Hindu Editorial: 93% of Decided West Bengal SIR Appeals Restored Wrongly Deleted Electors

The news

New Delhi / Kolkata. In an editorial titled “Presumed ineligible”, The Hindu argues that the Election Commission of India (ECI) must end its method of “deleting first and verifying later” in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. An SIR is a fresh, house-to-house preparation of the voter list in which electors must submit enumeration forms and, where asked, documents. Citing an ECI counter-affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the paper says that by early September 2026, of more than 38 lakh appeals filed before the SIR appellate tribunals in West Bengal, just over 1,22,000 had been disposed of, a disposal rate of 3.2%. Of these, 1,13,943 electors were added back to the rolls, an inclusion rate of nearly 93%. In the earlier claims and objections phase, judicial officers deployed for verification had deemed 27 lakh of the 60 lakh electors flagged for “logical discrepancies” to be ineligible, and more than 22 lakh of them have appealed. The editorial does not reconcile the 38 lakh and 22 lakh figures. If these rates hold, the paper argues, most of the 27 lakh should never have been declared ineligible, and “massive disenfranchisement preceded the West Bengal Assembly polls”; with municipal elections approaching, the ECI must speed up appeals. In Delhi’s Phase 3 SIR, The Hindu’s analysis found that in 24 of 70 constituencies the draft roll records fewer electors than those who voted in the February 2025 Assembly election. “Mapping”, the process of linking every elector to rolls from the early 2000s, has put 13.79 lakh Delhi electors under notice, and a further 19.33 lakh are flagged for “logical discrepancies” on undefined grounds. The paper says the burden of proving eligibility has been placed on the elector, and that the Court, which intervened sharply in the Bihar SIR, has since been permissive. Odisha’s final roll, published on Monday, has 3,16,32,754 voters, 17,66,837 fewer than the 3,33,99,591 on July 17, according to Chief Electoral Officer R.S. Gopalan. Draft exclusions included 8,32,544 dead, 8,08,205 shifted and 1,58,118 duplicates. In Nagaland, Additional CEO Awa Lorin said 9.33% of electors could not be mapped to the 2005 roll and 27.31% showed mapping anomalies, together 36.64%, and nearly five lakh voters are expected to receive notices, The Indian Express reports. The syllabus link is electoral reform and the right to vote.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The Constitution makes the franchise universal and the roll the ECI’s duty. Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections in the Election Commission. Article 325 provides for one general electoral roll for every constituency and bars exclusion on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or any of them. Article 326 provides that elections shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, and every citizen aged 18 or above who is not otherwise disqualified is entitled to be registered. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 by the 61st Amendment, 1988.
2. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 governs who is on the roll. Section 16 of the RP Act, 1950 disqualifies a person from registration if he is not a citizen, is declared of unsound mind by a competent court, or is disqualified under a law on corrupt practices. Section 19 requires that the person be 18 on the qualifying date and ordinarily resident in the constituency, and Section 20 explains ordinary residence. Section 21 provides for the preparation and revision of rolls, and Section 21(3) allows the ECI to direct a special revision at any time for reasons to be recorded. Section 22 lets the Electoral Registration Officer correct or delete entries, but only after giving the person a reasonable opportunity of being heard, and Section 24 provides for appeals.
3. Forms and qualifying dates are the machinery of everyday revision. Under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, Form 6 is used for inclusion of a name, Form 7 for objection to or deletion of an entry, and Form 8 for correction or shifting. The Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021 amended Section 14 of the RP Act, 1950 to provide four qualifying dates in a year — January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1 — so that young voters need not wait a full year. The Electoral Registration Officer, appointed under Section 13B, is usually a revenue officer, and the Booth Level Officer is the field functionary.
4. Courts have long insisted on hearing before deletion. In Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer (1995), the Supreme Court held that a person whose name is on the roll cannot be removed on a mere suspicion of not being a citizen without notice and a fair inquiry, and that the entry itself carries weight. In Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner (1978), the Court described Article 324 as a reservoir of power, but one that must be exercised fairly and in line with law. These rulings are the reason the editorial’s central complaint is about sequence: verification must come before deletion, not after.

Why UPSC loves this

1. Electoral reform is a standing GS2 topic. The syllabus names the Representation of People’s Act and the powers and functions of constitutional bodies. UPSC has asked about the independence of the ECI and about electoral reform, and the SIR exercise, with its huge numbers, gives a concrete case for questions on inclusion, administrative capacity and judicial oversight.
2. An editorial card trains the argument, not just the facts. The Hindu’s editorial offers a model of evidence-based criticism: it uses the ECI’s own affidavit numbers. Mains answers that quote a disposal rate and an inclusion rate, and then draw an inference, score better than those that merely state that exclusion is bad.

Analysis

1. A 93% reversal rate is an audit of the first decision, not proof of a fair system. When nine out of ten appeals end in restoration, the appellate tribunal is not correcting occasional errors; it is revealing that the original decision process was unreliable. In any administrative system, a reversal rate that high would trigger a review of the first-level procedure. The ECI may argue that early decided cases are the easy ones and that the rate will fall as harder cases are heard. That is possible, but it only strengthens the case for pausing deletions until the reasons for so many errors are known.
2. The disposal rate is the real disenfranchisement. A right to appeal that is decided after the election is, for that election, no right at all. With only 3.2% of appeals disposed of, most wrongly removed voters in West Bengal could not vote in the Assembly polls, and many may miss the municipal polls too. Voting is a time-bound right: a restored name in December does not return a vote lost in the spring. The ECI therefore needs either many more tribunals or a rule that disputed names stay on the roll until the appeal is decided.
3. Mapping to old rolls turns a paperwork gap into an eligibility question. Linking each elector to the rolls of the early 2000s, as Delhi and Nagaland show, penalises the people who moved, married, migrated for work, or were missed in those years. That group is disproportionately poor, female and migrant, and in Nagaland, remote. The Nagaland figure of 36.64% unmapped or anomalous shows that the mismatch reflects the weakness of old records, not the ineligibility of voters. A mapping failure should prompt a field visit, not a notice asking the citizen to prove his existence.
4. The counter-view: a clean roll also protects the vote. Odisha’s figures show that the SIR also removes real errors: over eight lakh dead electors and over one and a half lakh duplicates. Inflated rolls enable impersonation and weaken trust in results, and the ECI has a duty under Article 324 to fix them. The Hindu’s argument is not against revision but against its sequence and burden. A roll can be cleaned of the dead and duplicates through field verification and death records without making every living elector prove eligibility.
5. Judicial restraint has a cost when the right is time-bound. The editorial criticises the Supreme Court for being permissive after its early interventions in Bihar. Courts usually avoid interfering in ongoing electoral processes, following the principle that elections should not be stalled. But when the process itself is the source of exclusion, delay by the Court operates as a decision in favour of exclusion. A narrow interim direction, such as no final deletion before a hearing, would respect the ECI’s domain while protecting the franchise.

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