View from Bangladesh: The hardening of Hindutva in West Bengal will stifle pro-India voices

Five years ago, when the Trinamool Congress retained power in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly Elections, I penned a front-page commentary titled: “The World’s Greatest Democracy Lives.”

What a difference five years makes.

The point I made then was that for all the ills associated with Narendra Modi and the B, they were at least willing to meet their opponents at the ballot box and to accept the verdict of the electorate.

Fast forward five years and it is difficult to make the same argument.

The machinations surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls that removed some nine million voters, of whom at least 2.7 million have contested their removal, put paid to even the pretence that the BJP would countenance defeat in West Bengal or that they would be restrained by the niceties of representative democracy.

The implications for India are as profound as they are disquieting. India since its independence had always boasted independent institutions, including crucially the Election Commission and the judiciary, which made it a beacon for developing and post-colonial nations.

Today it is incontrovertible that the current dispensation’s commitment to democracy is as thin as its commitment to pluralism, and that the push to transform India into a majoritarian, authoritarian Hindu nationalist state is all...

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