[Reader-list] The Left in Singur and Capitalist Globalization

[Nishant]

Violence in Singur: Hardselling Capitalist Globalization in the name
of Left Alternative

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Several thousand police and paramilitary forces are
now roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghly
district, West Bengal. On 2nd December, they fired
tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a few
outside supporters who had gone to the area.
Television channels, so far strongly supportive of the
moves of the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government, now
found themselves projecting a story totally at
variance with the words their newscasters were being
made to utter. Even as the bourgeois media went on
mouthing claims that locals (later changed to
Outsiders) were attacking the police, what could be
seen , for example on the Kolkata or the Tara News
channels, or even in Star-Ananda, was the picture of
half a dozen hulking cops converging on individual
hapless villagers, and brutally beating them up with
truncheons. One could also see the tear gas shells
being lobbed and the rubber bullets being fired, and
huge paddy dumps being set on fire. All the while, the
Channels were seeking to divert attention by asking
viewers to send sms on whether they condemned the
behaviour of the (right-wing opposition) Trinamool
Congress members' action in smashing up property in
the Vidhan Sabha (the State legislature, where TMC
MLAs had gone berserk on 1st December).

Left wing Model of Development?
To understand what was happening we need to go back
and look at the model of development being pushed by
the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government. When
Bhattacharjee replaced Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister,
it was a signal to the Indian capitalist class as well
as capitalists from everywhere else, that a new
attitude was being developed by the CPI(M). Singur is
not an isolated case. All over India, the process of
taking over peasants' land is going on. The Special
Economic Zone Bill says that the SEZs created by
taking over land will be like a foreign country. Those
who invest capital in those areas will function under
laws different from the laws for the people throughout
the country. In Kharagpur, West Bengal, the Tatas want
another 1240 acre land. Total targeted land in West
Bengal is nearly 1,00,000 acres. In Gujarat, it is the
Reliance group that is staking major claims. Farmers
in Gujarat are fighting the Reliance group just as
farmers in West Bengal are fighting the Tatas. In
addition there are transnational companies. The Salim
group of Indonesia were feted a short while back by
the Left Front ministers. The group had a strong role
during the coup in Indonesia that led to the murder of
some half a million communists. But that is all old
hat, and seemingly the left ministers cannot be
bothered by such sentimental issues when behaving like
hardheaded businesspersons.

It is in this context that the government's plan for
Singur must be seen. The story of the "industrial
turn-around" of West Bengal begins with the election
results earlier in 2006. The CPI(M) led Front had won
a thumping victory, thanks to the first past the post
system. With just over 50% votes, it had obtained 235
seats, reducing all oppositions to such a minor
proportion that as per legislative assembly rules
there could not even be a formal leader of the
opposition. As the CM was addressing a press
conference at the CPI(M) office, an aide brought in a
message, and the elated CM informed the press that the
Tatas wanted to build a car factory in West Bengal.
Within a few days, a hush hush deal was struck. The
Tatas asked for close to 1000 acres of prime
agricultural land – nothing else would do for them.
The government complied with such alacrity that one
might be pardoned for thinking that they were bound
serfs of the Tatas. They did not consult the Gram
Sabha or any other elected local bodies, though even
their gurus at the World Bank go through the motions
of suggesting the need to consult with local bodies.
Tata Motors want to launch a new car model by 2008,
the one-lakh-rupee car. According to the Left Front,
this is development, and cannot be opposed. It will
put West Bengal in the industrial map of India.
According to CPI(M) Politbureau member and West Bengal
State Party Secretary Biman Bose, those who are
opposing the move are fronting for other big companies
who sell overpriced cars!

We need to look a little more closely at the entire
process. The land that Tata wants is prime
agricultural land. There is plenty of poor quality
land in West Bengal, for example in Purulia district,
or elsewhere. Plenty of old industries are in crisis
and their land could also have been converted. But
this particular area has a good road connection, as it
links up with the Delhi Road. That is the first real
reason why Tata is pushing for this, and only this
area. A second reason, likely to come up after a
decade, will be argued below.

So how did the state government act? Did it, in its
new found faith in market economics, tell Ratan Tata
and his minions to go and negotiate land price with
the peasants? Even that would have been detrimental to
the sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, if
direct sale of land had simply ousted them. But
keeping to the spurious logic of the free market, at
least this should have been done. Instead, the state
government used an act, the Land Acquisitions Act,
which was originally devised in the colonial period,
to take over the peasants' land. They were offered a
price worked out as the average of the previous three
years' price, plus a 30% hike known as the solacium.
The full details of the deal with Tata are not known,
but from the little information that came out, it
seems Tata will not even pay this much to the
government. According to Debabrata Bandyopadhyay,
former Commissioner, Land Reforms, West Bengal, (and
who is, according to many people, the main
burueacratic impulse behind Operation Barga, the
registration of sharecroppers, the reform measure that
a generation back had enabled the Left Front to gain
solid and unwavering rural support), the government
has in fact saddled the people of West Bengal with a
huge burden in order to bring in Tata Motors.
The West Bengal government claims this investment will
create many new jobs and be a major developmental
project. What is the truth? Between 1980 and 1994,
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the three top US
car manufacturers, cut down the total number of their
global employees from 7,50,000 to 3,75,000. Why should
the Tatas behave any differently? If they are really
going to sell cars at the rate of Rs. 1 lakh (US $
2246), they will be cutting costs. They have no
intention of running a loss making factory.

