‘Special Intensive Revision in Bengal is organised disenfranchisement’

New Delhi: The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in West Bengal is not electoral housekeeping, it is organised disenfranchisement, said Swaraj India leader Yogendra Yadav at a press conference organised by Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan and Desh Bachao Ganomancho on Wednesday.

Yadav stated that as of October 27, 2025, West Bengal had 7.66 crore registered voters against 7.67 crore adults, an Elector-Population ratio of 99.67 per cent. “There was no problem in the West Bengal voter list before SIR. It was among the most credible in the country,” he said.

The SIR, he argued, shifted the burden of proof onto existing voters, effectively overturning the presumption of citizenship.

The numbers that followed were stark. Across all SIR states, total voters fell from 50.72 crore pre-SIR to 45.29 crore at the final roll, a deletion of 5.84 crore.

West Bengal alone saw 90.8 lakh deletions. The adjudication process resulted in an additional 27 lakh deletions at an unusually high rate of 45 per cent. The pattern was not random, he said. Districts with strong TMC performance showed the heaviest deletions. Minority-concentrated areas saw “excessive Muslim deletions”, and so was Nandigram, he said. In Malda, 83 per cent of voter entries were flagged for adjudication, while the pass rate was only 71 per cent.

The TMC-BJP gap was 9.8 per cent in 2021, narrowing to 7.1 per cent in 2024.

Unusual deletions of five per cent in 2026 put between 19 and 25 seats in the critical category, with up to 70 seats becoming vulnerable.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan raised the structural question. “The logical discrepancy criteria are designed so that Muslims will be the ones flagged. This is not an administrative error,” he said, adding that the Supreme Court’s own recommendation of a neutral three-member panel for appointing Election Commissioners had been quietly buried.