Singur, Jan. 6: The Forward Bloc demanded that Tata Motors be asked to shift its Singur plant to West Midnapore on a day the CPM patted itself for changing with the times.

“The factory can’t be built here, on this fertile land. The government must accept this verdict of the local people, admit its folly and ask the Tatas to shift it to Kalaikunda,’’ Bloc state secretary Ashok Ghosh told a rally near the boundary wall of the car plant site.

At the release of his coll- ection of essays in Calcutta, industries minister Nirupam Sen said: “We’ve changed our policies in tune with the need of the times but kept in mind the interests of farmers and labourers.”

The Bloc has little presence in Singur and the party ferried supporters from other places to the rally venue. It has been lambasting partner CPM since deciding to go it alone in the rural polls, due in May.

“We’ll give a year to the government to shift the plant,” Ghosh said.

His party had not spoken a word on Singur when Mamata Banerjee raised the same demand over a year ago.

Ghosh tried to explain the delay by accusing the chief minister of “deceiving” the front partners. “The government told us that the land acquired in Singur was mono crop or barren,” he said and demanded a “white paper” on the government’s deal with the company.

The government had last week announced a plan to spend Rs 170 crore before the onset of monsoon to prevent waterlogging in Singur, a problem that had slowed down work on the Tata project in 2007.

Ghosh asked why the funds had not been sanctioned earlier, though the problem was decades old.

Bloc leaders saw their victory in the “government’s backtracking on Nandigram”.

Like Ghosh, Naren Chatterjee and Hafiz Alam Sairani attacked Jyoti Basu for supporting Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s contention that there was no alternative to private capital for industrialisation. “Are you (Basu) the face or the mask of the party?” asked Ghosh.

He lauded the CPM’s Kerala chief minister, V.S. Achuthanandan, for “not appeasing capitalists”. Bhattacharjee, he said, was “following Narendra Modi’s path”.

Despite the tirade, the Bloc will hold bipartite talks with the CPM on January 10. The Big Brother would meet CPI and RSP leaders before that.

At the book release, CPM state secretary Biman Bose said: “It is impossible to follow a different path of development in Bengal in the age of liberal globalised economy. Some of our allies have misunderstood the changes in our policies.”