Another question is, why do they want nearly 1000
acres of land? Maruti-Suzuki, a major car manufacturer
in India, need 296 acres of land on which they produce
over 600,000 cars per year. Moreover, we should
remember that while Maruti builds the entire car in
its factory, Tata will only assemble the car there. So
what is all this land needed for? It is likely, that
after the hue and cry has died out, much of this land
would be reconverted to agricultural land, but run by
the Tatas as an agribusiness. Reliance in Gujarat is
going in for marketing organic food. The Hindustan
Motors of the Birla Group, which had been given about
750 acres of land in Konnagar half a century back,
could use only 350 acres and has now sought permission
to reconvert the rest of the land. Moreover, plenty of
industrial land was left, for example in the Durgapur
industrial area. So targeting high quality
agricultural land and insisting that nothing else will
do is bound to create this kind of doubt. Clearly, the
tale of alternative, left wing model of development
peddled by Battacharjee, his industries minister
Nirupom Sen, and his finance minister Ashim Dasgupta,
is a murky tale indeed.

Media reports indicate that the land is being taken
over by the West Bengal Industrial Development
Corporation at a cost of Rs. 140 crores. The Tatas
have informed the West Bengal Government that they
will compensate the government to the tune of 20 crore
rupees after five years with a 0.01 per cent interest.
The discounted value of the money in today's terms
will be about 12 crore rupees. So the West Bengal
government is giving to the Tatas the sum of Rs. 128
crore rupees (28749185 US dollars). This money will
come either from taxes, or from loans contracted by
the WBIDC, which again must be repaid through taxes or
through cutting costs in social sectors like health
and education.

The most important issue of course is the story of
sacrifices. Ever since independence, when foreign
colonialism could no longer be blamed directly, people
have been asked to make sacrifices for the nation. Not
very surprising, though, that it is workers and poor
peasants, tribals and low caste people, who end up
making the sacrifices, while the wealthy, the
bourgeoisie, the urban middle and upper middle class,
the upper castes, all end up with profits. For whom is
Bhattacharjee proposing this development? For Tata?
For the shareholders of Tata's companies? What about
the ordinary people? The peasants are being given a
paltry compensation. Even that is murky. In many
cases, the land was sold to other people, by a small
number of landed elements who knew about the deal in
advance. But they still had the papers, so they were
identified as owners deserving compensation. In many,
even most cases, owners did not want to sell the land.
They are aware that what skills they have are as
peasants. Cash compensation is no good to them for
they will not be able to use the cash in an effective
way. Urbanisation of the area, inevitable if a factory
comes up, will raise the cost of living. The
landowners are not going to become traders all at
once. As one of them quipped, if we all set up shops,
in any case, who will buy?

Five villages of Singur, namely Gopalnagar, Beraberi,
Bajemelia, Khaser Bheri and Singher Bheri, are
affected. While peasants here are not rich farmers,
nor are they absolutely poor. Net income of the owner
of 1 acre of land is about Rs. 1,00,000. So for 1000
acres the net income is around Rs. 100 million (US
$2246030). The gross income is even more, about Rs.
250 million (US$ 5615075). Apart from the peasants or
landowners (in some cases the owners are absentee),
there are the share-croppers and agricultural
labourers. All told, some 7/8 thousand people are
employed, and their total income, Rs 250 million, was
being added to the GDP of West Bengal. This seven to
eight thousand is based on economic calculations
suggesting that for around 5000/6000 peasants there
will be an added 1200 or so share-croppers and about
1000 agricultural labourers. And how many workers will
the Tatas employ? Despite the Right to Information
Act, in West Bengal all real information is firmly
hidden. The West Bengal Government has refused to
divulge these figures to organisations who have sought
them. But one such organisation estimates it will be
around 250 employees. If their average monthly income
is pegged at Rs. 50,000 the total wage bill will be
150 million rupees (This average takes in the high
salaries of the managerial cadre). Then there will be
the profits of the shareholders and the concern, which
after all is the main reason for this investment.
Clearly, this is a model of development that will
intensify disparities.

