To SIR with Love or Hate: Why SIR has worked in Punjab, and how Didi sabotaged it in West Bengal

There is something perverse in a political posture where one can target the Election Commission of India (ECI) is abusive language for conducting the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, but then mark out convenient exclusions to suit your political purpose.

What, however, one must highlight here is one simple truth: no successful electoral process (whether in compiling voter lists or conducting elections) works purely as an ECI standalone activity. Reason: the ECI depends on staff provided by states and Centre, and active and positive participation by political parties is important to ensure success.

Here are two contrasting stories: from Punjab now and West Bengal earlier. In Punjab, which goes to the polls early in 2027, four parties – Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Congress, BJP and Akali Dal – are seeking either to retain power, dethrone the incumbent, or increase their political clout from where it stood in 2022.

But even as all opposition parties are trying to target the ECI for SIR’s inadequacies, The Indian Express reports that all four major Punjab parties lauded how the SIR exercise was conducted and completed in the state. They had praise for the state’s chief electoral officer, Anindita Mitra, who made herself available to all parties to address their complaints and grievances. Score one for the ECI at least in this state.

Now, hear what the political parties themselves did right – which underscores my point that active political participation is needed to ensure success in the SIR process. The Express report quotes Ferry Sofat, AAP spokesperson, as saying that 90,000 booth level agents (BLAs) of the major parties participated in the SIR exercise to make it work. He also said the Punjab government supported the booth level officers (BLOs) appointed by the ECI by relieving them of other official duties so that they could focus on the SIR work and electoral roll revisions.

Contrast this with what happened in West Bengal. From Day One, the Chief Minister was on the warpath with the ECI and the state-officials appointed to do SIR work. She not only erected administrative and legal obstacles for a successful SIR exercise, but went out of her way to derail it by repeatedly threatening ECI officials and state officials doing SIR work.  

In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court in January 2026, the ECI gave specific instances of Mamata Banerjee making “provocative speeches” asking the public to take the law into their own hands. Groups of party workers often surrounded election officials to prevent them from doing their work, while mouthing political slogans. This was putting election officials under “unwarranted pressure.”

In a 91-page affidavit, the ECI alleged that the local police were refusing to register complaints from booth level officers (BLOs), with the complaints often needing higher level interventions to be registered. On 24 November, 2024, the Chief Electoral Officer’s office in Kolkata was under siege and protesters broke police barricades to forcibly enter the premises, vandalising the office and restricting the movement of officials.

Thanks to this forced entry, the Chief Electoral Office had to be given Y category security by the home ministry – the only one in the country to receive this level of security.

The simple point is this: if West Bengal’s SIR became a very contentious issue, the primary blame for it must rest solely with Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress storm-troopers.

We now know that the violent opposition of the Trinamool to the SIR process was probably motivated by the need to give protective cover to many thousands of non-citizens (especially minorites) who served as reliable vote-banks for the party in power. In fact, the addition of ineligible voters was done on an industrial scale – and it could not be missed.

According to the ECI, which flagged the “logical discrepancies” in the voters’ list, in an assembly constituency in Asansol (Barabani), one dad reportedly had 389 children, all of whom made it to the 2025 voters’ list. This level of reproductive ability should put the previous record-holder, Dhritarashtra of the Mahabharata, to wallow in shame.

But this gentleman was not the exception. In Bally, the runner-up to the Asansol dad had managed to produce 310 children who became voters, while seven others reported equalling or exceeding Dhritarashtra with over 100 children each. There were 10 others with more than 50 kids who made it to the list, and another 10 parents had 40 kids each. Fourteen had 30 or more children, 50 had more than 20 progeny, and a stupendous 8,682 voters reported having 10 children each. Some families apparently produced kids on the assembly line.

Contrast these super-human reproductive abilities with the falling total fertility rate (TFR) in West Bengal of 1.4 – far below the replacement level of 2.1 - and you have a conundrum: can you get voter growth so much in excess of demographic trends?

A study by Professors Vidhu Shekhar and Milan Kumar, titled Electoral Roll Inflation in West Bengal: A Demographic Reconstruction of Legitimate Voter Counts, estimates that state had 1.04 crore (10.4 million) excess voters that contrasted with underlying demographic trends. It is at least possible that some of the excess voters were the result of in-migration, from nearby states and also Bangladesh.

Clearly, the SIR exercise was much-needed in West Bengal more than in any other state with similar demographic trends.

But here is the point that needs underscoring: even in West Bengal, the SIR exercise could have delivered better results if only the Mamata Banerjee government had chosen to support the exercise instead of playing spoilsport.

In Punjab, and earlier in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the SIR exercise did not get derailed because the principal political parties chose to help the ECI do a reasonably good job. In Kerala, where the losing LDF has raised some issues about abnormal voter increases or decreases in some constituencies, Chief Minister VD Satheesan rejected any problems with SIR, and said they parleyed with the state’s Chief Electoral Officer multiple times to ensure that no genuine voter was deleted. But the state assembly recently passed a resolution to get rid of the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

The problem comes when political parties raise problems with the SIR exercise after losing an election, as the DMK is doing now. Apparently in some constituencies with larger voter deletions, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam of actor Joseph Vijay won more seats, while the DMK had a better record in constituencies with lower deletions.

But if one considers the likelihood that the DMK probably had a better grip on booth-level voters than the fledgling TVK, this argument may not hold.

This leaves us with the Punjab Vs West Bengal contrast. In the former, the Aam Aadmi Party and the three rival parties chose to support the ECI with their own booth-level information. In West Bengal, it was the opposite. The loser in the Punjab elections may well start complaining about SIR, but an explanation post-facto is not legitimate when they are all singing the praises of the Chief Electoral Officer of Punjab.

A note on how political parties are vital to any successful voter list revision exercise is useful here. While both the summary and special voter roll revisions are done by nominees of the ECI in various states, political parties, which have solid voter intelligence at the booth level, aid the process by flagging irregularities or seeking additions. In between elections, political parties often try to enrol voters by getting forms 6 or 8 filled at voters’ homes, and then submit them in bulk to the Election Commission, which then issues the voter ID card after verification. Very few voters do this job all by themselves, which is why removing the dead from voter rolls, and deletion of names when people move from one place to another, is always a hit-or-miss affair. People seldom on their own seek to delete their names when they move. And political parties do not do this either, as there is no reward for their efforts. Getting new voters enrolled is, however, worth their time, for they help enrol those who they believe will vote for them.

What the Punjab-West Bengal contrast tells us is this: SIR can work when political parties do what they do best, which is work for voter inclusions at the booth level. When you have a recalcitrant party like the Trinamool, it can also sabotage SIR work.