Perspectives
Nandigram: A facet of terrorism
For quite sometime, the somnolent, rural area of Nandigram, in West Bengal's Mednipore district, has been hitting the headlines as a potential site for the state's Special Economic Zone (SEZ), at the cost of some of India's poorest people giving up little pieces of their land for the purpose.
Nandigram has become a fault-line in West Bengal's Communist rule, which has far reaching effects on Indian polity as it currently rests on the coalition between the Congress party and the Left Front, of which CPI (M) is an important element. It could eclipse Indo-US nuclear deal, and produce an explosive Molotov cocktail of Marxism, global capitalism and communalism.
A linkage with the West, particularly the US, with its accompanying economic benefits, is attractive, and even Congress, once led by a non-aligned stalwart like Jawaharlal Nehru, succumbed to it. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the communist leader of West Bengal, couldn't possibly ignore the likely windfall of such bonanza, and lent support to an unequal Indo-US deal in the hope of reaping the fruit of globalisation by attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) into his state.
It is a reflection of his desire to become a satrap, if required, in the global imperium of the United States, even though the West Bengal communists may have got involved unwittingly in this post-cold war game of international politics in which India wants to leapfrog from being a pawn to becoming a queen on the global chessboard of power.
Notwithstanding India's global desire -- and the West Bengal communists' stake in it -- domestic politics, ideology, industrial strategy, land acquisition, Naxalite insurrection and other factors, have all combined to become a volatile and lethal mix to exacerbate the situation in Nandigram.
However, paradoxically, in West Bengal, there is a popularly elected regime, which ruled the state for over three decades through democratic elections, and has carried out one of the most credible land reforms in South Asia. In the elections held 18 months ago, it won a massive electoral mandate.
Yet, as pointed out in a recent article by Ashok Mitra, the veteran Marxist economist who was sworn-in as the first finance minister in West Bengal's CPM government in 1977 under the chief minister-ship of legendary Jyoti Bose, the left front administration led by CPM has since jettisoned its ideological agenda.
The uninterrupted three-decade reign of the party in West Bengal, and its recent electoral success, though considerably short of the peak gained in 1987 has, indeed, bred hubris and ineptitude in the leadership, which had not been experienced before. Now, there is an increasing tendency to micro-manage the affairs of the society and state.
The Nandigram issue is part of the state policy to create SELs, and finds its genesis in an earlier incident in Hoogly district on December 2, 2006, when police brutally assaulted peaceful peasants while they were protesting against the forced acquisition of their land for building a car factory.
The police resorted to widespread baton charge, and fired teargas shells and rubber bullets, and entered the adjoining villages and mercilessly beating the residents. But most of the evicted people continued to resist and seek the return of their land. The CPM remained un-relenting, and not only persisted with its plan for the automobile plant, but also announced plans for acquiring land for the setting up of a chemical plant by the Salim Group of Indonesia.
This provoked strong protests from the affected people, most of whom were CPM members. As a result, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee retracted by publicly admitting that the unilateral acquisition of land was a mistake, and promised to return land of those who had not consented.
Still, out of vindictiveness against the dissenters, terror was unleashed in Nandigram on March 14 last. There was an outpouring is of sympathy for the sufferers. The observers of Nandigram incident, including left leaning academics, were appalled at the use of brute force to acquire land.
As the noted Indian economist, Amit Bhaduri, points out, the state acquisition of land is the most obvious case of forcible transfer of resources from ordinary people to private corporations, causing destruction of livelihood and displacement of people. In the same way, many more were outraged by the methods that were used to recapture Nandigram by CPM cadres from an alleged incursion of outsiders, including Maosists and Islamic fundamentalists, who were said to be fomenting trouble.
Redoubtable Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali have warned that the continuing Nandigram protests could harm Left unity in India against depredation of the globalisation projects spearheaded by multination companies in pursuit of higher profits, and rationalised by the neo-liberal paradigm of a new pattern of specialisation based primarily on the movement of capital rather than of labour.
Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.
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