NANDIGRAM:
Hats off to the great Indian stratagem that is now centuries old
— get the poor to bad name, abuse, fight, kill, butcher the
poor. And now India as well as the world is witnessing that one
class of people, the so called emancipated comrades of the Indian
communist variety, reveling in abusing, raping, killing the people
right in the state of West Bengal, not very far from Calcutta.
And the arraigned against- nuclear deal comrades
of India suddenly wanted the Center to shut its eyes towards
Nandigram. SO they were quick to strike a bargain. Sonia Gandhi and
Manmohan Singh calibrated their responses on Nandigram, and India
rushed to IAEA for talks on the next step towards safety guards and
eventual nuclear deal.
Bargaining is often a shameless game when the
powerful indulge in it. The CPI(M) has ruled West Bengal for three
decades now. Uninterrupted three decades. Notwithstanding the
slightly better saga of land reforms than in the rest of the
country, the West Bengal’s government of the Reds has singularly
failed to incorporate minorities into power levers, poverty levels
continue to zoom ever higher, and the only significant achievement
of the Left seems to have been the well-oiled party machinery which
ensures that right from the village-talukatehsil- district level, it
is the local party chieftain who remains the power center.
With such
a political mafia ruling, it was but natural that the CPI(M) was
soon to tilt towards the profiteer, the corporate, the market face
of the Shahukaar, and start acting as his stooge. In a
country where the issue of land reforms has lingered inconclusively
for 60 years, the comrades vowed to clear the Special Economic
Zones (SEZs) in six months. The trick? Simple.
Just snatch thousands of acres of fertile land from the poor at
abysmally low rates, give it to the corporate houses, ask them to put
up industries there, and call the entire fraud a huge
progress.
Except that the poor did not agree to the whole great plan
of separating them eternally from the land they have been tilling
for decades.
In March, the world watched horrified as police guns
pummeled unarmed villagers with bullets and bulldozed their way
through Nandigram. But the poor, most of them Muslims (yes, that is
one big untold story of Nandigram), got together under the banner of
Nandigram Bhoomi Ucched Pratirodh (Resistance to Land Acquisition)
Committee, and captured their own land back, partially because the
comrades were shamed no end for having evicted the poorest of the
poor, that too in West Bengal.
But shame has an expiry date when not
bolstered by real conviction. It was easy for the Left to make noise over
Tehelka’s expose of mass murderer Narinder Modi. It was easy for the
Left to adopt a so-called progressive stance on Nuclear Deal with
the United States, proclaiming the Reds as the guardians of India’s
sovereignty. Soon, under pressure from the rich corporate fatties,
shame was past its expiry date.
This time, Marxist foot soldiers
made sure that blockades and threats and the stealth of the night
would keep them protected from public gaze. Of all the people, of
all the butchers, the Reds had thought the poor won’t be able to
tell their horror stories to the wider world. Or perhaps they were
too sure of their capacity to swallow shame. Soon, the world heard
the cries and the bone-chilling stories of rape, plunder and
murder that broke through the shroud of silence. Shamelessness,
however, remained the leitmotif of the comrades. The West Bengal
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, drunk on unmitigated power
and the backing of the corporate honchos, claimed that the
protestors in Nandigram had been “paid back in their own coin.” The
mask was off. The CPI(M) top brass had permitted its foot soldiers
(remember, they too poor people) to raid Nandigram and shoot, kill
and rape to re-capture it. “Re-capture it!” The CPI(M)’s terminology
showed its war mentality against the poor.
The reprimand by even the West Bengal’s much
respected Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi was of no avail. Apologists
come in many forms, often as critics also. As Barkha Dutt wrote
recently, “Nandigram may well be a complex cocktail of contradictory
ingredients distilled into oversimplification by a liberal media
(but) its faultlines run through several layers of debate. Economics
marked out the original battle-lines between different models of
development. Politics catapulted the always-dramatic Mamata
Bannerjee into the role of a lifetime. Religious politics and a
sizeable Muslim population created an opportunity for the
reactionary Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind to play to stereotype and oppose
“imperialism”. And a contentious land acquisition policy (made worse
by a blundering administration) set the stage for a violent faceoff
between the Marxists and the Maoists.” Unfortunately, it is not that
simple. How can any government possibly justify this kind of illegal
storm-trooping?
How can a state’s police force and an entire
administration look the other way? And how can you strike deals like
Nandigram violence for nuclear deal? The Diaspora must speak up,
particularly that in the United States. Once even the so-called
progressives start arguing that in certain circumstances it is
permissible for the administration to lapse into deliberate
paralysis, you are entering terribly dangerous territory. India
today lives in this territory of mind. Big Business is projecting
leaders like CPI(M) top brass as brave reformers, but wait till you
find how the Indian State is also being paid back in its own coin.
(The next edition of the WSN will feature a detailed
Special Report on how the Indian Nation’s writ is being challenged
across large swathes of the country, symptomatic of the “same coin”
philosophy.)
Read Also