If Fraud does not Work, Use Force:
Initially, the government went into raptures about the
benefits to the province. Somehow, though, the
peasants did not respond. And so, pressure on them
began to mount. Apprehensive of losing their sole
safeguard to life, the farmers got together to launch
a resistance movement under the banner of 'Krishijami
Raksha Samiti' (Association for the Protection of
Agricultural Land). From the very beginning, women
have been in the forefront of the movement. In
recollection of a famous song of the tebhaga movement,
the greatest peasants' movement in Bengal in the
twentieth century, with 'life and honour as stakes,'
they began to 'hone the scythe.'[1] The state
government, hardly bothered about the plight of the
farmers, remained stubborn, repeatedly reiterating
that the Tata factory would come up on that piece of
land. If the slogan of the alleged Rambhaktas (the RSS
and its allied outfits) was 'Mandir wahin banayenge"
(the temple will be built just at that spot), the
slogan of West Bengal's alleged bam (left) CM was
"factory wahin banayenge". On 25 September, there was
a massive attack. In a pre-planned move, a reign of
terror was unleashed on thousands of peaceful
protesters at the Block Development Officer's office
in Singur. It was the first day cheques were being
handed over to those who had agreed to hand over the
land for compensation, and the demonstration was a
form of pressure on them as well. By the afternoon,
several cases were detected in which those who had
already sold off their land to others, but the
mutation process was not complete, were being given
cheques, denying the present legal owner. Protesting
such illegal deeds by government officials, the
demonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, even
gheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period.
At this point, Mamata Banerjee, leader and Supremo of
the Trinamool congress, arrived and joined the dharna.
A little after midnight, a black-out was created, and
under the cover of darkness, a huge police force,
according to the victims well lubricated with alcohol,
attacked and brutally beat up the protestors, men,
women and children. Ms. Banerjee was also manhandled,
and her sari torn. She was then bundled off to
Calcutta by force, and had to be admitted to a
hospital.

Hundreds were severely injured in the police assault
and 72 put behind bars. Women with small children were
arrested under the Arms Act and/or charged with
attempt to murder. Payel Bag, a
two-and-a-half- year-old, spent four days in prison,
along with two pre-teen boys. 26-year-old Rajkumar
Bhul became the first martyr of the Singur struggle
after he collapsed with severe internal haemorrhage
from police beating. Bhul's mother, in an open letter
to the Chief Minister, squarely blamed him for her
son's death. According to Sumit Chowdhury, one of the
most commited "outsider" activists, who has been
writing and organising solidarity, when he went to
Singur two days later as part of a fact finding team,
and also during subsequent trips, "the hapless and
angry women in the villages – some with broken arms,
bandaged eyes and scars here and there – said that the
policemen were drunk, cursed in the filthiest
language, kicked and molested them".

The subsequent responses not only of the government,
not only of one or two individuals, but of the entire
CPI(M) was damning. Prakash Karat, the General
Secretary of the CPI(M), who has never set foot in
Singur, announced from the CPI(M) headquarters in
Delhi that Singur has one-crop land, that the farmers
are queuing up for cash, and that the demonstrators
were anti-development hoodlums. Evidently, the
protests against land takeover for SEZs and similar
issues are reserved for provinces where the CPI(M) is
not a major partner in the government. Equally
evidently, when Prakash Karat wrote his introduction
to a recent publication entitled The Left and
Environmentalism, he should have entered a caveat that
all his pious utterances do not apply to West Bengal
and his comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.
On the night of the violence, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee
had his alibi. He and other party top brass were in
Delhi. But the alibi is thin. The same day, he also
met the Tata top management. The next day, there was a
report about a community package promised by the Tatas
for Singur. But examined carefully, it was mostly
verbiage. One needs to remember that the massive
investment of the in Orissa and Jharkhand, two of
Eastern India's poorest provinces (though very rich in
minerals and forest resources), has not led to any
positive development in the conditions of poor
peasants, tribals, and others. On returning to
Calcutta, the CM posed as injured Christ, stating,
"forgive them for they know not what they do". After a
huge outcry, two days later he was forced to say that
police action had been "unwarranted". But no single
policeman is known to have been punished.
At a meeting called by the Chief Minister, even a
number of Left Front partners criticised the way the
factory was coming up, but at the end of the meeting
the government announced that the Tata Motors factory
would come up on Singur at any cost. On 9th October,
the opposition parties, both right and left, called a
twelve hour bandh (general strike including total
stoppage of public activities). The CPI(M) threatened
to unleash its cadres.[2] But if anything, this threat
made people fearful and stay indoors.
>From this point, terror became the order of the day.
Any 'outsider', unless a staunch supporter of the CPI
(M) come to campaign for handing over the land to the
government, was treated as a member of one of the
Maoist groups.[3]

Terror was of different kinds. Nirupom Sen, the
industries minister, warned the locals that all
developmental work in Singur would be halted if land
was not handed over. One minister even termed
opposition to the project as 'anti-national' . As a
result of this unrelenting government pressure, some
land transfer began. There was an added dimension to
the handing over. As we noted earlier, some people had
actually sold the land to others, but the mutation had
not been done. So they took advantage of this to claim
compensation.

