Mamata Wants the CEC Arrested and Bengal’s Vote Rerun. Here Is What Her Case Rests On

Months after losing power, Mamata Banerjee wants a fresh Bengal election on the pre-SIR roll. The deletion numbers are real, but her remedy and the arrest demand hit hard legal limits.

Mamata Banerjee is no longer Chief Minister of West Bengal. The assembly election she now wants rerun was held on **23 and 29 April 2026** and counted on **4 May**. The BJP won **207 of 294 seats**. Her Trinamool Congress (TMC), which had won 215 in 2021, fell to **80**. She lost her own seat, Bhabanipur, to Suvendu Adhikari by **15,105 votes**, and Adhikari was sworn in as the state’s first BJP Chief Minister on 9 May.

So when Banerjee went on Facebook Live on **23 September** to demand the arrest of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and a fresh election on the voter list as it stood before the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), she was not trying to protect a coming vote. She was trying to reopen one already decided.

That makes her case harder, not easier. But it also means there is now a full record to test it against: the deletion figures, the tribunal data and the results themselves.

Banerjee spoke hours after it emerged that two of the three Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had repeatedly objected on record to decisions taken in the Commission’s name, including one that bears directly on West Bengal.

“It has now been proven that the BJP and the EC looted the West Bengal assembly polls,” she said. She called for Kumar to be arrested and prosecuted, alleged “systemic voter deletion, EVM hijacking and state-sponsored poll manipulation”, and said: “Re-election must be held in West Bengal with the old voter list.” She extended the demand to other states where, in her words, the BJP won after an SIR, and said leaders of the opposition INDIA bloc would launch a nationwide movement. Her nephew, TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee, asked for a look-out circular to stop the CEC from leaving the country.

None of this is new ground for her. On **4 February 2026**, while still Chief Minister, Banerjee appeared in person before a Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant to argue against the SIR in Bengal. She asked why the Commission was in such a hurry to finish an exercise that normally takes two years, and said Bengal was being singled out, pointing to micro-observers deployed in her state but not in others. After the results, she refused to resign, accusing the BJP, the Commission and central forces of manipulating the vote; the Governor dissolved the assembly without asking her to stay on as caretaker.

She also recalled that the opposition’s bid to remove Kumar through Parliament had failed. The TMC led that effort: notices signed by 130 Lok Sabha and 63 Rajya Sabha MPs were submitted on 12 March and rejected by the presiding officers on 6 April. “This is no longer merely about impeachment; criminal action is required,” she said.

Bengal’s SIR was the most fiercely contested in the country, and its numbers show why.

Before the revision began on **4 November 2025**, the state had **7,66,37,529** voters. The draft roll published on 16 December removed about **58.2 lakh** names on grounds of death, migration, duplication or failure to trace the voter. The final roll of **28 February 2026** listed **7,04,59,284** voters, after cumulative deletions of about **63.7 lakh**.

That was not the end. Another **60.06 lakh** voters had been placed “under adjudication” over what officials called “logical discrepancies” in their forms, flagged using parameters that ranged from misspelt surnames to an elector having more than six siblings. On the Supreme Court’s direction, **705 judicial officers** reviewed these cases. They found **32.68 lakh** eligible and **27.16 lakh** ineligible.

All told, about **90.8 lakh** names came off the roll, close to **12 per cent** of the pre-SIR electorate, leaving roughly 6.8 crore voters on polling day. The heaviest losses were in North 24 Parganas (about 12.6 lakh), South 24 Parganas (10.9 lakh) and Murshidabad (7.5 lakh), all districts bordering Bangladesh. Voters struck off after adjudication could not vote in April.

Bihar, where the SIR began, offers a baseline. Its roll went from 7.89 crore to about 7.42 crore: some 65 lakh names were removed at the draft stage, but 21.5 lakh new voters were also added. The net fall was about 6 per cent. Bengal’s net fall was roughly double that, and much of the difference came from the adjudication stage, which Bihar did not have in the same form.

The Supreme Court allowed those affected by adjudication to appeal to tribunals of retired High Court judges. By mid-September, the Commission told the court, **38.31 lakh** appeals had been filed. Of these, **22.21 lakh** came from deleted voters seeking to be restored. The other **16.10 lakh** sought the removal of voters whom judicial officers had kept on the roll.

The Commission did not tell the court who filed those 16.10 lakh appeals. That is the question Sandhu put on record in August. “Who was authorised to file these appeals on behalf of ECI, and by whom?” he asked, and “Who actually filed these appeals on behalf of ECI?” He noted that neither he, nor Joshi, nor the state’s current Chief Electoral Officer had been told the basis on which they were filed.

Commission sources have offered an answer: a Supreme Court order of 1 April 2026 said appeals could be filed both by excluded voters and by Commission authorities aggrieved by inclusions. That explains who was allowed to appeal. It does not explain who decided the Commission should file appeals on this scale, or why two of its three members were not consulted.

The tribunal results so far cut against the deletions. Of **1,22,592** appeals decided by 10 September, **1,13,943**, or about **93 per cent**, ended with names restored. But only about 1.26 lakh appeals have been decided in six months, and more than **37 lakh** are pending. The Commission has asked the court to raise the number of tribunals from **19 to 42**, one for each of the state’s Lok Sabha seats.

This is the heart of Banerjee’s claim, and the honest answer is that the data cannot settle it.

