The West Bengal panchayat poll is slated to become the new benchmark of subversion of a democratic process. Violence has become institutionalized
There are no relative measures in checking if the democratic process is free and fair. There is an absolute measure and that is, campaigning without clashes, polling with agents of every party present and working in every booth, no ballot snatching, no re-polling and no unprecedented queues till three or four in the morning.
The guarantee of free and fair election does not come with the presence of paramilitary personnel in overwhelming numbers from outside the State where election is being held. The guarantee of free and fair election comes with the nominal presence of local policemen detailed to ensure that overenthusiastic supporters do not violate the law. These are ideal scenarios. The ideal is impossible. If the experience of West Bengal is any indication, then the ideal is likely to remain impossible in the foreseeable future, as it was in the recent past and for a long time before that. The deeply divisive State Assembly poll of 2011 has transformed the panchayat election into a grim test of power.
The institutionalisation of terror has acquired an altogether different dimension through the Trinamool Congress's interpretation of what election connotes in West Bengal. Death in a bomb attack, dozens of people injured in pre-poll clashes, homes wrecked, hundreds homeless and seeking safety elsewhere, is the new model of how terror can overset normalcy. The branding of housewives, as in Kamduni, farmers as in Shiladitya of Nayagram in West Midnapore, an undergraduate as in Tania Bharadwaj of Presidency University, as Maoists by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has reinvented the identity of a potential terrorist. It marks an evolution in the institutionalisation of terror by the political class. As a model of excess, the panchayat poll is likely to become the new benchmark of subversion of the democratic process and the idea of democracy itself.
When the normal is an intensely divided people, then the routine exhortations by various Trinamool Congress leaders to the masses who gather at public meetings is logical in a totally bizarre way; when the infamous Anubrata Mandal urges voters to brook no resistance be it by the political Opposition, the police or the administration, then it begins to make sense, given the extreme polarisation in West Bengal.
In the institutionalisation of terror, the role of the State has changed from being the coercive power to a spectator of coercion by cadres. The accusations by the Trinamool Congress against the CPI(M) in Nandigram in 2007, of converting the police into a frontal organisation of the party, seems to have served as a lesson for the Trinamool Congress after it won power in the State. The police in West Bengal appears to have abandoned its codes and adopted playing by partisan rules as best practice. Guided presumably by enlightened self interest, the administration has transformed itself into the frontal organisation of a different party since 2011 as the inability to investigate politically-sensitive crime, be it in Kamduni, in Nayagram, in Park Street, in the slew of arrests of CPI(M) leaders before and during the panchayat poll, reveals.
With two more phases of the panchayat election to go, the fourth round is bound to be more disturbed than the last three. For the Trinamool Congress, winning in Murshidabad is necessary, but delivering a humiliating defeat to the Congress’s Union Minister of State for Railways Adhir Chowdhury is imperative. In what appears to be the pattern of contemporary election, where bike-borne cadres move in step with the different phases of polling, the conflict in Murshidabad may be fairly severe. The capacity of the State Election Commission to ensure the deployment of force to counter the intimidation of bike-borne cadres has proved to be weak. Shored up by directions of the High Court, its inabilities to contain the contamination of the election process indicates that there are ways in which the process can be subverted that had not been anticipated by the SEC on the one hand and the rule makers on the other. The originality of interpretation by the Trinamool Congress in imposing its will on the rules, practices, conventions and indeed the law and Constitution indicates that the political system is facing its most serious challenge ever. Freedom and fairness are no longer a universal right.