Parties Opposed to the SIR Ought to Have Shunned the West Bengal Election. Now They Have Normalised the Deletion of Voters |
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The most consequential message to emerge from the results of the 2026 assembly elections in four states and one Union territory is this: the very idea of universal adult franchise is now dead and buried. Parakala Prabhakar writes with palpable anguish that if the disenfranchisement of 27 lakh legitimate voters in West Bengal does not constitute our gravest concern, then we ought to cease calling ourselves a democracy.
The question is not what the electoral outcome in Bengal might have been had these 27 lakh citizens been allowed to vote. It should worry us that the people of India can now be divided into two categories: those who are granted the right to vote, and those who may be deprived of it from time to time. Has suffrage ceased to be a right and become instead a privilege – a favour conferred through the ‘logical’ procedures devised by a governmental Election Commission?
Just before the assembly elections, the Election Commission undertook the SIR in the state in an unholy haste and pushed nearly 91 lakh names out of the electoral rolls. Data indicates that the presence of a chunk of these voters in the rolls was disadvantageous to the Bharatiya Janata Party. When voters approached the Supreme Court of India seeking restoration to the electoral rolls, they were told with a flat face that their participation in this election........