Editorial

The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision in Manipur and Sikkim has deleted nearly 1.85 lakh names — 6.3 per cent in Manipur and over 11 per cent in Sikkim — and presented it as routine housekeeping. In reality, the exercise has only deepened the public’s growing distrust in a system that claims to protect the franchise while systematically narrowing it.

In Manipur, still scarred by ethnic violence since 2023, large numbers of displaced Kuki-Zo citizens lived in fear that their names would disappear precisely because they could not be found at their original addresses. Those fears have materialised. When enumeration forms go unreturned and “logical discrepancies” become grounds for deletion, the process stops being technical and starts looking selective. The Commission’s assurances that genuine voters can appeal ring hollow when the very people most likely to be excluded — the displaced, the poor, the remote — are also the least equipped to navigate bureaucratic hurdles.

Sikkim’s even steeper percentage drop raises the same red flag. High rates of unmapped electors and sudden ineligibility findings suggest either chronic neglect of earlier rolls or an overzealous purge that prioritises statistical neatness over lived citizenship. Clean rolls are necessary. Mass deletions without transparent, accessible verification are not.

Public confidence in the electoral machinery is already low. Repeated controversies over roll revisions, opaque deletions, and the difficulty of restoring names have left citizens sceptical. When the system appears more efficient at removing names than at ensuring no eligible voter is left behind, it stops functioning as a guardian of democracy and starts looking like an instrument of exclusion.

The appeals process exists on paper. In practice, it places the burden on the citizen rather than on the state. Until the Election Commission demonstrates that every deletion was preceded by genuine, reachable notice and that restoration is swift and barrier-free, these numbers will continue to erode trust rather than rebuild it. A democracy that deletes first and asks questions later is not working — it is failing its most basic test.

The Alternative for Germany’s crushing victory in Saxony-Anhalt, with roughly 44 per cent of the vote, is not a routine regional result. It is the closest a far-right party has come to governing a German state since the Second World War. That single fact should alarm every capital that values democratic stability in Europe.

History is unforgiving to those who dismiss early advances of radical nationalism as mere protest. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists did not seize power overnight; they exploited economic despair, cultural anxiety and institutional hesitation. Benito Mussolini’s Fascists began as a street movement that mainstream elites initially underestimated or sought to co-opt. In both cases, democratic norms eroded step by step—through electoral breakthroughs, coalition bargaining, and the gradual normalisation of once-taboo ideas—until the system itself was captured. Other authoritarian turns in the twentieth century followed similar patterns: polarisation, scapegoating of outsiders, and the promise of national restoration against a supposedly corrupt centre.

Saxony-Anhalt does not equal 1933. Germany today has strong institutions, a free press, and a constitutional order designed precisely to prevent a repeat of that catastrophe. Yet the parallel is not in scale but in sequence. When a party classified by domestic intelligence as right-wing extremist becomes the dominant force in a state parliament, the firewall that mainstream parties have maintained begins to look fragile. Voter frustration over migration, economic stagnation and distant elites is real. Channeling that frustration into a force that questions core elements of Germany’s post-war consensus, including aspects of European integration and NATO orientation, carries geopolitical weight.

A far-right foothold in eastern Germany would send signals far beyond Magdeburg. It would embolden similar movements across Europe, complicate EU decision-making on Ukraine and energy, and test the cohesion of the transatlantic alliance at a moment of global strain. Authoritarian regimes watching from Moscow and elsewhere would interpret any softening of Germany’s democratic guardrails as validation of their own narratives about Western decline.

Democracies do not usually collapse in a single election. They weaken when societies grow accustomed to the unacceptable, when economic and cultural grievances are left unanswered by the centre, and when historical memory fades into complacency. Saxony-Anhalt is a warning, not yet a verdict. Germany’s democratic parties, and Europe’s wider political class, must treat it as such—addressing legitimate voter concerns without legitimising forces that traffic in exclusion and historical revisionism. The lessons of Hitler, Mussolini and their contemporaries remain painfully relevant: early normalisation is the most dangerous phase of all.

• SAS Kirmani