As the Election Commission publishes the final SIR rolls under Supreme Court directive, Suvendu Adhikari claims even Mamata Banerjee’s Bhowanipore seat is now vulnerable — while TMC alleges genuine voters have been purged
By NIRENDRA DEV
New Delhi, February 28, 2026 — Weeks of speculation ended on Saturday, when the Election Commission of India published West Bengal’s final electoral rolls following its Special Intensive Revision exercise — a process that has already deleted over 63 lakh names from the state’s voter list, with a further 60 lakh under active adjudication.
The numbers are staggering in their scale and politically explosive in their implications. West Bengal now has 7,04,59,284 registered voters. Of these, 60,60,475 names remain “under adjudication” — their electoral fate to be determined by judicial officers drawn from West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha, working under directions from the Supreme Court. A total of 1,82,036 new voters have been added to the rolls.
Bhowanipore in the Crosshairs
For the BJP, the rolls represent an opportunity, and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari wasted no time in framing the political stakes. “Over 63 lakh voters have already been deleted. Another 60-lakh-plus are under consideration. Even in Bhowanipore there will not be enough voters left to re-elect Mamata Banerjee,” he said.
His claim has numbers behind it. In Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s own constituency of Bhowanipore, 47,111 voters have been deleted from the final rolls. The significance is not lost on anyone. In 2021, Mamata had suffered a stunning defeat in Nandigram against Suvendu Adhikari — a former Trinamool leader himself — before winning a subsequent by-election in Bhowanipore to retain her assembly seat and her position as Chief Minister.
District-by-District Deletions
The deletions are spread across West Bengal’s districts in numbers that have alarmed both civil society and political parties. In Nadia, around 2.73 lakh names have been removed. Bankura saw approximately 1.18 lakh deletions. In north Kolkata, around 17,000 voters were deleted in the final draft, taking total deletions in the area to 4.07 lakh since the SIR process began. In south Kolkata, the figure stood at 3,207 in the final draft, with the fate of another 78,675 voters still undecided. In Alipurduar in north Bengal, 1,02,835 names have been deleted from a total electorate of 11,96,651. As many as 5,46,063 names were removed specifically on the basis of Form 7 objections filed by individual electors and political parties.
In several parts of Bengal on Saturday, residents crowded around notice boards displaying printed voter lists, photographing entries on their phones. At district magistrate and sub-divisional offices, long queues formed as citizens attempted to verify whether their names were marked approved, deleted, or kept under adjudication.
TMC: Genuine Voters Being Erased
The Trinamool Congress has not accepted the deletions without challenge. TMC lawmaker Partha Bhowmick said: “From what I have gathered from Naihati in North 24-Parganas, names of genuine voters have been deleted. I have found seven doctors, railway employees and others missing. More will be found.”
In a pointed illustration of the controversy, allegations have surfaced that the names of Naihati Municipality Ward No. 4 Trinamool councillor Sushanta Sarkar and his mother, Arati Sarkar, have been deleted from the final rolls. A senior Trinamool leader declined to comment without a detailed review of the published rolls.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly claimed that 1.2 crore voters will ultimately be deleted across Bengal — a figure that, if accurate, would represent one of the largest electoral roll revisions in the state’s history.
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Election Commission’s Defence
West Bengal’s Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal sought to reassure voters about the integrity of the process. “We have tried to make the list as foolproof as possible,” he said. “It was a huge task and some mistakes happened, which we rectified at the earliest.” The Commission maintained that deletions were primarily on account of death, migration, duplication and untraceability, with additions processed only after document scrutiny.
Additional CEO Arindam Niyogi elaborated on the scale of the exercise: “This mobilisation of huge manpower was unprecedented. There were 24 district election officers, 294 electoral registration officers — one for each assembly constituency — 8,571 assistant electoral registration officers, and 8,136 supervisors overseeing the booth-level officers who conducted house-to-house visits, distributed and collected enumeration forms, which were then digitised and processed.”
Niyogi emphasised that physical verification was carried out at every stage. “There is complete transparency in each stage with a 100 per cent physical verification strategy,” he said.
Union Minister of State Sukanta Majumdar sought to calm political tensions over the process, noting that the published list is not final. “Some names are approved and the rest are being reviewed by judicial officers. Those who are eligible will continue to be included. The protests are politically motivated,” he said.
The TMC-BJP Rivalry: From Alliance to Sworn Enemies
The electoral roll controversy is unfolding against the backdrop of what has become West Bengal’s most acerbic political rivalry — all the more remarkable for the intimacy of its origins.
Twenty-eight years ago, Trinamool Congress and the BJP walked into Parliament together. They were partners. Today they are sworn enemies, trading accusations daily. The roots of this transformation lie in 1998, just a few months after Mamata Banerjee founded the Trinamool Congress. That year, the TMC-BJP alliance stunned the then-dominant Left, winning eight Lok Sabha seats with a combined vote share of 34.63 per cent. BJP’s Tapan Sikdar defeated CPI(M) heavyweight Nirmal Kanti Chatterjee in Dum Dum by over 1.36 lakh votes. The BJP’s vote share crossed 10 per cent for the first time; the Congress collapsed to a single seat with 15.2 per cent.
The profound irony of Bengal’s contemporary politics is that Mamata Banerjee effectively helped the BJP establish its first real foothold in a state that was then a secure Left fortress. The alliance that built that foothold is now the source of the state’s most bitter political war.
After 2014, as the BJP stepped up its assault on her government, Mamata turned furious. “Who is Amit Shah?” she once demanded publicly. The question no longer requires an answer. The BJP has since become the single largest opposition party in West Bengal, while the Left — once dominant — drew a blank in 2021, as did the Congress.
BJP national spokesperson Shazia Ilmi described the party’s 2026 mission in expansive terms: “The journey of change in West Bengal is not just a political programme. It is a symbol of public sentiment — a message to every village and tehsil that violence will not work in democracy. Our workers will go to every house and speak to the people. The suppressed issues of years — violence, corruption, unemployment — dialogue will happen on all these issues.”
With 63 lakh voters already gone from the rolls and 60 lakh more in the balance, the 2026 West Bengal election may be decided as much in the adjudication rooms of judicial officers as on the campaign trail.
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