FEATURE

PD Propaganda Can’t Wipe Out Singur Facts

Sankar Ray and Kavita Krishnan

With Tata’s flight from Singur, the CPI(M) seems to be expecting facts themselves to fly out of public memory! Their leaders are back to trotting out tired fictions in the pages of PD.
Biman Basu (People’s Democracy October 12 2008), for instance, tells us that the entire Singur episode of land acquisition and compensation was a “meticulous pro-people, pro-poor, pro-peasantry exercise.” This is surely a piece of Orwellian ‘newspeak’ on par with the US calling its war of occupation in Iraq ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom!’ The process of scuttling the right of Singur’s peasantry and poor to know, let alone decide about the land handover; of using everything from batons to rape and burning alive to silence the protests; of preparing elaborate lies about ‘compensation’ and ‘consent’ was indeed a ‘meticulous exercise’ – but all to serve Tata and not the peasantry and poor people of Singur.    
Basu claims that “the highest amount of cultivable land are in the hands of poorest of the poor in the rural areas (of W Bengal – Ed/-), incomparable with any other part of the country. Due to the fragmentation of land and the pressure of population through the increase in the families and family members, land is gradually becoming unviable as a source of livelihood.” Way back in December 2006, PD had tried convincing us that “90% of the land acquired is mono crop land… Less than 10 per cent of this land belongs to the more than one crop category.” Subsequently, impartial observers established what is universally recognized today – that Singur soil is fertile well-watered multi-crop land; and the peasants of Singur were relatively better off than their counterparts in other parts of the country. Singur was no Vidarbha, and peasants here certainly did not find their land to be an unviable burden. The land sustained more than 12, 000 families, and according to experts, the gross annual agricultural income from the 1000 acres acquired by Tata amounted to Rs. 150 crore. (see box) In fact, as we pointed out at the time (see Liberation January 2007), Singur is “at the heart of the green revolution belt of West Bengal; it is precisely the kind of area that the Left Front government showcased till the other day as the biggest success story of agriculture under Left Front rule in West Bengal... the area has excellent irrigation facilities and produces four or even five crops a year, has as many as four cold-storage centres and attracts agricultural labour even from neighbouring Bardhaman district during days of busy agricultural operations.” Such is the CPI(M)’s tame obedience to Tata, that once Tata had ‘chosen’ Singur, the CPI(M) overnight declared their own “success story” to be inferior mono-crop land and a scene of agricultural distress!      

The PD Editorial (October 12 2008) declares that “there is no iota of any evidence of either the source or the credibility” of “alleged electronic media footage” of policemen “brutally attacking ‘unwilling farmers’ in the process of acquiring land at Singur.” It compares such stories to those put out by embedded US journalists during the American war in Vietnam. We can recall that noted historian Sumit Sarkar who visited Singur to investigate soon after the violence of December 2006, wrote that “...there is no doubt that the vast bulk of the villagers we met are opposed to the take-over of land and most are refusing compensation. … we found much evidence of force being employed, particularly on the nights of September 25 and December 2...What the villagers repeatedly alleged was that along with the police, and it seems more than the police, party activists, whom the villagers call ‘cadres’ — which has sadly become a term of abuse — did the major part of the beating up..” (“A Question Marked In Red,” Indian Express, 9 January 2007) It is up to us to decide which is the ‘embedded’ version – the testimony of a historian of impeccable calibre and credibility, or the propaganda of PD! But even if we wish to rely on PD alone, we can easily find corroboration of the allegations of repression. Did not peasant leader and CPI(M) CC member Benoy Konar write in the PD, December 10, 2006, that “The work of the police is not to make drawings or teach in schools and colleges. The police are the instrument of repression. It is for the government to decide whom they shall repress.” What was this if not an admission – nay, boast – of police brutality? The PD is of course silent about the death of Rajkumar Bhul due to injuries inflicted by the police, and the rape and murder of 18-year-old Tapasi Malik by local CPI(M) goons.              
Basu’s piece in PD tells us that the compensation package that materialised eventually “covered very well the scenario of benefits of the land losers and the sharecroppers, including the agricultural labourers. ...Apart from a 50 per cent hike in compensation for land, the package also included 10 per cent additional cost of the land price for the land acquired as contained in the earlier package. The beneficiaries can either utilise the funds through business initiative and/or via purchase of land elsewhere in the area.”
What was the reality of these rosy compensation claims? Initially, the Singur compensation package inverted Operation Barga and given the sharecropper only 25% of what it gave the landlords (at least two of whom were absentee landlords) and had nothing for landless labourers. Subsequently, too, the TMC- WB Government “gentlemen's agreement” contained no specific provision for compensation to agricultural labourers and sharecroppers. After sustained protests spearheaded by the CPI(ML), the new package Biman Basu mentions, came into being. According to this, a compensation of 300 days of wage at NREGA rate was promised to agricultural workers and unregistered sharecroppers. But, as we pointed out, workers had already been deprived of nearly 700 days of work since December 2006, when the fencing came up for the Tata project. Not only was such compensation puny, there was no provision for adequate rehabilitation. Again, the agreement promised unregistered sharecroppers nothing more than 300 days of wage: thus punishing them for the failures of the much trumpeted Operation Barga! And the new agreement too continued to offer registered sharecroppers merely 25 per cent of what the landowner would get.
The PD Editorial claims the ouster of Tata was a “negation of the people’s mandate;” has it forgotten CPI(M)’s humiliating defeat in 15 out of 16 panchayats at Singur, wherein it failed to win a single Zila Parishad and panchayat samiti seat?

In a piece in the October 12 2008 issue of PD, WB Industries Minister Nirupam Sen has arrogantly ruled out return of land to peasants, or even of compensation for those who have refused to ‘consent’ to hand over their land: “On the issue of returning the acquired land, we hold that there is no such proviso in the Indian Constitution. The present owner of the land is the state government. There is no legal proviso by which one can return the land to the farmers or to the previous owners. There is really no need now more than ever to enter into any dialogue with the opposition any longer. The court of law shall hold onto the cheques of those who had not accepted them for whatever reason.”

The WB Government cannot be allowed to thus penalise the peasants of Singur who resolutely refused compensation in order to resist land grab. Nirupam Sen’s argument that return of the land is unconstitutional is ridiculous: the land belongs to the Government, and the Government can well choose to use the land for any purpose – agriculture or industry. If the peasants of Singur so demand, the WB Government can well denotify the land and return it to the peasants.  
Nirupam Sen adds, “We are right amidst the festival season and this is the time when we are faced with a sad and tragic event. The youth must be bitterly disappointed.” Such lament appears strangely ludicrous. Biman Basu claims that in the Nano factory, “Directly 2000 people would be employed. However, in the adjacent ancillary industries, the employment would go up to 10,000.” He does not tell us how many jobs were lost through the land grab exercise. Even so, we would do well to recall that in the 1990s, CPI(M) leaders assured of 300,000 direct and indirect employment due to the Haldia Petrochemical Complex. In practice, the HPC yielded less than 950 direct jobs (including the managing director) and 1800 contractual workers at the plant and about 10,000 in the downstream. [for a detailed analysis of the purported costs and benefits of the Nano plant, see Dipankar Basu, ‘Farewell to the Tatas: Costs and benefits of the Tata-Singur Project, a detailed dissection of the deal’ (http://sanhati.com/front-page/1001/)] 

By all accounts, the state is well rid of an unequal and exploitative agreement that imposed a punishing burden on the people of West Bengal, of appeasing Tata to the tune of 58% of the total realized industrial investment in the state in 2007 – all for benefits that are imaginary or highly dubious.