Kolkata: Mohd Dual Ali, a resident of Bhagwangola in Murshidabad, West Bengal, served in the Indian Army and was hit by gunfire while he was in uniform. He survived and went on to work in the Indian Railways. In May 2026, when West Bengal voted, he did not – and neither did three of his children. All their names had been struck off the electoral roll during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.He filed an appeal before the tribunal over four months ago but the date has not been decided yet. He still does not know why their names were dropped.A reply to a Right to Information (RTI) filing from the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, however, now explains why he is still waiting, and why, like him, roughly 37 lakh others are also waiting.RTI application filed by Congress MP Isha Khan ChoudhuryThe reply, Memo No. 8551/Home (Elec) dated August 17, 2026, was issued to Isha Khan Choudhury, Congress MP from Dakshin Malda, and runs to 28 pages. Two of its tables carry the story. As on August 7, 2026, the Appellate Tribunal in West Bengal had received 38,10,620 appeals arising out of the SIR. It had decided on 82,782 of them.That is 2.17%.Put another way, 37,27,838 appeals are left undecided four months after the assembly election, which the hearings were meant to precede. The number that should stop the argumentOf the 82,782 appeals disposed of, 75,443 ended with the voter being re-included on the roll. Only 7,339 were excluded.That is a restoration rate of 91.13%.So, the tribunal has looked at a sliver of the deletions and found that in more than nine cases out of ten, the deletion should not have happened. The safeguard works exactly as designed on the fraction of cases it reaches, which is the problem. If the same rate held across the pile, the overwhelming majority of the 27,28,500 people recorded as “not eligible” during adjudication were removed in error, but almost all of them are still off the roll.That inference needs one honest caveat. The 82,782 decided cases are not a random sample. Simpler files, or files pushed by someone with a lawyer, may well have been taken up first. Wing Commander Md Shamim Akhtar (Retd.), a decorated IAF veteran, was not called for a hearing. Photo: By arrangementWing Commander (Retired) Md Shamim Akhtar, a resident of Kolkata, whose own appeal is still pending, described to The Wire what that filter looks like from inside it: “Many people I know have spent thousands of rupees to get a lawyer to file the application.”The caveat cuts both ways, though. If the clean, well-represented cases are the ones getting decided, and 91% of those end in restoration, there is no obvious reason to think the untouched 37 lakh contain fewer genuine voters.Three ways to lose a voteCopies of three appeals reviewed for this report show how differently the process can fail while producing the same result.Akhtar took premature retirement from the Indian Air Force as a Wing Commander on July 31, 2022, and was handed his enumeration form by his block-level officer on November 19, 2025. He filled and submitted it. His name then appeared as “Under Adjudication” in the supplementary list for the Entally assembly constituency.What happened next is explained in his appeal:“I did not receive any notification for the verification of documents nor did I receive any notification for hearing. Subsequently, to my surprise, my name has been deleted from the Supplementary List published on 27-03-2026 without hearing and without assigning any reason.”Akhtar holds an ex-serviceman identity card, a PPO number, a valid passport, and an entry in the 2002 SIR roll. Yet, none of it was examined, because there was no proceeding at which it could be.Firoza Bibi, who cannot read or write and works as a house help in Rajarhat area of Kolkata, was deleted from the list four days earlier on March 23. Her appeal, too, says the same thing about the notice: “I have not received any notice of grounds for exclusion. I have the right to raise additional grounds upon receipt of grounds.”Firoza Bibi, who doesn’t know how to read or write, appealed to the tribunal with the help of another person on April 6, 2026. She is the only one in her family who could not vote, and is still awaiting an update. Photo: By arrangementCompared with her documents, the likely trigger was the spelling of her name. Her EPIC card records her as Firoja Bibi. Her Aadhaar, PAN and bank passbook, on the other hand, carry the name as it appears in the current roll, Firoza Bibi Mandal. One letter, the kind of variation any transliteration from Bengali can throw up. Her appeal calls it “a minor clerical or technical error from digital migration or enumeration” and cites the Supreme Court order in Sirajul Hoque v. State of Assam for the proposition that such minor name discrepancies cannot be the basis for disbelieving otherwise consistent documentation.She has voted since the late 1980s. Her father, the appeal notes, has voted since 1970.Then, there is Md Nehal Uddin Anwer, and his is a case the Election Commission of India (ECI) will find hardest to explain, because on the face of it the process worked.Anwer, an accountant from Topsia area, in the same Entally constituency as Akhtar, was told the ground for his erasure from the list. Notice number EFS251630237056820012026 informed him that his father’s name in the current roll did not match the name in the 2002 SIR roll, so his enumeration form linkage appeared to be wrong. He appealed and attended the hearing. He produced his father’s 2002 entry in full – AC 154-Taltola (SC), Part No. 15, serial no. 457, under SRIN-2002 dated April 12, 2002.On March 27, he was placed in adjudication and deleted from the roll regardless.Anwer had voted on June 1, 2024 in the Lok Sabha election on the same EPIC number that was now being struck off. He listed a passport valid till 2035, along with