Abhijit Sen and Abhijit Guha on the Vietnam vs. West Bengal debate

The Vietnam experience
By Abhijit Sen
The Statesman
10 May 2007
Many of the hypothetical fears about the conflict between agriculture and industry can be dispelled by a visit to Vietnam and a study of their methods in conditions very similar to those obtaining in West Bengal, says ABHIJIT SEN
The sudden outburst of Singur and Nandigram over land acquisition for industry has caught most people by surprise. After all, this was not the first time that land has been acquired for industry. Decades ago, when Bengal was the leading industrial state in the country, huge tracts of land had been acquired for mega projects like Durgapur Steel Plant, Alloy Steel Plant, expansion of IISCO, DVC projects, Farrakka, and so on.
Of course it can be argued that these projects were set up before land reforms, which gave peasants rights over the land they till. But even after land reforms many large industrial projects have come up on farmland. Examples are Dankuni, Haldia Petrochem, Haldia Refinery, Fritolay and Dabur factories in North Bengal and many more. Therefore, the attachment of peasants to their land after land reforms cannot be the main cause of the present troubles.
Threat to food scarcity is often cited as a reason for not setting up industry on agricultural land. Here again the fears seem unfounded. In the past two decades, in spite of conversion of land to industry without a hitch, West Bengal has emerged as the leading agricultural state in the country in rice, potatoes, fruits and vegetables.
It can be argued that modern industry is capital intensive and not labour intensive, and therefore the labour displaced from agriculture cannot be absorbed by industry. At first sight this seems to be a valid argument until we examine, for each square mile of land, how many people can be supported by employment in industry and commerce and how many can be supported by agriculture. This exercise will show that each unit of land can give maximum employment concentration in shops, offices, restaurants, software and BPO, then in industry and lastly agriculture. It must not be forgotten that agriculture is a land intensive activity and much more land is required to support a person in agriculture than in commerce or industry. A comparison of Burrabazar with Nandigram will illustrate the point. Nandigram is not the only place in the world where land has been sought to be converted from agriculture to industry. In practically every part of the world such conversions are taking place every day. How has this been achieved without riots and police firing?
It may be instructive to look at the experience of Vietnam. The land area of Vietnam and its population is almost the same as West Bengal. If anything the population density of Vietnam is somewhat higher. Like West Bengal, 70 per cent of the population of Vietnam is engaged in agriculture and in both places the principal crop is rice. The per capita income is also similar in both countries – if anything the per capita income in India is slightly higher. With so many similarities, is Vietnam facing a problem of acquiring agricultural land for industry? The answer is a resounding “NO”. New SEZs, industrial parks, software parks are coming up in huge numbers in Vietnam.
The author visited one park (out of many such) which employed 60,000 people and had exports of $ 1.3 billion. Another was dedicated to 600 Japanese companies. Industry in Vietnam is growing by leaps and bounds and the country is rapidly moving from its original agricultural base to become an industrial power house. This is not to say that agriculture is being neglected. From being a devastated famine stricken country at the end of the war, Vietnam has now become a leading food exporter. In fact, it is the world’s second largest exporter of rice, the very crop which is said to be most affected by conversion of land to industry.
Many of the hypothetical fears about the conflict between agriculture and industry can be dispelled by a visit to Vietnam and a study of their methods in conditions very similar to those obtaining in West Bengal. This state has very long and very close emotional ties with Vietnam. The cries of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” and “amar nam tomar nam Vietnam” still occasionally resound on the streets of Kolkata and one of the most important streets of Kolkata is named after the Vietnamese hero. However, we cannot just rest on past ties. The Vietnamese are practical people and while not forgetting the past, are more interested in the present and the future. In the past West Bengal has been in the vanguard in giving support to the Vietnamese war effort. However, it is a sad fact that the current material interchanges are almost non-existent. Now that West Bengal faces a continuing crisis over using land for industry, it is our turn to look to Vietnam for help in resolving the crisis. An intensive study of the Vietnamese methods by West Bengal delegations of both Left Front and opposition leaders will surely help in resolving the current impasse which is threatening to nip in the bud the nascent industrial revival in West Bengal.
Things should not come to such a pass in West Bengal where all progress is brought to a halt by a never ending face-off between the government and opposition over an issue which the Vietnamese experience shows is a non-issue. Our political parties must show a modicum of statesmanship in finding a solution to the problem, especially when an exemplary solution is available in a nearby country like Vietnam. (The author is former president of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce)


