Retired Calcutta High Court judge Biswajit Basu has resigned from the West Bengal SIR tribunals, becoming the fourth of the 19 members to leave the panel in a month. The tribunals were set up on the Supreme Court’s orders to hear appeals from people left out of the state’s electoral rolls.
Basu’s resignation became known on Saturday, November 7, according to PTI. He cited personal reasons in a letter to Calcutta High Court Chief Justice Ravindra Vithalrao Ghuge, which he is said to have sent on Friday. His exit leaves 15 of the 19 members.
Basu is the latest to go. Former Calcutta High Court Chief Justice T S Sivagnanam stepped down earlier, citing family reasons. Retired judge Ranjit Kumar Bag also quit for personal reasons without elaborating. Indrajit Chatterjee, who resigned a few days before Basu, said it was too difficult to commute 22 km every day. He had taken the assignment believing the work would take two to three months.
Basu had spoken about the burden before he resigned. “Resolving lakhs of cases in this manner is a little difficult,” he said, according to The Federal, adding that because the Supreme Court had ordered it, the work had to be carried out that way. He also stressed the need to improve the infrastructure available to the tribunals so that cases could be handled more effectively.
The tribunals were created under a Supreme Court order in March, to give a legal route to voters whose names were left out of the final roll after the Special Intensive Revision. The final roll, published on February 28, recorded 63,66,952 deletions, according to IANS, which also said around 60 lakh cases were referred for judicial adjudication. The workload of the tribunals comes from those cases.
A PTI report said a senior Election Commission official told the agency that the resignations are likely to affect how quickly appeals are decided in Murshidabad district, where many voters were excluded.
Clarion India reported that judges of more than a dozen of the tribunals have also pointed to serious gaps in the Commission’s digital portal built for them, which is a separate concern from the resignations. The Commission has not publicly responded to that criticism in the reports I found.
The appeals process is already under strain. An investigation by The Wire, reported earlier, found that the Election Commission has itself challenged tens of thousands of voters who judges cleared in border constituencies.
Voters whose cases are pending before the tribunals also cannot use the Form 6 route available to others, so delays directly affect their ability to vote.
No official has said how the vacancies will be filled, or whether the Supreme Court or the Calcutta High Court will take action over the resignations. Whether more members follow will decide how fast the backlog moves.
