KOLKATA (The Thursday Times) — Opposition parties and civil rights groups in West Bengal launched a joint platform on Saturday to fight for voters struck off the state’s electoral rolls, after a revision that removed more than 91 lakh names, about 13% of the electorate.
The All Bengal Joint Forum to Safeguard Voting Rights, or Sara Bangla Votadhikar Rokkha Jukto Moncho, called on people whose names it says were unlawfully deleted during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to speak out, and invited all opposition parties to a mass convention in Kolkata on November 21.
“The voters whose names have been unlawfully deleted from the electoral rolls are also being called upon to raise their voices through this platform to protect their constitutional right,” said Prasenjit Bose, an economist and Congress leader. Members said the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) would attend, along with civil rights groups.
38 lakh appeals pending
The SIR in Bengal ran from October 2025 to February 2026, just before the Assembly election that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in the state for the first time. In an affidavit to the Supreme Court in September, the Election Commission of India said 22 lakh of the 27 lakh people excluded for “logical discrepancies” had appealed to tribunals, and a further 16.10 lakh appeals had been filed against names that were included, leaving 38 lakh appeals pending.
Bose said the forum would put six questions to the authorities, including how long the tribunals would take to clear the backlog and whether the 22 lakh voters who appealed would be shut out of the coming municipal and panchayat elections.
The forum also alleged that the challenges to 16 lakh names had been generated by the state’s former chief electoral officer, Manoj Agrawal. “We want to know who are these people, why these applications have been issued against their names despite being included in the voters’ lists in the SIR. Do they belong to any specific community or any particular region?” said Jawhar Sircar, a retired civil servant and former Rajya Sabha member.
The launch comes as the political fight over the revision widens. Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said on Saturday that India was “no longer a democracy” after a nationwide revision he said had struck off 140 million voters, while Kolkata police questioned Trinamool MP Abhishek Banerjee over a social media post about the chief election commissioner.
Commission’s reply
The Election Commission filed a supplementary affidavit in the Supreme Court on Saturday setting out “further measures” to bring back voters wrongly left off draft rolls as absent, shifted, dead, or duplicate. “The Commission remains alive to the need to ensure that all those who are eligible to vote find their name in the voters’ lists,” it said.
Under directions issued on November 6 to the states where the revision is under way, such voters can submit an enumeration form in person, through family members, or online, and will get back their old voter ID numbers. Booth-wise lists of excluded voters are to be displayed again with the “probable reasons” they were left out. Voters who had already applied as new voters need not reapply and will not face prosecution, the commission said.
The petitioners, including the activist Anjali Bhardwaj, had told the court that previously registered voters were being pushed to file Form 6, which is meant for first-time voters, exposing them to prosecution for false declarations. The commission also told the court that it had put oversight of its IT division under a senior deputy election commissioner, after reports that the division had been bypassing that level of supervision.
