The city has bid adieu to Goddess Durga. The Carnival, a parade of the heritage of humanity, has rolled. Lakshmi Puja will be over on Thursday. The Bengal government, which was keen to ensure that the festive celebrations went off without a hitch, would possibly give itself a pat on its back. There was a surge of people at the top-billed Pujas on all the festive days. The business around the Pujas boomed.

But what the government cannot ignore is the looming shadow of the protest that continues in the aftermath of the RG Kar horror of August 9. Some junior doctors began a fast unto death right at the onset of the festivities. For many revellers, the protests remained at the back of their minds, a nagging reminder of the realities that dog our society.

The government on its part made two attempts to break the deadlock. But both meetings, convened by chief secretary Manoj Pant, ended without any result.

The doctors say they will not budge on their 10-point demand, the latest in their list that has seen some tweaks over the weeks. The government on Tuesday submitted an affidavit before the Supreme Court listing the work it says it has completed with regard to infrastructure and security at the medical colleges and hospitals. The chief secretary had also laid these down in his meeting with the doctors on Monday. The doctors had scoffed at the claims as a “lie”.

In the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Indira Jaising, the senior counsel representing a section of junior doctors, insisted on a direction from the bench for the state to conduct elections to student bodies. The bench did not agree, instead asking Jaising to approach Calcutta High Court.

Conduct of student union elections has been a demand of not just the doctors, but of several college associations across Bengal for the last few years. The government has so far not budged, ostensibly because it does not wish to risk losing its political control over educational institutions. It’s clear that if the government agrees to the doctors’ demand, it will open the floodgates in other educational battlegrounds. The doctors, who are smart, intelligent people, would surely know that the government can’t give a written undertaking on this.

The government has also begun a pilot central referral system, as demanded by the doctors. The doctors have said they are sceptical of its efficacy.

Hence, just what will make them stand down isn’t quite clear. This leads to the assumption that the doctors’ primary condition now is the removal of the principal secretary, health, Narayan Swaroop Nigam. This demand has been on their list for a long time but wasn’t the primary one. The ouster of Vineet Goyal as Calcutta’s police commissioner was. They had their wish fulfilled. Exactly a month ago, during their meeting with chief minister Mamata Banerjee. On September 16, Mamata, after a five-hour meeting with the doctors, had announced a new commissioner would be in place “by 4pm on Tuesday (September 17)”.

She also agreed to replace the deputy commissioner (north), the director of medical education and the director of health services. But Mamata drew the line on Nigam, arguing that she couldn’t shift all three key officers in the health department.

The government has also made its support for Nigam apparent: he’s present in the Supreme Court hearings and attends media briefings with the chief secretary.

Why this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation over a bureaucrat? Nigam, an IAS officer of the 1998 batch who is an electrical engineer educated at IIT Kanpur, was brought to the health department in May 2020, during the height of Covid-19. He has already spent over four years in the department and his transfer, therefore, should not be an issue.

This brings one back to the incident that triggered it all. The heinous murder and rape of a junior doctor on August 9 in the seminar room of her workplace where she was resting at night. That the alleged perpetrator — as of now the CBI has named only one person, Sanjay Roy, in its chargesheet — could carry out the grisly crime with impunity was possible because of the morass of corruption and degradation the RG Kar institution had become over the years, but especially under Sandip Ghosh’s tenure as principal.

The issue is that Ghosh could not have been running the facility like his fief without the backing of the health department whose boss is Nigam. If the health department was unaware of the goings-on in RG Kar, then it is a case of utter ineptitude.

But is Nigam the sole responsible person? Finally, the buck stops with Mamata who has been holding charge of the health — and police — department since 2011. The doctors have had their way with the police boss; if the health boss also has to be removed, the only other person at whom the finger can be directly pointed is the chief minister. So far, the junior doctors have been coy about speaking about Mamata directly but if Nigam is replaced, there is no telling if the junior doctors would scale up their demand to put Mamata under the lens.

The government, therefore, appears keen to brazen this out. Mamata, since that meeting on September 16, has not met the junior doctors herself. There was speculation that she might meet the fasting doctors on the eve of the festivities. But she didn’t.

The chief minister is no naive person. She must be aware of the fact that she — and her government — is at the receiving end of a sustained urban unrest that shows no sign of ebbing. One can’t recall the last time such a protest at the heart of a metropolis and state capital continued for over two months. If she has a strategy to convince the doctors, she is yet to unveil it. The more she dithers, the louder the cries and the more intense the fire would get.

The utsab is over, the winter of discontent looms large.