Left is not right

Rajat Roy Kolkata

Singur, with thickly populated, mostly farming communities, is about 40 km from Kolkata, the capital of the Left Front ruled-state, West Bengal. The habitat offers a diversity of occupations pursued by generations of locals — agriculturalists (landholding farmers and farm labourers), artisans, small traders and self-employed people like sharecroppers, landless migrants and resident labourers. This Singur became the centre of a new political debate once the state government started acquiring 998 acres of agricultural land to set up an automobile factory by Tata Motors. Already much blood has flowed, first in Singur and later in Nandigram. The resistance of the peasantry coupled with Mamata Banerjee's fast and protests of Medha Patkar and other activists have forced the political class, including the prime minister, to turn their attention to the issue.

For the first time in the 30 years of Left Front rule, the CPM is facing a real political challenge. The challenge, the CPM is facing now, is serious and it is coming from an expanding coalition of radical forces outside, and dissenters within. The CPM is facing a serious challenge from the same peasantry whose interest they have been championing for the last few decades.

During the first Left Front regime (1977-1982), and also as a fall-out of the Naxalbari uprising, the CPM intensified the land reform programme by distributing surplus land taken from the rich landlords to the landless peasants. With the ‘Operation Barga’ movement, the CPM ensured that the sharecroppers' right to till the land would be protected and landowners can’t evict them from their land. These measures helped the party in electoral politics. Now, after  30 years as a ruling power, the CPM is faced with the dilemma of snatching the land back from the peasants for big business groups, multinationals and real estate profiteers. 

Since the new industries are being set up by the private sector (in the case of Singur, Tata Motors will set up a automobile manufacturing unit), should the Left Front government keep the entire deal with Tata Motors and others under wrap? Since the government is acquiring private land in the name of ‘public interest’, do the people have the right to know what sort of public interest would be served by this initiative?

Despite repeated demands, the government is stonewalling all these questions and resorting to coercive measures to push the land acquisition drive. This has created a scenario where the poor peasants, hitherto a solid support base of the ruling Left, have been left with no option but to resist the strong-arm tactics of the government, the police and the goons of the CPM who operate as extra-constitutional power centres in most of Bengal. After Singur, we have witnessed similar agitations in Nandigram (East Midnapore) and Bhangar (South 24 Parganas).

At Nandigram, where the government is planning to acquire14/15,000 acres of land for setting up a SEZ (the Salim Group of Indonesia is planning a chemical hub here), people fought pitched battles with the police; seven villagers were killed in police firing, several others were injured. Seeing the determination of the protesting people of Nandigram, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who has become an ideological crusader for this massive big business and capitalist industrialisation programme, had to make a tactical retreat. But the government has not given up on this project. Hence, the uncanny debate remains alive, with the government refusing to divulge any information for public scrutiny.