(Image source from: Financialexpress.com)
Dispute regarding the Bengal election results - specifically, the removal of 90.8 lakh names following a detailed review of the voter lists - reached the Supreme Court on Monday. The Trinamool Congress claimed that this deletion greatly influenced the counting in 31 seats it previously won in 2021 but lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party this year. Kalyan Banerjee, a senior lawyer and party MP, highlighted that the number of voters removed in each of these 31 areas exceeded the victory margin of the Trinamool candidates in the last election. He mentioned that in several cases, the figures were nearly the same. A panel including Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi noted that if the margins in certain districts were so close that they could change with votes from those whose requests against being removed from the electoral roll are still unresolved, the affected party could submit a petition. The court had provided this option during its previous session. The Election Commission had also stated that petitions could be submitted for these specific situations.
During his arguments, Banerjee cited a case where a Trinamool candidate lost by 862 votes in a district where more than 5,000 names were taken off the rolls. Overall, Banerjee emphasized that the vote difference between the Trinamool and the BJP was around 32 lakhs while over 35 lakh appeals against removals remain unresolved. Regarding the handling of these petitions, senior lawyer Menaka Guruswamy mentioned that it could take about four years at the current pace to resolve the backlog. Nonetheless, the Election Commission, which faced strong criticism from the Trinamool and other opposition parties for supposedly working with the BJP to manipulate outcomes, referred to its own statistics to argue the opposite. The commission claimed that some areas with the most significant number of voter deletions, particularly in Malda and Murshidabad, actually favored the Trinamool. According to the EC, for instance, Sujapur saw 1.50 lakh removals, followed by Raghunathganj with 1.30 lakh, Samserganj with 1.25 lakh, Ratua with 1.23 lakh, and Suti with 1.20 lakh.
However, all five of these areas were won by the Trinamool Congress, the EC pointed out. The BJP ultimately secured 207 out of the 294 seats in the state, marking its first electoral victory in the eastern region, successfully challenging Mamata Banerjee, who had kept them out for nearly 15 years. The SIR and the related issue of 'ghuspaithiya' or 'infiltrators', referring to undocumented migrants from the Muslim-majority Bangladesh, which shares a 2,217-km border with Bengal, became key topics during the election campaign. The BJP accused the Trinamool of turning a blind eye to allow illegal immigrants to enter in exchange for their votes, while the Bengal party retorted that the SIR was a plot by the EC and the BJP to disenfranchise millions of marginalized voters.
