Kolkata: It was one particular move by the Election Commission, led by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, during the Bengal special intensive revision of rolls for the state that really ratcheted up tension within the three-member commission. The move, carried out with the cooperation of the then Bengal chief electoral officer, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, now the state’s chief secretary, led to the simmering anger over CEC Gyanesh’s unilateralism blowing up, The Wire has learnt.As soon as the Supreme Court on February 24 ordered judicial officers to deal with names flagged for ‘logical discrepancies’ in the Bengal SIR of rolls, lakhs of voters whose cases had already been decided by electoral registration officers (EROs) were moved into the ‘under adjudication’ category in the Election Commission’s portal. In all, about 60 lakh names were sent to judges, and 27 lakh of them ended up being struck off. In the process, many who would have voted in the April assembly elections had the ERO’s affirmative assessment of their status not been interfered with, could not.Highly placed sources have told The Wire that the two Election Commissioners, Vivek Joshi and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, expressed their concern to peers and colleagues about this situation in Bengal, particularly the fact that already-decided fates of voters were changed, unilaterally, the minute the Supreme Court’s order came. Sending voters whose presence in the list had already been decided by local election authorities – as they ought to have been – back to the ‘undecided’ list, and thus to judicial tribunals, ensured that their return to the list took much longer. It also sealed their fate as far as the assembly polls were concerned.The Wire was able to ask Subrata Gupta, who served as the EC’s special roll observer for the SIR in Bengal, whether he knew if and how this had taken place across the state. He admitted that indeed observers had sent for review lakhs of cases that had been cleared by EROs and the additional EROs. “Now, to what extent the EROs and AEROs actually took those decisions, or did not take them, is something we cannot say,” the observer said.Gupta’s detailed comments follow later in this story. What this story showsThe ECI’s own deadline-night reports, showing Murshidabad’s EROs had cleared 97% of hearing cases a week before 11 lakh voters there were sent to judges.How central observers sent lakhs of cases EROs had approved back for review, and how those voters ended up under adjudication.Malda Dakshin MP Isha Khan Chowdhury’s letter recording 5.91 lakh cases returned for review in a single day.How EROs were locked out of the portal on deadline day, and document uploads shut without warning.The SIR’s special roll observer’s opinions, on record.The disquiet inside the Election Commission, and what it has now told the Supreme Court.The Wire examined data of three districts and ascertained how the number of voters sent to adjudication tribunals far exceeded those that election officials still had pending. The Wire was told that the SIR page was removed from the dedicated portal set up by the Election Commission, thus making it impossible to procure proof of these allegedly unilateral decisions beyond what exists with electoral officers at this time. What the data from three districts saysThe Wire has been able to establish what happened in Murshidabad, Nadia and Malda districts, where voters whose presence in the voting list had already been decided by EROs – as the law and the process requires – were suddenly moved to the ‘under adjudication’ category. The findings cast a long shadow over the EC’s functioning, already the cause behind a nationwide movement.The figures for the night of February 21, which was the deadline for document scrutiny and disposal, are from the EC’s own status reports from ERONET, its electoral roll software. District officials also shared these reports with political parties. The Wire has seen two of them, for Murshidabad and Nadia. These reports show that the cases sent to judges were not, for the most part, the cases EROs had left undecided. They were cases that EROs had already decided – and some, it had cleared.Across West Bengal, 60.06 lakh voters were placed under adjudication, and 27.16 lakh were deleted. The account below draws on the ECI’s own reports, on an MP’s letter to the Bengal CEO, on the testimony of an additional electoral registration officer (AERO) who processed these cases, and the account of the leader of an organisation of West Bengal’s booth-level officers.The Wire has written to the Election Commission and the current and previous Bengal CEOs, asking how the status of these voters was changed in every district. This report will be updated when responses are received.