This is a rare victory, and Calcutta’s culture will be the richer for it. The Calcutta high court has ruled against the holding of the Book Fair on the Maidan. This marks the end, one hopes, of a long and ugly battle between judicial and public concern for the city’s environment on the one hand, and an unwarranted and thoughtless form of governmental interference on the other. The court’s ruling comes, therefore, as a direct reprimand to the state government’s persistent callousness regarding the environment and, though less directly, to its meddling with the civic life of Calcuttans in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. The permission given by, or wrenched from, the army has been deemed by the court to be unequivocally contrary to every environmental principle. And the court’s order to have the Maidan’s ravage cleared up within a specified period is perhaps its sharpest comment on the “recklessness” with which state bodies supposed to be preserving the city’s greens have actually been systematically ruining them.

It is unfortunate that the state government, with the explicit support of the chief minister, had got into this fracas at all. And the court’s intervention, though primarily on environmental grounds, underlines not only the government’s inability to mind its own business but also its indifference to environmental issues. The history of this conflict over the fair’s venue reveals how the government has repeatedly promised the building of an alternative fairground to dodge the court’s orders. But no such site has been built so far, and the shiftiness with which the government (including the chief minister) has covered up its own failure to do so is part of the Book Fair saga. If some Calcuttans lament the death of a tradition with the Book Fair not taking place on the Maidan this year, they must blame the government squarely for not managing to provide them with another location on which this cherished tradition might have been kept alive. If the court’s ruling is a triumph for Calcutta’s civil society, especially its environmentalists, then let this also be the beginning of an entirely salutary form of ‘activism’ by which Calcuttans could claim back from the State some sort of control over their own well-being and that of their city. If the Maidan can be saved from human depredation, callousness and politicking, then Bengal may also hope now for cleaner air and water. It is not books alone that will save Calcuttans from emission and arsenic.