The BJP won the popular vote by five points, 45.8 per cent to the TMC’s 40.8. Turnout was the highest the state has seen: provisional figures put it above 92 per cent, and the Commission’s final data later placed it at **93.71 per cent**, a record for any Indian assembly or Lok Sabha election. The previous Bengal high was 84.72 per cent in 2011. Part of the jump is arithmetic, because a roll with dead and shifted voters removed produces a higher percentage from the same number of voters.

Constituency-level analyses found that in **49 seats**, the number of voters deleted after adjudication alone was larger than the winning margin. The BJP won 26 of those, the TMC 21 and the Congress two. Counting all deletions, the overlap covers many more seats, including Bhabanipur, which lost more than 51,000 names. In Rajarhat New Town, the BJP won by 316 votes in a seat with more than 50,000 net deletions.

The BJP points to the other side of the ledger. Sambit Patra has noted that the TMC won 13 of the 20 seats with the highest deletions. Heavy deletions did not always mean BJP wins: in Samserganj, with more than 83,000 net deletions, the TMC held the seat.

What the overlap shows is that deletions were big enough to matter in dozens of seats. It does not show how deleted voters would have voted, or how many deletions were correct. Fifteen years of incumbency, an aggressive BJP campaign and a five-point vote gap are also part of the explanation.

Banerjee’s remedy has two problems, one practical and one legal.

The practical problem is that the pre-SIR roll was not clean either. Even critics of the SIR accept that Indian rolls carry dead, shifted and duplicate entries. A wholesale return would restore those along with any wrongly deleted voters. The tribunal figures suggest many adjudication deletions do not survive review, but they do not suggest every deletion was wrong.

The legal problem is bigger. Article 329(b) of the Constitution says an election can be challenged only through an election petition. Under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, such a petition must be filed within 45 days of the result and is decided seat by seat by the High Court. The law has no provision for annulling an entire state election and ordering a new one on a different roll.

Banerjee knows that route. She filed her own petition against Adhikari’s win in Bhabanipur, alleging corrupt practices, counting irregularities and unlawful deletions during the SIR. The Calcutta High Court admitted it on **23 June** and ordered that EVMs, VVPATs and counting-day CCTV footage be preserved. Such cases move slowly; her 2021 petition over her Nandigram defeat is still pending.

Her lawyer has also raised in court what happened to key officials after the vote. Manoj Kumar Agarwal, the Chief Electoral Officer who ran the SIR in Bengal, became the state’s Chief Secretary, and Subrata Gupta, the Commission’s special roll observer during the revision, was made an adviser to the new Chief Minister. Neither move is illegal, and Adhikari has defended them as bringing back efficient, impartial officers whom the previous government sidelined. But her side argues that such appointments feed the perception her case depends on, and the court will decide whether they have any bearing on the result.

A more defensible version of her argument would be a seat-level audit: which names were deleted, on what ground, and whether they have since been restored. That would test the claim without asking courts to do something the law does not allow.

There is no FIR, no criminal complaint before a court and no judicial finding against Kumar. Section 16 of the 2023 law governing the Commission bars courts from entertaining civil or criminal proceedings against a serving or former CEC for acts done in official duty. A challenge to that provision is pending in the Supreme Court, which has declined to suspend it. Removal requires Parliament, which has already refused once.

The arrest demand is a political statement, meant to signal that Banerjee sees this as a criminal matter rather than an administrative one. It is not a live legal process. It also makes the narrower, answerable questions easier for the Commission to brush aside.

The immediate stake is not the last election but the next one. Municipal elections are approaching in the state, while lakhs of voters struck off in the SIR wait in the tribunal queue. The Supreme Court has said it will consider whether appeals from excluded voters should be heard first. At the current pace, most will not be heard in time.

The second stake is trust. A roll shaped partly by appeals that one Election Commissioner says he was never told about will be hard to defend until the Commission explains who filed them and why. The Commission has not denied that the notes exist. It has said only that differing views are part of normal deliberation and that its final decisions were unanimous.

**Is Mamata Banerjee still Chief Minister?**

No. The BJP won the 2026 election and Suvendu Adhikari became Chief Minister on 9 May.

**Can a whole state election be cancelled?**

Not under current law. Results are challenged seat by seat through election petitions, which had to be filed within 45 days of the 4 May result.

**Can deleted Bengal voters get back on the roll?**

Yes, by appealing to the tribunals. More than 1.1 lakh have been restored so far, though over 37 lakh appeals of both kinds are still pending.

**Why were so many Bengal voters put under adjudication?**

Their forms were flagged for “logical discrepancies”, such as spelling mismatches or unusual family details, when checked against older rolls. About 60 lakh were flagged, and 27.16 lakh were excluded.

**Constituency-wise data.** Whether the Commission publishes seat-level figures on deletions by reason, restorations and pending appeals. This is the single most useful document for testing Banerjee’s claim.

**The 16.10 lakh appeals.** Whether the Commission identifies the officials who filed them, in court or in reply to its own commissioners.

**Tribunal expansion.** Whether the Supreme Court approves 42 tribunals, and whether disposals speed up before the municipal polls.

**The Bhabanipur petition.** The next hearings in the Calcutta High Court, including any order to examine the preserved machines or footage.

**The INDIA bloc.** Whether the promised nationwide movement settles on a common, testable demand such as a seat-level audit, or stays with arrest and a rerun.

**Note on perspective**: {{Based on Election Commission roll and tribunal data, Supreme Court and Calcutta High Court proceedings, official election results and on-record statements as of 25 September 2026. The piece takes Banerjee’s concern about deletions seriously while testing her proposed remedies against the law and the available numbers.}}