Why West Bengal and Assam Election Results Are Being Viewed With Suspicion

From the Editor’s Desk

May 8, 2026

In the 2026 state assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance returned to power comfortably in Assam and swept the West Bengal election, ending the 15-year rule of the Trinamool Congress. Some of this can certainly be explained through familiar electoral trends, voters rewarding an incumbent government in Assam and turning against one in Bengal. However, the debates surrounding constituency delimitation in Assam and voter roll revisions in Bengal have also led many people to ask whether state institutions and electoral procedures themselves may have tilted the playing field in favour of the ruling party at the Centre.

Delimitation in Assam

In Assam, the 2023 delimitation exercise carried enormous political consequences. It came into effect for the 2026 assembly election, significantly altering the state’s electoral map in ways critics said weakened the electoral influence of Muslims. Critics alleged, , as reported by Al Jazeera, that Muslim-majority areas were either “packed” into a small number of constituencies, concentrating Muslim voters into fewer seats, or “cracked” across several Hindu-majority constituencies so that Muslim voters no longer had the numbers to decisively influence outcomes in many places.

In nine districts where Muslims form more than half the population, the number of seats won by non-BJP parties fell sharply after delimitation. Muslim representation in the assembly reportedly dropped from 28 MLAs to 19. Reports also pointed to constituencies that were reorganised in ways that turned formerly Muslim-majority seats into Scheduled Caste reserved constituencies, changing their electoral character entirely. Opposition parties, including the Congress, called the exercise “communal gerrymandering,” which refers to the deliberate manipulation of constituency boundaries to favour a political party, although the BJP government in Assam strongly rejected the allegations. 

SIR in West Bengal

In West Bengal, the controversy revolved around the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of voter rolls. Electoral roll revision in itself is a necessary exercise because voter lists need periodic updating through the removal of duplicate entries, dead voters, migrants, or people considered ineligible, while newly eligible voters are added. However, questions begin arising if the scale or pattern of deletions appears politically uneven.

According to an analysis by Scroll.in, around 9.1 million (91 lakh) names were removed from West Bengal’s voter rolls during the revision exercise, shrinking the state’s electorate by roughly 12 percent. Around 2.7 million (27 lakh) cases reportedly remained under adjudication before special tribunals. The BJP supported the revision process from beginning to end, while opposition parties repeatedly objected to it and questioned both the scale and the method of deletions.

Scroll’s constituency-level analysis found that in 105 assembly seats won by the BJP, the number of deleted voters exceeded the party’s margin of victory. These 105 seats constituted roughly half of the BJP’s final tally of 207 seats in the 294-member assembly. In 86 of these constituencies, the BJP had never won before.

For example, in the Jadavpur assembly seat, more than 56,000 names were reportedly deleted from voter rolls, according to Scroll’s analysis. The BJP won the constituency for the first time by about 27,700 votes. In Tollyganj, where Trinamool minister Aroop Biswas lost after two decades, the BJP’s margin of victory was smaller than the number of deleted voters. Similar patterns reportedly appeared in constituencies represented by other Trinamool ministers and even in Bhabanipur, where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee lost to BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari.

Questions Over Institutional Neutrality

West Bengal clearly showed signs of anti-incumbency after 15 years of Trinamool rule. Complaints regarding corruption allegations, local strongman politics, unemployment and fatigue with long-term incumbency had circulated for years. Similarly, Assam may indeed have reflected pro-incumbency. The BJP’s welfare programmes, Assamese nationalist positioning and organisational strength likely contributed to its performance.

However, even if the election results themselves were not entirely surprising, the delimitation and SIR exercises, both conducted by the Election Commission of India, failed to inspire confidence among many opposition parties and critics that they had operated neutrally.

In Assam, opposition parties argued that allowing the Election Commission to directly conduct delimitation, instead of using the older model of a separate Delimitation Commission, reduced institutional distance from the Union government. The BJP rejected that criticism and maintained that the exercise remained constitutional and legally valid.

Assam has long witnessed intense political anxieties around citizenship, migration and identity. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) process, debates around “indigenous” rights and communal polarisation had already made Muslim representation politically contentious. Against that background, any delimitation exercise perceived as reducing Muslim electoral influence predictably attracts suspicion.

In West Bengal, opposition parties questioned both the scale and the transparency of the SIR, arguing that the deletion of around 9.1 million names from voter rolls risked disproportionately affecting sections of voters seen as less supportive of the BJP. The BJP defended the exercise as a necessary clean-up of electoral rolls and maintained that removing duplicate, shifted, or ineligible names was essential for fair elections. However, the fact that the number of deleted voters exceeded the BJP’s margin of victory in more than 100 constituencies intensified suspicions among critics that the revision process may have influenced the electoral playing field.

Several media reports had warned that large-scale removal of voters from electoral rolls before an election could directly affect democratic participation. The exercise eventually led to unusually high deletions, followed by intense political controversy.

In modern democracies, controversies rarely involve openly cancelling elections or banning opposition parties. The concern is usually subtler. Political scientists use terms like ‘competitive authoritarianism’ for situations where elections continue to take place regularly and opposition parties remain free to contest them, but state institutions and administrative processes gradually begin operating in ways that appear to favour those already in power. The real question is whether the contest remains, and is seen by the public as, equally fair for everyone underneath the formal structure.

Whether the allegations against the BJP and the Election Commission are true or not, the concerns themselves are politically significant. Polish-American political scientist Adam Przeworski has argued that democracy survives because political actors accept electoral defeat within a system they believe remains fair. Public confidence in the neutrality of electoral institutions therefore matters as much as the formal legality of the process itself.

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