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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

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More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

By refusing to resign, Mamata Banerjee isn’t resisting authoritarianism—she is becoming it

Mamata Banerjee spent decades fighting for Bengalis' right to vote. It would be a tragedy for her legacy if she told those same Bengalis their vote didn't count when it went against her.

Universal adult franchise, the right of every Indian citizen to vote and to have that vote count, is not a rhetorical device. It is the cornerstone of Articles 326 and 327 of the Constitution. When Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, after losing an election conducted under the supervision of the Election Commission of India, declares that she “hasn’t lost,” she is not resisting authoritarianism, as argued by TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose in her column in ThePrint. She is becoming it. Banerjee is telling millions of voters in West Bengal that their verdict is illegitimate and their democratic exercise was a sham. If that is “resistance”, it is resistance directed not at the BJP, but at the people of Bengal themselves. What Ghose calls resistance, the Indian Constitution calls something far less poetic: a refusal to honour the sovereign verdict of the people.

Let us examine this clearly.

Ghose makes much of the deployment of 2.5 lakh central security forces in West Bengal, comparing it to US troop deployments — a rhetorical flourish that collapses under scrutiny. Those security forces were not there because the central government distrusts Bengal. They were there because Bengal’s own documented electoral history demanded it.

After the 2021 Assembly elections, a batch of PILs filed by lawyers and civil society members came before the Calcutta High Court, documenting incidents of murder, rape, arson, and mass displacement of political workers across the state. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), constituted following a five-judge bench order, visited 311 spots and received nearly 1,979 complaints representing over 15,000 victims. Its report concluded that what had occurred was “retributive violence” causing “disruption of life and livelihood of thousands of people and their economic strangulation”, language that went publicly unrebutted by any senior TMC leader.

On 19 August 2021, the Calcutta High Court ordered a CBI probe into all cases of murder and rape, with a court-monitored SIT for all other offences. The CBI registered 43 cases pursuant to that direction. In a 2026 plea before the Supreme........

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