Over the past six months, the 19 Supreme Court-appointed appellate tribunals in West Bengal have disposed of only 1.02 lakh out of 38.20 lakh appeals filed by individuals whose names were rejected or deleted during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process.
According to an affidavit filed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the Supreme Court, a staggering 37,18,452 appeals remain pending.
Going by the affidavit, the Election Commission of India, despite a direction by a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, has not provided a break-up of how many appeals were filed by the 27.16 lakh persons whose names were deleted from the electoral rolls or by the ECI against inclusion of names.
This affidavit has come on a petition filed by the West Bengal Congress leader Prasenjit Bose, seeking directions to the ECI to disclose constituency-wise data on additions and deletions made during the SIR in West Bengal.
Bose, through his petition filed by SC Advocate-On-Record Neha Rathi, has also sought directions to make public the standard operating procedure governing appeals before appellate tribunals. Bose argued that there are no publicly available guidelines on appeals, documentation requirements, notices, hearings or timelines for disposal of cases.
On August 25, the last date of hearing, the Supreme Court had directed ECI to provide a break-up of pending and disposed appeals. The information sought by the Bench also included how many appeals are still pending before the appellate tribunals, how many appeals have so far been disposed of, including the nature of relief sought in those appeals, a break-up of the appeals concerning voters whose names have been excluded and those where exclusion of names from the electoral roll has been sought, how many appeals have been allowed and what consequential steps are being taken for updating the electoral rolls pursuant to such orders, what steps are being taken to streamline the mechanism for disposal of the pending appeals.
The order was passed after Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan who argued the petition filed by Bose, quoting a RTI response filed by ECI claimed that 31 lakh out of the 38 lakh appeals (nearly 80%) pending in WB SIR appellate tribunals are filed challenging the inclusion of persons in the electoral rolls and only 7 lakh appeals are filed by persons who have been excluded from rolls.
“This means that a major chunk of the appeals burdening the tribunals are seeking disenfranchisement of the persons. Also out of the 83,000 appeals against exclusions so far decided, over 75,000 have been allowed, which means nearly 90% of the decided appeals were in favour of voters”, Advocate Sankaranarayanan contended
After hearing the lawyer, Justice Joymalya Bagchi, one the judge in the 3 judge Bench led by CJI Surya Kant had told ECI’s counsel: “Get your data, the nature of the appeals that are filed, whether it is for inclusion or for exclusion. And then we will take a call as to whether we prioritise the exclusion and then inclusion because an inclusion is not affecting an individual right, but an exclusion is denuding a voting right. It will require some prioritisation. Nonetheless, it will bring down the burden (on the tribunals) to some extent.”