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Kolkata: Mohd Dual Ali, a resident of Bhagwangola in Murshidabad, West Bengal, served in the Indian Army and was hit by gunfire while he was in uniform. He survived and went on to work in the Indian Railways. In May 2026, when West Bengal voted, he did not – and neither did three of his children. All their names had been struck off the electoral roll during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.

He filed an appeal before the tribunal over four months ago but the date has not been decided yet. He still does not know why their names were dropped.

A reply to a Right to Information (RTI) filing from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, however, now explains why he is still waiting, and why, like him, roughly 37 lakh others are also waiting.

RTI application filed by Congress MP Isha Khan Choudhury

The reply, Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated August 17, 2026, was issued to Isha Khan Choudhury, Congress MP from Dakshin Malda, and runs to 28 pages. Two of its tables carry the story. As on August 7, 2026, the Appellate Tribunal in West Bengal had received 38,10,620 appeals arising out of the SIR. It had decided on 82,782 of them.

Put another way, 37,27,838 appeals are left undecided four months after the assembly election, which the hearings were meant to precede. 

The number that should stop the argument

Of the 82,782 appeals disposed of, 75,443 ended with the voter being re-included on the roll. Only 7,339 were excluded.

That is a restoration rate of 91.13%.

So, the tribunal has looked at a sliver of the deletions and found that in more than nine cases out of ten, the deletion should not have happened. The safeguard works exactly as designed on the fraction of cases it reaches, which is the problem. If the same rate held across the pile, the overwhelming majority of the 27,28,500 people recorded as “not eligible” during adjudication were removed in error, but almost all of them are still off the roll.

That inference needs one honest caveat. The 82,782 decided cases are not a random sample. Simpler files, or files pushed by someone with a lawyer, may well have been taken up first. 

Wing Commander Md Shamim Akhtar (Retd.), a decorated IAF veteran, was not called for a hearing. Photo: By arrangement

Wing Commander (Retired) Md Shamim Akhtar, a resident of Kolkata, whose own appeal is still pending, described to The Wire what that filter looks like from inside it: “Many people I know have spent thousands of rupees to get a lawyer to file the application.”

The caveat cuts both ways, though. If the clean, well-represented cases are the ones getting decided, and 91% of those end in restoration, there is no obvious reason to think the untouched 37 lakh contain fewer genuine voters.

Three ways to lose a vote

Copies of three appeals reviewed for this report show how differently the process can fail while producing the same result.

Akhtar took premature retirement from the Indian Air........

© The Wire