Kolkata: Former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, Justice T. S. Sivagnanam, has resigned from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Appellate Tribunal in West Bengal, days after the Assembly elections concluded and amid mounting controversy over massive voter list deletions in the state.
Justice Sivagnanam was among 19 retired judges appointed by the Election Commission of India to hear appeals from people whose names were removed from electoral rolls during the SIR exercise. He was also heading a three-member oversight panel formed under Supreme Court directions to supervise the appellate process.
In his resignation letter submitted to Calcutta High Court Chief Justice Sujoy Paul, Justice Sivagnanam reportedly cited “personal reasons” for stepping down. However, the timing of the resignation has intensified debate because lakhs of appeals related to deleted voter names are still pending.
According to reports, more than 90 lakh names were deleted during the SIR process in West Bengal, while nearly 27 lakh people challenged their exclusion through appeals. During his brief tenure of around three weeks, Justice Sivagnanam reportedly heard 1,777 appeals and did not reject any petition outright. Yet he allegedly observed that, at the current pace, clearing Kolkata’s pending appeals alone could take nearly four years.
The resignation has once again brought the controversial SIR process under scrutiny. Opposition groups and legal activists have repeatedly questioned the scale of voter deletions, arguing that many genuine voters struggled to restore their names before polling.
Justice Sivagnanam, who retired as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in 2025, had earlier served in both the Madras and Calcutta High Courts and was regarded as one of the senior-most judges in the country at the time of his retirement.