Farms vs Factories

Editorial
TOI, 16 March

In light of the massive toll inflicted by police firing in Nandigram — 12 are reported killed and over 50 injured — chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's offer to withdraw the notification for land acquisition and shift the SEZ project elsewhere looks more like a ruse meant to distract villagers who had barricaded the area.

Such deception, together with the knee-jerk reactions of police in firing on villagers, cannot win trust for any industrialisation programme. Neither can the situation be salvaged by blaming “outsiders” nor "Maoists" for the violence, as the CPM has done. At its root is the Left's own incoherence on liberalisation.

For the last two decades it had propagated the myth that West Bengal's land reforms have turned it into a bucolic paradise, and industrialists or foreign investors are irrelevant to its economic progress. Then it did a sudden U-turn. The chief minister decreed that people needed to move from farms to factories on a large scale to eliminate poverty; land reform was summarily shown the back door.

What the CPM hasn't realised is that it isn't an either/or choice. Land reforms are all very well, but they can work only up to a certain point. What happens when land is distributed widely, but holdings get increasingly fragmented due to an explosion in population?

Unless industry comes up to absorb excess agricultural labour, living standards will decline. Let alone industry, even agricultural policy can't be reduced simply to land reform — roads, literacy and rural electrification are all deficient in Left-ruled Bengal.

A one-point agenda of land reforms is like a man with an excessively developed torso, but weak knees and flabby muscles everywhere else — he is likely to keel over and fall. Neither does it help when the Left pushes reform policies in West Bengal and opposes them everywhere else.

Instead of using brute force to paper over its contradictions it should be prepared to openly make the case for industry, capital and foreign investors, and discuss plans for fair rehabilitation of those whose lands are acquired for industry. When capital was the villain, industrial gheraos were organised by politicising the police — the latter would stand by and watch as unions took the law into their own hands.

Now the wheel has come full circle — the same police are providing cover for CPM cadre as they terrorise Nandigram's villagers. Unfortunately economic illiteracy is not a monopoly of the Left alone; it is shared by populist politicians across the ideological spectrum. Industry and agriculture aren't necessarily opposed but can complement each other. But since politicians prey on division, they are likely to take a schismatic view.