s order in this case could dampen the spirits of all those who cherish the hope that the highest court will not fail the Constitution and the country, which it unfortunately did 50 years ago.
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal
The SIR case is to electoral democracy what ADM Jabalpur was to fundamental rights. That is why the apex court’s order in this case could dampen the spirits of all those who cherish the hope that the highest court will not fail the Constitution and the country, which it unfortunately did 50 years ago. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
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