There is more than a semantic difference between the words government and governance. West Bengal has a government that fails to provide even a semblance of governance. The government fails to maintain law and order and refuses to take action against those who flout the law of the land. What is worse, the attitude and functioning of the government lend ground to the suspicion that the government, despite swearing fidelity to the Constitution, deliberately refuses to execute orders passed by the high court. It is not one odd minister or a single bureaucrat who is guilty of all this, but the entire government beginning with the chief minister and the chief secretary. It is now common knowledge that on July 18, 2008, the Calcutta High Court passed an order banning two-stroke autorickshaws from December 31, 2008. This order was based on a notification issued by the state environment department on July 17 and presented in court by the state’s advocate-general. The West Bengal government is thus not only guilty of violating the high court’s order, but is also incapable of honouring its own public commitment. The West Bengal government and its chief minister are shameless about this state of affairs and continue to present lame excuses for the failure.

This is one side of the problem. The other side was manifest when the administration stood by and watched those opposed to the ban going on a rampage in the city, destroying public property. This was an admission of the failure to maintain law and order. The reasons for both failures — the refusal to implement the court order and the failure to punish violators of the law — are the same. The government has chosen to pander to narrow electoral interests instead of undertaking the responsibilities of governance. Since the administration has itself transgressed a court order, it has lost all moral standing to take action against other violators. In other words, the Left Front government has lost the moral right to rule the state. What prevails in the state is not the rule of law but the rule of street violence. In this there is no difference between Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s Communist Party of India (Marxist). Mr Bhattacharjee has power that he is incapable of exerting; he has responsibilities that he refuses to acknowledge. This leaves West Bengal in the penumbra zone of a state with no governance.