Mamata Banerjee moves Supreme Court against voter roll revision in Bengal

New Delhi: Mamata Banerjee has petitioned Supreme Court against Election Commission of India's move to hold a special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state.

Banerjee contended that ongoing SIR will lead to disenfranchisement of lakhs of voters and disrupt the level playing field for parties in elections. She urged the court to direct that polls be held on the basis of rolls prepared last year.

"The entire SIR exercise is an effort at disenfranchising the existing voters on the electoral roll by forcing them to prove their citizenship with 'documentary' evidence against an arbitrary cut-off date of 2002. This violates the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act of 1950 and 1951," she contended in her plea.


She also contended that SIR was being undertaken with undue haste in less than 90 days, just before assembly polls this year. She highlighted various practical problems and loopholes in the ongoing process. Allowing the same to go ahead will inevitably result in mass exclusion of voters, particularly poor migrants who regularly travel out of the state as seasonal workers, her plea alleges.

"ECI has turned the entire SIR exercise into a battlefield for voters who are scrambling through arbitrary rejection of documents, illogical hearings, inconsistent instructions, opaque rules, shifting stands and complete chaos caused by untested algorithms and software deployed by ECI," the plea adds.