Zamindari Intact, Resistance Intensifies

Zamindari Intact, Resistance Intensifies

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time - Ninty Three

Palash Biswas
India is transformed into a land of captive farmig. The Zamindari is intact. Brhmins are the masters as Manusmriti ruled thousands years ago. Other uppercastes cooperate and eighty percent of the rest of the Indian population consisting of SC, St, BC, OBC and Minorities have been enslaved with Non Violent Hindutva culture. Thus the Marxist leader from Kerala EMS wrote in his book ` Keralam Malalikalude Mathrubhumi: `Caste system is the greatest contribution madeby the Aryan Brahmins. The present Kerala culture is the gift of caste system and we should be proud of that culture status. Though it was oprresive, it could maintain administrative system. All these are the achievements of caste based feudal system.’ ( p-50-55)

No wonder the Bengali Communists follow suit in West Bengal and tripura to sutain Caste Hindu Hindutva dominance. This time they have got a magic weapon to disldge the SC, ST, BC, OBC, Minorities and Non Bengalies from their homes and livelihood in Rural Bengal as they have been succesful to destroy the Dalit Base in East Bengal partitioning India. Dalits were thrown out of Bengal`s History and geography and now all over India an eviction drive is on terming all of them Bangladeshi nationals.

India is not a nation at all as the Indian constitution declares itself as a union of states. It is only ruling caste Hindu upper castes which continuously assert that we happen to be nation and the patriotism is defined on Nazi lines. The caste Hindu state power demolishes all other antionalities, cultures, languages, religions, identities and so on to maintain hindutva dominance, which is a geopolitics rather than religion. Nevertheless, the incidents of atrocities and castebased, religionbased, languagebased discriminationare faster than the so called economic growth based on Sensex all along the subcontinent crossing borders.It appears as the authorities in this part of the worldare playing the game of poaching halocaust i.e eliminating human species. Systemetic ethinic cleansing continues violeting human rights.

The zamindari may be realised in the infrastructure of west Bengal government itself.

in WB, 75 seats are reserved for SC and 17 for ST. The rest 219 seats are unreserved. Apart from upper castes, 40 percent MLAs are from Muslims. But they have only three cabinet ministersand two ministers of state. No ST MLA is given cabinet status.Of 33 cabinet ministers 16 are Brahmins and out of 11 ministers of state two are Brahmins. 40 percent cabinet minmisters and 18 percent ministers of state belong to Brahmins. There are 44 Kulin Brahmin MLAs of which 11 Mukherjees, 9 Chakrabartys, 8 Bhattacharyas and 2 are Gangulies. This covers 20 percent of unreserved seats. All eleven Mukherjees belong to CPIM.Apart from 44 Kulin Brahmin MLAs there happen to be more 21 Brahmins with different titles.

Well this is the scenerio which was wanted by Shayma Prasad Mukherjee and Meghnad Saha and other caste Hindu leaders who threw Netaji out of India aligning with Gandhi and Nehru to complete the task. They trapped well Fazlul Haq and stimulated the origin of Muslim league in dacca and the concept of two nation`s theory. Only Netaji, CR Das and fazlul Haq could have stopped partition.The ruling classes in Bengal were succesful beyond doubt in alienating leaders like Fazlul haq and Jogendra nath Mandal who mobilised Hindu Muslim praja to overthrow the caste hindu Zamindary. With partition Teh zamindari is quite intact all over in this subcontinent.

Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee is stepping up pressure against West Bengal's two controversial projects, the Tata car factory in Singur and the SEZ in Nandigram.She held a rally in Nandigram on Sunday, which was her first since her hunger strike in December. "Agitations will not stop, taking away farm land will not be allowed, removing farmers from farm land will not be allowed and whosoever is part of the land cannot be removed. It does not matter if they own the land, it does not matter if the land if agricultural land or not or if they are shopkeepers or sharecroppers," said Banerjee.The rally took place where the Indonesian Salim Group has been sanctioned a Special Economic Zone in Nandigram. Police on Sunday fired rubber bullets after teargas and lathicharge failed to quell demonstrators who tried to uproot posts of the fenced off area of the Tatas' car project in Singur even as construction of the boundary wall continued.Eight people, including Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samiti convenor Anuradha Talwar and Singur Krishi Jami Rakha Committee convenor Becharam Manna were arrested, Hoogly Police Superintendent Supratim Sarkar said. One the other hand in Maharashtra, nine debt-ridden farmers in the Vidarbha region ended their lives over the weekend, according to information received here Sunday.Three suicides were reported from Buldana district of western Vidarbha, two from Chandrapur district of eastern Vidarbha and one each from Amravati, Akola, Washim and Yavatmal district, all in the western part of the region.Coming close on the heels of 16 suicides in the last three days of January, the nine suicides have taken the toll of suicides since the July 1, 2006 announcement of the prime minister's relief package to a whopping 1,052. Vinod Vaghare, 28, of Khanapur village in Amravati district, the youngest of the nine farmers committing suicide, had a loan of Rs.54,000 from a private money lender on his head apart from Rs.6,000 from Bank of Maharashtra.

