A tribunal cleared 55 nuns of the Missionaries of Charity (MC) for inclusion in Bengal’s supplementary electoral rolls on April 28, just hours before polling began in Kolkata, restoring their voting rights in time for the second phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections. The nuns, all registered voters in the Chowringhee assembly constituency, had been dropped from the rolls after judicial scrutiny and subsequently moved the tribunal seeking reinstatement.
An MC sister from Mother House confirmed the development to the media. “Nearly 55 names of sisters across the city have been cleared by the tribunal and included in the electoral rolls. They will cast their vote on Wednesday morning. We had help from Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien on this matter and we are thankful to him. We are also grateful to EC that they have looked into our issue and the tribunal cleared the names,” she said.
The nuns’ reinstatement was made possible by a Supreme Court order of April 16, which invoked Article 142 to direct the Election Commission to publish supplementary rolls carrying the names of all voters cleared by tribunals before April 27, making them eligible to vote in today’s second phase.
The problem had begun weeks earlier when the SIR process removed dozens of sisters whose only permanent address was a congregation home, either the Mother House or Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, treating institutional residence as insufficient proof of domicile. The MC had written to the Election Commission after the deletions, and the affected nuns moved the tribunal. In the first round of hearings alone, over 120 sisters registered in Chowringhee were summoned because the Election Commission could find no trace of them in any previous SIR exercise across any state or union territory, the nearest reference point being Bengal’s 2002 rolls.
During the hearings, the nuns produced passports, PAN cards, Aadhaar cards and church certificates. However, an EC source pointed to a structural difficulty: “Many could not provide documents of their parents or birth certificates, making it difficult to prove linkages. Since their names also change upon embracing sisterhood, previous documents may not match with their current names.”
The process also surfaced an unusual pattern in the enumeration forms. Some sisters had listed their fathers’ names, while others had named Saint Teresa or Sister Nirmala as their mother or parent. A sister explained: “We are religious sisters belonging to a congregation. We consider Mother Teresa and Sister Nirmala as our spiritual mothers, so many of the sisters named them as mothers or parents.”
The February 28 final list brought partial relief, restoring some names, but others disappeared from it without any explanation being offered. The sisters whose names were dropped refused to accept the deletions and appealed, a process that culminated in Tuesday’s tribunal ruling and their inclusion in the supplementary rolls published ahead of today’s polling.
The Missionaries of Charity was founded by Saint Teresa of Calcutta and is headquartered in Kolkata, where it runs homes and missions across the city. Chowringhee sitting MLA and TMC candidate Nayna Bandyopadhyay had earlier said: “It is unfortunate that names of MoC sisters have been removed.”
