The Election Commission of India (ECI) has published a supplementary voter list for West Bengal's second and final phase of assembly elections, adding 1,468 names cleared by Supreme Court-mandated appellate tribunals and deleting six names.
The 19 tribunals, set up on March 20, considered close to 1,500 cases for the second phase of polls and cleared 1,468 applications while ordering the deletion of six names.
This means that nearly all of the 2.71 million people flagged under a controversial logical discrepancy category in the special intensive revision stand disenfranchised without any hearing before the tribunals.
Their applications were rejected in the first stage of logical discrepancy adjudication by judicial officers but there was no time for a hearing before the tribunals – each of which is headed by a former high court judge or chief justice – because the forums took too long to become functional.
The development comes a day before the crucial second phase of the assembly elections when 142 seats across seven districts in southern Bengal, considered a bastion of the ruling Trinamool Congress, go to the polls.
The results will be announced on May 4. The BJP is hoping to deny chief minister Mamata Banerjee – whose seat of Bhabanipur is also going to the polls on Wednesday – a fourth straight term.
Of the 2.71 million voters flagged under the logical discrepancy category over issues such as mismatch in name, spelling errors and mapping to parents, only 1,609 names were restored across the entire election cycle.
