The Trinamool Congress (TMC) approached the Supreme Court on Monday with a pointed argument rooted in the court’s own earlier observation. It said that in at least 31 West Bengal assembly constituencies where it lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the BJP’s winning margin was lower than the number of voters deleted from voter rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process.
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The hearing, before a bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, brought into sharp focus a question that had been building since April — whether the controversial voter roll revision materially altered the outcome of the West Bengal assembly elections.
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‘Logical discrepancy’ question
Particularly under the lens have been the deletions made under the “logical discrepancy” category — for misspelt names and such — that went under an adjudication process. That adjudication process, still ongoing, could hardly make a difference as it came just days before polling.
In the TMC plea on Monday, senior advocate and party MP Kalyan Bandhopadhyay (Banerjee) told the bench that the deletions under the SIR adjudication process had a direct bearing on results in several constituencies.
Across the state, he argued, the vote gap between the TMC and the BJP stood at nearly 32 lakh, while approximately 35 lakh appeals were still pending before appellate tribunals.
Senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy, also a TMC MP in the Rajya Sabha, noted that at the current pace, appellate tribunals would take at least four years to clear the backlog of 35 lakh pending appeals. The CJI said expediting those appeals would remain the priority.
The TMC plea also cited one constituency where a TMC candidate lost by 862 votes, while over 5,432 persons had been removed from rolls pending adjudication.
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What court had said on win margin
In this argument, he invoked an earlier observation by Justice Bagchi on April 13, days before the elections.
At that hearing, the judge had posed a hypothetical query to the Election Commission of India that caried out the SIR: “Suppose margin (of victory) is 2%, and 15% of electorate who are mapped could not vote, then maybe — we are not expressing any opinion but — we would definitely have to apply our minds.”
The observation was made while hearing a writ petition from voters whose names had been deleted and whose appeals were still pending. The SC did not, however, stop the process, even as lakhs of appeals against “logical discrepancy”-based deletions were pending and remain so.
What is SIR, and what made Bengal different?
The Special Intensive Revision is an ECI exercise statedly to update and clean up electoral rolls. West Bengal’s version, which began in November 2025, was significantly more contentious than the exercise in other states, as the BJP argued it would remove “infiltrators”, referring to an alleged influx of illegal immigrants from Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
The ECI announced on April 10 that around 90 lakh (9 million) names were deleted from the state’s rolls during the SIR.
Of these, 27 lakh were removed after failing adjudication under a category called “logical discrepancy” — a classification the Supreme Court noted was introduced exclusively for West Bengal and had no equivalent in the Bihar SIR exercise that preceded it.
Under this category, voters were flagged on seven specific grounds, including cases of age gaps with parents or grandparents, or number of children, or mismatched names.
The court had taken sharp exception to this.
In an April 14 hearing, the bench told ECI counsel DS Naidu, “Your original notification did not touch the 2002 list…yet your rejection reasons now hinge on it.” When the ECI attempted to clarify its position, the bench was direct: “Now you are improvising the submissions which you made earlier.” The court also noted that West Bengal’s 11.6% deletion rate was the third highest among nine states that conducted SIR, behind only Gujarat and Chhattisgarh.
(Some analysts have noted the deletion were disproportionately higher among Muslims, who form about a third of West Bengal’s population.)
“Somewhere we are getting blinded due to the impending elections,” Justice Bagchi had said. The court also showed it was troubled by the slow speed of the process.
The BJP won the elections, ending the TMC’s 15-year run in power under Mamata Banerjee.
The TMC’s legal argument for now does not require proving that SIR caused the BJP’s overall victory, but only that in specific constituencies the scale of deletions relative to the winning margin raises a sufficient doubt.
What the court says now
The Supreme Court did not dismiss the argument on Monday, as Justice Bagchi directed that an application be filed with full details. The ECI argued that the proper remedy was an election petition.
The bench further said that former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and others were at liberty to file fresh applications, and matter was adjourned.
