New Delhi: Will the lakhs of West Bengal residents whose inclusion appeals are pending before the state’s glacially slow appellate tribunals benefit from the Election Commission (EC)’s special enrolment drive? A senior official speaking to The Hindu on Friday (October 2) indicated they may not.Amid public anger and protests calling for chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, the EC on Friday announced that in states where the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) is over, booth-level officers (BLOs) must compare the pre-SIR rolls with the final lists produced after the exercise, identify new voters as well as eligible persons who’ve been ‘left out’ and facilitate their inclusion by giving them Form 6.In other words, BLOs in these states will in part facilitate the restoration of electors whom the SIR left out, despite the EC’s claims that the exercise would have the opposite effect. For now, these officers have been given a month’s time to complete this special enrolment drive.Earlier this year, in Bengal the SIR infamously left out from the voter rolls 27 lakh individuals who may have had a shot at voting in the April assembly election but could not at any rate because the system was not given enough time to handle their cases.Over 22 lakh people approached Bengal’s 19 appellate tribunals seeking restoration on to the electoral rolls. Due to their high caseload, these bodies are expected to take many years to finish adjudicating all appeals (data compiled as of early August showed that 91% of tribunal decisions resulted in the restoration of electors to the voter list).This, the Congress has noted, may create a situation where ‘left out’ Bengal residents with pending appeals may have to wait years to get back on to the rolls – and potentially miss voting in even more elections – while other ‘left out’ individuals may enjoy a faster process by way of the EC’s special enrolment drive.Speaking to The Hindu‘s Sreeparna Chakrabarty on Friday, a senior EC official said that as far as the special enrolment drive is concerned, those with appeals pending before the tribunals “[are] different as [they are] already under adjudication”.West Bengal Congress leaders Subhankar Sarkar and Prasenjit Bose wrote to the EC on Friday stating that such a situation would discriminate against tribunal-bound appellants. To remedy this they suggested that either all 22 lakh appeals seeking inclusion be provisionally restored to the rolls pending final adjudication, or that they be converted into Form 6 applications that could be processed under the special enrolment drive.They also noted that the drive’s announcement comes just days ahead of the Nandigram and Rejinagar byelections scheduled for October 6. Because of this, many truly eligible voters in these constituencies will be unable to vote for a second consecutive time, Sarkar and Bose said.At the same time it has been pointed out that Form 6 is technically meant for new voters and not for those wrongly deleted from the rolls. In fact, this form requires a declaration that an individual is applying to be a voter for the first time and that they are making a truthful statement against the background of penalties under the 1950 Representation of the People Act.Goa resident Paresh Salgaonkar for instance has objected to the fact that electoral authorities have asked his family to file Forms 6 after their Form 8 (for modifying electors’ details) applications were rejected during the SIR.“Form 6 contains a declaration which states that it is solely applicable to first-time voters. I did not file Form 6 because it would have been a false declaration. It is against my ethics. You cannot punish a citizen due to a system constraint,” Salgaonkar said speaking to the Indian Express‘s Pavneet Singh Chadha. He has taken his grievance to the Bombay high court, whose circuit bench in Goa has grilled the EC over the past week over its decision to reject the Salgaonkars’ Form 8 applications.He also told Chadha that he is worried about filling Form 6 and ending up invalidating his voting history.As for the actual constituency for whom Forms 6 are intended, i.e. first-time voters, the special summary revision (SSR) exercise that often aims at enrolling young adults has not taken place ever since the (mostly) nationwide SIR kicked off in Bihar 16 months ago.Anubhuti Vishnoi of the Economic Times, who had reported last month that an SSR is yet to take place despite commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi being in favour of its resumption, now writes that the duo has interpreted both a 1980 Delhi high court case and the attorney general’s opinion as supporting their stance.Last month Vishnoi had written – in the wake of the Indian Express‘s landmark investigation revealing a measure of dysfunction at the very top of the EC – that while Sandhu and Joshi had supported resumption of the SSR, CEC Kumar had sought a legal opinion on the matter.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.