The struggle continued nonetheless, and therefore
terror took on more concrete shapes. Several of the
deep tube-wells of the area, essential for regular
irrigation of the fields, were vandalised at night.
And this happened despite the massive (already, at
that point, several hundred) policemen and women
posted in the region. From early November, agitation
and terror both stepped up, with the government
threatening to take over the land and hand it over to
the Tatas at any cost by December. Women played a
militant role, resisting all threats and
blandishments.

One of the regular refrains of the government and the
CPI(M) was that the real owner have accepted
compensation, it is outsiders who are causing trouble.
We will discuss the issue of "outsiders" later. Here
we should note that indeed, the lead in the struggle
was taken, not by well to do peasants, but by share
croppers, agricultural labourers, and the smaller
owners. This is the rural mix which fought six decades
back, in the tebhaga uprising.[4] This was the base
which gave the left its decisive majority even in the
occasional periods in the last three decades when in
the cities the Left was on the defensive. So it was
inevitable that the Left Front, notably the CPI(M),
would not be willing to accept that this base will now
speak in its own voice. Yet that was inevitable. The
tebhaga movement had been so massively successful
because the authentic voice of the rural poor had been
well represented by the undivided CPI and the All
India Kisan Sabha. By the present decade, the AIKS was
a bureaucratised carcass living on the memory of past
glories. Present day leaders of the AIKS have not even
seen the tebhaga. The younger among them became
leaders after the Left Front was already in power. So
for them the role of the peasant organisation is to
collect money, collect votes, and on occasion collect
lots of people in trucks and take them to Calcutta for
central rallies. The apparently impressive
anti-imperialist demonstrations, and so on, organised
by the CPI(M) conceal a reality where mass
organisations act as transmission belts of a high
command, herding people in different ways. And so
resentment and opposition grows. In Singur, the direct
attack on livelihood turned the sullen resentment into
organised politics, as the Krishijami Raksha Samiti
brought together most of this rural poor, albeit in a
small area. This challenge could never be allowed to
grow. The Left Front has always been sensitive to the
emergence of left wing oppositions and alternatives
from within the working class and poor peasantry. It
is aware that it has little to fear if the right wing
is even fully mobilised. As long as there is no
serious left wing alternative, it can expect to get
fairly close to half the votes every time, and
therefore get a majority in the first-past-the post
system. Mamata Banerjee was the only right-wing leader
to recognise this, and therefore to develop a populist
political style. But lacking a solid trade union and
rural poor implantation, she has never, even at her
most creditworthy performance proved to be a match for
the CPI(M).

Every time a single trade union, or a single rural
area, has shown autonomy, the CPI(M) has thrown more
forces in the field to smash it, than it has for
defeating its right wing opponents. Early in the Left
Front period, electricity workers had a couple of left
wing, but non-Left Front Unions – the Workers' Union
and the Technical Workers Union, in a number of
plants. Repeated violence, repeated attacks on the
workers, arrests, were used indiscriminately to smash
the unions. In the 1990s, the struggle of the Kanoria
Jute Mills took on epic proportions, as did the
regime's attempts to malign the struggle. So in
retrospect, it was not, or should not have been
surprising, that despite (or because of) its Left
credential, this regime was more aggressive to the
peasant struggle than almost any other regime in
India.

