Administrative Sabotage

West Bengal’s voter-roll clean-up has exposed a government that treats electoral integrity not as a civic duty but as a political inconvenience.

West Bengal

A democracy’s health can often be measured not by how loudly its leaders invoke the ballot, but by how scrupulously they guard the machinery behind it. In West Bengal, that machinery is now grinding audibly. The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has become a stress test of the Mamata Banerjee government’s commitment to clean elections. The results so far are damning.

Consider the numbers. Of the 4,600 micro-observers appointed by the ECI to supervise hearings on claims and objections, 778 failed to even attend a mandatory training session in Kolkata on December 24. These were not party cadres or political appointees, but Group A and Group B central government employees, drawn deliberately from outside the state’s political ecosystem, though posted within it, to act as neutral sentinels. Their collective absence was so brazen that the Commission was forced to issue show-cause notices, threatening disciplinary action and even suspension. For an exercise as procedurally modest as voter verification, such defiance is extraordinary. However, this seems to be familiar in Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal.

The hearings will determine the fate of some 32 lakh ‘unmapped’ voters, citizens whose names, or whose parents’ names, did not appear in the 2002 SIR list as well as thousands more flagged for logical inconsistencies. The process is pure housekeeping.

Discrepancies in spelling, age or parentage are expected to be resolved while voters who miss a hearing are to get another chance. All documents are uploaded digitally. If anything, the process bends over backwards to err on the side of inclusion.

Yet it is precisely this insistence on procedure that seems to have unsettled the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government. From the outset, the party has alleged that micro-observers were being ‘imported’ from other states, a claim swiftly rebutted by the Chief Electoral Officer.

More telling is the quiet resistance on the ground. Micro-observers are meant to sit at 11 tables in each of the state’s 294 Assembly constituencies, alongside Booth Level Officers, supervisors and Electoral Registration Officers, examining enumeration forms and correcting errors. Their unexplained absence threatens to slow or derail the process.

The exclusion of Booth Level Agents (BLAs) - party representatives - from the hearings has further sharpened the confrontation. The ECI insists this is to “avoid unnecessary chaos” and ensure transparency, since all documents are uploaded and nothing can be hidden. That logic is sound. BLAs, unlike BLOs, are partisan actors who were already involved in collecting documents. But for the ruling TMC, accustomed to embedding itself at every stage of the electoral pipeline, even a modest reduction in visibility can feel like disenfranchisement.

Mamata Banerjee has long styled herself as a ‘defender’ of democracy against an ‘overbearing’ Centre. The reality offers a sobering contrast. West Bengal’s recent electoral history, from the uncontested panchayat polls of 2018 to post-poll violence in 2021, has left scars that no amount of populist flourish can disguise. The SIR exercise was an opportunity to restore some confidence: to show that the state would cooperate fully with an independent constitutional authority, even when it was inconvenient. Instead, it has chosen obstruction.

The same government that rails against alleged voter suppression elsewhere now appears uncomfortable with the idea of voters being properly mapped, verified and documented at home. The same party that claims to speak for the marginalised balks at a process designed to ensure that genuine electors are accurately recorded. Transparency, it seems, is welcome only when it is ornamental. When a state government allows or encourages a culture in which officials feel emboldened to skip training, ignore orders and test the Commission’s patience, it sends a corrosive message about the nature of democracy in West Bengal.

Banerjee and her government are being asked to tidy its rolls. Instead, they are untidying their reputation by such unseemly defiance.