There is a choreography to election season in West Bengal that has become so familiar it barely registers as unusual anymore. It is precisely this familiarity, that smooth, unremarkable quality of repetition, which ought to trouble us most. The Election Commission of India (ECI) issues its orders, the Home Ministry makes its allocations, and then they come, the units of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), fanning out across constituencies in their olive and khaki, occupying schoolrooms converted into camps, conducting what the official circle calls “area domination marches” through streets where people are attempting, simply, to go about their lives.

In the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections, 1,100 companies of Central forces were deployed across eight phases of polling, a mobilisation of roughly 1,10,000 personnel that represented one of the largest peacetime paramilitary presences in the electoral history of independent India. For the 2026 Assembly elections, the Home Ministry has already authorised an initial deployment of 480 companies, with estimates from the ECI’s own office suggesting that the number could climb as high as 2,400 companies—approximately 240,000 personnel—if the polls are condensed into fewer phases. The standard frame through which commentators process this information is a binary one: is this democratic safeguarding, or is it political theatre, the Centre flexing its muscle against a recalcitrant State government?

The BJP’s investment in Bengal, historically and electorally, lends the question some genuine texture, and the Trinamool Congress’ equally well-documented history of electoral coercion means that neither position is without evidence. But I want to suggest that this binary, earnest and occasionally illuminating as it is, functions as a kind of intellectual ceiling, one that prevents us from seeing the deployment not as an isolated electoral intervention but as a chapter in a longer, more patient story about how the Indian state has methodically militarised its relationship to civilian space, and how the laboratories for that militarisation have, with a consistency that is not accidental, been located at the margins first.

The Palestine Laboratory and its Indian mirror

The most rigorous recent articulation of the laboratory thesis comes not from South Asian scholarship but from journalist Antony Loewenstein’s work on Israel and Palestine. Loewenstein traces how Gaza and the West Bank have functioned as live testing environments for surveillance technology, crowd-control tactics, and occupation infrastructure, with the implicit sales pitch attached to each export being 'It works; we proved it on them.’ The logic is both commercial and epistemological—the periphery produces the proof of concept that the centre later replicates and refines. What the occupied territory offers is a population on which techniques can be practised, adjusted, and institutionalised without the political costs that would attend their use on citizens whose grievances register more loudly in the national conversation.

India has its own geography of exception, its own peripheries where the state has long operated with a loosened relationship to the restraints that nominally govern its conduct elsewhere, and the parallels are close enough to be instructive. For decades Kashmir has lived under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), a legal architecture that grants security forces the power to shoot to kill in law enforcement situations, to detain without warrant, and to operate in conditions of near-total immunity from civil accountability. The practical consequences of this architecture are well-documented: thousands of custodial killings; the routine use of pellet-firing shotguns against civilian protesters (weapons that have blinded and maimed children alongside stone-throwers, that have made partial or total vision loss a biographical fact for an entire generation of Kashmiris); communication blackouts imposed as administrative instruments of control; and the “area domination” march, in which uniformed personnel move through residential neighbourhoods not in response to any particular disturbance but as a routine assertion of sovereign presence—a daily reminder of who occupies the ground.

What the Kashmir case represents, within the laboratory thesis, is the incubation phase. The AFSPA, as Human Rights Watch has documented, has created structures that obstruct the normal course of law and impede accountability, and within those structures a set of tactical and logistical habits have been cultivated over decades—habits of deployment, of crowd management, and intelligence-gathering—that do not remain quarantined within the territorial space that produced them. They travel, institutionalised within the bodies and institutional memory of the forces that practise them, along with the legal precedents and political vocabularies that make them sayable.

The same pattern, with its own particular history and character, is visible in India’s north-eastern States, where counterinsurgency operations stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s have become so thoroughly woven into the texture of daily life that their abnormality has long since ceased to be perceptible from within. The AFSPA has been in operation in parts of the north-eastern region even longer than in Kashmir. The checkpoint infrastructure, the biometric surveillance systems, the intelligence networks embedded in civil society represent not merely a security apparatus but a set of practices, technologies, and institutional reflexes that have been refined through sustained application on populations whose relationship to the Indian nation-state has always been, to put it charitably, contested.

It is worth pausing on the word “refined” here. The north-eastern region is not simply a zone of repression; it is, in the laboratory sense, a zone of optimisation, where techniques are tested against resistance, adjusted in response to failure, and gradually brought to a level of operational sophistication that reflects decades of accumulated experience. The biometric surveillance and checkpoint infrastructure that has been developed and refined in these contexts has not remained confined to the States in which it was pioneered. The Smart City Mission’s security planning across Indian metropolitan centres draws, in its architecture and its ambitions, on precisely the kind of population-monitoring logic that was first systematically developed on the periphery. The lab produces the product; the product finds its market.

The campus as theatre

The December 2019 violence at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi represents a different kind of laboratory moment, one that is temporally closer and spatially more central—Delhi, not Kashmir or Manipur—and therefore more revealing about how far the transfer of peripheral tactics has already progressed. On the evening of December 15, 2019, Delhi Police entered the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia in pursuit of students protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and proceeded to attack students who had taken shelter in the university library, dragging them from their reading rooms, assaulting them with batons, firing tear gas into enclosed spaces. The videos that circulated from that night showed something unprecedented: the deliberate targeting of a library, of a study space, of the interior sanctuary of a university campus, by uniformed state forces operating in a major Indian city in full visibility.

