The Supreme Court has been moved by five voters whose names were deleted from the West Bengal electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), seeking expeditious adjudication of their appeals pending before the Appellate Tribunals in Kolkata and Howrah ahead of the forthcoming municipal elections.
The application has been filed in the pending proceedings concerning the West Bengal SIR through Advocate Prashant Bhushan. The applicants have contended that their exclusion from the electoral rolls was effected without adequate notice and without furnishing any reasoned or speaking order explaining the basis for the deletion of their names.
The plea assumes significance in view of the impending elections to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Howrah Municipal Corporation, expected to be conducted in the latter part of November. The applicants have urged that their appeals be decided at the earliest so that, if found eligible, they are not deprived of their electoral franchise in the civic polls.
According to the application, the petitioners had duly submitted their enumeration forms during the SIR exercise and their names were reflected in the draft electoral rolls. They were subsequently issued notices and summoned before the concerned judicial officers on the ground of alleged “logical discrepancies”.
The applicants claim that they appeared in the proceedings and participated in the hearings. Their cases, however, were thereafter shown as “under adjudication”. It was only in April that they allegedly learnt that their names had been deleted from the electoral rolls.
The applicants have asserted that no speaking order communicating the adjudication of their cases was furnished to them and that they were not served with any further notice before their names were removed from the rolls.
Aggrieved by the exclusion, they preferred appeals before the Appellate Tribunals in the second week of April. The plea now seeks priority in the disposal of those proceedings, contending that any further delay could effectively render the appellate remedy nugatory insofar as the forthcoming municipal elections are concerned.
The applicants have further drawn the Supreme Court’s attention to the large pendency of appeals arising out of the SIR process. They state that approximately 1.7 lakh appeals are pending in Kolkata and Howrah, the two municipal areas where elections are due.
They have also raised questions regarding the legal and procedural framework governing cases categorised on the basis of alleged “logical discrepancies”. According to the application, no notification or order issued by the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, has clearly prescribed the criteria for identifying such discrepancies or laid down a comprehensive adjudicatory mechanism for dealing with them.
The plea additionally seeks the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to examine the decision-making process underlying the SIR exercise, including the original records relied upon for initiating proceedings that ultimately resulted in the exclusion of voters.
The applicants have further relied upon reports concerning the Election Commission’s subsequent re-enrolment exercise, contending that voters whose appeals against exclusion remain pending before the Appellate Tribunals may not be covered by the fresh enrolment mechanism. The West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer has also clarified that matters pending before the tribunals cannot be decided afresh by Electoral Registration Officers or District Electoral Officers.
In these circumstances, the applicants have submitted that expeditious adjudication of the pending appeals is imperative to ensure that the appellate process does not become merely academic and that eligible electors are afforded a meaningful opportunity to participate in the forthcoming municipal elections.
The plea comes against the backdrop of a substantial appellate workload arising from the West Bengal SIR exercise. The Election Commission had earlier informed the Supreme Court that more than 22 lakh appeals had been filed by deleted voters seeking restoration of their names to the electoral rolls.
The applicants have consequently urged the Supreme Court to intervene to ensure timely adjudication of their appeals, asserting that continued pendency before the Appellate Tribunals could result in their being denied the opportunity to exercise their electoral franchise in the forthcoming civic elections despite having invoked the prescribed statutory appellate mechanism.
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