Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has raised questions about the Special Intensive revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal and suggested that it may have helped the BJP win the state with a landslide.
Tharoor alleged on Sunday that the large-scale deletion from the voter rolls and delays in the adjudicating appeals may have prevented lakhs of legitimate voters from casting ballots.
He said that around 91 lakh names were removed from the West Bengal lists while nearly 34 lakh people filed appeals claiming they were legitimate voters.
Only a small number of the appeals were adjudicated before the polling.
#WATCH | San Francisco, USA: Speaking at the roundtable on 'India, That is Bharat: Growth Governance and Identity' at Stanford India Conference, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor says, "About the SIR... there are legitimate questions to answer. Look at the Bengal case. 91 lakh names… pic.twitter.com/QpysPZcVV1
— ANI (@ANI) May 10, 2026
“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 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,” he said at the ‘India, That is Bharat’ round table during the Stanford India conference in the US.
He noted that the number aligned with the BJP victory margin, which was around 30 lakh votes.
“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.”
He also said that the Sir made an impact in Congress’s win in Kerala. “And particularly in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPM was long a past 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.
In Kerala, the Congress-led UDF won 102 seats, defeating the LDF and ending their 10-year rule in the state.
