Kolkata: Former Rajya Sabha MP and retired IAS officer Jawhar Sircar, who once held the post of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of West Bengal, has written to the current CEO, Neelam Meena, demanding to know who ordered more than 16 lakh appeals against voters whom judicial officers had found eligible during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), and on what authority.The letter, dated November 13 and shared with The Wire, is Sircar’s second missive to the CEO of West Bengal. He wrote that the CEO had neither acknowledged nor replied to his first letter, dated October 22, in three weeks.“It reflects adversely on the courtesy that the civil service was/is reputed for,” he wrote. “It also casts a shadow over the traditional neutrality that the office of the Chief Electoral Officer of West Bengal was proud of.”Are all left-out voters covered?Sircar asks whether the special drive the Election Commission has ordered for “left-out electors” is open to all of them, or only to voters on the list of “Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate” (ASDD) entries drawn up during enumeration.Also read: ‘Four in 10 Appeals Against Voter Inclusion Came From Election Commission,’ Says Bengal SIR Tribunal JudgeThe commission’s letter of October 1 instructed booth-level officers to compare the current roll with the pre-SIR roll and identify everyone missing from it. That, Sircar writes, “would cover everyone removed, including the 27.16 lakh deleted by judicial officers and the 5.46 lakh voters deleted from rolls by utilising Form 7, often in bulk”.The commission’s letter and the CEO’s press note of October 7 both say that anyone “whose name has got deleted can apply for enrolment at any point of time”. Sircar asks whether that includes the roughly 22 lakh voters who have appealed to the SIR tribunals, some of whom have reportedly been turned away from the special enrolment camps.He also asks whether an electoral registration officer (ERO) can enrol a voter struck off by judges whose appeal is pending, since the commission’s letter makes the ERO “the competent authority to act as deemed fit”.‘Who ordered these appeals?’The heart of the letter is the appeals against cleared voters. “A very serious issue has cropped up because it appears that your office has filed appeals against 16,10,311 voters to the Appellate Tribunals in April 2026,” Sircar writes, “even though each one of them had been checked and included in the rolls by the judicial officers during adjudication.”He cites the commission’s own counter-affidavit in the Supreme Court in October. In paragraph 63, it said officers of the CEO’s office filed the appeals. In paragraph 60, it said these voters’ “documents are available on the portal and there is a favourable order passed by the Ld. Judicial Officer in their favour”.“So, who ordered these appeals to disenfranchise so many lakhs and why,” he asks. “Where is the authority, reason and the record?”He questions how more than 12 lakh appeals carrying a single batch code for 5 April could have been filed in one day, and what role the commission’s IT division played in what he calls a “lightning strike upon genuine and approved voters of this state”. “We understand that the processing of names for deletion was decided by ECI’s IT system,” he writes, demanding a yes or a no.Appealed before they were clearedSircar also raises a finding first reported by The Wire. In Hemtabad, in Uttar Dinajpur, appeals against 599 voters carry the code for the batch lodged on 5 April, but the supplementary list that cleared those voters was published only on 6 April. How could the CEO order or permit appeals to be filed before the tribunals against decisions that had not yet been published, he asks.Also read: The ECI Software Deleted 5.38 Lakh Bengal Voters With Auto-Generated Rejections Without Citing a ReasonHe closes with a warning. “Every act of commission or omission of public servants is subject to scrutiny,” he writes. “Need I remind you that the officials of the Election Commission or CEOs in the states (and CEOs themselves) do not enjoy immunity from prosecution, for actions taken in violation of the law?”No answer yetThe commission has told the Supreme Court that the appeals were filed by officers of the CEO’s office “in their capacity as authorities under the RP Act”, with authority under the court’s orders, and that “these matters were not brought to the commission”. It has not named the officers or said on what grounds the voters were challenged.Over recent weeks, The Wire has reached out to the West Bengal CEO’s office multiple times, seeking answers to questions about the appeals, on voters still under adjudication and on the special drive for left-out voters. This report will be updated when the CEO’s office responds.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.