Thousands of West Bengal Voters Miss Bye‑election as Tribunal Appeals Stall

Nearly 19,000 voters in West Bengal’s Nandigram and Rejinagar constituencies will be unable to vote in Tuesday’s bye‑elections because their appeals are still pending in sluggish Appellate Tribunals. The two seats are part of a larger pool of 38.31 lakh voters in the state whose enrolment cases remain unresolved, a backlog the Calcutta High Court warned could take 21 years to clear at the current pace. In Rejinagar, 12,452 appeals were filed and only four have been included so far; in Nandigram, 6,443 appeals were lodged and 89 have been included. No appeals have been excluded, yet the tribunals have cleared just 1.26 lakh of the 38.31 lakh pending appeals – roughly three percent of the total. The Election Commission set up 19 Appellate Tribunals in March, but three retired judges – Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, Justice Ranjit Bag and Justice Indrajit Chatterjee – quit, leaving their benches vacant and reducing functional tribunals to 16. The Commission’s plan to raise the number of tribunals to 42 has stalled, and a Supreme Court hearing scheduled for October 5 was not listed. A special door‑to‑door drive to re‑enrol voters missed those still waiting in the tribunals. The tribunals were created after the Supreme Court ordered a separate appellate body for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process. Judicial officers restored about 32.77 lakh voters and rejected 27.23 lakh, of which 22 lakh appealed. Over 16.1 lakh bulk appeals challenged the inclusion of restored voters, pushing the total pending cases just above 38 lakh.

Context

The backlog reflects systemic delays in processing electoral roll disputes, a problem that can affect election outcomes when large numbers of voters remain excluded.