West Bengal will vote in two phases on April 23 and 29 to elect a new assembly. After the publication of post-adjudication electoral rolls in the state, it is now clear that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise has led to a disproportionately high exclusion of Muslim voters in the state, a trend which has not been seen in any state which has undergone SIR so far and has released district-level data (to be sure, none of the other states
- TMC-BJP vote gap increases once the contest enters Muslim majority districtsAccording to the 2011 census data, 27% of West Bengal’s population is Muslim. The Muslim population in the state is not distributed uniformly. The district-wise share of Muslims varies from 5.7% in Darjeeling (the lowest) to 66.3% in Murshidabad (the highest) . How does this skew manifest itself in the state’s political competition? A good way to look at it is by comparing district-wise cumulative vote share of the TMC and BJP in the state with a the rising share of Muslims in the population. Data clearly shows that a large part of the TMC’s edge vis-a-vis the BJP is thanks to the former’s dominance in districts with higher Muslim population share.
- TMC’s advantage among Muslims was the most critical in 2019 Lok Sabha electionsWhile district-wise vote shares are useful to understand the regional skew in religious support patterns, it has limitations when it comes to distilling down to constituency level contests. This is because we do not have constituency level population data disaggregated by religion. One way to ascertain the dominance of Muslim voters in a constituency is to see whether a constituency has continuously elected a Muslim. An HT analysis of West Bengal assembly result data shows that 39 out of the state’s 294 assembly constituencies (ACs) elected a Muslim MLA in 2011, 2016 and 2021 assembly elections. Thanks to the 2008 delimitation, pre-2011 ACs are not comparable with the existing ones. The TMC has won a majority of both Muslim electing and non-Muslim electing ACs in all three assembly and three Lok Sabha elections since 2011. However, its lead in the non-Muslim electing ACs shrank to just 11 in the 2019 Lok Sabha when the BJP stunned the TMC by winning 18 out of the 42 Parliamentary Constituencies (PCs) in the state, just 4 short of the TMC’s total. It was the TMC’s massive 33-1 lead over the BJP in the Muslim electing ACs which saved the day for it in 2019. In the two post-2019 elections, the TMC has recovered a large part of the ground it lost to the BJP in 2019 even in the non-Muslim electing ACs.
- TMC has made large inroads in the Muslim vote in West Bengal the past two decadesThe TMC, which was originally formed as a breakaway group from the Congress in 1998, contested its first assembly election in 2001. Between the 2001 and 2021 assembly election, the TMC has increased its vote share and seat share count by 17.4 and 52.7 percentage points. How much of this support can be attributed to the TMC’s support among Muslims in the state? A good way is to look at the TMC’s cumulative vote share across districts arranged in ascending share of Muslim population in every assembly election since 2001. The results are unambiguous: the TMC’s support in Muslim majority districts increased continuously and reached a peak in 2021.
- What this means...The data is clear. TMC’s political dominance in West Bengal critically depends on its overwhelming support among Muslims.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.