Singur: The Nano Dilemma

chillibreeze writer — Anish Gupta

Singur has slipped back to square one, snuffing out hope of the world’s cheapest car rolling out in time from the plant the Tata Motors had set out to build for it.

A ray of possibility was seen briefly in early September when the government and the opposition agreed to talk and seek a solution to the stalemate. But Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee threatened, on September 16, to renew her agitation, accusing the government of reneging on an understanding reached in the presence of Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi.

Banerjee is leading a movement demanding the return of 400 acres of land taken by the government for the motorcar plant from farmers without their consent. She and her allies, who include the Leftist SUCI and Naxalites, had begun a dharna in front of the Tata Motors’ upcoming plant from August 24 to force the government to discuss the land question, something it had steadfastly refused to consider for over two years.

Banerjee does not challenge the location of the mother plant, but is pressing for the shifting of Nano’s ancillary industries to any nearby site to release the 400 acres farmers claim they had not willingly parted with.

But the government, citing land acquisition laws, had all along maintained that plots once acquired could not be given back, and had been inviting Banerjee for talks without willing to discuss the land issue, the key to a solution.

The dharna created a scare among the Tata Motors employees and labourers working at the plant site, prompting the auto-major to suspend construction work and threaten a pullout from Singur, if the situation did not improve.

The ultimatum sent the warring parties into a huddle. Three rounds of a make-or-break meeting were held from September 5, at the Raj Bhavan, Kolkata, in which the government and the Trinamool Congress, West Bengal’s main Opposition party, looked for a solution, with Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi playing the mediator.

There was a glimmer at the end of the talks on September 7 with the two sides reaching an understanding. It was decided, without specifying the acreage – and industry minister Nirupam Sen and the leader of the Opposition, Partha Chatterjee put their signatures to an agreement – that the government would try to find the “maximum land” from within the project area and rest from adjacent places for the farmers who were demanding their land back.

It was also agreed that a four-member committee, comprising the Singur MLA, covenor of the land-protection committee, the district magistrate and the chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Board, the body that had acquired the land for the Tatas, would identify the land that could be released, and file a report to the government within a week.

The government also decided to put on hold all construction work in the vendors’ park housing the Nano’s ancillary industries, till the issue was finally resolved.

Following the agreement, Mamata Banerjee at once called off her fortnight-old dharna, clearing the Tata project area.

But the very next afternoon, the Tatas issued a statement decrying the agreement and repeated their threat to withdraw.

And, that very evening, as if playing his role in a pre-planned drama, industry minister Nirupam Sen rubbished the agreement he had signed the previous evening. He held a press conference, with an uncomfortable chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee sitting next to him, in which Sen announced, with a tinge of vehemence, that not an inch could be taken from the project area.

The government’s volte-face, less than 24 hours of having signed an agreement, stunned the Opposition and left Banjerjee livid at what she described as an act of betrayal. Clouds of uncertainty were back over Singur again.

Two days later, chief minister Bhattacharjee personally called Banerjee, seeking another round of dialogue. Banerjee insisted that the discussion must be on the agreement that had been already reached, and nothing else. Bhattacharjee promised that the talks could help untie knots.

At the meeting, in which the industry minister was replaced by another senior minister and CPI(M) leader as Bhattacharjee’s aide, the chief minister held out a package for all of Singur farmers whose land had been taken..

The government was ready to provide 70 acres from the project area, hike the compensation money by another 50 per cent and give jobs to a member from each family that had lost land for the project.

Banerjee found the package unacceptable – 70 acres was certainly not what the agitating farmers were demanding back – but the chief minister pleaded his inability to concede more. The meeting ended on a disappointing note for both sides, and the Singur peace efforts were evidently close to collapsing.

And they did finally fall apart on September 14, when the government unilaterally made the new package public through newspaper insertions. The next day the Left Front held a rally in Singur , ferrying bus loads of supporters from the neighbouring districts, in which CPI(M) politburo member and state Left Front chairman Biman Bose read out the package to the gathering and urged the Opposition of accept it.