India successfully test-fired a short-range ballistic missile on Sunday, the head of the test operation said.The Brahmos cruise missile, developed by India and Russia, was launched off the coast of the eastern state of Orissa."Mounted on a mobile launcher, the missile was test-fired at 12.15 pm today ... off the Orissa coast as part of its user trial," said A.K. Checkar, director of Integrated Test Range, the body which manages ballistic missile tests.The three-tonne Brahmos, which has a range of 290 km (180 miles) is an anti-ship missile, but also has the capability to engage land-based targets.It is 8 metres (26 feet) in length and carries a conventional warhead weighing about 200 kg (440 lbs).Brahmos can reach a speed of Mach 2.823 (970 metres per second), almost three times the speed of sound, and can be launched from land, ships, submarines and aircrafts.This is the thirteenth test-fire of the Brahmos since 2001.

The launch of the ballistic missile is complete only after a scientific report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the most authoritative climate change study ever produced — has prompted new calls for concerted action to ward off soaring global temperatures and rising sea levels.The report, which put the blame directly on humans, says without action, global warming will deliver catastrophic change, including droughts, flooding, more tropical storms, heat waves and the disappearance of arctic ice in the sea in the second half of this century.The IPCC report identified that human behaviour is responsible for more than 90 per cent of environmental instability that causes climate changes over thousands of years.The global community of eminent scientists who prepared the report said that at a conservative estimate a three-degree rise in global temperatures is on the cards - and possibly 6.4 degrees by the end of the century.Launching the report in Paris, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made it clear that the scientists were simply telling the facts as they are and it was for governments to act.The document has the effective endorsement of the global community, although the report of doom does not shock governments the least, Pachauri pointed out.The report comes after last year's Stern Report commissioned by UK prime minister Tony Blair, and last month's European Commission report proposing an EU effort to keep the rise temperatures well below two degrees.
The cost to the planet, in human and financial terms, would be incalculable.EU experts have now admitted that rising temperatures will kill an extra 11,000 people in Europe a year within 10 years — even if politicians take serious action now.

In singur the protestors also included members of main opposition Trinamool Congress and Left party SUCI who tried to uproot posts at Beraberi Purbopara, Khaserbheri and Bajemelia.At Beraberi Purbopara and Khaserbheri, they were sucessful in uprooting 30 posts but failed at Bajemelia.Earlier reports had said that the protestors had tried to set the posts on fire.Sarkar said the trouble broke out around 11 am when the protestors armed with iron rods, bows and arrows threw bombs at the police, who tried to disperse them. Lathicharge, teargas shells and rubber bullets were used to control the mob.A hut near the site caught fire, he said but denied the protestors' allegations that it was sparked by teargas shells.

The hut was set on fire by the agitators themselves, he contended.

Know Namboodaripad

Elankulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad, (June 13, 1909 – March 19, 1998), popularly knows as EMS, was an Indian communist leader and the first Chief Minister of Kerala. Namboodiripad was one of the architects of unified Kerala. He was renowned as a committed socialist and a marxist theorist.In 1934, he formed the Congress Socialist Party, a socialist wing within the Indian National Congress and was elected as its All India Joint Secretary from 1934 to 1940. During this period he was also elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly (1939).
He remained committed to socialist ideals and his compassion towards the downtrodden working class made him join the ranks of the Communist movement. He was considered to be one of the founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Kerala, for which he had to go in hiding for many years. But when the CPI split in 1964, EMS stood with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)). He served as a member of Central Committee and Polit Bureau of CPI(M), before becoming its General Secretary in 1977, a designation he held until 1992. He was a member of Polit Bureau of the party until his death.

