It's difficult to know how to start writing again. The world's been full in the last few months. The head and heart have been heavy. And I just haven't felt like writing, but now I do. There's a clutch of memories and impressions and preoccupations that just keeps growing.
Here's the most vivid of recent memories.
A village in Singur, West Bengal, not far from Calcutta. New Year's Eve. An old woman, one of the leaders of the local resistance against the land grab by the West Bengal government on behalf of the Tatas, sitting in the courtyard of her small house, telling us of a night of terror. 25 September last year, when a group of villagers demonstrated outside the Block Development Office in Singur, into the small hours of the morning. The crowd thinning out. At one at night, upon a signal from the office, the electricity is cut off. A group of masked men emerge. They are, in different accounts, local cadres of the CPM, policemen, and trainee policemen from the training school in Barrackpore. Whoever they are, they run armed amok among the demonstrators, beat them senseless. (As the old woman told us of that night, a young man standing there, one of the victims of the attack who had to be hospitalized for several days, nodded and added details.) She told us how she escaped, but how the roads were too dangerous, how she spent all night in a ditch, waiting for the masked men to go.
These masked men, and more like them, with or without masks, in the months that have followed, are acting on the orders or with the tacit approval of a professedly left-wing government. This is a government that publicly dismisses the deep-rooted grass-roots political backlash from peasants, once its loyal constituency, as the machinations and conjurations of its political enemies. But it is not that, except at a very superficial level. And we are constantly fed a pervasive myth: that the two issues at hand here, the 'large' question of West Bengal's future strategies for development, and the mode in which these are put into being, can be separated from one another. That the state violence in Singur and the virtual civil war in Nandigram are regrettable and unnecessary complications, avoidable hitches, on the path to economic progress. This is a lie. For the villagers who were beaten up on 25 September, for Tapasi Malik who was brutally murdered in Gopalnagar (local villagers are certain that the CPM boss there, Debu Malik, bears at least part of the responsibility for this), for the family who were peppered with rubber bullets and lathis in Khaser Bheri, these two processes are not separable.For them, this industrial policy means sticks on the back, teargas, bombs hurled into villages, a constant reign of state terror. This strategy of development and this policy of repression are mutually necessary.
This is nothing new in India, and those of us who ever believed that the presence of a Left Front government would halt or soften the brutality of these processes were naive, or lived in more hopeful times, when the words 'Left Front' meant something quite different, something much more genuine, than it does in Bengal today. Among people who live and work in the Narmada Valley, among the slum-dwellers of Delhi, among the people of Kalinganagar in Orissa, where there has been resistance to another Tata project, a bauxite plant, and where state reprisal has involved the planting of anti-personnel landmines, the effects of neo-liberalism have been felt repeatedly and violently. Governments and companies have liked to believe that the victims of their policies will be too weak or too cowed down to respond. In Delhi, this has largely been true. In the Narmada and in Orissa, it hasn't. And it certainly hasn't in Nandigram, and the signs are that in Haripur, where the West Bengal government has recently tried to survey land for the construction of a nuclear power plant, resistance has already begun crystallizing.
It's too early to either celebrate or mourn the outcomes of these localized acts of resistance. Their future still hangs in the balance, though the forces arrayed against them are immensely powerful. The present retreat of the SEZ policy, and the noises made by the Centre and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya about 'adequate compensation packages' (who will measure their adequacy?), cannot last for very long. The pressures of India's economic agenda, and the direction of the world, will not be easy to fight back, or, even more seriously, provide counter-models of sustainable and just development to.
But resistance there will be, and there is no way in which the efforts by states and governments to contain and blunt this resistance can avoid drilling a deep hole into what remains of democratic norm and practice. The logic is crystal clear. Land will be acquired. It will not be acquired consensually, since consent is unreliable, uncertain and at best slow, and the driving imperative of the current economic agenda is merciless, irreversible speed. Peasants, landless labourers, and sharecroppers, their mutual tensions and antagonisms notwithstanding, will collectively organize resistance. And this resistance can be heady, but also brutal, in response to the far larger brutality of the state. The razing of a CPM leader's house and the lynching of a policeman in Nandigram demonstrate what the consequences of this violent showdown can be, even for the probable victors. Whatever feeble social contract binds the allegiance of the disempowered and subaltern to the state they are supposedly citizens of is in severe danger of cracking, and cracking fast. Buddhadeb may declaim 'amader 235, oder 30' from the rooftops till the next elections come around, but the government he runs stands to lose in the not-so-long-run, for all its failures and forgotten promises, but perhaps most of all from what is happening now.
