India: The forthcoming Assembly elections — Challenges before defenders of democracy (plus Defeat the conspiracy to steal the voting right of the people)
First published at Liberation.
On 15 March, Election Commission announced the election schedule for Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and West Bengal Assemblies. Assam, Kerala and Puducherry will vote on 9 April, Tamil Nadu on 23 April and West Bengal will vote in two phases, on 23 and 29 April. The counting will happen on 4 May which means the people of Kerala, Puducherry and Assam will have to wait for nearly a month for their votes to be counted! Those who still support EVMs for polling for the belief that EVM-based polling facilitates faster counting of votes and declaration of results should take note of this time gap between voting and counting.
Like the Bihar elections in November 2024, the current round of Assembly elections is also being preceded by the exclusionary campaign of Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls. In every state SIR is resulting in large scale exclusion of voters and shrinking of the electoral roll. The reduction has been the lowest in Kerala, but even here the electoral roll has been reduced by close to one million or 3 percent. By contrast, Tamil Nadu witnessed a massive 12 percent shrinking with the elimination of 74 lakh names bringing the electoral roll down from 6.2 crore to 5.5 crore. West Bengal has already witnessed deletion of more than six million voters, but the future of another six million voters is still 'under adjudication'.
Indeed, the opaque and arbitrary nature of the SIR process can be best understood in West Bengal. When the first draft roll was published after voters were linked back to the 2002 base electoral roll, 5.8 million names were excluded on grounds of death, permanent migration or duplicate entries. But what began after that initial phase was mass harassment and targeted exclusion of voters. In Muslim-dominated constituencies of Malda and Murshidabad, where only 2 percent voters were deleted in the first draft, the cases of half of the electorate now await adjudication for a second round of potential exclusion. And what is even more galling is that poll dates have been announced keeping these six million voters on hold as though their voting right does not matter, their votes do not count in the much touted 'festival of democracy'. Voters who have survived the SIR purge must use their vote to punish the Modi government for this SIR assault on India's electoral democracy.
Of these four poll-bound states, the BJP is currently in power only in Assam. The Assam Chief Minister has emerged as one of the BJP's most toxic peddlers of hate, who now openly incites violence against Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam. Under his government Assam has also turned into a grazing land for unregulated corporate plunder. In West Bengal the BJP is pulling out all the stops to grab power. Just before the announcement of elections, the Modi government transferred the controversial Tamil Nadu Governor N Ravi, who was condemned by the Supreme Court for his unconstitutional acts, to West Bengal. And immediately after the announcement, the EC has initiated a process of complete administrative takeover in the poll-bound state. Even in Tamil Nadu and Kerala where there is no prospect of a BJP victory in the foreseeable future, the aggression of the Modi government and the Sangh brigade is intensifying by the day.
For defenders of democracy and the Constitution, the Assembly elections must therefore be taken up as an anti-fascist platform of political mobilisation. From April 1, the government is going to enforce the new labour codes of slavery. There are already signs of growing workers' unrest against attempts to lengthen the work day. The agenda of the 12 February general strike should be taken up as the common election agenda. The disastrous implications of the escalating US-Israel war on Iran are already being felt quite sharply in India. The surrender of the Modi government to the US-Israel axis is not just a blot on India's foreign policy, it is a direct blow to the interests of India and our common people — farmers who will be hit hard by the trade deal with the US, expatriate workers who are trapped in West Asia and every ordinary Indian who feels the heat of the fuel crisis and soaring prices. The elections must also be treated as an anti-war campaign platform.
All the poll-bound states have been vibrant centres of Left movement in India. Beyond the immediate electoral context and outcome, we must work hard for strengthening the fighting capacity of the communist movement in all these states. There is no uniform alliance pattern in these states, but revolutionary communists must intervene in these elections to strengthen the people's movement and weaken the fascist grip over India. To this end, for the first time CPI(ML) will have a statewide electoral understanding with the CPI(M) and Left Front in West Bengal. In Assam the party will have partial understanding with the Congress, and in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala the party will field a few candidates in select constituencies while extending general support to the DMK-led coalition in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and the LDF in Kerala.
Defeat the conspiracy to steal the voting right of the people
First published at ML Update.
With nominations for the two-phase West Bengal Assembly elections drawing to a close, the electoral roll has been declared 'frozen' for these elections. And with this, electoral democracy, as we have known it since the first elections held in 1952, has also been shelved in the deep freeze.
