There is something deeply wrong with an election in which the most urgent question is not who should govern, but who gets to vote at all. West Bengal goes to the polls on April 23rd and April 29th carrying a wound that no campaign rally can dress: nearly 91 lakh citizens — roughly the population of Switzerland — have had their names struck from the electoral rolls. Many of them are not ghosts, not duplicates, not illegal migrants. They are farmers in Murshidabad with land deeds older than the Republic itself, and they are being told, in the week before the election, that their democracy cannot find a place for them.
This editorial does not take a position on which party deserves to govern West Bengal. That is, rightly, the decision of its people. What we do take a firm position on is this: any election conducted while valid voters are locked out is not a free and fair election — it is a managed one. The Special Intensive Revision process, whatever its stated intent, has in practice become the defining scandal of this election cycle, and neither the Election Commission nor the Supreme Court has acted with the urgency that a crisis of this scale demands.
The Erasure Nobody Talks About Enough
The numbers are staggering, but numbers have a way of becoming abstract. What is not abstract is Md Abdur Rob Shamim of Dakshin Mahadeb Nagar, whose family has held land deeds since 1942, standing before a reporter with documents in his hand, unable to comprehend why his name remains “under adjudication.” It is not abstract for the 12,000 voters of Murshidabad alone who face this limbo less than a week before Phase One voting. The electoral roll has been frozen. The tribunals are overwhelmed. The Supreme Court declined interim relief, ruling that those with pending appeals simply cannot vote — as though missing an election is a minor administrative inconvenience rather than a fundamental democratic right.
The BJP calls the deletion exercise a necessary purge of fake and illegal voters. The TMC calls it targeted disenfranchisement of minorities. Both framings are politically convenient and both are partially true — which is precisely the problem. When the legitimacy of the voter list itself is contested along communal lines, the election result, whatever it is, will be contested too. We are not just risking an unfair election. We are building the architecture of a permanent grievance.
The RG Kar Wound, Still Open
Eighteen months after a trainee doctor was raped and murdered inside R.G. Kar Medical College, the case has migrated from the streets to the campaign trail — but its moral core remains unaddressed. The protests that erupted in August 2024 were not merely about one crime. They were about the normalisation of impunity, the casual disregard for institutional safety, and the perception that in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal, certain crimes carry political costs only if they become politically embarrassing. The incumbent government’s response — initially dismissive, then defensive — became its single greatest liability with urban, educated, and women voters.
The BJP has not offered a serious reckoning with women’s safety either. Its campaign has weaponised the RG Kar case without engaging with the structural reforms that might prevent the next one. Neither party has committed to independent oversight of institutional complaints, meaningful police accountability, or survivor-centered legal reform. Women voters in this state deserve better than to be treated as swing votes to be activated through outrage and then forgotten.
Identity Is Not a Policy
The collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh, the rise of Jamaat-e-Islami in that country’s elections, and the documented persecution of Hindus across the border have created a genuine, legitimate anxiety among Bengali Hindus that no honest observer should dismiss. These are real events with real consequences.
But there is a difference between legitimate concern and electoral exploitation. The BJP has shown, in constituency after constituency, that it is far more interested in the electoral utility of Hindu fear than in the policy architecture that would actually address demographic anxieties, border security, or the integration of displaced minority communities. Slogans move crowds at rallies. They do not move water to villages in Purulia, or jobs to the young men of Bankura who constitute Bengal’s most volatile and most neglected electorate.
Meanwhile, TMC’s emphasis on Bengali identity and nativist pride has become a shield behind which governance failures hide. Fifteen years of rule have produced welfare schemes, but also a school recruitment scam of breathtaking scale, a culture of local-level political violence that neither party will seriously condemn, and a state apparatus where the line between the party and the government has, in many districts, ceased to exist.
What Bengal Actually Needs to Debate
SC communities are drifting away from TMC. Young voters are disengaged from both major parties. North Bengal feels, as it has for decades, like a colony of Kolkata’s political imagination. West Bengal has one of the lowest per capita incomes among major Indian states. It has young people leaving — for Pune, for Bengaluru, for the Gulf — because staying means accepting either unemployment or the patronage of local political machines.
These are the issues that should dominate the final days of this campaign. They are not. And that is not merely a failure of politicians — it is a failure of the political culture that voters, media, and civil society have collectively permitted to flourish.
A Word on What Comes After
Whoever wins on May 4th will inherit a state in which a significant portion of the population believes the election was conducted unfairly. The voter deletion crisis alone ensures that. If TMC wins, it will face renewed accusations of governing through captured institutions. If BJP wins, it will face the charge that it rode demographic fear and disenfranchisement to power. There is no clean outcome available to West Bengal this cycle.
Indian Political Debate 