The 2026 West Bengal assembly elections were not simply a contest between the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. It represents something qualitatively different – a situation where the ruling party of an elected state government finds itself fighting simultaneously against a political opponent and the institutional apparatus of the Indian state. The cumulative weight of decisions by the Election Commission, central investigative agencies, central armed forces, and a deferential judiciary has made this arguably the most interventionist state election in post-Emergency Indian history.SIR: Disenfranchisement by designThe most consequential instrument of this intervention has been the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The SIR removed around 90 lakh names from the rolls – roughly 12% of the electorate. Over 60 lakh were categorised as absentee or deceased, while the status of 27 lakh remained pending before tribunals. Roughly 65% of those under adjudication were Muslims, with Dalit (Namasudra) Hindus from the Matua community also significantly affected. Women from poorer sections are another targeted group. The ECI framed this as routine “purification,” but West Bengal was treated as a special case without statistical basis – 30 observers deployed here against just four in Uttar Pradesh, 8,000 micro-observers in Bengal and none elsewhere, 95% of all officer transfers across India in this one state. This cannot be explained administratively, and can only be explained politically.The SIR also inverted a foundational democratic principle. By shifting the burden of proof onto voters – requiring them to affirmatively establish their eligibility through documentation – the exercise overturned the presumption of enfranchisement that underlies any genuinely democratic process. The constituency-level data makes the targeting unmistakable: in Nandigram, where Muslims are 25% of the population, over 95% of deleted names were Muslim; in Bhabanipur, where Muslims constitute 20% of voters, 40% of those deleted were Muslim. The exercise was also never presented as neutral by those who designed its political logic. A BJP leader in the Union government explicitly declared that one crore Muslim infiltrators would be removed from the voters’ list. Basically, the ECI provided institutional cover; the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh provided the mandate.SIR: Above and beyond the constitutional mandateThe SIR has no clear legal basis. The term ‘special intensive revision’ does not appear anywhere in the Representation of the People Act. Section 21(3) of the RPA permits a special revision only for a constituency or part of a constituency – not an entire state. The qualifying date used has no statutory foundation either. Article 324, which grants the ECI broad superintendence over elections, is not a reservoir of unlimited power – the ECI must act according to law where law exists, and can act independently only where law is silent. The RPA is not silent but the SIR simply ignores it.The logical contradictions are equally damning. The ECI justified the exercise on demographic changes accumulated over 20 years – yet compressed it into weeks, months before a scheduled election, rather than earlier, as both law and common sense requires. Buried within the process was a category called “logical discrepancy” – a vague administrative classification applied to voters whose papers were otherwise in order, allowing their names to be flagged for deletion without any clear evidentiary standard. It is through this category that the exercise shed its bureaucratic cover most completely: a valid document could be held against you if an official deemed something internally inconsistent. The burden of disproving an official’s judgment fell on the voter, not the other way around.We must remember that the RPA provides only for determining ordinary residency – not citizenship. By requiring voters to establish citizenship through legacy linkage and documentary chains, the ECI has conducted a citizenship audit it has no legal authority to conduct. The SIR was not roll maintenance. It was an NRC by another name – invented, designed, and executed by the ECI alone.The arithmetic of targeted deletionThe SIR’s consequences map with striking precision onto the seats BJP won by the thinnest margins in 2021. Of 57 seats decided by 8,000 votes or fewer, TMC won 29 and BJP 28. In the 19 seats decided by under 3,000 votes, BJP won 12. Kulti was won by 679 votes and has seen 38,000 names deleted – 50 times the winning margin. Nandigram, won by 1,956 votes, has seen 14,462 deletions. Dantan was decided by 623 votes, Ghatal by 966, Bankura by 1,468. Before adjudication began, around 111 assembly segments had more voters under scrutiny than the winning margin of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in those segments.The SIR gives BJP a tactical push in precisely those constituencies where the margin is thin and outcome may go any which way. (Of course, whether this tactic would generate loss of citizenship anxiety in those who have not been deleted and push them towards TMC simply from a motive of self preservation, remains to be seen.)The opaque addition of new votersCompounding the asymmetry is what happened on the other side of the ledger. Just before polling, the ECI quietly added nearly 7 lakh new voters – 3.22 lakh for Phase 1 and 3.88 lakh for Phase 2 – while declining to release any demographic breakdown. Millions were deleted with granular scrutiny; hundreds of thousands were added without a word of explanation. Who these 7 lakh voters are, and why their addition required none of the transparency demanded of deletions, remains unanswered.Tribunals: The illusion of remedyThe appellate mechanism was a cruel joke. Lakhs of cases were to be decided in a matter