Dipankar Bhattacharya

THE WSF slogan or motto ‘another world is possible’ has quite understandably given rise to widespread political debates. In contrast to the triumphalist bourgeois claim of “there is no alternative,” the WSF slogan did reflect the popular yearning for a progressive alternative to the decadent and oppressive capitalist order. It also exuded a resolute optimism and even enthusiasm for such an alternative world order. Yet, with many forces within the WSF talking increasingly about the possibility of a regulated and reformed capitalism, of a romanticised and humane globalisation, the inherent ambivalence and vagueness of the WSF motto has also become quite clear. The slogan indeed says nothing about the nature of another world, and for another, it also does not address the important question of how that possibility of another world is to be realised.

Socialists of the world are more or less convinced and agreed that the only meaningful another world we can talk about is a socialist world and that the path to socialism proceeds through revolutions and not reforms. But then the WSF is not a World Socialist Forum, it is merely a world social forum and it is futile to expect sharp and crisp statements and definite calls to action from a body which calls itself a context, a process, a space, virtually anything and everything but an organisation or a movement.

When the WSF was born, the word ‘social’ was apparently stressed as a counterpoint to ‘economic’. If the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland were a jamboree of the big MNCs, and policymakers of capitalist states, the WSF was projected to be a global counter-gathering of activists, an international rainbow of protests against the oppressive Fund-Bank-WTO order. But the world has undergone major changes since January 2001 when the WSF was born in Brazil. In the wake of America's Afghan war and the subsequent Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the whole world has been forced to sit up and confront the brutal and barbaric reality of imperialism and militarisation. And over the last two years we have seen a huge worldwide anti-war movement come up in almost every corner of the globe. But the WSF has been completely aloof from the anti-war movement and remained busy only with ‘social concerns’ that refuse to lead to any commensurate political action. The ‘social’ in the WSF thus increasingly seems to be building bridges with the ‘economic’ in WEF while moving further away from the developing leftwing political trends of socialism and anti-imperialism.

Coming in the wake of the series of anti-globalisation demonstrations that began with Seattle, the WSF initially seemed really huge and promised to bring a new impetus and a lot of fresh inputs to the anti-globalisation campaign. But now that the anti-globalisation campaign has already acquired a strong anti-war anti-imperialist thrust, now that we have already seen millions of men and women marching across the globe demanding an end to war and racism, to all the accumulated debt burden imposed on the third world and to the entire ‘multilateral’ framework of domination and plunder, the WSF has started paling into insignificance. A world solidarity forum aiding and encouraging all the live and vibrant anti-globalisation anti-imperialist movements of the world would of course be relevant, but an exclusively social and avowedly non-party forum does indeed look like a forum too many. With its present orientation, the social forum does indeed run the risk of being rendered superfluous by the onward march of events.

The word ‘possibility’ has been vulgarised a lot in bourgeois politics. When bourgeois politicians and ideologues define politics as the art of the possible, we know we are being asked to prepare for the worst. Every opportunist alliance, every marriage of convenience, every act of betrayal to the cause of independence and democracy has been sought to be legitimised in the name of the art of the possible. Yet when the people seek to bring about a revolution and push beyond the capitalist frontier, it is sought to be dismissed as a futile exercise in Utopia, something that is outright impossible and undesirable. In the framework of bourgeois politics, the ‘desirable’ is always sought to be defined in terms of the ‘possible’ and the possible is then reduced to the existing. In other words, politics, the art of the possible, is reduced to a worship of the status quo, the worst kind of conformism. The point of departure in socialist or communist politics, on the contrary, is transformation of what is existing into what is not just possible but also desirable and necessary.

History continues to reveal before us a range of possibilities. During the last one hundred years two world wars have been shown to be possible, revolution in backward Russia and China has been shown to be possible, facism and nazism have been shown to be possible, the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union has been shown to be possible, recolonisation of Iraq has been shown to be possible. Indeed, world history evolves through a constant battle between conflicting possibilities. The point is to choose the kind of possibility that one finds most appealing and fight for its realization and development. The fight for socialism began long before the first socialist republic was born – as many as seven decades elapsed between the initial articulation of the Marxist vision of socialism and its first realisation in the form of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The fight continues today even after the collapse of the USSR and even in the midst of continuing retreat of the existing socialism in a few republics like China, Vietnam and Cuba.

Marxism however considers socialism to be not just desirable and necessary but also inevitable. Like the word ‘possibility’, the word 'inevitability' too has often been interpreted in a very mechanical manner. The ‘inevitable’ in Marxism is not automatic or spontaneous, but very much an outcome of conscious historical action. This inevitability is a projection into future of the laws of motion that have determined the trajectory of human history since the beginning of the written phase. Capitalism seeks to portray the present as the ultimate or eternal, and the laws governing capitalist market economy are sought to be passed off as natural laws. But if history has evolved through successive modes of production from the era of primitive communism through the age of slavery to the days of feudalism and capitalism, why should the process of change suddenly come to a standstill with the present phase of domination of capital? Why cannot there be social life beyond the frontiers of capitalism? Why cannot the small changes daily taking place in the capitalist context add up to a qualitative leap heralding the onset of a post-capitalist or socialist order?

This quest found its answer in the analysis of the dynamics of the processes of capitalism, and the vision of socialism provided a real solution to the contradiction between the growing socialisation of production and private appropriation and concentration of wealth by matching socialised production with socialised ownership and control over the means of production and the output.

The term scientific socialism has also been a matter of great controversy. The term scientific was used as opposed to Utopian notions of socialism which were rich in imagination but had little roots in social action or the history of social progress. And in today's technologically driven times, the distinction between scientific and technological must also be underscored. Scientific socialism did not provide any technological blueprint for building socialism, it only provided broad general guidelines for organising a socialist revolution. And these broad guidelines have been proved to be essentially correct even in considerably different circumstances. More importantly, the applied science of socialism has not remained static. Initially, it was considered scientific to expect socialism to arrive in developed capitalist countries where possibilities of further development of productive forces would have been exhausted under capitalist production relations. Also socialism was expected to announce its arrival simultaneously in a number of countries. In real life, the break however came in a single backward country. Uneven development of world capitalism made it virtually impossible for socialism to win simultaneously in several countries and forced socialists to go about building socialism in a single country.

It is true that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of socialism in China and other existing socialist countries, there is now not much practical evidence or display of the inherent superiority of actually existing socialism over capitalism. There are plenty of analyses about the degeneration and eventual collapse of socialism in the former Soviet Union, but a significantly superior model is yet to emerge. Yet if socialism remains a dream, the reality of capitalism is becoming increasingly nightmarish and the notion of a truly and universally peaceful, prosperous and democratic capitalism has been proved to be completely fictitious and illusory. Indeed, the model of postwar welfare capitalism seemed to work only so long as countering the socialist model of social security and employment for all remained a priority for advanced capitalism. It is no wonder therefore that the collapse of the Soviet system also signalled a rapid 'retreat' of the welfare state and return of predatory capitalism with all its ugly features of imperialist plunder and aggression.

On the eve of the revolution in 1917 when Lenin began to talk about the impossibility of simultaneous socialist revolution, he also started stressing the importance of anti-imperialist wars of national liberation. Massive economic plunder and brutal national oppression have been the two basic characteristic features of both colonialism and post-colonial or neo-colonial imperialism. The ‘clashes of civilisation’ argument is nothing but a theory of racist national oppression. From Palestine to Iraq, there has been no let-up in the imperialist campaign of national oppression. Along with socialist class wars, the battle for national liberation and independence from the clutches of the imperialist machine of plunder and humiliation therefore continues to remain central to any international vision of anti-imperialist resistance.

The two wars of anti-imperialist resistance — we can loosely call them class war and national war — are of course dialectically inter-related. During large parts of the twentieth century the two surged in tandem, each encouraging and strengthening the other. The leadership of the national wars of liberation, however, passed on in most cases into the hands of a vacillating bourgeoisie which in turn did everything to throttle the internal class war. As we approach yet another combined wave of class war and national awakening and assertion in large parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa, the forces of socialism must try to gain the upper hand both on the internal and external fronts of the war against imperialism.

