Mamata Banerjee vs. ECI: Why Bangladesh’s ‘Stamp and Stuff’ Model is the New ‘Free and Fair’
If you have seen the viral videos from the recent Bangladesh elections, you witnessed a level of efficiency that would put any corporate employee to shame. In one clip, a polling agent—let’s call him the “human voting machine”—grabs a booklet of ballot papers. With the speed of a college student copying an assignment five minutes before the deadline, he stamps them, folds them, and stuffs them into the box. He didn’t need a voter. He didn’t need a queue. He was the voter, the verifier, and the winner, all in one.
To most of us, this looked like the bad old days of booth capturing. But to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, it apparently looked like “Free and Fair.”
“See how Bangladesh conducted free and fair polls,” she lectured the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently, while blasting the ongoing voter list revision in her state. “But here is a conspiracy to destroy democracy.”
It is a statement so drenched in irony that you could wring it out and flood the Ganges. By holding up a neighbor—where “voting” in some booths was essentially a manual data entry job for local strongmen—as the Gold Standard, Didi has inadvertently revealed what the Opposition truly misses about the pre-EVM era: the drama.
The problem with the Indian EVM isn’t that it is “hacked”; it is that it is boring. It is a rude, silent machine. It sits there, beeps once, and refuses to be bullied. It doesn’t care how many muscular party workers are standing outside the booth. You cannot grab an EVM by the collar. You cannot pour water into it to ruin the votes. You cannot snatch it and run into the fields without looking ridiculous.
The “Bangladesh Model”—or rather, the return to paper ballots—fixes this. It restores the “human touch” to elections. When an agent stamps a ballot paper on video, it is transparent. You can see the theft. It feels honest because it is happening right in front of your eyes. Perhaps to the Trinamool Congress, this visible chaos feels more “democratic” than the silent, unyielding math of a microchip that just won’t listen to “requests.”
Banerjee also labeled the ECI a “Tughlaqi” commission—calling them eccentric tyrants—simply because they are running a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to remove duplicate and dead voters from the lists.
Let’s look at this “tyranny” closely. The ECI is using software and field verification to ensure that only living, breathing humans vote. This is apparently a “conspiracy.” Meanwhile, across the border, a system where one man can cast votes for an entire village in ten minutes is “Free.”
It seems the definition of democracy has been updated. It is no longer “One Person, One Vote.” It is now “One Agent, One Booklet, and Zero interference.”
The irony peaks when you remember the “Ghost of the Hackathon.” Years ago, the ECI put an EVM on a table and challenged every political party in India to come and hack it. They said, “Show us.” The Opposition, including the TMC, stood outside and boycotted it. They behaved like the student who refuses to sit for the exam but screams that the question paper was leaked.
In India, we have zero proof of EVM tampering, yet the machine is the villain. In Bangladesh, we have high-definition video evidence of ballot stuffing, yet the process is a role model.
This selective blindness suggests a simple rule: For Mamata Banerjee, “Free and Fair” is not about the process; it is about the result. When the TMC swept the West Bengal Assembly polls in 2021, the EVMs were working fine. The ECI was a great institution. The “beep” was the sound of the people’s will. But the moment the ECI starts cleaning up the voter lists—threatening the “ghost voters” that paper ballots so lovingly protect—the Commission becomes the enemy.
We Indians use UPI to buy a 10-rupee tea. We trust digital systems with our money, our taxes, and our identity. Yet, we are being told to look at a manual, paper-heavy system next door—one that is currently on fire—and say, “Yes, let’s go back to that.”
That isn’t a demand for democracy. That is nostalgia for a time when you could win an election with muscle instead of votes. We have seen the “Bangladesh Model.” And honestly? We prefer the boring beep. At least the machine only votes once.
