HARD TIMES: Nurul Islam Mondal, one of the farmers; the distressed villagers (below) photos: sanat kr sinha

Kanai Sanfui faces a gnawing, moral dilemma. This Panchayat member from Uttarbhag in Bengal’s district of South 24 Parganas, where the Indonesian Salim group proposes to build a special economic zone, cannot ignore the diktat of his party, the CPI(M). Nor can he ignore the will ? and plight ? of his people, who have been voting for him for close to two decades.

As the Left Front government proposes to acquire large swathes of land in and around Uttarbhag, barely 20 km from Calcutta, to turn chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s pet project into a reality, villagers are looking to Sanfui to protect them from displacement. For the affable 51-year-old uncle to the entire village, it’s a tough call.

True, he is a “disciplined soldier” of the Communist party, as he puts it. But he knows that power in Bengal villages flows not from the gun, but from the ballot box.

How can he ask his people to give up their land and move elsewhere without facing the electoral consequences, he wonders. In any case, he has not yet forgotten his days as a labourer at a near-by brick-kiln where he worked with his elder brother on a wage of Rs 3 a day until the mid-Seventies. His brother had his face bashed in by the owner when he demanded a 25 paise raise.

Sanfui is the product of the peasant movement the CPI(M) ran through the countryside of Bengal after it came to power in 1977. The official minimum wage has now gone up to Rs 62, but “you don’t get a labourer to work in your field these days unless you pay him Rs 80,” he says with a tinge of pride.

In fact, the success of the land reform is now beginning to haunt the CPI(M) leaders from Uttarbhag, a straggly village of more than 500 families on the road to Canning, the gateway to the Sunderbans. “I don’t think the government can now take away the land it has given to these poor landless people under its land reform programme,” says Reba Mondal, another CPI(M) Panchayat member from Uttarbhag, which falls under the Ramanagar II Panchayat in the Baruipur subdivision.

After scouting several areas for the 2,500 acres required for the project, which sparked off a fierce debate in the party about the use of agricultural land for industry, the government seems to have picked Uttarbhag as it’s a monocrop area with the contiguous plots necessary to set up the project.

Both Sanfui and Mondal, however, have “deep faith” in the Left Front government. “Our government will not do anything that will go against the farmers or the poor people,” Mondal says. Sanfui, on his part, says villagers might be asked to give up some farmland for the Salim group’s project, but no family would be displaced.

Yet villagers are concerned. After land and land reforms minister Abdur Razzak Molla declared Uttarbhag as a possible site for the project early this week, a pall of gloom has been cast over the village. An evening meeting on Wednesday, called to prepare for the village’s 50-year-old Durga puja, stretched into the early hours of Thursday, with the locals discussing, instead, plans to foil attempts to wrench their land from them.

Few are convinced that the project will bring jobs ? or prosperity ? to the village. “We hear it will be a commercial complex, with shopping malls and fast-food centres. None of us will get a job there as we are neither smart nor can speak in English,” says Biswajit Das, a 20-something who dropped out of school after failing his higher secondary examination. “Only outsiders from Calcutta will get jobs there.”

Nurul Islam Mondal, a 55-year-old farmer with nearly 20 bighas of land, says his family, like many others in the village, lives off the land. “We have no other jobs here. We will be reduced to beggars if they take away the land from us,” he says, as a group of peasants swarming around him nods in agreement.

Nurul feels the Salim project would benefit the “educated people from outside, but would kill the local farmers”. Says he, “It’s not in our interest.” Besides paddy, Uttarbhag produces a variety of vegetables supplied to the markets in Calcutta.

The government decision puts on hold Sipra Das’s lifetime plans for a home for her family. Her husband took a bank loan to build a small house on a two-cottah plot behind the Uttarbhag bus stand. “We have already received Rs 40,000 as first instalment, but we don’t know what to do with the money. We don’t want to build a house which the government may take over,” the housewife says.

Some are already comparing their plight with that of the Bengali refugees settled, driven out and killed in the Sunderbans island of Morichjhapi after the CPI(M) came to power in the state. “This government is planning to make a Morichjhapi of Uttarbhag. They want to throw us into the Sunderbans and make us easy preys for tigers,” Paritosh Dey, a fruit seller, says, his eyes fiery.

What upsets the villagers most is that they have always voted for the CPI(M), the party that controls 17 of the 19 Gram Panchayats under the Baruipur Panchayat Samity. “This is all our party is giving to us in return,” Hafizul Islam Naiya, a youth, says.

Baruipur block development officer, Debaroti Ghosh, says they have not yet received any official order to acquire land at Uttarbhag, while Mukti Majumdar, sabhapati of the Baruipur Panchayat Samity, calls the fear of displacement unfounded. “The media are misleading the villagers. Actually, the local residents stand to benefit most from the Salim project,” Majumdar, a senior CPI(M) leader, says.

Perched on a chair on his verandah, Kanai Sanfui, meanwhile, seeks to allay the fears of his fellow villagers who are clustered around him. “Don’t worry,” says the short, portly man in a green lungi. “If you were to leave this village, I would also go with you.”