[Reader-list] Nandigram....

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All, (apologies for Cross Posting on Kafila.org)


It is interesting to witness the spin doctoring of the CPI(M) come into 
play in the wake of the renewed violence in Nandigram, which in CPI(M) 
newspeak is now being called 'a transition to peaceful conditions' .

I am referring to the numerous efforts made by one of our fellow 
subscribers, Prakash Ray, to enlighten us with the line that emanates 
A.K.Gopalan Bhavan the CPI (M) national headquartes and Muzaffer Ahmed 
Bhavan (The West Bengal CPI(M) headquarters) filtered, no doubt, through 
several cups of tea and sympathy at Ganga Dhaba at JNU.

Now, the seasoned voice of one of the leading 'cultural' lights of the 
Consolidated Promotors of India(Militant) in Delhi, Comrades Sudhanva 
Deshpande has also come our way, again, thanks to Prakash. I am grateful 
for these morsels because they reveal a lot about how the current 
dispensation within the Consolidated Promoters of India (Militant) 
actually works.

In this posting, I intend to subject portions of Comrade Deshpande's 
text to some close reading. I invite other members to take other 
portions of this wonderful example of 'socialist magical realist', or 
'magical socialist realist' prose and subject it to close analytical 
scrutiny. I have relied extensively on an archive of news, opinion, 
analyses and articles at a blog called http://sanhati.com/ for the 
writing of this posting.

1. Nandigram and Gujarat

I agree, "Nandigram 2007 is not Gujarat 2002", but is that ground for 
comfort?

To be fair, the comparisons between Gujarat and West Bengal are 
misleading. Just as comparisons between Gujarat and Nazi Germany are 
misleading. And just as - to call the RSS 'Fascist' is to betray an 
understanding neither of the RSS, nor of Fascism, similarly, to call the 
CPI(M)'s rule in West Bengal a mirror of Modi's Gujarat is to understand 
neither Gujarat, nor West Bengal. This is not to say that West Bengal is 
heaven and Gujarat is hell. It is to make the important point that hell 
comes in different varieties, and that West Bengal and Gujarat can be, 
and are two very different flavours of hell. It is not to say that West 
Bengal is better, or worse, than Gujarat, it is just to point out that 
it is different in its venality.

I for one, do not think that jumping the gun and parrotting the cliche 
of 'concentration camps'  and 'genocide' is very useful as a method of 
being critical of the CPI(M)'s politics in West Bengal. Nandigram is not 
Auschwitz, nor was Naroda Patiya. And to invoke the language of some 
holocaust or the other when trying to construct a critical politics for 
today, in conditions that are quite different, is actually 
counter-productive.

All that the CPI(M) needs to do in response is to say that West Bengal 
does not have 'concentration camps', or 'genocide' and because they are 
formally right on that score, the opposition to them, which includes 
everyone from the Trinamool Congress to several Naxalite factions all 
playing the very Bengali game of overstatement and exaggeration, risk 
looking foolish. And they have looked foolish. Mamata Bannerjee, has 
made a lifetime's theatrical career out of looking and sounding foolish, 
and virtuous.

That is part of the reason why there is no effective opposition to the 
CPI(M)s stranglehold in West Bengal. The CPI(M) could not, in a thousand 
lifetimes of power, have hoped for anything better than the confused, 
incoherent, hysterical opposition than the one that entertains it in 
West Bengal. That is what keeps it in power, just as much as anything 
else does. No amount of 'scientific rigging' can be as effective as 
opponents as idiotic as what the CPI(M) has in West Bengal. If the 
CPI(M) did not have the Maoists and Trinamool Congress around, it would 
have had to invent them. With enemies like them, who needs friends?

