West Bengal’s fragile electoral credibility is now at the centre of a storm, as fresh revelations expose a nine-fold surge in new voter ID applications in infiltration-prone border districts of the state. The development, unfolding ahead of the 2026 Vidhan Sabha elections, has triggered a full-blown crisis, forcing the Election Commission of India (ECI) to hint that a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls in Bengal is no longer optional but inevitable.
For Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has long dismissed concerns of infiltration as “communal propaganda,” the numbers tell a damning story of demographic manipulation, political appeasement, and systematic corruption in the voter registration process.
According to the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), West Bengal, the increase is concentrated in Muslim-dominated border districts Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia, Uttar Dinajpur, Cooch Behar, North 24 Parganas, and South 24 Parganas all of which share porous boundaries with Bangladesh.
In just the last three months, fresh voter applications under Form-6 have jumped from around 100 per assembly constituency per month to nearly 900. The sheer scale of this spike — a nine-fold rise — has sparked fears that large numbers of illegal immigrants are being systematically seeded into the electoral rolls under the protection of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) regime.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has slammed Mamata Banerjee of deliberately encouraging infiltration from Bangladesh to alter West Bengal’s demographic balance in favour of her party. Today’s figures appear to confirm those warnings. The party has repeatedly flagged that unchecked infiltration is not just an electoral malpractice, but a national security threat, destabilising border districts and fuelling communal tensions.
The ECI has already exposed the rot within Bengal’s election machinery. Earlier this month, it suspended four key election officials after a sample check revealed that they had illegally cleared fake voter applications.
Those suspended include:
- Debottam Dutta Choudhary (ERO)
- Biplab Sarkar (ERO)
- Tathagata Mondal (AERO)
- Sudipta Das (AERO)
In addition, Data Entry Operator Surojit Haldar was named in an FIR.
The Commission directed not only suspension, but also criminal proceedings, declaring the officials’ conduct as criminal misconduct aimed at corrupting the electoral process. This rare move underscores how deeply compromised Bengal’s voter rolls have become under the current regime.
Research paper reveals 1 crore excess voters
The crisis was amplified further by a landmark research paper published on 7 August 2025 by two distinguished academics:
- Dr. Milan Kumar, Assistant Professor at IIM Visakhapatnam
- Dr. Vidhu Shekhar, Assistant Professor at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta
The study, “Electoral Roll Inflation in West Bengal: A Demographic Reconstruction of Legitimate Voter Counts (2024),” found that Bengal’s electoral rolls may contain up to one crore excess voters, with an inflation rate of 13.69 per cent. By comparing electoral rolls with census and civil registration data, the paper shows how voter counts have been artificially inflated beyond demographic reality — a smoking gun pointing to engineered voter fraud.
Official figures reveal that in the last three years, 2,688 Bangladeshi nationals were apprehended and deported from West Bengal. Experts stress that these numbers only represent those caught at the border, while the actual influx is likely much higher.
Once inside Bengal, the latest voter roll revelations suggest that infiltrators may be regularised into the system with the connivance of corrupt officials — transforming illegal immigration into legitimate votes. For Mamata Banerjee, these developments strike at the heart of her government’s credibility. For years, she has dismissed allegations of infiltration and fake voter roll inflation as “BJP propaganda.” But the data explosion, ECI crackdowns, and independent academic research now paint a very different picture.
Critics argue that Mamata’s government has turned Bengal’s borders into gateways for vote-bank politics, weaponising illegal immigration to create a loyal electoral bloc. The integrity of Bengal’s democracy itself now stands compromised.
The Election Commission has already dropped strong hints that a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) must be carried out urgently in West Bengal to purge bogus voters from the rolls. Without such a clean-up, the 2026 Vidhan Sabha elections risk being conducted on a foundation of fraud.
If launched, an SIR would involve door-to-door verification of voters, cross-checking of citizenship documents, and large-scale deletion of suspicious entries — a process that could fundamentally alter Bengal’s political arithmetic.
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