No SIR! West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee dons lawyer’s hat, argues against EC in Supreme Court

In an unprecedented move, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday argued her petition in the Supreme Court against the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and accused the poll panel of unfairly targeting the state by “bulldozing” its electors.

“Their SIR process is only for deletion, not for inclusion,” Mamata told a Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M Pancholi.

Alleging that alive people have been declared dead by the EC, she requested the top court to intervene and “save democracy” by ensuring that the SIR exercise was conducted in a fair manner.

Maintaining that genuine persons must remain on electoral rolls, the top court issued notice to the Election Commission and West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer on Mamata’s petition and posted the matter for further hearing on Monday.

“Every problem has a solution and we must ensure that no innocent person is left out,” CJI Kant said.

This is the first time that a sitting Chief Minister of a state personally appeared before the Supreme Court to make submissions.

The Bench also issued notice to the EC on the West Bengal Government’s petition on SIR-related issues and posted the matter for further hearing on Monday.

“Please protect the people’s rights. We are grateful (to you),” Mamata told the Bench at the end of the proceedings.

“We are not getting justice anywhere. I have written six letters to the Election Commission…,” she said. “I am a bonded labour... I am a very less important person… I am from a common family,” the West Bengal CM told the Bench.

Mamata, who has sought directions to scrap the EC’s SIR exercise, halt deletions and rely on the existing voters’ list, complained that the poll panel was not allowing domicile certificates to be accepted during the exercise.

“They have targeted only West Bengal on the eve of the Assembly elections. They want to do in two months what usually takes two years. When people were out, they carried it out... BLOs died by suicide and they blamed the election officials. It is because of the harassment. West Bengal is being targeted — why not Assam?” she asked.

The Bench told the poll panel to be careful while issuing notices to voters on the basis of name mismatches. “Please send notices carefully. You cannot put out notable authors etc.,” it said in a veiled reference to the notice issued by the EC to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

On behalf of Mamata, senior advocate Shyam Divan submitted that only a few days were left for the completion of the SIR exercise on February 14, even as around 32 lakh voters remained unmapped and about 1.36 crore people were listed under “logical discrepancies”, while hearings in nearly 63 lakh cases were still pending.

Divan said “logical discrepancies” included mismatches in parents’ names and unusual age gaps between a voter and a parent.

He alleged that approved documents such as domicile certificates, Aadhaar numbers and OBC certificates were being rejected, forcing voters to stand in queues for four to five hours.

Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing the poll panel, said the West Bengal Government provided only 80 Grade-2 officers such as SDMs and only two anganwadi workers for the SIR exercise. However, Mamata asserted that the state government extended whatever assistance the EC sought.

Clad in a traditional white saree along with a black scarf, Mamata, a lawyer herself, reached the Supreme Court’s gate around 10 am flanked by her lawyers, including TMC MP and senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee.

A large number of lawyers and litigants thronged the CJI’s courtroom to witness the unprecedented event of a sitting Chief Minister arguing her case in the top court.

As she asked for five minutes, the CJI said: “We will allow you 15 minutes.” She quoted Rabindranath Tagore to say, “Our lawyers fight for justice from the beginning, but when we don’t get justice, justice cries behind doors.”

Mamata has alleged that the SIR exercise was being conducted in West Bengal in a hurried and partisan manner. Earlier, she had written to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar complaining that the SIR process violated provisions of the Representation of Peoples Act and the rules thereunder.

She had warned that the SIR in the present form could trigger “mass disenfranchisement” and “strike at the foundations of democracy”.

In her January 3 letter to CEC Kumar, Banerjee had accused the poll panel of presiding over an “unplanned, ill-prepared and ad hoc” SIR process marked by “serious irregularities, procedural violations, and administrative lapses”.