NEW DELHI: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor questioned the outcome of the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections, suggesting that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls may have played a decisive role in the BJP’s victory in the state.Referring to the SIR exercise, Tharoor alleged that large-scale deletions from voter rolls and delays in adjudicating appeals may have prevented lakhs of legitimate voters from casting their ballots.
“In the matter of the SIR, what I have said is a legitimate question to answer. Look at the Bengal case. 91 lakh names were struck off the rolls. Of those, 34 lakh living human beings have appealed, saying that they are around and they are legitimately entitled to vote. The rules have required each case to be adjudicated individually, so only a few hundred were adjudicated before the vote,” he said at the ‘India, That is Bharat’ roundtable during the Stanford India Conference in US.“To this day, there are some 31, 32 lakh people who might be found to have been legitimate voters in the remaining years while adjudication carries on, but they have missed their chance to vote,” he added.Tharoor further pointed to the BJP’s victory margin in Bengal, saying the numbers closely mirrored the unresolved appeals.“And the BJP won Bengal by a margin of 30 lakh votes. Now you tell me, is that entirely fair and democratic? This is the question that I ask. Honestly, I have no problem with deleting spurious, deleted, absent, migrated voters,” he said.The Congress MP also claimed that the voter roll revision may have had a different political impact in Kerala, where he suggested the removal of duplicate entries could have worked against the CPM.“And particularly in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPM was long a master of double enrollment, triple enrollment, quadruple enrollment–the same people in four different booths and so on. That used to happen. And so they were eliminated by the SIR, and as you said, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, there were very few appeals. But in Bengal, there is no doubt that there were 34 lakh appeals. And that’s 34 lakh forms filled by 34 lakh individuals. And of that, only a few hundred have been heard,” Tharoor said.The BJP scripted a historic victory in the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections, winning 207 seats and ending the 15-year rule of Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress in the state. The TMC secured 80 seats. Following the victory, the BJP formed its first government in West Bengal, with Suvendu Adhikari taking oath as chief minister.
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Do you agree with claim by by Shashi Tharoor about the impact of voter roll deletions on voting rights ?
