Election Commission must address voter anxieties in Bengal

With only days to go before the electoral rolls are frozen ahead of the contest for West Bengal, a silence and a furore point to an election in which lakhs of voters are still in the dark. This week, the gates of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee National Institute of Water and Sanitation in Kolkata, the designated site for the 19 tribunals that are expected to begin hearings for voters deleted from the pending list of about 60 lakh voters stamped “under adjudication”, remained closed on Day 1. Also this week, in Malda, protesters, angry over the deletion of their names from the electoral rolls after adjudication, gheraoed officials, holding them hostage for several hours. Both the silence that shrouds the building in Kolkata and the outpouring of anger on the Malda street illustrate an election in which many voters are dependent on a protracted decision-making that may not be completed or resolved before voting begins. Large numbers confront possible disenfranchisement because an over-long verification has mutated into a process of exclusion. For them, administrative delay could mean that the constitutional promise enshrined in Article 326  —  that every eligible citizen shall be entitled to be a voter — will not be met.

The Election Commission, which has a storied past record of reaching out to each and every voter, and of erring on the side of voter inclusion, not exclusion, must address these urgent concerns. The Supreme Court, whose interventions during the EC’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls last year in Bihar helped to make the process more responsive to voter predicaments, must not take its eye off West Bengal. From the very beginning, the SIR in Bengal has seemed to be a more layered, or a more complicated, exercise than in other states. Several controversial new features were introduced amid a race against time. In December, the EC appointed 8,100 central government employees as micro-observers to help the Electoral Registration Officers, sparking apprehensions that the former would usurp the power of the EROs. In February, the Court, hearing a legal challenge to the SIR, ordered 500-odd judicial officers to decide the pending cases, without placing any deadline for the adjudication.

To be sure, West Bengal is a state where politicisation and partisanship have created trust deficits, and where it is all too easy to question the impartiality of the referee. Having said that, the EC’s conduct has not assuaged concerns about a free and fair election, only sharpened them. In the days before the first phase of voting begins, the EC must recognise that it cannot afford to let these anxieties deepen. And the Court must step in to prod the election monitor, as it has done before.