The number of voters deleted in the draft electoral rolls for Bengal published earlier this week exceeds the victory margin in more than 50 per cent of the seats that the BJP had won in the 2021 Assembly polls, analysis of the data shows.

This includes leader of Opposition in the Assembly Suvendu Adhikari’s Nandigram, from where he had defeated chief minister Mamata Banerjee by 1,956 votes. The number of voters deleted in this East Midnapore constituency is 10,599.

The BJP had won 77 seats in the last Assembly polls, which were held four years before the Election Commission launched the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls.

After the draft rolls were published this Tuesday, the BJP’s victory margin is lower than the total voters (dead, missing and permanently shifted) deleted in 42 of the 77 seats it had won in 2021.

So far over 58 lakh names have been deleted from the voter list in Bengal.

In these four years, seven seats from the BJP’s kitty have fallen into the Trinamool’s lap in subsequent by-elections necessitated by resignations and defections, which has further eroded the edge that the opposition party in the state claimed to possess.

Take the three seats of Cooch Behar North, Cooch Behar South and Dinhata in North Bengal’s Cooch Behar district. The BJP won the Dinhata seat by just 57 votes in 2021; the number of voters deleted is 16,442.

In the two Assembly seats in Cooch Behar town, Cooch Behar North and South, the BJP’s victory margin was 14, 615 and 4,931 respectively. The number of voters deleted is 14,652 Cooch Behar North and 12,253 in South.

North Bengal has turned into a stronghold for the BJP since the 2019 Lok Sabha election. In 2021, a total of 23 of the 77 seats the party had won came from north Bengal. In 10 of these seats, the BJP’s victory margin is lower than the voters deleted.

Even in south Bengal districts where the BJP had made inroads – like Nadia, North 24 Parganas, Hooghly, East Midnapore, West Midnapore, Bankura, Purulia and Burdwan – there have been huge deletions.

In the industrial belt of Burdwan, the deletions in Asansol South and Kulti, both held by the BJP, are over 13,000. The victory margin in Asansol South was 4,487 and it was a mere 679 in Kulti.

Bengal BJP president and Rajya Sabha MP Samik Bhattacharya said more names would be deleted when the final rolls are published in February ahead of the Assembly polls.

“So far we have only got the names of dead, missing and shifted voters. These are the voters that the Trinamool used in the local body polls and in the other elections. After the first round, the Trinamool is at a disadvantage. Once the full list is ready, we will get to know who stands where,” Bhattacharya told The Telegraph Online.

The BJP is counting on the over-one-crore voters whose enumeration forms have been marked by the Election Commission as having “logical discrepancies.”

The Bengal BJP leaders argued that the deletions would impact the ruling Trinamool more than the BJP.

“We are not in power. We do not have the organisational strength and the administrative backing to carry out electoral manipulations,” said a senior Bengal BJP leader.

Former BJP Bengal president Dilip Ghosh, however, felt there would be some impact for the party in the urban and industrial areas where the number of voter deletions is high, such as Kharagpur Sadar.

The BJP had won the seat in 2021 with a margin of 3,771 votes; 43,994 voters have been deleted in the draft electoral roll.

“Urban areas like Kharagpur town have witnessed high levels of migration because of Trinamool’s absence of focus on industrialisation and employment,” said Ghosh. “More voters will be deleted once the exercise is completed. The Trinamool being in power will be at a disadvantage once the process is completed.”

Political analyst Subhamay Maitra agreed with the BJP’s line of thinking.

“The BJP is not in power in Bengal. They are not in a position to dictate the process of voting. The ruling party is always at an advantage in using dead and missing voters. In the seats that BJP won they could because Trinamool’s manipulation of the electoral rolls did not work. There would be other local factors as well,” Maitra said.

The BJP in Delhi and Bengal had pushed hard for SIR in the state, primarily to cleanse the voters list of undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, whom the BJP dubs as “infiltrators.”

The BJP had used the same plank of infiltration successfully in neighbouring Bihar.

In his virtual address to BJP supporters at Ranaghat on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi again raked up the issue of infiltrators.

“The Trinamool says ‘Go Back Modi.’ They do not say go back to these infiltrators. These infiltrators want to capture Bengal and Trinamool protects them. That is why they opposed the SIR,” he said.

The question of infiltrators was neither settled in Bihar, nor has it been settled in Bengal yet.