For voters in West Bengal, this is the worst of times.
The Supreme Court of India (SC) and the Election Commission of India (ECI)—two institutions meant to safeguard the constitutional right to vote— and the Trinamool Congress and the BJP—political parties seeking to represent the people—have, over the past four months, pitchforked voters from one crisis to another, and, on Wednesday, into Malda's Mothabari.
The image lingers: in the dead of night, a speeding jeep with a woman judicial officer— also a mother—fleeing a mob after a 10-hour gherao at the Kaliachak 2 block development office at Mothabari, her voice breaking as she appealed over a phone to the High Court to take care of her children if something happened to her. That cry, now viral, will not fade easily.
That panic-stricken woman and seven other judicial officers had been sent to Mothabari by the Supreme Court on Special Intensive Revision (SIR) duty from March 10 to hear voters' claims and decide who stayed on the electoral rolls. On April 1, a mob protesting the prospect of mass deletion of voters' names gheraoed their office till, late at night, paramilitary forces and police rescued them. Even then, their vehicles were pelted with bricks and struck with bamboo poles.
West Bengal's voters deserve better—much better than a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) that has, from the outset, generated confusion and anxiety. With less than three weeks to polling, lakhs remain uncertain, not just about their right to vote, but also consequently, about their Indian identity.
Mothabari is not an isolated tremor. It is a warning.
Trust deficit
Mothabari is one of 12 Assembly seats in Malda district and includes the Kaliachak blocks 1 and partially 2, infamous for political volatility, especially after the 2016 violence that saw a police station, other government offices and vehicles torched amid competing explanations of communal tension and criminal rivalries.
This time, the trigger was different: fear of disenfranchisement.
Of 2.08 lakh voters in Mothabari, nearly 80,000 have been placed on the SIR adjudication list—a staggering number, roughly half the 2024 turnout.
Across Malda's 12 Assembly seats, over 8 lakh voters now face similar uncertainty, days before the poll on April 23.
How do you contain an anxiety of this scale?
Or is the storm already here?
Who was behind Malda?
The Supreme Court came down hard on the Malda mess. An "abdication of duty" by the West Bengal government, it said, in the face of a nearly 10-hour gherao of judicial officers.
There were other harsh indictments too: A "most polarised" state where discourse has turned uniformly political, it observed. A "brazen attempt" to browbeat judicial officers and challenge the judiciary's authority in a calculated manner, it added.
Then the question: "Do you think we don’t know who was behind it?"
The Court stopped short of naming anyone. But Mamata Banerjee denied all blame. She first attacked the Congress, then, after the arrest of a Kolkata-based lawyer with links to the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), she accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of deploying the AIMIM to provoke unrest and create conditions for President's Rule.
The EC, already under Mamata Banerjee fire for slips or "clerical errors" like the BJP party stamp on the commission's documents, also came into her line of fire. She accused the Commission of yanking the reins of administrative control from her hands through mass transfers and then failing to contain violence.
"I am not responsible for Malda," she said.
The Congress and BJP have blamed her in return. The EC has pointed to lapses by senior administrative officers, some of whom are now expected to be present before the Supreme Court.
The buck is still being passed.
A system under strain, a voter in limbo
The Court will determine accountability. But the immediate story is the voter.
In February, the Supreme Court of India tasked around 250 judicial officers in West Bengal with handling nearly 80 lakh SIR claims. The Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court flagged the arithmetic—even at pace, the exercise would take about 80 days, pushing into the election timeline. The Court then directed that 500 more judicial officers be brought in, including from Jharkhand and Odisha.
Then came the tribunals but only after civil society and affected voters raised concerns over the absence of any appellate mechanism. On March 10, the Court directed that they be set up. First there were restrictions on submitting fresh documents; those restrictions have since been eased.
But where are the tribunals?
Nineteen were expected to open on April 1 at the Shyama Prasad Mookerjee National Institute of Water and Sanitation near Joka in south-west Kolkata. At the time of writing, they are yet to become functional. The West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer has indicated uncertainty over when they will begin.
For lakhs of people, this is not procedural delay. It is a dead end.
Where do you go to prove you belong on the voters' list?
A race against time—and trust
Time is running out.
The tribunal must include names of phase one voters by April 6 and, for phase two voters, by April 9. Completing filing, hearings and orders within days appears extremely tight.
The Supreme Court of India has offered reassurance: a genuine voter's right cannot be extinguished. Names can be restored. But perhaps not in time for this election.
Is that acceptable? To lose, even temporarily, the most fundamental democratic right—not by adjudicated fault, but because a process ran out of time?
Questions remain. How were "logical discrepancies" identified? What the AI used, on what parameters? Was the process applied uniformly across states? And, most important, why was the SIR not initiated earlier—after the 2024 elections, or at least a whole year ago?
On the ground, the tension, anger, uncertainty among voters is intensifying. Mothabari may yet be an aberration. Or it may be a warning. Voters are in no mood to absorb institutional lapses and have only one question: Will I be allowed to vote or not?