The poll bugle has been sounded.

"Dates for Assembly elections in five states - Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Manipur, Punjab and Uttarakhand - were announced Saturday (yesterday) afternoon. The five states will vote over seven phases starting February 10, with counting of votes on March 10," NDTV. "Elections in all five states will be held amid a massive surge in Covid cases across the country fueled in part by the Omicron variant - this morning the Union Health Ministry reported over 1.41 lakh (141,000) new infections in the previous 24 hours, an increase of 21 percent from the day before." Election to the West Bengal Assembly was held in eight phases from 27 March to 29 April 2021, Election Commission of India (EC). The Delta variant of Covid was raging across India at the time. On 1 May, "Authorities reported 401,993 new cases in the previous 24 hours, after 10 consecutive days of more than 300,000 daily cases," Reuters. A world record. "In April 2020, as India reeled from a wave of hospitalizations and deaths and its citizens took to social media to beg for oxygen, a mask-less Modi boasted of huge crowds at an election rally in the state of West Bengal," wrote Ruth Pollard. "A lot of liberals like me might be very happy to see BJP lose the UP elections, but from the point of view of the economy, a bad BJP loss would mean a sudden squeeze or slowdown in the entire reform process and that would not be good for the economy," said Swaminathan Aiyar. Attempts to reform the power sector in UP is an example. "As soon as official announcements were made, the electricity staff ganged up and threatened to shut down the entire state, following which the government had to beat an ignominious retreat." In July, "dozens of Muslim women in India found they had been put up for sale online," BBC. "The app pretended to offer users the chance to buy a 'Sulli' - a derogatory slang term used by right-wing Hindu trolls for Muslim women." "With the arrest of a second-year engineering student from Jorhat in Assam, now there are four alleged culprits in connection with the Bulli Bai app case which had listed hundreds of Muslim women for auction," HT. "The open source app - Bulli Bai - was hosted on web platform GitHub which has since taken it down," BBC. "Over a series of tweets in April 2020, an anonymous Twitter account @ Aartisharma08 claiming to be an employee of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) Information Technology Cell (IT Cell) alleged the existence of a highly sophisticated and secret app called 'Tek Fog'," The Wire. This app can apparently 'bypass reCaptcha codes' and access Twitter and WhatsApp accounts "to artificially inflate the popularity of the party, harass its critics and manipulate public perceptions". "Though left- and right-wing dictatorships are different in several respects, they have one thing in common. Both use state power and charismatic leadership to prioritise nation-building and national power over individual lives. The pursuit of national glory vastly supersedes mass suffering," wrote Prof Ashutosh Varshney. The EC cannot control secret apps. It can only count votes.