On September 16, the Trinamool Congress and its allies flexed their muscle by holding an equally impressive rally, comprising a gathering more of Singur farmers than of people shipped from elsewhere.

Mamata Banerjee accused the government of betrayal and chickening out of the deal it had signed so as to protect Tatas’ interests at the expense of those of the poor farmers. The next phase of the land battle will soon begin, and the writing on the wall is now bright and clear for the Tatas to read.

THE GENESIS
Many would say the crisis is of the government’s own making, which had gone about acquiring land in Singur with guns and batons. Some even blame the Tatas for not doing their homework well.

There was a volley of protest from a section of the farmers immediately after chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced the project, within days of the Left Front assuming power for the seventh time in a row, in May 2006.

Tension rose further when broom-wielding women drove back district officials who had gone to survey the land for the project, in an act of defiance unheard of in 29 years of Left rule in West Bengal. The protests were almost spontaneous, triggered by the farmers’ fear of losing land, at a time when Banerjee was still not wholly involved.

The incident was indeed ominous, so much so that veteran CPI(M) leader and former chief minister Jyoti Basu censured the government for acting in haste, without taking the people into confidence.

Land and land reforms minister Abdul Rezzak Molla, a senior party man with strong rural links, too, was reported to have expressed doubts about his own government’s wisdom in venturing into Singur, one of India’s most fertile agricultural zones.

But chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, industry minister Nirupam Sen and state CPI(M) party secretary Biman Bose, chose not to heed the warnings. Instead, they embarked on a disinformation campaign, based on agricultural data almost 30 years old, to claim that the land being acquired for Tata Motors was, in the main, infertile.

In reality, the 997 acres being targeted for the Tatas yielded two to five crops a year, thanks to an elaborate irrigation network the state agriculture department had created over the years.

The controversy took a nasty turn when, in September 2006, the police brutally caned protesters at a public hearing the district officials had summoned. In the police action, Banerjee herself was manhandled and several farmers, including a child, were arrested and imprisoned on criminal charges.

The incident marked the beginning of a serious resistance to the land acquisition process by a section of the Singur farmers, prompting political and civil liberty organizations to throw in their lot with the agitators. The movement, led by the Krishi Jami O Jibika Raksha Committee, an amorphous body of farmers, politicians and social activists, quickly broke free of its local confines, triggering a fierce industry-vs-agriculture debate, in which the government and the CPI(M) and the state’s civil society came to be pitted against one another.

SNOWBALLING UNREST
Singur was clearly on the boil.

Surprisingly, the Tatas remained impassive. The company preferred to ignore the growing uproar, choosing to rely wholly on the government’s newly won clout, imagining perhaps that brute majority of the Left Front and brute force of the administration would together stifle the outcry. But it is now evident that the Tata managers made a mistake and will long lament their costly error.

The Left Front, which had won a thundering victory in the state Assembly elections just months back, was suddenly confronted with a snowballing challenge to its policy, in general, and the chief minister’s authority, in particular.

The government opted for strong-arm measures to crush the resistance. On the morning of December 2, 2006, all hell broke loose on Singur, when district officials, backed by several thousand armed policemen, went to take possession of the land the government had marked for the Tatas. As the police took up position and administrative officials prepared to cordon off the area, crowds of unarmed villagers gathered to hold on to their possession. Police orders to clear the ground were greeted with brickbats, provoking the bursting of teargas shells and a vicious baton charge.

It was a day-long skirmish the people of the state watched live on television, covered by several news channels beaming back some of the most revolting scenes of atrocity by the police force.

By the end of the day, the government’s battle had evidently been won. Several maimed peasants were admitted to nearby hospitals. Several more were herded off to the district jail. In the villages sulked the aged and traumatized women. A pall of gloom descended on all the villages.

But the war in Singur had only just begun. The day’s events provoked an outcry across the state. Even the CPI(M)’s own allies in the Left Front – the RSP, Forward Bloc, the CPI – bitterly criticized the police action, claiming they had been kept in the dark about the government’s decision to crack down.

