The Trinamool Congress on Monday told the Supreme Court that the number of voters deleted during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal exceeded the margin of victory between BJP and TMC candidates in certain Assembly constituencies in the recently concluded state elections.
Referring to the Jangipara Assembly constituency, where BJP candidate Prasenjit Bag defeated TMC’s Snehasis Chakraborty by 862 votes, senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee told a Bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi that more than 5,000 votes had been deleted from the constituency during the SIR exercise. According to him, the scale of deletion was far greater than the margin by which the TMC candidate lost.
Banerjee sought the intervention of the apex court in cases where large-scale deletion of voters may have materially affected election outcomes, particularly when appeals filed by deleted voters are still pending before Appellate Tribunals or are yet to be adjudicated.
At present, 19 Appellate Tribunals are hearing challenges related to the deletion of names from electoral rolls during the SIR process.
Justice Bagchi, however, observed that any challenge relating to election results or the possible impact of deleted votes would require a separate application before the Court.
The Bench indicated that issues concerning election outcomes and deleted voters could not be examined within the scope of the present proceedings and would have to be raised independently.
During an earlier hearing on the challenge to the SIR exercise in West Bengal, the Supreme Court had observed that election results ordinarily could not be interfered with unless there was exclusion of voters on an enormous scale.
Senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy submitted that it could take years for voters whose names had been deleted and who had approached the Appellate Tribunals to secure restoration of their names in the electoral rolls.
Appearing for the Election Commission, senior advocate Dama Seshadri Naidu maintained that grievances relating to election outcomes would have to be addressed through election petitions.