The State seems to be finally withering away in communist West Bengal. The violence and the politics of vendetta that now rage in Lalgarh and elsewhere in the state are an effect, rather than the cause, of the collapse of the administration. Ironically, the politics of the ruling Marxists, who are now mostly the victims of the violence, led to this collapse. 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. Every time an administrative intervention became inevitable, it ended up creating worse problems. The police firing in Nandigram in 2007 was a glaring example of this. It is unrealistic to expect such an administration to rise to the challenge of the current crisis.

The other reason of this administrative void relates to the CPI(M)’s approach to governance. 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 may make sense to a party that wants to have the administration entirely under its control. But this is a sure recipe for the collapse of governance and the rule of law. The Maoists have now revealed that they had dug into Lalgarh since 2007. This could happen only because the administration had retreated from the area. The retreat of the police from the area is thus more than symbolic of the administration’s withdrawal. There are enough reasons to be worried about the Maoist threat and the spread of political violence in the state. More worrisome, though, is the state of administration in West Bengal.