The most consequential message to emerge from the results of the 2026 assembly elections in four states and one Union territory is this: the very idea of universal adult franchise is now dead and buried. Parakala Prabhakar writes with palpable anguish that if the disenfranchisement of 27 lakh legitimate voters in West Bengal does not constitute our gravest concern, then we ought to cease calling ourselves a democracy.The question is not what the electoral outcome in Bengal might have been had these 27 lakh citizens been allowed to vote. It should worry us that the people of India can now be divided into two categories: those who are granted the right to vote, and those who may be deprived of it from time to time. Has suffrage ceased to be a right and become instead a privilege – a favour conferred through the ‘logical’ procedures devised by a governmental Election Commission?Just before the assembly elections, the Election Commission undertook the SIR in the state in an unholy haste and pushed nearly 91 lakh names out of the electoral rolls. Data indicates that the presence of a chunk of these voters in the rolls was disadvantageous to the Bharatiya Janata Party. When voters approached the Supreme Court of India seeking restoration to the electoral rolls, they were told with a flat face that their participation in this election was not essential. That they can vote in the next elections.The implication is stark: not every adult in India can claim the right to vote any longer. Nearly all political parties – even political parties that disagreed with this process and opposed it – chose to proceed with the elections without these 27 lakh citizens. In doing so, they conferred legitimacy upon the idea that adult franchise in India is no longer universal but a privilege, not guaranteed to all.Those who were thus stripped of their democratic rights witnessed that no political party considered them significant enough to stand with them. In such a context, it is futile to lament that Mamata Banerjee lost Bhabanipur by 15,000 votes when 47,000 names had been struck off the rolls there. Had she refused to contest under such conditions – refused to participate in an election that excluded these 47,000 – she would have scored a moral victory. Not now.Some point out that the margin between the BJP and Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress stands at merely 13 lakh votes, even as some 27 lakh were denied the right to vote. Would the result have been different had they participated? This question, too, has now been rendered irrelevant, for both the opposition and Banerjee chose to contest without these ‘deleted’ voters, who were very much alive and legitimate.None rose in defence of these voters whose rights were violated by the Election Commission and the Supreme Court. This was among the gravest injustices that can be inflicted within a democracy, yet it did not appear serious enough to non-BJP parties for them to refuse participation until these citizens had their rights restored. Yes, Banerjee did go to the Supreme Court, demanding their reentry to the electoral rolls, but neither for her nor for the other parties was this a crucial enough issue to declare that there was no point contesting an election in which the real people were not allowed to participate through an arbitrary and illegal process.If political parties expect voters to stand by them, they must first demonstrate that they stand by the voters. Unfortunately, parties have failed to do so.A similar and more disturbing thing happened in Assam, where the delimitation of constituencies has been engineered in such a way that the electoral weight of Muslim voters is diminished relative to their population. Constituencies in which they could once decisively influence outcomes have been reduced in number.The redrawing of boundaries has confined anti-BJP voters to a handful of constituencies, while supporters of the BJP and its allies have been dispersed with calculated precision across a wider terrain. The consequence is structural: even if non-BJP parties secure overwhelming majorities – 70 or 80% – in pockets of concentrated support, their overall seat share will remain constrained.This is the electoral ghettoisation of Muslims.Thus, the people of India are being divided, in two distinct ways and into two distinct categories: those endowed with voting rights and those deprived of them. Between these two, no organic solidarity will remain. Individuals will instead strive, by whatever means, to secure a place within the first category. And if it becomes widely accepted that only Muslims are to be disenfranchised, there will be no broad-based resistance.Where Muslims cannot be entirely stripped of voting rights, constituencies will be redrawn so that they are rendered incapable of influencing the overall electoral outcome of a state. They will be confined to limited pockets, their political significance reduced to near irrelevance in the formation of governments.What has been attempted in Bengal and Assam in the 2026 assembly elections marks a decisive step toward a project long articulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar: the construction of an India in which Hindu interests stand severed from those of Muslims. Muslims may continue to exist physically, but politically they will be rendered dead: present, seen, yet without democratic life.Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University.