Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has questioned the impact of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal, saying unresolved voter deletion appeals may have influenced the BJP’s victory. (Image via X: @ShashiTharoor)
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor raised concerns about the election process in West Bengal, saying large-scale voter deletions due to Special Intensive Revision (SIR) may have affected the poll result. He said around 91 lakh names were removed from the voter list during the process. Of these, about 34 lakh people appealed, saying they were genuine voters.
Tharoor said only a small number of these appeals were checked before polling, while most remained unresolved when voting took place.
Speaking at the ‘India, That is Bharat’ roundtable during the Stanford India Conference, Tharoor said, “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 have been legitimate voters in the remaining years while adjudication carries on, but they have missed their chance to vote.”
The BJP secured a historic victory in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, winning 207 seats and ending the Trinamool Congress’s 15-year rule in the state. The TMC secured 80 seats in the elections.
Tharoor questioned the scale of pending voter appeals pointing out that BJP’s victory margin of around 30 lakh votes is close to the number of unresolved voter appeals.
The Congress leader said, “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.”
However, on Kerala, Tharoor said that the removal of duplicate voter registrations may have helped the Congress in the state. He claimed there had been cases in the past of double, triple and even multiple voter registrations.
He said, “And particularly in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPM was long a master of double enrolment, triple enrolment, quadruple enrolment-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.”
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This time, the Congress in Kerala alone has won 63 seats, the highest ever secured by the party in Kerala. BJP won 3 seats.
