Speaking on Tuesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah disputed assertions put forward by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, saying the opposition's concerns over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls overlooked the BJP's own relationship with the electorate. Shah told Gandhi that a more productive course would be for Gandhi to examine his party's own standing rather than attribute that relationship to the revision exercise.

Addressing a gathering in Delhi, Shah drew on the Congress party's voting record across multiple states — pointing specifically to recent by-election outcomes in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry — to challenge opposition critiques directed at the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He posed a direct question to Gandhi asking whether those electoral results reflected what Gandhi had termed an "SIR."

Shah told the gathering that some self-reflection was in order for the opposition party. He pointed to the Congress party's inability to secure a state-level victory in a region where it had governed for four decades, adding that the pattern pointed to a need for the party to examine its own direction.

Pointing to by-election results across West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry, Shah told the audience that the Congress party had not secured a single seat across those three contests.

On the party's performance in West Bengal, Shah noted that the Bharatiya Janata Party had taken the Naogaon constituency away from the Congress party, with its candidate finishing ahead by a margin of 1,42,000 votes. Turning to specific constituency-level figures, Shah drew attention to Nandigram, where the BJP's candidate secured roughly 76 per cent of the total votes polled and built a lead of approximately 1,22,000 ballots. He added that in Rejinagar, West Bengal, the same party's candidate had outpaced the Trinamool Congress nominee by upwards of 75,000 votes to claim that seat.

Puducherry also drew a mention from Shah, where the AINRC — a partner within the NDA alliance — secured the constituency by a margin of 8,482 votes. The party's vote share, he noted, came in at roughly 22 per cent of the total ballots cast.

Those remarks were delivered at a time when the opposition had put forward both a challenge to the SIR exercise and a set of questions about how electoral procedures had been conducted. Shah pushed back on the notion that changes to voter rolls were solely responsible for the BJP's wins at the ballot box. The attribution of the BJP's and Modi's electoral fortunes entirely to an "SIR" factor represents one reading of a genuinely disputed question.