The 21st Century Election Commission of India
(Chapter 3)
We are in 26th year of this century and Election Commission has suddenly woken up to this reality. A little late but it got it here in West Bengal. It is now in the era of 5G Data speeds, Drone Videography, CCTV monitoring and realtime helicopter supervision of elections. Without all these dynamic 21st century solutions, the West Bengal was doomed to continue with archaic rulers with 18th century extractive mindset.
The Architecture of a Free Election
The Election Commission did not leave anything to chance this time in West Bengal. It began not on election day but months earlier with a surgical revision of electoral rolls that removed 91 lakh names while adding genuine first time voters. Among 6.44 crore registered voters were 5.23 lakh young voters between 18 and 19 years, voting for the first time in their lives, in a state where their parents had rarely voted freely.
80,719 polling stations were established across West Bengal. 480 companies of CAPF were deployed before a single vote was cast, with more arriving as polling approached. Political party camps were pushed 100 metres from booth entrances, which in the geography of West Bengal’s booth level intimidation is not a small distance. It is the difference between a voter walking to a booth and a voter running a gauntlet.
For the first time senior citizens above 85 and disabled voters could vote from home. Remember Shova Majumdar from Chapter 2? Such measure earlier could save her life.
In West Bengal 10,361 booths were managed entirely by women personnel. Every booth had drinking water, ramps, shade and lighting. These are not luxuries. In a state where booth conditions had historically been designed to discourage certain voters, basic comfort is itself a political statement.
Vote Counting
In a state like West Bengal which is in total anarchy, where every single citizen is reeling under terror of violence, counting of votes is also a task. Election Commission has excused most of employees of State Government from counting duties. Employess of Central Government and PSUs are deployed this time. The Counting stations have been reduced from about 1.7 lacs to 87 thousand which were further reduced to 77 thousand. This was done to concentrate the focus on fewer stations for tight security and better administration.
CCTV covered the counting. A dedicated Observer Monitoring Cell tracked election observers in real time. Repolling was ordered wherever irregularities appeared without waiting to be asked. 77 polling stations were ordered to be repolled due to such irregularity.
Supervisors
The Election Commission deployed a layered supervision architecture that left no level of the electoral process unsupervised. At the state level a Chief Electoral Officer, a senior IAS officer, held overall command. Below him District Election Officers, typically the District Collectors, managed ground operations. At constituency level Returning Officers handled nominations and results. At each booth a Presiding Officer was personally accountable for the conduct of voting and the sealing of EVMs.
Two roles deserve special mention because they were specifically designed for Bengal’s pathology. Micro Observers monitored individual booths for irregularities, reporting directly upward rather than through the state machinery. Police Observers, senior IPS officers brought in from other states, oversaw law and order independently of Bengal’s own politically colonised police force. Eleven such observers were deployed in South 24 Parganas alone.
Police Observers
One Police Observer became a story in himself. Ajay Pal Sharma, a 2011 batch IPS officer from Uttar Pradesh known for encounter operations, visited the home of TMC candidate Jahangir Khan in Falta on April 27 and warned his family directly against voter intimidation. TMC called it overreach. BJP called it exactly right. The Election Commission defended it as boosting voter confidence. What it actually did was simpler. A senior police officer from outside Bengal, owing nothing to its political ecosystem, walked up to a TMC strongman’s door and told his family that the rules had changed. He told them that do not threat voters.
Jahangir Khan’s response to Sharma’s visit removed any ambiguity about whether the visit was justified. A politician who responds to a warning against voter intimidation with “Khela tumne shuru kiya, khatam hum karenge” has confirmed in public that there was indeed a game being played. “Picture abhi baaki hai” is not the language of an innocent man reassuring his constituents. It is a threat dressed in film dialogue, which is perhaps the only vocabulary available to a man who has run a constituency through intimidation so long that he no longer recognises where governance ends and menace begins.
“Agar woh Singham hai, toh main Pushpa hoon” is the most self-defeating line in the entire 2026 election. Pushpa is a smuggler. Jahangir Khan chose a criminal as his self-identification without apparently noticing. Sharma could not have written a better justification for his visit if he had scripted it himself.
The midnight visit to Firhad Hakim, Kolkata’s Mayor and TMC candidate, past 12 AM on April 28 for a twenty minute poll compliance conversation, completed the picture. Hakim called it foul, harassment and unprecedented. That last word is the most interesting. Unprecedented means it had never happened before. A senior civic official being visited at midnight to be reminded that elections must be free and fair had genuinely never happened before in Mamata’s Bengal. Hakim found the reminder offensive because the reminder itself was new.
