Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to extend the ongoing SIR process in Bengal beyond January 15, alleging that the drive would lead to massive disenfranchisement as the Election Commission has purportedly found “logical discrepancies” against 1.36 crore voters.

The petition assailed the EC’s extensive use of WhatsApp for official communications with BLOs and other staff involved in the SIR exercise, which is contrary to the rule of issuing official circulars and letters.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, before whom the Trinamool leader’s petition was listed for hearing along with connected SIR matters, is likely to take it up on Wednesday or Thursday. The matter could not be heard on Tuesday because of paucity of time.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had declared on Monday that she would move the Supreme Court against the SIR drive in Bengal and said she was ready to argue the case herself as a “commoner”. Mamata is a qualified lawyer.

Although the petition does not state why an extension was being sought on the SIR drive, the Trinamool Congress has repeatedly alleged that the exercise was being conducted in a tearing hurry without following due processes.

O’Brien’s petition said: “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 1.3 crore voters being labelled as having ‘logical discrepancies’ and subjected to notice issuance without clear explanation of the specific defect in each case.”

According to the petition, field reports from BLOs indicate the following procedural and operational difficulties arising from the “unregulated actions” of the EC:

n A majority of the affected electors are female voters, whose surnames have changed post-marriage, leading to misclassification by the algorithm deployed by the EC

n More than 90 per cent of the cases are of mismatches in names attributable largely to the failure of the algorithm

n Minorities are largely affected by the misclassification of the algorithm

The petition stated that 58,20,898 names had been deleted in Bengal’s draft electoral roll published on December 16 last year. It alleged that these deletions were done without any notice or 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,” the petition said.

In several Assembly constituencies, the names of voters categorised as Absentee, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) were being deleted centrally by marking them en masse as “Disposed — Form 7” on the ERONET portal, the petition contended.

“Alarmingly, this appears to be occurring without physical verification, individual hearing or meaningful involvement of the concerned electoral registration officers (EROs). Such centralised backend deletions, undertaken without the knowledge or consent of the EROs, constitute a serious procedural violation and bypass the statutory role of EROs, who alone are empowered to decide on the inclusion or exclusion of electors based on ground-level verification and documentary scrutiny,” the petition said.

“The ECI has, in effect, substituted its formal system of statutory communication with what is being informally described at the field level as a ‘WhatsApp Commission’, wherein critical instructions, warnings and consequences of alleged non-compliance are communicated exclusively through messaging platforms.

“Such casual communication channels for such a critical exercise, which strikes at the root of democracy by arbitrarily fixing a palpably erroneous voter list for an election, has been unheard of in the country since its Independence, reeks of arrogance and is devoid of legal legitimacy, authenticity, or any audit trail,” it added.

The petition sought a direction to the EC to “produce” before the court all such “informal communications disseminated through WhatsApp in the nature of instructions”.

It was submitted that since the start of the SIR drive in Bengal, the EC has issued instructions to ground-level officials “through informal and extra-statutory channels, such as WhatsApp messages in WhatsApp groups and oral directions conveyed during videoconferences, instead of issuing formal written instructions through duly notified orders, circulars or guidelines”.

The petition listed as examples the alleged instances of booth-level agents being prohibited from remaining present during hearings despite the apex court’s orders directing BLAs to assist voters at all stages of the SIR exercise; directions to BLOs to collect death records from burial grounds, burning ghats and death registers without statutory authority; directions to mark electors as “uncollectable” after merely three visits, resulting in premature exclusion of names from the draft roll; abrupt and unilateral curtailment of the enumeration period to November 24, 2025, despite earlier notification extending the period till December 9; and failure to issue acknowledgements or receipts for documents submitted by electors despite orders of the Supreme Court mandating issuance of receipts to electors.