ABHIJIT GUHA’S REPLY
Areas where Vietnam scores over West Bengal
The Statesman
31 May 2007
Sir, ~ In the article, “The Vietnam experience” (10 May) Abhijit Sen has compared Vietnam with West Bengal in terms of their population, proportion of population engaged in agriculture, the principal crop produced and the per capita income. However, he has found one striking dissimilarity. According to him, Communist Vietnam does not face any problem in acquiring land for industries as is currently being encountered by the Leftist government in West Bengal. Further, by introducing SEZs, industrial parks, software parks and so on, Vietnam has been able to move out from its “original agricultural base to become an industrial power house.” The author also tells us that “Vietnam has now become a leading food exporter.” With due respect to Mr Sen who is a great captain of industry and commerce in Bengal, I would like to bring to his kind notice the following facts:
1) In 2002, the West Bengal government organised an international seminar on agrarian relations in which scholars from Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba presented their papers and two noted economists VK Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan edited the published versions of those papers in a book entitled “Agrarian Studies: Essays on Agrarian Relations in Less Developing Countries”. The paper by the Vietnamese scholar, Noguen Tan Trin, depicted the condition of agriculture and the government policies in Vietnam from 1945 to the present period. His paper clearly reveals that land reforms and formation of agricultural cooperatives were the two major activities which helped Vietnam to achieve self-sufficiency in food crop and literacy. In West Bengal, according to government reports prepared by N Mukarji and D Banerjee (1993) and Jayati Ghosh (2000), let alone the cooperative movement, the process of land reforms became slow since the mid-1980s and landlessness began to emerge as an alarming trend! This is a major difference between Vietnam and West Bengal.
2) Another dissimilarity between Vietnam and West Bengal is the new land law which the former enacted in 1993. By that law, land belonged to the people and the government only had administrative control over it. The law also empowered individual and communal owner of land to give the land in lease to others for large-scale cultivation, social forestry, pisciculture and salt production.
The Vietnamese government is presently encouraging farmers to reclaim uncultivable land to form “ideal large farms” to avoid land fragmentation. At present, there are nearly 130,000 such farms in the country.
In 1994, the West Bengal government introduced the new industrial policy to invite huge capital-intensive investment and began to acquire fertile farmland without changing the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The failure to check land fragmentation through cooperatives in West Bengal is well known. The Jayati Ghosh report strongly recommended the formation of agricultural cooperatives.
3) In Vietnam, the government is targeting to bring down the number of persons engaged in agriculture to 50 per cent by 2010 through technological improvement in agriculture and not by large-scale land acquisition.
Additionally, in Vietnam there is a strong emphasis on expanding village-based cottage industries, agricultural marketing and services in the rural areas.
The West Bengal Leftists also had such plans and experts committees are still recommending such activities, but the government is paying all its attention to installing big industries and SEZ under the pretext of “successful land reforms”.
~ Yours, etc., Abhijit Guha,
Vidyasagar University, 11 May.

Abhijit Guha's article in Dainik Statesman

Articles and debates

A debate. The headings are numbered and set in bold font.


1. Real estate, unreal methods
Hindustan Times
By Abhirup Sarkar February 7, 2007

Animosities over acquisition of agricultural land for non-agricultural uses have reached dizzying heights in West Bengal, Orissa and other parts of the country. In January 2005, several people were killed in police firing in Kalinga Nagar, Orissa. The feud had originated from an attempt of land acquisition for a mammoth steel plant proposed to be built by the South Korean steel major Posco.

More recently, history has repeated itself in Singur and Nandigram, both in West Bengal. In Singur, the strife is over land acquisition by the state government on behalf of the Tatas for constructing an automobile factory. Most recently, in Nandigram, a mere rumour of land acquirement for the purpose of building an SEZ by the Indonesian Salim group has led to bloody fights between rival political bands and the death of seven people.

The basic issue is one of industrial and infrastructural development at the cost of displacing sections of the agricultural population. The issue, which is being hotly debated both inside and outside the state and central governments, has deep relevance for the future course of progress of the country. Apart from crude economic calculations, there are problems with finer political, social and moral nuances that need to be carefully analysed.

