This is the third of a series on how the adjudication process of the Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal continues in Bengal. Read part one, here, part two, here, part four, here, and part five, here.Judicial officers reviewing the electoral rolls in Murarai, a constituency in West Bengal’s Birbhum, in March this year marked 14,870 names not eligible and struck them off the voter list. Ninety-five percent of these names were Muslim. The Appellate Tribunal set up to hear their appeals has, in the last five or so months, decided exactly one case in Murarai. That one person was excluded from the list.Murarai is an extreme case and shorn of context, it perhaps should not be read as a pattern. But its theme holds across West Bengal, and it can be stated in one sentence – the places where the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) affected the most number of Muslim electors are the places where the process of correction has been slowest and least effective.Note: Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. Community assigned by surname classification of the Commission’s published lists of electors marked not eligible, an estimate carrying an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Commission’s restoration figures carry no community field.The scaleOf the 27,05,162 names on the Election Commission’s published lists of those found “not eligible” to vote, approximately 18.98 lakh were Muslim. This is 70.2%, in a state where Muslims are around 25% of the electorate.The removal of Muslim names was not spread evenly across the state. The districts Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur, with 43 constituencies between them, account for 31.8% of the total number of electors in West Bengal. In these three districts, 94.4% of the removals were Muslim. Measured against the electorate they started with, those three districts lost 7.63% of their voters to the revision, against a state figure of 3.53%, more than double the rate.To follow what is being said below, click on the two dashboards here and here, to check the data for yourself.Eighteen of the 43 constituencies sit on an international border. In these constituencies, 42% of Muslims were deleted, against the 15% figure of the state, and their electorates had grown 50.1% since 2011 against the 36.7% statewide figure. It is no surprise that rapid growth of an electorate on a border attracts suspicion of ineligible enrolment. Statewide, the removals at border seats were 79.9% Muslim against 66.5% in non-border seats. One explanation can be ruled out, and it is the one the Commission is likely to reach for first. The SIR functioned through the process of matching each elector against the 2002 roll. Those who could not be matched were recorded as ‘unmapped’. In these three districts, the share of those unmapped was 2.21% of the electorate, against 3.99% across West Bengal and 4.30% in the rest of the state. Therefore, voters in these three districts were able to map themselves to the old rolls in more numbers than anywhere else in the state.What separated them was what happened after that. The share of their electorate placed under adjudication was 21.36%, against 5.50% in the rest of the state, and it was at that stage – after the draft roll had been published – that the removals were made. Across the 23 districts of the state, there is no relationship at all between the share who failed to map themselves to the 2002 rolls and the share of the electorate who were eventually struck off. Bankura had the lowest unmapped share in the state at 0.85% and removed 0.21% of its electorate. Malda had 1.88% who were unmapped and removed a whopping 7.48%.Also read: Bengal SIR: What the Patterns of Exclusion for Muslim, Scheduled Caste and Urban Voters SayWhere the remedy has not arrivedMalda and Murshidabad have 6,83,683 removals between them, a quarter of the state total. Out of this figure, 6,52,858 were Muslim electors. The tribunals have put 2,833 people back on the rolls in the two districts.Ranked by restorations for every thousand electors removed, Murshidabad stands at 4.05 and Malda at 4.13, against a state average of 27.77. Only Purba Bardhaman at 0.90 and Paschim Bardhaman at 3.75 are worse. Malda has more appeals waiting than any other district in West Bengal, and has decided a smaller share of them than any other district.The Election Commission’s Right to Information reply on August 17 to Isha Khan Choudhury, the Congress MP for Dakshin Malda, gives two different counts for how many appeals Malda has, 6,85,341 in one of its tables and 5,31,149 in another. The previous article on this series has already reported that one of the two must be wrong. Here, it makes no difference. On the larger count Malda has decided 0.150% of its appeals. On the smaller, 0.193%. The next worst district in the state is 0.265%, so Malda is last either way. In its constituency of Malatipur, 86,989 appeals are pending and 90 have been decided. Figure: Restorations for every 1,000 electors removedNote: Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. Community assigned by surname classification of the Commission’s published lists of electors marked not eligible, an estimate carrying an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Commission’s restoration figures carry no community field.Sixteen constituencies statewide have restored nobody at allThe obvious explanation is that Malda and Murshidabad were simply handed more than any tribunal could process. However, this explanation is put to doubt by the example of Uttar Dinajpur.Adjudication there marked 1,76,869 electors not eligible and 90.4% of them were Muslim. It marked Muslims ineligible at 13.3 times the rate at which it marked everyone else. Like Malda and Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur too is a border district with a fast-growing and predominantly Muslim electorate. Uttar Dinajpur has restored 11,053 electors. This means 62.5 per 1,000 were removed. This is 15 times the rate of Malda and Murshidabad. Its constituency of Raiganj has decided 23.9% of its appeals against a state average of 2.17%.The same kind of caseload has therefore produced very different outcomes in neighbouring districts. What is left as an explanation is how the machinery was staffed and directed, district by district, which is the one thing the Election Commission knows and has not revealed.Note: Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. Community assigned by surname classification of the Commission’s published lists of electors marked not eligible, an estimate carrying an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Commission’s restoration figures carry no community field.Note: Appellate Tribunal Appeal Report and Individuals under Adjudication Report as on 07.08.2026, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, RTI Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated 17.08.2026. Community assigned by surname classification of the Commission’s published lists of electors marked not eligible, an estimate carrying an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Commission’s restoration figures carry no community field.What the tribunals find when they lookOf the cases the tribunals have decided anywhere in West Bengal, 91.13% ended with the elector back on the roll. Each removal has therefore been a determination by a named Judicial Officer on a file. When a second officer looks at the same file, the first decision has been reversed about nine times out of ten.This is the most consequential figure of the Election Commission’s RTI reply, because it means the several hundred thousand people still waiting in Malda and Murshidabad are, if you follow the tribunals’ own record, mostly people who should never have been removed.What the figures will not supportThe reversal rate rests on the 2.17% of the pile that has been decided. This is not a random slice, it appears. The constituency of Sonarpur Uttar alone supplies 9% of every restoration in the state, all of them granted and none refused. One of the six constituencies – an earlier story of this series has illustrated – put back more electors than they ever removed.The 16 statewide constituencies that have restored nobody are not a Muslim story, and it would be wrong to present it as one. Across the 16, 57.3% of those removed were Muslim, which is below the state figure, and only six of the 16 are above 70%. Murarai at 95% and Khanakul at 92% sit alongside Dum Dum Uttar at 9% and Durgapur Purba at 11%. Whatever has stopped those benches from sitting and adjudicating is the same factor that has stopped them everywhere else.All the community figures here are estimates. The deleted-elector lists carry no column for community, so the shares come from classifying surnames, a method with an error rate that cannot be quantified. The Election Commission records restorations with no community field at all, which means the single number that would settle the question, the share of the 75,443 already put back who were Muslim, is not available to anybody outside the Election Commission.What the RTI reply does establish needs no inference. Muslims were 70.2% of the total number that the SIR removed. Those removals concentrated in three border districts where they made up 94.4% of the total electorate. These districts had voters who were able to map themselves to the old rolls more easily than anyone else. It is those districts, above all others, where adjudication or correction has not been done. Where cases are decided, nine in ten go the elector’s way. For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.