Mamata Banerjee On SIR Row, Supreme Court Responds

Mamata stands at the center of West Bengal’s latest political controversy after the Trinamool Congress challenged the election results over large-scale voter list deletions. The party claimed that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) removed lakhs of names from electoral rolls and directly changed the final outcome. As Mamata faces one of her toughest political setbacks, the Supreme Court has started hearing the matter.

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Mamata Questions Voter List Deletions

The controversy began after officials removed nearly 90.8 lakh names during the Special Intensive Revision of voter lists before the Bengal Assembly elections. The Trinamool Congress claimed that this process changed the results in at least 31 constituencies where the party had won in 2021 but lost this year to the BJP.

Senior advocate and Trinamool MP Kalyan Banerjee told the Supreme Court that the number of deleted voters in these seats exceeded the earlier winning margins of Trinamool candidates. In several constituencies, the numbers matched closely, which raised serious concerns about fairness.

He gave one example where a Trinamool candidate lost by only 862 votes, while officials had removed more than 5,000 names from the voter list in that same constituency. He also explained that the vote gap between Trinamool and BJP stood at nearly 32 lakh, while voters still have over 35 lakh pending appeals against deletion.

A bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi stated that affected parties could file separate petitions if pending voter appeals influenced such narrow election margins.

Mamata Faces Election Commission’s Reply

The Election Commission rejected the allegations and presented its own data to defend the process. The poll body argued that many constituencies with the highest number of voter deletions still voted in favor of Trinamool Congress.

For example, voters in Sujapur, Raghunathganj, Samserganj, Ratua, and Suti saw large-scale deletions, yet Trinamool won all five seats. The Election Commission used this information to reject claims that the SIR process helped the BJP.

Despite the controversy, the BJP won 207 out of 294 seats and recorded its first major Assembly victory in West Bengal. This result also weakened Mamata Banerjee, who had kept the BJP away from state power for nearly 15 years.

The issue of illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh also became a major campaign topic. BJP leaders accused Trinamool of allowing undocumented migrants for vote-bank politics, while Trinamool leaders claimed that the voter revision unfairly targeted poor and marginalized communities.

The legal and political battle continues, and Mamata will likely keep fighting this issue both in court and in public politics.

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