A people’s mandate lost in the fog of SIR |
If the BJP’s triumph in the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections is remembered as a turning point in the history of the state, it won’t be simply because the party got a brute majority (207 of the 293 seats) or because it ended Mamata Banerjee’s uninterrupted reign of 15 years. There were early indications in the violence that ensued after the results, in the vulgarity of the victor’s celebrations, in the bulldozing of meat shops in the city’s iconic New Market on which way the state was headed.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls in West Bengal will also not be easily forgotten. By the time of the elections, held in two phases on 23 and 29 April, the Election Commission of India (ECI) had managed to remove ~91 lakh names from the rolls. That’s nearly 12 per cent of the state’s voter base, shrinking it from around 7.66 crore pre-SIR to 6.8 crore.
The scale and pattern of deletions are instructive: in 105 of the BJP’s winning seats, i.e., half its tally, the number of deleted voters exceeded the party’s victory margin. Of these, 86 were seats the BJP had never won before. Let’s just say these numbers do not inspire confidence in the electoral process.
But what the dubious SIR exercise has also done is to deflect attention from the very real anti-incumbency in the state and obscured its impact on the........