India achieved its independence in 1947 and the state of Kerala was formed in 1956. In 1957, EMS led the Communists to victory in the first election for the state government, making him the first communist leader anywhere to head a popularly elected government.On5th April 1957 he was appointed as the first chief minister of Kerala.He soon introduced the Land Reform Ordinance and Education Bill. His government was dismissed in 1959 by the Central Government, which invoked the controversial Article 356 of the Indian Constitution. He became the Chief Minister of Kerala for the second time in 1967. This time his tenure lasted for two years.

EMS was the Leader of Opposition in the Kerala Legislative Assembly from 1960 to 1964 and again from 1970 to 1977. He influenced Kerala society by his vision on decentralization of power and resources (People's Plan) and the Kerala Literacy Movement.He authored several books in English & Malayalam. Chintha Publication,Kerala has published all his books in title, E M S SANCHIKA . He was well-known as a journalist also.

EMS passed away on March 19, 1998. He was married to Smt. Arya Antarjanam and had two sons and two daughters.

The Zamindari Saga
To Warren Hastings (1772-1785) belongs the credit of consolidating British power in Bengal, and converting a military occupation into a relatively stable civil government. To another member of the civil service, John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, was due the formation of a regular system of legislation. Acting through Lord Cornwallis, then Governor-General, he ascertained and defined the rights of the landholders in the soil. These landholders under the previous system had started, for the most part, as collectors of the revenues, and gradually acquired certain prescriptive rights as quasi-proprietors of the estates entrusted to them by the government. In 1793 Lord Cornwallis declared their rights perpetual, and made over the land of Bengal to the previous quasi-proprietors or zamindars, on condition of the payment of a fixed land tax. This piece of legislation is known as the Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue. It was designed to "introduce" ideas of property rights to India, and stimulate a market in land. The former aim misunderstood the nature of landholding in India, and the latter was an abject failure. The Cornwallis code, while defining the rights of the proprietors, failed to give adequate recognition to the rights of the under-tenants and the cultivators. This remained a serious problem for the duration of British Rule, as throughout the Bengal Presidency ryots (peasants) found themselves oppressed by rack-renting landlords, who knew that every rupee they could squeeze from their tenants over and above the fixed revenue demand from the Government represented pure profit. Furthermore the Permanent Settlement took no account of inflation, meaning that the value of the revenue to Government declined year by year, whilst the heavy burden on the peasantry grew no less. This was compounded in the early 19th century by compulsory schemes for the cultivation of Opium and Indigo, the former by the state, and the latter by British planters (most especially in the district of Tirhut in Bihar). Peasants were forced to grow a certain acreage of these crops, which were then purchased at below market rates for export. This added greatly to rural poverty.

So unsuccessful was the Permanent Settlement that it was not introduced in the North-Western Provinces (taken from the Marathas during the campaigns of Lord Lake and Arthur Wellesley) after 1831, in Punjab after its conquest in 1849, or in Oudh which was annexed in 1856. These regions were nominally part of the Bengal Presidency, but remained administratively distinct. Officially Punjab, Agra and Allahabad had Lieutenant-Governors subject to the authority of the Governor of Bengal in Calcutta, but in practice they were more or less independent. The only all-Presidency institutions which remained were the Bengal Army and the Civil Service. The Bengal Army was finally amalgamated into the new Indian Army in 1904-5, after a lengthy struggle over its reform between Lord Kitchener, the Commander-in-Chief, and Lord Curzon, the Viceroy.

The 1905 Partition of Bengal
The partition of the large province of Bengal, which was decided upon by Lord Curzon, was carried into execution in October 1905. The Chittagong, Dacca and Rajshahi divisions, the Malda District and the state of Hill Tipperah were transferred from Bengal to a new province, Eastern Bengal and Assam; the five Hindi-speaking states of Chota Nagpur, namely Chang Bhakar, Korea, Sirguja, Udaipur and Jashpur, were transferred from Bengal to the Central Provinces; and Sambalpur and the five Oriya states of Bamra, Rairakhol, Sonepur, Patna and Kalahandi were transferred from the Central Provinces to Bengal. The province of West Bengal then consisted of the thirty-three districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapur, Hughli, Howrah, Twenty-four Parganas, Calcutta, Nadia, Murshidabad, Jessore, Khulna, Patna, Gaya, Shahabad, Saran, Champaran, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Monghyr, Bhagalpur, Purnea, Santhal Parganas, Cuttack, Balasore, Angul and Khondmals, Pun, Hazaribagh, Ranchi, Palamau, Manbhum, Singhbum and Sambalpur, and the princely states of Sikkim and the tributary states of Orissa and Chota Nagpur.

