Mainstream WeeklyThe mode of conducting the recent assembly elections in West Bengal and its aftermath signify a paradigm shift in the mode of governance. Lakhs of voters lost their voting rights through the process of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Critical political observers feel that the SIR, monitored by the Election Commission and legally ratified by the Supreme Court, played a big role in changing the ruling political regime in West Bengal. The party which came to power, the BJP, has initiated a number of steps including targeting of leaders/followers of the previous regime, eviction of hawkers, bulldozing of ‘illegal’ settlements, and detection-detention-deportation of ‘illegal immigrants’, leading to dispossession of a large number of footloose people and destruction of their sources of livelihood.
The above developments remind us of Giorgio Agamben’s arguments/observations made in his seminal work, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agamben observed:
“…the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter – in fact, has already palpably altered – the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms. Indeed, from this perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.”
Agamben theorized the outcome of the State of Exception:
“as the establishment…of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”
What is happening all around signify the arrival of Agamben’s theory in the state of West Bengal.