In half the seats BJP won in Bengal, total SIR deletions outnumber victory margin

In 105 seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party won in West Bengal, the total number of voters deleted during the special intensive revision exceeds its margin of victory, according to a data analysis by Scroll.

Of these, 86 are seats that the BJP has never won before.

These 105 seats made up about 50% of the BJP’s final tally of 207 on Monday. Bengal has 294 Assembly seats in all. The Hindutva party secured a historic two-thirds majority and ended Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s 15-year reign in the state.

In West Bengal, the SIR was a contentious process that dragged on for six months and culminated in a total of about 91 lakh names being deleted, shrinking the state’s voter rolls by 12%. Of the 91 lakh total deletions in the SIR, at least 27 lakh voters are still under adjudication, with their fate to be decided by special tribunals.

The BJP was the only major political party in Bengal that supported the exercise from start to finish.

An odd pattern

The results on Monday clearly showed that there was a significant anti-incumbency sentiment in the state against Banerjee’s government. As a result, the Trinamool Congress, which had won 215 seats last time, was reduced to just 80 in these elections. However, Scroll’s data analysis shows that the SIR might have also played a significant part in its defeat.

In as many as 105 seats, the BJP won by fewer votes than the total number of names that were purged from the electoral roll ahead of polling. This analysis is based on the results published by the Election Commission of India. The data on SIR deletions was tabulated by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research organisation. It is publicly available here.

One constituency where the BJP won is the Indus seat in Bankura district. The BJP had won it in 2021, too. But during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the Trinamool took a 9,000-vote lead over the Hindtuva party here. Then came the SIR, which removed 7,515 total voters from the rolls of this seat. On Monday, the BJP won it again by only 900 votes.

The bulk of these 105 seats have never been won before by the BJP. Banerjee’s party ended up losing 129 seats it had held to the BJP. The Hindutva party, on the other hand, won every single seat that it had won five years ago.

For the sake of this analysis, the seats that changed hands from the Trinamool to the BJP in these elections have been labelled as swing seats. Scroll found that in 86 swing seats, the BJP’s margin of victory was less than the total number of voters deleted during the SIR.

Take the Jadavpur Assembly seat located in South Kolkata, for example. The seat was, for decades, held by the communists. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, former chief minister of West Bengal, used to be the MLA from here between 1987 and 2011. Even after Banerjee replaced him as chief minister, this seat changed hands between her party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

In 2021, the Trinamool had won this seat while the CPI(M) had finished second. The BJP candidate, who received 53,139 votes, came in third. On the ground in Jadavpur last month, Scroll found that the competition seemed to be largely between the CPI(M) and the Trinamool this time too.

The SIR excluded more than 56,000 names in total from the rolls in Jadavpur. The BJP won it for the first time on Monday with a margin of less than half that number: 27,716 votes. Its vote tally in Jadavpur surged past 106,000. In contrast, the sitting MLA from the Trinamool received about 20,000 fewer votes than the last time. The CPI(M) got a little over 41,000 votes.

Crumbling bastions

On Monday, many Trinamool strongholds were breached. Some of the party’s most recognised leaders lost from what Bengal watchers consider Trinamool pocket boroughs.

Aroop Biswas, a minister in the outgoing government, lost his seat of Tollyganj for the first time in 20 years. The BJP candidate won by 6,013 votes. The total number of voters deleted during the SIR was 37,889.

At least ten other ministers including Shashi Panja, Siddiqullah Chowdhury, Moloy Ghatak and Snehasis Chakraborty met with the same fate. The total number of deletions in each of their constituencies was greater than the margin by which they lost.

Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the pack, also lost her Bhabanipur seat to BJP heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari by 15,105 votes. The seat, which had been with the Trinamool since 2011, saw over 51,000 total deletions in the SIR.