Mamata Banerjee on Monday shot her fifth missive to Gyanesh Kumar since November 20 last year, this time seeking to draw Nirvachan Sadan's attention to "serious procedural lapses" in the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in poll-bound Bengal, implying deliberate attempts at removal of eligible voters under the “logical discrepancy” scanner.
The chief minister again accused the Election Commission under Kumar of unduly harassing genuine voters and endangering their democratic rights through the very process of the SIR.
"I trust that these issues will receive your immediate attention to not only end the harassment and agony of the citizens and the official machinery but also protect the democratic rights of citizens," she wrote in her latest three-page letter.
Mamata wrote that it had been noticed during hearings that electors were submitting documents in support of their eligibility, but often getting no proper acknowledgment or receipt.
"Subsequently, at the stage of verification or hearing, these documents are reported as 'not found' or 'not available on record', and on that basis, names of electors are being deleted," she wrote to Kumar, whose past as a purportedly favoured officer of Union home minister Amit Shah she has repeatedly underscored. Mamata, who refers to him as "Vanish Kumar", has publicly accused Kumar of carrying out political orders from Shah while helming the constitutionally autonomous EC.
Similar charges have been levelled by many in the national Opposition, especially the leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, who has accused Team Kumar of vote chori in several recent state elections.
"... fundamentally flawed and untenable. The non-issuance of documentary acknowledgment deprives electors of proof of submission and places them at the mercy of internal record-keeping deficiencies," wrote Mamata.
Mamata said this defeats the very objective of the SIR, intended to strengthen and purify the electoral rolls, instead of excluding genuine voters.
She added that in the absence of digitised database of the previous SIR, the manual electoral rolls of 2002 (including those published in regional languages) were scanned and translated into English using AI tools for digitisation.
"During this transliteration, serious errors occurred in elector particulars such as name, age, sex, relationship and guardian's name. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as 'logical discrepancies'," she wrote.
Mamata said that over the past 23 years, many voters followed due processes of the EC to become part of the current electoral roll. But now the EC was disregarding its own statutory processes followed over two decades, compelling voters to once again establish their identity and eligibility.
"Such an approach — disowning its own actions and mechanisms spanning more than two decades — is arbitrary, illogical and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India," she wrote. "Why should the process revert to 2002? Does this imply that all revisions carried out over the intervening years were illegal?"
Mamata wrote that many discrepancies were extremely minor — "Kr" and "Kumar", "Shaik" and "Sk" — or age, and should be resolved without calling electors for hearings.
"Surprisingly, the system allows disposal only through generation of hearing notices. Even cases already forwarded to the DEO by EROS/AEROs after due satisfaction of documents uploaded by BLOs are being repopulated at the ERO/AERO level, leaving no option except issuance of hearing notices," she wrote.
"(The) Commission is itself deviating from its directions contained in its letter dated 27th October, 2025.... All these voters who are being issued hearing notices are already mapped with 2002 electoral roll, by themselves or through progeny, so there is no need of issuing hearing notices in such cases," she added. "This is causing avoidable confusion and hardship to genuine electors who have established their mapping from the 2002 electoral roll and submitted all supporting documents."
Speaker questions PM
Speaker Biman Banerjee on Monday asked what the Narendra Modi government was doing in response to present-day scenario in Bangladesh.
"Can the Centre not see what is being happening to the Bengali minorities there? What steps have they taken? What role has the Prime Minister of India played?" asked the Speaker in a media interaction at the Assembly on the sidelines of an event to observe Swami Vivekananda's birth anniversary. "So many Bengali minority people have been killed or tortured. What steps are being taken against it by our Union government?" he asked.