Chanchal, in the Malda district of West Bengal, is a mixed rural-urban seat marked as Constituency No. 45 on the state’s electoral roll. It does not share a border with Bangladesh. Demographically, 88% of Chanchal’s population belongs to three distinct groups – 51.96% are Muslim, 21.90% belong to a Scheduled Caste and 14.16% to a Scheduled Tribe.During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a massive 30.1% of Chanchal’s electorate – 73,901 voters – was flagged for adjudication. On judicial scrutiny, almost all of these flags were cleared. Officers cleared 69,731 voters’ names and disqualified only 4,170, a 5.6% rejection rate, the third-lowest across West Bengal’s 289 constituencies.This stands in stark contrast to the state’s 45.4% average rejection rate, indicating that the flags raised in this district during enumeration were found incorrect on judicial review.Despite the low removal figure for Chanchal’s voters, the Election Commission of India (ECI) data shows, 38,564 appeals were subsequently filed in the constituency. That is, 9.25 appeals were filed per elector removed – another significant deviation from the statewide ratio of 1.40 appeals per voter.Who filed these appeals?Available evidence indicates that the removed voters were not the ones who filed the vast majority of these 38,564 appeals.The Civic Research Group, a volunteer research body, manually cross-referenced every EPIC (voter-ID) number from the ECI’s deletion lists against the official appeal portal. They wanted to find out how many removed electors had appealed their own exclusion. In Chanchal, they traced just 2,892 such cases.Even after accounting for untraceable electors, it turns out that around 35,007 of Chanchal’s 38,564 appeals – or 90.8% – are appeals against inclusion. These are petitions filed specifically to strike down the names of voters who were cleared by judicial officers.The scale is staggering. Half (50.2%) of the people a judge examined and allowed to stay on the rolls in Chanchal now face an application seeking to remove them. Progress on these cases has been negligible. Only 31 out of 38,564 appeals (0.08%) have been resolved to date – and all 31 decisions upheld the electors’ inclusion.A district-wide pattern in MaldaChanchal is not an outlier within its district. Across all 12 constituencies in Malda, 58.4% of all electoral appeals are against voter inclusion, the highest proportion of any district in West Bengal. In Malda, more appeals were filed seeking to remove voters who had already been cleared by judges than by excluded voters seeking to return to the rolls.On average, Malda’s constituencies are 42.52% Muslim, 19.61% Scheduled Caste and 8.40% Scheduled Tribe. The data reveals a clear demographic gradient: constituencies with higher Muslim populations see a correspondingly higher share of anti-inclusion appeals.Interestingly, Habibpur, with the district’s lowest Muslim population (4.64%), also has the lowest share of anti-inclusion appeals (31.6%). Englishbazar, with the second-lowest Muslim demographic (19.57%), has the second-lowest appeal share (39.0%).On the other end, Sujapur, which has the highest Muslim population (75.44%), recorded 61,285 anti-inclusion appeals, the highest absolute number in the state.This pattern continues in neighbouring regions. Murshidabad holds the highest absolute volume of these appeals statewide with 3,26,266 (43.6% of its total). Uttar Dinajpur sits at 47.8%, and Birbhum at 49.8%. Together, just 34 assembly seats across Malda and Murshidabad account for 6,36,873 anti-inclusion appeals, roughly two-fifths of West Bengal’s entire total.A statewide pattern of administrative appealsAcross West Bengal, the ECI’s own figures highlight the sheer scale of this operation. On September 16, the ECI informed the Supreme Court that of the 38,31,429 (~38 lakh) tribunal appeals, 22,21,118 (~22 lakh) were filed by excluded voters fighting to return to the rolls. The remaining 16,10,311 (~16 lakh) were appeals against voter inclusion.This means that 49.1% of the 32,77,360 (~32 lakh) electors cleared by judicial officers statewide are facing new removal petitions, a ratio that almost perfectly matches Chanchal.While the ECI provided the Supreme Court with this statistical split, it conspicuously omitted both the geographic distribution of these appeals and the identities of the