Since this may sound a bit of a hyperbole, let us take
a concrete, very right wing example, to make our
point. Medha Patkar has already made the point. A lot
of people thought Medha was indulging in shock tactics
when she said the Left Front is worse than the Gujarat
government.[ 5] But this is the picture if we restrict
ourselves to the attitude to peasants and
industrialisation, and the violence on them. Patkar
argued that even in Gujarat, she had not been
restricted in her movements as much as in West Bengal.
We should add, that by now the virus is spreading.
First, she was debarred from Singur as an "outsider"
fomenting trouble. Now, when she went to Presidency
College, Calcutta, to speak at the invitation of
students there, SFI thugs beat up students of the
Independent consolidation, and the college authorities
shut the gates on her face. She then climbed on top of
the gates and spoke. But we can also go beyond what
she said to add another point. In Gujarat, the
government made a commitment that it would provide
land for land to all the people ousted due to the
Sardar Sarovar Dam. The Narmada Bachao Andolan argued
that it cannot be done. Indeed, proper land-for-land
rehabilitation has not proved possible even for those
who have been properly identified. As I saw in two
trips earlier this year, village communities have been
split up, with one village resettled in 8-10 new
sites. People have been given plots for cultivation,
but not enough grazing land and open fields necessary
for their survival. Often there are conflicts with the
original inhabitants. Sometimes, after people were
settled, this new land was partially taken away in
order to build the canal network that would carry the
waters from the dam to the target areas. So
rehabilitation has received much flak. But if we look
at the entire process, we find two waves of campaigns.
We find a fairly long period, so that people could get
some information and try and seek redress. Pro-dam but
pro-rehabilitation NGOs, such as Arch-Vahini and its
activists like Anil Patel, waged one type of campaign.
They sought a compromise, and the whole concept of
land-for-land rehabilitation came because of such
interventions. When the NBA, led by Patkar and others,
criticises the rehabilitation and resettlement
schemes, it is because they see the land-for-land
proposal as inadequate in theory and fraudulent in
practice. They see it breaking up the community,
creating much social disorder, and all for the benefit
of small elite groups. Whether they are right about
the dam benefiting only small groups is of course much
debated. But we have sought to show that the picture
is much more open and shut in the case of West Bengal.
The peasants, share-croppers and agricultural
labourers are being pushed out of land. They are not
getting any alternative land. Many are not getting any
rehabilitation at all. It is our experience, from
Madhya Pradesh, were the government has used cash
compensation rather than land-for-land rehabilitation
whenever possible, that peasants, unaccustomed to
large sums of money, sent it on consumer goods, on
building big houses, and so on. At the end of a
relatively short period, many of them had neither land
nor money. Of course, if we extrapolate from this and
argue that in all respects the West Bengal government
is worse, we would be in error. But Patkar has not
made such a sweeping generalisation, nor are we.
Perhaps confirmation of a different kind came in the
newspapers recently. On 5th December, Ananda Bazar
Patrika reported that there were differences within
the BJP. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had told
his party that it is opportunistic of them to try to
exploit Buddhadev Bhattacharjee' s recent difficulties,
and they should support him over the issue of land
acquisition.

November 30 – December 2 and the aftermath:
On 30th December, Mamata Banerjee and her supporters
were prevented from going to Singur, because Section
144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, disallowing any
congregation of five or more persons, had been clamped
in that entire area. Angry, and losing her head as she
is often accustomed to doing, Ms. Banerjee told her
supporters to turn their motor cavalcade back and
drive straight to the West Bengal Legislative
Assembly. From late afternoon, TV channels had a field
day. No sports, no cartoon channel could compete with
the live show, and then the re-runs, of MLAs smashing
furniture, and generally wrecking havoc. Then she
called for a Bengal bandh on 1st December. In view of
the massive publicity given to the antics of her
party, the bandh was a partial failure, even in areas
thought to be her stronghold. South Calcutta, her
personal fief, alone saw a near complete shut down. An
emboldened Bhattacharyya moved in for the kill. On 2nd
December, several thousand police started storming
Singur. According to Samir Saha, reporting in the
Bengali Dainik Statesman, ordinary police, Rapid
Action Force and State Armed Police all together
numbered 20,000. Even the pro-CPI(M) Kolkata TV
channel reported at least 6000 police. From the first,
they seemed to have been instructed to go on the
offensive. A wide area was surrounded, and then tear
gas firing began at random. The next task was to find
out the aggrieved peasants. For the police, it was of
course difficult to know who was an aggrieved peasant
and who a party loyalist. So this task had been given
to party cadres. As Ganashakti, the CPI(M) daily,
admitted on 4th December, in many cases locals
themselves were identifying and fighting the
opposition. Only, they were not fighting alone. They
were moving as agents of the police, identifying
specific houses.

There was of course some resistance. And the
resistance acted as proof that the police attack was
right and proper. But if paddy stacks are set on fire,
if even tomorrow's food, let alone next year's, is
snatched away thereby, who would not resist? So
peasants, already pledged to resist till the end, did
strike back. The fight was utterly uneven. Stones,
knives, perhaps a few crude home-made bombs (if at all
we are to give credence to this part of the police
story) were hurled. According to the Chief Minister,
the violence was entirely the work of outsiders,
anti-socials, SUCI and Naxalites.[6] CPI(M) State
Secretaiat member and long time trade union leader
Shyamal Chakraborty asserted, "The police were
attacked first. The police showed great restraint. If
they had not tackled in this manner they themselves
would have been beaten up."[7]

>From the paddy fields, reporter Ashish Ghosh could see
the 'anti-socials' being dragged into police camps.
They included lungi-clad aged peasants, as well as
young rural women. Near the highway, Ghosh could see a
different scene. The Superintendent of Police
smilingly reporting to the Inspector General, "Sir, we
have already arrested fifty. By tonight we will set up
camp at Beraberi.", and the IG responding, "in three
more days we will complete the operation". Sitting
next to the police was the CPI(M) Panchayat Pradhan
Dibakar Das. Food packets were being brought from a
car for the high officers and their cadre friends.
Meanwhile ripe paddy was being trampled underfoot or
set on fire, one scene even the most pro-government
channel could not avoid shoeing, since in one case
that was also a major battle field which the channels
were keen to sow, since it "proved' their claim that
it was all the work of outsiders.

