India / Singur

If WB Government had really a good intention of protecting farmers' rights to their land, why the process of listing names of the unrecorded sharecropper has started only after the protests? The administration didn't have any prior information about their existence? And what about CPI(M) party machinery and its Krishak Sabha? Has it got defunct at grass-root levels?

Medha Patkar has her own findings on the number persons really wiling to sell their land off to the government. She claimed that nearly 315 landholders of the 400 families interviewed in the four villages - Madhyapara, Gopalnagar, Beraberi, Bajemelia and Khaser Bheri - were against the land acquisition bid, according to a sample study. Aloke Banerjee's report on November 29 in HT (Singur villagers ready to die for their land, Left firm) confirms the fact.

A sharecropper, if he is registered in the BL & LRO office, has some rights on the land. He can move court if the landowner refuses to pay him anything after selling the land. But the unrecorded sharecorpper has no such claim and therefore no scope for compensation under the law.

Today, The WB Congress Party (Pradesh Congress) officially announced to have parted ways with TMC on the pretext of TMC's alleged hobnobbing with the communal BJP. In fact, they have long seeking an escape route. Quite naturally, the WB Congress cannot afford to get involved in any any kind of militant opposition against an agenda, which falls within the overarching structural reform-project so much championed by their party in the centre.

Let us recall once again, in this context, that the structural reform is essentially a market based response at overcoming constraints , the univeral panacea strongly recommended by Bretton Woods institutions - IMF and World Bank for all developping nations.

Nowadays, it has become highly out of fashion to be critical about their exploitative motives. The reform alias industrialisation discourse is so much hyped at national and international levels, that it is almost impossible to take a structuralist position, emphasising the need for massive domestic investment to build capacity, especially in infrastructure but also in industry generally, using the state as an entrepreneurial agent to stimulate investment.

Therefore, in the name of the economic growth, the State will serve as an agent to the national (The TATAS) and foreign (The SALIMS) private investors and unleash its coercive agents to crush any movements standing up against the interests of these private entrepreuneurs.

What I am trying to stress on is, "Singur" is not merely a story of Buddha-Mamata ego-trip so much the way the media is trying to paint the picture. It's a saga of a deep rooted contradiction of free market vis-a-vis structuralist economy where the "Private Industry", a symbol of free-market mode of development enters into head-on coflict with the "Agriculture" still bearing the tinges of protectionist structural mode of development.