Kolkata: Citing the scale of deletions from the state’s electoral roll during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi said on Thursday (November 6) that he believes the 2026 West Bengal Assembly election was not legally valid.“Was the Bengal election legally valid or not? I believe it wasn’t,” Quraishi said, delivering the Hashim Abdul Halim memorial lecture in Kolkata on Thursday. “I have said this publicly, repeatedly, in the media. It is before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will make a proper decision,” he said.He stopped short of saying the result of the election should be set aside. “Maybe the whole election isn’t ruined, but at least [the Supreme Court will] point out where there is suspicion,” he said. He urged the court to begin with the constituencies where, he said he had read about 70–80% of Muslim voters being removed.‘NRC through the front door’Quraishi, who served as an election commissioner from 2006 onwards and as chief election commissioner from 2010 to 2012, compared the SIR with Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was carried out under the Supreme Court’s supervision and ended in 2019 with about 19 lakh people left out of the state’s register of voters.Also read: 7 Years After NRC Excluded 1.9 Million People, Process of Issuing Rejection Slips Yet to Start: Govt Tells SC“Many people asked me, is the SIR NRC through the back door? My answer is that SIR is NRC through the front door,” he said. “In fact, it is the father of NRC. There, they followed legal procedures for years to reach a conclusion. Here, in one stroke, within fifteen days, across Bengal, I read that in 49 constituencies, 70-80 per cent of Muslims were cut, calling them all Bangladeshis.”He questioned the SIR’s central requirement, that voters link themselves to the 2002 electoral roll. His father and mother, he said, had both died years before 2002, and he had not voted that year himself. “So where did I go? But I am an Indian citizen. I have voted in many elections,” he said. “Where did this mischief come from, to map from 2002? There is no logic to it.”Form 6 and a false declarationQuraishi was sharply critical of the Election Commission’s plan to bring deleted voters back onto the voter lists through Form 6, the application for new voters, under the special enrolment drive it announced in October.Form 6, he said, requires the applicant to declare that they are a new voter who is not enrolled anywhere else. The form warns that a false statement is punishable with up to a year in prison. “How can I, who has voted 10-15 times, call myself a new voter? But I am being forced to,” he said.Also read: Don’t Have to Make False Form 6 Declarations During SIR, Says Goa Bench of Bombay HCFriends had called him saying they were being made to sign the form to get their names back on the rolls, he said. “I said, if you are ready to go to jail, sign it.”“A long-registered elector should not casually be treated as a first-time applicant,” he said, calling for “a fast and effective system for the restoration of wrongfully deleted names”.The courts and the appealsQuraishi also criticised the judicial responses to the SIR. Sending deleted voters to tribunals, he said, was no easy remedy for the working poor. In his neighbourhood in Gurgaon, Haryana, where many workers are from West Bengal, “All their [local residents’] staff had gone to Bengal to save their votes,” he said. Labourers were told to correct their records within 24 hours, when “their monthly salary isn’t even enough to cover airplane fare”.Congress workers march in protest against the SIR in Kolkata, West Bengal, October 29, 2026. Photo: PTI/Swapan Mahapatra.By one calculation, he said, it would take 21 years to decide the appeals of the 25 to 27 lakh people deleted during the West Bengal elections, and 14 years even if the number of tribunals is increased from 19 to 40.He took issue with Justice Joymalya Bagchi’s remark that those left out “can vote next time”, and by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s observation that a by-poll held in September on two West Bengal constituencies was “just a by-election”. “A chief minister can lose their seat if they don’t win a by-election,” he pointed out.“This is not a judicial statement. It is a highly irresponsible statement,” he said.He also questioned the decision to send judicial officers to verify voters’ credentials. “The court’s job is to use the stick to get work done by the Executive,” he said. “If traffic isn’t being managed properly tomorrow, will you tell a Sessions Judge to go and direct traffic?”Also read: How Over 50 Lakh Cleared West Bengal Voters Ended Up Under Judicial Review In SIRDeletion from the electoral roll, Quraishi said, now threatened more than the vote. He cited the case of the former editor of the Telegraph, whose passport renewal was held up because his name had been deleted from the voters’ list. Some chief ministers had spoken of withdrawing welfare from those no longer on the roll, he reminded, which amounted to citizenship being determined “through the back door” via electoral rolls.‘The CEC is not the Election Commission’Quraishi turned to the disputes within the Election Commission, revealed by the Indian Express. The reports showed that objections had been repeatedly raised by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.Since the commission became a three-member body in the 1990s, he said, decisions are to be unanimous where possible and otherwise by a majority. “The Chief Election Commissioner is not the Election Commission,” he said. “If the CEC is left alone, he is not the Election Commission. He is one out of three.”He said he had privately been critical of the two commissioners for staying silent. “It turned out they were actually doing something,” he said. “They were writing protests, making notes and creating evidence that things weren’t running properly. Thanks to that, the matter has reached the Supreme Court with complete evidence.”He said the absence of commission meetings for four months showed that one man had been making all decisions. “In fact, it emerged that one man wasn’t taking decisions, a computer was taking decisions,” he said.To illustrate how a majority of commissioners can overrule a chief election commissioners, he recalled the 2008 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly election, when, he said, he and Election Commissioner Navin Chawla had outvoted the then CEC, N. Gopalaswami, to hold the polls on schedule despite unrest in the erstwhile state at the time. The commissioners kept their disagreement private, he said, and the ECI conducted the election.How commissioners are chosenQuraishi repeated his call to improve the process for appointing election commissioners. Under the 2023 law, they are chosen by a panel of the prime minister, a Union minister he nominates and the leader of the opposition. “This is already two-to-one. The majority sits with the government, so fair selection won’t happen,” he said.He suggested that the panel be required to agree unanimously on at least one name, and referred to Nepal, where a constitutional council shortlists candidates who then face televised hearings before a parliamentary committee.Also read: How Can We Constitute a More Impartial, Non-Partisan Election Commission?He set out reforms he said would restore trust in the electoral roll, which include continuous rather than one-off revisions, transparent and timely publication of every change and a quick way to restore wrongly deleted names.“Not one voter to be left behind” had been the commission’s slogan, he said, but “the formula being adopted was ‘Not one voter should be left on the roll’”.Aishe Ghosh: “Cultural diversity is our strength”Student leader Aishe Ghosh, a former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, spoke of the place of young people in defending constitutional values. University and school campuses, she said, “should be free from all this religious dogmatism”.She praised the documentary Muslims Against Partition, screened at the event, saying that at a time when campuses were not teaching history “in the right way”, such work was “very, very important to speak to people and tell people what happened”.“India has to be secular,” she said. “This cultural diversity is our strength.” Young people who had taken to the streets, she said, “challenged that very idea that the state, through the government at this moment, is trying to push inside society”.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.