A lot has been said about the disintegration of the organised working class and even the dismantling of the organised economy. We have heard any number of stories about the miraculous rise of the new economy, about computers replacing human hands all along the chain of production and human beings having little more to do than to press the occassional button of sophisticated electronic machines. Well, if capitalism has succeeded in partially doing away with the concentration of thousands of workers in a single production point, it is because production centres have been considerably relocated and the production chain or net has been cast much wider. For every automated production plant, there are sweatshops proliferating all over the third world. Socialisation of production has not been reversed, it continues to grow and in the process it has crossed national boundaries. If we keep the big picture in mind we will see that what is happening is not disintegration of the working class but dispersal and expansion of the class. From highly educated and skilled groups working with state-of-the-art computers and sophisticated machines and electronic equipments to vast masses of unorganised and informal sector workers, the working class today occupies a much bigger social turf than any time before.

Of course the class remains to be welded with a new consciousness and spirit, the transition from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself is certainly a very big challenge. But on this score too, there are a lot of new inputs. Apart from local trade union and other struggles, the anti-globalisation anti-war movement is also shaping up as an excellent international training school for the working class. The communication revolution especially the rise of satellite television and the arrival of the internet has opened up whole new avenues for not just dissemination of information but also networking for actual struggle. The vibrant two-way traffic between networking in the cyberspace and actual demonstration of solidarity and unity on the street is indeed an exciting development of our times.

A socialist world still remains a dream. Even during the heyday of the Soviet Union and China, the world was very much a capitalist world even though there was a powerful socilaist challenge. The conflict between the two worlds — the dominant capitalist world and the socialist challenger — has proved to be more intense, with more ups and downs, and twists and turns, than was possibly imagined in the early days. But the historical and material foundation of socialism, developed and democratic socialism if you will, continues to mature within the womb of global capitalism. And the forces of socialism are also gaining in maturity and strength. With the structural crisis of capitalism spreading deeper and wider and inter-imperialist rivalry intensifying all over again, socialism is sure to bounce back with new strength and vitality.

A socialist world is possible. It is necessary. It is the future of humankind.

SIXTEEN years ago 21 people – almost all of them women and children including infants – had been butchered in broad daylight in Bathani Tola in central Bihar’s Bhojpur district. That was when the country woke up to the existence of this obscure hamlet and the sordid reality of the Ranveer Sena, a feudal private army that went on to perpetrate a series of horrific massacres in the late 1990s, killing hundreds of people all over central Bihar.

That was the twentieth century and we are now into the second decade of a new century and new millennium. Bihar is now ruled by a government which claims to be delivering ‘development with justice’. The massacres have apparently stopped and in May 2010, the district court in Ara convicted 23 people for the massacre in Bathani Tola, awarding death penalty to three and life sentence to the rest.

At last justice was being delivered to the massacre victims of yesteryear, claimed the government and romped back to power with a bigger majority in November 2010. The oppressed and marginalised rural poor, rechristened mahadalits (dalits among dalits), ati pichhdas (most backward castes) and pasmanda Musalmans (backward Muslims), all reposed considerable faith in the new dispensation.

Two years later, in April 2012, all the 23 convicts have been acquitted by the Patna High Court leaving everybody to wonder who killed the hapless twenty-one in Bathani Tola on that fateful July 11 afternoon in 1996.

How are we to make sense of this High Court verdict? Is it just a case of judicial aberration? On the contrary, records tell us that this has rather been the norm in Bihar – those accused of massacring the rural poor have almost all got acquitted eventually even if some of them may have had to spend a few years in jail as under-trial prisoners. But then aren’t things supposed to have changed in Bihar? Is it not anachronistic to talk of any feudal bias in Nitish Kumar’s ‘changed’ Bihar?

Just as the July 1996 Bathani Tola massacre had served to underline the socio-political character of the Lalu regime, the April 2012 High Court verdict – call it a judicial massacre or Bathani Tola-II – holds a mirror to the dominant socio-political milieu in Nitish Kumar’s Bihar. While the Supreme Court must judicially review the High Court verdict and ensure legal justice for the Bathani Tola victims, political and social justice demands we must understand the context and implications of Bathani Tola and stand by the victims in their battle for dignity and democracy.

When Bathani Tola-I happened many thought it was just another caste massacre rooted in some land dispute. But contrary to this common wisdom, Bathani Tola was an explicitly political massacre carried out with the avowed aim of teaching the CPI(ML) supporters a lesson. It was a massacre perpetrated in broad daylight that targeted women and children, including pregnant women and infants, with a kind of barbarity seen only in genocides marked by the motto of ethnic cleansing. Women were targeted because they would give birth Naxalites, children were eliminated because they would otherwise grow into Naxalites.

Some people believe that private armies like the Ranveer Sena arose in Bihar only as a social reaction to the ‘excesses’ committed by the CPI(ML) in land and wage struggles. It is sought to be pointed out that Bhojpur or its neighbouring districts in central Bihar hardly have the kind of huge landholdings that one would usually associate with feudalism and hence the CPI(ML)’s entire theory and practice of anti-feudal struggle is rather misplaced.

The CPI(ML)’s history in Bhojpur and many other parts of Bihar clearly shows that while land and wages have been important issues, decisive battles often have been fought on questions of human dignity and political representation. This should not come as a surprise if we care to remember that feudal power is exercised and reproduced primarily through extra-economic coercion. Social oppression, various kinds and degrees of bondage and political exclusion have historically been the hallmarks of feudal domination the world over.

If we look at the history of the CPI(ML) movement in Bhojpur, we will see that the right to vote has been one of the most keenly contested issues. In fact, behind the very emergence of the CPI(ML) in Bhojpur was the Assembly election in 1967 in which Comrade Ramnaresh Ram contested as a CPI(M) candidate and he and all his close comrades were badly beaten up and harassed by the feudal lobby which could not stomach this ‘political audacity’ of the oppressed and the downtrodden.

Years later, in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, when large numbers of dalits for the first time succeeded in exercising their franchise and electing Comrade Rameshwar Prasad as the first ‘Naxalite’ member of Parliament from Ara, a bloodbath ensued in Danwar-Bihta village just after the polling and as many as twenty-two persons had to pay with their lives the price for the right to vote.

Bathani Tola had a very similar backdrop. In the panchayat elections in 1978, Mohammad Yunus had become the ‘mukhiya’ (chief) of Kharaon panchayat in Sahar block much to the chagrin of the feudal-communal forces in the area. Under the leadership of this popular mukhiya, poor Muslims in and around Kharaon joined the CPI(ML) in large numbers. In 1995, the Sahar (SC) Assembly seat as well as the adjacent seat of Sandesh were won for the first time by the CPI(ML) and the victorious MLAs were none other than Comrades Ramnaresh Ram – the 1967 CPI(M) candidate was now a towering leader of the CPI(ML) in Bihar – and Rameshwar Prasad, the former Indian People’s Front MP from Ara.

The feudal lobby of Bhojpur became jittery and desperate. The Ranveer Sena was formed with the declared objective of wiping out the CPI(ML) from the soil of Bihar. A communal mobilisation began in Kharaon to deny the Muslim people their customary right to the Imambada and Karbala land. It was in the course of the struggle to defend their land and right that several Muslim families got evicted and had to relocate themselves in the predominantly dalit settlement of Bathani Tola in Kharaon panchayat. It was this united settlement of dalit and Muslim rural poor households that witnessed the macabre dance of death on July 11, 1996.

Massive protests ensued in Bihar following the massacre. One would have expected Lalu Prasad, the self-styled champion of the poor, the backward castes and Muslims in particular, to swing into action. But it took weeks of hunger strike by Comrade Rameshwar Prasad and the octogenarian CPI(ML) leader Comrade Taqi Rahim to make Lalu Prasad order a mere transfer of the DM of Bhojpur for his failure in stopping a massacre of this magnitude that went on for hours, with a police station being present at a distance of just two kilometres, and three police camps between 100 metres to 1 kilometres from the massacre site, without a single bullet being fired by the police. The Ranvir Sena was banned on paper but nobody was arrested and the list of massacres got longer with every passing year. In one of his most revealing political statements, Lalu Prasad announced in a public meeting in Bhojpur that to combat the CPI(ML) he was ready to unite with the devil!

