Published : 12 May 2026, 05:08 PM
Updated : 21 Aug 2026, 03:43 PM
Controversy over the West Bengal election results has continued as the removal of 9 million names after a special intensive revision of voter lists came under the spotlight at India’s Supreme Court on Monday.
The Trinamool Congress has alleged 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, Indian outlet NDTV reports.
Party MP and senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee pointed out the number of voters cut in each of the 31 seats was larger 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 3.2 million, while over 3.5 million applications against ejection are still pending.
On the subject of the 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.
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 150,000 deletions followed by Raghunathganj with 130,000, Samserganj with 125,000, Ratua with 123,000 and Suti with 120,000.
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 who had ruled the state for nearly 15 years.
The SIR, and the associated issue of “ghuspaithiya” or “infiltrators”, i.e., undocumented migrants from Muslim-majority Bangladesh, with which West Bengal shares a 2,217-km border, became major campaign concerns.
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 the Saffron party to disenfranchise thousands of marginalised voters.
