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POLITICS-INDIA: 'Neo-Liberal' Left Behind Peasants' Massacre
By Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Mar 16, 2007 (IPS) - By ordering police to open fire on peasants
trying to protect their land from being acquired for a Special Economic
Zone (SEZ), the communist government of West Bengal state has indicated
the crumbling away of the last bulwark in India against neo-liberal and
free market policies.
At least 15 people died and over 50 were injured by police firing on
Wednesday in Nandigram leading to serious rifts within the Left Front
coalition that is supposed to rule West Bengal but where power is
monopolised by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).
Since the firing, Nandigram has witnessed unceasing confrontation between
the state police and CPI-M cadres, on the one hand, and local residents
organised under the banners of various political parties and non-party
groupings, on the other.
After the initial shock and fear that sent them fleeing, people belonging
to five villages in the Nandigram area, about 150 km from West Bengal's
capital Kolkata, have regrouped and are now fighting the police and
demanding to know the whereabouts of their missing relatives.
"The people claim that the number of those killed is much higher than the
official figure of 15, and that the police and CPI-M cadres are burying
bodies under rubble and building roads and culverts over them," said Aditi
Chowdhury, a Kolkata-based social activist who has been following
developments in the area, where trouble first erupted two-and-a-half
months ago over the acquisition of land for the construction of an SEZ.
Speaking with IPS over telephone Chowdhury said: "Thousands of armed
policemen surrounded the villages, and on many occasions they fired at
eye-level to kill. TV footage showed trucks carrying bodies with their
legs dangling out. The brutality was chilling.'' She added that state
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's brazen defence of the firing, as
part of an attempt to restore law and order in the area, has only
occasioned more public anger.
The Nandigram events, in particular the police firing, have seriously
dented the image of the Left Front, which has ruled the state for an
uninterrupted three decades - considered a global record in democracy and
electoral politics.
The CPI-M's main partners in the Left Front - which includes the
Communist Party of India (CPI), the Forward Bloc, and the Revolutionary
Socialist Party (RSP) - are livid and have publicly deplored the resort
to repression. They are alarmed at the blatant contradiction between what
the Left preaches at the national level, and what it practises in the
states where it is in power - West Bengal and to a lesser extent in
southern Kerala.
Like West Bengal, Kerala has also been looking to foreign investment to
help generate employment for its skilled workforce. But its Chief Minister
V.S. Achuthanandan, once a factory worker himself, has stuck to
transparent functioning and a pro-poor approach in dealing with foreign
investors keen to set up software parks in the 100 percent literate state.
In West Bengal, Bhattacharjee advocates the zealous pursuit of
industrialisation at any cost, if necessary by offering concessions and
tax breaks to investors, of a kind which the Left Front has always
regarded as "crony capitalists".
CPI general secretary A. B. Bardhan strongly condemned the police action
in Nandigram as "unheard of" in the Left Front's history and a black-mark
in its record. The party's West Bengal secretary Manju Majumdar called it
"brutal and barbaric." Forward Bloc general secretary Ashok Ghosh said
the incident "has tarnished the image of the Left Front." And senior RSP
leader Kshiti Goswami rhetorically asked: "Does democracy exist in this
state or not?"
Together these partners hold a total of 51 seats in the 294-strong
legislative assembly, as compared to the CPI-M's overwhelming 176 seats.
They have long complained, usually off the record, that they are not
consulted by the CPI-M while taking major decisions on behalf of the
government. But Nandigram has given them a new voice.
The dissidents in the Left Front have found a strong supporter in the
grand old man of West Bengal politics, CPI-M politburo member and former
chief minister Jyoti Basu. He told the Left Front chairman Biman Bose that
the CPI-M was running "one-party rule in this state. It doesn't look like
a coalition government at allà" Basu has asked the Chief Minister to own
up responsibility.
Clearly there are serious misgivings about Nandigram and Bhattacharjee's
industrialisation policy within the CPI-M too. These are voiced in private
by party leaders and especially intellectuals who are bitterly but
cogently critical of neo-liberal or free-market policies.
Bhattacharjee is inured to such concerns. He has been rooting for private
sector-led industrialisation as a panacea for the state's economic woes.
He is pushing through an automobile factory for the Tatas, one of India's
foremost business groups, at Singur in the face of staunch opposition from
peasants who are being forced to sell their land under the colonial Land
Acquisition Act of 1894.
Nationally, the Left Front demands abrogation of this law because it
allows the state to expropriate land to be used for private profit.
The Tatas are also being offered huge subsidies at Singur, of the order of
one-fourth of their capital investment.
Bhattacharjee shelved land acquisition plans for the Nandigram SEZ because
of powerful protests in early January, and because the CPI-M politburo
asked him to put all SEZs on hold in line with the central government's
own decision to do so until after a national rehabilitation policy is
finalised.
But, as the influential Times of India daily pointed out in an editorial
on Friday, ‘'the offer to withdraw the notification for land acquisition
and shift the SEZ project elsewhere seems like a ruse meant to distract
the villagers who had barricaded the area''.
SEZs have become intensely unpopular in India because they are widely seen
as "sweetheart deals" which offer huge tax breaks and privileged treatment
to promoters and exporters at the expense of the public exchequer. Even
the World Bank has expressed misgivings about SEZs.
Originally, 10,000 acres of land were meant to be acquired for the
Nandigram SEZ to be awarded to the Salim conglomerate of Indonesia, which
is believed to be a front for the super-corrupt Suharto family. There is a
great deal of unease in the CPI-M and the Left Front about favouring this
group.
Why did Bhattacharjee resort to draconian police action after the
Nandigram SEZ was shelved? He claims the state had to reestablish its writ
and law-and-order, which had broken down; the area was blockaded to
government functionaries for two-and-a-half months.
"The rest of the answer lies in the CPI-M organisational structure in West
Bengal," says Tanika Sarkar, a modern Indian historian who visited
Nandigram to inquire into the violence there in January.
Speaking with IPS, she explained that the CPI-M cadres control the entire
area and have a stake in all major economic transactions. ‘'It won't brook
any challenge to its monopoly of power. Yet, when the protests against
land acquisition broke out on Jan. 7, and the cadres tried to suppress
them, they faced the people's anger. Many were driven out. The have been
itching to return and reestablish their hold."
Sarkar said the CPI-M cadres knew that they could only return to Nandigram
by relying on police support. ‘'That's what the latest operation was all
about. Brutalising ordinary people and denting the party's credibility as
a pro-poor organisation is the price the CPI-M had to pay to please its
local cadres."
Nandigram has major implications for the Left's future in India. Of the
country's many political parties, the Left alone has a coherent critique
of neo-liberal policies, which are creating havoc through their vicious
dualism, contribution to widening disparities, and callousness towards the
poor.
If the Left embraces neo-liberalism in West Bengal, and tries to attract
corporate investment irrespective of whether it generates employment and
skills, that will damage its credibility, and weaken its ability to act as
a progressive pressure-group to rein in the aggressively
pro-liberalisation Manmohan Singh government at the centre.
It is in pursuit of the pressure-group role that Left Front supports the
Singh government from the outside rather than join in the federal
government.
India's Left parties today enjoy their highest-ever representation in
Parliament. Their credibility and respect far exceeds their membership or
political representation. They are best placed to develop an alternative
model of development that is not predatory on people's livelihoods.
"But this won't happen unless the Left, in particular the CPI-M, stops its
own rightward drift," argues the noted political scientist Achin Vanaik.
‘'If it fails to correct course, it will undergo rapid decline,'' said
Vanaik who teaches political science at Delhi University.
(END)
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