Satyabrata Ghosh examines West Bengal’s 2026 Assembly Election, voter deletions, AI-driven electoral discrepancies, Supreme Court observations, and the psychological climate shaping public response amid intense political polarization, legal uncertainty, and exit poll predictions favouring a fiercely contested BJP-TMC battle.

As West Bengal’s 2026 Assembly Election moves toward its conclusion, fresh exit polls released by major networks suggest an intensely polarised contest between the BJP and the ruling TMC, with several projections indicating a possible BJP edge while others forecast Mamata Banerjee’s return. The election has also been overshadowed by controversy over AI-assisted voter roll revisions, mass deletions, tribunal interventions, and legal scrutiny surrounding electoral legitimacy.

Compared to other parts of our country since independence, the voters of West Bengal have historically been slow in bringing change through their mandate. At the time of this writing, the state is undergoing the second phase of the 2026 Assembly Election.
The incumbency of TMC has remained a major undertone across the demography. However, what distinguishes the electoral process this time is the fallout of the Special Intensive Revision of the voters. Allegedly, the Election Commission of India has used an untested software called ERONET, which, powered by an app called BLO with the AI-based facial matching systems, had culled almost ninety lakhs of voters in the state.

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The AI Controversy and Electoral Roll Deletions
In 2002, when the intensive revision was last conducted countrywide, the assigned Officer visited every home of the voters at the booth level and ticked out the names of dead persons and those who had changed their home address. This time in 2026, however, the detection of duplicate voters is done by AI. While it had cleaned the non-existent voters from the list, a huge number of living persons became victims of this artificial intelligence.

According to a report published by the Reporters’ Collective, ECI had breached its own guidelines and previous practices before the Bihar election in 2025. In the final Bihar list, it was found that more than 1.32 crore voters of different families, castes, and communities were bundled and registered in groups of 20 or more at dubious and fictitious addresses in the final Bihar list. At least 20 households were found in which more than 650 people have been clubbed and registered wrongly.

Such large-scale errors and possible fraud could have been detected had the ECI run its de-duplication software on the draft voter roll before finalizing it. Instead of that, the same software was run to determine the intensive revision process of electoral rolls in West Bengal and the rest of the states, including union territories.

While sweeping out the dead voters and the possibilities of duplication, West Bengal witnesses the surge of D-voters (‘D’ referring to both doubtful and deleted), a new adage was introduced by ECI— ‘logical discrepancy’. Among the ninety lakh and more voters dropped out of the final list, at least fifty-seven lakh voters pleaded for their legitimate inclusion.
Supreme Court Intervention and Tribunal Proceedings

Mamata Banerjee, the incumbent Chief Minister of West Bengal, appeared at the Supreme Court and made it clear that there is a breach of trust between the ECI and the state. The CJI admitted that the trust factor is missing and appointed the High Court to mediate.
For more than a month, about 700 retired judges have been invited by the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court to take the final call about such a huge deletion of voters. Before the last date of withdrawal of candidatures, the judges came out to announce that there are discrepancies in twenty-seven lakh cases, in which the voters are allowed to appeal to the tribunal.

In the last hearings of the related cases, the Supreme Court saw. While the defense urged for certainty about the rightful voters’ inclusion, one of the Justices in the bench remarked that the right of not voting in this particular election doesn’t imply exclusion of the voters from the Voter List.

This is one of the most unprecedented observations about certainly the most unprecedented case in the tradition of Article 326 of the Indian Constitution. The universal adult franchise guarantees the right to vote to every Indian citizen who is eighteen years old. The recent observation of the Supreme Court judge knowingly violating the mandate of our Constitution regarding the 2026 Assembly Election in West Bengal.
Because the current tenure of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly ends on May 7, 2026, the said observation of the SC judge appeared prudent to some. However, they knowingly or unknowingly ignore the fact that almost one-tenth of the total voters in the state are deprived of casting their respective votes.

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Questions Around Electoral Legitimacy
While 19 tribunals were formed and commenced in pen and paper, the outcomes about the inclusion of voters remained unknown to the public till April 28 night. It was on the morning of April 29, the second and final phase of voting date, when people came to know the news that the tribunal consented 1,468 appeals out of twenty-seven lakhs to be included in the supplementary voter list.
This news raises the legal validity of the current West Bengal Assembly Election. One way or the other, the validations by the Tribunals also validate the discrepancy in the entire SIR system. The patterns of the ECI’s deletion by AI also corroborate with the BJP’s agenda of the NRC. In their incessant campaigns for votes in and around West Bengal, the common demand reiterated by the top echelon of BJP leadership had been the exclusion of ‘ghoospetias’, the infiltrator.

In an incumbent election environment in the state, such loud resonances of ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide are looming large with an anticipation that the ruling dispensation must change. Be that as it may, any tilt in the public mandate towards the BJP would set in motion the reconsideration and reopening of the NRC in West Bengal. The introduction of the Uniform Civil Code and the One Nation One Vote Bill are also on the horizon.
The Stockholm Syndrome Analogy

The situation for voters in West Bengal is synonymous with the infamous Stockholm Syndrome. Coined after the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery in Stockholm, it roughly defines the irrational fear of authorities and a paranoid feeling that results in empathy toward the captor. This is a coping mechanism where the victims view their abusers as the saviors. And any counter to that is treated as a threat.
In the original instance, the bank employees of Stockholm remained captured for six days. Within that period, these ordinary men and women overrode their mortal fear and defended their captors who took them hostage.
In West Bengal, the passive repression and larger-than-life mega campaigns for an extended period of more than six months seem enough for the victims to behave like ‘fawns’ who lose perspective. In a crisis like this, the blurring of lines between abusers and saviors can well lead to more trauma in the near future.

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