'Our lives, but not our land.' Much has been written about this slogan. An editorial page essay in the HT, by Indrajit Hazra, recently expressed incomprehension of this, in the light of the grotty, squalid and deprived existences apparently eked out in Nandigram. It doesn't matter, however, whether he perceives the texture of the villagers' lives correctly or wrongly. The point is that people in village after village have raised this cry, and meant it. Their lives, but not their land. The analysts and observers who hold that industrial development in India cannot possibly happen without the conversion of agricultural land, too, may be either wrong or right. If they are right, the ball is still in their court, because what Nandigram and Singur have shown us is the unqualified failure of the state and of development planners to formulate a strategy to accomplish this democratically. There exists no blueprint, and no precedent in India, for land acquisition that can move through all the accepted democratic channels, conceive of and offer genuine rehabilitation, and secure any measure of broad legitimacy among affected people. The consequences of this, beamed live from Nandigram, are on the daily news.
Singur, at any rate, seems lost. The Tatas have dug themselves in securely there, the land allotted to them has been fenced off, and there is draconian police security in place, periodically bolstered by the RAF. Early on in the long battle of Singur, the government posted 25,000 policemen around the villages, in a population of roughly 25, 000. One policeman per citizen, give or take a few. This will not end happily for the villagers of Singur, whether or not further blood is spilled. It is tempting to say that the battle will be fought in other places, that the centre of the struggle will shift elsewhere, and that these new confrontations may yet be won. That somehow this will restore the historical balance, and that while the resistance in Singur may just become a historical memory, it may be redeemed elsewhere.
It is tempting, but not possible. The woman who spent the night of the 25th in a ditch, hiding from the armed men in masks, declared that she would feed us in style when 'we have driven the Tatas out'. Whether bravado or genuine hope, that meal doesn't seem very likely now. For her, there will be no absolution in a struggle accomplishing success elsewhere. Whatever the eventual outcome of this long confrontation on so many fronts, whatever the resolution or lack of it, there will be something to mourn.
Here's the most vivid of recent memories.
A village in Singur, West Bengal, not far from Calcutta. New Year's Eve. An old woman, one of the leaders of the local resistance against the land grab by the West Bengal government on behalf of the Tatas, sitting in the courtyard of her small house, telling us of a night of terror. 25 September last year, when a group of villagers demonstrated outside the Block Development Office in Singur, into the small hours of the morning. The crowd thinning out. At one at night, upon a signal from the office, the electricity is cut off. A group of masked men emerge. They are, in different accounts, local cadres of the CPM, policemen, and trainee policemen from the training school in Barrackpore. Whoever they are, they run armed amok among the demonstrators, beat them senseless. (As the old woman told us of that night, a young man standing there, one of the victims of the attack who had to be hospitalized for several days, nodded and added details.) She told us how she escaped, but how the roads were too dangerous, how she spent all night in a ditch, waiting for the masked men to go.
These masked men, and more like them, with or without masks, in the months that have followed, are acting on the orders or with the tacit approval of a professedly left-wing government. This is a government that publicly dismisses the deep-rooted grass-roots political backlash from peasants, once its loyal constituency, as the machinations and conjurations of its political enemies. But it is not that, except at a very superficial level. And we are constantly fed a pervasive myth: that the two issues at hand here, the 'large' question of West Bengal's future strategies for development, and the mode in which these are put into being, can be separated from one another. That the state violence in Singur and the virtual civil war in Nandigram are regrettable and unnecessary complications, avoidable hitches, on the path to economic progress. This is a lie. For the villagers who were beaten up on 25 September, for Tapasi Malik who was brutally murdered in Gopalnagar (local villagers are certain that the CPM boss there, Debu Malik, bears at least part of the responsibility for this), for the family who were peppered with rubber bullets and lathis in Khaser Bheri, these two processes are not separable.For them, this industrial policy means sticks on the back, teargas, bombs hurled into villages, a constant reign of state terror. This strategy of development and this policy of repression are mutually necessary.
