Will a letter in time save nine... hundred acres in Singur?

Manash Ghosh
The Statesman

KOLKATA, Feb. 23: Renowned jurist and former judge of the Supreme Court Mr Justice VR Krishna Iyer in a letter has “personally appealed” to his “dear old comrade” Mr Jyoti Basu “to put pressure on your younger comrade Buddhadeb to give up the large acquisition of land in Singur and withdraw from there altogether”. He has suggested that land already acquired and available at neighbouring Dankuni could be offered to the Tatas for relocating their small car project. Alternatively, land already acquired by the state government in Durgapur or in Haldia port area could also be offered for the Tata small car project. The letter, faxed to Mr Basu on Tuesday evening also suggested an alternative middle path wherein a compromise on the land issue between the two extreme positions taken together by Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Mr Ratan Tata on the one hand and by the Singur land losers on the other is sought to be affected. The letter says that if “for some reason” the state government “refuses to give up Singur, the other alternative would be to reduce the area under acquisition from 997 acres to say 275 acres to 300 acres. This is being suggested on the ground that none of the existing motor car factories in India has more than 300 acres of land in their campuses.” Mr Justice Iyer, who was law minister in EMS Namboodiripad’s 1956- 1959 Kerala administration, India’s first Communist government, goes on to say: “If the area under acquisition could be reduced to one third, the whole tension prevailing in the area could be defused. In the block of land that will be earmarked for the Tatas if there were reluctant landowners, they could be given land-for-land outside the area earmarked for Tatas out of the remaining 700 acres. After they have been rehabilitated on land-for-land basis the rest of the land could be de-notified. That would immediately ease the whole situation”. The jurist has prefaced his proposals with a personal touch saying “We, of the socialist thought, stand for agrarian development and peasant prosperity, not the glamorous automobile abundance with Yankee Yen. I write this letter taking liberty with you based on my conviction that you are among the great Marxists in the country with a long and distinguished administrative experience and the vision of a statesman.” Mr Iyer goes on to say that though Mr Basu is no longer in power. “yet, on matters of principle, your words carry weight from a Marxist angle”. Regretting that Indian leaders “like Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram” have forced the Indian economy into a “billionaire syndrome” where the welfare of millions of Indians is ignored and the hungry denied basic human rights, he points out that government, paradoxically enough, “issues licences for the manufacture of millions of cars”. “This car-crazy fate has perhaps influenced the West Bengal economy. The Tata brand of socialism as against Gandhain redemption of destitution has persuaded the present able chief minister to deprive the agriculturists of Singur of nearly thousand acres of fertile land to facilitate Tata’s automobile factory. Sri Buddhadeb who once declared that he was running a capitalist and not socialist government, is disenchanting me and many like me of the Marxist perspective of the common man’s welfare... This is happening because government bends to the needs and economic power of big businesses. Peasant prosperity is nearer development conscience than the glut of fashionable Western, sophisticated four-wheelers. So I plead with you in the name of Indian socialist thinking, to adopt one or the other of my proposals. This is because the Marxist party is a leader of the proletariat as opposed to ‘proprietariat’. Westoxication is the opium of the Indian governing class which travels only in cars and planes. We want Indian humanity to have land where greens grow and everyone will have food and work.” He concludes his letter thus: “Did Marx not tell us: ‘philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it’.”