Mamata Banerjee Claims SIR Impacted Bengal Poll Results, Top Court Responds

Controversy over the Bengal election results - i.e., the removal of 90.8 lakh names after a special intensive revision of voter lists - rolled up to the Supreme Court Monday, with the Trinamool Congress alleging the deletion had materially affected counting in 31 seats the party won in 2021 but lost - to the eventual winners, the Bharatiya Janata Party - this year.

Party MP and senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee pointed out the number of voters cut in each of the 31 was more than the winning margin of Trinamool candidates in the last election.

In many cases the numbers were almost identical, he said.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that if the margins in some seats were so narrow - that it could be swayed by votes from people whose appeals against electoral roll ejection are still pending - the aggrieved party may file a petition.

The court had offered such a provision in its last hearing. The Election Commission had also affirmed that petitions could be filed for specifically such instances.

In his arguments Banerjee pointed to an instance in which a Trinamool candidate lost by 862 votes in a constituency where over 5,000 name had been removed from the rolls.

From an overall perspective, Banerjee pointed out the votes gap between the Trinamool and BJP was around 32 lakhs, while over 35 lakh applications against ejection are still pending.

On the subject of disposal of these petitions, senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy said it could take four years - at the current rate of disposal - to clear the backlog of petitions.

Were Bengal poll results affected by SIR?

However, the Election Commission - heavily criticised by the Trinamool and other opposition parties for allegedly colluding with the BJP to engineer results - referred to its own data to claim the reverse. The poll panel said some constituencies that saw the highest number of voter deletions - in the Malda and Murshidabad belt - voted in favour of the Trinamool.

Per EC data, Sujapur, for example, recorded 1.50 lakh deletions followed by Raghunathganj with 1.30 lakh, Samserganj with 1.25 lakh, Ratua with 1.23 lakh and Suti with 1.20 lakh.

But all five were won by the Trinamool Congress, the EC argued.

The BJP eventually won 207 of the state's 294 seats for its first ever election triumph in the eastern state, and to peg back Mamata Banerjee who had denied it space for nearly 15 years.

The SIR, and the associated issue of 'ghuspaithiya' or 'infiltrators', i.e., undocumented migrants from Muslim-majority Bangladesh, with which Bengal shares a 2,217-km border, became major campaign platforms in the build-up to this election.

The BJP accused the Trinamool of looking the other way to allow illegal immigrants entry, in exchange for their votes, while the Bengal party snapped back claiming the SIR had been orchestrated by the EC and saffron party to disenfranchise lakhs of marginalised voters.