Mumbai: Days before the deadline to finalise electoral rolls for the West Bengal legislative assembly elections on 23 and 29 April 2026, the Supreme Court on 6 April 2026 allowed the Election Commission of India to stop 2 million people from casting their vote. 

Told by senior counsel Shyam Divan that 2 million voters among the 6 million placed ‘under adjudication’ during the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls had been rejected in adjudication and would approach appellate tribunals, the court rejected the West Bengal state government’s plea to wait a few more days before freezing the electoral roll.  

“The appellate tribunals would formulate their own procedure based on the principles of natural justice, and a final order would be delivered,” the apex court said. “That may, however, take a month or 60 days… How can the tribunals work when so much pressure is put on them?”

Divan, appearing for the state government, had contended that the appellate process is a part of the adjudication, and electors would be disenfranchised if they were left out of the electoral rolls pending the appeals process.  

The outcome marks the end of a rushed voter rolls revision marked by opaque processes and a blurring of institutional roles between the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the judiciary.  

When the SIR concluded on 20 February 2026, 6 million electors’ names were marked as “under adjudication,” with their eligibility to vote uncertain. As the rapid adjudication process continued on 1, 2 and 3 April, protests broke out over the deletion of names from electoral rolls through the SIR and the subsequent adjudication. 

In Malda, Jalpaiguri, Purba Bardhaman and Cooch Behar, protestors blocked highways and set tyres ablaze. On 1 April, seven judicial officials were held hostage by a mob of agitators for several hours in Kaliachak in Malda before police rescued them. 

The Supreme Court described the incident as a “deplorable”, “calculated” attempt to challenge the authority of the apex court. It ordered a probe and sought security for judicial officers completing the SIR adjudication, including by deploying central forces if needed. 

The court’s reported comment on West Bengal being the “most politically polarised state” was curious, given the unprecedented judicialisation of the electoral process in a highly sensitive state. 

The Lack Of Trust

Early in February, chief minister Mamata Banerjee appeared in the Supreme Court to challenge the ongoing SIR. The list of those placed under adjudication had not been uploaded online at the time, despite the court’s directions, denying those affected an opportunity to appeal in time. Conduct the current polls based on the rolls prepared in 2025, she urged. 

As early as December 2025, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) had demanded that the names of electors whose eligibility to vote was deemed uncertain be published. 

Singling out West Bengal, the Election Commission of India (ECI) had appointed over 8,000 ‘micro-observers’ for the SIR here. The TMC had alleged that these micro-observers, mostly employees of central public sector undertakings and banks, had taken control of the electoral registration officer (ERO) or assistant ERO log-ins on the ECI’s portal, used for preparing and revising electoral rolls. In February, citing the trust deficit between the West Bengal government and the ECI, the SC ordered the appointment of judicial officers to process SIR-related claims and objections.

At each instance when it was approached, beginning in mid-2025, regarding the hasty SIR exercises in states about to go to polls, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rule on the Constitutionality of the SIR, and remind the ECI of its role and the limits of the chief election commissioner’s powers. 

Instead, despite the Supreme Court’s supervision, the finalisation of the West Bengal electoral rolls has risked egregious exclusions and undermined constitutional guarantees. Inserting itself into a politically charged exercise alongside a compromised ECI, a court that has historically cautioned against intervening in elections now appears to be shaping the electorate itself, in real time.

Conducted 13 times since 1952, the 2025-26 iteration of the SIR has been singularly opaque, conducted alarmingly close to the poll, and completed with software about which voters and the wider public have little to no information. 

Majority Excluded Are Muslim  

An extraordinary effort by independent news website Alt News to extract and analyse voter records in two constituencies of voters placed under adjudication—shared eventually by the ECI on its website but as scanned images of documents instead of a searchable file format—showed 11.2% of the total electorate marked as being “under adjudication”. 

Despite the hurdles deliberately put in place by the ECI, Alt News managed to extract the data. It showed that Muslims accounted for a disproportionately large number of electors placed “under adjudication”—51.8% in Bhabanipur, the chief minister’s constituency, where Muslims account for 21.9% of the electorate; and 76.1% of those under adjudication in Ballygunge, where Muslims account for 54.3% of the electorate. In Bhabanipur, 23% or nearly one in every four Muslim voters was placed under adjudication.

