Muddled perestroika

The animal brutality that exploded in Nandigram — when police fired at stone throwing women and children in school uniform and killed 14 people — has finally exploded the myth of seemingly peaceful bucolic village communities in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal being part of an unwavering bank of indissoluble red support.

With the violent Maoists' attempt to take on the role as votaries of the dispossessed, it also raises the alarming prospect of a far more violent red tide sweeping the landscape.

As pictures of a policeman beating a woman, bent double, trying to shield her child, were played out on television screens, over and over, the seething ferment in rural Bengal over the widespread opposition to the government's plans to forcibly acquire farmland to set up special economic zones has seen the first crack in the monolithic communist alliance that has never broken the 'left line'.

Stalwarts of the lesser left parties such as the All India Forward Bloc, the Communist Party of India and Revolutionary Socialist Party — all allied with the main Communist Party of India- Marxist, quickly distanced themselves from the fiasco. Said CPI general secretary AB Bardhan: "The firing could neither be justified nor condoned … Never before has there been a such an organised and brutal police assault under a Left regime.

West Bengal's Governor Gopaldas Gandhi ( the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, apostle of non-violent protests) wrote of " a sense of cold horror".

Buddadeb Bhattacharjee, West Bengal Chief Minister and poster boy of the CPM claims he did not order the firing. The police say they did not fire on the villagers. If they didn't, who did? Were they armed CPM activists who sought to retake the village alongside the police? Or were they the dreaded Maoist Naxalites?

Given that the police now claim the spent shell casings and ammunition they recovered from the scene were of a type used by the underworld, this is an all too real possibility.

Bhattacharjee has since, swiftly backtracked on the land acquisition, saying plans to set up the proposed private chemical plant in Nandigram are on hold. Ironic — 'politics on hold because of economics' is the preferred Marxist tactic of holding more centrist parties to ransom.

But he has not budged on Singur, where the government has already forcibly acquired 10,000 square hectares of land from villagers for a private car plant by the Tata group, in the face of violent protests. There are reports that many of Singur's villagers, share-croppers and desperate landless labourers attached to various landowners have since accepted compensation for their land and taken jobs to build the Tata car plant.

Clearly, Nandigram as much as Singur are glaring examples of the 'muddled perestroika' that marks the Bhattacharjee led government in West Bengal as it does the mother party, the CPM. A party that is trapped in the Marxist dialectics of the nineteenth century, it's lacklustre leadership unable to get to grips with the demands of twenty-first century India where the cities pull in one direction and the rural heartland in quite another.

It's a party that speaks in many tongues — the language of outright obstruction in New Delhi, obfuscation in Kolkata, dissembling in Thiruvananthapuram. The last two — capitals of West Bengal and Kerala, are two of the three states where they are currently in government and wield enormous political influence; yet, it is also here that they are completely at odds with one another, their policies riddled with contradictions.

If in West Bengal, 'Brand Buddha', the moniker for the chief minister's economic reform programme bears striking similarities with that of his ally, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Delhi, in Kerala, the government of Chief Minister V.S. Atchuthanandan, old style commissar is fighting off the pro-liberalisation schemes of his state party boss and rival, Kerala's own 'Buddha' Pinarayi Vijayan (on issues as diverse as the Asian Development Bank loan, the SNC Lavalin power kickback and the Smart City project); while at the centre, it piously preaches the non-developmental mantra at Singh's pro-reform Congress party.

As self-styled conscience keeper of the nation's poor and dispossessed, the Marxists, alliance partner in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance have used an outdated Marxism to challenge Singh's forward thinking economic reforms programme (which may be flawed too for not ensuring the dispossessed a safe landing).

Singh, together with his Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, and to a lesser extent his Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram — a landed farmer himself who says the central government could lose billions of dollars of tax revenue because of the special concessions given to firms that will operate in the SEZs — are keen to globalise and bring in sweeping economic reforms.

While Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi's thinking is more populist, Singh's more centrist pragmatism would sell off ailing public sector undertakings, attract foreign direct investment to plug India's glaring gaps in infrastructure, and through special economic zones hope to boost income generation and employment.