PAN, Aadhaar, gas and electricity bills, his B.Com result, an OBC certificate, an income tax return receipt and the 1995 voter list.Yet, his notice and a hearing produced the same outcome as those who got no notice and no hearing. What was the hearing for then?The 2002 problem nobody has addressedAnwer’s deletion was due to a failure to link him to the 2002 roll. His father’s 2002 record is in Taltola constituency (AC 154). Anwer votes in Entally now (AC 163). Akhtar’s 2002 record is in Kulti constituency (AC 257, pre-2008 delimitation). He now votes in AC 163.Both Anwer and Akhtar are being asked to match themselves to a roll drawn on constituency boundaries and numbers that no longer exist, because West Bengal’s assembly seats were redrawn and renumbered in the 2008 delimitation.Anwer did the matching anyway, produced the SRIN reference, and was deleted for a linkage mismatch. If the exercise can generate a mismatch for a man holding the precise 2002 serial number, then the mismatch is being produced by the method rather than the record. That would explain, to some extent, why the statewide “not eligible” rate is 45.4%.The appeal presumes a literacy the appellants may not haveFiroza Bibi’s appeal is drafted partly in the third person. “Her Aadhar, Bank Passbook and PAN card show name as it’s shown in the current voter list,” it reads in a document filed on behalf of a woman who cannot read what was submitted under her name. It cites case law, and was uploaded at 9.55 am on April 6, on a portal she does not know to use.Somebody wrote it for her. To contest a deletion, one must locate the deletion list, identify the ground she might never have been told about, assemble the documents, navigate an online form, and ideally, cite a judgment. The appeal numbers themselves, too, record the pattern. Each carries the filing date inside it. Akhtar filed it on April 1, Anwer on April 3, and Firoza Bibi on April 6 – all three have been pending since.Where you live decides whether you are heardThe state average of 2.17% hides something worse. Disposal rates across the 24 district units in the reply vary by a factor of more than eight hundred.The pattern is not explained by workload. Purulia, with 14,990 appeals, has decided nearly a quarter of them. Murshidabad, with 50 times the volume, has decided on 487 cases in total. The two districts carrying the heaviest burden of deletions, Murshidabad and Malda, meanwhile, sit at the bottom. Together, they account for 12,78,454 appeals – a third of the state’s total – and 1,958 decisions.Firoza Bibi is in North 24 Parganas, where 277 appeals out of 3,58,872 have been decided and not one has ended in exclusion.Outcomes vary as sharply as speed. Seven districts have recorded zero exclusions. In Birbhum and Paschim Medinipur, the pattern inverts entirely. Birbhum has restored 173 names and excluded 1,091, Paschim Medinipur has restored 192 and excluded 1,006. In these two districts, the tribunal rejects appellants roughly six times out of seven, against a statewide restoration rate of 91%. Hooghly alone accounts for just under half of every exclusion recorded in West Bengal.A claim that raises more questionsChoudhury released a press release on August 21 following the RTI reply. The release leads with what he calls the “most shocking” finding. A total of 38,10,620 appeals were filed against 27,28,500 voters recorded as ‘not eligible’ – a difference of 10,82,120 – something he describes as “appeals by Election Commission for exclusion of people who have cast their votes” in the 2026 assembly election. The press release issued by Congress MP Isha Khan Choudhury.The RTI reply does not establish who these 10 lakh excess appeals belong to.However, the constituency-level sheet furnished by the state CEO’s office carries an asterisk against the 38,10,620 total and a footnote in plain language: “These include appeals against inclusion and appeals against exclusion.”This footnote creates a harder problem. If the pool is mixed, the list of 75,443 names labelled “included in e-roll” is mixed too. It could contain deleted voters who won their appeals, along with voters who successfully saw off an objection. The 91% restoration rate rests on a category the CEO’s own footnote says is two categories mixed in one.We can presume these are filed by the ECI or another individual to remove names. As a result, 2.17% is a best case scenario rather than an estimate. Moreover, if a share of the 75,443 restorations are people who saw off an objection rather than people put back after being marked ineligible, the real figure for those marked ineligible may be lower. How much lower is something only the ECI can answer. But until the split is published, nobody can say how many of Bengal’s deleted voters have actually been restored.The cost of the waitThe damage has already travelled past the ballot box. Firoza Bibi has held off from applying for the Annapurna Bhandar scheme – the Bengal BJP government’s monthly financial assistance of Rs 3,000 to eligible female heads – while she waits to be restored, and watches the ongoing Census with the wariness of someone whose papers have just been found wanting by one arm of the state.The 2026 election is over. Whatever the tribunal eventually decides, it cannot give Dual Ali back the vote he did not cast, and the same is true for everyone else in the queue.Mohd Dual Ali, Kargil war veteran, who lost his voting rights, along with three other family members. All of them appealed to the tribunal in April 2026, but their cases are still pending. Photo: By arrangementAli asked the only question left that’s left to ask: “I stood in the line of fire for this country. Yet today, I am being forced to prove that I am a citizen of this country and that I am entitled to vote. There is no certainty about when I will get my voting rights back. What will happen to the future of my children and me?”