There is something exceedingly odd in which the Mamata Banerjee government is handling the impending panchayat elections. Or perhaps the word is “mishandling”, and “impending” means “later rather than sooner”, and “elections” means “imposition”.

As matters stand, the panchayat elections will be held as scheduled – on July 2, July 6 and July 9 – only if a miracle comes to pass. After a first-phase nomination period marred by violence on a scale the state experienced only during the panchayat elections of May 2003, when the Left Front was in power, Mira Pandey, the by-the-book state election commissioner, has decided to move the Calcutta high court for an unequivocal directive on armed security to be deployed by the West Bengal government before the first phase of the elections on July 2.

“We have received a few thousand complaints [of violence] so far,” Pandey said on June 10. “We have also received the letter from the state regarding availability of forces. The high court guideline on manning of polling booths is quite clear. We want to ensure the security arrangements before we go to the polls.”

Since much of the SEC’s angst is born of the Trinamool government deliberately dragging its heels (given its recent setbacks, including the Saradha Effect that has bankrupted millions of the state’s rural poor, it needs all the time it can get to muster its forces), the possibility of the issue winding its way to the supreme court is strong.

And the supreme court, by now probably peeved beyond leniency by recalcitrant states – including Karnataka, where the state poll panel, the state government and the high court couldn’t settle the issue and approached the apex court, which rocketed the state government – is very likely to censure the Trinamool government. But where the Karnataka big stink ended in the president’s rule (November 2007), that will happen in Bengal only when the centre decides it has to step in – and the opposition is unlikely to see it fit to lodge a demand for central rule.

But the Trinamool Congress has more or less perfected inertia, by dint of much-applied trial-and-error rather than planning. What it might resort to, therefore, is invoking as precedent the Karnataka government cutting the Karnataka election commission’s powers on February 12, 2013 by passing the Karnataka Municipality and Certain Other Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013, and making it mandatory for the SEC to announce (urban local body) poll dates in concurrence with the state government – the Trinamool’s dream. (It’s another matter that the supreme court ordered the Karnataka government to acquiesce to the SEC the very next day.)

There is no lack of evidence of engineering pre-nomination violence: As far back as Wednesday, May 29, the first day of filing nominations for the first, July 2 phase, complaints rolled in about opposition candidates being prevented from filing their nominations by Trinamool enforcers. Reports came in from Bardhaman, Bankura, South 24 Parganas and Howrah districts. A Congress delegation met the governor, MK Narayanan, who has hardly been a dispassionate chider of Trinamool violence. The BJP, which has decided to contest “almost all the seats” under the charge of the recently appointed greenhorn Varun Gandhi – which just goes to show how important the BJP considers the state – has decided to just batten the hatches and sit tight.

The SEC has just two bugs it wants to address: enough armed security to render the elections ‘free and fair’ – “the sine qua non of democracy”, according to a five-bench ruling of the supreme court in 2002 – in the loosest meanings of the words, which is the best that can be hoped for in Bengal; and an adequate number of observers to keep its probity untarnished. The number of security personnel necessary now stands at 1,46,920; the number the state can provide is 45,000. The bare minimum number of observers needed is 400. As of June 4, the number the state government had listed for the SEC was still 40 short (down from 134 reported during the May 14 SEC vs state government donnybrook in the Calcutta high court).

In the first phase on July 2, nine districts, comprising 36,000 booths, are supposed to go to the polls. But Mira Pandey’s concern is that adequate security will be nearly absent: According to the SEC’s estimates, based on inputs from district magistrates and superintendents of police, 80 percent (or 28,800) of the booths are sensitive and will require the presence of 57,600 armed personnel – which is more than the state can supply in toto, for all the three phases.

On May 14, a division bench of the Calcutta high court refused to accept the SEC's contention that 800 central armed police companies – or 80,000 personnel – were required to securitise the panchayat elections. But the bench was dead wrong: West Bengal needs 85,390 armed personnel for just 19,125 ‘super-sensitive booths’ and 20,737 ‘sensitive booths’.

The 9,668 ‘less-sensitive booths’ and the 4,840 ‘normal booths’ will make do with the lathi-armed personnel the state can supply on its very own. But an indication of how fraught the SEC considers these elections is that just about 36 percent of the 54,370 booths in the state can be guarded ‘normally’.