No wonder Bathani Tola was soon followed by Laxmanpur Bathe. At the end of 1997 when the whole country was celebrating the eve of the New Year, the Ranveer Sena gunned down sixty-odd people in cold blood in Laxmanpur Bathe village of Jahanabad district. Bathani and Bathe, two obscure hamlets on two sides of the River Sone became prominent names in national news. KR Narayanan, the then President of India described the Bathe massacre as an act of ‘national shame’. Lalu Prasad was forced to set up a one-man Commission led by Justice Amir Das to probe the political and administrative patronage behind the Ranveer Sena. The commission however kept complaining that it was starved of necessary staff, powers and resources. Meanwhile, the Ranveer Sena got increasingly isolated and in 2002, the Sena supremo Brahmeswar Singh ‘surrendered’ to the state.

In November 2005 Bihar witnessed a change of guard and Nitish Kumar became the chief minister with the BJP’s support. One of the first steps the government took was to disband the Amir Das Commission. The BJP-JDU leaders and even a few leaders of the RJD and the Congress who had all been summoned by the Commission to depose before it heaved a huge sigh of relief. As the second term began, Brahmeswar Singh was granted bail. And now the High Court has acquitted the Bathani convicts while the fate of Bathe hangs in the balance. Nitish Kumar of course waxes eloquent about ‘development with justice’ and Bihar witnessing ‘waves of revolutionary change’ in his tenure.

Bihar has surely changed. From the Jagannath Mishras and Bindeshwari Dubeys of yesteryear, power has passed on to the likes of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar. Yet Bathani-I and Bathani-II clearly tells us that this power remains as feudal as ever. Nitish Kumar is in an explicit alliance with the BJP, the most organised representative of the feudal-communal lobby in Bihar. Even Lalu Prasad for all his rhetoric against upper-caste domination always went out of his way to appease the feudal forces especially vis-à-vis the rural poor and the CPI(ML). It is not an aberration that the report of the Land Reform commission gets dumped. That the Amir Das Commission gets disbanded before it can produce its report. That the Bathani convicts get acquitted and a mastermind of dozens of heinous massacres is out on bail.

Real change in Bihar does not lie in the changing caste complexion of the rulers. Real change does not lie in the changing political rhetoric of the rulers – whether Lalu Prasad’s slogan ‘social justice’ or Nitish Kumar’s gospel of ‘good governance’. Real change does not lie in the gloss of globalisation and corporatisation added to the semi-feudal political economy of Bihar resulting in spectacular statistical growth on paper.

Real change lies in the tenacity and courage and determination with which Bathani and Bathe fight back for their justice, their dignity and their democracy. Yes, justice, dignity and democracy are not class-neutral words, and are certainly not monopolies of the rich and the powerful. In the wake of the Arwal massacre in April 1986, when Jallianwala Bagh was re-enacted in Congress-ruled Bihar, Comrade Vinod Mishra had written, “when the unceremonious death of the poorest among the peasants in the unknown, unheard of, dingy, mud-tracked, tiny country-town of Arwal begins to shape the political crisis of the powers that be in Bihar, one can safely proclaim that the heroes have finally arrived on the stage.” Regardless of court verdicts, Arwal, Bathani and Bathe refuse to fade away and continue to pump fresh energy into the battle for justice and democracy in Bihar.

In 1974 Bihar challenged the budding autocracy in Delhi with the dreams and aspirations of the youth. When Lalu Prasad’s reign of ‘social justice’ degenerated into scams and massacres, Bihar fought back saying social transformation was a must for social justice. Today when Nitish Kumar’s slogan of ‘development with justice’ is fast turning into ‘injustice with loot’, and ‘good governance’ is giving way to unfettered police raj, every dreamer and defender of democracy must stand by the victims of Bathani Tola to take Bihar forward, upholding the banner of justice and real transformation.

EVEN as the Congress and the CPI(M) and their respective governments in New Delhi and Kolkata are busy covering up the state-sponsored barbarism in Nandigram, the ‘empowered group of union ministers’ has cleared the deck for the government’s SEZ campaign with only a few minor modifications in the SEZ policy. There will now be a cap on the size of SEZs – individual SEZs will henceforth not exceed 5,000 hectares. Half of the area in an SEZ will now be earmarked for the main processing activity with the other half still left free for real estate business. And governments will apparently no longer be involved in the act of forcible land acquisition – that part of the job will from now on be left to the free market! Of course, very soon after this announcement, Kamal Nath has declared that these rules are not final and binding – they will be reviewed if a particular case calls for it!

With these minor modifications, the government has now paved the way for immediate notification of formal approval for as many as 54 SEZs. Another 29 SEZs just await clearance from the Law Ministry, while 88 applications are now passing through the stage of verification. Then there are 162 SEZs that have already secured in-principle approval and only formalities remain to be completed. And then there are 350 new applications waiting for approval. Add up all these categories and the total is already close to seven hundred! If the average size of an SEZs is assumed to be 2000 hectares or 5000 acres, seven hundred SEZs would occupy around 1.4 million hectares or 14,000 square kilometres! And this is all prime land – agricultural or otherwise – in the vicinity of India’s major urban centres.

There is absolutely not a word regarding the enormous tax concessions that the Government’s own finance ministry had been questioning. Tax concessions apart, SEZs will continue to promise a massive immunity from the laws of the land. Municipal regulations or labour laws will all remain eminently dispensable. And it is not difficult to envisage how easily big corporations can subvert each of the minor modifications mooted by the group of ministers. To take just one example we already hear reports that the giant Reliance SEZ in Haryana, originally proposed to sprawl over 25,000 acres, will now be broken up into five separate zones: one large multi-product SEZ and four smaller ones, to conform to the new norms.

What will be the state’s role in the new scheme of things? We are told that the state will no longer directly lend its hand to the act of land acquisition. In other words, the peasants will now be directly subjected to corporate thuggery and the armed forces of the state will wield their batons and bullets to enforce corporate ‘rights’ on peasant land. If the people who are robbed of their land insist on the implementation of promises made to them – cash compensation, rehabilitation, employment in SEZ projects – they have Kalinganagars in store for them. Let us not forget that the gas victims of Bhopal have not been rehabilitated till date and Honda workers in Gurgaon were brutally beaten up just because they had dared to exercise their most elementary right to get unionised. The so-called ‘retreat’ of the state from the direct business of land acquisition does by no means signal any neutrality on the part of the state in enforcing corporate interests.

When the SEZ Act was passed in parliament, it saw little debate and no party, including the CPI(M) and its allies, voted against it. With mass resistance intensifying, the CPI(M) began making some noise about amending the SEZ Act. The amendments are mostly of a procedural nature and not substantive; in fact, it has now all boiled down to haggling over the size of SEZs. While the government is arrogantly bypassing all public debate and steamrolling its way to enforce its SEZ policy, the CPI(M) and its allies are fulfilling their duty by merely criticising the government for its ‘obsession’ with SEZs. And the government is perfectly aware that as the architect of “Operation Nandigram”, the CPI(M) has little moral courage and credibility left to risk a showdown with the Congress over the issue of SEZs. Indeed, for ruling parties of different hues, the debate over SEZs is just one more opportunity for another bout of shadow-boxing. The people of this country have become sick of this shadow-boxing, their opposition to SEZs is most urgent and real. They are staking their lives to resist this corporate land-grab.

It is now as clear as daylight why like POTA and AFSPA, we must fight for a complete repeal of the SEZ Act. Whichever way the government may implement this Act and whatever be the average or maximum size of the SEZs, the people of this country cannot accept this corporate land-grab which will drain away their resources into corporate coffers and mortgage their rights to brutal corporate power. Let us intensify the resistance to SEZs and let this resistance redefine the lines of political demarcation. Parties and governments that stand on the corporate side of the SEZ fence can have no claim to the legacy of the Left.

[Liberation May 2007]

Three Decades of Uninterrupted CPI(M) Rule...

