Eggs and tomatoes, and broken light bulbs — perhaps that is what Trinamool Congress legislators are made of. Because these are the missiles they rained at treasury benches and the speaker’s chair in the assembly in protest against the West block level pre-litigation conciliation bill, 2004, that the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front has proposed. Paper balls and chairs were included in the Trinamool Congress legislators’ arsenal, but they were not content with mere target practice. They surrounded the speaker’s chair and blocked his way when he entered to take his seat. There was one adjournment, and the speaker called it “a black day for democracy”. But their righteous rage was most fiercely directed at the law minister, Mr Nisith Adhikary, who was repeatedly collared with a black scarf and once brought to the ground in the scuffle, when he lost his glasses. Ladies and gentlemen of the party also jumped up on tables in the frenzy of the war dance, or overturned them as an alternative; there was much by-play with the speaker’s mace between members of the opposition and the government. The general idea was not to let the proposal be tabled, and to carry on the mayhem once it had been. Congress legislators did not join the merrymaking, but they did walk out once the bill was tabled.

What the bill proposes may or may not be cause for alarm or controversy. That has to be worked out by debate within the assembly, as in any normal, civilized society. The superlative exhibition by Trinamool Congress legislators of disrespect of all norms has little to do with serious purpose. The bill is not what they are interested in, they are only interested in getting back lost attention and lost space. Thinking politics was never the Trinamool Congress’s forte. The deliberate disruption of traffic and therefore normal life on Wednesday in order to protest against the starvation deaths in Amlashole is added evidence of that fact. A politics without ideology, and hence without discipline or forethought, is unlikely to give rise to anything but mayhem. But there is, in the Trinamool Congress and the Youth Congress’s decisions to hold huge public rallies, a deliberate flaunting of police orders and of civic rights that has become part of the political culture of West Bengal, to which the CPI(M) has contributed most of all. What the Trinamool Congress members of the legislative assembly did in the assembly on Monday is unprecedented, what the party did in the city on Wednesday is not. But the actions together can add further colour to the impression of West Bengal as a state where it is impossible to get work done.