Article 14 reported in March that nine of the 10 districts with the highest number of voters ‘under adjudication’ have a Muslim voter population of 50% or more. 

Murshidabad had the highest such number at 1.10 million ‘under adjudication’. Malda, where an angry mob hurled stones at the vehicles of judicial officers after keeping them under siege for about eight hours, came a close second. The district in the north-central part of the state, with a 51% Muslim voter population, had 0.83 million voters under adjudication.

So close to polling, this effort required a tribunalisation, at scale. Deleted voters have 15 days within which to file an appeal. The ECI announced 19 appellate tribunals on 21 March to hear appeals related to the SIR. 

The constitution of the tribunals was in compliance with the 10 March SC order, the ECI said, announcing that the tribunals would be headed by former high court judges.  

However, on 2 April, the day the 19 tribunals were expected to begin hearings, more than 12 days since the ECI announced their constitution, these were yet to be set up physically. 

“I cannot say when the tribunal will start functioning,” the state’s chief electoral officer, Manoj Agarwal, was quoted as saying. 

Appeals can also be filed online or at the office of the district magistrate, sub-divisional magistrate, etc., where officials will upload digitised appeals. 

On 1 April, the SC read out updated information it had received on the adjudication process. Judicial officers deployed as election registration officers and assistant election registration officers for the SIR had disposed of nearly 4.7 million lakh out of 6 million voters placed under adjudication, the court said. The remaining were to be completed by 7 April.

At the 1 April hearing, senior counsel Divan pointed out that the adjudication had a high exclusion rate, of nearly 45%, including many who had been “mapped”, which means they had voted in the 2002 election. 

It is clear now that the court-mandated tribunal process, which may potentially see lakhs of claims and objections, will not be even partially complete before the current election. For millions of electors who find themselves disenfranchised, this appears to be the State's promise of due process, delivered without the ability to meaningfully deliver it. 

Exclusion from the rolls at the moment would not repeal an elector’s right to vote in the future, the court observed, assuring that appellate hearings would ensure justice for those excluded incorrectly. 

Defying The Constitution

For vulnerable sections of the West Bengal population, including migrant workers and minorities, the promise of justice, eventually, before another election perhaps, within an electoral process that has been judicially steered for four months, falls well short of the Constitutional guarantee that entitles every adult citizen to cast a vote at every election. 

Article 326 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees universal adult suffrage, explicitly says “every person who is a citizen of India”… who is “not otherwise disqualified” by the Constitution or by any law under any grounds “shall be entitled to be registered as a voter at any such election.”

The provision needs no interpretation; it says quite simply that a citizen’s constitutional right trumps any delay in verifying her eligibility to vote. The SC’s separation of who enjoys this constitutional right at all times or at any time from who enjoys the right to vote in this election is mystifying.  

The perceived legitimacy of the electoral process depends not just on its legal robustness but also on public trust in its fairness, and the latter is now dangerously thin.

Since the announcement of elections on 15 March, the ECI has ordered the transfer of 483 administration and police officials in West Bengal. This is 21 times the 23 officers it ordered transferred in the three other poll-bound states combined, the Hindustan Times reported.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to the chief election commissioner on 31 March claiming that BJP agents had been “caught red-handed” sending the state’s chief electoral officer “thousands” of fraudulent Form 6 applications—the official application form to the ECI for Indian citizens to register as new voters or to seek that their names be included in the electoral roll. 

“This is an attempt at voter hijacking, the same dirty game BJP successfully played in Maharashtra and Delhi,” Banerjee wrote.

In Surat, more than 1,900 km away from Kolkata and home to a large Bengali community of textile and gold workers, the BJP and the local Surat Bengali Samaj have reportedly booked 5,000 carefully vetted voters on four Bengal-bound trains to enable them to exercise their franchise. The local BJP unit reportedly “declined” 1,500 applications.

Meanwhile, among the 6 million electors placed under adjudication by the SIR was retired Subedar Major Azad Ali of the Indian Army’s Corps of Electronics and Mechanical Engineers, a veteran of the Kargil war, Operation Parakram (2001-02) and Operation Sindoor (2025). Ali, a resident of North 24 Parganas, will pursue his case before a tribunal—likely not in time for the current election. 

(Kavitha Iyer is a member of the editorial board of Article 14.)

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