The 2025 Bihar Assembly elections delivered a sweeping mandate for the NDA, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Nitish Kumar's JD(U), while Congress and RJD's Mahagathbandhan (MGB) were reduced to its weakest tallies in years.
Gains by NDA, which won 202 out of 243 seats in the state, spanned districts that had previously been considered opposition strongholds.
But a closer look at the numbers reveals a striking pattern: In as many as 174 seats, the victory margins were lower than the number of voters deleted during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls. 91 seats of these seats changed hands between 2020 and 2025. Of these, the NDA won 75, the MGB won just 15, and 1 went to smaller parties.
This raises questions on whether the deletions helped tilt the scales in these seats.
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The Opposition to NDA Shift
In 2020, the Mahagathbandhan had held 71 of these 91 seats. By 2025, its presence shrank to just 15. The NDA, which held only 14 of these seats in 2020, expanded dramatically to 75.
Consider these examples:
Kurhani (Muzaffarpur) – BJP Gain
The BJP won Kurhani in 2025 by a margin of just 616 votes, while the constituency saw over 24,000 deletions. Kurhani flipped from the RJD, showing how a high-deletion, tight-margin seat swung towards the NDA.Sandesh (Bhojpur) – JD(U) Gain
JD(U) captured Sandesh by only 27 votes, against a massive 25,682 deletions. The seat had been held by the RJD in 2020 but switched to the JD(U) in one of the narrowest victories of this election cycle.Matihani (Begusarai) – RJD Gain
RJD won Matihani by 5,290 votes, but the constituency recorded over 33,700 deletions. This seat flipped from the LJP in 2020, showing that the Mahagathbandhan also made gains in high-deletion, close-margin segments, though far fewer than the NDA.
The alliance-level movement in these 91 seats is stark.
Who held these seats in 2020?
MGB: 71
NDA: 14
Others: 2
VIP: 4
Who won them in 2025?
NDA: 75
MGB: 15
Others: 1
NDA's win was made possible by the 100 seats they managed to flip between 2020 and 2025. But 75 of these were also seats where deletions exceeded the NDA's margin.
Why SIR Has Become a Flashpoint
The Election Commission of India (ECI) announced a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls on the heels of the Bihar Assembly elections. They said it was aimed at removing duplicate entries, deceased voters, shifted voters, and other inaccuracies from the electoral rolls.
The exercise, however, drew sharp criticism from the Opposition parties as well as the civil society groups.
Some districts saw unusually high numbers of deletions, with the Opposition alleging that genuine voters, particularly from vulnerable or marginalised communities, were removed without adequate verification.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) rejects these claims, calling the deletions routine and procedural.
But There Are Some Caveats
This analysis does not imply that deletions directly changed outcomes in these seats.
Several factors can shape electoral results:
Candidate selection
Local caste alignments
Coalition arithmetic
Anti-incumbency
Booth-level mobilisation
Regional swings
Turnout patterns independent of deletions
The dataset also reflects officially published deletions, not whether those deleted voters showed up to vote in 2020, were duplicate entries, or had genuinely shifted residence. Therefore, this data highlights where volatility was concentrated, not why outcomes shifted.