“We can count the votes that were cast. We cannot recover the votes that were never allowed to be cast,” writes Gilles Vernier, a researcher at the Sciences Po in Paris. Vernier, who had helped build up electoral data from past elections while at Ashoka University, has been a long-time poll analyst.

In a column published in The Economic Times on 5 May 2026, however, he wrote that he was unable to analyse the results in West Bengal. Election Commission’s interference, he added, had muddied the outcome and ‘precluded any clear analysis’.

Newspapers and the electronic media, however, scrupulously avoided mentioning the role of SIR which disenfranchised 34 lakh voters in West Bengal, all of them Indian citizens (even the election commission does not say they are foreigners or Bangladeshis) on dubious grounds. Barely 1,600 of them could reach out to the appellate tribunals which restored 99 per cent of them back to the electoral roll. Which way they would have voted cannot obviously be known but that a disproportionate number of them were women and Muslims are now public knowledge.

Headlines foregrounded spectacle and personality. Images of Narendra Modi in a Bengali-style dhoti dominated front pages, with........

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