As far as we can see, two fundamental questions are involved in the current debate. First, how far is it necessary, at this stage of development, to shift resources from agriculture to industry? In particular, how much should we worry about an unchecked and desperate sacrifice of agricultural lands imposing threats to future food security? Second, how far should the governments indulge themselves in the act of acquiring land, by force if necessary, from farmers and hand them over to profit-maximising investors? How far can we justify this infringement on private property rights?

The first question has a straightforward answer. For the employment-starved still predominantly traditional Indian economy, where an overwhelming majority of the labour force is struggling to earn a living in the agricultural sector, development entails growth of industry and services. Indeed, for the country as a whole, there is hardly any alternative but to shift labour from the low productivity primary sector to high productivity secondary and tertiary sectors. The globalisation endeavour has given a jumpstart to the industrialisation process. But this is yet to make a dent into the backwardness of a large section of the population. To drag this unfortunate lot into the mainstream development process, the country needs to embark upon an industrialisation drive on a much larger scale.

But industrialisation cannot be pulled out of thin air. To build factories, townships, roads, bridges, seaports and airports — all integral parts of industrialisation — one needs land. In a country like India, where the land-man ratio is pretty adverse and where most of the available land is already being used to grow food for the masses, any attempt to acquire land to build up industry and infrastructure must impinge on agricultural land. But that should hardly put a threat to our food security, for the fact of the matter is that the land requirement for industrialisation is minuscule in relation to the total agricultural land available in the country.

For example, the West Bengal government is contemplating acquiring around 1.25 lakh acres of land for its entire industrialisation drive (the Tatas requiring not even a thousand acres for their automobile project) which constitutes less than 1 per cent of the total arable land in the state. The situation should be similar in other states as well. Thus, acquisition of agricultural land cannot possibly impose any threat to our food security.

The problem, however, is microeconomic. It pertains to those who are losing their land and their livelihood. It pertains to the tillers of the soil and to others who depend for their daily bread on the appropriated land, to owner-cultivators, sharecroppers, landless agricultural labourers and even small local traders whose economic existence had so far been rooted in the tiny plots of land that are proposed to be handed over to the industrial investors.

In Orissa, West Bengal and some other states the government and political organisations are intervening in a big way to make sure that unwilling sellers do not impede quick land transactions. This is certainly important for attracting actual investors to the state and for sending the right signals to distantly potential ones. But the trouble is that this act of intervention, this feat of land acquisition by special power — by force if you will — is blatantly violating property rights. We have seen this violation in Narmada, and now we see it in Kalinga Nagar, Singur and other places. This brings us to the second question: how far should the government involve itself in acquiring land, especially for private investors whose interests are strictly confined to narrow profit motives?

Ronald Coase of the University of Chicago had a Nobel winning theorem which could be of relevance in the present context. According to the Coase theorem, initial distribution of property rights does not matter provided property owners can freely transact with one another. Indeed, through free market transactions they would reach the social optimum where the person who has the greatest use for a property would pay a suitable price and acquire it.

In the present context, the Coase theorem would imply that if the initially unwilling farmer were offered a high enough price, it is most likely that he would sell his land voluntarily. And if the government had allowed the investors to freely acquire their land by directly bargaining with the owners of the soil, not only would there be a smooth transfer of land but also the market would have ensured an efficient outcome.

Coase theorem, however, is unlikely to be relevant for land acquisition in India for a couple of reasons. First, small sellers of land are not in a position to bargain successfully with big multinationals and the government has to intervene to protect the interest of the small sellers. Second, if investors are asked to acquire land directly from the market, it might lead to speculation, holding up of land in the expectation of higher prices and unnecessary delay. The delay might even compel the potential investor to pack up and go elsewhere to set up his factory which, in turn, justifies government intervention in the process of land acquisition.

The only thing that needs to be ensured, however, is adequate compensation. Compensations are important not only because the government, which is acquiring land in the name of public interest, has a moral responsibility to compensate the loser, but also because the loser is the least likely candidate to get any employment in the factory to be set up by the investor. Moreover, the entire transaction process has to be made transparent. For, if land is acquired in public interest, the public has a right to know exactly what is going on.

Abhirup Sarkar is Professor of Economics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata



2. Sukla Sen < suklasenpatyahoo.co.uk> wrote: There is as yet no concept of compensating loss of livelihood and far less selfhood linked to work. If at all, only loss of property rights are compensated.