§At 10 pm on February 21, two hours before the deadline, Murshidabad’s EROs had finished with almost every case before them. Of 18,84,772 voters called for hearings across the district’s 22 constituencies, they had approved 18,30,045 for the final rolls and found 41,214 ineligible. Only 13,513 cases were still pending.However, a week later, when the final roll was published on February 28, a total of 11,01,145 Murshidabad voters were marked “under adjudication”, and their fate handed to judges. Judicial officers eventually struck 4,55,137 of them off the rolls. Those voters could not vote in the assembly election in April.§Who was supposed to decide?Under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, it is the ERO who decides whether a person’s name goes on the electoral roll. The Supreme Court said so explicitly in its order of February 9. The micro-observers the EC had deployed from the Union government could assist, but could not take the final decision.Section 13B of the Act says the electoral roll for each assembly constituency “shall be prepared and revised by an electoral registration officer”. Section 13C allows the Commission to appoint assistant EROs or AEROs “to assist any electoral registration officer in the performance of his functions”, and makes every AERO “subject to the control of the electoral registration officer”. The Supreme Court’s February 9 order states that “the final decision will be taken by the EROs only”. Its February 20 order describes the claims of voters flagged for logical discrepancies, or left unmapped, as “required to be adjudicated, in a way, through a quasi-judicial process by the EROs”.When the court stepped in on February 20, recording a “trust deficit” between the state and the Election Commission, and then on February 24, handed the remaining verification to district and additional district judges, the work it gave them was the work still left undone. The court said: “To ensure fairness in the adjudication of the genuineness of the documents relied upon and the consequential determination for inclusion or exclusion from the voter list, as agreed by both sides, we are left with hardly any other option but to request Hon’ble the Chief Justice of the High Court at Calcutta to spare some serving judicial officers, along with some former judicial officers of impeccable integrity in the rank of District Judges/Additional District Judges, who can then, in each district, be requested to revisit and dispose of the pending claims under the category of “logical discrepancy/unmapped category”.”What unfolded in reality was very different. “The Supreme Court always said that the EROs and AEROs would take the final decision, and that the judges would hear only the pending cases,” an AERO in one of the state’s border districts told The Wire, requesting anonymity. “What we see in reality is that the judges are deciding on voters about whom a decision has already been taken twice. And those about whom no decision could be taken have walked through, and been cleared.”Seven days in FebruaryTo illustrate what the AERO said above, we need to look closely at the dates. The last date for hearings was February 14. As noted before, the last date for EROs to finish scrutiny and dispose of cases was February 21. What happened between those two dates has decided the fate of lakhs.At midnight on February 14, according to the AERO and booth-level officers (BLOs) whom The Wire spoke to, the ERONET portal suddenly stopped accepting uploads of voters’ documents, without warning. Concerns were raised by several BLOs in a Facebook group for West Bengal BLOs at around the same time. “Requests for uploads went in from almost every assembly constituency in West Bengal, but the upload option was not reopened even for a single day,” the AERO said. “Nobody had imagined it would be shut on February 14,” the AERO added, stressing that February 14 was the last day for hearings and not the last day to finish the disposal of cases. Thus, the documents of several voters who had submitted them at hearings on February 13 or 14 may never have been uploaded. By the AERO’s estimate, about 95% of cases across Bengal had been disposed of by then, and about 5% were left undecided.On the portal, EROs and AEROs had the option to sort the cases they had decided into two groups. Voters they had cleared went into ‘Parked at Final’. Those they rejected went into ‘Ineligible Electors’.After February 14, at a time when the AEROs could not make further changes, the AERO said that the Election Commission added a third category, ‘Documents to be reviewed.’ Micro-observers and the roll observers who were above them in hierarchy used their own login credentials to mark voters for review. “Voters who were ‘Parked at Final’ came out of the safe section and entered this uncertain group,” the AERO said. These changes were visible to EROs and AEROs.When EROs and AEROs reviewed a voter again and approved them for the final roll, a red flag appeared beside the voter’s name on the portal. It was those voters, the AERO said, who ended up under adjudication.The observers had been appointed in late December, in the AERO’s words, “to help the AEROs with their work. But instead of helping, they increased the pressure.” Once the observers had put voters under the ‘Documents to be reviewed’ category, each AERO had two choices. They could agree with the observer and strike the voter off, or disagree and park the voter at final again. “Most chose the second path,” the AERO said. “A few, out of fear, chose the first, but that number was very small. Until midnight on February 21, most AEROs were parking voters at final, against the opinion of the observers, the AERO said. “And the observers kept sending cases for review until midnight too.” In that tug of war, some cases were left pending, because each had to be checked again before it could be re-approved.ERO-level case lists, seen by The Wire, show two columns headed “Roll-Observer Observation” and “Micro-Observer Observation”. The micro-observer column reads “Documents to be reviewed” on every row shown.Questions about who was really behind the observers’ logins were raised publicly in the middle of that week. On February 18, Abhishek Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress alleged on X that instructions were being circulated to micro-observers over WhatsApp, not through formal channels. Roll observers are assigned district by district, he wrote, “yet it is seen that login credentials linked to these observers are being accessed from a central location in Kolkata”, and an independent examination would show that “the tower location and IP address of the login device differ from the actual location of the concerned roll observer”. He alleged that the logins were being used to “specifically target a certain community”.The Wire has not been able to verify these allegations. The Election Commission’s own login records will show where each observer’s account was used, and when.An MP’s letterA letter written in the middle of that week gives a contemporary account. On February 20, Isha Khan Choudhury, Congress MP for Maldaha Dakshin Lok Sabha, wrote to the then chief electoral officer, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, seeking “urgent intervention regarding mass ‘Documents to be Reviewed’ notices”.In the previous two days, he wrote, roughly 30,000 to 50,000 voters in every block of Malda had been called again under the ‘Documents to be Reviewed’ tag “even after attending hearings and submitting necessary documents”. He wrote that the district magistrate had told an all-party meeting that day that 5.91 lakh cases had been “returned for review today”. The letter bears a receipt stamp dated February 20.On February 28, 8,28,127 Malda voters were under adjudication. If the DM’s figure is right, more than 70% of them had been sent back for review on a single day.Three days earlier, on February 17, an association of BLOs had also written to the CEO that thousands of genuine voters with a direct link to the 2002 roll had been marked unmapped on wrong instructions, and that EROs would not clear them “without instruction from higher authority”.Isha Khan Choudhury’s letter.EROs locked out on deadline dayAs the deadline approached, EROs themselves lost sight of their own work.On the evening of February 21, deadline day, Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee posted on X that “EROs are no longer able to monitor the progress of AEROs on the ECINet portal”. He called it a violation of Sections 13B and 13C of the Act, of the Supreme Court’s orders of February 9 and 20, and of the Commission’s own order of 24 June 2025, which makes the ERO of each constituency “responsible for ensuring that no eligible citizen is left out and no ineligible person is included”. When the problem was escalated to the CEO through the district election officers, Banerjee wrote, it “was met with a cavalier and dismissive response”.Banerjee also shared a screenshot from a WhatsApp group of district election officers, which shows an officer writing to the group late at night. “We r also facing the same issue sir. And in portal ERO’s access to all parts has been denied. Submitted for kind consideration.” The next day, Agarwal, then CEO, replied in the group. “Why should ERO have access to all parts? Wasn’t he supposed to have access in his…” The screenshot cuts off there.The Wire could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but the AERO who spoke to The Wire has corroborated the exchange.The law makes the ERO responsible for the roll and puts the AEROs under the ERO’s control. In the final hours before the deadline, by these accounts, the officer the law holds responsible could not see what was being decided in parts of their own constituency.What the final roll showedBy the wording of the Supreme Court’s February order and the AERO’s account, the cases that should have gone to the judges were the ones still pending with EROs on deadline night, i.e. the last column of the EC’s own status report. That is not what happened.