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Kolkata: Voters of 11 assembly constituencies in Murshidabad are having their cases heard at Appellate Tribunal 11 – from 55-Farakka to 65-Nabagram. Between them are 6,35,983 appeals that arose out of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls in Bengal. 

Of these, around 2.54 lakh, about four out of every 10 appeals – challenging the inclusion of electors – before the tribunal, were filed by the Additional Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Bengal. These were not appeals by voters seeking restoration of their names to the electoral roll but by election authorities seeking the exclusion of electors whose names had already been included.

The figure comes from retired Justice Indrajit Chatterjee, the former Calcutta high court judge presiding over the tribunal, who spoke at length to The Wire for this report.

How commission pushed to remove voters

On September 16, 2026, the Election Commission of India (ECI) presented a statistical breakdown of the West Bengal tribunal appeals to the Supreme Court. The data revealed a total of 38,31,429 appeals, comprising 22,21,118 petitions from excluded electors and 16,10,311 appeals contesting voter inclusion. The ECI did not disclose the origin of the appeals made against the inclusion of voters. The court’s August 25 directive had not mandated this information either.

Internally, the origin of these appeals was already a matter of contention. The Indian Express reported that on August 12, Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu formally inquired about the authorisation of the appeals in West Bengal. He stated that senior officials, including himself, fellow Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi, and the state’s Chief Electoral Officer, were uninformed on filings made by the state-level Additional CEO.

As The Wire had noted in its September 27 report, public records from Justice Indrajit Chatterjee’s Appellate Tribunal Number 11 created as........

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