3.
Sir,
Abhirup Sarkar (Feb. 8) claims that "the finer political, social and moral nuances" of the drive to acquire land for new industries have not been "carefully analyzed." He then buttresses it with some gems of wisdom that I now summarize: that we should be g;sd because the quantum of arable land that needs to be acquired for setting up new industries in West Bengal is too small to threaten the future food security of the state's people, but sad because many of the same people will lose their livelihoods; glad because the process will be swift now that many political players are involved in the process, but sad because private property holders will be dispossessed; glad because a theorem of economics makes such acquisitions "socially optimal", but sad because the theorem does not apply to West Bengal; glad because adequate compensation to first-to-be-fired, never-to -be-hired land losers is all that needs to be ensured, but sad because the process of doing so remains abysmally dark, whereas all things done in the public interest should be transparent. It is thus okay for a State to commit mayhem in the public interest as long as it does so transparently (my addition).

Sincerely,
Meher Engineer

4.
Abstract
Globalization Challenges and the Need for Institutional Reforms: India's Ongoing Land Battles

Dr. Abhijit Guha
Dept. of Anthropology
Vidyasagar University
Medinipur: 721102
West Bengal,
India
E-mail: abhijitguhavuatrediffmail.com

No development policy in India could avoid the issues of reforming land legislation and of protecting those losing their lands to industrial and urban development. The common theme that runs through long periods of India's history is the encounter between the state and the people, who negotiated, bargained and often fought each other for control over this vital natural resource.
The State's recent reform policy for giving free field to the demands of globalization, by liberalizing the economy and confiscating lands through eminent domain on behalf of private enterprise ventures, facilitates the entry of private foreign capital investments. But it also creates, however, great social contradictions.
While the policy of economic liberalization assumes the creation of employment, the absence of a national legislation on displacement from land and on the state's obligations vis-à-vis peoples' resettlement paves the way toward the immediate dispossession and disempowerment of great numbers of people. Thus, the Indian State's democratic policies and institutions are receiving severe blows.
In this paper, we will describe this process with examples of development-caused displacements and impoverishment. We would also report the findings of the author's empirical and archival research in a district of West Bengal, India, which shows how the land management policy of the West Bengal government is being transformed, but at the same time is resisted by the people. The paper reviews atrocities committed in the process of imposing forced displacement without adequate mitigation, and describes the powerfully growing protest movements in West Bengal, and elsewhere, against such impoverishment. Finally, the paper searches ways for institutional reforms able to create a system of land management fitting for a democratic state.

5.
Abhijit Guha <abhijitguhavuatrediffmail.com> wrote: Date: 11 Feb 2007 11:16:09 -0000From: "Abhijit Guha" < abhijitguhavuatrediffmail.com>To: "meher engineer" <mengineer2003atyahoo.com>Subject: Re: Re: Re: Singur, Nandigram, Kashipur, Kalinga Nagar: Dispossession as 'Development'

Dear Prof.Engineer,
Please find the news item attached.It is interesting how the govt.is moving to combat critiques on land acquisition.The Trinamul led opposition is yet to raise the point that land acquisition ultimately affects land reform and also Panchayati Raj.This opposition, I believe will never raise this crucial point.No opposition in the W.B. Assembly or outside ever raised this point probably because every political party knows that if it shates power at any level of government it will support land acquisition for so called public purpose!!!That is why there had been no move towards changing the colonial law by any political party in India.No one is an exception.This is one of my findings which I depicted in my Ph.D thesis. It is only the NGOs who have demanded it.This is the irony of movements against development caused displacement in India.

Regards,
Abhijit

Abhijit Guha on 'Singur on the Kharagpur track' and Meher Engineer's response

http://thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?date=2006-12-27&usrsess=1&clid=4&id=168879
Singur on the Kharagpur track
by Abhijit Guha
[THE STATESMAN; 27 December 2006]