However, just because West Bengal is not Gujarat, does not mean that 
when Buddhadeb Bhattacharya says 'we paid them back in their own coin' 
he does not risk inviting a fair comparison with Narendra Modi who, 
post-Godhra,  talked about the anger of the injured Hindu, or Rajiv 
Gandhi, who in the wake of the Anti-Sikh riots of 1984 invoked the 
language of 'when a big tree falls, the earth shakes'. In invoking the 
identical language of vendetta and retribution as a response to a 
political crisis, the speech acts of Bhattacharya, Modi and the late 
Rajiv Gandhi, speaks volumes about the impoverished monotony of the 
political imagination in contemporary India.

Having agreed to point one of Sudhanva Deshpande's assertion, let me now 
come to the rest of his argument.

2. Violence

First, let us come to the question of the quantum of violences. I am not 
one of those who say, or find it necessary to say, that "thousands of 
bodies were dumped into mass graves in Nandigram". I think that even at 
lesser numbers, the reality is quite chilling. Whatever be the case, 
the official count of 14 dead in the violence of March this year has 
reason to be widely disputed.

In a report titled - 'Nandigram Turns Blood Red' in the Economic Times 
of March 15, 2007
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Nandigram_turns_blood_red/articleshow/1764786.cms

The West Bengal Left Front Government's PWD minister Kshiti Goswami (of 
the Revolutionary Socialist Party) is quoted as saying that "50 bodies 
were taken to hospital, but it was impossible to ascertain how many were 
actually dead."

Normally, when one says "50 Bodies", it is understood that the reference 
is to 50 dead bodies. The accompanying qualifying expression "it was 
impossible to ascertain how many were actually dead." must then be taken 
to mean that at least 50 people had died, and their bodies were taken to 
hospital, and it is possible that more, perhaps many more had also died, 
but that number is impossible to ascertain".

Clearly, we are looking at a number of dead that is at least three and a 
half times as large, if not more, than has been admitted to by the 
CPI(M). The math is simple three times fourteen is forty two, and it 
takes eight more than forty two to make fifty. If at least 50 died on 
the 14th of March according to a minister of a party allied to the 
CPI(M) - we are not talking about a hysterical Mamata Bannerjee plying 
her own obscene trade in the numbers of the dead here - then the 
juggling of that figure by Sudhanva Deshpande lays him open to the 
suspicion that he is dissimulating when he talks of casualties and the 
dead. I am all for probity and precision when it comes to statistics 
about the dead and the injured, whether the dead or the killers come 
from the CPI(M).

In fact, the suspicion that

After the resistance of the ordinary peasants of Nandigram in early 
January had compelled the West Bengal government to declare that no land 
will be grabbed without people’s wishes, there were ominous sound bytes 
coming from the CPI(M) leaders. On 29th January the central committee 
member, also the state health minister, Suryakanta Misra, was 
elaborating on the role the opposition was playing in stalling the State 
Government’s drive for industrialisation in a public meeting at Khejuri 
(three kilometres away from Sonachura village of Nandigram). His advice 
to the farmers, “winter is retreating and summer is on. Venomous snakes 
may raise heads from their holes. They may even bite. Keep the staff of 
the red flag handy. As they spread their hood, strike them. That would 
treat them fine.”


3. Notices, and a few things Sudhanva Deshpande chose not to notice

"One, the so-called "land acquisition." What was purported to be the 
land acquisition notice was not that at all“ it was a notice to clarify 
rumours
about land acquisition. In any case, the notice was, rightly or wrongly,
deliberately or otherwise, construed to be for land acquisition. Once this
became apparent, the government, in February itself, clarified that there
was no question of land acquisition in Nandigram. Period."

There is a very delicate game being played with language here. And I 
would like us all to pay close attention to it. According to Comrade 
Deshpande, a  'land acquisition notice' is not a land acquisition 
notice, it is only a notice to clarify rumours about land acquisition.

Let's take that statement at face value.

If this were so, then, the land acquisition notice that was not a land 
acquisition notice could have clarified the matter by saying that there 
would be no land acquisition. It did not do so. And that is very 
inconvenient, and totally contrary to party discipline. Because, as 
anyone schooled in Stalinism knows, 'the unity of opposites' is a 
fundamental dia-mat principle, such that, a thing should be itself and 
its own opposite. A land acquisition ought not to be a land acquisition 
notice. It is really being mischievously deviationist when it insists on 
being a land acquisition notice. A deviation from the party line is a 
far more serious error than a deviation from the truth. Because the 
truth only suggests how things are, while the party line tells us how 
things ought to be. Only a fool, or a renagade, would jettison the ought 
for the is.

