New Delhi: Jawhar Sircar, former Rajya Sabha MP and former secretary to the government of India has written to the Chief Election Officer (CEO) West Bengal, Neelam Meena, asking her nine questions related to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The queries relate to most of the key issues raised in media reports, including on The Wire, about how the process has gone on in the state.They relate to the disposal rate of the tribunals especially set up for West Bengal to tackle the appeals against mass exclusion of voters to whether the tribunal judges have “refused” to use the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) new portal to how it has been processing Form 7 (voter deletion) requests.At least 12 of 19 judges heading tribunals to review SIR appeals complained in August about the ECINET portal, saying it failed to work as intended, The Wire has reported.Question number 3 on his list is particularly relevant to recent developments. Sircar asks:How many applications were filed by election officers before the tribunals for deletion of names; under what authority this was done and how many names were thus deleted – [was it] after observing each of the legal provisions, including hearings?As per numbers verified by the Civic Research Group, an independent group of researchers in West Bengal, the EC has filed appeals against 16,08,175 (over 16 lakh) of the 32,53,401 (around 32.5 lakh) cleared voters, or nearly half of them.The Wire reported these details on October 21, including how these 16 lakh voters had been cleared by judicial officers during the SIR.On September 27, The Wire had reported how a judge presiding over a SIR tribunal had noted clearly that the Additional CEO of the state had appealed to remove voters examined by judicial officers and restored to the rolls.According to the Indian Express, Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu wrote to ECI officials asking who had been authorised to file appeals on the commission’s behalf before the West Bengal tribunals, and who had actually filed them.Now that the ECI is conducting a Special Summary Revision (SSR) of voter lists – the usual revision it carried out until the process was halted for the SIR – it has announced that voters will get a chance to return to the rolls through “special” drives, apart from using Form 6, meant for first-time voters.Special camps are being held across the state so that no eligible voter is left off the roll. The CEO’s note announcing the drive on October 12 calls it a “proactive campaign”.Sircar has also asked if reports filed by Booth Level Officers (BLO) after physical verification have been stored and if the reports of Electoral Roll Officers (ERO) and Assisstant EROs have been matched against the final electoral roll generated by the SIR.Further, he wants to know what extent of “discrepancy” has been found between the decisions made regarding voter exclusion and inclusion by the EROs and AEROs.He has tellingly sought the CEO’s response on a crucial issue introduced in the Bengal SIR: Logical discrepancy.“Can you please provide the notification of ECI which introduced ‘logical discrepancies’ and the total number thus affected in the state, as well as a post on website [with] the details of those affected?”Also read: In Bengal SIR, ‘Logical Discrepancy’ Became the Election Commission’s Alibi for Mass Voter ExclusionThe Wire has reported on how this unfolded in Bengal, starting with approximately 1.63 crore voters initially flagged across seven categories of discrepancies, a result of software-generated red flags. Later, this number reduced to 1.34 crore, still a sizeable proportion of the voting population. The Wire’s Aparna Bhattacharya reported on January 1:Out of these 1.34 crore, 85 lakh voters (approx. 11% of the electorate) have been flagged for “Father Name Mismatch”, forcing them to defend potential spelling errors. Another 23.6 lakh individuals are under the scanner for the “Progeny > 6” rule, while 19.3 lakh face questions over age anomalies like “Elector Age > 45”.The scope of scrutiny also includes 12.9 lakh voters for “Gender Mismatch” and 10.8 lakh flagged for having a “Parent Age Difference < 15 Years”. When combined with the earlier No Mapping figures, nearly a quarter of West Bengal’s voting population is now navigating a bureaucratic obstacle course to prove their citizenship.Sircar’s letter also points to a more recent development – the revelation that the software/portals used by the election staff across the country was being centrally controlled. He asks whether it is true that ECINET, the portal of the ECI, has a feature that can bar the EROs from viewing or reviewing voters’ enumeration forms as well as the notice and hearing dashboard on the portal.“And was such a bar applied in Bengal, but why?” he asks, referring, without mentioning by name, a recent audit by Charchagram, a civic-tech initiative, which found that only in West Bengal, EROs and AEROs could be restricted from accessing these forms and the dashboard.Further, Sircar writes in his letter, are all ‘left-out’ voters in West Bengal covered by the ECI’s post-SIR drive (its October 1, 2026 order) or are they deprived of this second opportunity because of your order of October 6 restricting its scope to only Absentee, Shifted, Deceased and Duplicate (ASDD) voters.The CEO’s press note of October 6 invites people on the list of absent, shifted and dead voters to walk into a camp and fill in Form 6 – unless they had appealed their exclusion before one of the 19 tribunals.Another issue that features in Sircar’s letter has to do with Form 7 applications processed by ECI in the state. Specifically, he seeks details about how many applications were received during the claims and objections period, how many voters ended up deleted in this process and whether those voters were given a chance to be heard.Until January 15, The Wire has reported, political party agents had not filed a single objection for exclusion. On January 16, the day the commission told the CEO there was no limit to how many objections could be filed, 604 claims for exclusion first appeared. Recently, a cap was imposed – of 10 form 7s – but this does not help voters already removed based on objections filed in January.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.