Bihar flips the ‘vote chori’ script, puts Mamata and Stalin’s fortresses to the test

New Delhi: The Bihar verdict has not only delivered the NDA a three-fourths majority but also flipped the “vote chori” narrative back on the Opposition and placed the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists at the centre of India’s next electoral cycle. 

From here on, the real political battlefield is not just Patna but Kolkata and Chennai, where the same exercise threatens to redraw the rules for parties that have thrived on old, bloated rolls.

In Bihar, the NDA’s “200-paar” win, with BJP taking 89 seats and JD(U) 85 in the 243-member Assembly, has turned what the Congress and its allies projected as “vote theft” into a story of consolidation under a cleaned-up voter list.

Rahul Gandhi had repeatedly alleged “vote chori” during the campaign and after polling, but the numbers, turnout and strike rate have cut sharply against that claim and strengthened the BJP’s argument that a tighter roll favours, rather than hurts, a motivated majority. 

Under Supreme Court supervision, the Election Commission was forced to open up its SIR, publishing the details of roughly 65 lakh names that disappeared between the January 2025 rolls and the draft list, along with reasons such as death, migration or duplication.

Without staying the revision, the apex told EC, “If you are departing from the normal summary revision, you must be painstakingly transparent, put every deletion online, advertise it widely, and keep a clear trail of why each name has been removed.”

The Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi treated SIR as a permissible tool within the Election Commission’s constitutional “reservoir of power” under Article 324, provided the exercise is reasoned, proportionate and open to challenge. 

It pushed back on the secrecy and compressed timelines, but not on the basic idea that a one-time, deeper clean-up may be needed to remove deceased, migrated, duplicate and ineligible names that ordinary summary revisions fail to catch.

This is precisely why the argument that SIR is inherently anti-poor has begun to fray after Bihar. Petitioners in court spoke of literacy gaps, floods and documentary hurdles, and warned that mobile, marginal voters would be the worst hit.

But on the Commission’s own submission, almost 6.5 crore voters on the 2003 base roll were carried forward without having to furnish fresh papers, and their children only had to prove a basic relationship.

A widely discussed contention is that the biggest losers from a rigorous clean-up are not migrant workers or urban poor with valid credentials in their home towns, but those who should never have been on any Indian roll in the first place or who appear more than once under different identities. 

That includes deceased voters whose names were never removed, people who have shifted permanently but remain on old lists, and those whom the BJP routinely describes as “illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya voters”.

After Bihar, the Election Commission has rolled out SIR 2.0 across nine states and three Union Territories, including West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Both states are headed for Assembly elections in 2026 and are governed by non-NDA parties that have built their politics on fierce opposition to CAA-NRC, tightened citizenship norms and any exercise that looks like a demographic audit.

West Bengal is already the sharpest flashpoint. The Trinamool Congress has branded SIR a “con job” by a “compromised” poll body and described the entire exercise as a backdoor NRC aimed at minority voters.

Mamata Banerjee has vowed to protect every name on the rolls, warning of mass protest if “genuine voters” are struck off, and linking SIR to what she calls a broader, politically driven campaign around CAA and NRC.

Yet the numbers emerging from Bengal are making that defence more difficult to sustain. The UIDAI has informed the state’s Chief Electoral Officer that Aadhaar numbers of around 34 lakh deceased residents have already been deactivated, while the Election Commission has separately identified another 13 lakh deceased individuals without Aadhaar.

Political observers in the state point out that a pool of 47 lakh deceased names is larger than the winning margin in dozens of Assembly seats, and that their silent presence on the rolls has been an open secret for years.

The Trinamool’s response has been to attack the data itself, calling the UIDAI exercise “planted” and hinting at a conspiracy between the Aadhaar authority and the Election Commission.

Now, see what happened in the context of Bihar. Once the Supreme Court pushed the Commission to publish deletions booth-wise, with reasons, the conversation in Bihar shifted from abstract accusations to specific lists. Voters were told where to check their status, how to appeal, and which document, including Aadhaar, which the Court insisted be restored to the acceptable list, would suffice. 

That transparency model is now likely to be replicated in West Bengal, making it much harder to argue that every large deletion block is automatically “vote chori” rather than a belated purge of dead and duplicate entries.