The ‘future’ peeped out quite prominently at the seventh swearing-in ceremony of the Left Front government when big industrial and real estate tycoons made a special appearance for the show. Soon afterwards a beaming Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee addressed a joint press conference with none other than Ratan Tata by his side, telling the whole world that Tata had been gracious enough to gift an automobile plant to Bengal that would churn out cars for the people at a mere Rs. 100,000 apiece. The Birlas and Goenkas had long made Bengal their industrial and commercial home, now the Tatas and Ambanis would also make their presence felt, not to mention the Mitsubishis and Salims from Japan and Indonesia. What greater evidence of ‘industrialisation’ could Bengal ever ask for!

There was a small hitch though. The first corporate requirement for ‘industrialisation’ is the same land that also sustains the much-advertised success story of three decades of Left Front rule: agriculture. But then the countryside is the fabled traditional stronghold of the CPI(M) and who could possibly stop the CPI(M) from ‘convincing’ the peasantry and acquiring farmland as requisitioned by the Tatas and the Salims? There was no bourgeois opposition worth its name. Mamata Banerjee had been reduced to a poor shadow of the powerful rabble-rouser that she had once been and was now widely believed to be the best ‘oppositional insurance’ for the CPI(M)’s continued stay in power. The ‘bourgeois media’ which had been playing an oppositional role till some years ago had also turned into an ardent admirer of Brand Buddha, if not exactly the CPI(M) and the Left Front. Who could then possibly play ‘spoilsport’?

...And then Came Singur Followed by Nandigram!

While all calculations seemed perfect on paper and the conditions tailor-made for the launch of a ‘Bengal Shining’ blitzkrieg, the peasant women of Singur appeared suddenly on the stage and did the unthinkable by chasing away the combined ‘inspection team’ of Tata executives and government officials from their multi-cropped farmlands. It was still May 2006 and the focus in Bengal suddenly began turning away from the televised images of Buddha-Tata bonhomie to the simmering anger in the country-side.

Singur has since gone on to become a household name in Bengal and beyond and in January 2007 it found its partner in Nandigram. The air in Bengal today is thick with the slogan: Singur theke Nandigram, pratirodher notun naam (Singur and Nandigram are the new names of resistance).

With the peasants reasserting their presence beyond the tired and fading rhetoric of Operation Barga and Panchayati Raj and defying the stifling regimentation of the CPI(M)’s well-oiled party machine, one can see a new fluidity and dynamism in the otherwise settled environment of West Bengal. For all the talks of students turning apolitical and the entire middle class becoming a strong votary of privatisation and corporate globalisation, we once again see students from Jadavpur University and Presidency College and from across the state siding with the peasants of Singur and Nandigram even at the risk of incurring the wrath of the CPI(M) and the repressive apparatus of the state. Anandabazar Patrika, the highest circulated Bengali daily has suffered a significant drop in its circulation and new newspapers and television channels have made their presence felt riding on the resistance at Singur and Nandigram. Left-leaning intellectuals from within and outside Bengal have raised their voice questioning the CPI(M)’s Singur-Nandigram model of ‘development’ and ‘industrialisation’. The CPI(M)’s partners in the Left Front have also started distancing themselves from the CPI(M) on the issues of Singur and especially Nandigram.

The CPI(M) had certainly not bargained for such a big shake-up. Jolted out of its arrogance and complacence, the party and the government in West Bengal are trying out every option to overpower the peasant resistance and the broad popular opposition. The strong-arm methods – the police repression unleashed on peasants and activists at Singur, the massacre at Nandigram, abuse of administrative power, assaults on journalists and students, detention of members of fact-finding mission, incarceration of protesters in false and fabricated cases, and abuses and insults hurled at whoever questions the Singur-Nandigram ‘model’ – have predictably only boomeranged. The CPI(M) has therefore been forced to beat a partial retreat. In fact, Nandigram has forced the UPA government too to announce a temporary halt to its SEZ campaign.

The Chief Minister has backtracked from his initial version of ‘conspiracy and rumour’ behind the Nandigram incidents, he now talks about the failure of the party and the administration to allay the fears of the peasants at Nandigram. The bill to relax land-ceiling limits has also been deferred for further consultation among Left Front partners. It should be noted that despite major differences within the Front and even within sections of the CPI(M), not to speak of the known opposition of the radical left and the peasantry at large, the Left Front government had been bent upon pushing through this legislation to revert land reforms so as to facilitate its current land acquisition drive.

Sophistry and Subterfuge: How the CPI(M) Skirts the Real Debate

While the resistance at Singur and Nandigram goes on and revolutionary and democratic voices demanding a complete scrapping of the policy of corporate land grab, in particular the SEZ Act, get louder in different parts of the country, it would be instructive to take a close look at the ‘arguments’ the CPI(M) offers to skirt the real issue and derail the actual debate.

Let us first listen to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the West Bengal State Committee of the party. For the Chief Minister Singur is just a great symbol of industrialisation and the whole issue is one of transition from agriculture to industry and villages to cities. This he says is the direction of history and the law of civilisation and his government is only serving as a tool of history and civilisation. Regarding Singur all that he would say is that this is the place the Tatas had chosen and his government had to acquire the land lest the Tatas went to Uttaranchal and Bengal lost out on this great opportunity. The propaganda materials produced by the State unit of the party echo all these arguments and portray the protests over Singur as a ploy against Bengal’s development being hatched by corporate rivals of Tata and forces ranged against the Left Front and the interests of West Bengal!

Narendra Modi saw the opposition to the genocide in Gujarat as an assault on the state’s pride and unfurled the banner of Gujarat Gaurav to ‘silence’ his critics. A similar streak of propaganda is at work in Buddha’s Bengal – any opposition to the state government’s deal with the Tatas and the treatment meted out to the peasants at Singur is a conspiracy against West Bengal!

Behind the Euphoria of ‘Industrialisation’

Let us take a closer look at all this talk about industrialisation. The proposed Tata Motors plant at Singur will not be the first industry to be set up on the soil of Bengal. Big industries have been operating in the state for decades – in fact the history of industrialisation in West Bengal goes back to the colonial period. The district of Hooghly, where Singur is located, has long been known as part of the industrial region surrounding Kolkata. The district has been home to an old automobile plant of the Birlas, a rubber plant (Dunlop), and a number of textile, paper and jute mills. The Dunlop plant remained closed for most of the last one decade (in spite of economic liberalisation and the West Bengal government adopting its own version of new industrial policy in 1994), the jute mills have also periodically remained closed and employment in the automobile plant of the Birlas has steadily gone down. What is this new story of industrialisation that Buddhadeb wants to tell the people of West Bengal?

Buddhadeb is talking about a false transition from agriculture to industry. The countries that are industrially most developed are usually also the ones that are agriculturally most developed. Industry never replaces agriculture, it is capitalism that develops both in industry as well as agriculture and this process of capitalist development brings not just developments of technique and machine-induced increases in labour productivity but also a whole range of imbalances, uncertainties and crises. This has been the story of capitalist development even in the developed countries, and the story is all the more painful and perverse in our country because of our specific conditions marked by stubborn feudal survivals and imperialist domination. The overwhelming majority of the people of India have been at the receiving end of this process and hence their refusal to buy the euphoria of deliverance through the dazzling spectacles of corporate development. Hence the electoral debacles that have inexorably befallen the Chandrababu Naidus and the scriptwriters of the ‘India Shining’ opera.

All this abstract talk about agriculture and industry, and industrialisation and development, is aimed at diverting public attention away from the core issue of the West Bengal government’s deal with the Tatas. Defying the Right to Information Act, the government of West Bengal has been suppressing information regarding the actual terms and conditions under-lying the government’s understanding with the Tatas. The facts that have already come to light – and not denied by the West Bengal government – indicate a major bonanza for the Tatas. Just consider the following major points: (a) the Government of West Bengal pays compensation worth Rs. 130 crore to acquire the land requisitioned by the Tatas while the latter pay the government only a paltry sum of Rs. 20 crore over a period of five years, (b) the Tatas will not have to pay any stamp duty on the Singur land and will have complete tax holidays for ten years apart from heavily subsidised, if not free, supply of water and power, (c) the Government of West Bengal has promised to compensate the Tatas for the 16% excise duty exemption that apparently the Tatas are foregoing by locating the plant in West Bengal and not Uttaranchal – an effective subsidy of another Rs. 160 crore, (c) a concomitant real estate gift of 650 acres of prime land to the Tata Housing Development Company at Rajarhat New Town and the Bhangar Rajarhat Area Development Authority for construction of an IT park and residential township in partnership with the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation.