The Outsider:
For the last two months, the 'outsider' has been a
major target of CPI(M) propaganda, especially outside
Singur. On 4th December, Ganashakti wrote, only
outsiders are resisting the government at Singur.
Ephemera are always bolder. So a poster put up by the
Students' Federation of India, the student wing of the
CPI(M), asserted that urban people dressed as peasants
had done all the mischief. In other words, even if you
see peasants being beaten up on TV, don't worry, they
were all urban Naxalites playing at revolution in
Singur. Ganashakti of course charged Medha Patkar too,
with being an outsider. A CPI(M) leader, evidently
more illiterate than the average, asked why she did
not agitate in Gujarat against land take over, and why
she came to West Bengal. Medha, typical of her track
record, managed to get to Singur despite the thousands
of cops and plenty of party cadres keeping a watch on
outsiders. This of course suggested she had a lot of
local sympathisers and insider help. But of course, we
rule out such a possibility a priori. And so,
Ganashakti also had a big story about how many routes
there are to Singur, and why the police failed to stop
Naxalites and Medha Patkar from entering the village.
Medha confronted the police, and for her pains she,
Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights
activist Amitadyuti Kumar, and Sumit Chowdhury were
arrested, dragged to a car and thrown out. She was
then taken to a State Government Guest House in
Calcutta, seemingly because someone higher up had
realised that a faux pas had been committed. But she
refused to be a guest of the State Government. After
spending the entire night in the police van, from
which she refused to budge, she gave the police aslip
and went off to Chandernagore, where the seventy
arrested people had been kept.

If Medha Patkar was one outsider, the "Naxalites" were
another category. As the CM told the media on the 3rd,
there had been students of Jadavpur Univeristy. This
was a coded signal. Jadavpur University, rated in
recent times by the UGC as one of India's top five,
has an ill-reputation because all its teachers are not
housebroken partisans of the CPI(M), and even more,
because the Faculty of Engineering and Technology
Students' Union has been under the uninterrupted
control, since 1977, of the Democratic Students Front,
a non-party far left association which has allowed in
every shade of radical left, Maoist, Trotskyist, and
other. As late as 2005, JU engineering students had
been beaten up by the police in order to break a
peaceful hunger strike. So when Bhattacharjee said JU
students, he implied radical left, militant, and
"mal-adjusted" . Yet how many JU students did they
find? Out of the around seventy arrested, there is one
student of JU, currently in a hospital, with a broken
hand.

Another arrested "outsider" is Swapna Banerjee. A
fifty year old school teacher, Banerjee is a member of
the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha. Women's
involvement in the struggles led to her being closely
involved in the area for several months. Immediately,
The Telegraph, on 3rd December, invented a story that
she was the main ultra-left figure in organising and
fomenting trouble.[8] Between the police, the Chief
Minister, and the inventive staff of The Telegraph,
local resistance was wiped off the map. Becharam Manna
became a non-person, as did 81 year old Saraswati, who
gave an interview to Soma Marik a few days earlier and
promised to continue fighting till the end.[9]
But there is another, even more crucial aspect of the
invention of the outsider. On one hand, we are told
that even the nation is too small a unit. We are asked
to accept globalisation as the inevitable goal. On the
other hand, in every battle where we try to organise
resistance, we are told we are outsiders, or that we
have outsiders amongst us. Medha Patkar is of course
the great outsider in India. She has been branded an
outsider in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, and now in
West Bengal. In Gujarat, the regional language papers
are always attacking her, arguing that as an outsider
she has no business talking about the Sardar Sarovar
Dam on the Narmada, which is supposedly the sole hope
for Saurashtra and Kutch. In Madhya Pradesh, I was
asked why Medha Patkar is sniping at the MP
government, and not at others. And for the last few
days, the CPI(M) and the media that has, in the
interests of big capital, placed itself entirely at
the disposal of the CPI(M) for the moment, argued that
as an outsider, Patkar has no business in West Bengal.
In flagrant violation of law, she was stopped
repeatedly from going to Singur, even when she was not
violating Section 144 of the CrPC. She was kept locked
up, along with Anuradha Talwar of the Sramajeebi
Mahila Samity, at Dankuni on the night of 4th
December, and told on the 5th that she could go
anywhere else but Singur. Yet, she had not been
formally arrested, so she could not be served an
externment order. In other words, what was being done
to her was sheer hooliganism, even if done by men in
uniforms, backed by a Chief Minister.

