A Tribunal Built to Treat Every Appeal the Same - Even the Ones That Restore a Right

The Text Gives the EC Total Control Over Rolls. It Says Nothing About Which Appeal Gets Heard First. Article 324

vests in the Election Commission the "superintendence, direction and control" of preparing electoral rolls and conducting elections - about as sweeping a grant of institutional power as the Constitution makes anywhere. What Article 324 does not do and what no statute has fully supplied either, is specify how an appellate mechanism reviewing that roll-preparation process should sequence its case load when two very different kinds of appeals arrive at once: one from a citizen wrongly struck off the rolls, asking to be put back; another from an objector or the EC itself, asking for someone else to be removed.

The Constitution treats both as "appeals." It does not treat them as equally urgent - and until this week, the tribunal system built to hear them didn't either. That gap is the actual story behind the numbers. Of 38.10 lakh appeals filed before West Bengal's 19 SIR tribunals, only 7 lakh - fewer than one in five - came from voters seeking re-inclusion.

The remaining 31 lakh were filed to remove more names. Yet it is precisely the smaller category that carries constitutional weight in the way Justice Bagchi described it in court: "an inclusion is not affecting an individual right, but an exclusion is denuding a voting right." A rejected exclusion appeal leaves the electoral roll exactly as it was.

A rejected - or merely delayed - inclusion appeal leaves a citizen unable to vote in an election happening in weeks. These are not symmetrical harms, but the tribunal design, absent any statutory prioritisation, has been processing them as if they were.

The numbers make the cost of that design concrete. Of the roughly 83,000 appeals decided in five months - about 2% of the total backlog - 75,443 or 91%, ended in restoration to the rolls. That success rate is itself the argument: the vast majority of exclusion appeals that do get heard turn out to be correct, meaning the excluded voter was right and the enumeration process was wrong.

Every day that appeal sits unheard while a symmetrical-priority queue processes exclusion-seeking objections alongside it is a day a wrongly excluded citizen loses, with a municipal election now closing in. This is not a case of the Constitution failing to protect the right to vote.

It's a case of institutional design - built by the EC, not mandated by any specific text - declining to build in the asymmetry that Article 324's own purpose implies. The Supreme Court's direction to segregate and prioritise exclusion appeals is, in effect, retrofitting a distinction the tribunal structure should have made from day one: not every appeal to a roll-revision tribunal is asking for the same thing and treating them as if they were is itself a quiet form of disenfranchisement.