Bengal SIR: How Times Now’s ‘93% Comeback’ Framing Misleads
There is a difference between reporting a percentage and helping readers understand what that percentage actually represents. Times Now’s graphic on the West Bengal Special Intensive Revision chose the dramatic formulation, “With 93% Comeback, Bengal SIR Deletions Under Scanner.” For anyone quickly consuming the headline, the obvious impression is that an overwhelming majority of voters removed during the Bengal SIR have subsequently fought their cases and returned to the electoral roll. That would indeed be an extraordinary development, and one that would raise fundamental questions about the accuracy of the deletion exercise.
Except that is not what the larger set of numbers shows. The Election Commission’s submissions before the Supreme Court reveal a far more complicated picture involving tens of lakhs of pending appeals, two completely different categories of challenges and only a small fraction of the entire appellate caseload having reached a decision. The approximately 93% figure relates to outcomes within a limited set of disposed cases. Presenting it simply as a “93% comeback” strips away the denominator that readers need before drawing conclusions.
The Number That Should Accompany 93%
The Election Commission told the Supreme Court that 38,31,429 appeals had been filed before the appellate tribunals. Yet only 1,26,194 had been decided, leaving 37,05,235 pending. Put differently, only about 3.3% of the entire appeal caseload had been disposed of, while approximately 96.7% remained unresolved. That single piece of context dramatically changes how a headline about a “93% comeback” is understood.
This does not make the restoration figures insignificant. Quite the opposite. A high rate of inclusion among decided cases deserves serious scrutiny and may raise legitimate questions about the original decisions. But journalism should distinguish between saying that a high proportion of a small decided subset produced a particular outcome and suggesting that the same outcome has already been established across the wider SIR exercise. When more than 37 lakh appeals remain pending, the process is nowhere close to producing a final statewide picture.
38 Lakh Appeals Were Not 38 Lakh Deleted Voters
There is another number that makes the headline framing even more problematic. Of the 38.31 lakh appeals, only 22,21,118 were filed by people whose names had been deleted and who wanted to return to the electoral roll. Another 16,10,311 appeals challenged the inclusion of names already on the roll. Those are opposite types of proceedings, yet both form part of the overall tribunal workload.
That means roughly 42% of all appeals were not voters fighting against their own deletion at all. They were challenges to somebody’s inclusion. A casual reader encountering a story built around a mass “comeback” could easily miss this crucial distinction. The appellate process is examining both whether people were wrongly excluded and whether others were wrongly included. Compressing that complicated exercise into a single comeback percentage sacrifices precisely the context that statistical journalism is supposed to provide.
Even the 93% Figure Needs Its Denominator
The figures cited from the tribunal results show 1,13,943 inclusion outcomes and 8,649 exclusion outcomes, producing approximately 92.94% inclusion among those 1,22,592 outcomes. There is also a later Election Commission figure stating that 1,26,194 appeals had been disposed of by September 16, meaning the reported totals come from slightly different reporting dates or datasets. That distinction matters when a percentage is being elevated into the central headline.
There is an additional limitation. Reporting based on the Commission’s detailed figures has noted that the available breakdown does not clearly establish how many of the 1,13,943 inclusion outcomes were successful appeals by previously deleted voters and how many resulted from challenges to existing inclusions being rejected. That does not invalidate the tribunal outcomes, but it makes broad language such as “93% comeback” even less satisfactory without explaining exactly what population is being measured.
The Real Story Was Already Big Enough
None of this means the Bengal SIR should escape scrutiny. More than 22.21 lakh excluded electors appealed for restoration, which itself represents roughly 82% of the 27.16 lakh voters excluded through the adjudication process. The Election Commission has also sought to increase the number of appellate tribunals from 19 to 42, acknowledging the enormous backlog confronting the existing system. These are substantial facts worthy of serious reporting without any need to package them into an impression that the entire deletion exercise has already been overturned.
Indeed, the unresolved appeals may be the more consequential story. An appellate mechanism dealing with voting rights is meaningful only if eligible voters can receive decisions in time for elections in which they are entitled to participate. The size of the backlog therefore deserves rigorous examination. So do the reasons why so many excluded voters appealed and why such a large number of challenges were simultaneously filed against inclusions.
Journalism Needs Denominators, Not Drama
Percentages are among the easiest statistics to make dramatic because a percentage can look enormous while concealing the size and nature of the population behind it. A responsible headline involving “93%” should tell readers, either immediately or unmistakably, that it concerns a limited set of cases decided so far while more than 37 lakh appeals remain pending. Without that context, the percentage risks doing more to shape an impression than to explain the evidence.
Times Now was entitled to examine whether tribunal outcomes raise questions about Bengal’s SIR deletions. They plainly do deserve examination. But “93% comeback” turns an incomplete appellate snapshot into something that sounds far closer to a statewide verdict. When only about 3.3% of the overall appeal caseload has been decided, the honest question is not merely whether 93% sounds dramatic. It is 93% of what? Journalism earns credibility by answering that question before the reader has to ask it.
