Shashi Tharoor Says Congress Likely Gained From SIR In Kerala: 'I Suspect That...'

Last Updated:May 11, 2026, 11:21 IST

The Congress-led United Democratic Front secured a decisive victory, winning 102 seats in the 140-member Kerala Assembly.

Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has said that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls may have actually helped the Congress party in the recently held Kerala assembly polls by removing duplicate voter registrations.

While speaking at the ‘India, That is Bharat’ roundtable during the Stanford India Conference in San Francisco, the Congress MP claimed that in the past, multiple voter registrations were common in Kerala.

He asserted that the removal of duplicate or multiple voter registrations in Kerala, where he claimed instances of double, triple, and even quadruple enrolments had existed in the past, may have worked in favour of the Congress party by cleaning up inflated voter lists historically associated with rival political practices.

“…in Kerala, I suspect the Congress benefited from the deletions because the CPIM was long a past master of double, triple, quadruple enrollment… That used to happen. So they were eliminated by the SIR…" he said as quoted by news agency ANI.

He noted that Kerala and Tamil Nadu saw very few appeals against voter deletions, unlike West Bengal, where the issue became far more controversial.

Turning to Bengal, Tharoor raised concerns over the fairness of the electoral process after large-scale deletions from voter rolls.

He claimed that nearly 91 lakh names were removed during the revision exercise, and around 34 lakh people later appealed, claiming they were genuine voters.

He said only a few hundred appeals were reportedly resolved before polling, leaving lakhs of voters unable to cast their votes.

“Look at the Bengal case. 91 lakh names were struck off the rolls. Of those, 34 lakh living human beings have appealed, saying that they are around and they are legitimately entitled to vote. The rules have required each case to be adjudicated individually, so only a few hundred were adjudicated before the vote. To this day, there are some 31, 32 lakh people who might be found to have been legitimate voters in the remaining years while adjudication carries on, but they have missed their chance to vote," he said.

Drawing attention to the scale of the figures, he observed that the BJP’s victory margin, around 30 lakh votes, closely aligns with the number of pending voter appeals, raising questions about whether eligible voters were effectively unable to cast their ballots.

“And the BJP won Bengal by a margin of 30 lakh votes. Now you tell me, is that entirely fair and democratic? This is the question that I ask. Honestly, I have no problem with deleting spurious, deleted, absent, migrated voters," Tharoor said.

The Congress leader clarified that he had no objection to removing fake or duplicate voters but questioned whether legitimate voters were unfairly excluded from the electoral process.

The BJP put up a stunning performance in the West Bengal polls, results of which were announced on May 4, winning 207 seats in the 294-member assembly, in the process ending the 15-year rule of the Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee. The TMC ended up with just 80 seats.

In the April 9 Assembly elections, the Congress-led United Democratic Front secured a decisive victory, winning 102 seats in the 140-member House, while the Left Democratic Front won 35 seats. The BJP won three seats. With this victory, the 10-year rule of the Left government has also come to an end.

News india Shashi Tharoor Says Congress Likely Gained From SIR In Kerala: 'I Suspect That...'

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