West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee caused a stir on February 27 when she claimed fake voters were being “smuggled into electoral rolls” ahead of the state’s polls in 2026, echoing allegations made earlier by the Maha Vikas Aghadi in Maharashtra and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi.

This claim that there has been fraud in preparing India’s voter list is at the core of a new consensus emerging within the Opposition, interviews with leaders from five major parties belonging to the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance showed.

This alleged manipulation of the electoral rolls helps the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party skew elections, officials of these parties told Scroll. Before this, some Opposition leaders had also claimed that the Hindutva party was benefitting from electronic voting machines being rigged.

As Banerjee addressed the press, behind the scenes, leaders of her party “coordinated actively” with the Congress party’s data analytics head Praveen Chakravarty to share “technical expertise,” Chakravarty confirmed to Scroll.

As proof, the Trinamool Congress circulated a list of 129 voters from a single constituency in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district whose Electors Photo Identity Card numbers had also been assigned to people in other states. The duplication of EPIC numbers, which the Election Commission says are designed to be unique to every person, would serve as cover for “ghost voters” to be brought into the state by the BJP next year, the Trinamool Congress claimed.

In a press note released on Sunday, the Election Commission admitted the duplication error but claimed that voters cannot cast their ballots in constituencies other than their own, irrespective of their EPIC numbers. It reiterated this on Friday, promising to fix the problem of duplication in three months.

The Trinamool retorted that the resultant mismatch in photos of different individuals having the same EPIC number could still deprive voters of their right to participate in an election when they turn up at the polling booth. On Friday, the Commission said it would remove all duplicates.

Chakravarty, like the other opposition officials Scroll spoke to for this story, distinguished between the recent allegations of voter list manipulation and previous claims about EVM tampering. He expressed greater confidence in the evidence available for roll tampering.

“It is very clearly electoral rolls,” he said. “What else? I don’t know. But voter lists for sure.”

Aam Aadmi Party’s national spokesperson and MP Sanjay Singh described voter list manipulation as one of many tactics allegedly deployed by the BJP regime for “election management”.

Opposition allegations

The Congress was the first party to allege voter list stuffing after its defeat in the Maharashtra Assembly elections in November. To make its case, the party set up an Empowered Action Group of Leaders and Experts to look into accusations of election fraud.

The group used data put out by the Election Commission to allege that 39 lakh additional voters had been added to Maharashtra’s electoral rolls in the six months between the Lok Sabha and the Assembly elections.

Chakravarty, one of the eight members of the group, told Scroll that they found “something suspicious” with voter lists in between 30 and 50 of the state’s 288 Assembly constituencies.

The Aam Aadmi Party too repeatedly complained about the allegedly fraudulent deletion of names from Delhi’s electoral rolls during Assembly polls in February. Sanjay Singh estimated that the Opposition’s lack of attention to such tactics could potentially give the BJP “5%-7% extra votes”.

“It is true that we caught this very early on and restricted some of the damage, but we could not stop it completely,” he said. “In state elections that are two-way fights, we can lose all the seats with just a 1% gap in votes.”

Aam Aadmi Party finished with 22 seats in the Delhi Assembly, less than half of BJP’s final tally of 48. However, the difference between the vote shares of the two parties was less than 2 percentage points.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party is also concerned. “It is the duty of the Election Commission of India to identify issues in the electoral rolls,” said Abbas Haider, a national spokesperson for the party. “We do it for them but they still don’t take action on our complaints. The administration works hand-in-glove with the ruling party to ensure bogus voting.”

P Wilson, a Rajya Sabha MP from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, echoed Mamata Banerjee’s concerns about bogus voters being brought in by the BJP from other states. “People are moving from one state to another wherever the election happens,” he said. “That should be stopped. It is tilting the election results in favor of the BJP.”

However, because of its strong cadre strength, the DMK did not share the apprehensions of other opposition parties when it came to voter roll fraud. Wilson told Scroll that his party was confident that the vigilance of grassroot-level party workers would keep bogus voters away in Tamil Nadu.

The Samajwadi Party also told Scroll that cadre strength was the key to counter voter roll irregularities. “It is a grassroot reality that there is an active Samajwadi Party worker in every booth, every village of Uttar Pradesh,” Abbas Haider claimed. “Our network is working to expose all forms of rigging. When the electoral rolls for 2027 elections are published, we will point out which voters have been left out and get it corrected.”

The Trinamool announced that its grassroots cadre would be deployed to counter the alleged fraud it had uncovered. “I call upon my brave soldiers of Trinamool Congress to stay vigilant,” Chief Minister Banerjee wrote in a post on her X account on February 27. The party has begun a door-to-door survey to identify fake voters.

Party coordination

The heightened concerns about the BJP’s alleged capture of institutions such as the Election Commission means that Opposition parties are beginning to work together on claims of voter roll fraud. Scroll has learnt they are pooling “technical expertise”, exchanging information and coordinating between themselves on the issue.

At a press conference in February at which he raised allegations of additional voters being added to the rolls in Maharashtra, the Congress’ Rahul Gandhi was flanked by Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) and Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar).

Chakravarty confirmed the Congress has been working with its two allies in Maharashtra to identify the 30-50 Assembly constituencies where the voter lists were allegedly manipulated.

“We are going to do a political campaign to take this to the people there,” he said. “We are coordinating with Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP) because these constituencies also include some that they lost.”

Parties are also working together on the issue across states. “We are definitely in touch with our ally, the Aam Aadmi Party,” said Trinamool’s Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose. “We believe massive fraud with electoral rolls happened in Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi.”

Ghose said her party is coordinating with others to raise it “in a big way” when the Parliament reconvenes on March 10.

“We are going to take it up on a national level,” said Ghose. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The Congress echoed Ghose. “There will definitely be action on this as a joint, united opposition,” said Chakravarty. “We have to stop pretending that we are a free and fair democracy. We are absolutely not.”

Taking it to the people

While the Maha Vikas Aghadi made its allegations after the Maharashtra polls concluded, the Trinamool Congress has flagged possible voter list manipulation more than a year ahead of Bengal’s election. In doing so, it is demonstrating its preparedness to counter tactics that seemingly got the better of its allies elsewhere.

The Bengal unit of the BJP responded in turn by alleging that the real intention behind Trinamool’s increased scrutiny of voter lists was to delete the names of Bangladeshi Hindu refugees and linguistic minorities, such as Hindi speakers, from them. These are thought to be groups that are sympathetic to the Hindutva party.

As political stakes rise in forthcoming elections across the country, protecting the sanctity of electoral rolls in particular and the behaviour of the Election Commission in general are likely to remain hot-button issues.

But party leaders and civil society members are less hopeful about what will come out of another protest in parliament.

“We need to increase public awareness about this through massive protests across the country,” said Aam Aadmi Party’s Singh.

Political economist Parakala Prabhakar, who has drawn attention to discrepancies in the 2024 Lok Sabha election data put out by the Election Commission for months now, expressed more confidence in citizen-led campaigns and local protests as a way to shame “wrongly elected” politicians.

“My confidence level in the political parties is quite low,” Prabhakar said. “They should have acted much, much earlier. We cannot outsource the protection of our democracy to them.”