For years, the Opposition has perfected a lazy political slogan: “BJP is stealing elections.” EVMs, institutions, democracy—everything is allegedly compromised. But as the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal progresses, an inconvenient question now demands an answer: who is actually stealing votes?
Because what the SIR is unearthing is not clerical error or routine mismatch. It is electoral rot on an industrial scale.
Over two crore electors in Bengal are now expected to produce documents to retain their names on the voters’ list. This alone should set alarm bells ringing. Democracies don’t casually summon two crore citizens to prove they exist. That happens only when the voter rolls themselves resemble a work of fiction.
The numbers coming out of the SIR drive are staggering—and frankly absurd.
Start with the basics. 58 lakh forms remain unreturned. That’s not apathy; that’s a parallel electorate evaporating the moment scrutiny begins. Then 13.5 lakh voters got their own gender wrong—an error rate that would be comical if it weren’t electorally dangerous.
Dig deeper and the picture becomes grotesque.
Nearly 20 lakh voters above the age of 45 did not exist in the 2002 electoral rolls. Were they all late bloomers to citizenship? Or is the voters’ list being quietly inflated over the decades with names that appear only when elections arrive?
The family trees are even more revealing. 85 lakh voter forms carry dubious or mismatched fathers’ names. In 13.5 lakh cases, the father and mother share the same name. In 9 lakh cases, the age gap between father and voter exceeds 50 years; in 12 lakh cases, it is an impossible 15 years. Apparently, Bengal has discovered time travel—or a miraculous reproductive biology that science has yet to record.
It gets better. Or worse.
24 lakh male voters are recorded as having more than six children each. 3.5 lakh “grandfathers” are under the age of 40. These aren’t marginal anomalies; they are systemic fabrications. No serious administrator can dismiss this as data-entry fatigue.
And remember, this is not happening in a vacuum. This is West Bengal, ruled uninterrupted for over a decade by the Trinamool Congress, a party that routinely accuses the BJP of “democracy murder” while presiding over one of the most dubious electoral ecosystems in the country.
Let’s be clear: the Election Commission did not invent these inconsistencies. It merely looked closely—and the façade collapsed.
Predictably, the response from TMC and Congress has followed a familiar script. Instead of explaining how millions of biologically impossible voters found their way onto the rolls, the outrage is directed at the process of verification. The SIR, we are told, is “disenfranchisement.” Asking for documents is “authoritarian.” Cleaning voter lists is suddenly “anti-poor.”
This is political gaslighting at its finest.
No democracy survives on bloated rolls. No fair election can coexist with ghost voters, cloned parents, and age-defying grandfathers. And no party genuinely confident of popular support fears scrutiny this violently.
If the BJP were the “vote chor,” as endlessly alleged, why would it push for verification that risks deletion rather than addition? Why would it welcome hearings where two crore individuals must prove citizenship with documents, knowing the political cost?
The uncomfortable truth is this: vote theft thrives not where elections are monitored, but where scrutiny is resisted.
The SIR in Bengal has ripped the mask off a long-suspected reality—that electoral manipulation doesn’t always happen on polling day. Sometimes, it happens quietly, patiently, name by name, year after year, inside the voters’ list itself.
So the question must now be asked plainly, without slogans or spin:
When fake voters vanish the moment documents are demanded, who exactly was benefitting from their presence all these years?
And more importantly, who is afraid of the truth coming out?