We learn from the print media that after Singur, huge amounts of agricultural land will be acquired in the Kharagpur area of Midnapore (West). But if we take a longer view of events revolving around land acquisition for private industries, we will find that worse things had happened in Kharagpur during the early 1990s, a few years before the declaration of the New Industrial Policy (NEP) by the Left Front government in 1994. Kolkata-based scientists and intellectuals who are now protesting against the acquisition of fertile agricultural land for Tata Motors at Singur, did not pay any heed to the dispossession of thousands of small and marginal farmers and bargadars (including tribals) for the pig-iron companies of the Tatas and Birlas at Kharagpur. The Opposition parties, too, were silent. No Opposition leader was found to storm the Assembly on the acquisition of farmland for private companies at Kharagpur. The report on the adverse consequences of land acquisition was published in the media, particularly The Statesman, but the intellectuals remained silent.The reasons behind the silence of Kolkata-based intellectuals and the Opposition parties over the land acquisition for the Tatas and Birlas by the Left Front government at Kharagpur in the early 1990s are more than one. First, anti-Left Front political parties (the SUCI and CPI-ML) and human rights groups (APDR and Nagarik Mancha) were not much interested in the land acquisition issue during that period when the Left Front-driven industrialisation was at its nascent stage, with promises of huge industrial investments by private companies in the state.Second, though the farmlands acquired in Kharagpur provided food security to vegetable growers of Gokulpur (it is also the name of a railway station between Kharagpur and Midnapore) and the adjoining villages, they were monocrop (jal soem in the departmental classification) in nature. We still find among those who are opposed to the acquisition of multicrop farmlands a notion which runs like this: “Well, monocrop land may be acquired since we need to have industrialisation in the state, but a multicrop land should never be allowed to be acquired for non-agricultural use.”There is hardly anyone in the anti-Left Front lobby who is demanding the upgradation of monocrop land into multicrop ones, which is the government policy. We often hear from the advocates of this anti-acquisition lobby: “Why isn’t the government building industries in Purulia, Bankura and Midnapore (West)?” As if people in these districts do not depend on agriculture but on something else! So, if industries come up in these backward districts, the poor will benefit. Third, despite the spontaneous but weak protests and resistance by farmers of Kharagpur during the mid-1990s, no Opposition party lent any solid support (as they have done in Singur) to them. The media did report the adverse effects of farmland acquisition and the protests of peasants. But these did not attract the attention of Kolkata-based intellectuals and human rights groups.They were at that time busy with other issues. After all, Kharagpur is not equipped with such a great number of anti-Left Front intellectuals of all shades and colours such as Kolkata. The reason the land acquisition scenario in Kharagpur is far worse than that of Singur is based on government records and field research over six years for my PhD thesis at Vidyasagar University. Let us state some of the dismal facts. Kharagpur and SingurAccording to information revealed through the print media, a total of 997 acres of agricultural land have been acquired for the Tatas’ small car factory at Singur and it took eight months for the West Bengal government to do it by bureaucratic machinery.The compensation rate, according to government sources, turned out to be a little more than Rs 7 lakh per acre (The Statesman, 14 December). Let us compare Singur with Kharagpur. In 1992, a pig-iron manufacturing plant named Tata Metaliks was set up by the Tatas on the monocrop land of six mouzas under Kharagpur I block of the erstwhile Midnapore district, though non-arable land was available in the vicinity, having communication and other facilities. A total of 217.23 acres was acquired by the state government and the acquisition was complete within a year through the application of the more coercive West Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act, 1948 which became defunct after 31 March, 1993. The compensation paid by the district land acquisition department was Rs 20,686 an acre for a landowner, while for a recorded bargadar, it was Rs 11,211.75 an acre. On 1 June, 1992 in the West Bengal Assembly, Mr Manas Bhunia of the Congress wanted to know about the land acquisition for the establishment of the pig-iron industry by the Tatas at Kharagpur. The land and land reforms minister in his reply informed about the amount of land given to the company and the rates of compensation. No question was asked about the rehabilitation of the displaced peasants by any member of the Assembly (West Bengal Assembly Proceedings Vol 99; 1992). An unpublished report of the Midnapore land acquisition department dated 27-3-92 revealed that the lack of irrigation facilities and the monocrop nature of the acquired land led to the calculation of its market price at such a low rate. The department, too, did not explore the possibilities of rehabilitation of the affected families in terms of providing permanent jobs and/or land as compensation. The administration seemed to be concerned only with monetary compensation at the market price prevalent in the area.Three years later, people of the same area were served with notices by the district administration for the acquisition of their farmland in 10 mouzas covering about 525 acres for another pig-iron plant named Century Textiles and Industrial Limited (CTIL) owned by the Birlas. The local people, being totally disillusioned and frustrated with the government’s attitude towards rehabilitation and compensation in the Tata Metaliks case, began to protest against this decision of acquisition. This time, the land acquisition department prepared rates of compensation, which ranged between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1,00,000 an acre and Rs 7,000 an acre for the bargadars. The farmers objected to these rates and mass deputations to the district authorities began, and on 10 January, 1996, the peasants prevented soil testing by the company and blocked the National Highway 6 for eight hours. The farmers’ agitation continued for about five months and they also boycotted the parliamentary election in May, 1996. All these events were reported in The Statesman and some Bengali dailies. No political party came to organise this spontaneous movement of peasants, no social or human rights activist came forward to support landlosers of a rural area in West Bengal, just 120 km from Kolkata and well connected by trains. One former Naxalite peasant leader, with the help of a few local Intuc boys, led a brief but significant movement against land acquisition. The district unit of the APDR published a leaflet, held a meeting in the locality and gave a deputation to the district magistrate and that was all.The land acquisition episode for CTIL, however, took a horrible turn within a few years. After taking possession of 358.25 acres by April 1997 and fencing the land, the company decided not to deposit any money for payment of compensation. The company’s managing director, Mr BK Birla, in an interview with the correspondent of The Statesman, said they would not proceed with the project since “the national market of pig-iron has become very competitive because of the entry of China and Australia in the field”.The then state land and land reforms minister, Mr Surya Kanta Mishra, on the other hand told The Statesman: “We are not finding any takers for the land” (The Statesman, 18 November, 1999).This huge chunk of fertile agricultural land, which provided subsistence to nearly 3,000 families, remained unutilised till 2003 after which some portion of it was given to a private company but the larger area still remains unutilised.The Kharagpur scenario of land acquisition for industries is an important lesson both for the Left Front government and its critics. The government should now seriously ponder over what would happen to the 997 acres of agricultural land if the Tatas suddenly backed out from Singur due to the “disturbances” created by Trinamul Congress and other social activists? Will the land be returned to the farmers? That had not happened in Kharagpur.According to the survey conducted by the Kharagpur I Block Development Office, 73 per cent of families of the gram panchayats from which land was acquired for Tata Metaliks and Century Textiles and Industries Limited were living below the poverty line in 1997, that is, one to five years after the acquisition. Will the same story be repeated in Singur?Critics of the Left Front government, particularly social activists and human rights groups, should ask themselves what would be their activity if they lose or win in the Singur battle?Will they look for another issue or should they continue a sustained struggle in changing the Draconian Land Acquisition Act, whether it is employed to acquire multicrop lands near Kolkata or monocrop lands in far off districts inhabited by poorer people?

