A little more than a month apart, the West Bengal government mourned and celebrated. On July 29, the Trinamool Congress government gave a State funeral to Gnanpith and Sahitya Academy award winning litterateur, Mahashweta Devi and on September 2, it celebrated Singur Divas - which surely, was the kind of irony that only life can conconct.
Mahashweta Devi had been an activist all her life, using her pen to write of people relegated to the fringes of society, be it gang-raped ‘Draupadi’ or hapless members of ancient tribes, like her protagonist ‘Chotti Munda’. When police brutality on women and children opposing land acquisition at Singur made news in regional dailies and on television channels, the frail octogenarian did not just pick up a pen. She took her activism to the streets.
Her statements and messages and the subsequent march by ‘civil society’, straddling actors, musicians, film, theatre and television personalities, earned the hick town on the outskirts of Kolkata a dot on the map. Had the agitation over land acquisition at Singur for Tata Motors’ Nano project not brought public attention on the then Left Front government’s industrial policy, who knows if its subsequent efforts to acquire land at Nandigram, would have met with the resistance it did.
Protests over land acquisition are neither new, nor specific to India. Around the time, the first murmurs of protests emerged from cultivators at Singur, unrest over acquisition of farmland in China inspired cover stories in at least two magazines circulated worldwide. The Orissa government’s efforts to acquire land for a mega steel plant at Paradip were marred by protests and violent clashes between betel nut growers and the State police ever since the project was offered to South Korean steel producer Posco in 2007. The protests continued till July 2015, when Posco announced its plans to put the project on hold.
The epoch-making denouement of the stir on the verdant vegetable fields of Singur, was surely an outcome of the sheer media blitz the sleepy town received since December 2006, when a share-cropper’s teenaged daughter was gang-raped and burnt alive within the barricaded site of the Tata project. It was only fortuitous that Singur happened to be 40 kilometres away from a metropolis with a long tradition of radical thought and literature, where a doughty Padma Vibhusan awardee, decided to raise her voice.
The protests and outcry over the gruesome murder at Singur conflagrated into a blaze that spread to another rural site for industry – Nandigram. The public uproar over the violence that ensued at Nandigram razed the reputation of a coalition that had survived a 34-year tenure in West Bengal and made way for the Trinamool Congress, which had led the protests against the Left Front.
The Supreme Court verdict of September 2, directing the State government to return the land acquired from farmers a decade ago, too will now revolutionize land acquisition strategies of State governments. The 2013 amendments to the law on land acquisition will now surely, be interpreted in the light of the judgment?
This scribe was at Singur in January 2008, when the strife over land acquisition was at its height. Television footage had shown green fields and red-tiled brick houses, wailing women and children and politicians showing solidarity with the farmers. At a massive rally at Brigade Parade grounds, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, then chief minister of a Left Front government, had announced liberal compensations for the land owners and share-croppers of Singur.
A short drive from Kolkata on the Durgapur Expressway, had brought this writer to a giant construction site, carpeted with moist silver sand and strewn with bricks, mounds of concrete, piling machines and other contraptions that go into industrial construction. The Tata Motors plant was visible from the highway, encompassed within a brick wall guarded by some 800 security staff, recruited from adjoining villages.
Beyond those walls, green flags of the Trinamool Congress fluttered in the wind at neighbouring Beraberi village. The only testimony to the once green fields that had till 2006, grown intermittent crops of potato and other vegetables, was an abandoned cold storage and three white owls nestling amidst the fronds of a palm tree that had survived the bulldozers. The rumble of motor cycles from the villages beyond the boundary of the factory site, suggested prosperity, though not perhaps, of the kind that could pay for a small car.
Singur dwellers were till then happy to talk of the irrigation canals that dated back to the Muslim period of Indian history and the wealth of the land, enriched by the distributaries of the Ganges as they flow to the sea. Television footage had shown village elders, protesting that their children knew of farming and did not want jobs they did not know how to do. Jobs at the Nano factory were among the incentives being offered to the land-owners and share-croppers at Singur.
The denouement of the tragic tale of the Singur farmers who were being deprived of both their hearth and livelihood in the name of development - was unimaginable then. The dramatic climax of that story will now hopefully, inspire new thinking on the eternal skirmish between farmlands and industrial development.
BW Reporters
Madhumita Chakraborty is a business journalist with long innings in media. She worked with The Economic Times, The Telegraph and The Financial Express before joining BW Businessworld. She has also been a columnist with Hindustan Dainik, a commentator on economic affairs on Lok Sabha Television (now Sansad TV) and a researcher.
