‘3.4 million appeals, heard by hundreds’: Shashi Tharoor questions if Bengal poll results ‘totally fair’

New Delhi: Congress leaders Shashi Tharoor Questioning the results of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, it was argued that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls may have played a decisive role in the victory of the BJP in the state.Talking about the SIR campaign, Tharoor claimed that mass deletions from electoral rolls and delays in appeal rulings could prevent hundreds of thousands of legal voters from casting their votes.“As far as the SIR is concerned, what I’m saying is a legitimate question that needs to be answered. Look at what happened in Bangladesh. 9.1 million people were taken off the rolls. 3.4 million of them appealed, saying they were around and had the legal right to vote. The rules require each case to be adjudicated individually, so only a few hundred cases are decided before the vote,” he told a roundtable on ‘India, this is Bharat’ on the sidelines of the Stanford India Conference in the US.He added: “To date, in the remaining years, as the ruling continues, approximately 31, 3.2 million people may be identified as legal voters who have missed the opportunity to vote.”Tharoor further pointed to the BJP’s margin of victory in Bengal, saying the figures were closely related to the pending appeals.“BJP won Bengal by a margin of 30 lakh votes. Now you tell me, was it completely fair and democratic? That’s the question I’m asking. Honestly, I have no problem with deleting false, deleted, absentee, migrant voters,” he said.The Congress MP also claimed that the electoral roll revision could have a different political impact on Kerala, saying deletion of duplicate entries could have an adverse impact on the CPM.“Especially in Kerala, I suspect the Congress has benefited from deletion because the CPM has long been the master of double registration, triple registration, quadruple registration – the same people in four different booths and so on. This has happened before. So they were eliminated by the SIR, and as you said, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the number of appeals was very low. But in Bengal, there are undoubtedly 3.4 million appeals. That’s 3.4 million forms filled out by 3.4 million people. Tharoor said only a few hundred people had heard of it.The Bharatiya Janata Party scored a historic victory in the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections, winning 207 seats, ending the 15-year rule of Mamata Banerjee’s All-India Trinamool Congress party in the state. TMC got 80 seats. After the victory, the BJP formed the first government in West Bengal and Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the chief minister.