Why do the Tatas who have the financial muscle to buy an Anglo-Dutch steelmaking giant by paying more than Rs 50,000 crore have to be wooed and subsidised by a government that professes to take care of the interests of the working people? This is the million-dollar question that Singur has thrown up and that needs an answer. The government of West Bengal has refused to answer any question associated with the whole rationale of its land acquisition drive in Singur (questions like why Singur where the land is so fertile, and why so much land – 997 acres, that is more than 4 sq. km – when the Tata Motors giant Pune plant covers an area of only 188 acres or less than one-fifth of the land acquired at Singur), by simply ‘justifying’ everything in the name of the Tatas. Clearly, it is not the abstract idea of industrialisation but this blatant appeasement of big business by a government that calls itself Left that is at the heart of the whole debate.

Ideological Acrobatics to Justify Land Grab for Corporates

From West Bengal, let us turn to the CPI(M) headquarters in New Delhi. The party’s weekly mouthpiece People’s Democracy has been understandably busy defending the positions of the West Bengal government and the state unit of the party. Week after week, every piece of disinformation and conspiracy theory emanating from Alimuddin Street is being dutifully disseminated by the comrades at AKG Bhavan through the pages of People’s Democracy. In addition, the comrades in Delhi are also trying to give the debate an ideological appearance – and here they of course differ from Advani who now harps on deideologisation of governance!

Writing on Nandigram in People’s Democracy, Prakash Karat seeks to refute the critics who apparently accuse the CPI(M) of double-speak. He then goes on to show that there is no dichotomy in what the CPI(M) says in Delhi and does in Kolkata. Well, you are answering an old ‘accusation’ comrade, which belonged to the NDA period. Who doesn’t know that in the UPA period you are very much bound to the government in Delhi by the threads of a Common Minimum Programme? Who can still fail to see that you are now saying and doing the same things in Delhi and Kolkata, the only difference being your refusal to participate directly in the affairs in Delhi while in Kolkata you are in the driver’s seat?

But could you please spare us this old story of ‘limitations and compulsions of a state government’ and your governments in West Bengal and Kerala being forced into neo-liberal policies by the Centre? When the new policy regime came, the biggest virtue you saw in it was the abolition of the ‘license-quota-permit raj’, which made you considerably free from central control and possible obstruction to pursue your own goals of ‘industrialisation’ and ‘development’ in states where you were in power. You were quick to adapt to the new policies – West Bengal adopted its new industrial policy in 1994, three years after the Central Government had done it. But ten years later it was your government which played the pioneering role in legislating the SEZ policy – you did it in 2003 while Delhi did it only in 2005! So please do not tell us that SEZs are a compulsion ‘imposed’ on you – your West Bengal chief minister is reportedly particularly upset and angry now that the Centre has been forced to put the SEZ policy temporarily on hold?

Renewed Debate on the CPI(M)’s Programme and Practice of Running State Governments

“At the heart of the matter is these critics’ inability to comprehend the role of a State Government under India’s constitutional set-up and the CPI(M)’s understanding of what governments headed by the Party can do”, says Karat. Now who are these critics? Karat is certainly not talking here about either the Naxalites or propagandists from the right. He is actually talking about sympathetic observers and analysts who never had any problem in appreciating the agrarian reforms in West Bengal or the anti-communal role of the CPI(M) and who surely are not criticizing the CPI(M) for not building sovereign socialist republics in West Bengal or Kerala. Now Karat accuses them of not comprehending India’s constitutional set-up and the CPI(M)’s understanding regarding the role of state governments headed by it. One does not really understand how the Constitution of India comes into the picture in a debate over Singur and Nandigram. (If one has to go by what the judiciary has to say regarding the matter, we know the Kolkata High Court has recently termed the continued sealing off of Singur under Section 144 an abuse of power on the part of the administration.)

The real issue indeed is the CPI(M)’s understanding of the role of governments headed by it. According to the CPI(M)’s own party programme, the role of such governments had been defined in terms of carrying out reforms and providing relief to the people. In the early days of the Left Front government the most common slogan used to be “Bamfront Sarkar, Sangramer Hatiyar” (Left Front Government is an instrument of struggle). And we all know that in 1977 the party had come to power promising to restore democracy in West Bengal. Now if the critics find it difficult to comprehend Singur and Nandigram in the CPI(M)’s declared programmatic framework of relief, reforms and democracy, and Karat blames the critics for their inability to comprehend, how are we to solve this riddle? Marxist literature has dealt with this riddle since almost the inception of Marxism – devoid of an agenda and orientation of class struggle, communist parties entrusted with the running of a bourgeois state are bound to slip into the morass of the worst kind of class collaboration and betrayal of working class interests. This is why the Comintern guideline had insisted that local governments led by communists must constitute part of an overall revolutionary opposition to the central authority of the state.

Singur has exposed this phenomenon with a kind of brutal clarity that cannot be camouflaged by any talk of constitutional compulsions or any interpretation of Marxism. Who got ‘relief’ in Singur? The Tatas got whatever they wanted at whatever terms and the rural poor of Singur lost their land and livelihood without even any pretence of ‘compensation’ for the agricultural labourers and unrecorded sharecroppers. And who enjoyed democracy? Tata executives and government officials conducted ‘bhoomi puja’ on farm land acquired by the government and ‘secured’ by Section 144 while peasants got brutally beaten up, young Tapasi Malik was raped and murdered and the rest of West Bengal and India was not even allowed to go to Singur and express solidarity. If anybody still had some illusions left regarding the role of the ‘Left’ government, Singur has shattered them irretrievably.

The Fiction of Economic Liberalisation with Special Benefits for the Poor

“West Bengal will have the basic features of a liberalized capitalist economy. Those who believe that it can be otherwise are only deluding themselves”, warns Karat as though his readers were dreaming of socialism in CPI(M)-ruled West Bengal. But his warning is only a half-truth that goes without saying. The whole truth is that the basic features are not confined to the economy alone and have begun pervading the polity as well. If Singur and Nandigram have shocked people, it is not because nobody expected the Tatas or the Salim group to enter West Bengal, but because of the obnoxious manner in which the state government and the CPI(M) leadership went out of their way to carry out the corporate agenda and suppress every expression of popular dissent.

Within the basic features of a liberalized capitalist economy, Karat tells us that “the challenge for the Left is to see how, in extraordinarily difficult conditions in which State-sponsored economic activities are severely limited, economic development can take place in a manner that benefits the people, particularly the working people and the poor.” Now Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram could well say the same thing in the context of the Indian economy and they do indeed often say such stuff – this is the rhetoric of safety net and reforms with a human face. Let us also note that Karat does no longer talk about the state being made to deliver relief, his context is one in which “state-sponsored economic activities are severely limited”. In other words, he is talking about economic development led by the Indian private sector and foreign MNCs and lenders and he wants us to believe that this development could be made to serve “particularly the working people and the poor” (emphasis ours)! He could well use Singur as a brilliant example – the CPI(M) is getting the Tatas to manufacture cheap cars for the working people and the poor!

Caricaturing Lenin’s Views on Narodniks

While dishing out such pious platitudes and proven fictions as his patented brand of Marxism, Karat brands the critics of the Singur-Nandigram model of industrialisation anti-industry and modern-day Narodniks. He perhaps believes that he can clinch the issue by cleverly presenting the debate as one between anti- and pro-industrywallahs, between those who seek to retard capitalist development and return to pristine pre-capitalist times and ones who recognise capitalist development as inevitable and forward-looking.