Even more damaging was their allegation that the chief minister had not discussed the government’s deal with the Tatas in Left Front meetings nor had he informed a Cabinet core committee of the concessions being given to the industrial giant.

However, the government and the CPI(M), remained unfazed. The chief minister stoutly defended the police action for the sake of industrialization, which, he maintained, was needed to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and bring the state out of the economic backwaters.

His critics had no quarrel with industrialization but contested the CPI(M)’s claim that modern, capital-intensive factories would create the thousands of promised jobs and urged the government to keep prime agricultural land off limits. They also demanded that the government publish a map showing how it planned to use land in a densely populated state.

The government reacted by branding them as forces out to scuttle the state’s industrial plans but failed to show any land map or reveal the deal it had struck with the Tatas.
Meanwhile, it worked in extraordinary haste to close the issue. The West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC), took over the land from the district authorities, hired watchmen, many of them CPI(M) followers who had volunteered to give their land, to guard the acquisition round the clock, and mobilized workmen to transform agricultural plots into an industrial site.

The Trinamool Congress along with the land protection committee appealed to the Calcutta High Court against the land acquisition, furnishing the affidavits of several hundred farmers who affirmed they had not consented to give their land. The court, however, ruled after several hearings that the acquisition had been in accordance with the law, absolving the government of legal wrongdoing. The agitators then appealed to the Supreme Court against the high court ruling, where the case is still pending.

In the meanwhile, deprived of their land, the pent up resentment of Singur farmers only kept growing, finding an occasional outlet in futile attempts to bring down portions of the Tata factory wall which, guarded by hundreds of policemen, stood like a Berlin Wall between the farmers and the land they tilled till recently. A few farmers committed suicide, driven to death by depression, while others waited, more stoically, for an opportunity to strike back.

The building anger produced an explosive verdict in the three-tier panchayat elections held in May. The Left Front was convincingly trounced in the whole of the Singur block and not at the plant area alone, clearly showing that the overwhelming majority of the Singur voters were against the acquisition of fertile land for the Tata project.
The verdict proved to be particularly embarrassing for the CPI(M), which had, in its pre-poll campaigns, confidently described the rural elections as a referendum on the state government’s industrial policy.

As a matter of fact, the Left Front, despite its seemingly invincible organization, suffered ignominious reverses in every place where the government had eyed fertile land as sites for industries or infrastructure projects.

The farmers gave their unambiguous erdict through the ballot box, making it clear they were in no mood to part with their fertile fields. The message emboldened Banerjee, who felt vindicated, and stepped up her campaign for the return of 400 acres of Tata project land acquired by the government without the owners’ consent.

But the government refused to budge, reiterating its readiness to discuss every other issue but the return of any portion of the acquired land. And Banerjee, banking on the people’s verdict, began a satyagraha on National Highway 2, next to the Tata Motors factory on August 24, forcing a showdown.

While the government, once bitten, refused to use apply force to break the siege, the Tatas suspended work to ensure the safety of their workmen and employees, and issued a threat to pull out.

FAILED SOLUTION
The crisis had deepened to the point where the Nano project appeared to be in jeopardy, forcing the Governor Gandhi to write to Banerjee, requesting her to agree to sit for talks with the government. She replied saying she was ready to do that provided the Governor himself was willing to mediate.

Chief minister Buddhdeb Bhattacharjee, whose party had almost been abusive of the Governor’s anguished reactions to police brutalities on the farmers of Nadigram, where their was a virtual uprising against the government’s attempts to take land for a chemical hub, approached the Governor with a similar appeal.

With the Governor’s initiative succeeding in bringing the government and the agitators to the negotiation table and the crafting of an agreement, observers in Kolkata felt there was hope yet for the Nano to roll out of Singur.

But the government took a sharp U-turn soon afterwards, taking Singur back to the warpath. Both sides have staked much in the outcome. Mamata Banerjee might meet her Waterloo, if the agitating farmers opt for the package and end the stir. If they do not, the CPI(M) might bite the dust.

But more than that, the events in Singur will determine the course of West Bengal’s future.

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Anish writes for chillibreeze.

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