In his victory speech at the BJP headquarters after the Bihar results, Narendra Modi did not stop at thanking Bihar’s women and young voters for delivering what he called a new “MY – Mahila and Youth” mandate. He pointed east. Comparing the political map to the course of the Ganga, he said the river flows from Bihar into Bengal and that this mandate had “paved the way” for the BJP’s next battle in the state.

For Mamata Banerjee, already grappling with the optics of lakhs of deceased names being flagged by UIDAI and the Commission, that line underlined the larger threat: SIR in Bengal is not a routine administrative exercise but the foundation of an all-out attempt by the BJP to break her fortress in 2026.

In case of Tamil Nadu, the DMK has moved the Supreme Court challenging the SIR notification, calling it a “de facto NRC” and warning that it could be used to target minorities and marginalised communities. 

At the same time, DMK leaders and their allies have publicly opposed any move to add “guest workers” from Bihar and other states to the Tamil Nadu roll, arguing that this would alter the state’s political and cultural balance. 

In effect, the ruling party is attacking SIR both as a deletion mechanism and as an inclusion gateway that could dilute its core Tamil base, a more complex, but equally defensive, position.

AIADMK, now aligned with the BJP, has welcomed the revision and gone to the Supreme Court accusing the DMK government of trying to “take over” the SIR machinery at the ground level and create confusion.

Smaller parties such as Naam Tamilar Katchi have, in turn, accused the BJP of using SIR to insert northern migrants into the roll, a proof that, despite radically different ideologies, almost every stakeholder in Tamil Nadu reads voter-list engineering as central to the 2026 outcome.

Crucially, the early signals from the Supreme Court in the Bihar matter suggest that neither the DMK nor the Trinamool is likely to get what they ultimately want, a judicial veto on the SIR itself. 

The Court has directed the Commission to publish deletions in accessible formats, restore Aadhaar as an accepted ID for corrections, and give wider notice so that those wrongly struck off can file claims. But it has stopped short of calling the Bihar SIR unconstitutional or halting the exercise, and has repeatedly underlined that revising rolls is fundamentally the Election Commission’s domain.

Translated to West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, this means that the most realistic outcome from pending petitions is not the scrapping of SIR but tighter safeguards and greater disclosure. 

For ruling parties that have invested political capital in painting SIR as wholesale “vote chori”, that is a difficult place to be. If the Court’s remedy is transparency rather than rollback, they will face a hard question: how many of the deleted names they are defending can actually be shown to be living, eligible voters, and how many turn out to be deceased, migrated or duplicated entries that nobody publicly wants to own?

The BJP is already using the state as a template, arguing that a cleaned-up roll produced a record turnout and a decisive mandate rather than the mass suppression predicted by critics.

Senior leaders now describe SIR as a “clean-up drive” that removes “illegal citizens” and infiltrators from the list and accuse opponents of opposing the exercise because it threatens their “vote bank”. 

In West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the parties shouting loudest against SIR are also the ones with the most to lose if the voter list is stripped down to only those with a clean, documentable chain of citizenship and residency. 

In Bengal, that affects long-standing allegations of cross-border infiltration being converted into votes. In Tamil Nadu, it touches a different discomfort: the unease over how many non-locals and non-citizens have found their way into urban rolls over time, even as ruling parties publicly claim to be defending marginalised Tamils from deletion.

The Bihar experience has shown that once the Supreme Court forces the voter-list debate into the terrain of hard data, booth-wise deletions, reasons, appeals and outcomes, abstract claims of “vote chori” become much harder to sustain without evidence. 

As SIR 2.0 moves deeper into West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and as the Court continues to supervise the fine print, the political battle will increasingly be fought on that ground.

For the Trinamool and the DMK, that is the real shockwave from the Bihar result. 

They may still mobilise on the street and in court, but the trajectory of the hearings so far suggests they will ultimately have to fight the next elections under rolls that are shorter, cleaner and more contestable than the ones on which they built their empires. 

Blocking SIR altogether looks less and less like a realistic outcome. Learning to live with it, and reworking their politics for an electorate in which “illegal” and “ghost” votes have been sharply curtailed, may, in the end, be the only option left.