Mamata Banerjee Questions Bengal Poll Outcome Over Voter List Revision, Supreme Court Opens Door For Fresh Pleas
New Delhi: The controversy surrounding the recent West Bengal Assembly election results reached the Supreme Court of India on Monday after Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress alleged that a large-scale voter list revision may have influenced the final outcome.
The party claimed that nearly 90.8 lakh names were removed during a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls before the polls. According to Trinamool leaders, this may have affected at least 31 constituencies that the party had won in 2021 but lost this time to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Senior advocate and Trinamool MP Kalyan Banerjee argued in court that in several of these seats, the number of deleted voters was greater than the victory margin. In one constituency, he pointed out, over 5,000 names were removed while the Trinamool candidate lost by only 862 votes.
Hearing the matter, a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant observed that if pending appeals from removed voters could impact narrow-margin seats, affected parties are free to file separate petitions. Justice Joymalya Bagchi was also part of the bench.
The Trinamool further argued that while the overall vote gap between the BJP and the party was around 32 lakh votes, more than 35 lakh appeals against voter deletion are still pending. Senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy said it could take years to clear the backlog at the current pace.
However, the Election Commission of India rejected claims that the deletions helped the BJP. It cited data showing that constituencies with some of the highest voter removals — including Sujapur, Raghunathganj, Samserganj, Ratua and Suti — were all won by the Trinamool Congress.
The BJP secured 207 of 294 seats, marking its first-ever Assembly victory in Bengal and ending Mamata Banerjee’s long dominance in the state.
The voter revision exercise, along with the politically sensitive issue of alleged illegal immigration from Bangladesh, became a key election theme. While the BJP accused Trinamool of protecting infiltrators for votes, the ruling party countered that the revision drive unfairly targeted poor and marginalised communities.
News source: Information for this article was gathered from a variety of reliable news outlets.