This decision proved highly controversial, as it resulted in a largely Hindu West Bengal and a largely Muslim East. Serious popular agitation followed this step, partly on the grounds that this was part of a cynical policy of divide and rule, and partly that the Bengali population, the centre of whose interests and prosperity was Calcutta, would now be divided under two governments, instead of being concentrated and numerically dominant under the one, while the bulk would be in the new division. In 1906-1909 the unrest developed to a considerable extent, requiring special attention from the Indian and Home governments, and this led to the decision being reversed in 1912. It is often forgotten that the same year saw the separation from Bengal of Bihar and Orissa, which, for the first time were made independent provinces, the former with its capital at Patna, the latter administered from Cuttack. This change proved a popular and lasting one.

With this final partition, the Bengal Presidency ceased to exist in all but name, and even this disappeared after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 reconstituted Indian Provincial Government.

And the Superpower
Now the ruling classes in India have decided to use Globalisation to sustain the Hindutva dominance pronounsed in holy scripts like Vedas, Upanaishads and Smirities including Manusmriti. They target to make hindutva global and for this India has to be a Super Power, at least a regional one.


With investment banks predicting that India will become the world's third largest economy within two decades and a CIA report forecasting that the 21st century will be India's, this national self-confidence is spreading fast. 'We no longer discuss the future of India. We say: "The future is India",' Trade Minister Kamal Nath likes to remark.Last week such triumphalist excitement was on display in abundance with the news that the Mumbai-based Tata Group had bought out the Anglo-Dutch Corus Group (which comprises what used to be British Steel) with a $12.2bn bid - the largest foreign takeover ever accomplished by an Indian company.Beneath the headline 'Empire Strikes Back', one paper reminded readers that British colonial administrators had repeatedly tried to stifle the growth of the Tata family business in the early 20th century. 'Corus, the erstwhile British Steel and one of the icons of Her Majesty's Empire will now fly the [Indian] Tricolour,' the paper said. 'It's the first step towards what we call the Global Indian Takeover,' a front-page headline promised.

Travel a few miles outside the bubble of prosperity in Delhi or the financial capital, Mumbai, and this superpower mania can seem bewildering. Beyond the sleek glass-tower blocks that house call-centre offices on the outskirts of the city, and the extravagant, Florida-style apartment complexes (titled with imaginative dishonesty 'Bayview Heights' or 'Heritage Luxury'), the new India suddenly disappears.

Instead there is a vision of a more troubled India, where around 700 million people scratch a living out of agriculture and some 300 million battle to survive beneath the poverty line. Horse-drawn carts dodge trucks as they drive the wrong way down the national highway, overloaded with leaking sacks of grain. Visibly weak infant children break stones in the central reservation, helping to repair the road surface.

Health Minister Ambumani Ramadoss highlighted these paradoxes in a speech he made recently: 'India is on its way to becoming a superpower, but unfortunately 50 to 60 per cent of children under three years are undernourished,' he said. 'We have the IT revolution, but then we have this pitiful infant mortality.'

The two most powerful people in India's government are at pains (at least in public) to restrain the national surge of triumphalism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently highlighted the inherent tastelessness in harping on about the country's glorious economic destiny at a time when such a large portion of the population continued to be excluded from the benefits of growth. Singh urged his listeners to remember the 'vast segments of our people who are untouched by modernisation; who continue to do backbreaking labour,' and, with characteristic honesty, listed the countless obstacles standing in the way of enduring economic success - illiteracy, failing healthcare, lagging education systems, crumbling infrastructure, hunger, poverty.His words were echoed by the leader of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, who warned against the prevailing 'superpower obsession', emphasising that while India had become a country of 'dazzling prosperity' it still remained a nation of 'dehumanising poverty'.Both leaders have a vested political interest in avoiding the spirit of self-congratulation which surrounds them; appearing to be sensitive to the needs of those excluded from the country's financial boom is a vital part of their electoral strategy.But the words of these leaders have done little to quell the simmering excitement in the media and the business community. Indians already view themselves as the second most powerful nation in the world behind the United States, according to a study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, and among international leaders there is no doubt about India's soaring global stature.

India's indispensability to the US was displayed last year with the sealing of a ground-breaking civilian nuclear pact. Last month the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, came with a contingent of 150 senior business people from the UK to display Britain's own desire to expand trade ties with India (although his message was drowned in the far noisier debate over whether comments made on Celebrity Big Brother represented lingering racist attitudes in Britain towards India.) There have also been visits by trade delegations from China and Russia, eager to capture business.

