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Neo-Liberal' Left Behind Peasants' Massacre
by Praful Bidwai
Inter Press Service
March 16, 2007
NEW DELHI, Mar 16 (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/2007)
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