SIR effect in West Bengal: How Trinamool Congress performed where voter deletions were highest
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "SIR effect in West Bengal: How Trinamool Congress performed where voter deletions were highest")
File photo of Narendra Modi. Photograph: (ANI)
In 67 constituencies with deletions ranging from 15,000 to 25,000, the BJP again led with 47 wins, compared to 19 for the Trinamool and one for Congress. Among 62 seats with deletions between 5,000 and 15,000, the BJP won 50, with the rest going to the Trinamool.
BJP's thundering victory against the Trinamool Congress, ending a 15-year regime helmed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has marked one of the major aspects of assembly elections in West Bengal. In a significant blow before the assembly polls, more than 90 lakh electors in the state discovered that their names had been deleted from the voters' lists. The development unfolded months after the Election Commission undertook a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter rolls, intending to clean up the records of dead and duplicate voters.
In response, TMC alleged to ECI that the SIR process was targeted, fearing that the party could lose its voter base in the state. Meanwhile, after the party went out of power, attention has turned to how voter list deletions aligned with the final vote share of TMC and BJP.
More than 25,000 names were removed across 147 constituencies in West Bengal. An analysis by NDTV found that a significant share of these seats went to the BJP, which secured 95 out of 147. The Trinamool won 51, while the Indian National Congress managed just one.
In 67 constituencies with deletions ranging from 15,000 to 25,000, the BJP again led with 47 wins, compared to 19 for the Trinamool and 1 for the Congress. Among 62 seats with deletions between 5,000 and 15,000, the BJP won 50, with the rest going to the Trinamool. Notably, all 13 constituencies with fewer than 5,000 deletions were won by the BJP.
Most exclusions from Murshidabad
During the SIR process, the maximum number of cases deemed "excludable" were from the Murshidabad district, where more than 4.55 lakh cases were deleted, whereas from North 24 Parganas were 3,25,666 cases, and from Malda, 2,39,375 cases were deleted. In Murshidabad, Trinamool secured 20 seats out of 22 in 2021, dropping to nine this time. The result shows a split in the minority votes and a consolidation of Hindu votes in favour of the BJP.
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A similar pattern was seen in North 24 Paraganas, where TMC saw a sharp dip, from 28 seats out of 33 seats in 2021, dropping to just eight this time. In Malda, its tally dropped from eight of 12 seats to six, with the remaining seats won by the BJP. The SIR conducted by the ECI became a contentious issue in West Bengal, which shares a 2,200-km border with Bangladesh. The exercise identified a record 91 lakh ineligible voters.
Before the SIR notification in November, the electorate stood at over 7.66 crore. A draft roll released in December removed more than 58.20 lakh names, which rose to 63.66 lakh in the final list published on February 28. According to the Chief Electoral Officer’s office, over 60.06 lakh cases were sent for judicial review in February. Of these, 27,16,393 were deemed ineligible, taking the total number of deletions to 90,83,345.
