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Amid 'vote chori' row, poll body's Bengal data points to seats TMC won despite SIR deletions
The five seats with the most deletions are all in Malda and Murshidabad (both districts border Bangladesh). All of them were won by the TMC.
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The five West Bengal constituencies where the most names were struck off the voter rolls in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) ahead of the 2026 assembly election were all won by the Trinamool Congress (TMC), according to officials who cited Election Commission of India (ECI) data amid protests by the Opposition and activists over the process.
The state went on to record a turnout of 93.71%, its highest since Independence. The figure surpassed Tripura's 93.61% from 2013, until then the highest for any state. Votes cast also rose from 2021, though the roll was smaller. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) routed the TMC in a historic verdict and formed the government in the eastern state for the first time, prompting Opposition allegations that SIR had a bearing on the outcome.
The five seats with the most deletions are all in Malda and Murshidabad (both districts border Bangladesh), according to the ECI data, which excludes Falta, where a repoll was ordered. These seats are Sujapur, Raghunathganj, Samserganj, Ratua and Suti. All of them were won by the TMC.
The ranking is based on the roll published on February 28, and many names were restored later. Sujapur, which lost 1,50,410 names at that stage, regained 1,14,766 before nominations closed.
The five least affected seats lost between 8,254 and 9,309 names each, or about 3% to 4%. All five were won by the BJP.
The pattern is not uniform beyond those seats. In Murshidabad district, for example, the TMC fell from 20 seats in 2021 to nine.
Based on this data, it would not be right to infer that the SIR process nudged a particular political party to victory. At the same time, the data points to a layered impact of the voter-roll revision that calls for more nuanced analysis.
The officials cited the figures as the commission faced renewed charges of what the Opposition calls "vote chori" over the revision, which removed 90,83,345 names from a roll of 7.66 crore in the state. The commission has rejected the charge and called the revision a necessary exercise to ensure an accurate roll.
The INDIA bloc, led by the Congress, and the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) are separately holding protests calling for Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar's resignation, after a news report brought some decisions of the poll body under scrutiny and suggested that Kumar and two Election Commissioners (ECs) were not in agreement over several issues. The commission has said differences among officers are normal and that all its actions were lawful.
Amid allegations that India's electoral system is under threat, the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also stressed, citing a comparison of 24 other countries and India's last national elections, that the turnout in recent state elections was higher than national turnout in many of the world's major democracies.
West Bengal's 93.71% in 2026 was above all 25 countries in the comparison, including Singapore, Australia and Belgium, where voting is compulsory. Puducherry, at 91.19%, was ahead of Australia, while Assam (86.33%) and Tamil Nadu (86.03%) were above Sweden and Germany.
Kerala recorded 79.53%, level with Brazil and South Korea. Bihar, the lowest of the six at 67.25%, was still ahead of the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. India's own turnout in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, 65.79%, sits in the middle of the list.
The comparison sets turnout in state assembly elections against turnout in national elections in the other countries.
Another Opposition allegation is that 13.39 crore voters have been disenfranchised through the SIR process.
The poll body has clarified that a total of 95.40 crore voters were reviewed during the three phases of the SIR exercise. Of them, 13.39 crore voters were categorised under ASDD, which means "Absent, Permanently Shifted, Dead or Duplicate", along with some other categories. The ECI has rejected the characterisation of all these voters as disenfranchised, saying eligible electors can apply for review and inclusion in the rolls.
The BJP has called out what it described as the Opposition's “double standards”, accusing it of raising objections when poll outcomes go against it while celebrating favourable verdicts.