The SEC’s job is daunting. There are, at present, 17 districts, 755 zilla parishad constituencies spread over 17 zilla parishads and one mahakuma parishad, 8,864 panchayat samiti constituencies in 341 panchayat samitis, and 36,016 gram panchayat constituencies in 3,354 gram panchayats. There are six municipal corporations and 121 municipalities, with a total of 1,806 constituencies / wards.

The state government is hampered by a vast, cumbersome ego – primarily that of the chief minister. The problem is that by the time she realises that the ego is not really serving her purpose, it’s a bit late to turn back the clock and re-examine the virtues of negotiation. Feeding her sense of righteousness are legally open-ended court orders such that one on May 14, in which the Calcutta high court had passed a “consent order” – phraseology disputed by the SEC – that the state “may procure” forces from other states or the centre, “as may be considered appropriate by the state government".

The SEC saw both “may procure” and “considered appropriate by the state government” as juridical indulgence of governance that was deliberately remiss. The state government – still being herded around by a chief minister who told a meeting on June 7 of the Trinamool’s nine Rajya Sabha MPs that “the Lok Sabha elections will be held in mid-November” and that the “panchayat elections are a run-up to it”, and on June 10 rambled on about a “non-Congress, non-BJP federal front” – found it “appropriate” to ask seven states for 130 companies. All of them turned down the request, most on the grounds that they had their own battles to fight – primarily against a new Maoist upsurge.

On May 27, the day the SEC notified the polls, Mamata Banerjee bent from her ‘never-bend-to-the-centre’ stance and asked the central government for 300 companies of central armed forces – still inadequate but an indication that she acknowledged her ego was shot. On June 4, the union home ministry refused, saying that it had no central forces to spare, knowing full well that the rebuff would result in an impasse that the Calcutta high court could not break. (The election commission, meanwhile, had no problems loaning 500 central paramilitary companies to keep the Karnataka assembly elections in May trouble-free.)

On Tuesday, June 11, union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde agreed to supply central forces to Bengal – but 120-130 companies, not the 300 Banerjee had asked for. It’s a clever move: the Trinamool cannot now say that the centre refused to help, though the maths says that the centre’s offer won’t make a dent (even with 300 central companies and 130 companies from various states, Bengal will still fall short by 28,000 personnel in the first phase alone).

Meanwhile, the Trinamool Congress has already won uncontested 39 gram panchayats in Hooghly, 17 in West Midnapore, and 10 of 11 in Howrah. Eventually, it can count more than 60 gram panchayats and far more panchayat samitis in its bag of uncontested seats. Among these seats are those about who complaints have reached Mira Pandey’s office. In the first phase alone, the Trinamool is set to win 5,259 seats uncontested. If the calculations hold, the Trinamool might easily outshine the Left Front’s rack-up of 6,800 ‘unopposed’ victories—including 5,030 gram panchayat seats, 836 panchayat samiti seats and 31 zilla parishad seats—during the six panchayat elections in May 2003.

Left Front chairperson Biman Bose, who is given to emotional and numerical exaggeration, said that “[m]ore than 5,000 candidates have failed to file nominations”. But anecdotal and experienced evidence of hundreds of opposition candidates being press-ganged by armed Trinamool enforcers into not filing nominations at block development offices is rife; in fact, sub-divisional officers informed candidates attacked at BDOs to file their nominations instead at the SDOs.

These hundreds include a few score Trinamool rebels. There are at least 100 seats in West Midnapore, at least 50 in East Midnapore, and many in Hooghly where a Trinamool vs Trinamool faceoff is certain. The violence in these intraparty areas has been just as brutal as in interparty zones, because the intraparty battles have to do with economic turf, almost all of it illegal, and some perceived slights unaddressed by effective party whip or a structure of grievance redress. But an indication of the inelasticity of the ideological battlelines is that none of the Trinamool rebels has seen it fit to join the opposition (the Left Front is not entertaining any defectors, largely because many of these Trinamool rebels were opportunistic defectors from the Left Front).

Whatever the case, state election commissioner Mira Pandey’s apprehensions are not overstated. With a state government unwilling to acquiesce to a democratic electoral process – with both “democratic” and “process” being operative words – West Bengal stands to lose the minimum stability it needs for minimum governance to continue.