West Bengal is due to vote for a new Assembly on April 23 and 29.

The voter lists stands finalised – with one mortal glitch: for the first time in the electoral history of the republic, an Indian’s fundamental right to exercise franchise will, in all likelihood, stand forfeited because of an institutional failure to complete Constitutional due process in stipulated time.

In West Bengal, some 27 lakh residents as of the day remain excluded from the voter list which has come to be foreclosed before inhabitants have had the statutory opportunity to plead their case to a tribunal stipulated by the Supreme Court of India.

To remind ourselves: the Constitution which requires “free and fair” elections to be held as an unamendable “basic feature” of the Constitution qualifies that no election may be deemed to satisfy that condition if even a single eligible voter is left out of the voter list.

An attendant fact: as per reports, the actual character and content of the exclusions appear shamefully coloured, and the honourable Election Commission has been pleased to ascribe the possibility of mayhem explicitly to just one party in the fray – an unprecedented political immersion of the Constitutional body in the power equations of the day.

Shameful and deeply worrying as all that is, what threatens Indian democracy with institutional collapse is the cavalier way in which the inability (sic) of both the Election Commission and the honourable Supreme Court to meet the necessary stipulations of the constitutional requirement in the West Bengal case seem to be acquiring a finality.

Nor does the remark by an honourable Bench that those excluded now will not lose their right to exercise franchise forever do anything to meet the injunction about “free and fair” elections and the inalienable fundamental right of the Indian citizen to vote her choice for a new government.

The top Court we understand is scheduled to meet again on April 13 (Jallianwala and Baisakhi day). All those good Indians who remain devoted to the principle of democracy and proud of India’s record thus far in the matter will not but hope and expect that the honourable Justices will find a way to forestall the enormity that now assails democracy in West Bengal, and thereby in the republic.

Dare we say that the issue does not lend itself to a superior nonchalance, or a resort to philosophical acceptance.

We either are a democracy or we are not; the right to vote for a government is the only right that puts the immiserated Indian on an equal footing with the money bags and sundrcy scions of the power structure.

If that too is subverted for reasons of institutional failure or complicity, not much remains that we may continue to sing praises of.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

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