CPI (M) plans to do a 'Singur' on Mamata

Demands return of idle Rly land in Howrah.

Having been outwitted by Trinamool Congress’ Mamata Banerjee after she sent the Tata Nano car project packing from West Bengal by demanding that land be returned to unwilling farmers, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is getting ready to do a Singur on Banerjee.

After supporting the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for almost four years, the CPI(M), the largest of the four-party Left Front that has ruled that state for 32 years, has suddenly woken up to the fact that 700 acres of railway land is lying unutilised in the prime industrial area of Howrah — the adjacent district to Kolkata — and is planning to start a protest demanding that it be returned to farmers.

The significance of CPI(M)’s decision is that Banerjee is now railway minister. Her agitation in Singur, about an hour’s drive from Kolkata, resulted in significant electoral gains in parliamentary elections earlier this year. Not only did the Trinamool defeat a sitting Left MP in Singur, it gained 19 seats in Bengal, handing the ruling coalition its worst electoral performance since its inception. Banerjee now has an eye on the Assembly election of 2011, when she hopes to become chief minister of the state.

Although the Howrah land was acquired way back in 1985 — when Madhavrao Scindia was railway minister and Banerjee (then a Congress member) had barely completed a year as a Lok Sabha MP — the CPI(M) wants to make it an issue now after almost a quarter of a century.

“We have planned an agitation and our demand is simple: Either the Railway builds its proposed rail yard as planned originally or it returns the land to the farmers,” the party’s Central Committee member Hannan Mollah told Business Standard.

The CPI (M)’s agitation programme includes processions from three corners of the state, a sit-in demonstration and submitting a petition to the Centre through the governor.

Why not a memorandum to the railway minister? “We don’t feel like communicating with her directly,” says Mollah, who was a seven-time MP from Howrah but lost to a Trinamool candidate in 2009.

In the past four months, many Left leaders have written to Banerjee on various issues but she has not acknowledged any of them.

Politically, the CPI (M) now wants to make Banerjee feel the Singur heat. In Singur, Banerjee had insisted that Tata Motors build its Nano factory on 600 acres of land and return 300 acres to unwilling farmers. The agitation eventually prompted an exasperated Ratan Tata to decide to shift the factory to Gujarat last year.

As a part of the second UPA government, Banerjee’s party is vehemently opposing a land acquisition Bill, demanding that it include a provision to return land to farmers if a project doesn’t take off.

The CPI(M) wishes to put pressure on Banerjee and make her do exactly that with idle Railway land. “She is advocating return of unutilised land to farmers. We are demanding the same. The central government must take a call,” says Mollah, a member of the previous parliamentary standing committee on rural development that suggested many changes in the land Bill. Those changes, however, were not accepted by the UPA.

Banerjee has already stalled the land acquisition process in Uttar Pradesh for the proposed east-west freight corridor after the Bengal CPI(M)’s newspaper — Ganashakti — pointed out that the Railway Ministry was acquiring agricultural land for the freight line.