Dutta's bosses

Wed, Oct 28 05:48 AM

You could take a charitable view of Atindranath Dutta's twirl before television cameras. Liberation after a two-day captivity can be exhilarating. So, there he has been, changing his shirt six times a day to keep up with the television appearances, cheerfully recounting the story of his abduction by Maoists as the officer-in-charge of Sankrail police station, thanking his abductors for letting him go, and debating out loud when and why he'd like to join duty. However, to

rationalise Dutta's cheerful engagement with television crew is not to imply that he is in any way being proper. And even as his seniors in the West Bengal police talk of evaluating his "role" in the police station during the Maoist attack last week, Dutta has become the chubby-faced symbol of all that is wrong with the state of Bengal.

It is easy to count Dutta's indiscretions, his failure to express regret over colleagues killed by the Maoists, his inability to affect the sobriety expected after a prisoner swap. But the political and administrative establishment in West Bengal has hardly been different these past days. The state's home secretary has flouted service rules by talking openly about the Dutta incident, freely imbuing his remarks with political content by referring to the Kandahar hijack. Dutta's seniors in the police are furious at his indiscretions, and privately even hint at questionable conduct during the attack on the Sankrail police station in which he has abducted, but in effect Dutta has been allowed a free run. The state government has presented a comic picture. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee thundered warnings, about how the Naxals had better watch out the "next time". This while his party boss, CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat, defended the swap, and said that the police and the administration cannot fight the Maoists alone — the party, he actually said, will "mobilise people to resist them (the Maoists) and fight them back. We don't rely on the police and administration."

These last days have been a revelation of the administrative anomalies wrought by 32 years of Left rule, during which the lines between party and state have vanished, thereby handicapping the administration in taking on a security issue seen to have ideological colour. It is questionable whether this administration can take on the Maoists with the requisite focus and finesse.

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