Shame, CPI(M): Find politics for industrialisation

Editorial
Economic Times, 16 March

We condemn the brutal killing of 12 people by the police in Nandigram. The incident highlights political failure in West Bengal — both state inability to engage the people in a dialogue and an aptitude for violent coercion against dissenters on the part of the CPI (M). It also highlights the urgency of evolving a democratic method of transforming traditional habitats and occupations for the purpose of setting up modern industry. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is right to proclaim his determination to go ahead with the Tata car project at Singur. But it would be a gross mistake for him to close his eyes to the political culture his party has wrought in West Bengal that seeks resolution of disputes by force and violence. How does he account for CPM activists sealing off all access points along a 30-km radius around Nandigram, even as the police carried out the bloodbath? That clashes over ‘acquisition of land’ for the proposed SEZ have occurred in spite of the chief minister announcing the withdrawal of the land acquisition notification and offering to shift the project elsewhere if Nandigram did not want it is, indeed, galling. For the CPM cadre, which has worked on the principle of ‘occupying’ and ‘holding on’ to areas, retreat is never an option. It sees the LF government’s amenability to popular demands as an erosion of its influence and prestige. The party has been sustaining its cadre network by dispensing patronage. This is yet another reason why the CPM cadre finds it difficult, as it has in Nandigram, to yield to popular pressure, and give up its forcible control over areas in the state. An all-pervasive political culture of coercive violence, which precludes any attempt to evolve consensus through dialogue, has been its inevitable result. The government’s failure to engage the Nandigram protestors in negotiations, and its decision to send a 5,000-strong police force to deal with them, as if they were occupier-enemies, are symptoms of this crisis of democratic politics. In fact, that is precisely why the question of development in West Bengal has come to be posed as an opposition, between agriculture and industry, and not in more inclusive terms of sustainable income growth and full employment.