A week after tasting defeat in the West Bengal Assembly elections, the TMC on Monday alleged before the Supreme Court that deletions of voters during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls materially affected results in several assembly constituencies in the state.Having secured 207 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly, which registered a record voter turnout of above 92 per cent, the BJP decisively defeated the Mamata Banerjee-led party, which could barely manage to get 80 seats and lost power after 15 years.Senior counsel and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee alleged that there were 31 seats in which the winning margin of BJP candidates over TMC rivals was less than the number of voters deleted in the SIR process.The vote gap between the TMC and the BJP was nearly 32 lakhs, and nearly 35 lakh appeals were pending before the appellate tribunals, he submitted.”One of my candidates lost by 862 votes and, interestingly, 5,550 votes were deleted during the SIR from that constituency… There are 31 such seats where victory margins are less than the deleted votes,” Banerjee told a Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.He referred to an earlier observation made by the top court that it could look into the grievances if victory margins were less than the number of voters deleted during the SIR.”Whatever you (TMC) want to say about results, about deletions, etc., this requires an independent IA (interim application),” Justice Bagchi told Kalyan Banerjee during a hearing on petitions filed by Mamata Banerjee and others against alleged wrongful deletions during SIR of electoral rolls in the state.On behalf of the Election Commission, senior counsel DS Naidu objected to Banerjee’s submission, saying the only remedy was an election petition. He said the commission can be held accountable only for issues related to the SIR and the consequential appeals against the addition or deletion of votes.Whatever the poll panel wanted to say – that an election petition was the remedy – could come in its reply affidavit.While dealing with cases of ‘logical discrepancy’ and alleged wrongful deletion of voters from electoral rolls, the top court had on April 13 said if the winning margin was less than the percentage of exclusion, it may be a matter of concern.“If 10% of the electorate does not vote and the winning margin is more than 10%…what will happen? Suppose the margin is 2% and 15% of the electorate who are mapped could not vote, then maybe, we are not expressing any opinion, but we would definitely have to apply our minds. Please keep this in mind that the concern of a vigilant voter whose name is correctly or incorrectly in the list is not in our minds,” Justice Bagchi had told the EC.”Unfair denial of participation as a candidate is a ground to cancel an election. But the right to vote will per se, until and unless, it’s an enormous number of electors, Section 100 of the RP Act does not fall as one of the grounds for cancelling an election,” Justice Bagchi had said.Kalyan Banerjee drew the top court’s attention to the resignation of former Calcutta High Court Chief Justice T S Sivagnanam — one of the 19 judges designated as SIR Appellate Tribunals by the Calcutta High Court to hear appeals by those excluded from electoral rolls during the SIR exercise and cross appeals of the EC against alleged wrongful additions.As senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy, representing one of the petitioners, said there was a feeling that appellate tribunals would take four years to decide the appeals against deletions, the CJI said he would see if any improvement could be made in the adjudication of appeals.Around 700 judicial officers from West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand were deployed to deal with around 60 lakh claims and objections of those deleted from voter lists during the SIR exercise in the state.Later, on the directions of the top court, the Calcutta High Court Chief Justice set up 19 appellate tribunals headed by former HC chief justices and judges to adjudicate on appeals against deletions from the voter lists.