Thursday, August 23, 2012

NANO’S SUMO BITE!

THE SINGUR STANDOFF IS JUST THE MOST PROMINENT EXAMPLE OF HOW THE FALLACY OF ASSUMPTION CAN BE DANGEROUS IN A DEMOCRACY! WRITES ANIRUDDHA BANERJEE

Little more than two years back, Singur — a small town in Hoogly district of West Bengal — grabbed media attention for a historic standoff, which is still what we’d call ‘raw nerve news’ not only in India but also in the international arena. The dream of offering the Rs 1 lakh car to the people of lower-middle strata in India met with a serious jolt when the landless farmers of Singur came out with all guns blazing against the Left-Tata module of pseudo-industrialisation!

However, the year 2007 witnessed a clash of two dreams. On the one hand, it was Ratan Tata whose dream was to come up with the Nano — a commendable vision undoubtedly. On the other, it was West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee who realised that if Ratan Tata’s dream car found its destination in the soil of Bengal, it could unleash huge employment opportunities for the locals and also act as a stimulus to the ‘image-makeover’ strategy of the Left. Subsequently, Buddhadev obliged and directed his administration to acquire 997 acres of land in Singur for industrial purposes. While a few farmers really liked the idea of industrialisation and handed over their lands to the administration, there were many others who still had not made up their minds. The state machinery thought it better to bank upon the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, and rather than going for dialogues and peaceful deliberations with the unwilling farmers, yanked off the land from seemingly powerless farmers. But here came the biggest blow for the West Bengal state government. Little did they realise that media activism and even political avitivism – led by the firebrand Mamata Banerjee – were waiting for exactly this to happen.

One suspects that what started as purely sporadic incidents of hooliganism against the Tata facilities – undertaken by hooligans of course – suddenly found momentum quite on its own, and to the surprise of the initiators, who realised there was something bigger rumbling under. Farmers started holding protest rallies against the state government’s land-acquisition move. When the locals perceived that a foul play was being hatched against them, many self-help groups started staging protests against the Nano project. Besides noted social activists like Mahasweta Devi and Medha Pathkar, scores of other activists rushed to Singur too, supporting the demands of the landless farmers, blaming the project to be a state-sponsored capitalist conspiracy.


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