This is a sheer opportunist caricature of Lenin’s views on the question. Let us recall what Lenin actually had to say: “that it is capitalism which ruins the peasant is by no means a corner-stone of Narodism, but of Marxism. The Narodniks saw and continue to see the causes of the separation of the producer from the means of production in the policy of the government, which, according to them, was a failure (“we” went the wrong way, etc.), in the stagnancy of society which rallied insufficiently against the vultures and tricksters, etc., and not in that specific organisation of the Russian social economy which bears the name of capitalism. That is why their “measures” amounted to action to be taken by “society” and the “state.” On the contrary, when it is shown that the existence of the capitalist organisation of social economy is the cause of expropriation this leads inevitably to the theory of the class struggle... The Narodniks say that capitalism ruins agriculture and for that reason is incapable of embracing the country’s entire production and leads this production the wrong way; the Marxists say that capitalism, both in manufacturing industry and in agriculture, oppresses the producer, but by raising production to a higher level creates the conditions and the forces for “socialisation.”...”. (All quotations from Lenin are from The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve’s Book: The Reflection of Marxism in Bourgeois Literature, 1894-95, LCW, Volume-I).

So Lenin criticises the Narodnik position from the point of view of class struggle and socialisation, from the point of view of socialism, and not (as Karat appears to) from the point of view of capitalism and the big bourgeoisie. Lenin then draws the conclusion that “it would be absolutely wrong to reject the whole of the Narodnik programme indiscriminately and in its entirety. One must clearly distinguish its reactionary and progressive sides.” When it comes to comparing the Narodnik views with those “abominably crude” ideas that “presume police interference in the economy of the peasants”, Lenin had absolutely no hesitation in pointing out that “from the Marxist viewpoint there can be no doubt that Narodism is absolutely to be preferred in this respect.” “The Narodniks in this respect understand and represent the interests of the small producers far more correctly, and the Marxists, while rejecting all the reactionary features of their programme, must not only accept the general democratic points, but carry them through more exactly, deeply and further”, said Lenin.

When in the wake of Singur and Nandigram, Left intellectuals question and oppose the indiscriminate land acquisition drive, they are by no means echoing Narodnik views. When it turns out that Singur and Nandigram are not isolated incidents but part of a bigger and deeper pattern that would see many more SEZs come up, land ceiling abandoned and nearly 1,50,00 acres of land converted through governmental intervention to industry and real estate business, the question of food security and the livelihood of the rural poor cannot but come up as an issue of major concern for Marxists engaged in class struggle. It is patently cynical and mischievous to dismiss such concerns as Narodnik romanticism for the past or Luddite fear of the mechanised future.

Karat Rendered More Profound by His Comrades

Taking the cue from Karat, his comrades have of course gone further ahead in selling Singur-Nandigram as creative Marxism. In a two-part article titled “Singur, Nandigram and Industrailisation of West Bengal” Nilotpal Basu, a member of the CPI(M) Central Committee, tells us that “In the present age of globalisation, the major direction of neo-liberal policies is aimed at de-industrialisation in third world economies. In the face of this, industrial development, particularly in manufacturing and processing sectors, is, in itself, a struggle against those policies.” Wooing the Tatas to set up an automobile plant in West Bengal is thus an act of struggle against the neo-liberal policies! What a gem of a formulation! But has not the same globalisation also led to a deepening of the structural crisis in Indian agriculture, bringing agricultural growth to a standstill, if not negative, even as the overall economy grows at more than 8 per cent per annum? Has not agrarian crisis been as stark a manifestation of globalisation in India as deindustrialisation? And how would then Nilotpal respond if one said that by dispossessing 12,000 agriculturists (this is the official figure of people who are entitled to payment of compensation and it excludes unrecorded share-croppers, agricultural labourers and other sections of the rural poor) in Singur, the CPI(M) was only pushing globalisation’s agenda of assault on agriculture?

While Nilotpal sells class collaboration as class struggle, Benoy Konar, another CPI(M) Central Committee member, goes another step ahead and describes socialism as a higher stage of capitalism! In a lecture dedicated to the memory of Comrade Abani Lahiri, a legendary leader of the Tebhaga movement who cherished militant peasant struggles all through his life, Konar defended Singur as a service to socialism! The ‘argument’ goes some-what like this: socialism is a project of the future, the way to this future goes through the capitalist present, the present task is to build capitalism, to build capitalism you need to collaborate with capital and so you need closer ties with the Tatas and the Salims ... Have we not heard all this before? Do we not often hear ‘communist’ trade union leaders preach the same thing to workers: workers will exist only if industry exists, and industry will exist only if the industrialist can earn sufficient profit, so in its own interest of survival and progress, the working class and the trade union movement must make sure that capital is not unduly obstructed in its free operations?

Ever since socialism and democratic revolutions have been placed on the agenda of the communist movement, the movement has witnessed serious ideological-political debates and divisions on this line. One line has argued that the question of working class leadership can only come up at the socialist stage, democratic revolutions preceding transition to socialism can essentially be led by the bourgeoisie, any notion of working class leadership at the stage of democratic revolutions can at the most be a joint venture between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Lenin fought precisely against this ‘Menshevik’ line and stressed the need for correct identification of the section of the bourgeoisie with which the working class could work and march together. And he taught Bolsheviks (revolutionary communists of Russia) to discover that bourgeois section within the peasantry – alliance with the peasantry and a combined worker-peasant fight against big capital thus became the hallmark of Lenin’s legacy.

Mao carried forward this distinction and showed that communists could also work with certain sections of the bourgeoisie if they showed an anti-imperialist streak and thus developed the thesis of national bourgeoisie as opposed to the comprador, pro-imperialist bourgeoisie. But central to both Lenin’s concept of worker-peasant alliance and Mao’s notion of a bigger four-class front, which had room for the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, was the absolute need for proletarian independence and class leadership. Both Lenin and Mao rejected the theory of stages that separated democratic revolution and socialism into watertight compartments and stressed the continuum between the two, the uninterrupted transition of democratic revolution into socialism, and consequently the need for nurturing the socialist component and vision right since the stage of democratic revolution.

What the Karats and Konars are preaching and practising (you are acquitted of charges of doublespeak, comrades!) today is what Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has proclaimed quite proudly and repeatedly: we are building capitalism. And this is capitalism led by the Tatas and their class under the aegis of the bourgeois-landlord state governed by the UPAs and the NDAs, capitalism which works in tandem with imperialism and will never peacefully mature into socialism. And the CPI(M) is using its entire party machinery and the constitutionally circumscribed state power it enjoys in West Bengal or Kerala to coerce sections of the working people into a ‘disciplined’ surrender to this project of the Indian ruling classes. Beyond the defence of land and livelihood, Singur and Nandigram mark a veritable peasant rebellion against this school of capitulation. Herein lies the continuity with Naxalbari and the great ideological significance and political potential of these struggles within and outside the borders of West Bengal.

[Liberation March 2007]

IS there at all any case for a debate and agitation over Singur? The CPI(M) leadership would like us to believe there is absolutely none and that the people questioning the great Singur model of industrialisation and rehabilitation are either stupid or mad or driven by ulterior motives. Some members of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau and Central Committee have even attributed the parentage of the whole campaign to defend the people’s right to their land and livelihood to corporate rivals of the Tata group. For the Left Front government of West Bengal, the campaign is of course just another law and order problem that the state must crush by all means. The Chief Minister has proudly declared that nobody would be allowed to touch the tip of a single hair on Tata’s head. Singur has been sealed off from the rest of West Bengal by an unprecedented extension of Section 144 to cover every road that could remotely be suspected of ‘approaching’ Singur and stop all persons who seemingly have ‘malicious intent’ writ large on their faces!

Beyond West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, wherever the CPI(M) is not in power, it asserts its right to question and oppose attempts by various state governments to forcibly acquire agricultural land in the name of setting up industries or SEZs. No problems with that, but should not the CPI(M) then tell us how it is following a different course in states where it is in power? Before Singur, the CPI(M) said it would indeed follow a different course.It would not acquire fertile agricultural land. And before acquiring any land, it would take not only the landowning peasants but also other landless toilers whose livelihood depended on the concerned plot of land into confidence. Singur has proved each of these assurances absolutely hollow.