Several states have now undergone the traumatic experience of what the Election Commission of India calls SIR or Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll. In the name of a grand fool proof updating of the electoral roll involving removing names of deceased voters, voters with multiple entries or voters who have permanently shifted from their original place of enrolment, millions of voters have been deleted from the electoral roll in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal. By the time SIR covers the whole of India, the world would have witnessed the biggest ever electoral purge.
While the scale of deletion of voters is huge in all states, what is happening in West Bengal is truly shocking with the voting right of millions of voters being suspended for no fault of their own. The initial scale of deletion in West Bengal was comparable to what we had witnessed in Bihar — 5.8 million voters out of a pre-SIR electorate of 76 million. But what started next turned out to be an unprecedented saga of mass harassment and targeted exclusion.
In West Bengal, the ECI applied an extra set of filters to detect what it called cases of 'logical discrepancy'. Using untested software and AI tools, the EC claimed to detect some 15 million such cases, eventually narrowing it down to nearly 10 million. These voters were all asked to attend hearings and submit additional documents. Another half a million deletions followed and six million were referred to adjudication. The task of electoral roll finalisation quietly became a judicial business.
The adjudication of these six million voters has produced an excessive rate of exclusion: nearly forty five percent. The scale apart, what is more scandalous about this process of adjudication and resultant deletion is the hugely disproportionate exclusion of Muslims. In some constituencies of Muslim-dominated districts like Murshidabad and Malda, the initial exclusion rate of 2-5 percent jumped ten to twentyfold to reach the 40-50 percent mark.
The pattern has been glaring even in districts with average levels of Muslim population. Let us consider, for example, the Nandigram constituency where Mamata Banerjee suffered a shock defeat in 2021 to the outgoing leader of the opposition in the West Bengal Assembly Suvendu Adhikari. Nandigram has some 25 percent Muslim population. In the first SIR list published in end December, 10,604 names were deleted of which Muslims accounted for 33.3 percent, one out of every three. But now in the supplementary list covering additional deletion of 2,826 voters, Muslims number 2,700 or a stunning 95.5 percent of further excluded voters! AltNews has found similar patterns in its intensive study of two constituencies in Kolkata — Mamata Banerjee's current seat Bhabanipur and Ballygunge.
When the issue of adjudication came up before the Supreme Court, the judges stressed the availability of another redressal forum and option for correction - the tribunal. We were told that nineteen tribunals would be set up to consider the appeals of voters deleted through the adjudication process. It sounded fine except that the tribunals existed only on paper. But with tribunals yet to really get going, how can 27 lakh excluded voters who are very much alive and documented get any justice before the elections? The court now offers the consolation that if the appeals are upheld, excluded voters could always vote in future elections! Justice delayed is justice denied. If the voting right of a citizen is suspended because of the procedural complexities of the joint operation of the Election Commission and the judiciary, it is nothing but an effective disenfranchisement of an eligible elector. And when millions of voters are excluded, the entire election becomes unfair and vitiated. Adjudication and verification can be deferred, but there can be no postponing or dilution of the principle of universal adult suffrage.
When the SIR was launched, the credo was 'no eligible voter shall be left out'. Now with twenty seven lakh voters who had voted in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections being denied their rights, the eligibility principle has been turned on its head. The vote is no longer a fundamental right for citizens in West Bengal, it is a matter of privilege and luck. An election held by denying the voting right of millions of voters is evidently a farce, an unprecedented farce right at the most fundamental level of finalisation of electoral roll.
How do we fight against this farce? Many are arguing that participation in such a farcical election amounts to legitimising this unconstitutional exercise. But can a token boycott provide an effective political answer? Or will it leave the field open for the power-grabbers? From demonetisation and electoral bonds (since declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court) to CAA and SIR — most steps of the Modi government have been illogical and blatantly discriminatory. When citizens are forced to engage with processes shaped and distorted by these measures, they do not legitimise the wrongs, nor do they give up the struggle against these acts of injustice. More than any other state, the SIR process has become a major issue in West Bengal. That the BJP has launched such a massive onslaught on the fundamentals of the electoral system to grab power in West Bengal is now a glaring fact and the election campaign must be directed squarely against this SIR onslaught. Those who seek to purge the electors to grab power must be given a fitting rebuff.