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Snapshot of the day
September 28, 2026
Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan
Almost five months ago, it was pointed out to the Supreme Court that lakhs of people would be unable to exercise their right to vote in the West Bengal assembly elections because the system was not given enough time to hear the appeals of those struck off the electoral roll. In his now infamous response, Justice Joymalya Bagchi had said that the right of such persons to vote would be preserved in the long term even if they couldn’t exercise it this one time.
Well, next time is just round the corner but the signals from the apex court remain unencouraging. A petitioner today asked that the bench advance its hearing of Bengal’s slow-moving appellate tribunals in light of by-elections scheduled in Nandigram and Rejinagar for October 6. But Chief Justice Surya Kant respinded: “These are only by-elections, that’s all.” The court declined to advance the hearing from its currently listed date of October 5 – one day before the by-elections. The state’s overworked tribunals have disposed of a small fraction of the appeals pending before them; one judge of a Calcutta high court circuit bench estimated that they will, at their current speed, take many years to clear the backlog.
Fresh signals have also come from Nirvachan Sadan – currently under the microscope thanks to journalist Ritika Chopra’s exposé of the dysfunction and strife at its highest levels – and these do not inspire confidence either. In fact, some have noted, they affirm everything that has been said about the ECI so far. On Saturday, all three Election Commissioners held a meeting (which it turns out has become an uncommon occurrence amid the ‘frozen turbulence’ between them) and issued a two-page communique attempting unsuccessfully to address the various issues yanked into the spotlight by the Indian Express story:
ECI Claim: The Supreme Court upheld the EC’s declaration annexed to Form 6
Fact Check: Actually, the court did not deal with the EC’s move to amend Form 6 without a government notification and parliamentary oversight, which is what commissioners Vivek Joshi and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu had opposed, with the latter calling it outright illegal.ECI Claim: Agendas and minutes will be issued before and after the EC’s meetings, and that the commission’s approval will be required for foreign trips.
Facet Check: We are not told why these norms have been breached.ECI Claim: Those issued notices for being ‘unmapped’ and having ‘logical discrepancies’ in their data will no longer be required to physically attend hearings.
Fact check: Why has it taken until the last leg of the SIR to effect this salve?ECI Claim: Eighty-one of the 97 Goan electors who were wrongly struck off the rolls due to the EC centralising its intranet have already filled Form 6.
Fact check: But Form 6 is technically for people who have never voted before – why are these individuals being made to fill it?ECI claim: The said intranet will be subject to review by a committee and that all new IT-related initiatives will be discussed prior to the EC’s approval.
Fact check: Sandhu and Joshi had flagged these issues as early as April and May this year. Why the delay?
Notably, the press release is entirely silent on Sandhu’s concern that neither he nor Joshi nor West Bengal’s chief electoral officer were aware of who within the commission filed appeals against the inclusion of names to the state’s rolls, and by what method. That method has left behind some clues though. Aparna Bhattacharya has perused the state’s appellate tribunal data and reports that some of these anti-inclusion appeals have been filed apparently via an automated process. One tribunal specifically attributes two of these automated appeals to an additional chief electoral officer. Bhattacharya writes:
“What remains unknown is no longer whether there was a large, centrally organised challenge to these inclusions. It is how that system was instructed to generate it, who authorised that instruction and how much human scrutiny, if any, took place between a software flag and an appeal seeking to remove a voter from the electoral roll.”
Another organisation that has been applying its own controversial automated process is Meta – in a bid to cover itself in the face of the various takedown notices the Union and other governments have been sending its way, many of
