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This is the second in a series of articles on the tribunal hearings on Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.

In the first of this series, The Wire reported that of the 27,16,393 electors West Bengal’s SIR found not eligible, about seven lakh went to the Appellate Tribunal and 75,443 have been put back on the roll. Those figures came from the Election Commission of India (ECI) under the Right to Information Act (RTI). Read a second time, against the commission’s own parallel returns in the same reply, they do not hold. Read the first article of the series here.

West Bengal voted in phases. For that first phase, the tribunals examined 138 appeals and allowed 136. For the second phase the figure was 1,468, on a list closed on April 27.

Set that against the reply to the RTI application, which records 75,443 restorations as on August 7. In eleven constituencies, the named lists exceed the figure the reply gives. The RTI shows 26 restorations in Chowrangee while tribunal cleared 322 names. Same for Ballygunge, Rashbehari, Bhabanipur, Beleghata. Hence, it can be assumed that the RTI reply does not include those who were cleared to cast their votes. 

Six constituencies have restored more electors than were ever found ineligible in them. The reply reports the same appeal totals twice over, once constituency by constituency and once district by district, and the two accounts disagree for 23 of the 24 districts. One district record 25 filings for every person it removed.

And the deleted-elector list for one constituency does not appear in the published record at all.

None of that is an inference drawn from outside the commission’s books. Taken together they mean the commission is not currently in a position to say how many of the electors it removed have been put back, and neither is anybody else.

The reply, issued on August 17, 2026 under memo number 8551/Home (Elec) to Isha Khan Choudhury, Congress MP for Dakshin Malda, runs to 28 pages.

The mysterious restoration in six constituencies

If every restoration meant an elector found not eligible getting a name back, no constituency could restore more people than it ever marked ineligible. Six did.

Manbazar in Purulia was recorded as finding........

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