Just bystanders

Silda,West Bengal this week was the site of violence of a level unseen in the state since the Naxalbari uprising in 1967. In broad daylight,Maoists on motorbikes and trucks stormed an Eastern Frontier Rifles camp,killing 24 jawans,stripping it of ammunitions and supplies. How they got away with an ambush of this scale and audacity,and why the state intelligence units had no whiff of the danger remains to be investigated. In November last year,a similar attack by a Maoist squad had killed four EFR jawans in the same area. This round of violence has again exposed something soft and rotten in the state of West Bengal. Now,as Maoist leader Kishenji brags of the force of their “reply to Operation Green Hunt”,the government looks simply besieged,and unable to cope.

A few months back,after the attack on the Sankrail police station,the chief minister was forced into an ignominious compromise,entirely on the Maoists’ terms — having to swap several Naxalite prisoners in exchange for the abducted officer. Atindranath Dutta,the schlubby policeman who was returned to safety with a POW card hung around his neck,exemplified the yielding ineffectuality of West Bengal’s law and order machinery. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee vowed that the Naxalites better watch out,that he would crush them mercilessly the next time,and so on — a day after the state had been humiliatingly showed up,in full view of the media. The “next time” has come and gone,and the West Bengal government stands by,helpless.

More worryingly,CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat claimed then that the party would “mobilise people to resist them (the Maoists) and fight back. We don’t rely on the police and administration”. That response is telling — in West Bengal,party and state have blurred into each other to disturbing effect. In the last few decades,the CPM’s tight clutch over the administration has rendered state machinery enfeebled and incapable of taking on India’s most urgent internal security issue. As they confront Maoists (whose call to arms is grotesque parody of the party’s own rhetoric on empowering the exploited),the West Bengal state looks especially shifty. What is a state’s ancient mandate but to assure protection? If the West Bengal government cannot shoulder up to the task,maybe its time someone more competent was called in to crush the insurgency.