http://sanhati.com/front-page/175/
Economic and Political Weekly
The killing of protesting villagers in Nandigram
by a trigger-happy police on March 14 sounds
an alarm bell that sends a warning not only to
the Left Front regime of
occurred, but to all those at the helm of affairs in both the
centre and other states, who irrespective of their party
affiliation, are fond of riding roughshod over public
opposition, for the sake of “economic growth” – the
catchword in today’s official discourse of liberalisation.
The developments in Nandigram should not be treated
as something coming out of the blue. The air was already
heavy with signs of the approaching storm. The sequence
of events exposes both the political myopia of an overconfident
and arrogant ruling party and the inhuman
indifference to public concerns by its administration –
features shared in common by state governments, whether
based in Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur,
Gandhinagar. When the
announced its plan to acquire land at Nandigram
for the setting up of a chemical hub, it immediately
provoked protests from among the affected villagers –
the majority of them incidentally being supporters of the
ruling CPI(M). But the party chose to ignore the signs of
discontent in Nandigram, and also failed to take lessons
from the popular outburst that had already challenged
the ham-handed efforts of its administration to acquire
land in Singur for the Tata car factory a few months
ago. Instead of correcting its past mistakes, the CPI(M)
in Nandigram persisted in ramrodding the drive for
industrialisation, without caring to take into confidence
the affected villagers. The Haldia Development Authority
(under which Nandigram falls and is headed by the local
CPI(M) MP), went ahead by issuing a circular declaring
its unilateral decision to acquire land for the project.
A smug party leadership apparently assumed that since
the villagers had voted for the Left, they would meekly
submit to the orders issued from above.
When the villagers rose in protest, chief minister
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya retracted by admitting in public
that it was a mistake, and had to announce that no land
would be taken away from them without their consent.
Yet, rather than following up the public gesture by
meeting and apologising to the disgruntled villagers and
officially withdrawing the circular, the ruling CPI(M)
seemed to have been driven by a petty vindictive motive
of teaching a lesson to their voters and dissident followers
for having dared to oppose the party’s plan. Reports by
both the media and human rights activists reveal that
in the terror that was unleashed in Nandigram on March
14 – all in the name of restoring “law and order” – the
police were accompanied by CPI(M) armed cadres who
wreaked vengeance on their opponents.
The bloody trail of terror left in Nandigram has
besmirched the image of Bhattacharya, who till recently
was basking in the glory of success in winning the
elections, regaining the confidence of Indian investors,
and earning the admiration of bhadralok Bengali society.
The Nandigram tragedy will also hang as an albatross
around the neck of his party’s central leadership which
has just begun to acquire some respectability and
importance among the Indian political classes, thanks
to the Left’s ability to win enough seats in Parliament
to influence national policies.
Beyond the immediate tragedy of Nandigram, there
lurks the more frightful prospect of increasing confrontation
all over
are bent on following a particular model of development,
on the one hand, and the vast masses who are to be
dispossessed by that model, on the other. Nandigram
is only one episode among the series of agitations that
have exploded in various parts in the recent past (in
Sangrur in
economic zone, Kinnaur in Himachal Pradesh against
the construction of a mega hydel project and Panaji in
corporate houses – to quote a few instances). L K Advani
of the Bharatiya Janata Party who is now crying hoarse
over the killings in Nandigram, chose to remain silent
Economic and Political Weekly
over a similar happening in Kalinganagar in Orissa (where his
party is an ally of the ruling Biju Janata Dal) in January 2006,
when the police shot down 13 villagers as the local tribal
community came out in a demonstration against the appropriation
of their land for an industrial project. EPW
Economic and Political Weekly
NANDIGRAM-II
Beyond the Immediate Tragedy
There is a need to go beyond the immediate tragedy of
Nandigram and examine the underlying process that gives
rise to such episodes. In the neoliberal times that we are
living through, governments, whether at the central or a state
level, are essentially for the markets, by the markets and of
the markets. Indeed, the parliamentary political process is
increasingly governed by the logic of the market. But at a
more basic level, the process of capitalist development, which
is now driven largely by private investment, is creating
progress and wealth at one pole, while at the same time
dragging masses of people – poor and middle peasants,
landless rural workers, urban workers weakened by the
decline of effective trade unions, and non-wage earners in the
informal sector – “through blood and dirt, through misery
and degradation” at the other.
Classically, the “peasant question” has been articulated in
terms of class differentiation of the peasantry, ultimately
tending to polarisation into capitalists and proletarians.
However, the process of industrialisation also demands the
mobilisation of agricultural land that leads to displacement
of peasants, leading to their “proletarianisation” or
“marginalisation” in an urban environment, a process that has
accelerated in
reforms and the drive towards free trade in agricultural
commodities initiated at the World Trade Organisation, such
effects were mitigated through state support to agriculture in
various forms. But now the “commodification” of food is at
high tide. The “peasant question” of the 21st century, more
than in the past, thus brings to the fore issues of landlessness,
hunger, “informalisation”, homelessness and environmental
destruction. Millions of people have been victims of displacement
and dislocation, and many more will follow, if the
many proposals on the anvil to set up special economic zones
(SEZs) go ahead in the country.
In
land reform – implementation of the land ceiling
and the redistribution of land, as also “Operation Barga” –
improved the distribution of income and changed the incentive
structure in favour of those who tilled the land, though
subsequently some land transfers may have been reversed via
the market. But over time there has been the inevitable rising
disproportion between the rural population, land resources
and jobs, what with the failure of rural industry to take off.
The CPI(M) has been rightly quite concerned about the
future of the small and middle peasants, given the decline of
landholding areas and the limits of the diffusion of technical
progress, and with the increase in population density also
about the landless. After all, with the land reform, around 80
per cent of the cultivated land is now with small and middle
peasants, whereas elsewhere, where the implementation of
the land ceiling and redistribution was a failure, this proportion
is less than half that figure. And, post-land reforms, the
Chayanovian tendency of demographic differentiation has
also asserted itself. But will industrialisation in the form of
a “mega-chemical hub” and multi-product SEZ over 10,000
acres of land in Nandigram or elsewhere and other such
projects serve to address the question of alternative livelihood
opportunities? An enormous number of people who are
involved in agriculture and allied activities will be expropriated
and displaced as a result, leading to a further increase
in the huge mass of people in the informal sector, living on
the margins of existence.
Should not the CPI(M) then be thinking and acting at least
along social-democratic lines? In agriculture and allied
activities, the LF government, with the active participation
of the Kisan Sabhas, can help form mutual aid teams in which
households can pool resources (tools, implements, draft power,
occasional labour) but still cultivate the land on an individual
basis. When this is successful, they can then move to the
formation of elementary cooperatives in which land as well
as other resources can be pooled, but individual ownership
rights maintained, and where incomes can be based partly
on property ownership and partly on labour time committed
to cooperative production. In industry, the LF government
should be pursuing more vigorously its policy of industrial
clusters based on specific products/skills of small and
medium units with common infrastructure services that
improve the viability of the units. Here too, cooperative forms
of organisation can be given precedence, with the trade
unions as effective stakeholders. Land acquisition, as
required, must of course go through the process of democratic
consent via the gram sabhas, with environmental and social
impact assessments, public hearings, and reasonable
compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation. EPW
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