The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed back against Opposition claims linking voter deletions to its Bengal election win, arguing the numbers themselves undercut the allegation.
BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said the party had lost the majority of seats where the highest number of deletions from electoral rolls took place. “The edifice is that because of the deletion of voters from the voter list, the BJP won in Bengal. The highest number of voters were deleted in 20 Assembly seats, of which the TMC won 13 and the BJP won six. If we won through ‘vote chori’, then how did we lose more than half of the seats?” he asked.
BJP Questions Voter Deletion Claim
Patra pointed to specific constituencies to back his argument, citing Murshidabad’s Samserganj as an example, where 91,712 voters over one in three names on the rolls were removed following the SIR exercise, marking the highest number of deletions recorded from any single seat in the state.
In that seat, Mohammed Noor Alam of the All India Trinamool Congress secured victory with 61,918 votes, defeating his nearest challenger from the Congress, while the BJP did not feature in the contest at all.
Patra’s remarks came in response to the Election Commission’s statement addressing an Indian Express report, which disclosed that two of the three Election Commissioners had raised objections to multiple SIR-related processes, including those carried out during Bengal’s recently held Assembly elections.
Mamata Demands Bengal Re-Election
As Patra mounted his defence, former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took to Facebook Live to call for fresh elections in the state and the arrest of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, describing the Indian Express report as “scandalous.”
“BJP and Gyanesh Kumar is a joint venture company. They together looted the Bengal election. If you have any moral strength, give back our election,” Banerjee said.
ERONET At The Centre Of The Row
In Bengal, the Supreme Court did not leave the SIR appeals process solely to the Election Commission, instead assigning the review of flagged voters to 700 judicial officers. These officers ultimately ordered the deletion of 27 lakh voters while retaining 33 lakh names on the electoral rolls.
When the Election Commission subsequently appealed the retention of certain voters the judicial officers had chosen to keep, lakhs of appeals were filed through the ERONET system most of them lodged in the name of, and through, a single officer.
ERONET is the software at the heart of the controversy, functioning as part of the Election Commission’s broader ECINET platform and enabling such processes to be executed with minimal manual intervention. When the Supreme Court sought accountability for these appeals, Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu reportedly wrote to his officers asking who had authorised and filed them and, according to the Indian Express investigation, did not have an answer.
“We Are Saving Democracy”: Patra
Patra argued that Opposition parties had faced repeated rejection from voters since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. “You would remember that since 2014 after Modi ji came to power, all opposition political parties have been rejected by people,” he said.
He alleged that the Congress turned to attacking constitutional institutions once it recognised it could not win public support. “When Congress party realised that it cannot win over the hearts of people of India, it started attacking constitutional institutions,” Patra said, adding that the Election Commission had now issued a detailed note in response to such attacks.
Addressing the dissent reported among the three Election Commissioners in the Indian Express investigation, Patra said internal deliberation is a healthy sign in a functioning democracy, rather than a system surrounded by “yes-men.” He noted that the Commission’s note confirmed official deliberations had taken place among all three Commissioners. “According to this note, it has been observed that official deliberations have happened between all election commissioners,” he said. “This tells us that this is the beauty of democratic process. After all deliberations, all election commissioners were on the same page.”
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Patra maintained that the BJP was not shielding any individual but was defending India’s democratic institutions against what he termed “malicious propaganda.” “We are not trying to save any specific individual; we are trying to save India’s democracy,” he said.
He noted that the Opposition had already moved the Supreme Court on the matter and had faced no obstruction in doing so. On calls for impeachment or raising the issue in Parliament, Patra issued a challenge: “Just bring a blank sheet of paper, and I will sign it.” He further predicted that the Opposition would obstruct proceedings once the Winter Session begins. “They will not allow the session to run for even a single day; you will see them standing outside, creating a massive ruckus and shouting slogans,” he said.
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