It is a peasants' movement in West Bengal: Citizens' panel

Gargi Parsai

The "mass uprising" should not be mistaken for right-wing politics

NEW DELHI: A group of concerned citizens "with a Left orientation" who visited Singur and Nandigram on a fact-finding mission have observed that the struggle against the Government take-over of agriculture land for industry was a "land issue" and the protests there were a "mass uprising" which should not be mistaken for right-wing politics.

"The State Government alleged that there was a communal overtone to the struggle of the people but we found remarkable communal unity on the ground and that people's protests cut across political differences. `We were all CPI (M), but now we only have our movement,' said a woman who did not want to wander around like gypsies carrying tents on their backs,'' said historian Sumit Sarkar, journalist Sumit Chakravarty and Tanika Sarkar of the Jawaharlal Nehru University at a joint press conference here on Friday.

The other members of the Citizens' Committee who visited Singur and Nandigram included Colin Gonsalves, Supreme Court advocate, and Krishna Majumdar of the Delhi University. They also met a large number of politicians.

Presenting their Interim Report, the members of the committee described in detail the actions leading to violence at Nandigram and the police action to curb the protests.

"We found the people's fury was genuine. It was partly due to lack of transparency. They were not part of any discussion about matters that concerned their lives and livelihood. Singur villagers learnt of the land acquisition for the Tata factory from newspapers. They claim that holders of 360 acres have refused to accept cash compensation. There is no land for land rehabilitation, only cash compensation and that too much below the actual price," said the team, adding that their impression was that the people were prepared for a long struggle.

"It is a peasants' movement and the main Opposition, the Trinamool Congress, is fishing in troubled waters,'' the panel members observed.

In Singur and Nandigram, unregistered sharecroppers and agricultural labourers — numbering several thousands — are not included within the category of compensation. "Property alone has value, not labour."

RSP, CPI seek LF meet on Nandigram crisis

Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Feb. 3. — The Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Communist Party of India plan to seek a Left Front meeting to discuss Nandigram crisis. The two parties will write to Left Front chairman and CPI-M state secretary Mr Biman Bose to convene a meeting as soon as possible.
“After the recent killings in Nandigram, we were made to believe that the issue will be discussed at the Front. But no meeting has been called till now. In the meantime, the Opposition has made an issue out of Nandigram,” an RSP leader said. “We need to tackle the situation before it gets out of hand,” he added.
RSP and CPI leaders had discussed land reforms and problems arising out of land acquisition during recent meetings of their national bodies. Though both parties supported the industrial policy, they prescribed caution when it came to acquisition of fertile land in the districts. It is apparent that the rise of the Jamait-Ulema-e-Hind in minority belts has become a cause for concern among the Left allies.

Economic times
Salvaging Singur, Slowly but surely
ARINDAM SEN GUPTA

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2007 02:01:00 AM]

The protests forced the Buddha government to look beyond the feedback from local comrades. It realised that things weren’t as simple as they were made out to be — it wasn’t just a case of desperate politicians trying to whip up a storm in a teacup

Singur: It is the day after Basant Panchami which is celebrated as Saraswati Puja in West Bengal. Tarun Sangha, a youth club of Bajebelia, a village hugging the southern fringes of the land fenced off for Tata’s small-car project, has organised a puja with a difference. Apart from the devi’s idol that has been taken away for immersion in the morning, there is a photo exhibition in an adjacent enclosure — an exhibition on government ‘atrocities’ in Singur.

It does not take too long to go through the exhibits: grainy newspaper photos, photographs of Gandhi and Lenin, some excerpts of their speeches and a few fiery slogans like ‘We will give blood, but not our land’ in Bengali. Outside there’s a placard in English: ‘‘Oh, Goddess of Learning, Buddha and Tata have snatched everything. Please illuminate us with all your blessings to fight back.’’

If a TV camera were to pan on this exhibition and then on to the faces of slogan-shouting boys attracted by television, the images reaching your drawing-rooms would be one of fierce opposition to the Singur project. But that would be misleading. For, when you go there minus the pull of TV cameras, the picture looks more sedate and nuanced.

The angry boys are missing. Barring a lone dog stretched out in the sun next to the flowerpot adorning the middle of the exhibition, there’s no one else. In the background, you hear an over-used tape recorder warbling Dhoom 2 numbers. You look up to see the green spread of a young potato crop, beyond that the factory fence, and on the blue winter sky a trail of white left by a streaking jet. It’s an uncanny juxtaposition of the rural with the modern, but not exactly a violent one.

