India, Oct. 18 -- Unable to defeat the BJP through successive electoral contests, sections of the opposition and the organised Left have chosen to delegitimise the process itself.

In a functioning democracy, the right to protest is fundamental. It is also not absolute. The moment a protest deliberately breaches the fundamental rights of others, through sustained disruption of public order, engineered institutional collapse, or campaigns of disinformation that seek to delegitimise the electoral process itself, it ceases to be a democratic exercise and becomes something else entirely.

What unfolded in Delhi in October 2026 was the latter. A narrow, technical exercise of cleaning electoral rolls was inflated into a national crisis of "vote...