Tragedy, it has been said, repeats itself as farce. There is no reason for the annual Book Fair in Calcutta to be either a farce or a tragedy in the normal course of things. Yet the event, over the last few years, has managed to expose certain aspects of Bengal’s political and civic life in a rather ugly light. At one level, the entire fracas over the fair’s venue — played out by the state government, the army, the Calcutta high court, the private guild that organizes the fair, the Central defence ministry and litigants worried about the city’s environment — is impossible to take seriously. But it is precisely the ridiculousness of the entire situation, unfailingly rehearsed every year, which has sad and serious implications for Calcutta, its keepers and its citizens. A “temporary” resolution has been found again that saves the situation for the government. This resolution turns the army, court and environmentalists into absurd and troublesome non-players. In contrast, the chief minister and some of his political colleagues in Delhi emerge as triumphant saviours of nothing less than Culture, the entity that gives Bengal its inviolable raison d’être.

It is this image of a chief minister anxious to take his state into liberalized modernity, yet with apparently nothing better to do than eagerly politicking over a private cultural event, that embodies the regressiveness and general damage of this temporary solution. For Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, to endorse a notion of culture that overturns all environmental, legal and civic principles, and then publicly busy himself meddling with the life of that culture in the name of what ‘the people want’, is to use his office to drag the state back a decade or two politically. Mr Bhattacharjee has far more important things to do at the moment. He must keep away from such gratuitous intrusions in what should concern no government or politician. He must also not actively compromise the sanctity of the courts and the army’s right to hold a consistent and principled position on a matter that remains well within its rights.

The Maidan embodies — not just symbolically, but in actual terms — Calcutta’s hopes of ensuring for its citizens their right to live healthily and in an atmosphere of civic (and civilized) awareness. The chief minister must keep in mind that these are people who have been breathing the most lethal air purely because of the criminal ineptitude, indifference and corruption of his government. The pollution in urban and rural Bengal is a shameful fact, with its own sordid political history, for which the chief minister is no less accountable than some of his more directly culpable colleagues. A meddlesome chief minister ruining the vital resources of his city is not the best icon for a ‘new’ Bengal.