Be that as it may, the notice issued  issued by the Haldia Development 
Authority (Nandigram-I block office), dated 28 December, 2006, which was 
circulated to all gram panchayat offices (though not to individual 
landholders) stated, that " 27 mouzas of land in Nandigram and two 
mouzas of land in Khejuri ~ comprising 25,000 acres in all ~ would be 
acquired for the Salem Group’s proposed chemical hub.”

What did these "27 mouzas of land" include? In a subsequent 
notification, issued to the same Gram Panchayat and Block offices four 
days after the first, on the 2nd of January, 2007, the Haldia 
Development Authority stated initially, about 14,500 acres of land would 
be acquired. This included 5 Gram Panchayats in Nandigram-1 block namely 
10 No. Sonachura, 9 No. Kalicharanpur, 3 No. Kendemari, 2 No. 
Muhammadpur and 1 No. Vekutia and Khejuri GP in Khejuri-2 Block - all 
having a population of nearly 60-70,000 people.

In other words, the 'notice' (two notices, in fact) clarified the 
rumours about land acquisition by responding affirmatively. They 
effectively said - yes, there would be land acquisition that would 
affect about 60-70,000 people. The Chief Minister, in a statement in the 
West Bengal Assembly on March 15 said that "Though no final decision has 
yet been taken about the exact location of the projects, on December 29, 
2006 an *informal* notice for public information regarding likely 
location of this project was circulated by the Haldia Development 
Authority to all blocks and Gram Panchayat offices of the area.” Since 
when does a written notice, sent out by a government department to the 
lowest tiers of legislative and administrative power - Gram Panchayats 
(village councils) and Block Offices constitute a study in informality, 
or have the rules about what constitutes a formal move by the state and 
what constitutes an informal move by sectional interests allied to the 
ruling party in West Bengal been radically reconstituted in the last 30 
years? Or does this blurring of distinctions between the 'formal' and 
'real' subsumption of capital (as in land) constitute the CPI(M) unique 
and singular contribution to a renewed Marxism for the twenty first 
century?

Morover, the people of Nandigram were exercised about the possibility of 
the 'real' , if not 'formal' subsumption of 25,000 acres because news of 
the way in which the question of land acquisition and compensation had 
played out in Singur in Hoogly district had by then become common 
knowledge in West Bengal. The crisis in Nandigram has somewhat 
overshadowed the recent history of land acquisition in Singur (perhaps 
because the Trinamool Congress in that area has been reasonably 
successful in buying peace from the Tatas in hard cash, in happy 
collaboration with the local CPI(M). But it needs to be borne in mind 
that the road to Nandigram, and the history of SEZs in West Bengal had 
to necessarily pass through the experience of Singur.

In a very detailed article (See - <http://sanhati.com/articles/322/>)
titled - "Agrarian Confusion-Singur, Farmers' Consent and the Left 
Front's Statistical Misrepresentations", Sankar Ray convincingly argues 
that there were a series of irregularities that attended to the process 
of the 'acquisition of land' in Singur.

It is worth our while to read a lengthy quotation from this article -

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The West Bengal's Land and Land Revenue Minister Abdul Rezzak Mollah 
has stated that in Singur, 2552 farmers, owning 326 acres did not 
consent to the policy of acquisition of land for the Tata Motors 
factory. Morevore, the acquisition of land itself did not occur as per 
the rules laid down in the West Bengal Land and Land Reforms Act...

...Let’s quote from the LF government’s Status Report on Singur (SRS) . 
'Declaration of award for the entire 997.11 acres in five **mouzas** was 
made by the Collector of Hooghly on 23 and 25 September 2006. On 4 
October 2006, the Collector took possession of the lands and handed them 
over to the WBIDC the same day.' The SRS stated that compensation, paid 
until 31 December last, covered 658 acres - meaning that compensation 
for 339 acres was yet to be paid.