“In reality, the pending cases did not become ‘under adjudication’,” the AERO said. “The ones that did were those the observers had sent for review. Even voters we had ‘parked at final’ for the second time carry the ‘under adjudication’ mark.”When the final rolls came out on February 28, the AERO said that every voter who had still been pending at the ERO’s end was on it, with no mark at all. None of the voters the observers had left alone were marked ‘under adjudication’. But voters the observers had sent for review were, including some whom the AEROs had already rejected. “Yes, the observers sent voters for review even after the AEROs had declared them ineligible,” the AERO said. “They even sent for review a dead voter whom we had declared ineligible on the basis of a death certificate.”“I am at a loss for words,” the AERO said. “I cannot say what the observers looked at before sending cases for review, or whether they looked at anything at all.”What the EC’s own reports showDistrict officials shared EC status reports from ERONET with political parties. The Wire has seen two of them, for Murshidabad and Nadia, which record where every hearing case in those districts stood on deadline night. One covers Murshidabad at 10 pm on February 21. The other covers Nadia at 4:04 am on February 22. District Hearing Reports from February 21, 2026, provided to political parties by district election officials.District Hearing Reports from February 21, 2026, provided to political parties by district election officials.In both cases, the number of voters later placed under adjudication is far larger than the number EROs had left undecided, i.e. ‘pending’.Samserganj in Murshidabad shows the gap most starkly. On deadline night, EROs there had 2,391 cases pending. A week later, 1,08,400 of the constituency’s voters were under adjudication, and judges went on to delete 74,775, more than in any other seat in the state.At least 10.46 lakh Murshidabad voters whom EROs had approved for the final roll – 11,01,145 minus the 41,214 found ineligible – were sent to adjudication, and at least 4.02 lakh of them were deleted. In Samserganj alone, at least 1,05,125 approved voters were sent to the judges, and at least 71,500 of them were struck off. In Nadia, where EROs had rejected far more cases themselves, the same calculation, done constituency by constituency, gives at least 79,900 approved voters sent to adjudication and at least 45,700 deleted.Two hours before the deadline on February 21, 97.1% of Murshidabad’s voters who had been to SIR hearings had been parked for the final rolls. A week later, more than half of the district’s ‘hearing’ cases were in the hands of judges for fresh evaluation.The CEO’s explanationThe day after the roll was published, the CEO’s office offered its own account of why so many names were under adjudication. The then CEO is now, controversially, the chief secretary. “Certain names have been marked as ‘Under Adjudication’ since the concerned EROs/AEROs did not decide them after hearing,” it posted on X on March 1. “As a result, those names being pending were sent for adjudication by Judicial Officers as per the order of the Hon’ble Apex Court.”But the Election Commission’s own figures tell a different story. In Murshidabad, 13,513 cases were pending with EROs on deadline night, and 11,01,145 voters were sent to adjudication. In Samserganj, 2,391 were pending, and 1,08,400 were sent to adjudication.In a second post the very next day, on March 2, 2026, the CEO’s office stepped back. “Nowhere has it been attributed by O/o CEO West Bengal that all the cases under Adjudication were due to indecision by EROs,” it said. “However, certain number of cases remained pending at the end of EROs/AEROs and were therefore referred for adjudication, which is factually verifiable.” It did not say why the rest were sent to judges.The same post was addressed to the West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Officers’ Association, whose members serve as EROs and AEROs. The association, the CEO’s office wrote, “cannot and should not assume the role of spokesperson of officers under deemed deputation to ECI. Posting comments on the basis of hearsay and attempts to discredit constitutional bodies / statutory authorities can have serious consequences. Govt. servants are well advised to function within the Lakshman Rekha of the applicable conduct rules.”The officers who had decided these cases were, in effect, told not to speak about them. The AERO who spoke to The Wire stressed this repeatedly, requesting anonymity. The observer’s accountSubrata Gupta, who served as the ECI’s special roll observer for the SIR in West Bengal, told The Wire that the observers had asked for a review of lakhs of cases that EROs and AEROs had already cleared.“There were many kinds of cases,” he said. “In some cases, a review had been recommended. In others, documents were found to be missing, but the ERO or AERO had nevertheless cleared the cases. There were many such cases, running into lakhs. In all these cases, the observers recommended that the documents should be reviewed.”The observers could not take the decision themselves, he said. “Obviously, neither the micro-observers nor the observers could substitute themselves for the AEROs or EROs. The decisions had to be taken by the EROs and AEROs. Now, to what extent the EROs and AEROs actually took those decisions, or did not take them, is something we cannot say.”By Gupta’s account, the EC told the observers that of about 1.5 crore cases heard, about 90 lakh had been disposed of, and that the remaining 60 lakh, “which according to it were pending”, had been referred to judicial officers. He could not say how that pile was made up. “Whether those 60 lakh cases were the cases that had been marked for review, or whether they included other cases, I cannot say.”That figure does not match the EC’s own deadline-night report for Murshidabad, which shows EROs had parked 97% of the district’s hearing cases for the final roll, with under 1% pending.Also read: Bengal SIR Observer Says He Knew Nothing About 16 Lakh Appeals Against Cleared VotersAsked about EROs being unable to upload decisions after mid-February, and unable to act on cases the observers had flagged, Gupta said the Commission had set a deadline because the roll had to be published by a fixed date, and had repeatedly told officers to upload documents and dispose of cases. “It is a fact that once the deadline was fixed, no further disposal of cases was to be undertaken by the AEROs or EROs after that deadline,” he said. “Those cases were to be disposed of by the judicial officers.”His account and the AERO’s agree on one thing. Observers sent back cases that EROs had already cleared. Neither the observer nor the EC has explained why the cases EROs then approved for the roll a second time went to judges anyway.‘Everything is being done from Delhi’A leader of an association of booth-level officers, who met the CEO several times during the revision, spoke to The Wire. Swapan Mandal is general secretary of the Votekormi o BLO Aikya Mancha. His association had supported the SIR, he said, but not “at the cost of deleting people’s names from the voter list”.During the revision, Mandal said, the BLO app changed about 16 times. “Every morning, we would find that another new instruction had arrived.” The “logical discrepancy” system that flagged voters for mismatched spellings, or for a parent and child less than fifteen years apart in age, “was done from Delhi”, he said.A screen recording of the ECI’s officer portal, seen by The Wire, shows what such a flag looks like. It records the case of a woman in Deganga, in North 24 Parganas, born in 1977, with her photograph on the roll beside the one on her enumeration form. Under the heading “Logical Discrepancies”, the portal gives a single reason: “You have been linked as son/daughter with someone who is also claimed by six others as father, giving suspicion of a likely incorrect match.” She had named her father, and the portal had found him in the 2002 roll. Because six other voters had also named him as their father, the system marked her case as suspect, and the only option on the screen was to schedule a hearing.For the record, Indian law offering universal adult franchise to Indians does not say that only those who are the first six offspring of their parents can vote and the seventh cannot. The BLO association leader said he had met Agarwal face to face several times, and had also submitted deputations to the CEO’s office. “He told us, ‘Look, regarding all these things that are happening, we are merely acting as messengers. We have nothing in our hands. Whatever is being done is being done from Delhi,’” Mandal said of Agarwal. “‘You are writing letters to us. We are forwarding those letters, along with fresh proposals, to Delhi. If Delhi does not accept them, there is nothing we can do.’”“He (Agarwal) repeatedly told us, ‘Look … even after receiving your letters, we have informed Delhi. But Delhi is not doing anything,’” he said.The Wire has specifically asked Agarwal if he can confirm saying this. This report will be updated when we get a response.When ‘logical discrepancies’ were flagged, BLOs were ordered to verify voters physically, and did. “The verification reports were submitted through the software they had developed,” Mandal said, “but no action was taken on the basis of those reports.” He cited cases of schoolteachers and other government employees serving as BLOs whose own names were deleted, though their fathers’ names were on the roll. According to his estimate, based on reports from BLOs across the state, 18 to 19 lakh of the roughly 27 lakh voters deleted were genuine. The Wire has not been able to verify that estimate.Turmoil between Election CommissionersAccording