West Bengal's SIR exercise casts a long shadow on electoral integrity

The Supreme Court’s decision on April 13 to decline interim voting rights to West Bengal voters whose names were deleted in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has focused the spotlight on how the process was conducted. It eliminates 2.7 million voters from the roll for the upcoming Assembly elections; their appeals are pending before 19 apex court-mandated special judicial tribunals. West Bengal is the only one of the 13 states and Union territories to have an additional layer of special adjudication following Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s appeal to the Supreme Court on February 4 this year.

 

Overall, some nine million voters — about 12 per cent of the electorate — were struck off the roll. Of those, about six million were deemed “absentee” or “deceased”. For the rest, the Election Commission either categorised them as voters unmapped to the 2002 roll, the official cutoff date, or as facing “logical discrepancies”. Under a controversial artificial-intelligence algorithm, these logical discrepancies were broken down into five categories, including spelling differences, age gaps between parent and voter, more than six people linked to the same ancestor, and so on. However, it became increasingly clear that the logic behind these so-called discrepancies was questionable. As a result, some family members were excluded while others were included; voters with decades-long voting histories were left out and so on.

 

While the court-mandated judicial tribunals were supposed to address these issues more thoroughly, questions must be raised about the implementation of the process. Nearly 700 judicial officers drafted from West Bengal and neighbouring Odisha and Jharkhand heard over six million cases. Those whose names were not cleared in this initial process were permitted to approach 19 special tribunals set up for the purpose. The catch here is that no timelines have been fixed for adjudication because the apex court argued that former judges manning the tribunals could not be “overburdened”. Given this, the court would have done well to commandeer more resources and set a deadline for dealing with the cases. Neglecting to do so has defeated the purpose of the exercise. Yet the judges expressed deep concern about the vote-exclusion process, suggesting that a 2 per cent winning margin could be invalidated if 10-15 per cent of the electorate is excluded.

 

With the roll now frozen, almost 2.7 million voters, therefore, would not be able to vote on April 23 and 29. The claim that the SIR process aims to “clean” the roll and exclude “non-citizens” from voting — an allusion to infiltration across the border West Bengal shares with Bangladesh —  does not seem to reflect in the pattern of deletions. To be sure, according to reports, Muslims account for more than a third of the deletions, with border districts such as Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia, and Cooch Behar bearing the brunt. But the state capital, Kolkata, has seen between 27 and 30 per cent of its voters struck off the roll in the north and south, the highest rate in the state. Equally some Hindu-majority districts have seen sharp cuts, including Paschim Bardhaman. These trends raise questions about the veracity of the SIR process, and urgently warrant reconsideration. It is also worth debating whether the SIR should have been conducted on the eve of the election. If large numbers of genuine voters are left out, it defeats the purpose. Such processes should not only be fair but also be seen to be fair.