The government led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee seems to have been seized with fatalism. Not only has it proven itself to be inefficient on most counts, but it is also refusing to make an effort to look smarter and more active in the months that are left for the assembly elections in West Bengal. Ways to do this were provided by the recommendations of the administrative reforms committee headed by the former chief secretary, Amit Kiran Deb, a committee that the chief minister had asked for. But most of the recommendations of the committee will now be ignored, because the suggestions are likely to seriously upset the status quo. The committee recommends that 16 departments of the government with overlapping functions be reduced to eight. This would eliminate delays, lack of coordination, the spinning out of red tape and the stifling layers of obfuscation. But all that is better — in other words, people’s harassment and administrative inefficiency are better, whatever the price, than upsetting coalition partners who must have a required number of departments under their control. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), now a little shaken by signs of its unpopularity that it cannot ignore even at its most arrogant, obviously feels it cannot afford to upset its allies. With the gradual lessening of its contact with reality and its slightly unbalanced focus on every breath that the Opposition draws, the CPI(M) is probably finding that the state and its voters have somehow become dimmer than the party’s immediate interests.

In spite of frequently pronounced brave words, evidently the CPI(M)-led government feels that it is walking a tightrope. So there can be no question of merging, for example, the agriculture department with agricultural marketing as recommended, or fisheries with animal resources development, or school education with mass education extension, and so on. Only civil defence and disaster management have been brought together. But the government has also rejected the recommendation to divide six of the larger districts into smaller units for the sake of more efficient governance. All of which leads to a puzzling question: since reforms are intended to change things, did the West Bengal chief minister expect that reforms in the case of a CPI(M)-led government would mean something novel, defined as something that suits the Left Front government alone?