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In a ruthlessly crafted mission, with the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being close collaborators, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government has been laid low in west Bengal.

In a shameful first, 2.7 million voters came to be disenfranchised because their “logical discrepancies” – a device never used before by the Election commission – could not be sorted out for want of time.

What that unprecedented breach of the Constitutional injunction that “free and fair” elections cannot be said to have been held should even a single eligible voter be prevented from casting her vote does to the republic order is for residual democrats to ponder.

Imagine that the total difference of votes cast for the BJP and the TMC has been three million or so.

What might have happened had the 2.7 million disenfranchised voters actually voted is for all to wonder at, especially in view of the seats that were lost or won by less than 5,000 votes.

A travesty of an electoral process if there ever was one. The felling of the feisty Mamata Banerjee has brought cheer equally to the Left and the Right.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Long viewed as an unpedigreed usurper who had the temerity in 2011 to rudely bring down the 34-year-old Left front regime – high priests of theory and iron-clad organisation notwithstanding – by, of all things, mobilising the farming community against industrialists who were eyeing to acquire agricultural land to set up manufacturing units, leading to an episode of police firing on agitating peasantry with many fatalities resulting, the vandalism visited now on a statue of Lenin seems less consequential than the ignominious exit of Banerjee, the bete noir.

That Left cadres have for some time now been openly raising the slogan “pehle........

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