of days. Only 139 voters were heard in time for Phase 1, and 1,474 were heard ahead of Phase 2. Nearly all made it, but much over 27 lakh were not even heard. These voters were not absent or dead – they submitted documents, attended hearings, produced passports. But the appeals went unheard, not just for the poor and marginalised, but across the social spectrum.The ECI’s unaccountable powerWhat makes the ECI’s conduct qualitatively different is not just scale but complete freedom from accountability. The ECI secretly prepared a list of nearly over 1,300 individuals across the two phases – predominantly TMC workers and elected representatives including councillors, panchayat members, MLAs, and MPs – and directed their preventive arrest ahead of polling. The Calcutta high court questioned whether the ECI had the right to direct arrests at all: “Can the ECI take away people’s freedom? Can the ECI abdicate the duties of a magistrate? Nowhere in the country is this happening – only in West Bengal.” The arrest list, the ED-NIA-CBI raids on TMC leaders, and the agency-driven criminalisation of the opposition before voters have had their say reflect the use of legal instruments to pre-emptively designate political opponents as criminals. There is no appeal against ECI orders during the Model Code of Conduct. Its observers wield quasi-judicial powers. Its directions override state government authority. Unelected and unaccountable, virtually outside of any judicial check, the ECI is acting as the super government of West Bengal. The TMC is among parties which have twice moved impeachment motions against the ECI’s top official in parliament, accusing him of favouring the BJP – an extraordinary step with no modern precedent, signalling the complete collapse of institutional trust in the Commission. A force occupation: Central Forces and the sidelining of state policeThe ECI deployed 2,407 companies of Central Armed Police Forces – approximately 2.4 lakh personnel – across West Bengal, more than three times the 725 companies deployed for the 2021 assembly election and nearly three times the 92,000 personnel deployed in the state during the 2024 general election. All five major paramilitary forces – the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Border Security Force (BSF), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) – were pulled from their nationwide postings and concentrated in a single state with zero active insurgency. They appeared armed with automatic rifles, in camouflage uniforms, riding in armoured vehicles. An integrated joint command of the chiefs of all five forces was convened in Kolkata – without precedent for a state election.This must be read alongside the BSF’s permanent footprint. The Union government expanded BSF jurisdiction in 2021 from 15 km to 50 km along the Bangladesh border – covering large portions of Murshidabad, Malda, North 24 Parganas, and Nadia – making it a permanent Union-controlled presence across these polling areas entirely outside state government supervision. Against this, the state’s own police force was functionally decapitated: the ECI replaced the Chief Secretary, DGP, Kolkata Police Commissioner, and Principal Secretary for Home, reshuffled over 18 IPS officers, and transferred 12 more senior Kolkata Police officials in a final overnight wave before Phase 1.On polling day, central forces moved from structural intimidation to active interference. TMC candidate Sabina Yeasmin from Sujapur accused central forces of conducting prolonged ID checks to deliberately slow voting and exhaust voters standing in the sun. “They intend that there should be less voting,” she said, announcing a formal complaint. Then, on the last day of campaigning before Phase 2, Amit Shah revealed what the deployment was always really about. At a rally in Behala he told the crowd: “Do not worry about Didi’s goons. The Election Commission has deployed CAPF at every nook and corner. I am telling you today – even though the BJP will come to power after the elections, central forces will remain here for 60 more days.” The constitutional significance is breathtaking: during elections the ECI controls paramilitary deployment; the moment polling ends, command reverts to the Union home ministry – to Amit Shah. Around 500 companies, or 50,000 personnel, are expected to remain after polling concludes. Standing on a BJP campaign stage, in his capacity as a party leader, he announced the future deployment of Union government paramilitary forces – forces he controls as home minister. There was no distinction between the party man and the minister of state. That is not a slip. That is the merger of party and state, spoken out aloud. Shah was not promising security. He was announcing that the military occupation of West Bengal would continue regardless of the election result. The ECI’s neutrality was the fig leaf for the election period. After May 4, that pretence too will drop.The weaponisation of the constitutional Union biasOne cannot but wonder, if this would have been possible without the structural architecture of the Indian Constitution, which tilts decisively toward the Union – through the primacy of central legislation, the Union’s appointment of governors, and emergency powers that collapse the federal structure into a unitary one. The Supreme Court has more than once described India as an “indestructible union of destructible states.” In West Bengal in 2026, every lever has been pulled simultaneously: the governor as political irritant, transferred IPS officers as administrative wedge, the ECI as operational command. The union bias of the constitution was not designed for this purpose, but it has been weaponised for it.The BJP’s campaign: Prejudice as programmeWhile this time in West Bengal, BJP seems to have largely outsourced its campaigning and activity