West Bengal’s Dual Power Play

The Mamata Banerjee-ruled state is beginning to look eerily like colonial Bengal’s dual tyranny.

At the height of the British Raj, writer and dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra wrote his classic ‘Nil Darpan’ in the 1860s to expose the brutal economics of empire. His play, a thinly fictionalised account of Bengal’s indigo revolt, portrayed a province ruled twice over: once by a hapless Nawab who held the seals of authority, and again by an East India Company that held the purse, the police and the whip. Robert Clive’s ‘dual government’ inaugurated in 1765, perfected this arrangement. The Company collected revenue and enforced its will, while the Nawab shouldered responsibility for law, order and famine.

Two centuries later, while Bengal is not under foreign rule, the sensation of being governed twice has returned - once by the Constitution, and again by the parallel power structure installed by the state’s ruling political party that has shredded constitutional norms.

Like Mitra’s indigo planters, this parallel power structure – which only answers to the ruling party and not the law - operates with impunity, secure in the knowledge that officialdom will look the other way.

New Duality

The events that unfolded recently in and around the Calcutta High Court were a vivid demonstration of this new duality. The immediate trigger was an Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigation into a coal-scam-linked money-laundering case. That, in itself, was unremarkable. What was extraordinary was the response of West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

She physically stormed the premises, accompanied by senior officers, police and bureaucrats. Laptops, pen drives and hard disks were seized by the state government. A constitutional authority, operating under federal law, found itself dispossessed by another constitutional authority acting in the name of a state.

The premises raided belonged to Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), a political consultancy that works closely with the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), and to its head, Prateek Jain. Among the documents carted away by Banerjee’s officials were said to be government files. Why, precisely, state records were sitting in the office of a party-linked consultancy is a question that has yet to be convincingly answered. The ED, alarmed, rushed to the High Court seeking urgent relief.

What followed should worry anyone who believes courts are meant to be sanctuaries from the street. The ED’s plea for an urgent hearing was brushed aside.

When the matter eventually came up, a crowd of TMC supporters descended on the court complex. Proceedings were drowned out by slogans and lawyers were heckled. One of the judges, Justice Souvra Ghosh, was forced to walk out, recording in his order that the atmosphere had become “unfit for hearing.”

Brazen Assault

This was a physical assault on the judiciary. Bengal’s third pillar of democracy was literally shouted down by a mob aligned with the ruling party. That the Kolkata police, despite being present, could only partially restore order only reinforced the sense that there are now two systems of authority in the state.

The ED’s petition accused the state’s top police brass, including the director general of police and the Kolkata police commissioner, of stealing evidence and wrongfully detaining central officers. Banerjee’s counter-charge was that the agency was acting as a tool of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the centre, and was fishing for political data ahead of election. Both claims may contain a grain of truth. But the deeper issue is not who is right in this particular quarrel. It is that a constitutional dispute was settled by force.

In January 2024, when the ED raided the home of notorious TMC enforcer Shahjahan Sheikh in Sandeshkhali, a mob attacked the agency, smashing computers and driving officers away. In September last year, a routine army exercise in Kolkata was turned into a political crisis when troops removed a protest stage erected by the TMC. Banerjee accused the Centre of ‘misusing’ the armed forces even as retired officers took to the streets to defend the military’s neutrality.

These episodes have revealed a pattern where central agencies are obstructed and courts are intimidated in Banerjee’s Bengal. Paramilitary forces are politicised. And the state government presents itself as the aggrieved party in every clash.

That is where the analogy with ‘Nil Darpan’ bites. Clive’s dual government worked because the Company could exploit the ambiguity between formal sovereignty and real power. Today, Bengal’s ruling party thrives in a similar twilight. When it suits, it invokes the Constitution and the rights of states. When it does not, it deploys the police, the cadre and the crowd. The result is a polity in which legality and loyalty are no longer the same thing.

Should the Centre respond with President’s Rule, that blunt instrument of constitutional surgery? History cautions against it. Article 356 has been abused often enough to justify scepticism. Yet history also warns of the cost of inaction. When a state’s institutions can no longer protect themselves, the promise of self-government has already been hollowed out.

At the very least, the Supreme Court should step in. The Chief Justice of India has the power to take suo motu cognisance of a breakdown in judicial functioning. Such intervention would be a defence of the idea that disputes in a democracy are settled by arguments, not by mobs.

Bengal has seen what happens when dual power goes unchecked. In Mitra’s time it led to famine, revolt and the slow destruction of rural society. Today the stakes are different, but the principle is the same. A state cannot long endure when its citizens are ruled by two masters, one written in law and the other enforced in practice. If that new Nil Darpan is not shattered, the reflection it shows will only grow darker.