Calcutta will go to the polls in three days. Only three days to go before the most high-pitched election in recent times takes place.

This time round, political parties seemed to have dropped even the pretence of elections being a people-centric, welfare and development-oriented process. Instead, what has played out since the announcement of dates, and even before that, is a no-holds-barred, brazen tug of war. And right through this high-pitched, hi-tech, frenzied and muscular run-up, the voter has been reduced to a caricature of an entity.

Since it is practically impossible to have an adda about these elections without ending up with a red nose or a black eye, and the cha groups won’t let strangers in, I chatted with a bot. For believers and disbelievers alike, I have “exported” the entire chat text as a doc file and saved it. And here are edited excerpts.

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Me: Are you familiar with the political campaigns and slogans in connection with the West Bengal Assembly elections?

Bot: Yes.

Me: Malinowski said many interesting things about how humans use language. No?

Bot: The 20th-century anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was actually a pioneer in how we look at language. His famous ideas include language as context, phatic communion, the coefficient of weirdness.

Me: Yes, yes. I remember the coefficient of weirdness. Did he not propose after living amongst the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea that the magic incantations they used were not really a string of unintelligible words? Instead, they were a collection of familiar words strung without care for grammar and repeated in innovative loops.

Bot: You’ve hit on the core of his theory.

Me: What if you applied this theory of weirdness to this year’s political campaigns in Bengal?

Bot: It proves that political slogans function less as logical arguments and more as magical incantations designed to “grip” the voter’s reality. When political leaders make historical blunders — like misattributing Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s famous slogan to Swami Vivekananda — the “magic” breaks. In Malinowski’s theory, the precise repetition of the ritual is key.

Me: What does it reveal about how political parties view the voter?

Bot: It suggests that parties do not primarily view the voter as a rational deliberator (instrument of reflection), but as a social actor who needs psychological security and simplified heuristics (mode of action).

Me: Please elaborate.

Bot: Here’s an itemised list. Consumer of direct benefits, primarily driven by financial liquidity rather than long-term infrastructure, underserved, bribable, someone who needs constant reassurance about dietary and local traditions, anxious about their legal status... The Bottomline: In 2026, the parties don’t seem to perceive the voter as a citizen-builder of a future economy but rather as a vulnerable survivor who needs to be protected, fed and legally validated.

Me: Is it any different in the United States?

Bot: While Bengal’s parties see a voter who needs a
patron (someone to give them a stipend), US parties see a
voter who needs a product (someone who fits their cultural brand and promises to lower the price of gas).

Me: What about Nepal?

Bot: Nepal has moved towards what analysts call the “Romance of Leadership”, where the voter is perceived as someone who wants to invest a single, decisive and “uncorrupted” personality with the power to overhaul the entire system. In 2026, the voter is no longer a “supporter” — they are a critic with a ballot.

Me: And Bangladesh?

Bot: In 2026, the Bangladeshi voter is perceived by the ruling BNP and the Opposition as a “Watchdog with a short fuse”. The parties are no longer campaigning to “rule” the voter; they are campaigning to prove they are “fit to serve” a population that has proven it can topple an autocracy.

(The responses are collated and summarised from sources, some of which appear on click, research papers, news reports, policy papers, etc., etc. They are far from infallible, but the ones closer home hurt.)

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Calcutta will vote in three days.

Three more days to feel the weight of the vote. A little over 90 lakh people have been removed from the list of voters. Of these, 63 lakh comprise those who died, shifted, were absent or found to be duplicate voters. Of the remaining 27 lakh, the majority are yet to make it back to the voter list. Bengal’s electoral roll, and Calcutta’s, is vastly denuded. Which basically means the right to vote is more of a privilege than ever.

In Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Qatar, UAE, North Korea, Eritrea there are irregular or no elections. There are no public elections in the Vatican. In China, elections occur but at every level they are controlled by a single party. Elections were held in Athens even in 5th century BCE and adult citizens could participate. The glitch — only free men were considered citizens. New Zealand became the first country to give women the right to vote in 1893, but they couldn’t contest until 1919.

Back to Calcutta. Three more days to sift the actual electoral issues from the non-issues circulating. Work done by a candidate, her accessibility, his track record, the Himalayan garbage piles, the shameless defectors, the hate-mongering, the state of the schools and colleges, the air and noise pollution...

Last June, The New Yorker ran a piece titled “There are no perfect choices in the New York mayoral race”. But Calcutta has to choose and choosing is voting. In 2016, surveys in the UK showed that overwhelming numbers of those between 18 and 24 years of age did not want Britain to exit from the European Union. It was the pensioners who wanted to leave. The outcome of the referendum surprised many. But here’s what happened — the pensioners came out and voted as they felt. The youth may have felt equally strongly but they did not translate their sentiments into votes and lost out.

More recently, when Donald Trump was elected to power a second time, it was his “fighter’s attitude” that apparently won him his place. None of the things he promised then has changed now, but his approval ratings have dipped. According to data and research firm YouGov, even the number of Republicans who “strongly approve” of his performance has dropped post-Iran.

There might be no perfect choices in an electoral situation, but there is something called sound rationale. And that rationale needs to be based on citizen welfare, not party fanfare.

Calcutta must vote in three days. For a new government, decidedly. But also to reclaim the power and place that is the ordinary voter’s.