State of policy - Bengal politics is sui generis

Editorial
The Financial Express, 16 March


Has what happened in a Bengal village a portent for the rest of India? Yes, suggest TV soundbytes. That’s wrong. Violence of the kind Nandigram witnessed is more or less Bengal-specific. Thanks to the CPM’s praxis over the last few decades, Bengal politics is sui generis. The party and the government are indistinguishable, and Nandigram is as much about taking on the CPM as opposing land acquisition. Why else would the Congress, BJP, CPI and Jamaat all be protesting together? In Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s wholly rational decision to industrialise Bengal, they have, from splinters of inevitable local disputes, fashioned at long last a stick to beat the CPM with. It is vicious because the CPM has been wielding the stick for so long. Nandigram thus is a small but significant challenge to the CPM’s political suzerainty, and the challengers are as brutish as CPM cadres. It’s not pretty. And it confronts Bhattacharjee with the question whether de-Stalinisation of the party is not as desirable as modernisation of the state’s economy. But crucial as these issues are, they do not really affect national politics on industrialisation.

Not that national politics needs any help from Bengal’s politics on this. SEZs have already been frozen. The Congress, despite the Prime Minister’s clear enunciation of the case for industrialisation, seems convinced that giving regularly paying jobs—that is, industrial employment—to rural India is a vote loser. The BJP, despite industry-induced economic success in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where land acquisition has progressed smoothly, has found a paragon of economic rationality in Mamata Banerjee. The rhetoric following Nandigram, however, does have a direct national political implication. If this kind of politics grows louder and more persistent, transaction costs of doing business will increase significantly. Many SEZ investors are apprehensive. Other prospective investors may be put off. Politicians should ask themselves this: does the Salim group really need to invest in India? Weren’t Chinese towns fiercely competing for Posco’s project? Did Tata Motors not have other options for a car plant?