San Francisco: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has cast doubt on West Bengal’s election process, claiming widespread voter roll deletions and unresolved appeals swayed the results toward the BJP, ANI reported.
Speaking at the ‘India, That is Bharat’ roundtable at the Stanford India Conference, Tharoor flagged the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), under which about 9.1 million names were purged from rolls. Around 3.4 million affected individuals appealed their eligibility, but only hundreds of cases were heard before polls, with over 3 million still pending.
Bengal Deletions Match BJP Margin
Tharoor remarked, “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. To this day, there are some 31, 32 lakh people who might be found to be legitimate voters in the remaining years while adjudication carries on, but they have missed their chance to vote.”
He linked this to the BJP’s roughly 30 lakh-vote victory margin, asking, “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,” Tharoor added.
Kerala Gains from SIR’s Cleanup
In Kerala, Tharoor said SIR favoured Congress by eliminating duplicates tied to rivals. “And particularly in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPM was long a past 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,” he stated.
The BJP clinched a historic 2026 West Bengal Assembly win with 207 seats, toppling TMC’s 15-year rule (TMC: 80 seats). Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the state’s first BJP Chief Minister.