The principal objective of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is the cleansing of the voters’ list to ensure that only bona fide voters remain as electors. It must be asked though whether this prerogative of cleansing — motivated or otherwise — has made the SIR demonstrably exclusionary in poll-bound Bengal. The numbers compel such a query. More than 27 lakh voters were found to be ineligible by the Election Commission of India after the completion of the adjudication process in Bengal. A closer look at the relevant data in districts reveals that of the 60.06 lakh voters marked under adjudication, 27,16,393 voters have been excluded. This is over and above the 58.25 lakh voters who had been deleted on account of being dead, absent, shifted or duplicate from the draft rolls published in December last year. In essence, Bengal’s electoral rolls have been depleted by a little less than 91 lakh voters. The deletions — they have been severely contested by citizens in many instances — have cut across religious lines. But not every district or constituency has suffered equally. For instance, the data suggest that Murshidabad — a minority-dominated district — has borne a disproportionate brunt of deletions; of the 11,01,145 voters marked for adjudication, 4,55,137 were declared ineligible. In Nandigram, where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Suvendu Adhikari is in the fray, Muslims constitute 25% of the electorate but have been subjected to 95% of deletions in the seven supplementary lists published by the EC. Worryingly, so far, only two special cases, those of contestants, have been resolved in the 19 tribunals that have been instituted to address deletions. This has raised the prospect of mass disenfranchisement of voters, most of whom claim to be legitimate electors.

In light of such worrying developments, the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to decline a plea by the Bengal government was unfortunate. The latter had sought interim relief from the highest court, particularly for ‘mapped’ voters whose names have been deleted: mapped voters are a constituency whose members had been able to link their names, or those of their parents and grandparents, to the rolls after the 2002 SIR. The volume of deletions as well as the time constraints faced by tribunals made the Bengal government’s appeal just. Yet the Supreme Court was unconvinced, even though one of the justices assured that the appellate tribunals would be conscious of constitutional prerogatives. This means that the electoral right of a large number of people in Bengal has been made uncertain for the coming polls: is that not disenfranchisement? The SIR, its minders and defenders can claim credit for this dubious achievement.