Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in a letter to chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Monday hinted at a deliberate attempt by the Election Commission to remove the names of voters caught in the “logical discrepancy” net.

This is the fifth letter the chief minister has written to CEC Kumar on the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls underway in Bengal.

“It has been noticed that during hearings conducted as part of the SIR, electors are submitting requisite documents in support of their eligibility. However, in several cases, no proper acknowledgement or receipt is being issued for the documents submitted,” Mamata wrote in her letter.

“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 from the electoral rolls.”

Several electors who were called for SIR hearings confirmed to The Telegraph Online that they were not given any acknowledgement for the copies of the documents submitted.

“I submitted my Class X admit card, birth certificate, passport and my father’s Aadhaar card. There were no receipts but the BLO clicked a groupfie,” said a voter from a north Calcutta constituency.

Mamata said though the commission had instructed the EROs (electoral registration officers) to issue notices to electors who could not be mapped with the 2002 SIR roll, the notices are being sent also to those voters who have been mapped.

“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,” Mamata wrote.

The ongoing SIR exercise in Bengal has generated political heat since its inception with the ruling Trinamool accusing the Election Commission of working at the behest of the BJP and weaponising the electoral rolls.

Mamata also blamed the use of Artificial Intelligence tools for digitisation of the 2002 electoral rolls as the reason behind “logical discrepancy” in the enumeration forms submitted by 1.35 crore electors in the state.

The number has been revised to around 94 lakh.

“In the absence of any digitised database of the last SIR (held in 2002), the manual voter lists of the 2002 – including those published in vernacular scripts were scanned and translated into English using A.I. tools for digitisation. During this transliteration, serious errors occurred in elector particulars such as name, age, sex, relationship and guardian’s names. These errors have resulted in large-scale data mismatches, leading to many genuine voters being categorised as “logical discrepancy,” the chief minister wrote.

More than 25 lakh voters have been called for the hearings which started across the state in December. The central poll panel is currently engaged in conducting hearings of 32 lakh unmapped voters who could not link with the 2002 electoral rolls through self or progeny mapping. The hearing of voters with logical discrepancies is scheduled to start from January 14.

Mamata said the EC had cast a question mark on its own work carried out over the last 23 years.

“Over the last 23 years, a large number of electors have submitted Form-8 along with valid government-issued documents, and after due quasi-judicial hearings by EROs (Electoral Registration Officers) /AEROs (Assistant Electoral Registration Officers), their particulars were duly corrected and incorporated in the current electoral roll -2025.

“The commission is now disregarding its own statutory processes followed consistently over two decades and is compelling electors to once again establish their identity and eligibility,” Mamata wrote.

“Such an approach – disowning its own actions and mechanism spanning more than two decades – is arbitrary, illogical and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution of India. Why should the process revert to 2002? Does this imply that all revisions carried out over the intervening years were illegal?” asked Mamata.

The chief minister pointed out that in many cases the discrepancy involved minor variations in the names or age of the elector or either of the parents, which should have been resolved through a “table-top exercise” by the BLO/ERO/AERO without calling electors for hearings.”

“Surprisingly, the system allows disposal only through generation of hearing notices. Even cases already forwarded to the DEO (District Election Officer) 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,” the chief minister wrote.

SC notice to Election Commission

In a related development, the Supreme Court on Monday sought the response of the Election Commission on applications filed by the Trinamool’s leader in the Rajya Sabha, Derek O’Brien, and MP Dola Sen challenging the procedural actions taken in the SIR exercise in Bengal.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal, appearing on behalf of the Trinamool MPs, told the division bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi that instructions related to the SIR exercise were being sent to the field officials through social communication platforms like WhatsApp.

Sibal also pointed out that the commission has introduced a ‘logical discrepancy’ category of voters, who were likely to be issued with notices over errors in their voter details submitted in the enumeration forms.

The bench gave the EC time till next Monday, when the case will be heard again, to submit its response.