“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,” BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari said.
In the chief minister’s constituency, Bhowanipore, 47,111 voters have been deleted. In 2021, Mamata Banerjee had initially suffered a humiliating defeat in Nandigram against Suvendu - a former Trinamool leader himself.
The names of Naihati Municipality ward No. 4 Trinamool councillor Sushanta Sarkar and his mother, Arati Sarkar, have been deleted from the final rolls published on Saturday, it has been alleged.
Without studying it in detail it would be wrong to make any comment, remarked a Trinamool leader.
"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," says TMC lawmaker Partha Bhowmick.
Around 1.18 lakh voters have been deleted from the final rolls in Bankura district.
In Nadia, the figure is around 2.73 lakh.
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| Amit Shah with Suvendu Adhikari |
On SIR list, Union MoS Sukanta Majumdar says, "The list that has come, is not a final list. Some names are approved and the rest are seen by the judicial officers. The judicial officers will see and those are eligible their names would keep coming in. Now the protests are politically motivated".
West Bengal now has 7,04,59,284 voters and 60,60,475 of those names are “under adjudication”.
Notably, after the draft rolls were published last December, the total number of electors was 7.08 crore.
The Election Commission has published the electoral rolls on Saturday, Feb 28th after its special intensive revision (SIR) exercise and as per Supreme Court's directives.
As per Supreme Court's orders, the judicial officers from West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha are working to complete the process of adjudication.
As many as 5,46,063 names were deleted from the voters’ list on the basis of Form 7 (for objections) submitted by individual electors and political parties.
In the draft roll published last December, names of over 58 lakh voters were deleted.
“We have tried to make the list as foolproof as possible,” Bengal CEO Manoj Agarwal said.
“It was a huge task and some mistakes happened, which we rectified at the earliest".
The total number of voters deleted in Bengal since the SIR exercise was rolled out is now over 63 lakh. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly said 1.2 crore voters will be deleted in Bengal.
Election Commission officials maintained that deletions were primarily on account of death, migration, duplication and untraceability, while additions were processed after scrutiny of documents.
A total of 1,82,036 new voters were added to the list.
Around 17,000 voters were deleted in the final draft in north Kolkata, taking the total deletion to 4.07 lakh in the area since the SIR process started.
In south Kolkata, the number stood at 3,207 while the fate of another 78,675 voters is yet to be decided.
In Alipurduar in north Bengal, 11,96,651 names featured in the final rolls, with the total deletions in the district at 1,02,835, officials said.
In several parts of Bengal, residents crowded notice boards displaying printed lists, going through pages and capturing photographs of entries on mobile phones. At district magistrate and sub-divisional offices, people waited in serpentine queues to verify whether their names had been marked 'approved', 'deleted' or kept 'under adjudication'.
On the Final Draft List of SIR 2026, Additional CEO Arindam Niyogi said:
"This mobilization of huge manpower was there. It was unprecedented, as done in West Bengal, there were 24 district election officers.
The electoral registration officers for each assembly constituency were 294 with one ERO for each AC. The assistant electoral registration officers, that is the EROs, were of 8,571 numbers, officers. Supervisors were there 8,136, who supervised the works of the BLOs...".
Niyogi also said:
"There is a complete transparency in each stage with 100 percent physical verification strategy.
The approach it was you know it was very exhaustive in nature with BLOs, the boot level officers who distributed the forms, the enumeration forms in the house to house visit and after that they collected the filled in enumeration forms, then it was digitized and processed...".
Twenty-eight years after walking together into Parliament, Trinamool Congress and BJP (since 1998) now face each other as sworn enemies—making West Bengal’s coming election the most acerbic yet. After 2014 as the BJP stepped up attack against Mamata Banerjee; at one point she was furious and had said -- "Who is Amit Shah?".
But the BJP's rise has been phenomenal. It became single largest and principal opposition to TMC while former dominant force the Left parties drew blank in 2021. And so did the Congress party.
In retrospect, Mamata Banerjee helped the BJP gain its first real foothold in Bengal—when the state was still a secure Left fortress. The irony is profound. Friends turned foes now trade accusations daily, but the roots of this rivalry lie in 1998, just a few months after the Trinamool Congress was born.
That year, the TMC–BJP alliance stunned the Left, winning eight Lok Sabha seats with a combined vote share of 34.63%. BJP’s Tapan Sikdar humbled CPI(M) heavyweight Nirmal Kanti Chatterjee in Dum Dum by over 1.36 lakh votes. The BJP’s vote share jumped sharply, crossing 10%, while the Congress collapsed to 15.2%, reduced to a single seat.
BJP national spokesperson Shazia Ilmi says, "The journey of change in West Bengal is not just a political program. It is not just a political program. It is a symbol of public sentiment.
This journey is to send a message to villages to tehsil that violence will not work in democracy. And whatever will be the decision will be of the people. So, public contact is important for this. Dialogue is important for this.
The suppressed issues for years, whether it is violence, corruption or unemployment, dialogue will be on all these issues. Our workers will go to every house and talk to them...".
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