The pattern is becoming unmistakable. First it was the RJD–Congress combine in Bihar. Now it is the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. Every time the Opposition senses that its carefully engineered vote banks may not survive a credible verification exercise, the first instinct is not to cooperate with the system but to malign the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The TMC’s latest outburst—that there is “blood on the hands” of the Chief Election Commissioner—crosses all boundaries of political decency. More importantly, it reads less like an accusation and more like a confession: a confession that the party fears the ground beneath it is slipping as West Bengal heads into elections next year.
The reason for this nervousness is no secret. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has triggered panic in pockets where illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have long been cultivated as dependable votes. Over the past week, multiple news channels have shown visuals of illegal entrants attempting to flee across the border, fearing that they may be identified during the verification drive. These are voters who should never have been on the rolls in the first place—people whose names continued to exist even decades after their arrival, or even after their death in some cases.
For years, the TMC has allegedly provided patronage to such elements—helping them secure identity documents, enrolling them as voters, and shielding them from scrutiny. In return, they formed the backbone of a loyal, tightly controlled vote bank. This ecosystem is now under serious threat. The SIR is designed precisely to weed out bogus voters, dead voters, and illegal migrants who have been fraudulently inserted into the electoral rolls. Naturally, a party dependent on such distortions has reasons to panic.
The Election Commission’s battles are not new. It recently had to fight a legal case over a migrant family whose antecedents could not be verified despite decades of illegal stay. That case was only the tip of the iceberg; thousands of such instances are now surfacing across Bengal. Instead of cooperating with the constitutional body tasked with conducting free and fair elections, the TMC has chosen confrontation and theatrics.
This is exactly what we saw in Bihar. The RJD and Congress repeatedly hurled allegations of “vote chori” even before polling began. Yet, the Bihar election was one of the most peaceful and transparent in recent memory. The results—where JDU–BJP secured a decisive mandate—were accepted by voters, observers and institutions. Crucially, not a single losing candidate demanded a recount. The loud allegations were merely political positioning, not grounded in fact.
But the Opposition is now caught in a cycle of blaming institutions for its own decline. The Congress, which once ruled for more than six decades, is today a party shrinking at alarming speed, unable to win states, unable to anchor an Opposition alliance, and consistently failing to challenge the BJP on the ground. Rahul Gandhi has lost electoral battles repeatedly—94 times by some counts—and may well face defeat in Amethi again. A party that has failed to reinvent itself now seeks refuge in conspiracy theories targeting constitutional bodies.
The TMC is heading down the same path. A 10-member delegation of its MPs—including Mahua Moitra, Kalyan Banerjee, Dola Sen and Saket Gokhale—met the CEC alleging that the SIR was driving people to suicide. They cited the unfortunate case of a 37-year-old woman in Hooghly who took her life because she reportedly did not receive an enumeration form. Tragic as her death is, the TMC’s narrative collapses under the weight of basic questions: deported to where? On what grounds? Why should a genuine Indian citizen fear verification?
The truth is simple: no genuine voter is at risk. At worst, an undocumented illegal immigrant may lose the right to vote—but deportation is a matter governed by immigration law, not the Election Commission. Ordinary citizens have nothing to fear from a routine verification drive.
What the TMC truly fears is losing a vote bank it has nurtured with impunity. If illegal migrants, sensing the tightening scrutiny, choose to flee, that is not the failure of the ECI—it is the exposure of a long-standing political fraud.
In this context, the TMC’s shrill attacks betray more desperation than principle. A party confident of its political strength does not erupt at the mention of voter verification. Only one that knows its electoral fortress is built on shifting sand reacts this way.
For Bengal’s voters, the real question is simple: will elections be fought on governance, development and law and order, or on the survival of an illegal vote bank? The ECI’s SIR is a step toward ensuring the former. The TMC’s attacks suggest it fears the latter.
Either way, one thing is clear—the game, as they say, is up.
