SC seeks poll panel reply on TMC’s plea over ‘irregularities’ in Bengal SIR

The Supreme Court on Monday sought a response from the Election Commission (EC) on pleas filed by Trinamool Congress MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen, alleging arbitrariness and serious procedural irregularities in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi issued notice to the poll panel after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the MPs, submitted that “very weird procedures” were being followed during the revision exercise. He alleged that instructions were being issued through informal channels such as WhatsApp and oral directions during video conferences, without any formal written orders, leaving booth-level officers (BLOs) to act without statutory backing.

Sibal pointed out that the EC had introduced a new category of voters labelled as having “logical discrepancies”, who could be issued notices for quasi-judicial hearings on their eligibility owing to alleged errors or anomalies in voter details.

The Bench asked the EC to file its response within a week, after the Commission’s counsel sought two weeks’ time to submit a counter affidavit.

In his petition, O’Brien alleged that since the commencement of the SIR process in West Bengal, the EC had relied on “informal and extra-statutory channels”, including WhatsApp messages and oral instructions, instead of issuing formal written directives.

He further said that while the EC granted a limited extension of the revision schedule on November 30 last year, it fixed January 15, 2026, as the final date for submission of claims and objections. The petition sought a direction to the EC to extend this deadline.

The application alleged that the draft electoral roll published on December 16, 2025, resulted in the deletion of 58,20,898 names without any notice or personal hearing. It added that after publication of the draft roll, it was initially reported that around 31,68,424 voters could not be “mapped” with the 2002 electoral roll and would therefore be issued hearing notices.

The final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on February 14, even as the entire document verification phase has been “thrown into disarray because of the ECI’s procedural nightmare”, the plea claimed.

It further alleged that during the SIR exercise, the EC had created and deployed a new category termed “logical discrepancies” without any written order or guideline, to “issue or decide to issue notices to 1.36 crore electors without any statutory basis”.

Meanwhile, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday wrote again to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, alleging that AI-driven digitisation errors in the 2002 electoral rolls were causing widespread hardship to genuine voters during the SIR process.

In her fifth letter to the Chief Election Commissioner since the beginning of the revision exercise, Banerjee claimed that serious errors had crept into elector particulars during the digitisation of the 2002 voters’ list using AI tools, leading to large-scale data mismatches and the wrongful categorisation of genuine voters as having “logical discrepancies”.