Zamindars of globalism

Jeremy seabrook
The Statesman, 24 December

The macabre death of an 18-year-old girl on the disputed site at Singur adds an even more sinister turn to events in West Bengal, where “development” is ceasing to be a promise, and has become a menace to the people. Development, supposedly an organic unfolding of economic and social wellbeing, is now, for those whose land and property is confiscated, a forfeit of rights, liberties, and increasingly, lives.

When the Indian government acquires land from farmers, it does so under the British Land Acquisition Act of 1894; a significant process, since it illustrates once again continuity between imperial rule and the leaders of an India whose people are still subject to many archaic, colonial laws.

This should come as no surprise; for the Indian authorities, at the national and state levels, are pursuing a colonial, economic policy. The pity is that they have no colonies. This compels them to place pressure on their own people, particularly poor people, who have the historic misfortune to own land required for infrastructural or industrial purposes, for the minerals that lie beneath their feet, or the forests that shelter them.

The case of Singur is one of thousands worldwide, where industrial houses, national and international corporations and other generators of wealth have been ceded land on which agriculturists have gone about their peaceable occupation for generations.

It is an irony observed by many, that the West Bengal government, earlier accused of having driven industry away from Kolkata because of its Leftist militancy, should now be enticing it back with other people’s property. The socialist axiom that all property is theft has a cruel resonance in the hinterland of Kolkata; the more so in the seemingly impossible contradiction of the enforcement of neo-liberalism with a Stalin-like coercion.

It ought to be clear by now that people will not meekly renounce their heritage simply because they are obstructing the will of the powerful. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee intones the mantra “Without industry and commerce there can be no progress”. He has managed the worst of both worlds, an ugly hybrid: the ruthless authoritarianism of Communism and the monstrous social injustice of global capitalism.

The dispute between spokespersons for the farmers and government on the readiness of landowners to accept compensation is a sideshow. Leaving aside that only a proportion of those with an interest in the 1,000-acre site have received any monetary recompense from the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation, the very notion of compensatory payment should also be questioned.

Land represents livelihood in perpetuity. A sum of money in hand - no matter how apparently substantial - is no substitute for an asset whose capacity for production, if carefully tended, is of indefinite duration.

Wherever farmers have been “compensated”, the inedible harvest of money, unlike that of rice or wheat or corn, is soon used up, and the great majority are reduced to the status of landless workers on other people’s farms.

Add to this that the land acquired by government is invariably at lower than the market rate, and the sense of injustice is compounded. The people to be expropriated are never consulted, but are presented with the fait accompli. Mr Bhattacharjee says: “The Tatas will get their land”. The deal is done; the land transferred, its owners a minor irritant in these imperial transactions.

The shift from agricultural to industrial society does indeed represent an irreversible transformation. For one thing, it turns people into dependents of the market, and does away with all future possibility of self-provisioning in food. Newly urbanised and industrialised populations soon learn that they are at the mercy, not of the seasons and the rhythms of the agricultural year, but of the savage discipline of what the market will bear. This establishes a different form of poverty from that which depends upon the vagaries of nature, for the seasons of money are even less unpredictable than the weather.

Of course, macro-economic statistics are deployed to tell a convincing story. Only one quarter of the GDP of West Bengal comes from agriculture, though this provides employment to two-thirds of the people. It seems only logical that a large number of workers on the land should be “shaken out” (in the homely pepper-pot image), and sent to find their fortune elsewhere.

The Tata plant planned for Singur is supposed to provide 2,500 jobs, with an additional 7,500 in ancillary products and services ~ for the Rs 1,000 crore to be invested, this is very expensive job-creation indeed, and will make an insignificant impression on the 50 million people still depending on the land. But this is to be a “people’s car, costing a mere $2,000 per vehicle. Perhaps it should be called ‘some people’s car’”, because it will remain out of reach of the vast majority of the people. In a state where almost half of all children are undernourished, it may seem a bizarre priority of socialism to provide cars before food. Let them eat fumes.

There will, of course, be other consequences of increased car production. The State will have to provide more roads. More oil will be imported. Congestion and pollution will entail further health costs. It will be said that cars are what the people want. True, no doubt. But it is equally true that they emphatically do not want some of the consequences ~ more traffic accidents (more people die annually on India’s roads than the casualties of a medium-sized war, half as many as have died over 15 years in Kashmir), a decline in food security, the degradation of the environment and loss of fertile land.

But these things the people must have, since they are the inevitable outcome of an economy based upon the growth in private transport.

It is clear that the true costs of Tata’s flagship project are not entirely contained within the modest price-tag affixed to the shining metal that will soon doubtlessly be hot off the assembly line at Singur. The real cost is detached from the cover price, and will be paid by others who are unable to benefit from the purchase.

India’s “development” is imitative and inappropriate. Every error made by the West is duly being repeated by an India which seems voluntarily to have suspended all capacity for independent thought. The China model also serves as secondary inspiration to the sightless visionaries of West Bengal; dazzled no doubt by Shanghai, and impressed by the draconian methods of their nominally Communist kinsfolk in Beijing, the inconvenience of poor Indian farmers must not pose an obstacle to their dystopic subservience to corporate greed.

In their admiration of the development of China, it is unlikely that the leaders of West Bengal have visited the tainted countryside, tasted the poisoned water, or sampled produce from the polluted soil of that happy model of the future, nor yet examined the birth defects, cancers and pollution sicknesses which disfigure the people.

There is another issue in the passage of land coveted by Tata into its possession. Tata has always prided itself on its ethical policies and charitable work. When I first came to India in the early 1980s, I visited some villages in Maharashtra whose fortunes had been transformed by Tatas’ commitment to the rural poor. It seems that, following the shootings at Kalinganagar in Orissa last January, and now, the bid for fertile agricultural land in West Bengal, Tata is adapting to the ethics and morality of globalism.

Welcome to the world of dog eat dog, the competition of cut-throats and the race of the rats. Progress indeed. In the hinterland of Kolkata, Singur exemplifies urban-rural linkages, the shadow-land between urban and rural, in which increasing numbers of the world’s people survive in livelihoods that are neither fully industrial nor completely rural.

Development as land-grab means the extinction of rural life beneath concrete, glass and marble. The skyscrapers of development are grandiose funerary monuments in the graveyard of an agricultural way of living pronounced defunct by the doctors of universal progress.

How sad it is, the atrophied imagination, the desiccated heart and the arid morality of those who call themselves leaders, but are unable to understand the simple distinction between money and the true wealth of the world.

The author lives in Britain. He has written plays for the stage, TV and radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed to leading journals around the world. email:yrn63@dial.pipex.com