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Shahidul Islam was not too unhappy until Singur happened. His family had lost part of its land in Nawabpur village in the Rajarhat area on the eastern fringe of Calcutta when the government began acquiring land there for the New Town. But then, hundreds of others in the villages around had lost parts of their land. They complained that the price that the government offered — Rs 6,000 per cottah or Rs 3,60,000 per acre — was too low. He remembers joining others from his village in demonstrations outside the HIDCO (Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation, a West Bengal government undertaking) office at the Salt Lake stadium complex. The villagers were happy when the agitation forced the government to increase the price of the acquired land to Rs 11,975 per cottah.
Shahidul’s family has only a small plot left. He is now a member of Nabadisha, one of the four co-operatives in his village which the government helped the land-losers to form for themselves. The co-operatives supply building material to the construction projects that are fast changing the landscape of the place. Young men from farming families, those like Shahidul, had been trying other means of a livelihood anyway. So he now puts some of his energy and time into the “supply business.” Add that to his regular income — Rs 3,100 a month — which he earns working as a driver in Calcutta, and Shahidul did not feel too unhappy or too angry about losing part of his family’s farm land.
That was until Singur erupted into violence. Shahidul now feels cheated. At Singur, the government paid Rs 8,40,000 per acre of single-crop land and Rs 12 lakh per acre of multi-crop land. And he is angry that the political leaders in his village, including the Trinamul Congress, whose supporter he is, could not get land-losers at Rajarhat a better deal.
Not that the people who lost their land to industrial or other projects in Bengal in earlier decades had no complaints. In several places, they — and the opposition political parties — tried to resist the acquisition of land. And not that the state and the ruling party used force for the first time at Singur.
In the Sixties and the early Seventies, when the Congress government took land from farmers in Haldia to set up the port complex, or an industrial project like Haldia Fertilisers, leftist parties, then in the opposition, led farmers’ protests. During the Left’s rule, nearly 5,000 acres were acquired for the Haldia industrial complex. At Budge Budge in South 24 Parganas district, the police fired on three occasions when farmers, led by Mamata Banerjee and others of the then undivided Congress in Bengal, protested against the acquisition of their land for a thermal power project.
It is also not true that agricultural land had not been used for industrial or urbanisation projects in earlier periods. Several crops were grown on most of the acquired land at Budge Budge, Rajarhat and Haldia. Yet, the sporadic violence notwithstanding, the projects for which land was acquired went ahead alright. Not just that, Haldia today stands as a shining testimony to the fact that the economies of the places were transformed by the new projects.
So, what went wrong this time?
The answers are many and they vary in accordance with differing political positions. But there is little doubt that at the centre of the trouble at Singur was the speed with which the land was acquired. Ironically, a fast pace is also at the heart of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s new industrialisation drive.
Consider this. At Singur, 954 acres were acquired over less than three months. At Budge Budge, it took the government more than two years to acquire 500 acres and that too after the affected families were all rehabilitated.
The Tatas wanted the land by December as they planned to roll out the cars by the end of 2008. They dangled the threat that they would shift the project to some other state if it was delayed. The chief minister would not let that happen because a Tata project, that too in automobile manufacturing, he argued, would change the state’s economy and create a new centre for job-generating growth.
But Singur was not prepared for this pace of change. Neither the government nor the ruling CPM did enough to prepare the people there for it. True, the government offered a much better compensation package than ever before. Landowners who no longer depended on their land consented to sell their land easily. The trouble was with recorded and unrecorded sharecroppers and the farm labourers. Mamata Banerjee and ultra-Left groups stepped in to lead the disgruntled.
The kind of organised resistance that Singur and Nandigram have put up is, ironically, a legacy of the CPM’s politics. The party taught the people to organise and it did so far better than any other party. Its peasant wing, Krishak Sabha, has 1.4 crore members in Bengal alone! If this huge political mobilisation had helped it implement the Left Front government’s land reforms movements, it has also created a political force that can do other things.
All of Nandigram’s village panchayats were controlled by the leftists. The people who voted communists for 30 years now turned against them. “At Rajarhat, our opposition was weak and the people were cheated,” says Sougata Roy, senior leader of Trinamul Congress. But where is the need for an organised opposition if the ruling party’s men switch sides?
Part of today’s land war story can be explained by another irony. The Left government’s land reforms programmes, improved irrigation measures and the panchayat administration made for an unprecedented economic and political empowerment of the village poor. While richer farmers moved to neighbouring towns and even to Calcutta, those who stayed behind to till the land were not unhappy with the income they made from it. In yet another irony, the successes of the past partly created today’s problems. If things worked fine in the past, they should do so now, thought the CPM. “What the party failed to recognise was that the context has dramatically changed,” argues a bureaucrat who had been involved in the acquisition of land at Haldia in the late 1980s. The political rhetoric against liberalisation and globalisation, to which the CPM contributes the largest share, has created this new climate of opinion.
If the CPM misjudged the changed context, it compounded the mistake by getting too carried away by its overwhelming victory in last May’s Assembly elections. True, the people gave Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee a massive mandate for industrialisation. “But it was Buddha’s arrogance and his party’s strong-arm methods that made Singur explode,” Sougata Roy says.
The CPM, of course, has a different story to tell. The current violence, according to party leader, Rabin Deb, is born of the opposition’s desperation to stop Bengal’s economic transformation under the Left. “There was a time when they accused us of false promises and of signing up projects that would never happen. In the Assembly, Trinamul leaders used to dare us to ‘bring big names like Tatas and Ambanis’. But when big names and projects actually began looking like a reality, they were alarmed. Their fears proved true when the development slogan worked for our victory last year.”
Deb is right about one thing. Unlike in the past, a wave of investment proposals did hit Bengal. The past year alone saw more than 28 such proposals, including those for special economic zones. But they would together require 1,04,826 acres of land, including 37,000 acres for the proposals by Indonesia’s Salim group alone. Just the big leap forward Bengal badly needed, the chief minister told the party and the people; but both he and his party underestimated their opponents’ capacity to work up a very different perception of the scenario.
Singur has shaken Bengal’s social and political stability in a way unprecedented since the days of the Naxalite movement. How much the Left loses and the opposition gains because of Singur in next year’s panchayat polls may be inconsequential. The real challenge still is for the CPM which, as the largest organised political force, has to match change with stability.
HALDIA: 5,000 acres
Status: acquired
Rajarhat: 7,598 acres
Status: acquired
Budge Budge: 500 acres
Status: acquired