The Supreme Court on Monday granted one week to the Election Commission to respond to allegations levelled in separate petitions filed by Trinamool Congress MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen that there were large-scale irregularities in the ongoing special intensive revision of the voter list in Bengal.
A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi has posted the matter for further hearing to January 19, and the EC is expected to file its response by then. EC’s counsel had sought two weeks to respond, but the bench said it was inclined to grant only one week
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who represented O’Brien, submitted that “weird” methods like WhatsApp communications were being used by the poll panel to pass instructions to its staff, which he said was contrary to rules.
“Very weird procedures are being followed in West Bengal. The authorities are acting on the basis of WhatsApp messages. There are logical discrepancies…,” Sibal said while submitting that an estimated 1.36 crore voters might stand disenfranchised.
In his petition, O’Brien had also urged the court to extend the SIR in Bengal beyond January 15, alleging that it would lead to massive disenfranchisement of voters as the EC had purportedly found “logical discrepancies” in 1.36 crore electors’ enumeration forms.
The petition assailed the extensive use of the WhatsApp messaging platform by the EC for communicating with booth-level officers (BLOs) and other staff, contrary to the rules for issuing official circulars and letters to deal with various aspects of the SIR.
“The Election Commission of India is acting colourably and has not even disclosed the list of such 1.36 Crore Electors against whom the Election Commission has purportedly found logical discrepancies. Such categorisation has reportedly resulted in over 1.36 crore voters being labelled as having “logical discrepancies” and subjected to notice issuance without clear explanation of the specific defect in each case,” the petition said.
The petition said field reports further indicated the following procedural and operational difficulties arising from the unregulated initiation of such cases:
- A majority of the affected electors are women whose surnames have changed post-marriage, leading to misclassification by the algorithm. More than 90 per cent of the cases have a mismatch in names attributable largely to the failure of the algorithm used by the EC
- Minorities are largely affected by the misclassification of the algorithm
It was alleged that the draft electoral roll was published in Bengal on December 16, 2025, and 58,20,898 names were deleted without any notice or personal hearing. There has been a precipitous decline from 7,66,37,529 voters after the special summary revision of 2025 to 7,08,16,616 voters on the draft electoral roll.
In several Assembly constituencies (ACs), deletion decisions with respect to voters categorised as absentee, shifted, dead and duplicate (ASDD) are being processed centrally and marked en masse as “Disposed - Form 7” on the ERO Net Portal.