The campus has historically occupied a protected position in the civic imagination, not because of any legal inviolability but because of a broadly shared understanding that the university was a space of a different order—a space where the state’s instruments of coercion were expected to observe a certain restraint, even where they disagreed violently with what was being said or organised within its walls. The Jamia attack did not merely violate this understanding; it performed the violation publicly, ensuring that it would be witnessed and recorded and therefore normalised. What was shocking in December 2019 had, by the time the anti-CAA protests were being more broadly policed across Delhi and the country, already begun to recede into the category of the expected. The threshold had shifted.

This is, in Professor Stephen Graham’s terms, precisely how the new military urbanism works—not through a single decisive rupture but through the patient, iterative redrawing of what counts as legitimate terrain for state force. In Cities Under Siege, Graham traces what he calls the “boomerang effect”, by which security practices circulate between remote foreign peripheries and domestic spaces, between the exceptional and the ordinary, until the distinction itself becomes difficult to sustain. The city is perceived as a conflict zone; urban inhabitants become subjects to be tracked, scanned, and controlled; the forces deployed in civil spaces begin, in their posture and their logic, to reproduce the patterns of the border and the counterinsurgency theatre. What is being learned in Srinagar or Imphal does not stay there. It comes home.

Bengal enters the circuit

Against this background, the electoral deployment of Central forces in West Bengal is legible as something more than an electoral intervention, however politically motivated or administratively justified it may also be. The CRPF’s “election duty” mandate has expanded substantially as a share of its total deployment days over the past two decades, a reflection of the broader growth of the CAPF as a whole: against a sanctioned strength of just over a million personnel—a figure confirmed in parliamentary responses from the Home Ministry—the CAPF now maintains an institutional scale and a logistical infrastructure that requires, practically, sustained deployment across multiple theatres. Elections provide one such theatre.

The legal sanction they carry is real and not to be dismissed. But the social effect of that deployment is separable from its legal status, and the social effect is this: a hundred thousand or more uniformed personnel moving through Bengali towns and villages, conducting area domination marches along the same streets where people are trying to vote, establishing the sight of paramilitary boots on urban ground as a feature of the democratic process itself.

The documentation from civil liberties organisations— People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Association for Protection of Democratic Rights, and others who have worked systematically to record civilian-paramilitary encounters during Bengal’s election periods—suggests that the deployment is not without incident, that the presence of Central forces does not invariably produce the calm security environment that the ECI’s official framing implies. There are confrontations, allegations of intimidation, complaints that run into the bureaucratic opacity that attends any attempt to hold paramilitary forces accountable for conduct during election duty. This is not to say the forces are uniformly hostile or that their presence produces no legitimate deterrent effect on genuine electoral violence. It is to say that the deployment creates conditions—of impunity, of normalised military presence, of institutional muscle memory—that outlast the electoral moment that occasioned them.

This is where the laboratory thesis becomes most pointed. The personnel who serve election duty in West Bengal carry the experience of that duty back into their institutional lives, into their subsequent postings in Kashmir or Chhattisgarh or wherever the CRPF deploys next. The legal frameworks tested and not challenged during electoral deployments become available as precedents for less electorally justified mobilisations. The public that learns to navigate voting booths flanked by men carrying automatic weapons learns, incrementally, that this is simply how democratic participation looks—and that learning is not easily unlearned.

What normalisation does

There is a passage in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks that remains indispensable here, about the way that hegemony works not through the continuous exercise of coercive force but through the gradual production of consent, through the cultivation of a common sense that mistakes historically contingent arrangements for natural ones. The militarisation of electoral space in India operates partly in this register: it does not announce itself as a transformation of the relationship between citizen and state, but rather presents itself, each cycle, as a necessary and temporary administrative measure, a regrettable but pragmatic response to local conditions.

The cumulativeness of these cycles—the accumulating precedent, the expanding institutional capacity, the steadily rising threshold of what prompts public concern—is the transformation, but it happens slowly enough that it does not look like one. What is being produced, across these years and these deployments, is something that might be called an infrastructure of repression, by which I mean not merely the physical infrastructure of weaponry and logistics but the softer infrastructure of legal precedent, institutional habit, professional culture, and public expectation.

The AFSPA in Kashmir is not simply a law; it is a set of practices and reflexes that have become embedded in the bodies and the institutional memories of the forces that operate under it. The area domination march in Manipur is not simply a security tactic; it is a form of territorial assertion that has become so routine as to have lost its original character as an exceptional measure. And the electoral deployment in West Bengal is not simply a temporary mobilisation; it is a lesson, repeated every five years, in what the state looks like when it decides that a political event requires a paramilitary frame.

The danger is not that India will wake up one morning to find that it has become a military state by decree. The danger is subtler and, in some ways, more insidious than that: that it will find, looking back from some future vantage point, that the accumulation of legitimate-seeming exceptional measures has, brick by brick and deployment by deployment, constructed something that functions like one without ever having announced itself as such. That West Bengal’s elections will have served not only as democratic exercises but as training grounds, logistics rehearsals, and normalisation machines—laboratories, in the precise sense, for a militarisation of civic life that began, as it always does, at the margins, and is moving, as it always does, towards the centre.

The question that remains, and that the data alone cannot answer, is whether there is still sufficient civic imagination left—in the courts, in the press, in the movements that have mobilised against previous encroachments—to name what is happening clearly enough, and loudly enough, to interrupt it. But that question cannot even be properly asked until we are willing to look at the choreography for what it is.

Ankush Pal is a sociologist trained at the London School of Economics, researching urban spatiality, caste epistemology, and social movements.

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