to highly placed sources, Joshi and Sandhu’s unease with the CEC peaked over this decision of switching decided cases onto adjudication overnight, and over CEO Agarwal and the ECI’s director general of information technology, Seema Khanna, allegedly acting on “direct oral orders” from the CEC.It is not clear whether each district was instructed separately, or whether the changes were made through central control of the data, which the CEC is accused of exercising through Khanna and a few other officers. An investigation by The Indian Express reported that Sandhu had said neither he, nor Joshi, nor West Bengal’s CEO was aware of the basis on which, or the process by which the Election Commission filed appeals objecting to the inclusion of names on the state’s rolls. The Express also reported that in Goa, the alleged centralisation of the Commission’s intranet prevented election officials from adding close to a hundred people back to the rolls, despite their writing to the Commission several times.On Monday, October 26, the Election Commission responded in a counter-affidavit filed in the Supreme Court. The affidavit says that under the Representation of the People Act, the CEO, district election officers, EROs and AEROs are the authorities responsible for electoral rolls. “It is submitted that a communication dt. 22.10.2026 has been received by the office of the ECI from the office of the CEO, West Bengal, stating that the said Appeals have been filed by the officers of the Office of the CEO, West Bengal, in their capacity as authorities under the RP Act,” it states. “The officers had the authority to file the Appeals as per the orders of this Hon’ble Court and these matters were not brought to the Commission.”By the affidavit’s own account, then, the Commission’s explanation as to who filed 16.10 lakh appeals rests on a letter from the CEO’s office dated October 22, more than six months after the appeals were lodged in early April.As noted before, The Wire has written to the Bengal CEOs, current and previous, and additional CEOs and will update this report with their responses.Separately, an audit of ECINET’s publicly served code by the civic-tech initiative Charchagram, found a restriction written into the code for West Bengal alone. It bars the state’s EROs and AEROs from the screens where they review enumeration forms and run hearings. The audit found the restriction in code from September and October, and could not establish when it was introduced or whether it was used. The February exchange in the district election officers’ group, and Banerjee’s post on February 21, suggest that EROs were already being cut off from their constituencies’ cases eight months earlier, in the final days of the revision.A vanishing trailWithin a day or two of February 21, the AERO said, the SIR section was removed from ERONET altogether. “As a result, it will no longer be possible to give any proof of what happened at that time.”The record of who changed each case’s status, and when, should still exist in the ECI’s own audit logs. The Commission has not made them public.Why the switch matteredA voter whom an ERO had approved would have been on the roll on 28 February, and able to vote in April. A voter sent to adjudication had to wait for a judge, and 27.16 lakh of them were struck off. Those who appealed against their deletion could not vote in the 2026 election even if a tribunal later restored them. The CEO’s office said they would be re-enrolled only for future elections.Supreme court judge, Justice Joymalya Bagchi said as much when he called upon those left out this time to not worry as “they could vote next time.”The appeals have barely moved. All 19 appellate tribunals sit in Kolkata, hundreds of kilometres from Malda and Murshidabad. In September, the ECI told the Supreme Court that 22,21,118 appeals had been filed by excluded voters seeking to be restored. By its own figures, 1,22,592 appeals of all kinds had been decided. Since September 21, according to The Telegraph, no tribunal has been able to upload an order at all, after judges refused an ECI portal requirement to log in with their Aadhaar credentials.As The Wire has reported, the Election Commission, meanwhile, has used the same tribunals to challenge the voters’ whom the judges did clear. It has filed appeals against 16.08 lakh of them, almost exactly half, nearly all lodged on three days in early April, days before the roll was frozen. The election to choose MLAs for the West Bengal assembly is over. The voters whose cases the EROs had already decided, and who were sent to judges in the last week of February, did not vote in it.The ERONET status reports for Murshidabad and Nadia were shared by district officials with political parties and have been seen by The Wire. The AERO spoke on condition of anonymity. Figures for adjudication and deletions are from the SIR master list.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.