LF policy-framers may go through an article by Amar Chattopadhyay, an 
expert on matters pertaining to land and land laws, in 'Bhumibarta', 
mouthpiece of the West Bengal Land and Land Reforms Officers’ 
Association, months back. He raised fundamental queries on the SRS 
rationale. Referring to a circular (1701-LA, dated 6 June 2006) by the 
L&LR department, he cited the rampant violation. Para 23 of the circular 
states - Possession only after payment - “Along with and as soon as 
award money is paid in connection with any land acquired, the possession 
of such land shall be immediately handed over to the requiring body and 
the possession of the acquired land to the requiring body shall be a 
continuous process and completed within 15 days after payment of award 
money”.

So, excepting lands for which compensation was paid until 4 October 
2006, no land could be taken possession of. In other words, possession 
of over one-third of land by the Collector of Hooghly district (SRS 
rightly states that power for acquisition is delegated to the Collector, 
as per Section 16 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894) (is irregular)

The tearing hurry and lack of patience to abide by the rules are evident 
in the SRS. “Conversion of usage of land from agriculture to factory was 
done of 21st November, 2006 in accordance with Section 4C of the WB Land 
Reforms Act, 1955. WBIDC has thereafter given permissive possession on 
27th December, 2006 to Tata Motors Ltd,” it states. Thus the 6 June 2006 
circular was trampled arbitrarily, taking unwilling-to-consent 
land-owners for a ride. The WBIDC is obviously a trespasser, 
compensation-payment having been incomplete. Chattopadhyay elaborated 
the point further that Section 4C and rule 5A of WBLR rules were 
misused. How could the WBIDC accord “permissive possession” to a third 
party (Tata Motors Ltd)? It has been allowed to travel far behind the 
statutes.
There are many instances of desperate bid by the CPI-M leaders to throw 
away principles of agrarian legalities. Ignorance or innocence is not an 
acceptable escape route after three decades of uninterrupted hegemony 
that provided the party enough trial-and-error experiences to fine-tune 
agrarian attitude in line with the electoral pledges, laid down in 1977 
and thereafter.

Sankar Ray cites Chattopadhyay pointing out  several more lapses in the 
manner in which land was acquired and possession transferred at Singur, 
citing sections 9, 10,11, 12 and 13 of LA -1894 for dealing with likely 
objections or petitions and inquiries thereof as also preparation of 
individual-wise award for ascertaining compensation as per different 
subsections under Section 23.

Relevant criteria include inter alia market value of land [“at the rate 
of twelve per cent per annum” over a period between on and from the date 
of publication of notification’ under sub-section 4(1), plus 30 per cent 
of market value].

The present government pays little attention to those fundamentals that 
are consonant with the logic of civil society. For instance, after 
notification for land acquisition under Section 4(1) through two 
newspapers (one local), the collector must elicit details about at least 
ten most recent sales of holdings up to the date of notification in 
order to compute market values (average) with type-wise segregation. 
This was not done, according to sources in the Hooghly collectorate. 
CPI(M) biggies from general secretary Prakash Karat to acid-tongue 
central committee member create an impression that the LF government 
goes out of the way to pay compensation to the share-croppers. 
Explanatory portion of Section 23(4), Chattopadhyay points out, has 
clearly provided for such compensation (not confined to recorded ones). 
The net annual income - six times of which being the compensation - is 
50 per cent of “total produce of the land cultivated by him in that year 
where the plough, cattle, manure and seeds necessary for cultivation” 
are provided by the person owning the land and 75 per cent of total 
produce in all other cases.

