THE siege of the Tata Motors project in Singur, West Bengal, by a grand alliance of disparate forces led by Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee continues to disrupt normalcy and all developmental activities in the area. The Durgapur Expressway, one of the main road arteries in the region, continues to remain blocked, completely disrupting the flow of goods and public transport. It has severely affected normal life by preventing patients and sick people from rural Bengal to reach hospitals in Kolkata. With dwindling public support, calls have been given to disrupt traffic and rail communications all across the state.
Firstly, those spearheading this agitation have used as one of their fundamental pillars of opposition the canard that industrialisation in Bengal is impossible under the Left Front government. This has been their constant refrain for the last three decades. Now, when concrete and significant industrialisation efforts are successfully advancing, these very forces seek to thwart them. The politics of this is not far to seek. If industrialisation advances in Bengal under the Left Front government, then the raison d’etre of the opposition’s political existence, will simply cease. Hence, for their political survival, they need to prevent industrialisation in Bengal and, therefore, to sabotage greater employment opportunities and better livelihood for the people. They, thus, emerge as the enemies of Bengal’s prosperity.
Secondly, this opposition comes from those very political forces in Bengal that had violently opposed land reforms and openly sided with the landlords protecting their illegal possession of vast amounts of land above the legal ceiling. Since the Left Front government came into existence in 1977, West Bengal has distributed more land to the landless than any other state in the country. While its population is only 8 per cent that of India’s, 22 per cent of all land distributed in the country is in West Bengal. The 2.97 million beneficiaries of land reforms in Bengal account for 55 per cent of all beneficiaries in India. During the last three years, over 200,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of cultivable land has been compulsorily acquired for non-agricultural uses all over India as compared to a few thousand acres in Bengal, much of which has been for highways. The compensation for such acquisition in Singur in West Bengal compared to elsewhere in the country is highly favourable. Not only were the peasants given three times the current market price, for the first time anywhere in the country, those non-owners of land but dependent on the land for their livelihood, like tenant farmers, were also given compensation.
Those who are opposing the industrialisation efforts in Bengal by charging the Left Front of forcibly acquiring cultivable land deliberately seek to conceal such facts. Despite such successes of the land reforms, the future development of the state rested mainly in rapid industrialisation. Amongst various reasons, one important issue was the fragmentation of land following the distribution some decades ago. For the 997.11 acres of land acquired, the number of owners eligible for compensation were over 13,000 apart from the tenant farmers. This means that nearly 13 families were surviving on one acre of land. In reality, only one or two families would cultivate, while the rest would eke out their livelihood by doing sundry jobs outside. Clearly, therefore, without rapid industrialisation that will generate employment, the future of Bengal and the prosperity of its people is impossible.
Finally, the success of such efforts for Bengal’s industrialisation and the consequent improvements in people’s livelihood, the opposition feared would lead to the further consolidation of the Left Front and its support base. From the opposition’s point of view, for their very survival, this had to be thwarted at all costs. This is precisely what they are attempting. In the process, a grand alliance led by the Trinamool and including the Congress, BJP, some Muslim fundamentalist organisations, ‘Maoists’, SUCI, foreign-funded NGOs and sections of the corporate media has been forged to oppose the Left Front. All these outfits represent the interests of one or the other who seek to weaken the Left forces in India today.
(Sitaram Yechury is an MP in the Rajya Sabha and a member of the CPI(M) Politburo. The piece appears as an edit in the party mouthpiece People’s Democracy in its August 31 issue)
