An application was filed in the Supreme Court on Monday (September 28, 2026) to constitute an independent committee comprising former judges of the apex court, retired Chief Election Commissioners/Election Commissioners and experts to conduct a time-bound inquiry into the implementation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) across 20 States and Union Territories.
The plea by Prasenjit Bose, petitioner in the West Bengal SIR case and chairperson of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee’s SIR panel, sought a stay of further proceedings pursuant to the SIR undertaken in these States and Union Territories during the period of the proposed inquiry.
The recent Election Commission of India (ECI) press note on a ‘special drive’ to re-enroll deleted electors through a different version of Form 6, in effect, nullifies the SIR process, the application said.
It said the exclusion of lakhs of eligible electors during the SIR in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala deprived them of an opportunity to exercise their vote in the Assembly elections held in April-May 2026. Of the 22 lakh applications filed by deleted electors in West Bengal, only 1,607 electors had been reinstated in time to vote in April. So far, the Appellate Tribunals, according to ECI statistics, have disposed of only 3% of the total appeals filed, and 93% of these disposed appeals have resulted in the inclusion of electors in the electoral rolls. Unlike other States, where additions heavily outpaced removals from the voter list, West Bengal saw widespread Form 6 (inclusions in the electoral roll) rejections and Form 7 (objection to inclusion) purges. As on August 7, the application said, only 7.07 lakh fresh enrolments had been made out of the 34.13 lakh Form 6 applications received in West Bengal, while 7.26 lakh applications had been rejected. Nearly 20 lakh Form 6 applications were either under process or remained unprocessed.
This revealed that the ‘logical discrepancies’ criteria applied by the EC resulted in large-scale wrongful exclusion of eligible electors in West Bengal.
Over 16 lakh appeals against inclusions have clogged the tribunals, he said, and the “manner and authority under which these 16.10 lakh appeals were filed, and their legality, remain unclear”. The application said the entire claims and objections process in West Bengal warranted an independent inquiry.
