Did SIR exercise win W

SIR could not have won the Bharatiya Janata Party the state of West Bengal if hard electoral data is looked at

- Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore

The short answer: Likely not.

For the long answer: read on.

The question above is the most polarising one to ask vis-à-vis the West Bengal results. Of the 14 states and union territories where the Election Commission of India (ECI) has conducted the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) or special revision (SR) of electoral rolls since last year, six states/UTs have had elections after the exercise. SIR was the most contentious and potentially disenfranchising in nature in West Bengal, where 2.7 million electors were removed from the rolls under the adjudication process (and were awaiting their fate even on the day of election) over and above the 6.2 million who were deleted in SIR apart from the adjudication category.

SIR's constitutional and political morality problems aside, it could not have won the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the state of West Bengal if hard electoral data is looked at. Here is why.

The BJP and the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) (both are taken along with any allies throughout this analysis) have vote shares of 45.8% and 41.1% respectively in the 2026 assembly election as of 10pm. The BJP has gained 7.1 percentage points in vote share and the TMC has lost 4.7 percentage points compared to the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the latest pre-SIR poll in the state. In absolute terms, the BJP has polled 5.6 million more votes while the TMC has polled 1.7 million less votes compared to the 2024 elections (according to ECI data as of 10pm). The net SIR deletions in the state are 8.9 million, of which 2.7 million were deleted during the adjudication process. That the decline in votes polled by TMC is close to at least the adjudication deletions makes it tempting to believe that SIR could have played a role in the BJP's victory in West Bengal, as indeed some analysts have claimed. But did it really? Answering this question requires reading the numbers in context.

Let us look at them one by one.