Kolkata: On September 28, the Supreme Court refused to urgently hear the West Bengal Special Intensive Revision (SIR) case before the Nandigram and Rejinagar by-elections. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant observed, “These are only by-elections, that’s all.”The two constituencies vote on October 6.Between these two constituencies, the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) own figures show, 18,895 appeals were recorded. Appellate Tribunal List No. 3 shows only 90 decided cases as on October 5 – with a disposal rate of 0.476%, just 86 appeals in Nandigram and 4 in Rejinagar have been decided.Rejinagar: Four decisions out of 12,452 appealsRejinagar, in Murshidabad district, has a Muslim population of 62.46%. Of its electors, 19,800 were put before judicial officers, who cleared 15,877 and marked 3,923 not eligible. Of those, 3,752, or 95.6%, were Muslim.The ECI’s report to the Supreme Court shows that as on September 10, there were 12,452 appeals in Rejinagar. Four have been decided. That is a 0.032% disposal rate, against a statewide disposal of 3.201%. Rejinagar’s tribunal is running a hundred times slower than the state.In the 175 days since the tribunals began functioning on April 13, the four decisions in Rejinagar amount to one taken every 44 days. At that rate the 12,448 appeals still outstanding there would take about 1,490 years.Nandigram: 6,443 appeals, 86 decisionsNandigram presents a different demographic picture but a similar procedural problem. The constituency in Purba Medinipur has a Muslim population of 23.02%.During the SIR, 10,616 electors were sent for adjudication. Judicial officers cleared 7,154 and found 3,461 not eligible. Of those marked not eligible, 3,270 or 94.5% can be identified as Muslim, although Muslims constitute less than a quarter of the constituency’s population.The ECI’s September 10 record shows 6,443 appeals in Nandigram, almost double the people excluded from voting in the assembly election due to judicial review. Of these, 86 had been decided – a disposal rate of 1.381% with another 6,354 cases pending.Eighty-five electors were cleared twiceBut even the low number of decisions does not explain what has been happening in Nandigram. The voters awaiting a decision in the constituency can be divided into two categories – those who were marked not eligible and those who were included, yet still faced appeals for exclusion by the ECI.The first column in the table below counts voters whom a judicial officer had already cleared, against whose inclusion an appeal was then filed, and whose inclusion the tribunal has now upheld.Put differently, the 86 Nandigram decisions on this list not a count of people restored. They consist of 85 dismissals of appeals that sought to remove voters who had already been cleared. One name was a restoration.In Rejinagar, we find the reverse pattern. All four decisions restored electors who had been removed, and not one appeal against inclusion has been decided there at all.Every voter included in these two constituencies on that list is a Muslim. In Nandigram, that means 85 Muslim electors had to be cleared twice, once by a judicial officer and again by a tribunal.The 177 voters who had won their cases but were still waitingThere is another layer to the unfinished adjudication process. After the electoral roll was frozen in April, 256 cases in Nandigram and five in Rejinagar remained “under adjudication”.By August 7, only one of the Nandigram cases was still awaiting a judicial decision.The other cases had been decided but were awaiting the electronic signature of the electoral authority. Among them were 177 Nandigram electors whom judicial officers had found eligible. The Election Commission has not clarified whether those signatures were subsequently affixed and all 177 names were added before the by-election.In Rejinagar, five electors remained in adjudication, while the deleted list, required for an appeal, had not been made publicly available.The BJP’s ‘target’ marginThe Nandigram result is particularly sensitive to relatively small changes in the electorate.Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari won the constituency in May by 9,665 votes, receiving 1,27,301 votes against Trinamool Congress candidate Pabitra Kar’s 1,17,636. The 3,461 electors found not eligible amount to nearly 36% of the margin.While these comparisons do not show how those electors would have voted, they show the scale of the unresolved electoral-roll cases relative to the margin by which the constituency was decided.Adhikari had set the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a “target” of exceeding the 1.09-lakh margin recorded in the Falta re-election, while the BJP’s candidate Hasirani Rath put it even higher, at 1.50 lakh.The arithmetic shows how large such a shift would be.Nandigram’s electoral roll carried 2,66,415 electors. In the May election, 2,52,722 votes were cast, or about 94.9% of the roll. The official ECI result gave the BJP 50.37% of the vote and Trinamool 46.55%.At the same turnout, a winning margin of one lakh votes would require the winner to receive about 1,76,361 votes, leaving roughly 76,361 for all other candidates combined.That would mean one party receiving close to 70% of all votes cast, compared with the BJP’s 50.37% in May. Even at 100% turnout, a one-lakh margin would require slightly under 69% of all registered electors to vote for the winner.There is a useful comparison for a share of that size. In the 2024 general election, Trinamool’s Abhishek Banerjee won the Diamond Harbour seat with a vote share of 68.48%, a result the BJP publicly attributed to large-scale rigging.The margin Adhikari now describes as a target would require a share higher than the one his own party called rigged.What ‘only a by-election’ means hereBy-elections in these two constituencies are the first electoral test of a roll the ECI has not finished adjudicating. They are also taking place on two seats where the commission has adjudicated least.In Nandigram, the Congress candidate spent 11 of the 16 campaign days in custody on warrants linked to the 2007 agitation. Two of his campaigners were arrested the day after his release, while the Communist Party of India candidate was assaulted during campaigning. The Trinamool candidate withdrew after meeting the chief minister.In Rejinagar, the candidate backed by the Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AUJP) was arrested, after which the party stopped campaigning. The Revolutionary Socialist Party withdrew after being denied its symbol. The Indian Secular Front (ISF), meanwhile, is contesting on the almirah symbol after the envelope it had used in 2024 and again in April was allotted to Democratic Trinamool Congress, a breakaway faction of the Trinamool, led by Ritabrata Banerjee.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.