SIR and the Opposition’s Argument: What the Election Data Actually Shows

The demand by several Opposition parties including Congress party for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls raises a much larger question than the controversy surrounding voter-list revision. It concerns the institutional credibility and independence of the Election Commission of India. Political parties have every right to question the Election Commission, demand transparency, challenge its decisions in court and even initiate the constitutional procedure for removal when they believe there is evidence of serious misconduct. But demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner merely because an electoral process produces politically inconvenient outcomes risks establishing a dangerous precedent. The Election Commission cannot become an institution whose leadership is expected to resign whenever a major political party alleges that an electoral exercise has worked against it. Electoral statistics emerging from elections held after SIR do not support a simple conclusion that voter deletions automatically benefited one political side. 

The core of the opposition's case is that SIR-driven deletions systematically hurt them and helped the BJP. The results from the three biggest exercises completed so far tell a messier story. What the statistics actually show is

Bihar: RJD won the highest vote share

Opposition parties' claim that SIR-driven deletions handed Bihar to the NDA through "vote chori" runs into a basic problem: the RJD actually won the largest vote share of any single party in the election with 23 percent, yet still collapsed to just 25 seats — down sharply from 75 in 2020 — while the NDA swept 202 of 243 seats. The BJP in ruling alliance just secured 20 percent votes. This gap between vote share and seat share isn't new or unique to a "rigged" roll; it's a structural feature of India's first-past-the-post system, where a party can win the most votes yet lose badly on seats if its support is spread thin across many contests while the rival alliance's votes are concentrated into winning margins — exactly what happened as the NDA's coordinated two-party arithmetic (BJP 89, JD(U) 85) out-performed a fragmented Mahagathbandhan, with Congress alone recording its second-worst-ever Bihar result at just 6 of 61 seats contested despite polling respectably in vote share. If SIR deletions were systematically engineered to suppress the opposition's voters, the RJD's vote share itself should have cratered — it didn't; what collapsed was seat conversion, which points to alliance strategy, seat-sharing, and vote-splitting as more plausible explanations than a roll-revision exercise that, as Bengal and Tamil Nadu later showed, didn't reliably benefit the BJP at all. 

West Bengal: TMC’s victory in constituencies of highest number of SIR deletions

West Bengal provides an even more interesting test because the SIR was followed by a dramatic political transformation. The BJP won 207 of the 293 declared seats, while the TMC won 80, Congress two, and smaller parties the remaining seats in the results reported by the Election Commission.

Yet the constituencies with the highest number of SIR deletions tell a very different story. Among the 20 constituencies with the highest deletions, the TMC won 13, the BJP six and Congress one. Samserganj had the highest number of deletions—74,775—and the TMC retained it. Lalgola had 55,420 deletions and was also won by TMC. Bhagabangola recorded 47,493 deletions and TMC won it. Raghunathganj, with 46,100 deletions, remained with TMC. Metiaburuz had 39,579 deletions and TMC won with a large margin. Farakka, with 38,222 deletions, was won by Congress. That is perhaps the single most important statistic in the political debate because it demonstrates that high deletion numbers did not automatically translate into BJP victories.

Tamil Nadu: Where the opposition's own prediction failed

This is the clearest test case, because the DMK made its prediction before the results came in. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin explicitly said the SIR exercise, which ultimately shrank the rolls from 6.41 crore to 5.67 crore voters, was designed to help the AIADMK-BJP alliance win the 2026 election. Here was a testable claim, made in advance, by the party with the most to lose.

The result: the BJP won exactly one seat out of 234. The AIADMK, the party the DMK said SIR was built to install in power, won 47 seats and finished third. The actual winner was TVK, Vijay's two-year-old party, which took an outright majority with 108 seats. The DMK itself, despite losing power, still finished second with 59 seats — a respectable opposition tally, not the wipeout that a rigged-rolls theory would predict. If SIR had been engineered to deliver Tamil Nadu to the BJP or its ally, the mechanism conspicuously failed to do the one thing it was allegedly built for.

Even more interesting is what happened in constituencies with very large voter deletions. A constituency-level analysis reported that TVK won 22 of the 80 seats where deletions were between 10,000 and 20,000; 32 of 66 seats where deletions were between 20,000 and 30,000; and 24 of 37 seats where deletions were between 30,000 and 50,000. Among the 22 constituencies with deletions between 50,000 and 80,000, TVK won 18. Most strikingly, all 10 constituencies reporting more than 80,000 deletions were won by TVK.

This is politically significant because TVK is not the BJP. If the argument is that SIR was inherently designed to benefit the BJP or its allies, Tamil Nadu presents a major challenge to that theory. The party that performed most strongly in the highest-deletion category was TVK, while the BJP won only one Assembly seat statewide according to the Election Commission's results.There is another important lesson from Tamil Nadu. DMK's vote share fell to about 24.2% and AIADMK's to about 21.2%, while TVK captured nearly 35%. The dramatic result therefore has to be understood through political realignment, voter preferences, leadership, anti-incumbency, alliance

Ultimately, the credibility of SIR should be established not by political speeches but by data. 

Dr K. Venkatakrishna Rao, Assistant Professor, NIT Warangal and Visiting Fellow, India Foundation, New Delhi