What was unique was not the charge, "outsiders". This
is a necessary salami tactics applied by rulers. They
would like each fight to be an isolated one. They can
bring 20,000 police from all over West Bengal, but the
peasants of Singur have to be alone. For they know, at
the present level of class struggle probably better
than the toiling people, that in solidarity and unity
alone lie chances of victory.

What was unique was something else. This was the fact
that a so-called Communist Party is doing the
propaganda. After all, exactly who built this party?
What was its founding ideology? Were Muzaffar Ahmed,
S.A. Dange, themselves factory workers? How many acres
of land did Muhammad Abdullah Rasul or Bankim
Mukherjee cultivate? Did not Somnath Lahiri say, that
they were often called the "strike-babus" , because
they would rush to any mill where a strike had broken
out, in the hope of making contact with militant
workers. And even if we forget those heroic pioneers
of the early twentieth century, and concentrate on the
prosaic present day leaders, Shyamal Chakraborty is
still hailed as a Centre of Indian Trades Union
leader. When did he last, if ever, work in a factory?
Is it not a fact that Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury
represent West Bengal in the Upper House of
Parliament? If the CPI(M) is going to turn regional
chauvinist at this date, should it not start by
inquiring about how that could happen? We for our part
believe that the Leninist party building concept
clearly rejects this particular notion of "insider"
and "outsider". We are even prepared to concede that
within the parliamentary framework, even a CPI(M),
which is certainly not a Leninist party, can send
Karat to parliament from wherever they are sure of a
safe seat. The question is, why then the chauvinistic
witch-hunt unleashed on Medha Patkar? What this shows
is, behind the mask of regionalism and localism is the
class position. And it forces everyone to start
rethinking the nature of the CPI(M). How many miles
must a party walk right, till it ceases to be a part
of the left?

After 2nd December:
The struggle is difficult after 2nd December. The
organisation of resistance has been crushed for the
moment by stationing 20,000 police. Arrests have meant
that energies have gone into court cases; money has to
go for putting up bail bonds. But the struggle is not
over. On 5th December, a few small parties, the SUCI,
and two of the CPI(ML) groups called a bandh. Despite
all bluster, TV channels could only prove that roads
were empty, buses plied empty, and the Chamber of
Commerce expressed unhappiness at the losses incurred
(surely the losses were due to the success, not the
failure of the bandh). On 8th December, a march to
Singur, called by two CPI(ML) groups, was brutally
beaten up by the police. Hundreds were injured. True
to form, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported only the
violence unleashed also on a few journalists.
Some other developments are worth noting. For decades,
the Left Front has had the pretence of being a
"cultured" political force, as opposed to the
"uncouth", "uncivilised" politics of the Congress and
the Trinamool Congress (these choice epithets are
often used by CPI(M) leaders). Long years in power has
enabled the CPI(M) to use a patronage network and get
plenty of intellectuals, not the most straight-backed
of all beings, to line up with it and paint it in
glowing terms. But the violence resulted in
condemnations pouring in from many intellectuals and
artistes of Bengal. Mahasweta Devi, internationally
reputed author, issued a short, blunt statement: "This
is a war. Ask yourself, on which side are you? Let war
meet war." Well known leftist poet Sankho Ghosh, a
Tagore scholar of great repute, condemned the attacks
on the peasants and committed himself to organised
protest mvements. Artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyay
condemned the arrest of Medha Patkar and questioned
why, if India is a democracy, she did not have the
right to go to Singur. Statements came from singers
Pratul Mukhopadhyay and Srikanata Acharya, poets like
Nirendranath Chakraborty and Mallika Sengupta, authors
like Sanjib Chattopadhyay, film director Haranath
Chakraborty, academics like Esha De of Calcutta
University, Avee Dutta-Majumdar of Saha Institute of
Nuclear Physics, around thirty teachers of Jadavpur
university who took part in a silent demonstration in
the University campus, and others. The students of
Engineering Faculty in Jadavpur University boycotted
the first day of their end-of-semester examination as
a mark of protest. On 8th December, Medha Patkar spoke
at both Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jadavpur
University, at the invitation of students. A number of
online petitions have also been launched, while two
protest letters have been sent to the Governor of West
Bengal, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights
Commission and the National Commission for Women,
signed by human rights and womens' organisation, NGOs,
and networks as well as by leftwing groups. Well known
academics who are also activists, like Achin Vanaik
and Professor Vibhuti Patel, also signed them.
Arundhati Roy, Mainstream Editor Sumit Chakravarty,
were among those who protested in Delhi, in front of
the CPI(M) office.

