6 min readApr 28, 2026 06:12 AM IST First published on: Apr 28, 2026 at 06:12 AM ISTThe SIR in West Bengal was a Special Impediment Removal exercise designed by the BJP, executed by the ECI and certified by the Supreme Court. Carefully designed to remove the demographic impediment faced by the BJP in its desperate bid to conquer Bengal, obediently executed by an army of outside officials deployed by the ECI, bypassing its established structure and processes, and repeatedly certified by the Supreme Court, not quite in control of, or fully aware of, the disenfranchising consequences of its orders.Over the past 10 months, we have normalised the deletion of large numbers of names in the SIR. Even by those standards, Bengal is an extraordinary case of SIR-led disenfranchisement. It needn’t have been so. There was nothing unusual about the voters’ list in Bengal. Nothing that required special treatment. Unless you look at it from the BJP’s eyes.AdvertisementTake the size of the electorate. In October 2025, prior to the SIR, Bengal’s electoral rolls had 7.66 crore names. Almost exactly the same number as the adult population in the state that month — 7.67 crore. Rarely does one find such a perfect electorate-population ratio. Clearly, there was no cause for alarm on this score. Nor is there any truth in the rumours that the TMC had used state officials to smuggle in massive insertions in the voters’ list just before the SIR. The total number of fresh inclusions in June-August 2025 was just 3.5 lakh, about 0.4 per cent. As many as 41 per cent of applications for inclusion of names during this period were rejected. This rules out the possibility of official complicity.Or, take the first stage of the SIR. A total of 58 lakh names were excluded in the draft SIR list of West Bengal. That works out to 7.7 per cent of the pre-SIR list in the state, not very different from Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh (7.6 and 7.3 per cent). The proportion of “unmapped” voters (those who filled enumeration form without proving that they or their blood relative was on the 2002 voters list) was not unusually low. At 4.5 per cent, the figure in Bengal was higher than Chhattisgarh (3.5 per cent), Tamil Nadu (2.3 per cent) and Rajasthan and MP (both 1.6 per cent). It was SIR as usual, large-scale haphazard deletions. Thus far, there was nothing to suggest that the voters’ list in Bengal was unduly inflated or not subjected to due pruning.This is when the alarm went off.We can only guess that the button must have been pushed at the BJP headquarters. The bell must have rung very loud at the Nirvachan Sadan. Loud enough for the ECI to take a series of extraordinary steps.AdvertisementThe ECI appointed 30 roll observers and special roll observers on top of the EROs designated for the job and 8,000 micro observers to work under them to ensure made-to-order deletions. For context, the number of roll and special observers in UP was four. No other state had a single micro-observer. When this did not yield the desired level of deletions, the ECI weaponised “logical discrepancies”. This basic software check that flags any mismatch between personal details supplied now and those recorded in 2002 was run in all the states where the SIR was carried out after Bihar. In West Bengal, the proportion of draft voters’ list entries with “discrepancies” (mismatch of name, relation’s name, or improbable age gaps between parents and children) was about the same as in other states. But in other states, the ECI overlooked or corrected the discrepancies arising from spelling variations or mis-recording of age. Not in Bengal. Notices were issued to over 1.3 crore persons on the draft voters’ list. They were asked to furnish documents at special hearings. Even this did not yield more than 6 lakh deletions. And there was no legal way to achieve further deletions.Now the ECI knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court with a contrived dispute vis-à-vis its own election machinery in the state. The apex court obliged by using its extraordinary powers and created a special adjudication mechanism to settle “disputed” cases. The court did not insist on a transparent process to decide which cases were to be sent for adjudication. Out of nowhere, the number of such disputes arose to 60 lakh. Till this date, no one can tell how and why 76 lakh logical discrepancies were resolved and 60 lakh sent for further adjudication. The court did not lay down a fair and clear protocol for how this adjudication was to take place. And the court did not apply its mind to how a few hundred judges were to decide 60 lakh cases within 35 days. The final outcome could not but be a miscarriage of justice. At a scale unknown in recent history.The scandal in the deletion of 27 lakh names (out of the 60 lakh under adjudication, over and above the 58 lakh and 6 lakh excluded in the earlier stages) is not just in the sheer numbers. It is in the fact that all these 27 lakh persons had filled the requisite enumeration form, had responded to the ECI’s notice, had attended a scheduled hearing, had produced documents (most applications that this author reviewed had submitted PAN Card, birth or school certificate and in many cases passport, besides Aadhaar) and have no idea why their case went up for adjudication and why it was decided against them. The scandal is that Bengal is the only state where the number of deletions went up after the draft SIR list was released. The scandal is that nearly two-thirds of those deleted are from the minority community.you may likeThe final act was a bit of a comedy. Faced with the deletion of 27 lakh names and with no time left for the polling day, the Supreme Court post-haste set up appellate tribunals that simply could not take off. Till the first phase, despite the prodding by the apex court, these tribunals have “disposed of” 657 appeals, out of 34 lakh or so that are pending. Analysis by the SABAR Institute tells us that so far, about 89 per cent of the “adjudication” decisions that the Supreme Court was happy to rely upon have been overturned by the tribunals.Add a tadka of comedy to a tragedy and you have a perfect farce, the SIR in West Bengal.The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal