The Withdrawing State in West Bengal

The Telegraph runs an editorial piece today about the 'Withered State' in West Bengal, which is mainly a description of how badly the government has messed up in dealing with the Lalgarh uprising, and the Maoist infiltration into the state. Its diagnosis of the condition seems convincing:

"A sectarian view of administration marked their long reign in the state. They did everything to blur and even obliterate the distinction between the government and the party. The administration was bent to serve the party’s interests. In a policy that was perfected by Anil Biswas, the late secretary of the West Bengal unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), top levels of the administration were packed with incompetent people. The only criterion for their selection was their ability to please the bosses at Alimuddin Street. With such people at the top, the administration simply lacked the capacity or will to deal with a crisis."

The title of the article may appear misleading, since the point being made is not so much the non-existence of the administration, as its sheer incompetence, brought about by years of subversion for political ends. However, the editorial goes on to clarify that the situation in Bengal isn't just about using the administration to further party ends (something which is a feature of politics in pretty much every other state in India), but also about replacing the enforcement process with a more deliberative, 'political' method of resolving disputes:

"To the party, all issues of governance must be reduced to politics. The result has been a bizarre situation in which all conflicts are sought to be resolved politically. This may sound pretty harmless; but what it meant in effect was that the party’s approach must prevail over all other options. Such an approach requires the administration to be constantly sidelined in order to make room for the so-called political approach"

This is reflected in the conditions leading to the Shalboni attacks on the CM's cavalcade: while the government did nothing for years to counter Maoist infiltration into Lalgarh and the surrounding areas, it reacted with brutal, and terrorising, force against local tribals following the incident. The decline of the administration implies that the state only has two options left when confronted with internal security crises: it can either do nothing (as it has done in Lalgarh, and continues to do in areas along the border with Bangladesh), or react with excessive, disproportionate force to try to re-establish some semblance of authority (Nandigram being the classic example of this). Neither of these options, of course, is sustainable in the long run to maintaining political authority over a large area of land, so this has led to a third feature of the state in Bengal: it is in withdrawal.

Much like the stereotypical Versailles court, the government in West Bengal is moving out of far-flung, troublesome areas towards consolidation in the centre, pausing along the way only to make a desperate attempt to prove its existence by gratuitous shows of violence. Again, bearing an uncanny similarity to Louis XVI's doomed reign, administration has been reduced to being a function of party games: the decisions of the mandarins at Alimuddin Street are final, and take precedence over the proposals of those in the administration who are far more experienced, and well-informed. This saga, as one may recall from history, is not likely to end well for anyone. Neither for the villagers caught in the cross-fire of the violent state and the despotic Maoists, nor for the pusillanimous administration, which can only withdraw so far and no further. It only took hours for Versailles to be occupied, but the aftermath of the march set back the course of French democracy by decades.