This is nothing new in India, and those of us who ever believed that the presence of a Left Front government would halt or soften the brutality of these processes were naive, or lived in more hopeful times, when the words 'Left Front' meant something quite different, something much more genuine, than it does in Bengal today. Among people who live and work in the Narmada Valley, among the slum-dwellers of Delhi, among the people of Kalinganagar in Orissa, where there has been resistance to another Tata project, a bauxite plant, and where state reprisal has involved the planting of anti-personnel landmines, the effects of neo-liberalism have been felt repeatedly and violently. Governments and companies have liked to believe that the victims of their policies will be too weak or too cowed down to respond. In Delhi, this has largely been true. In the Narmada and in Orissa, it hasn't. And it certainly hasn't in Nandigram, and the signs are that in Haripur, where the West Bengal government has recently tried to survey land for the construction of a nuclear power plant, resistance has already begun crystallizing.
It's too early to either celebrate or mourn the outcomes of these localized acts of resistance. Their future still hangs in the balance, though the forces arrayed against them are immensely powerful. The present retreat of the SEZ policy, and the noises made by the Centre and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya about 'adequate compensation packages' (who will measure their adequacy?), cannot last for very long. The pressures of India's economic agenda, and the direction of the world, will not be easy to fight back, or, even more seriously, provide counter-models of sustainable and just development to.
But resistance there will be, and there is no way in which the efforts by states and governments to contain and blunt this resistance can avoid drilling a deep hole into what remains of democratic norm and practice. The logic is crystal clear. Land will be acquired. It will not be acquired consensually, since consent is unreliable, uncertain and at best slow, and the driving imperative of the current economic agenda is merciless, irreversible speed. Peasants, landless labourers, and sharecroppers, their mutual tensions and antagonisms notwithstanding, will collectively organize resistance. And this resistance can be heady, but also brutal, in response to the far larger brutality of the state. The razing of a CPM leader's house and the lynching of a policeman in Nandigram demonstrate what the consequences of this violent showdown can be, even for the probable victors. Whatever feeble social contract binds the allegiance of the disempowered and subaltern to the state they are supposedly citizens of is in severe danger of cracking, and cracking fast. Buddhadeb may declaim 'amader 235, oder 30' from the rooftops till the next elections come around, but the government he runs stands to lose in the not-so-long-run, for all its failures and forgotten promises, but perhaps most of all from what is happening now.
'Our lives, but not our land.' Much has been written about this slogan. An editorial page essay in the HT, by Indrajit Hazra, recently expressed incomprehension of this, in the light of the grotty, squalid and deprived existences apparently eked out in Nandigram. It doesn't matter, however, whether he perceives the texture of the villagers' lives correctly or wrongly. The point is that people in village after village have raised this cry, and meant it. Their lives, but not their land. The analysts and observers who hold that industrial development in India cannot possibly happen without the conversion of agricultural land, too, may be either wrong or right. If they are right, the ball is still in their court, because what Nandigram and Singur have shown us is the unqualified failure of the state and of development planners to formulate a strategy to accomplish this democratically. There exists no blueprint, and no precedent in India, for land acquisition that can move through all the accepted democratic channels, conceive of and offer genuine rehabilitation, and secure any measure of broad legitimacy among affected people. The consequences of this, beamed live from Nandigram, are on the daily news.
Singur, at any rate, seems lost. The Tatas have dug themselves in securely there, the land allotted to them has been fenced off, and there is draconian police security in place, periodically bolstered by the RAF. Early on in the long battle of Singur, the government posted 25,000 policemen around the villages, in a population of roughly 25, 000. One policeman per citizen, give or take a few. This will not end happily for the villagers of Singur, whether or not further blood is spilled. It is tempting to say that the battle will be fought in other places, that the centre of the struggle will shift elsewhere, and that these new confrontations may yet be won. That somehow this will restore the historical balance, and that while the resistance in Singur may just become a historical memory, it may be redeemed elsewhere.
It is tempting, but not possible. The woman who spent the night of the 25th in a ditch, hiding from the armed men in masks, declared that she would feed us in style when 'we have driven the Tatas out'. Whether bravado or genuine hope, that meal doesn't seem very likely now. For her, there will be no absolution in a struggle accomplishing success elsewhere. Whatever the eventual outcome of this long confrontation on so many fronts, whatever the resolution or lack of it, there will be something to mourn.
1 comment:
It's great to see you back!
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