The compensation the so-called pro-landless peasant government wants to 
pay to the bargadars is much less. It’s nothing short of deprivation. 
The WBIDC, according to the SRS, “decided to pay higher compensation to 
the recorded bargadars to the extent of 25 per cent of the amount of 
compensation paid to the owners."
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4. The People, and their Consent

 From the above, four things become clear, and unfortunately, they fly 
in the face of everything that Brinda Karat, Jayati Ghosh, Sudhanva 
Deshpande, Sitaram Yechury and Buddhadev Dasgupta have said whenever 
they have uttered the word 'Nandigram' or 'Singur'

Remember, the facts pointed out above come not from a Maoist or 
Trinamool source but from a journal (Bhumibarta) of the  West Bengal 
Land and Land Reforms Officers’ Association. I do not know how much 
closer you can get than this to an official position on the subject of 
the mechanics of land transactions in West Bengal.

1.  land was acquired against the wishes of at least 30% of the farming 
population of Singur. This exposes the CPI(M) claim that 95 % of the 
people of Singur had signed their consent to the acquisition.

2. The acquisition process occurred in undue haste, leading to several 
procedural irregularities, including the acquisition of land from people 
who were not compensated for the acquisition.

3. Where compensation was paid, it was not paid as per the guidelines 
which lay out methods for the computation of the inter alia market value 
of the land.

4. Bargadars or Share Croppers were compensated in a meagre fashion, as 
compared to large land owners. This meant that poorer people were worse 
off in the deal as a whole, even when they were given compensation.

It does not take rocket science to prove that the process of land 
acquisition, as it had played out in Singur, was unjust, and there was 
nothing to reassure the people of Nandigram that it would not be unfair 
in their case. It was this clarity that made the people of Nandigram 
anxious when the two notices of December 28 and January 02 were sent to 
the Gram Panchayat and Block offices.

It must be remembered, that Nandigram had been a solidly CPI(M) area, 
and a majority of the people who joined the resistance to the land 
acquisition were disgruntled former CPI(M) supporters who felt badly let 
down by the very party that they had supported for decades, and which 
claimed to speak on their behalf.

No amount of CPI(M) spin about Maoists entering Nandigram from the Bay 
of Bengal, Trinamool terror, or even a secret (and unlikely, under the 
present circumstances) entente between the US consulate in Kolkata and 
muslim fundamentalists in Nandigram can distract us from the reality 
that in Nandigram, the CPI(M) was essentially battling what had been its 
'own people'. And it is this that gives the developments in Nandigram a 
particularly vicious and violent character. The people of Nandigram had 
to be taught a lesson so that people elsewhere in West Bengal, 
especially the CPI(M)'s own people understand clearly that dissent from 
within the party's ranks would not be tolerated. As always, when a 
Communist party decides to shed blood, the first people it chooses to 
sacrifice are its own, are those who were once its own.

The recent violence (which has its own unique revanchist, vendetta based 
character) is essentially about the party winning back its own turf, and 
realizing the conditions which will fructify the Chief Minister's 
assurance that land acquisition will not happen without the people's 
consent. So far, the 'people' of Nandigram had churlishly withheld their 
consent, and so, if necessary, a new 'people' must be invented, or 
manufactured in Nandigram. It is these 'new' people who will consent to 
the ever closer integration of their land with the juggernaut of global 
capitalism. Who better than a party that calls itself communist to 
oversee this transition. Remember, things ought to be the very opposites 
of what they are. No one makes for better partisans for capitalism than 
the apparitchiki of Communist parties.

Berthold Brecht, writing in and ironic vein in the wake of the failed 
workers uprising against the workers state of the German Democratic 
Republic on the 17th of June, 1953 had said in a poem pithily titled, 
'The Solution'

"After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?"

The ruling party in West Bengal, a past master at the intricacies of 
electoral politics, somewhat bruised after having faced a people angry 
at shady deals with Tata and Salem, and tragic ends to Hindu Muslim 
romances in Kolkata via contract killings (I am referring of course to 
the Rizwanur case) could now consider the wisdom of dissolving this 
angry, ungrateful and recalcitrant people, and electing another, more 
pliant one in its place. Nandigram in November is an exemplary first 
step in that direction.

best

Shuddha