Singur in Hooghly district lies at the heart of the green revolution belt of West Bengal; it is precisely the kind of area that the Left Front government showcased till the other day as the biggest success story of agriculture under Left Front rule in West Bengal, in fact industrialisation was supposed to proceed by consolidating the gains achieved on the agricultural front. But now the CPI(M) tells us that it is imperative to sacrifice the fertile farm land of Singur at the altar of industrialisation simply because the Tatas have chosen this area. To downplay the extent of loss to agriculture, the state government is claiming that more than 90 per cent of the land acquired is monocrop. That is of course some concession to the truth, for the powers that be could just as well declare the whole land barren and fallow! But what do the sharecroppers and agricultural labourers of Singur have to say about this? They will tell you that it is mischievous to talk about such generously endowed land producing just one crop a year. The truth is that the area has excellent irrigation facilities and produces four or even five crops a year, has as many as four cold-storage centres and attracts agricultural labour even from neighbouring Bardhaman district during days of busy agricultural operations.

As for taking the concerned local people into confidence, we know it from none other than Jyoti Basu that the local peasant association secretary of the CPI(M) was literally caught napping at home when the local women chased away the combined team of government officials and Tata Motors representatives. The mammoth CPI(M)-led peasant organisation with a claimed membership of 1.5 crore in West Bengal alone and the celebrated panchayati raj machinery of West Bengal were nowhere to be seen on the ground ‘convincing’ the agricultural population of Singur that the time had come for them to move on from the drudgery and misery of agriculture to the comfort and security of living off interest income by depositing the jackpot of ‘compensation’ in a bank! Even according to the status report released by the West Bengal government it is clear that out of 997.11 acres of land acquired by the government, ‘prior consent’ for 586 acres was obtained only on the day the land was fenced off while for another 411.11 acres no consent had been obtained till the publication of the report (Times Of India, 16 December, 2006).

And how was this partial ‘consent’ manufactured? Meetings with land-owners started only on 27 May 2006, after the whole world had known and even seen how the peasant women of Singur – ‘armed with brooms’ – had sent out ‘the wrong signal’ by chasing away the Tata team. The meetings happened first at the DM’s bungalow and the venue was later shifted to Kolkata, but nothing concrete emerged from these meetings and the ‘consent’ could only be obtained in the ‘benign and gracious’ presence of the police, who were incidentally raining lathis and firing tear gas shells and rubber bullets. A two-year-old girl detained in police custody and implicated in criminal cases, women harassed and tortured, sixty-year-old peasants beaten up and humiliated, not to mention the injuries suffered by student and peasant activists, and now this ghastly rape and murder of a young woman that even the state government has been forced to refer for a CBI probe – is this the CPI(M)’s model of participatory democracy at work at the grassroots?

The Land Acquisition Act of 1894 which the West Bengal government has invoked to acquire the Singur land authorises the state to acquire land in public interest and in national emergencies (the colonial rulers needed to set up military cantonments, among other things, following the shock of 1857). It is nothing short of a legal fraud to invoke this Act to acquire land for the purpose of setting up private industries. To camouflage such fraud all state governments use State Industrial Development Corporations as a middleman and the West Bengal government too has done the same thing. But Buddhadev Bhattacharya has surely gone one step ahead by describing the proposed Tata plant as an epitome of public interest. The CPI(M) in power seems to have become oblivious of any demarcation between private interest and public utility!

Reports have it that the CPI(M) now contemplates marketing Singur as a great model in terms of rehabilitation of the displaced and even empowerment of women. Ganashakti, the Bengali daily of the CPI(M) is full of stories telling us how the rural women of Singur are being trained on a war footing to enable them to stitch uniforms for workers of the proposed Tata Motors plant and prepare snacks and fast food to be served at the factory canteen! The CPI(M) ideologues do not however bother to tell us how many land-losers of Singur, if at all, will be absorbed directly as workers in the Tata plant! If we insist on an answer, they might well give us a few lessons in economics and remind us that the job of an industrialist is to maximise his profit and not to create jobs for every Tom, Dick and Harry. Bored with complaints regarding the role of the police, the CPI(M)’s peasant leader and Central Committee member Benoy Konar does something similar. He gives us lessons in statecraft and tells us about the job of the police: “The work of the police is not to make drawings or teach in schools and colleges. The police are the instrument of repression.” (People’s Democracy, December 10, 2006). Well, could Benoybabu tell us what the job of a peasant leader is? Is it just to lure peasants away from their land and agriculture by telling them that the sale value of their land if deposited in bank would yield them an interest income “10-15 times more than that from land.” (Konar in PD, 10.12.06)?

Indeed, the biggest claim of the CPI(M) regarding Singur revolves around the compensation package which we are told is the best on offer to people facing eviction and takes care of all those who are dependent on the land for their livelihood. In her article 'Singur: Just The Facts, Please' published in The Hindu (December 13, 2006), Brinda Karat tells us that the compensation package covers not only the landowners and registered share-croppers, but even the case of unregistered sharecroppers “is under consideration”. As advised by Brinda, let us look at the facts as furnished by the December 4-10, 2006 issue of People’s Democracy in its editorial 'Singur: Myth and Reality' (Facts submitted before the people’s tribunal held at Singur and collected by non-CPI(M) investigators through extensive interaction with the local people are often at variance with the CPI(M) version of the story, but one guesses that in Bengal in 2006 the CPI(M) alone has the ‘moral’ and political monopoly over the real facts – facts backed by state power and endorsed by major sections of the corporate media – just as perhaps the Congress can be credited to have had its historical monopoly ovr facts in the state in the fifties and sixties when every election used to return it to power!).

The PD editorial tells us that 12,000 landowners and sharecroppers are entitled to receive compensation the total quantum of which has been declared at Rs. 130 crore. The average amount works out to a little over Rs. 1,08,300 – hardly the kind of money that if put away in fixed deposits can yield an interest income “10-15 times more than that from land”! The claim made by Benoy Konar could of course be somewhat realistic for the big absentee landowners (Konar tells us that there are actually two families living abroad), whose current income from land is confined to the 25 per cent share he gets from the sharecropper. But what about the small and marginal farmers and sharecroppers? A sharecropper who is much more attached to and dependent on the land than the absentee landowner will be entitled to only 25 per cent of the compensation received by the latter. If ‘Operation Barga’ saved the sharecropper from being evicted by the land-owner and limited the landowner’s share of income to 25% of the produce, the compensation package has now completely reversed the terms. The state evicts the sharecropper and gives him only 25% of what it gives to the landowner! And as for the toiler, the agricultural labourer who puts in the greatest efforts to produce the crop, he becomes even more ‘free’ than before – he is freed from all his erstwhile occupational ties with the land, and in place of the agricultural wages he now gets the consolation of a promise of an alternative avenue of future employment! So the old slogan of ‘land to the tiller’ has now boiled down to land to the buyer, hefty compensation to the absentee owner, token ‘severance’ money for the actual tiller and empty promise for the toiler.

Indeed, there are facts and facts, but there is also something called the truth which has to be sought out on the basis of the facts. And worse still, in a class-divided society, the truth is also divided – the ruler’s truth is often at loggerheads with the truth experienced by the ruled, the gainer’s truth ‘triumphs’ at the expense of the losses suffered by the loser. The truth of the tillers and toilers of Singur cannot be the same as the truth of the Tata Motors and of Buddhadev Bhattacharya who is behaving more like a CEO of the Tatas than an elected Chief Minister of West Bengal. It may be easy to equate the interest of the Tatas (the fact that they want 1,000 acres of fertile farm land at Singur to set up their plant) with the interest of industrial development of West Bengal (industry calls for more and more of private investment and if a big name like the Tatas can be shown to have been ‘attracted’ by West Bengal, it will have a demonstration effect on other potential investors), pit the combined weight of the brand power of the Tatas and the state power wielded by the CPI(M)-led government and paint the opposition put up by the affected people of Singur as an anti-Bengal attempt to halt the progress of the state, but this is a dangerous logic that may boomerang on the very forces of reason and progress.

