EC tells SC most deleted Bengal voters won their appeals

The Election Commission has told the Supreme Court that most West Bengal voters who appealed after being left off the rolls during the special intensive revision have won those appeals so far.

An annexure to the EC affidavit says about 93% of decided cases ended with the voter put back on the roll. Roughly 1.14 lakh people satisfied the tribunals that the exclusion was wrong. Another 8,649 lost their appeal and will stay deleted. The commission says about 1.2 lakh cases had been decided by mid-September, though the exact cut-off dates in the affidavit and annexure do not fully match.

The appellate panels were set up on the Supreme Court's direction. They include former high court chief justices and judges. Hearings began in April for people whose claim for inclusion was rejected.

The EC filed the numbers to push back on TMC MP Derek O'Brien's claim that the exclusions cost the party 31 assembly seats. The commission says O'Brien ignored constituencies where deletions under appeal exceed margins his own party won, and that treating every deletion as disenfranchisement is misleading once absent, shifted, duplicate, and similar entries are set aside.

Separately, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh called the nationwide SIR an "assault on the Constitution," saying 7.8 crore names were deleted across the first two phases and that the state had shifted the burden onto citizens to produce documents.

Electoral rolls decide who can vote. When a large share of early appeals reverse the commission's own exclusions, the quality of the first cut comes under fresh pressure, even if the EC says the disposed cases are still a thin sample and that proof-heavy files were decided first.

For Bengal politics, the affidavit is also a numbers fight. One side reads the deletions as decisive. The other says the same data cuts both ways once margins and ASDD removals are counted properly. Readers do not need to pick a team to see why the Supreme Court file matters: it is the public record of how many people were wrongly kept off the list, at least among those who appealed and got a hearing.

Watch how many more appeals the tribunals clear, and whether the win rate for inclusion holds as harder cases come up. The Supreme Court will keep hearing the challenge to the revision. Political parties will keep arguing over what the deletions did to the West Bengal result.