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In the first week of January 2026, the Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation election ended before most citizens realised it had begun, not with slogans or polling queues but with silence, files being closed, names being withdrawn, and winners declared without the inconvenience of a vote. Twenty seats out of one hundred and twenty-two were handed to a single alliance without a single ballot being cast, an outcome that looked procedurally clean yet felt democratically hollow. Municipal elections are meant to be intimate exercises of governance where citizens decide who manages their water, roads, waste and neighbourhoods, yet in Kalyan Dombivli, democracy did not arrive at the polling booth at all. What unfolded was not a sudden collapse but a slow vanishing of choice, a moment where the machinery of elections continued to function while the public was quietly removed from the equation. The wards did not erupt in protest because there was no visible disruption, no police barricades, no violent suppression. Instead, the contest dissolved through paperwork. Forms were rejected, names were withdrawn, deadlines passed, and by the time the city woke up, sixteen per cent of its civic body had already been decided. This ordinariness is what made the moment unsettling. Elections are not only about legality, but they are also about legitimacy, and legitimacy weakens when outcomes are decided in rooms rather than among people.

The numbers explain the scale of the event but not its weight. Fourteen seats went to the Bharatiya Janata Party and six to the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, granting the Mahayuti alliance an unchallenged entry into the corporation without public endorsement. Opposition candidates across parties withdrew almost in unison, including members from Shiv Sena UBT, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, both factions of the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress. Entire panels cleared out, leaving voters with no option to affirm or reject. Candidates like Harshal More in Ward 28A and the trio of Ramesh Mhatre, Vishwanath Rane and Vrushali Joshi in Ward 24 emerged victorious without meeting a voter. In Dombivli and Kalyan, Asavari Navare and Rekha Chaudhary were declared winners simply because no one remained to oppose them. One of the most consequential withdrawals came from a senior MNS leader whose exit altered the balance of power overnight. None of this violated election rules on paper, yet together it created a landscape where competition was engineered out rather than defeated. Democracy assumes conflict of ideas and personalities, but in Kalyan Dombivli, conflict was replaced by coordination. The absence of resistance created victories that felt less earned and more allocated. When elections are reduced to survival of paperwork rather than persuasion, governance begins with a deficit of trust.

As expected, the aftermath was louder than the process itself. Opposition leaders described the episode as a systemic manipulation rather than a political defeat, alleging financial inducements, administrative bias and targeted rejection of nomination papers. Claims surfaced that candidates were persuaded to withdraw through pressure and incentives that ordinary citizens could never access. The language used was sharp, yet beneath the rhetoric lay a deeper anxiety about institutional neutrality. When returning officers are accused of rejecting forms over minor clerical errors while overlooking similar discrepancies elsewhere, the issue is no longer partisan but structural. The ruling alliance dismissed these allegations, framing the outcome as evidence of organisational strength and public confidence, citing welfare initiatives and ground-level work. Both narratives competed for legitimacy, but what neither could erase was the fact that voters had been excluded entirely. Democracy allows for landslides but not for silence. The controversy soon entered the legal arena with petitions arguing that even a single-candidate election should proceed to allow citizens the right to vote, including the option of NOTA. Activists questioned how an electoral system that recognises rejection through NOTA could simultaneously declare winners without any voting. The State Election Commission itself hesitated to finalise the results, asking for inquiry reports into whether withdrawals were voluntary or influenced. This hesitation was telling. Institutions rarely pause unless discomfort exists beneath the surface.

Beyond party politics, the KDMC episode revealed how fragile local democracy becomes when civic engagement collides with power consolidation. The boycott by the twenty-seven villages' struggle committee added another layer to the silence. Their long-standing demand for a separate municipality led them to stay away from the election entirely, inadvertently clearing the field in several wards. Their protest was ideological, yet its effect was an electoral vacuum. Together with opposition withdrawals, this vacuum created an environment where democracy technically survived but substantively retreated.

What makes this election resonate beyond Kalyan Dombivli is its familiarity. Many urban local bodies across India operate under similar pressures, weak opposition structures, administrative discretion, financial muscle and voter fatigue. The danger lies not in one election being unopposed but in unopposed outcomes becoming normalised. When citizens stop expecting a vote and politicians stop needing one, governance shifts from representation to management. The KDMC election may or may not be remembered as the most shameless in Maharashtra’s history, but it will stand as one of the clearest demonstrations of how democracy can be emptied without being overthrown. It reminds us that the health of an election is not measured by how smoothly results are declared but by how meaningfully people are allowed to participate in shaping them.

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