Illogical acts: On SIR adjudication, Malda gherao

The gherao of seven judicial officers by a mob in Malda on April 1 marks a disturbing escalation in what is a heated election season in West Bengal. The Supreme Court of India condemned this as a “calculated” attempt to disrupt the trial process. The ECI referred the investigation to the National Investigation Agency and the incident became a flashpoint in the conflict between the Trinamool Congress (TMC)-led State government and the ECI over the Special Intensive Revision exercise and its aftermath. Election-related violence is largely a thing of the past in most states, but this is not the case in West Bengal, where violence is common during any election. This is partly due to the intensity of political conflict. During the period when the Left Front was dominant, elections were battlegrounds between the Left and the TMC for “regional dominance”. The state pioneered panchayati institutions in India, leading to significant politicization even at the local level. Because of a largely rural economy and little industrialization, electoral contests were also about who controlled the power to distribute patronage. Today, the Left Front is a shell of its former self and the administration is dominated by squabbles between the TMC and the BJP; The TMC is using what some scholars call the “franchise model of politics”, leveraging the charisma of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to develop a patronage system with local satraps, and the BJP is trying to import a similar model with its emphasis on Hindutva. This new political conflict brought its own forms of violence.

This year the competition was complicated by SIR. The process continued even after the publication of the revised list, in which the number of voters dropped from 7.6 million to 7.04 million in 2024. Around 60 lakh voters are still being singled out due to “logical inconsistencies” and nearly 40% of the decided cases end in rejections. Judicial officers working under the supervision of the Court eliminate this backlog; It’s an application that would never have reached this stage if ECI had not relied on flawed software to filter out numbering requests. The court has allowed appeals tribunals for people whose names were rejected, but there is uncertainty about whether these tribunals will conclude before the ballot box. As anger mounts over what appears to be significant disenfranchisement (voters and political leaders in the affected areas claim the deletions disproportionately impact the minority Muslim community), resort to illegal methods of protest such as Malda gherao has negatively impacted the electoral process. The ECI’s more voter-friendly approach to the SIR and the Court’s effective interventions could have averted much of the public outrage. West Bengal’s political leaders should tone down the discourse rather than inflame it.