Heroic Buddhadeb

Gurcharan Das
TOI, 24 February

When you have been teaching bad ideas to people for a couple of generations, they tend to catch up with you. This is poor Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's dilemma, as he attempts heroically to break with his desperate past. (Very true-IP)

To begin with, he has to contend with the pervasive envy of peasant societies in places like Singur and Nandigram. Peasants believe that society's wealth is more or less fixed so that one person's gain must be another's loss. (The author seems to be too smart to understand what peasants believe in - IP)

They view the social system as a zero sum game and it is hard to imagine that the overall pie may actually grow in a way that everyone will be unbelievably better off through mutual cooperation (by selling land, for example, to Tata's car factory).

Furthermore, Buddhadeb must deal with the communist cadres' suspicion (The suspicion is though quite legitimate - IP)of the market, which is now so built into Bengali genes, and is exceeded only by their general hatred of businessmen.

In the 1980s, I used to work in Mumbai and i worried that our factory was next door to that of a famous European company that had been on strike for almost a year. Their Marxist trade union leader had the dangerous psychological make up of Duryodhana. (Readers, see the scabrous attitude of this crooked Baniya - IP)

Once he said at a gate meeting: "I don't care if we sink this factory as long as the European manager goes down with us." When this kind of attitude gets institutionalised in the mental make-up of a militant movement, the result is de-industrialisation. (The author speaks like the CM of West Bengal! - IP)

This is what happened in West Bengal in the 1970s. Company after company left the state as the unions preferred to sink the economy rather than come to agreement with industry.

Like Deng in China, Buddhadeb is determined to make a break with this self-destructive past and bring prosperity to his people despite themselves. He sees in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) his chance to bring about an industrial revolution in Bengal. (IP fully agree with this view!)

He realises that SEZs will only create pockets of world-class infrastructure. Ideally, he would like the whole of Bengal to have world-class roads, ports, power plants, but reforming is slow business in a democracy. (true! - IP)

So, you create pockets and hope the effects spill over. But in a democracy you must also face your Nandigrams, something that Deng didn't have to think about in China. (Bravo!- At last he realised! - IP)

The significance of Nandigram is that it has brought home to everyone the unfairness of our present, inhumane system of forcibly acquiring land from farmers. As Swaminathan Aiyar has eloquently pointed out, government should not be in the business of acquiring land. It ought to be a voluntary transaction between farmers and industry. (This is what is the usual norm in the market economy. - IP)

And if there is a deadlock say if 5% of the farmers refuse to sell, then it should be put to a community vote. I do hope that this is the sort of model displacement policy that the Centre is working on at the moment.

Because of competition between so many SEZs, i think our farmers are going to get rich beyond their dreams in the months ahead. (A pipe dream. - IP)

We are now at a tipping point, and if we don't seize the moment, history will not forgive us (This is the very phrase that WB-CM is chattering at every public meeting after the Singur atrocities. - IP) . With all their flaws, SEZs will create millions of jobs and eventually lift the poor into the middle class (Blatant lie! - IP). Fifty years hence, when India's per capita income is $25,000 per year, historians will remember Buddhadeb's vision of a vibrant, prosperous, and forward looking India.

In comparison, Mamta Banerji, V P Singh and Medha Patkar's India is a perpetually victimised peasant society that belongs in the garbage dump of history. (This is what is your very own fate, Mr. author. - IP)