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It is about gaining control of rural Bengal, which has helped the Front – headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and several smaller left parties – romp home to power in successive elections for the last 30 years.
The government was led for the first 24 years from 1977 by veteran communist Jyoti Basu, who sewed together the Left Front before handing over charge after the 2001 election victory to his protégé, literature aficionado Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, earlier known for his haughty intellectual demeanor.
While Bengal turned into a graveyard for industry thanks to militant communist-affiliated trade unions in the first 24 years, Buddhadeb switched gears to court industry after bending over backward in a bid to spruce up the state’s image. Even the British Airways office was vandalized by party cadres in the early 1990s. Investors were considered to be in suicide mode to plough capital into West Bengal.
Contrary to the logic that everything was hunky dory in agricultural Bengal, it was mostly party cadres and their sympathizers who flourished, while the bulk of the poor farmers whose holdings were insufficient to make ends meet could not find jobs, as industries closed down or were shifted out of the state.
Leftists harp that industrial policy was on the blueprint way back in 1996 under Buddhadeb’s predecessor, couched in the traditional pretext that a step-motherly central government neglected the state. But that does not explain the erosion of a work culture, the conduct of irresponsible trade unions, the strikes at the drop of a hat and the flight of capital to greener pastures.
The only notable industrial activity during the last decade of Jyoti Basu’s time was restricted to several Memorandums of Understanding, perhaps to add credence to his regular summer trips to Europe. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, in his last seven years, only went abroad officially a couple of times.
Trouble erupted last year in rural Nandigram, an area 70 kilometers southwest of Kolkata with a sizable Muslim population – they form 27 percent in the state and impact electoral results. Police, alongside armed communist party cadres, beat up and fired at unarmed villagers protesting against the takeover of land for a proposed chemical hub to be set up by the Indonesian Selim group. Violence simmered even though chief minister Buddhadeb categorically withdrew the proposal of a chemical hub.
Singur – 50 kilometers from Kolkata and the place where the Nano, priced at an incredible US$2,500, is expected to roll out in the October festive season – also has a sizable Muslim population. This is where the sit-in demonstration began last Sunday.
Most opinion shapers, with non-journalistic gingerliness, have highlighted only the Muslims’ plight – they are the most secure in Bengal – without treating the Tata case as a rural raw deal. Both Tapasi Malik, a teenager allegedly raped and murdered after protesting the land grab for the car project, and a woman stripped and dragged along during the last village-level elections in which the Left slithered into its strongholds, were non-Muslims.
The problem has arisen with the 400 acres earmarked for ancillary units, which the opposition Trinamool Congress, along with other parties that have jumped on the bandwagon, wants returned to the farmers and the land sourced elsewhere. After sidling off the forced acquisition issue, the government confessed to using a late 19th century colonial act to justify the takeover and reiterated its inability to return the land, citing legal tangles.
The Tata Group has issued an ultimatum, threatening to pull out even at a cost of nearly US$350 million if the demonstrations do not cease.
The Left government’s obituary will be inked with Tata’s exit, as several other projects in the pipeline on several thousand acres of land are watching this mammoth investment before taking a plunge.
In thrall of Stalin, the vintage Marxists of Bengal, some of whom honed their intellect in U.S. and West European academies, packed off information technology during the initial years and withdrew English instruction at the primary level in government schools, perhaps to create a non-skeptical bureaucracy. But they turned arrogant with untrammeled power. Arrogance with the subjects persisted even after capital was courted with gusto.
They had the villagers, who are now threatening to careen toward Mamata Bannerjee, known for being headstrong and unpredictable. She is unmoved by the administration’s overtures for talks, as this is her only chance to unseat the Left in the coming elections – even if it means setting back Bengal’s clock once again.
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(Susenjit Guha is a freelance writer living in Kolkata, India. He can be contacted at sguha60@yahoo.com. ©Copyright Susenjit Guha.)
