West Bengal's 2026 election may not be decided across all 294 constituencies but in a tight cluster of 65–70 seats, where margins are wafer-thin and every
booth counts. From Nandigram to Bhabanipur, and across the Matua belt of North 24 Parganas to the minority-heavy stretches of Murshidabad and Malda, these are the battlegrounds where victories have often hinged on just a few thousand votes. With the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls leading to thousands of deletions, the fight in these seats has become even more unpredictable. In Murshidabad and Malda's minority-heavy belts, the 2024 Lok Sabha assembly leads were often just 8,000-15,000 votes. In 2021, several MLAs won here by as little as 1,000-8,000. With thousands of names now gone from the rolls, those margins could vanish overnight. So, even as Mamata Banerjee talks of beating her 215-seat tally and Amit Shah sets a 170-seat target for the BJP, the real battle is unfolding at the booth level, in fragile constituencies, where every deleted vote could tilt the outcome. Also Read: West Bengal SIR Shake-Up: 27 Lakh Voters Axed — Will BJP & TMC's Fortunes Be Dented Equally?
The SIR and its impact
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, PTI reported. 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.
Kulti in Paschim Bardhaman was won by the BJP by just 679 votes. Dantan by 623, Ghatal by 966, Bankura by 1,468, and Nandigram, where Suvendu Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee, by 1,956.
Kulti has seen around 38,000 names deleted -- more than 50 times the victory margin. Nandigram -- the BJP's most symbolic victory and the constituency that turned Adhikari into the saffron camp's key leader -- has witnessed 14,462 deletions, more than seven times the margin by which Banerjee lost there.
In North 24 Parganas and Nadia, where the BJP has tried to build a Hindu refugee-Matua coalition around the citizenship issue, the mismatch between margins and deletions is even starker.
Bongaon South, which the BJP won by around 2,000 votes, has seen nearly 7,000 names deleted. Kalyani, another BJP-held seat won by roughly 2,000 votes, witnessed around 9,000 deletions.
In North 24 Parganas, more than 55 per cent of the names kept under scrutiny were eventually deleted. In Nadia, the figure was nearly 78 per cent.
Where the contest comes down to
The scale of the churn becomes clearer in 44 assembly seats where the number of names struck off the rolls is greater than the margin by which the winner had prevailed in 2021. Before the adjudication process began, there were around 111 assembly segments where the number of voters under scrutiny exceeded the winning margin of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in the segments. Even after the process, deleted voters outnumber the Lok Sabha victory margin in at least 120 assembly seats.
The TMC holds 24 of these seats and the BJP 20, underlining that neither side is insulated from the impact of the revision. The BJP-held list includes emblematic constituencies such as Nandigram and Gaighata.
The cluster is spread across some of the state's most politically sensitive districts. Purba and Paschim Bardhaman and Nadia account for five such seats each. North 24 Parganas and Paschim Medinipur have four each, while Cooch Behar, Dakshin Dinajpur and Murshidabad have three each. Purba Medinipur and Howrah account for two each.
Murshidabad, one of the TMC's strongest districts, saw the sharpest under-adjudication deletions -- 4.55 lakh names. Together with earlier deletions, the district has lost nearly 7.49 lakh voters. North 24 Parganas lost over 12.6 lakh names in the two phases combined, while Malda lost 4.59 lakh. South 24 Parganas saw over 10.91 lakh names disappear and Kolkata alone lost nearly 6.97 lakh.
Of the metropolis' 16 assembly seats, only Beleghata and Bhabanipur are estimated to have recorded SIR deletions lower than the previous victory margin. In every other constituency, deleted names exceed the winning margin.
One of the TMC's safest bastions, Bhabanipur, saw 51,005 names deleted, including 3,893 removed after being kept in the "under consideration" category. Yet, even there, the deletions remain below the scale of the TMC's victories. The party won the seat by around 29,000 votes in 2021, and Mamata Banerjee later retained it in the bypoll with a margin of nearly 58,000.
Dinhata perhaps remains the most dramatic anecdote of West Bengal's volatility. BJP's Nisith Pramanik beat TMC's Udayan Guha there by only 57 votes in 2021. Months later, after a bypoll, Guha returned with a margin of 1.64 lakh.
The assembly elections are set for April 23 and 29, with results announced on May 4.