Rule of Law
Both men were not outraged by overreach. They were outraged by accountability. For fifteen years the architecture of Bengal elections had ensured that nobody knocked on their doors at midnight, nobody walked up to their family with warnings, nobody treated them as answerable to the same rules as ordinary citizens.
Sharma and the CAPF simply introduced them to a concept they had successfully avoided for a very long time.
In every democracy violence is the monopoly of the State. TMC had borrowed that monopoly for fifteen years and forgotten it was borrowed. Jahangir Khan’s Pushpa dialogue and Hakim’s outrage at a midnight visit were both expressions of the same shock. The monopoly was being reclaimed by its legitimate owner.
During elections in India the Election Commission is the State. It commands the CAPF. It transfers officers. It orders repolling. It visits candidates at midnight. It warns strongmen’s families at their doorstep. It does not hesitate to use the full weight of that authority because that authority exists precisely for moments when the borrowed monopoly must be returned.
Sharma’s visit to Jahangir Khan’s home was not a courtesy call. It was the State reminding a private party that the gun it had been using belonged to someone else all along and the owner had come to collect it.
Additional Measures
The machinery of intimidation in Bengal operated through vehicles, gatherings and money. The Election Commission addressed all three simultaneously.
Motorcycles and vehicles faced movement restrictions for three days before polling. Night movement was banned. Non essential vehicles were prohibited from midnight before voting until polls closed. This directly targeted the mobile intimidation squads that have historically moved between booths on election day.
Gatherings of more than four people near polling stations were prohibited. Anyone with the indelible ink mark of a voter was legally barred from congregating, making the ink itself an enforcement tool. All campaigning halted 48 hours before polling. Liquor shops closed for the same period, removing the traditional lubricant of booth level coercion.
The Election Commission had clearly studied every failure in every West Bengal election under Mamata’s regime and addressed each point without sentiment or hesitation. This was not election management. It was the dismantling of an anarchy machine, one booth at a time.
The Martial Law
Election Commission of India (ECI) has vast powers unde the Constitution to ensure free and fair elections. Article 324 grants ECI plenary superintendence, direction, and control over elections to Parliament, state legislatures, President/Vice-President which includes force deployments, observers, and civic restrictions for fair polls.
Judiciary has never interfered into its powesr. This time too Mamata Benrjee repeatedly went to Supreme Court with one petition after another to challenge the actions of Election Commission but the Court refused to interfere with another constitutional body from doing its duty.
This time was no different when ECI, together with Home Ministry decided to go for final push what Mamata may call an undeclared Martial law. 200 bulletproof armoured vehicles were diverted from Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur, two of India’s active conflict zones, by a single phone call from Delhi and stationed in West Bengal for a state assembly election. 700 companies. 2.4 lakh personnel. The highest deployment ever for any state election in Indian history. The equipment that protects soldiers against insurgents was deemed necessary to protect voters against their own elected government’s cadre.
Mamata called it intimidation and demanded the vehicles be sent back to Manipur. She did not realise she was making the Election Commission’s argument for it. A Chief Minister who in the same breath condemns central forces and invokes Manipur has publicly placed her state in the same security category as an insurgency theatre.
The action of the ECI is the most damning verdict possible on fifteen years of Mamata’s governance in West Bengal. A state that requires something resembling martial law to conduct a free election has not been governed. It has been occupied.
The occupation ends on 4th May, 2026. Hopefully.
References:
- All articles on 2026 Election in West Bengal
- Firhad Hakim: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/capf-visits-firhad-house-at-midnight/amp_articleshow/130584205.cms
- Ajay Pal Sharma: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-bengal-ups-singham-warns-candidate-bjp-vs-trinamool-follows-11419302
- CAPF deployment: https://www.scribd.com/document/1001745984/CAPF-Deployment-for-WBGELA-2026
- Armored Vehicles: https://www.amarujala.com/india-news/phone-call-changed-the-route-of-200-crpf-bulletproof-armoured-vehicles-2026-04-16
- Hindustan Times Report: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ec-to-retain-700-capf-companies-in-west-bengal-till-further-orders-101777491005516.html
- Supreme Court refused to interfere with decision to deploy Central Govt. employees: