Land politics lands Buddha in trouble
By A K B Krishnan
CHANGE throws about its own challenges and dilemmas for Buddhadeb Bhattacharya of West Bengal. As Marxist chief minister of the state, he claims to understand the new generation better than some of his partners in the left ruling front and the opposition. And that landed him in real trouble.
Bhattacharya could persuade capitalist Ratan Tata to set up a factory in Nandigram. But his power of persuasion has failed to work with his comrades of some of the left-minded and left parties. They fail to understand the significance of an automobile factory coming up in the farmland of West Bengal that provides for 4,000 direct job opportunities and attracts a host of ancillary units with huge employment potential.
What offended his comrades most is the government’s U-turn on land reforms, the Left Front’s biggest achievement. The same government that distributed land among the poor is now charged with snatching farmers’ land and giving it to the rich.
And Bhattacharya’s plunge to meet the expectations of the young generation fell flat in the face of resistance. His exhortations that this generation wants industry, business and the service sector more than agriculture failed to change the mindset of the traditional left parties who can’t cope with the idea of promoting modern industries. Seven successive elections have returned the Left Front to power in West Bengal. Its main strength has come from its being able to change the ownership pattern of agricultural land. “It has achieved substantial success in agriculture but there is still ample room for greater development and productivity,” Bhattacharya explains.
But now the question is whether West Bengal can keep clinging on to the legacy of its agricultural success. “We feel that we have to move fast from agriculture to industry and that is where the problems emerge because of the new situation,” he says.
“The path being taken (by the government) is an uncharted one and as we go ahead we seek new directions… we do not know how to retreat, our only way is forward,” the chief minister said marking 30 years of the Left front’s rule in West Bengal. “The younger generation wants heavy industries and better living conditions. If we fail to deliver, they will not spare us,” he said.
CPM general secretary Prakash Karat too stood by Bhattacharya. He said there was no other way for industrial development than to invite and ensure capitalist investment from companies like the Tata Group. “Post-land reform, we have to adopt industrialisation. It would not be at the cost of agriculture but we have to compromise. Industrialisation cannot be achieved without the help of capitalists like the Tatas,” Karat said.
But the “forward-looking” government in a hurry did not look back and prepare the masses before it jumped into competition with other states for wooing private capital. With a missionary zeal for rapid industrialisation, Bhattacharya sought to bypass the political process. He misread the massive verdict of the 2006 assembly election as an approval for his ways and scrambled to acquire fertile agricultural land purely by bureaucratic means for the Tata car factory in Singur.
Thus West Bengal’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) became a subject of controversy and a cause for violent agitation. Until Nandigram no one realised how unfair this system was to the farmer. With a series of administrative blunders, the anti-government agitation snowballed into a rejection of its action. In a way, Bhattacharya was undoing what the left had done for over three decades. From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, leftist organisations acted as conduits between people and state apparatus. In rural and semi-rural areas, the organisations were the facilitators for everything from admission to hospitals to selection of beneficiaries in government schemes.
It is impossible to understand the durability of the government without appreciating the spread of leftist organisations in West Bengal’s social sphere. They gave the society a sense of coherence. Change and evolution are constants in politics and the Marxist party is no stranger to that. While the rhetoric and positioning of the Nehruvian state’s command economy had offered it room to be critical of private capital, the neo-liberal order denied that.
The challenge before the Marxists was to align with capitalist globalisation and accrue its advantages without appearing as its votary. But political imagination worldwide has taken a right-wing shift and it will require a lot of creative energy to revitalise idealism inevitable for harnessing the left’s critical faculties. What is being challenged in West Bengal today is not just the SEZ policy or even land acquisition, but the land politics that the left has followed for the last 30 years.

In Kerala too
KERALA, also ruled by Left Front led by the Marxists, is not far behind West Bengal in the land politics of a different kind. Last month, residents of the picturesque Munnar region, an internationally-acclaimed tourist resort at the confluence of three mountain streams, were surprised to see bulldozers along the winding mountain roads. Before they knew, the machines were pulling down concrete from sprawling multi-storeyed complexes that, until an hour ago, were luxury tourist resorts. Later they realised that this was Marxist Chief Minister V S Achutanandan’s style of shock-and-awe.
In the run up to his first year in office, he had declared war on encroachers of government land, much to the consternation of detractors both inside and outside his party.
Every brick broken brought a fresh round of applause, as the people saw the actions as uncharacteristic of a political leader. As the Special Task Force team, handpicked by the chief minister, went about cracking, the scale of damage that came to surface was stupefying. Hundreds of acres of government land and virgin forests worth millions had been taken over illegally. But when the team’s bulldozers pulled down a concrete structure in front of the CPI office there, its rumblings threatened to wreck political coalitions that silently stood guard over Munnar’s destruction in the name of tourism.
The CPI, a ruling coalition partner, rose in revolt targeting the chief minister and his task force. A coalition meeting followed. And a hurried circular soon reached all district headquarters asking them to exempt political party offices and religious sites from the eviction drive. That in effect exposed the government’s double standard in protecting some encroachers, particularly the CPM and the CPI, which have party office-cum-resorts in Munnar.
The tide of public opinion, court remarks and media onslaught really put pressure on the government. CPI leaders, on the defensive, were explaining a lot without convincing anyone. The government eventually withdrew the circular quietly. Its wavering also gave ample ammunition to the opposition when the assembly was reconvened. With protests and walkout, the opposition cried foul.
As in West Bengal, Tatas figured here too. When Achuthanandan was the opposition leader, he alleged that Tata Tea had grabbed 20,000 hectares of land in Munnar. But now as chief minister he has plans to retrieve only 2.3 acres.
‘Backtracking’ on the Munnar operation will have a long-term impact on Kerala’s social psyche as well as on the morale of honest government officers. It has also done incalculable damage to people’s faith and hope and once again exposed the politicians with vested interests.