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'SIR likely a reason for BJP's West Bengal win, Congress' Kerala victory': Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor noted the large number of appeals in the West Bengal assembly, compared to “a few hundred” in Kerala.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor compared the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process in Kerala and West Bengal, claiming it was one of the reasons the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the recent assembly elections in the eastern state.
While Tharoor admitted that the Congress might have benefited from the SIR of voter rolls in Kerala, the Thiruvananthapuram MP pointed out the large number of appeals in the West Bengal assembly compared to “a few hundred” in the southern state. He also noted that only a small number of these cases in West Bengal were adjudicated before polling, leaving the vast majority unresolved at the time of voting.
"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,” Tharoor said at the 'India, That is Bharat' roundtable during the Stanford India Conference.
Drawing attention to the scale of the figures, he observed that the BJP's victory margin, around 30 lakh votes, closely aligns with the number of pending voter appeals, raising questions about whether eligible voters were effectively unable to cast their ballots.
"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," Tharoor said.
Further, Tharoor suspected that the removal of duplicate or multiple voter registrations in Kerala, where he claimed instances of double, triple, and even quadruple enrolments had existed in the past, may have worked in favour of the Congress party by cleaning up inflated voter lists historically associated with rival political practices.
"And particularly in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPM was long a master of double enrollment, triple enrollment, quadruple enrollment--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," he said.
The assembly election results in Bengal and Kerala
The BJP and the Congress had contrasting results in Bengal and Kerala. The saffron party 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.
Congress could win just two seats in the 294-member House. After the verdict, the BJP has formed its government in West Bengal for the first time, with Suvendu Adhikari leading the charge with the chief minister post.
In Kerala, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) ended the Left's 10-year reign, winning 102 of the 140 seats in the state assembly. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) secured 35 seats while the BJP managed to increase its seats to 3 while its vote share remained largely flat.
