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This is the third of a series on how the adjudication process of the Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal continues in Bengal. Read part one, here and part two, here.

Judicial officers reviewing the electoral rolls in Murarai, a constituency in West Bengal’s Birbhum, in March this year marked 14,870 names not eligible and struck them off the voter list. Ninety-five percent of these names were Muslim. The Appellate Tribunal set up to hear their appeals has, in the last five or so months, decided exactly one case in Murarai. That one person was excluded from the list.

Murarai is an extreme case and shorn of context, it perhaps should not be read as a pattern. But its theme holds across West Bengal, and it can be stated in one sentence – the places where the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) affected the most number of Muslim electors are the places where the process of correction has been slowest and least effective.

Note: Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. Community assigned by surname classification of the Commission’s published lists of electors marked not eligible, an estimate carrying an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Commission’s restoration figures carry no community field.

Of the 27,05,162 names on the Election Commission’s published lists of those found “not eligible” to vote, approximately 18.98 lakh were Muslim. This is 70.2%, in a state where Muslims are around 25% of the electorate.

The removal of Muslim names was not spread evenly across the state. The districts Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur, with 43 constituencies between them, account for 31.8% of the total number of electors in West Bengal. In these three districts, 94.4% of the removals were Muslim. Measured against the electorate they started with, those three districts lost 7.63% of their voters to the revision, against a state figure of 3.53%, more than double the rate.

To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.

To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.

Eighteen of the 43 constituencies sit on an international border. In these constituencies, 42% of Muslims were deleted, against the 15% figure of the state, and their electorates had grown 50.1% since 2011 against the 36.7%........

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