Tharoor Questions Voter Deletions Impact in Bengal, Kerala Polls

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor raised concerns about the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls ahead of India's 2026 state assembly elections, suggesting the process may have affected results differently in West Bengal and Kerala. Speaking at a roundtable on the sidelines of the Stanford India Conference in San Francisco, Tharoor pointed to large-scale voter deletions and slow appeal resolutions as potential factors in the outcomes.

In West Bengal, the Bharatiya Janata Party secured a landslide victory by winning 207 of 294 seats, ending the All India Trinamool Congress's 15-year rule. The TMC took 80 seats, after which BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as chief minister. Tharoor highlighted that approximately 9.1 million names were removed from the voter rolls during the revision. Of those, 3.4 million people filed appeals claiming they were legitimate voters eligible to cast ballots. He noted that rules required individual adjudication for each case, with only a few hundred resolved before polling day. As a result, around 3.1 million to 3.2 million appeals remain pending.

Tharoor drew attention to the BJP's victory margin of roughly 3 million votes, which closely...