appellants. Yet, the paper trail reveals the source. Two specific orders from Murshidabad’s Appellate Tribunal No. 11, dated May 8 and 11, explicitly state in their opening lines that the appeals against inclusion were filed by the state’s Additional Chief Electoral Officer.Calculating the anti-inclusion appealsTo determine the exact number of appeals filed against voter inclusion, researchers cross-referenced the commission’s counter affidavit, which lists the total number of appeals, against their own EPIC-by-EPIC tracking of appeals filed by electors who had been removed.The remainder of total appeals reported by the commission minus appeals by removed voters – represents the administrative appeals against inclusion.While the researchers successfully identified 18,99,417 (~19 lakh) appeals filed by excluded voters, the ECI’s count sits at 22,21,118 (~22 lakh). This leaves roughly 3.2 lakh appeals untraced, a gap the research report attributes directly to the commission’s data formatting.By publishing electoral rolls and exclusion lists as image-based PDFs rather than machine-readable files, the ECI left 2,33,404 (~2.3 lakh) EPICs unverifiable and 1,29,499 (~1.3 lakh) voter records unprocessed.On September 18, the ECI introduced a one-time password (OTP) requirement for every EPIC search, which the researchers record as making independent large-scale verification considerably harder and existing figures difficult to refresh.To reconcile the dataset, the researchers allocated the untraced appeals back to individual constituencies proportionally, based on each seat’s invalid or unconverted EPIC counts. This aligned their totals with the commission’s aggregate numbers. The resulting calculation estimates that 42.0% of all appeals statewide are against inclusion, a figure that perfectly matches the ECI’s submission to the Supreme Court.Independent data corroborates the Appellate Tribunal No. 11 recordThe calculated estimate closely matches the manual count provided by the presiding officer of Appellate Tribunal No. 11. Justice (Retd.) Indrajit Chatterjee, who oversees 11 Murshidabad constituencies with 6,35,932 (~6.4 lakh) total appeals. It reported that approximately 2.54 lakh of these cases (roughly 40%) were filed by the Additional Chief Electoral Officer.When the independent tracing methodology is applied to these 11 Murshidabad constituencies, it produces an estimate of 2,61,461 (~2.6 lakh) appeals against inclusion, representing 41.1% of the local docket.These two figures were reached entirely independently. One came from a presiding judge reviewing his own docket, while the other was derived from the ECI’s statewide data and by tracing its deletion lists.The difference between them is a mere 7,461 appeals, or 1.1 percentage points. Because the judge explicitly names the Additional CEO as the appellant, this tight mathematical agreement strongly indicates that the appeals against voter inclusion were overwhelmingly institutional filings by the ECI itself, rather than private objections from citizens.A pattern of demographic targeting in districtsThe pattern of these administrative appeals is neither evenly distributed nor random. The data reveals a staggering correlation (rho 0.767, p<0.0001) between appeals against inclusion and a constituency’s Muslim population, the strongest relationship found anywhere in the dataset.Constituencies with a Muslim population above 60% face 7.85 appeals for every 100 electors. In contrast, those below 20% see just 0.80. This is a nearly ten-fold difference. Chanchal, with a 51.96% Muslim population, carries 13.39 appeals per 100 electors, the fourth-highest rate in West Bengal.This targeting is exceptionally specific. It does not reflect a general sweep of marginalised voters. The Scheduled Caste population share (23.34% in the state), shows zero statistical relationship with the appeals (rho -0.048, p=0.42).Crucially, the data proves that this demographic targeting is not merely a proxy for punishing anti-BJP voters. While there is a raw negative correlation (-0.539) between the appeals and the BJP’s 2026 vote share, this is because Muslim demographics and BJP voting are themselves heavily inversely correlated (-0.729). Separating the two reveals the true driver.In the 157 constituencies with fewer than 20% Muslims, voting heavily against the BJP resulted in no surge