Trinamool Congress Moves Supreme Court Against Election Commission Over SIR

The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) has moved the Supreme Court against the Election Commission of India (ECI), stepping up its opposition to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.

The petition, filed by TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O'Brien, challenges the orders issued by the ECI. The 101-page plea, accessed by NDTV, argues that the poll body has acted outside the law and followed arbitrary procedures during the SIR exercise. The move comes a day after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said she would approach the Supreme Court to fight the Election Commission.

“ECI cannot act arbitrarily, capriciously or dehors law, nor can it substitute legally prescribed set procedures with ad-hoc or informal mechanisms,” the petition states.

The Trinamool Congress has claimed that since the start of the state-wide exercise, there have been more than 50 instances where the Chief Electoral Officer's (CEO) office issued instructions to officials conducting the SIR through WhatsApp messages and oral directions.

“The ECI has, in effect, substituted its formal system of statutory communication with what is being informally described at the field level as a ‘WhatsApp Commission', wherein critical instructions, warnings and consequences of alleged non-compliance are communicated exclusively through messaging platforms,” the petition said.

The party has also raised concerns over Booth Level Agents (BLAs) being barred from entering hearing centres in West Bengal and Booth Level Officers (BLOs) being assigned to collect death certificates from burial grounds. It further alleged that in several assembly constituencies, voters are being deleted centrally through the ECI's ERO-net portal.

"Such centralized backend deletions, undertaken without the knowledge or consent of the EROs, constitute a serious procedural violation and bypass the statutory role of EROs, who alone are empowered to decide on the inclusion or exclusion of electors based on ground-level verification and documentary scrutiny," it said.

Raising issues of technological mismanagement, the ruling party has also alleged that the ECI mapped voters using undisclosed algorithms and software.

“The Election Commission of India is acting colourably and has not even disclosed the list of such 1.36 Crore Electors against whom the Election Commission has purportedly found logical discrepancies,” the petition alleged.

It further stated, “At the moment, there exists absolutely no clarity about what the software the ECI has used is, how the digitisation process has happened and how it has fallen short. The ECI has, as it has throughout this SIR process, behaved in a completely opaque manner and not disclosed any of these necessary details, thereby avoiding public scrutiny of its methods.”

With state elections weeks away in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee and her party has made the ongoing SIR exercise the key political issue to corner the BJP. Taking on the Election Commission of India, the party's National General Secretary, Abhishek Banerjee also had a heated altercation with Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar in New Delhi. In the coming days, the fight against the poll body is likely to only escalate in West Bengal.