From the unprecedented refusal of a sitting chief minister to resign citing election malpractices to the mysterious “secret algorithm” that disenfranchised lakhs of citizens, we question whether the 2026 Bengal polls met the threshold of free and fair elections.RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri are joined by political researcher and analyst Yamini Aiyar, in this edition of Jaanne Bhi Do Yaaro to decode the troubling issues the West Bengal 2026 assembly elections raise for India’s democracy.In an unexpected step, Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee refused to resign after election results, alleging manipulation, including physical removal of her party’s counting agents from centres, deletion of CCTV footage and tampering with electric voting machines. The party demanded that security footage from counting centres be disclosed for public viewing.In this video, we discuss the impact of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) on people and the subsequent electoral outcome. Analysis by The Wire shows that in 150 seats, more than half of West Bengal’s total of 294, deletions were greater than victory margins. BJP ended up wining in 99 seats.As many as 91 lakh names were deleted from the voter list, of which 27 lakh people were deleted after being flagged for logical discrepancy using a secret algorithm. People who had passports and other relevant documents were unfairly disenfranchised, leading the Supreme Court to set up appellate tribunals headed by retired judges to address appeals against wrongful deletions. Due to the rushed SIR process, more than 27 lakh appeals were left pending, and could not be heard by the tribunal, leading to the exclusion of these voters from the elections.The impact on ground is even more severe, enhanced by the endless chase for documents to ‘prove’ one’s identity, the callousness of algorithmic decisions and the sharply differentiated ways in which the burden of proving identity is experienced across religious lines.We also discuss the election commission’s repeated resistance to transparency: refusal to make CCTV recordings public, denial to publish Form 17C, the statutory proof of voter turnout, or provide voter lists in machine-readable form, thereby hindering public monitoring of the entire process. Soon after the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered the disclosure of CCTV footage, the ECI along with the central government amended the Conduct of Election Rules, restricting peoples’ access to election records.By refusing to disclose these essential records, the commission has allowed a spectre of doubt to grow. The nation must confront the painful question: did the West Bengal polls fall below the minimum threshold of free and fair elections and where does Indian democracy go from here?