of appeals (a mathematically insignificant correlation of 0.020, p=0.81). Yet, even within that low-Muslim group, the Muslim population share still strongly predicted the appeal rate (0.598). In seats with few Muslim voters, rejecting the BJP brought no appeals.Even more tellingly, when Muslim-heavy constituencies actually voted for the BJP, the appeals arrived anyway. There are eight constituencies with a Muslim population over 40% that also gave the BJP over 40% of their vote. These seats average 5.33 anti-inclusion appeals per 100 electors, more than double the state mean of 2.10.Manikchak in Malda (42.37% Muslim, 48.9% BJP vote) carries 9.6 appeals per 100. Baisnabnagar (44.44% Muslim, 48.3% BJP vote) carries 9.2.Political impactThese administrative appeals, filed between April 5 and 10, targeted electors who were already verified on the roll. When the Supreme Court ruled on April 13 that pending appeals do not entitle a person to vote, that restriction applied to excluded individuals seeking to restore their names on the electoral rolls, not those who had already been verified.Consequently, when West Bengal polled on April 23 and 29, the people named in these anti-inclusion appeals were able to cast their ballots. The true threat of these appeals hangs over the next electoral roll and the elections that are to come.Statewide, the appeals against inclusion equal 2.37% of the entire 2026 electorate. Broken down by the party that won the seat, the gradient is steep and follows the exact same demographic fault lines observed elsewhere.The two seats held by the Congress, both in Murshidabad, carry 12 anti-inclusion appeals for every hundred electors, 10 times the rate seen in seats won by the BJP. Raninagar (75.40% Muslim) carries 14.8 appeals per hundred, the second highest in the state, while Farakka (61.53% Muslim) carries 9.1.The ordering of the chart above is not based on political ranking. It is the Muslim share in each group of seats, in sequence. The 87 constituencies the BJP did not win carry 9,62,197 (~9.6 lakh) appeals against inclusion, 4.18 for every hundred electors. The 202 it won carry 6,34,242 (~6.3 lakh) or 1.21 per hundred electors.The minor opposition bloc, seven seats held by the Congress, the Indian Secular Front (ISF), the Jamiat-e-Ulama Party and the CPI(M), averages a 62.1% Muslim population and faces 5.45 anti-inclusion appeals per hundred electors. This is a higher intensity than even the Trinamool Congress’s seats. Bhangar, won by the ISF (64.89% Muslim), sees 87% of all its appeals filed against inclusion. Domkal, the solitary CPI(M) seat, is 77.67% Muslim.Taken together, the 87 seats the BJP did not win carry 9,62,197 (~9.6 lakh) appeals against inclusion (4.18 per hundred electors). The 202 seats the BJP won carry 6,34,242 (~6.3 lakh or 1.21 per hundred electors).The intensity of the purge effort is three-and-a-half times higher in seats the BJP lost. The ordering of the table above is not merely a political ranking; it closely tracks the demographic concentration of the constituencies.The looming electoral impact is massive. In 26 constituencies, the number of electors facing removal exceeds the margin by which the seat was won in 2026. These 26 seats average a 35.6% Muslim population (compared to 22.3% elsewhere). This electoral exposure crosses party lines: 12 were won by the AITC, 11 by the BJP and 3 by other parties.In Amdanga, pending appeals outnumber the winning margin by 3.7 to 1, in Harirampur by 3.4 to 1 and in Suti by 2.8 to 1.If these state-driven appeals succeed, over three lakh electors will be stripped from the rolls in races decided by margins smaller than the removals.The ECI is now reportedly planning a special re-enrolment drive for people who were left out of the electoral roll during the SIR process. But, with respect to West Bengal, the commission says that the Form 6 route it has offered to excluded voters is not available to those whose cases are pending before a tribunal.There are over 20 lakh such people in the state, as per what the ECI has told the Supreme Court. While the Form 6 route itself is controversial for voters who have exercised their franchise in the past, this route will not be available to voters who challenged the decision to remove their names from the voter lists before tribunals.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.