As Mamataland simmers again under the heat of street protests, stone-pelting, and spontaneous burning of state property, the question arises, almost with a sense of weary inevitability: Has the time come to impose President’s Rule?
This week’s eruption in Murshidabad over the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, which left at least three dead and many more arrested, may just be the tipping point in a state long teetering on the edge of constitutional chaos. Trains were halted, police vans torched, and the government appeared to have taken an extended roshogolla and tea break. This was not a tableau of robust federalism but a snapshot of breakdown.
Writing on the charred wall
To its credit, the Calcutta High Court recognised the writing on the charred wall. It ordered the deployment of central forces, including the Border Security Force, to restore a semblance of order. When judges start doing the job of the executive, one knows the republic is running on empty.
The opposition, never one to miss a chance to sound the alarm, has upped the ante. The BJP has called for the imposition of President’s Rule, citing the state’s persistent failure to uphold basic law and order. Predictably, the state government has blamed everyone except itself: central conspiracies, historical grievances, and the usual bogey of communal politics.
And yet, even critics of central intervention must concede that something is seriously amiss. This is not an isolated skirmish. It comes on the heels of multiple instances where the state machinery either looked away or looked overwhelmed. The rot, if one may be blunt, is structural. A government that cannot – or will not – protect its own police stations is one whose writ no longer runs.
Not a trivial matter
Of course, invoking Article 356 is no trivial matter. The Supreme Court’s S.R. Bommai judgement (1994) remains the constitutional North Star. It holds that President’s Rule is not a political panic button but a legal mechanism of last resort, to be triggered only when there is ‘a breakdown of constitutional machinery,’ not merely political inconvenience or administrative ineptitude.
The historical record offers both cautionary tales and instructive precedents. The first elected communist government in India, led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Kerala, was dismissed in 1959 by Jawaharlal Nehru’s government following a prolonged agitation known as the ‘Liberation Struggle’. There was no breakdown of governance, just a breakdown of political patience. That decision – steeped in Cold War anxieties and domestic expediency – was the original sin, the moment Article 356 ceased to be a safeguard and became a weapon.
Some invocations of the provision have, of course, stood the test of constitutional scrutiny. Punjab (1987 to 1992), during the height of the Khalistan insurgency, and Jammu and Kashmir—where central rule has been more the rule than the exception—are examples where the Centre intervened not out of pique but necessity.
Favoured tool to dismiss governments
But the same cannot be said of its use during the Indira Gandhi era, when President’s Rule became a favoured instrument for dismissing unfriendly state governments with almost metronomic regularity. Between 1967 and 1977, more than 50 state governments were dismissed, often on little more than a governor’s whim or a PMO directive.
The most brazen of these was in 1984, when the Congress-installed governor of Andhra Pradesh dismissed N.T. Rama Rao’s elected government while the chief minister was away in the United States for heart surgery. The governor swore in a rebel minister, Nadendla Bhaskara Rao, claiming – on the strength of dubious affidavits – that NTR had lost his majority. Public outrage and NTR’s theatrical return, complete with MLAs in tow, forced a humiliating rollback. But the message had been sent: Article 356 could be used not just to uphold the Constitution but to sabotage it.
Legacy of misue
This legacy of misuse is precisely why courts later imposed guardrails. The Bommai ruling mandated that the majority be tested on the floor of the House, not in Raj Bhavans or drawing rooms. It also made clear that political instability alone does not equal constitutional collapse.
Even so, the line remains thin and contested. Uttar Pradesh in 1992, in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition, saw President’s Rule imposed to prevent further communal violence – a decision upheld as proportionate to the gravity of the crisis. More recently, Maharashtra in 2019 entered central rule after a hung assembly failed to produce a government, though that interregnum lasted only as long as it took for political scriptwriters to agree on a plot twist.
Protest turns into pogrom
So, where does West Bengal sit on this spectrum? If armed mobs dictate the schedule of suburban trains, if a district headquarters resembles a war zone, and if the High Court is forced to do the job of the Home Department, are we not already in the zone of breakdown? Those defending the status quo will argue, as they always do, that democracy must allow for dissent, even disruption. Fair enough. But when protest turns into a pogrom, and disorder wears the garb of governance, democracy begins to devour itself.
President’s Rule is no magic fix. It is a blunt instrument meant to arrest a freefall, not engineer reform. But at times, even blunt instruments are better than studied indifference. And West Bengal, in its current state, is no longer merely a troubled state. It is a state in trouble.
The Constitution provides for a remedy. The Centre, if it chooses to act, must do so with care, clarity and courage. And if it does not, it must be prepared to answer a simpler, starker question: how many more Murshidabads will it take?