The CPI(M) has tried its level best to discredit the entire movement over Singur as the handiwork of the Trinamool Congress, as a desperate and disruptive move by a politically frustrated and defeated opposition to foment trouble. By ransacking the Assembly, the TMC MLAs have also provided the CPI(M) with considerable opportunities to try and divert public attention away from Singur. Indeed, the state government made a veritable spectacle of the TMC vandalism in the Assembly encouraging the people to come and see the broken chairs on display even as it sealed off Singur and all the signs of police brutality and the people’s lived experiences behind the protective wall of Section 144! But the courage and determination displayed by the people of Singur in the course of their sustained struggle has been far too powerful to be brushed aside as TMC tantrums against the Tatas or the CPI(M). It is this strength of the popular resistance in Singur which has evoked such widespread public response in West Bengal and beyond.

The CPI(M) is extremely peeved by the solidarity evoked by the Singur struggle. From Medha Patkar to Mahashweta Devi, anybody and everybody questioning the government’s move on Singur – the systematic violation of democracy coupled with complete lack of transparency regarding the terms of the state government’s deal with the Tatas and implications for the local people – has been dubbed an ‘outsider’ and his or her credentials have been subjected to vulgar and vitriolic comments. The nomenclature is indeed quite interesting – for the Left Front government Ratan Tata is an insider while Medha Patkar is an outsider! Sitaram Yechury and Brinda Karat have all the credentials to represent West Bengal in the Rajya Sabha, but Mahasweta Devi who has spent her whole life defending democracy and the struggles and rights of the oppressed and the marginalised becomes an ‘outsider’ to be greeted with a disdainful ‘who-is Mahasweta’ by the CPI(M) top brass in West Bengal!

The CPI(M)’s constant propaganda regarding ‘outsiders’ raking up trouble in Singur is best rebuffed by field reports from the site of struggle. Of the 54 people arrested in early December on charges of ‘attempted murder’ for their attempt to resist the police and stop the forcible fencing off of the land, as many as 47 are local peasants. There are also reports of murder and rape of local people – Rajkumar Bhul succumbed to injuries sustained during the police attack in late September and the charred body of young Tapasi Malik, brutally raped and killed by the CPI(M) ‘night guards’ in league with the police was discovered in the early hours of December 18. The CPI(M) and the State government of course describe the first incident as a case of natural death and the latter as a suicide! And who are the ‘outsiders’ beaten up and arrested by the police at Singur? They are all known political activists, including Comrades Tapan Batabyal, a state committee member of the CPI(ML)(Liberation) and Bilas Sarkar, an activist of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) from Jadavpur University. What business can Jadavpur University students have in Singur, ask the CPI(M) leaders. The CPI(M)’s paradigm of politics now revolves only around state power and its twin pillars – capital and coercion – and its leaders will surely find it hard to understand why student activists should stand by the people of Singur. We are however proud of our comrades who have held high the revolutionary tradition of Indian communists and braved police repression to forge strong ties of fighting solidarity with the people of Singur.

The CPI(M) should remember that beyond the borders of West Bengal, the ‘outsider’ argument could well boomerang against it every time it might try and raise its voice against another Gurgaon-type assault on workers or Gujarat-type genocide of Muslims. And should power change hands in Bengal, the same might well happen right in West Bengal. History is replete with examples of how opportunist sins of the Left end up paving the way for the revival of right reaction. To understand the implications we need not go any further than West Bengal itself. Some forty years ago peasants in many parts of West Bengal had embarked on a militant struggle to establish their rights over their land. Revolutionary sections within the CPI(M) had sought to raise this struggle to the level of a protracted war for bringing about a revolutionary change in agrarian relations and to usher in, on this basis, a new kind of people’s democracy in India. Naxalbari emerged as the storm centre of this brewing agrarian revolutionary campaign. The CPI(M) as the leading partner of the United Front government then in power in Kolkata played the leading role in unleashing severe state repression on that movement. And soon the reins of repression had passed on to the hands of the Congress and the repression, initially directed against revolutionary communists, generalised to let loose a veritable reign of terror against all Left, progressive and democratic forces. Subsequently, this policy of state terror and repression developed and perfected by the Congress in the laboratory of West Bengal was extended to the whole of the country and democracy was pushed into a state of coma as India experienced her first encounter with Internal Emergency for as many as nineteen months from June 1975 to January 1977.

Singur 2006 is of course vastly different from Naxalbari of 1967. During the Naxalbari days, the whole of West Bengal was passing through a period of upswing in the Left movement. The CPI(M) crushed Naxalbari by saying that peasants had no business linking the question of land to revolution and their demand for land could very well be fulfilled by a Left government in West Bengal. Back in power in 1977 after the semi-fascist interlude of the Emergency, the CPI(M) de-revolutionised the agenda of agrarian reforms and consolidated its grip over governance by implementing a three-point package of reforms and democracy for rural Bengal (redistribution of ceiling-surplus land, Operation Barga and Panchayati Raj).

Things have now come a full circle in West Bengal. The small peasants and sharecroppers of Singur are not demanding a revolution. All that they want is to retain their land and their right to earn their livelihood and live their lives with dignity. But like Naxalbari, Singur too is being crushed by the CPI(M) led state government. During the Naxalbari days, the CPI(M) wanted peasants to stay as peasants and not dare to dream and fight for a revolution. In Singur, the CPI(M) wants to depeasantise the peasantry by making them passive and dispossessed participants in a process of industrialisation that has little connection with the vast untapped and underde-veloped home market lying beyond the islands of urban affluence.

CPI(M)’s land reform and Operation Barga campaigns have long run out of steam in West Bengal. The new agenda is reversal of land reform, depeasantisation, corporate farming, SEZs ... Over the last two decades as the Left Front government of West Bengal has steadily moved towards the neo-liberal agenda, and we have seen signs of unrest among the rural poor, agricultural labourers, and the urban working class engaged in the unorganised and organised sectors of Bengal. We have also seen this disillusionment turn into electoral resentment and this has contributed considerably to the rise of the TMC as a political force and trend in West Bengal. The CPI(M) may have managed to stem the tide by weaning away a section of the Congress base and the upwardly mobile middle class, but the Left Front has clearly lost much of its ‘left’ appeal among large sections of its old support base. Now Singur signals the beginning of the alienation of sharecroppers and small and middle peasantry from the CPI(M), an alienation that clearly has the potential of upsetting the CPI(M)’s three-decadeold applecart in West Bengal. In the West Bengal Assembly, Singur is represented by a TMC MLA, and the TMC being the main opposition party in West Bengal – the fact cannot be wished away even if Buddhadev ridicules it for its small size with a patronising small-is-beautiful certificate – lost no opportunity to cash in on the Singur issue.

Like a power-obsessed ruling party, the CPI(M) may only choose to see Singur as a TMC-inspired conspiracy to destabilise its government, but revolutionary communists cannot but see the simmering and potentially quite explosive peasant discontent that lies underneath. When Ratan Tata becomes an insider for the CPI(M)’s house of power and the dissenting people of Singur are dubbed outsiders, peasants in West Bengal cannot miss the irony of the whole situation. How long will the Bengal peasantry agree to play the role of political extras in a script that revolves around the ‘Buddha-Tata bhai-bhai’ equation? The revival of the land question, albeit in a changed context and on quite different terms, has its obvious implication for the political landscape of Bengal. In Rabindranath’s immortal poem Dui bigha jomi (Two Bighas of Land, written in June 1894, the year the colonial land acquisition act was passed) the ‘Babu’ landlord buys off indebted and impoverished Upen’s last two bighas by exercising his feudal power and reduces him to a pauper. Today the Singur peasants are fighting to save their ‘Do Bigha Zameen’ from the ‘babudom’ driven by the growing Buddha-Tata bonhomie. But if Singur fails, how long will the CPI(M) be able to hold on to its political ‘landholding’ among the Bengal peasantry? For revolutionary communists, the question is not whatever might or would happen to the CPI(M) and its political fiefdom in West Bengal. The point is to radicalise the anger of the peasantry and shape a communist resurgence in West Bengal. Far from making common cause with the TMC, revolutionary communists must step up their independent initiative and efforts and lead a radical realignment of forces within the broad Left and democratic camp to prevent a possible right resurgence in the state. Too much is at stake in Singur, and revolutionary communists cannot be stopped by either repression or malicious disinformation from discharging their political responsibility.

[ Liberation, January 2007]