At every step, however, the CPM has stalled Singh's plans, be it to privatise airports and airport services, or reform and trim bloated pension plans and wages and benefits for public sector workers. Until Nandigram.

As an alliance partner with 64 seats in parliament, the CPM has played the role of spoiler perfectly, threatening to withdraw support and pull down the alliance government if Singh does not heed their call to ensure workers benefit from sell-offs.

Singh had given the green signal for upwards of 170 SEZs to be set up, a policy that is ironically enshrined in 'Buddha's' own state budget. The SEZs, so long the preserve of the more industrialised western states of Delhi, Maharashtra and Gujarat — the first SEZ was set up in the port city of Kandla 40 years ago — were all set to move to the east with Buddha's active encouragement in West Bengal.

But with Nandigram opening the door for violent anti-state players like the Maoists to enter the fray — the group called for a strike in five eastern states including West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Orissa and Bihar — the main pillar of Singh's economic reforms may be on shaky ground.

Running virtually independent conclaves where the government's writ is non-existent, groups with varied nomenclatures but going by the generic name of Naxalites, draw on allegiances that vary from religion to caste and class as well as political affiliations.

They control huge swathes of territory, the so-called 'red corridor' that runs from Nepal in the north through the dense forests of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Orrisa to Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

The Marxists, credited with the most successful land for the landless programme that has sustained their popularity in West Bengal and Kerala for over 50 years — despite their cadres' feared reputation for intimidation and killings of those who don't toe the party line — may be ceding power to the even more ruthless Maoists with their rush to shed age-old communist shibboleths for the monetary benefits of capitalism.

In what is already being described by some contemporary historians as the biggest land-grab since independence, in a policy that reverses programmes initiated in the 1950s when the communists led the often bloody movement to divest the rich of their land and give it to the poor, Buddha, who was always seen as a lightweight compared to the more seasoned former chief minister Jyoti Basu, is spearheading the push to bring in private investment into his largely agrarian state. Here, the Marxists' heady trade unionism and agitational politics had ensured the virtual demise of once booming industrialised state.

Unpopularity

But as Nandigram has shown, the bid to reinvent Bengal has come at a steep price — unpopularity. The cause of this predominantly Muslim town has been taken up the powerful Jamiat-Ulema-al-Hind which clashed with the CPM in Nandigram and police in Kolkata, days after the Nandigram killings. Their involvement adds a troubling communal colour to West Bengal's politics with the prospect of similar violence spilling over into nearby states.

At the heart of the problem is the attempt to cut the Indian farmers' almost "sacred links" with land. Land, that the communists gave to the tiller 50 years ago, that in turn is now being given to rich entrepreneurs to redevelop in a forced industrialisation that highly politicised and agrarian communities like West Bengal and its neighbouring states may be unprepared for.

Buddha's biggest mistake may be that he has gone after prime agricultural land on which sometimes four crops are sown annually, the main livelihood for millions of small farmers, who have remained loyal soldiers of the 'red' army.

Buddha's SEZs would have done better to look for less arable land and build the infrastructure that would make access to air and sea ports and rail junctions more profitable. In this case, his government has sought to hand land, close to such ports on a platter to the industrialists without factoring in the angst that goes hand in hand with dispossession of family assets. With compensation inadequate, sociologists have noted how it leads to "islands of affluence in a sea of deprivation".

In many cases, land of the quality as the one that has been lost, and employment at new industrial units is not guaranteed. In the end, Nandigram, may be where, in the battle between the farmer and the commissar, modern day Communism was tested for the first time in the history of independent India; And found wanting.
Neena Gopal is a South Asia analyst.

The violent timeline

March 20, 2007 Maoists and Naxalites enforce a strike across five states to protest forced land acquisition.

March 19, 2007 Jamiat Ulema-al-Hind protests Nandigram firing in Kolkata, West Bengal.

March 14, 2007 14 people killed in police firing in Nandigram, West Bengal.

March 9, 2007 55 policemen from civil militia Salwa Judum killed by Naxalites in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh.

January 28, 2007 Dozens injured in clashes at proposed Tata car plant at Singur, West Bengal.

January 2006 Police firing in Kalinganagar, Orissa, site of another industrial plant.