On the day the US and Iran announced a ceasefire in West Asia, the doctor whom I was visiting asked, “What did you write on this week?” I replied, “West Asia.” Hailing from West Bengal, the doctor’s anxiety was different from the world’s over the death toll in the war against Iran, and the global energy crisis sparked by it. The doctor said, “How about writing on SIR [Special Intensive Revision]? What’s happening in Bengal is not too different from genocide?”

Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin combined the Greek prefix genos—meaning race or tribe or community or nation—with the Latin suffix cide, or killing, to coin the term genocide. It signifies an intentional destruction of a human group by an infinitely more powerful adversary. When the opposing group is reduced to helplessness through mass murder and indiscriminate devastation, the genocidaire believes his victory and security would be eternal. This psychology underlies Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where over 75,000 people have been killed.

What has happened in West Bengal is “votercide”, which has intentionally inflicted civic deaths upon 27.16 lakh people there. They are alive, reside in Bengal, and wished to be enrolled as voters, in contrast to those whose names from the voter list were deleted as they had shifted out of the State or were dead.

Most of the 27.16 lakh people possessed the requisite documents to prove their eligibility. Yet their right to vote has been extinguished through bizarre bureaucratic rules, framed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) at the behest of the Modi government, with the Supreme Court ultimately green-lighting the votercide. The randomness of the votercide matches the arbitrariness of genocide.

The “votercidaire”

On the face of it, the “votercidaire” is the ECI. In reality, though, it is the BJP government at the Centre that has scripted the votercide in Bengal, in the same manner the Israel Defence Forces executed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal plan. For one, the Union government has a preponderant say in the appointment of the three Election Commissioners, who have seldom worked against the BJP’s interests. For another, the BJP hasn’t criticised the SIR, not even for the harassment to which citizens have been subjected, a testament to the Modi government masterminding the exercise for preparing the voter list afresh.

The motivation of the BJP, the real votercidaire, is to win West Bengal, which it has been unable to conquer, to further expand the territory under its rule. Just as Israel violated the norms of humanity in Gaza, the BJP and the ECI have connived to subvert the decades-old tradition of enrolling voters. They have unjustly and arbitrarily, as media reports have shown, engineered the civic death of 27.16 lakh people, believing their disenfranchisement will irreparably damage the poll prospects of its principal opponent, the Trinamool Congress. Not too surprisingly, a substantial segment of the victims of the votercide comprises Muslims, who overwhelmingly vote for Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee to keep their bête noire BJP, which relentlessly targets them, out of power.

Undoubtedly Hindus, too, have been disenfranchised. But their civic death is collateral damage, in the same way Israeli soldiers perished in the genocide in Gaza. Consider this: BJP MP and Matua leader Shantanu Thakur, in December, said, “If 50 lakh Rohingyas, Bangladeshi Muslims, and Pakistani Muslims are removed during the SIR exercise, while one lakh of our own people are required to stop voting for a while, where are we gaining more?” There can’t be more compelling evidence that the votercide in Bengal was planned meticulously.

Consider also this: last week, after the electoral rolls were frozen, disqualifying 27.16 lakh people from voting in this month’s election, BJP sources told Anandabazar Patrika that 80 per cent of the disenfranchised are Muslim and only 20 per cent Hindu. These figures may not be correct, but what the BJP sources said was startling—that the disenfranchisement was in consonance with their strategy of foregoing some of their own supporters in order to rob Mamata of a much larger share of her votes. After all, an exclusion list comprising only Muslims would have made it impossible to deny the civic death inflicted wilfully on the community.

The votercide in Bengal began a month or so after the SIR process was rolled out there, with the ECI inventing rules for the State it didn’t for others—for instance, appointing micro-observers, applying software to conjure logical discrepancies in the electoral rolls, and appointing judicial officers to adjudicate appeals for inclusion in the voter list. These provoked howls of protest, but the ECI continued with the votercide, under the Modi government’s patronage, just as Israel killed in Gaza, with US’ endorsement, despite worldwide protests against it.

Again, the UN couldn’t stop the genocide in Gaza because of US’ veto. Our Supreme Court didn’t care to exercise its enormous powers to prevent the ECI from creating an ecosystem for votercide, which is tantamount to contempt of justice, as genocide is of humanity.

With the apex court’s approval

When the SIR was announced months before the Bihar Assembly election last year, its constitutionality was challenged on several counts. The Supreme Court didn’t stay it, as it should have, letting the ECI take the SIR to another nine States and three Union Territories. The votercide in Bengal, it can be said, had the Supreme Court’s tacit approval, although it’s possible for it to still make amends today during the hearing of a review petition pertaining to the freezing of Bengal’s electoral rolls.

The misery of the 27.16 lakh disenfranchised Bengalis will extend beyond this month’s Assembly election. This is because there is a question mark on their citizenship, for the ECI’s avowed purpose behind the SIR exercise was to deny voting rights to those deemed non-citizens, a status which can trigger their deportation out of India. Nineteen Appellate Tribunals, under retired High Court judges, have been established to adjudicate whether the 27.16 lakh people are eligible to be on the voter list.

Unlike in genocide, civic deaths in votercide can be reversed, a reason for the 27.16 lakh people in Bengal to hope that their rights have been extinguished only temporarily. Imagining their plight, as they swing between hope and hopelessness, will likely have you fathom why the emerging votercidal India is so chummy with the genocidal Israel.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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