to ECI and the central forces, the BJP-RSS agenda has already been proclaimed as the agenda of the Indian state. The BJP has campaigned primarily on the claim that infiltrators from Bangladesh are altering West Bengal’s demographic profile and stealing jobs – a “detect, delete and deport” programme forming the centrepiece of its manifesto. In his Independence Day address from the Red Fort in August 2025, Modi announced a “high-power demography mission” against what he called a deliberate conspiracy to alter India’s demographic character through infiltration. Crucially, this programme was already underway: the Union government deported hundreds of ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh without due process in 2025. Shah made the electoral connection explicit at a campaign rally in Bengal: “After May 4, all infiltrators will be identified and removed from Bengal.” Party and state are actively being merged around a single demographic project.This convergence has a name. When a ruling party uses the machinery of the state to advance a campaign built on ethnic and religious prejudice against a specific minority, and when that campaign becomes institutionally indistinguishable from governance itself, the appropriate analytical term is fascism. Electoral victories give fascism legitimacy and access to state power. However, fascism does not merely win elections, it also tries to use state power to make the outcome of elections increasingly irrelevant. Much like the earlier Gujarat Model, the current Bengal Model is an experiment in that direction.The ‘ghuspaithiye‘ is the functional equivalent of the classic fascist folk-enemy: unverifiable, ubiquitous, and politically indispensable. The phantom infiltrator exists not in Bengal’s towns and villages but in BJP’s political programme, and it is being pursued with the full weight of the Indian state. However, after the first phase of elections, the ‘infiltrator’ campaign has been dialled down, to be replaced with a plethora of welfare promises and governance critiques. Evidently, the on-ground response to this issue has not been satisfactory, despite all the weight that was thrown behind it. Or perhaps because of it. Instead of a stock-taking of the Mamata Banerjee government, BJP has made this election about citizenship. And going by the way it is playing out, every Bengali is a potential infiltrator, unless they can prove otherwise. Why BJP thought that this would endear them to Bengal voters is perhaps a question for psychologists and psychiatrists, not just political analysts.The judiciary’s abdicationThe Supreme Court refused to halt a process it acknowledged was flawed, directed aggrieved citizens to tribunals crushed under millions of cases, and declined to grant interim voting rights to those with pending appeals. Chief Justice Surya Kant expressed public dismay at the hullabaloo being raised in West Bengal over the SIR, noting the same exercise had generated no controversy elsewhere and revealing the apex court’s starting presumption: that Bengali resistance was the problem, not the blatantly draconian exercise itself. A judiciary that greets constitutional protest with irritation has already chosen its side.Beyond Bengal: The federal order under threatDespite its diabolical efforts, it is far from certain that BJP will win. What is certain, however, is that a fascist party in state power may not follow the old constitutional consensus. Nor is it certain that it will rely only on fair electoral outcomes – it will use raw state power to push through. In fact, the Bengal election, when read with its other attacks on federalism, shows that it is actually working towards not just winning elections by force, but towards making state governments redundant. The suspension of elected municipal bodies, the weaponisation of the Governor’s office in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Manipur, and Kerala (not to mention that which used to be a state, but is no longer) and the routine deployment of Article 356 threats against opposition states form a consistent pattern – the BJP is not merely trying to win Bengal, it is trying to demonstrate that state governments exist at the Centre’s sufferance. It is also trying to say that this new Indian state has a temper – be it contract workers demanding minimum wage in UP or Haryana or a mainstream party fighting elections, the response is disproportionate force.The TMC did not fight this election against the BJP alone. It fought against the Indian state. The ECI has functioned as a co-belligerent. Central forces have replaced state police command and will remain after the election ends. The SIR has erased millions while new voters were added in the dark. Constitutional union bias has been deployed as an electoral instrument. And the ruling party has run a campaign whose core premise – that a religious minority is a demographic threat – was operationalised through deportations, roll deletions, and force deployment before a single vote was cast.There are reasons to believe that what is happening in West Bengal in 2026 is a dress rehearsal for the entire country. What BJP and the Union government it controls, are trying to build in West Bengal – the infrastructure of roll manipulation, permanent central paramilitary presence, administrative takeover, and agency intimidation (all with the tacit and implicit support of the judiciary) – does not need an election victory to function. It functions as a system of control regardless of who wins. That is the dress rehearsal’s real lesson. The people of West Bengal are fighting back, with whatever little is there at their disposal. The fight is not going to get over anytime soon, no matter who wins the elections.Santanu is a commentator on society, politics and the arts, who divides his time between Delhi NCR and Kolkata.