(The author is Reader, Department of Anthropology, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore)


Meher Engineer on Guha on Singur
Something relevant to the concerns raised in Abhijit Guha’s article happened in Kolkata recently, at the Students Hall meeting on the questions that the Singur Car project raises. The meeting was called by Nagarik Manch, so the Hall was full. Recall that those present listened, silently, to the many speakers, both scheduled and unscheduled. Recall, further, that they even remained silent when one of the speakers berated them - liberally - for allowing a massive, urban, housing project to be built, before their eyes, on fertile land, by a party whose election promises have always included a reference to Land Reforms, and a reference to the party’s “best in India” record on that subject. The speaker was referring to the New Town project at Rajarhat.The people of Kolkata, particularly the intellectuals in it, did not protest then, when they saw fertile land being taken away from those whose livelihoods depended on it. They failed to say “You can’t do that.” What explains that massive indifference to the displacement of so many people?The answer surely lies in the fact that the number of people, based in Kolkata, who have taken any interest at all (since the mid-80’s?) to events occuring in the state’s rural areas can be counted on the fingers of a very small number of hands. Rural West Bengalis were left to the ever changing currents of state policy. That, in a state being run by an avowedly Leninist party, means disaster. Thus we, in Kolkata, now reap what we had then sowed. The indifference and the hostility that emanate from the party in power to its dictates is not a cause for surprise. I know of only one antidote to that kind of social poison: an alert citizenry, that is not content to sleep between elections, but which which keeps constant watch over its representatives to see that the latter perform as per the promises that they made.That was the whole idea of the JP led movement of the late seventies. It was also the idea behind the Gujarat andolan that followed JP’s movement, which tried to introduce the right to recall into Indian democracy. Neither movement succeeded. Both threw up a new generation of leaders, who succumbed, some soon some later, to the old style of Indian leadership.