Left holds massive rally at Tata factory gates

SINGUR SIMMERS

The Left Front today staged a massive show of strength right at the gates of the Tata Motors Nano car project at Singur, 40 km from Kolkata, to prove that while it may have lost the panchayat elections in the region, it was still a force to reckon with in the district.

State Commerce Minister Nirupam Sen told thousands of supporters at the meeting: “Industry is the only way we can provide jobs to our youth and those who are opposing the project are the successors of those who held up earlier state projects, like Haldia Petrochemicals and Bakreswar thermal power station, in the 1980s.”

The massive rally was to demonstrate that there was substantial public and political support for the project, he added.

Addressing people brought to the site in hundreds of buses, trucks and commercial vehicles, Sen said larger tracts of land had been acquired for private steel and other processing factories in Barddhaman, his home district, but in Singur’s Hugli district, the common people were being misled by Opposition politicians into opposing the project.