SIR May Not Have Won Bengal for BJP. That Doesn’t Make It Fair.

A voter does not have to change the final government for their disenfranchisement to matter.

The question is not only whether SIR numerically changed the final tally in West Bengal. The question is whether a democratic exercise can be called legitimate when nearly 27 lakh people were, hopefully temporarily, stripped of their right to vote without proper and accessible hearing.

(Illustration: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

There is a sophisticated neatness to the argument that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls did not “win” West Bengal for the Bharatiya Janata Party. Numbers also back this argument: the BJP’s victory was too large, the swing too wide, and the anti-incumbency too visible to be explained by the SIR exercise alone.

First, let's get the statistics out of our way. At the end of counting day, BJP stood at 206 seats with a vote share of 45.84 percent against Trinamool Congress' 80 seats with a 40.80 percent vote share. BJP completely swept nine districts, including Purba Medinipur, the hill districts, Purulia, Bankura, Jhargram and Paschim Bardhaman, while TMC’s strongest resistance came from minority-heavy belts such as Murshidabad, Malda and parts of North and South 24 Parganas. A fall of almost 8 percent in TMC's vote share as compared to 2021 is being attributed to multiple factors including anti-incumbency, corruption, and communal polarisation.

None of this is wrong. But that is not the end of the story. In fact, it is not even the most important part of it.

The question is not only whether SIR numerically changed the final tally in West Bengal. The question is whether a democratic exercise can be called legitimate when nearly 27 lakh people were, hopefully temporarily, stripped of their right to vote without proper and accessible hearing. The question is whether an election remains fair when one party is forced to spend the weeks before polling not just campaigning, but also running a parallel administrative operation to protect its voters from being pushed out of the electoral process.

Disenfranchisement Is Not Just Arithmetic

The SIR process in West Bengal saw 27 Lakh electors removed from the rolls under the adjudication process. In the Supreme Court hearings, petitioners repeatedly flagged that the SIR process had pushed voters into adjudication for reasons that appeared absurdly minor such as spelling mismatches, old errors in the 2002 rolls, discrepancies in parents’ names, and even “logical discrepancies” triggered by people being mapped to fathers with six or more children.

The contradiction became even starker when several government employees assigned to conduct polling said they themselves could not vote because their names had not been restored to the rolls.

The Supreme Court did not dismiss these concerns outright.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that the right to vote is not merely constitutional but also “sentimental”, and that voters should not be “sandwiched between two constitutional authorities”. At the same time, the Court stopped short of allowing those with pending appeals to vote, treating the pleas as premature and directing voters to the appellate tribunals.

That many of these people were awaiting their fate even on the day of polling should ideally be the starting point for any serious discussion on the election results in Bengal. Disenfranchisement is not just a number on the final scorecard. A citizen should not need to prove that their vote would have altered the chief minister’s chair for the denial of that vote to be called an injustice.

And this is precisely where the “SIR did not decide Bengal” argument becomes inadequate. It asks if these missing voters change the state result instead of asking why were they missing in the first place.

The Micro-Result Matters Too

According to the constituency-level analysis by The Quint, in at least 48 Assembly seats, the number of voters put under adjudication was higher than the final victory margin.

This does not automatically mean the losing candidate would have won. It does not tell us how these voters would have voted. It also does not change the overall result in the state. But it does tell us that in nearly four dozen constituencies, the pool of voters kept out of the electoral process was large enough to potentially alter the result of the seat.

If voters under adjudication exceeded the margin in Sitai, Samserganj, Jangipur, Lalgola, Manikchak, Mothabari, Raninagar, Nakashipara, Satgachhia, Raina, Bhatar, Asansol Uttar, and dozens of other constituencies, how can the Election Commission simply move on?

If these voters are later found eligible in appeal, will the EC nullify the results in these seats and order repolls? Will it tell the winning candidates that their mandate is provisional?

An Unequal Playing Field

The injustice of SIR lies not only in what it may have changed, but in what it made impossible to know. Once a voter is kept out, their political choice disappears from the record.

This is especially dangerous when the burden of correction falls unevenly. In the run-up to an election, political parties are supposed to campaign, persuade, mobilise, and be judged by voters. In Bengal, the TMC also had to spend crucial time chasing lists, identifying excluded voters, coordinating paperwork, arranging legal help, and firefighting adjudication cases. That is not a level playing field. That is an administrative handicap placed on one party while the other campaigns with the advantage of institutional momentum.

The Election Commission’s conduct, in this context, cannot be treated as neutral merely because the final result was decisive. A biased process does not become acceptable because its consequences are difficult to quantify. If anything, that is why it becomes more dangerous.

The Political Narrative of SIR

There is also the political effect of the exercise beyond the numbers. Targeted deletions, or even the widespread perception of targeted deletions, in minority-heavy districts did not exist in a vacuum. They fed directly into the BJP’s larger political vocabulary: infiltration, illegal immigrants, demographic change et al.

In this data analysis, The Quint showed how adjudication cases across West Bengal were clustered in minority heavy districts. When this is juxtaposed with how communally polarised this election was, it makes it hard to ignore how polarisation and SIR are part of the same ecosystem.

When large numbers of Muslims, Dalits, and poor voters are placed under suspicion, the act is not merely bureaucratic. It sends a message. It tells one set of citizens that their belonging is conditional. It tells another set that the state is protecting them from a manufactured threat.

This not only explains why TMC performed better in districts with large deletion and adjudication numbers but also partly explains the consolidation of Hindu votes behind the BJP.

SIR may have helped the BJP even if it did not “win” Bengal for the BJP. It helped create the atmosphere in which the election was fought. It made citizenship itself a campaign issue. It forced the TMC into defensive administrative work. And it may have helped consolidate Hindu votes by framing the electoral roll as a battle over identity.

The central issue, then, is not whether SIR alone explains the BJP’s victory. It probably does not. Anti-incumbency was real. The BJP’s gains were significant. The TMC’s losses were widespread. But none of that absolves the Election Commission.