For 61 lakh ‘doubtful’ voters, it’s a race against time to get on electoral roll | India News
New Delhi: Around 60 lakh voters in West Bengal have been classified as ‘suspicious’ by the Election Commission and their cases have been referred for trial by judicial officers appointed by the Calcutta High Court. Consistent with this Supreme CourtInstructions dated 20th February. Assembly elections in the state are likely to be announced in the second half of March, which means that it will be a race against time to include “suspicious” voters in the electoral rolls.Sources said that Bengal’s final electorate was around 6.4 crore, with a total deletion of 1.2 crore from October 27, 2025 (15.9%). Of these, about 61.8 lakh were deleted due to dead, transferred, transferred and registered at multiple places and another 60 lakh were classified as pending ‘suspicious’ voters.Such ‘doubtful’ electors, when their cases are approved by court-appointed judicial officers, will be added back to the state list through supplementary lists published later. Until then these voters cannot vote in any election.A senior EC official told TOI that most of these ‘suspicious’ voters could be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. “Despite stiff resistance, the SIR exercise in Bengal has been a huge success,” said another EC official.As per rules, the voter list of a state is frozen 10 days before the last date of nomination for Lok Sabha or Assembly elections. Hence only those ‘suspected’ voters whose cases are disposed of within the stipulated time frame will be able to vote in the upcoming Bengal Assembly elections.It remains to be seen how much time the judicial officers will take to resolve the cases of 60 lakh ‘dubious’ voters in West Bengal. Cases of thousands of ‘suspicious’ or ‘D’ voters in Assam, classified since 1997 and not allowed to vote, have been pending before foreign tribunals for decades. Only after the Tribunal declares ‘D’ voters as bona fide citizens can they vote. If ruled as aliens, they are sent to detention centers and deportation proceedings are initiated.Judiciary-appointed officials in Bengal now have to do the same for people classified as ‘suspicious’ voters because of the SIR, ostensibly for being Bangladeshis. So effectively, judicial officers would act like foreign tribunals, checking and confirming the citizenship of ‘suspicious’ voters before restoring their franchise.At the start of the SIR exercise on October 27, 2025, the electorate of Bengal was 7.7 crore. The draft list released on December 16, 2025 put the voter strength at 7.08 crore after deletion of 58.2 lakh. 6.4 crore voters were enrolled in the final list released on Saturday, a net deletion of 3.6 lakh since the publication of the draft roll.