Yet an organised force like the CPI(M), backed by the
bulk of the media, which is not even reporting
protests in any even handed manner, will certainly try
to turn all these into a three-day wonder, urging
people to move on to other things. The leading
newspaper in West Bengal, Ananda Bazar Patrika, and
its English counterpart, The Telegraph, have taken the
lead in this. Reporting the massive violence, The
Telegraph sought to play it down, to trivialize it, by
using tennis match rhetoric about post-police action,
it was "advantage Mamata". It pontificated editorially
that in a democracy, street demonstrations were
pursued by parties that do not have faith in the
democratic system. And then it went on to cite as
example Lal Krishna Advani's notorious "ratha yatra"
of 1989, which had stirred up communal riots in 43
towns. As though that had been a street demonstration,
and as though that could be used to justify the
illegal externment of Medha Patkar.

The Singur land has been taken over, but the story is
just beginning. The West Bengal government proposes to
give vaster stretches of land, for example to the
Salim Group of Indonesia, again from peasants. It
proposes to take over land to build a nuclear power
plant. And even for Singur, there is at the least the
need to fight for a proper rehabilitation for the
great many who have got nothing or next to nothing,
for a land-for-land resettlement. International and
national solidarity is needed, particularly because
Stalinists all over the world today still point to the
Left Front as a shining example. CPI(M) MP Nilotpal
Basu's article on the Left Front was reprinted even in
the US progressive paper Guardian earlier this year.
Even Noam Chomsky, the libertarian, found reasons to
praise the Left Front government when he came to
Calcutta. The myth of the Left Front as alternative
has to be disposed of, before a struggle for a real
alternative can succeed. Let the tragedy of the
peasants of Singur create at least the possibility of
that. They deserve such revenge.

[1] The first lines of the song went: Hei Samaalo dhan
ho kasteta dao shan ho
Jan kabul aar maan kabul
Aar debona aar debona rakte bona dhan moder jan ho
Oh keep a watch on the paddy, hone your scythe
With life and honour as stake
We will never again hand over the paddy sown with our
life's blood
[2] Cadre has come to sound like an obscene and
utterly alienating word in West Bengal. Cadre today
evokes the image of stick or other more murderous
weapons wielding thugs, tragically carrying the red
flag. Yet, notwithstanding the Stalinist nature of the
major left parties, and despite their clear reformist
turn from 1942, and again after 1951 (there was a
short in-between period in 1948-51 when they had
become ultra-left) communist party cadre had meant the
most sincere, dedicated social movement activist.
[3] Though on paper in West Bengal none of the Maoist
groups are banned, in practice, people suspected of
Maoist affiliation are routinely arrested and
variously heckled and tortured by the police,
especially outside Calcutta.
[4] See Kunal Chattopadhyay, Tebhaga Andolaner Itihas,
Kolkata, 1987, reprint, 1997. In English the most
detailed study is Adrienne Cooper's Sharecropping and
Sharecroppers' Struggle in Bengal 1930-1950, Calcutta,
1988.

[5] Medha Patkar made this point repeatedly, including
in a speech in Jadavpur University Campus on 8th
December.
[6] The Socialist Unity Centre of India is a smaller
Stalinist formation, opposed to the Left Front.
Naxalite is a way of referring to the Maoists of all
trends, in view of the origin of Maoism in India from
the peasant struggles in Naxalbari, in North Bengal.
The CPI(ML) Liberation is active in Singur.
[7] Dainik Statesman, 3 December 2006, page 1, news
box 'Policer Kaaj Police Korechhe: Buddha' ('The
Police have Done Their Duty: Buddha')
[8] The Telegraph has been among the most consistent
spokespersons of the ruling class. Whereas even The
Statesman, despite its historic connections with the
Tata family, has reported relatively objectively, The
Telegraph and its Bengali sister publication, Ananda
Bazar Patrika, have been running a sustained campaign
vilifying protestors and arguing that there is no
alternative to industrialization at any cost. The
Telegraph has indeed gone further. On 5th December, it
ran an editorial virtually calling for the suspension
of what little democracy remains in West Bengal.
Entitled 'No Velvet Glove', the Editorial thundered:
"The menace of Maoist violence is not new to West
Bengal. When it had first surfaced in the late Sixties
and early Seventies, it was eradicated through
counter-violence. Mr Bhattacharjee must learn from
that experience and nip the present movement in the
bud before Maoist weeds strangle the hundred flowers
of West Bengal." Even after the passage of decades,
people still remember much of what had been done at
that time. The "eradication of Maoism" meant the
Cossipore-Baranagor e massacre, when an entire area had
been sealed off and every known youth connected the
leasdt bit to the Naxalites murdered. It included the
massive application of the Maintenance of Internal
Security Act, from which Bush could learn something
about fighting terrorism. It included the killings of
prisoners. It included "encounters" where prisoners
were shot in the back and proclaimed dead in
encounters.
[9] Interview taken by Soma Marik, 19th November 2006.
Courtesy Soma Marik.


	
	
		
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