New Delhi: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor Questioning the outcome of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, it has been suggested that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists may have played a decisive role in the BJP’s victory in the state.Referring to the SIR exercise, Tharoor alleged that large-scale deletions from electoral rolls and delays in deciding appeals would have prevented millions of legitimate voters from casting their votes.“In the case of SIR, what I have said is a legitimate question to be answered. Look at the case of Bengal. 91 lakh names were removed from the list. 34 lakh of them are living human beings who have appealed that they are around and they are legitimately entitled to vote. The rules require each case to be decided individually, so only a few hundred cases were decided before voting,” he said at the ‘India, That’s Bharat’ roundtable on the sidelines of the Stanford India Conference in the US.“As of today, there are approximately 31,32 lakh people who could be found to be valid voters in the remaining years while the decision is on, but have missed the chance to vote,” he said.Tharoor further pointed to the BJP’s victory margin in Bengal, saying the numbers closely reflected unresolved appeals.He said, “And BJP won in Bengal by a margin of 30 lakh votes. Now you tell me is it completely fair and democratic? That’s the question I ask. To be honest, I have no problem in removing fake, removed, absentee, transferred voters.”The Congress MP also claimed that the voter list revision could have a distinct political impact in Kerala, where he suggested that removing duplicate entries could work against the CPM.“And especially in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from deletions because the CPM had long been adept at double nominations, triple nominations, quadruple nominations – same people in four different booths, etc. This used to happen. And so they were eliminated by SIR, and as you said, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, there were very few appeals. But in Bengal, there was no doubt that there were 34 lakh appeals. And this is 34 lakh forms filled by 34 lakh persons. And of those, only a few hundred have been heard from,” Tharoor said.The BJP registered a historic victory in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, winning 207 seats and ending the 15-year rule of the Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress in the state. TMC won 80 seats. Following the victory, the BJP formed its first government in West Bengal, with Suvendu Adhikari sworn in as the Chief Minister.