Bengal's 65-seat faultline: How razor-thin margins, SIR deletions could decide who forms govt

PTI, April 12, 2026, Kolkata : West Bengal's 2026 election may be decided not by the arithmetic of 294 seats that dominate campaign speeches, but by around 65–70 constituencies where victory and defeat are separated by little more than a few booths and where the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has suddenly redrawn the battlefield.

Crucial among those are seats such as Nandigram to Bhabanipur, and regions like the Matua belt of North 24 Parganas and the minority-heavy stretches of Murshidabad and Malda, where the assembly-wise lead in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls was often no more than 8,000 to 15,000 votes.

Several MLAs had scraped through in 2021 in these areas by less than 1,000–8,000 votes, and now, thousands of names have disappeared from the rolls.

This is why, beneath Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's claim that the TMC will return with a bigger mandate than the 215 seats it won in 2021, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah's assertion that the BJP will cross 170 seats from its present tally of 77, both parties are quietly fighting a grimmer battle — one booth, one deleted voter and one marginal constituency at a time.

More than 90.83 lakh names have been deleted across West Bengal till April 7, nearly 11.85 per cent of the electorate identified last October. Of those, 27.16 lakh deletions came from the "under adjudication" category alone.

The epicentre lies in nearly 70 seats across 11 districts. Twenty-five are in Kolkata and the adjoining belt of North 24 Parganas, Howrah and Hooghly.

The rest are in Murshidabad, Malda, Bankura, Purulia, the two Bardhamans and the two Medinipurs. North 24 Parganas alone has 13 such closely fought seats, Murshidabad 10, Bankura–Purulia nine, Howrah–Hooghly eight and the twin Medinipurs and Bardhamans another eight.

The 2021 election showed how narrow the divide had become. Of the 57 seats decided by 8,000 votes or less, the TMC won 29 and the BJP 28. In the 19 seats where the margin was below 3,000, the BJP won 12 and the TMC seven.