At the heart of the happenings in Singur, which has come to be the symbol of a countrywide passionate debate on land acquisition for industry, are three questions. Who are the people being dislocated by it? Who among the locals are opposed to the project? And who are in its favour?

To take the last question first, three categories of people readily agreed to give their land for the project. One, the absentee landlords, who owned land in Singur but lived in cities like Kolkata; two, the share-croppers (bargadars) whose names are registered in government records; and three, cultivators who stood to lose only a part of their land.
For the absentee landlords, their Singur property was giving scant returns — perhaps a sack of rice or potato a year if the bargadar felt like giving anything at all. A sum of Rs 20-30 lakh or more, depending on the size of their land, that the acquisition would give them was a windfall, a tempting opportunity to be encashed. Not surprisingly, they were the first to queue up to give their consent.

Registered bargadars followed soon after. For them, too, a compensation of Rs 2-3 lakh was an unexpected gain. While they worked on the land and earned a livelihood from it, they did not own it. They had the security of a designated tract of land to work on. That would go now, but they would suddenly possess a sum of money that they had never thought they would. And, they still had their labour to sell. Overall, it was a win-win proposition for them.

The third category to give their consent were landowners who risked losing only a part of their land, as only a portion of their holding fell within the notified factory area of 997.11 acres. Most of them reasoned that as they could retain a part of their land, they did not risk losing their agrarian way of life. Yet, they could make some good money, on which they could earn interest or use it on a daughter’s marriage, repair of their homestead or on their children’s education. All in all, it looked an attractive opportunity.

That left those who are opposed to the project. They, too, can be divided into three broad categories. First, the non-registered bargadars, who over the years have been unable to get their names recorded by the state land reforms department. So far their bargadar rights were not threatened; but they never imagined something like the Singur car project would pop up and threaten their livelihoods.

This is exactly what happened when an impersonal bureaucracy, on the orders of the Left Front government, fresh from a thumping election victory that probably bred arrogance, reached Singur with its compensation package on the basis of government records on landowners and bargadars. The package itself was not bad: for landowners, Rs 9 lakh an acre for mono-crop land, Rs 13.5 lakh an acre for multi-crop land, and for bargadars 25% of the land value, which would be at least Rs 2.25 lakh an acre. About 15-20% of the factory area is multi-crop land, the rest mono crop. Clearly, the problem was not with compensation, it was with the way it was being doled out, leaving out many people who have been equally dependent on the land and eked out their living from it.

These were the large number of unrecorded bargadars. And a small number of primarily daily-wage labourers: bullock-cart drivers or rickshaw pullers, small-time plumbers and mechanics who serviced the farmers as well as landless labourers who helped them during sowing or harvesting. They were left high and dry.

A few small landowners whose entire holding fell in the notified factory area also felt similarly dispossessed, even though they were eligible for compensation. For this category of cultivator-landowners, a way of life seemed to be coming to an end. While the acquisition took away from them the resource that gave them a living they were familiar with, they did not have the skills to take to alternate employment like trade or service. The money coming their way also looked little to give them the lifelong security that land did. It is their children who articulated the fear of total dislocation of life with slogans like ‘We will give blood, but not our land’ at the Tarun Sangha Saraswati Puja.

It was ostensibly to uphold the cause of these three categories of people that Mamata Banerjee, Rajnath Singh, P R Dasmunsi, SUCI and a few Jadavpur University-bred Naxalities moved in. While the debate centred on Mamata & Co’s political motivation, on whether industrialisation could ever happen in India with such ‘short-sighted, anti-industry’ groups, there was no getting away from the fact that a large number of people were getting a raw deal in Singur.

The greatness of democracy lies in the fact that it forces governments to look at the real reason behind protests. The Singur protests did precisely that by forcing Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the Left Front government to look beyond the feedback from the local comrades. They soon realised that things were not as simple as they were being made out to be; it was not just a case of desperate politicians trying to whip up a storm in a teacup.

A wiser CPM soon handed the job of salvaging Singur to a different lot of local leaders. At the same time, the state government took a step that has gone a long way in taking the sting out of the protest — it directed its land reforms department to identify and register all non-recorded bargadars. They were promised the same compensation as the recorded bargadars: at least Rs 2.25 lakh an acre.