NEW DELHI: Retired Calcutta high court judge Biswajit Basu has resigned from the West Bengal SIR tribunals, becoming the fourth among the 19 retired judges appointed to head the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) panels in the state to step down.Basu communicated his decision to the chief justice of the Calcutta high court through a letter on Friday, citing personal reasons, PTI reported.His resignation follows those of former Calcutta High Court Chief Justice TS Sivagnanam and retired judges Ranjit Kumar Bag and Indrajit Chatterjee.According to an Election Commission (EC) official, Basu and Chatterjee had been assigned to handle cases from the Murshidabad district.Chatterjee had earlier stepped down, citing the difficulty of travelling around 22 km daily to carry out the assignment. He had initially accepted the responsibility believing it would be a temporary arrangement lasting two to three months. However, the large volume of pending cases eventually prompted him to resign.Bag and Sivagnanam had also resigned from the tribunals, citing personal and family reasons.
Resignations likely to affect disposal of applications in Murshidabad
The resignations of the two tribunal members are likely to affect the disposal of appeals in Murshidabad district, where a large number of voters were excluded from the electoral rolls, an EC official said.“With both judges stepping down within a month, the disposal of appeals from Murshidabad voters has effectively come to a standstill, raising questions over the tribunal’s ability to clear the backlog,” the official told PTI.Basu had earlier acknowledged the challenges involved in disposing of a large number of cases, while emphasising that the tribunals were functioning on the directions of the Supreme Court.
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He had also called for better infrastructure to ensure more effective case disposal.“Resolving lakhs of cases in this manner is a little difficult. Since this has been done on the directions of the Supreme Court, it has to be carried out in this manner,” he had said.The EC had constituted 19 appellate tribunals for West Bengal in March in compliance with a Supreme Court order. The SIR resulted in the deletion of nearly 91 lakh voters from the state’s electoral rolls for various reasons, including “logical discrepancies”.The tribunals are hearing appeals filed by lakhs of voters whose names were deleted.