Like the Bihar elections in November 2024, the current round of Assembly elections is also being preceded by the exclusionary campaign of Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls. In every state SIR is resulting in large scale exclusion of voters and shrinking of the electoral roll. The reduction has been the lowest in Kerala, but even here the electoral roll has been reduced by close to one million or 3 percent. By contrast, Tamil Nadu witnessed a massive 12 percent shrinking with the elimination of 74 lakh names bringing the electoral roll down from 6.2 crore to 5.5 crore. West Bengal has already witnessed deletion of more than six million voters, but the future of another six million voters is still 'under adjudication'.
Indeed, the opaque and arbitrary nature of the SIR process can be best understood in West Bengal. When the first draft roll was published after voters were linked back to the 2002 base electoral roll, 5.8 million names were excluded on grounds of death, permanent migration or duplicate entries. But what began after that initial phase was mass harassment and targeted exclusion of voters. In Muslim-dominated constituencies of Malda and Murshidabad, where only 2 percent voters were deleted in the first draft, the cases of half of the electorate now await adjudication for a second round of potential exclusion. And what is even more galling is that poll dates have been announced keeping these six million voters on hold as though their voting right does not matter, their votes do not count in the much touted 'festival of democracy'. Voters who have survived the SIR purge must use their vote to punish the Modi government for this SIR assault on India's electoral democracy.
Of these four poll-bound states, the BJP is currently in power only in Assam. The Assam Chief Minister has emerged as one of the BJP's most toxic peddlers of hate, who now openly incites violence against Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam. Under his government Assam has also turned into a grazing land for unregulated corporate plunder. In West Bengal the BJP is pulling out all the stops to grab power. Just before the announcement of elections, the Modi government transferred the controversial Tamil Nadu Governor N Ravi, who was condemned by the Supreme Court for his unconstitutional acts, to West Bengal. And immediately after the announcement, the EC has initiated a process of complete administrative takeover in the poll-bound state. Even in Tamil Nadu and Kerala where there is no prospect of a BJP victory in the foreseeable future, the aggression of the Modi government and the Sangh brigade is intensifying by the day.
For defenders of democracy and the Constitution, the Assembly elections must therefore be taken up as an anti-fascist platform of political mobilisation. From April 1, the government is going to enforce the new labour codes of slavery. There are already signs of growing workers' unrest against attempts to lengthen the work day. The agenda of the 12 February general strike should be taken up as the common election agenda. The disastrous implications of the escalating US-Israel war on Iran are already being felt quite sharply in India. The surrender of the Modi government to the US-Israel axis is not just a blot on India's foreign policy, it is a direct blow to the interests of India and our common people - farmers who will be hit hard by the trade deal with the US, expatriate workers who are trapped in West Asia and every ordinary Indian who feels the heat of the fuel crisis and soaring prices. The elections must also be treated as an anti-war campaign platform.
All the poll-bound states have been vibrant centres of Left movement in India. Beyond the immediate electoral context and outcome, we must work hard for strengthening the fighting capacity of the communist movement in all these states. There is no uniform alliance pattern in these states, but revolutionary communists must intervene in these elections to strengthen the people's movement and weaken the fascist grip over India. To this end, for the first time CPI(ML) will have a statewide electoral understanding with the CPI(M) and Left Front in West Bengal. In Assam the party will have partial understanding with the Congress, and in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala the party will field a few candidates in select constituencies while extending general support to the DMK-led coalition in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and the LDF in Kerala.
