CM Mamata Banerjee to move court against SIR, Suvendu Adhikari dismisses her allegations as propaganda

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister and the Trinamool Congress supremo, Mamata Banerjee, on Monday said that she would move the court against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in the state – a process, which, according to her, was marred by serious irregularities, procedural violations, and administrative lapses.

She announced her plan to move the court against the SIR of the electoral rolls, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s heavyweight in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, dismissed her allegations about the revision of the list of voters and claimed that her plea to the Chief Election Commissioner to pause the process was an “admission of defeat” of her TMC in the forthcoming assembly elections in the state. Adhikari wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar that the people of West Bengal, contrary to the propaganda by the ruling TMC, had embraced the SIR of the electoral rolls as “a beacon of hope”.

“This is a fight for existence. We are seeking legal help. So many people have died due to SIR. We are moving court tomorrow against the inhumane treatment and the death of so many people due to the SIR,” Mamata said at Sagar Island in the South 24 Parganas district of the state on Monday. She had on January 3 written to the CEC, urging him to rectify the glitches in the SIR of the electoral rolls and warning that if the process continued with serious irregularities, it might lead to mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

The EC on December 16 published the draft electoral rolls for West Bengal after the first phase of the SIR, striking off over 58 lakh voters and bringing down the size of the electorate from 7.66 crore at the beginning of the year to 7.08 crore. In the second phase, which started on December 27, 1.67 crore voters under scrutiny are being summoned for hearings, including 1.36 crore flagged for logical discrepancies and 31 lakh whose current electoral roll details did not match or link to the records from the 2002 voter list.

Mamata alleged that elderly citizens, pregnant women and voters on oxygen support were being called for hearings for the SIR. “After living in this country for so long, do they still need to prove that they are voters and citizens?” she wondered.

Cricketer, Mohammed Shami, and his brother, Mohammed Kaif, celebrity Bengali film actor Dev and poet Joy Goswami are among the people asked to appear for a hearing for the SIR of the electoral rolls in West Bengal.

“Artificial Intelligence has emerged now. Using images and voices, lies can be spread. Names are being removed using AI,” Mamata alleged on Monday, adding that the names of lakhs of people had been deleted without giving voters adequate opportunity to respond through statutory forms. "AI is deciding whose surname has changed, who got married, and which girl has gone to her in-laws' house. Even a murderer gets a chance to defend himself. Here, people's names are being removed," the TMC supremo said, arguing that routine events like marriage, address changes, or minor spelling mismatches between English and Bangla were being used to justify deletions.

Adhikari, a frontrunner for the BJP’s chief ministerial face for the West Bengal elections, however, countered Mamata, arguing that the allegations of hardship to the elderly or infirm were only the rarest happenings and were basically exaggerated propaganda.

“It is clear as daylight that the Hon'ble Chief Minister's outrage stems from the counterfactual reality: the SIR is proving devastatingly counterproductive to her party's prospects in the upcoming 2026 Assembly Elections, as it lays bare the "extras" - fictitious voters, ghosts of the deceased, and illegal infiltrators; that her administration and party cadres have systematically shielded and thrived upon,” Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly, wrote in his letter to the CEC.