On the 20th and 21st of September I attended a meeting organised by the Nagarik Mancha in Kolkata on the condition of workers in West Bengal, specifically in relation to social security schemes like pension, P.F., and E.S.I. The cosy two day meeting in the Indian Council for Social Science Research on what is now Jadunath Sarkar Street, was revealing in ways that well made American horror films are revolting. We- me and S, representing our respective organisations- had gone through the Nagarik Mancha report on factory closures and the transformation of urban space in Kolkata. A beautifully detailed work, that extensive report helped orient us to Nagarik Mancha as well as the state (we could just as easily say plight) of workers in Bengal. On the 22nd, after great indecision, S helped me take an on the spot decision (for which I am utterly grateful,) about making a longish journey to Madhyamgram. We set out from Tollygunge in a C18, taking in the bustling streets of the city, slowly yielding to less populated and urban scenes after Ultadanga. At Chowmatha, I saw for the first time, what I had only heard of the day before- a rickshaw van, which is simply, a fruit/vegetable cart where instead of fruits or vegetables, the human buttock is rested. One of those strange innovations that beg to be tried out!
The Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti (PBKMS) office was like walking into an old relative’s house in the more archaic parts of Kolkata. Close to three hours of talking to S and Swapan Ganguly put in perspective both, a lot of what is going on in the state and the Nagarik Manacha meeting. In the midst of talking sharply but politely to a reporter, and rifling through sheets of papers on NREGA (not to mention receiving calls from Singur,) Swapanda contextualised all my thoughts accumulated over the past two days. His invaluable and unwarrantedly welcoming and friendly tolerance of my ignorant questions will remain for me the most crucial and cherished aspects of that trip. What I will try and do in the following few paragraphs is to unpack the information I collected in notes and in memory, keeping the now all-important ‘Singur question’ in mind.
First of all let’s get one thing out of the way: unpopular political stands can only be taken through unequivocal courage and conviction. In a country where the red carpet is readily rolled out for capital and industry, the act of shredding that carpet is of utmost importance. The analogy is less militaristic than militant. The stakes in this debate are high, and they keep getting higher every day. I’m reminded frequently of a quote attributed to Malcolm X: “I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.” What these words reveal is the sheer hypocrisy of certain discourses of non-violence that conveniently see popular violence as savage, even as they close their eyes to the structural violence that drives people to their limits. In this context, I can shed no tears over the ‘loss’ of Tata. Ill-conceived authoritarian projects deserve graves more watery than this. In many ways by now Singur has overtaken Nandigram in terms of public memory. I tend to go along with the view that the victory in Singur has come at the expense of the loss of huge middle-class support, which will possibly immediately line up behind Buddhababu. In Nandigram the unrestrained Stalinism of state violence meant that civil society was shaken out of its illusions about industry, and corporations had to stand back and play to their constituency by keeping shut. In Singur however, both these parties have been vocal about their desire to see the Nano on the streets. What this means, from my perspective, is that Singur is a landmark victory of popular resistance against the onslaught of corporate capital and the state. In fact, along with Raigad, (where farmers just a few days ago rejected the Reliance SEZ through a vote,) Singur establishes a precedent. One stands for the democratic voice of popular sentiment, the other for what happens when that democracy is violated. (Incidentally, with Reliance having declared doubts over how genuine the Raigad vote was, I will only say Watch This Space, because that story is far from over.)
West Bengal has had an unhappy historical tryst with industrialisation. Looking back on the state today one would cringe to think that this is Communism in action. West Bengal is Communism betraying whatever little it had left to salvage its reputation. Thirty years on, the abyss is staring back. Over and over again, bitterness and anger was the common refrain of those I came in contact with. It doesn’t matter who they are, what their political affiliation is. In some ways I would guess that the Left feels angrier than anyone else. A sustained and relentless attack (there is no word more appropriate, though many much harsher,) has weakened and crushed the industrial working class- those fabled warriors of conventional Marxism. Trade Unions have failed totally and completely. The lesser of their crimes is not taking up the cases of laid off and jobless workers and securing their pensions and P.F. dues. Their greater crime is that under the garb of Unionism central TUs have become money-making machines, corrupt and despotic, deploying- along with the rest of the party machinery- apparatuses of state terror in the lives of people. This is not overtly violent terror, but a more menacing kind, that operates within the structures of the everyday, that makes itself accepted in the heart of society. One taxi driver from North Calcutta, driving us to Keyatala, in the course of general venting against the government responded to a question about Singur with the words “shob shesh hoye galo, ebar shilpo ashche (everything is finished, and now industry’s coming.)” In spite of all this, what truly surprised me was how the Bengali middle class, having lived through a lot of it, would still prefer to see the CPM return to power in the next assembly elections- because according to them, the Trinamool is a party of ‘goondas.’ No rational analysis seems possible of a stand like this. Surely any fool can understand that even if the TMC got its five years in power it would never be able to build up a Stalinist machinery as well-coordinated and perfected as the LF one. Still, an explanation there is. In my view one of the signal achievements of this regime has been its ability to give its violent politics a degree of acceptance. Communist violence has gained bourgeois respectability. While Mamata Banerjee is still seen as a less sophisticated woman who hasn’t quite mastered the English language, the Left Front’s men murder in style: they are intellectuals, poets, visionaries, bhadralok.
Into this torn country investment has suddenly come riding in. Many specific questions have been raised over both Singur and Nandigram. Fact-findings and independent investigations by a range of civil society and democratic rights groups, as well as TUs like PBKMS, have exploded the myths the government built its project on. Swapanda point out something that only began to catch the eyes of the biased elite media in the last few days of the controversy: that the Tata-Government deal was never made public. At every stage both parties stepped in to vehemently deny access to the agreement. Obvious questions arise over this, given the fact that Singur is not Utopia but is in fact financed by public money. What is in the agreement that neither party wanted anyone else to know? What kind of concessions, exactly, could the government have given that it had to protect its agreement with such vengeance?
Common knowledge of Bengal’s industrial past, and the specific knowledge contained in the Nagarik Mancha report made plain another fact, raised another fundamental question. By all accounts there are staggering quantities of land that are lying unused after old factories shut shop. Couldn’t these lands be given for newer industrial projects? Swapanda not only answered in the affirmative, but right there in front of us he rattled of three locations where these kinds of projects were possible. One has to wonder why the government refuses to do such an easy and seemingly fair thing. Aseem Srivastava, quoted in The Citizens’ Initiative exhibition in JNU, gave one possible reason: industrial houses prefer to occupy fertile land since all facilities are already in place and they need make minimal investments on infrastructure. This might be true, but only up to a point, for the final allocation of land is not in the hands of industry but of the state. And I wonder whether here something more important than logistics comes into play: ideology. One can address this at the level of a teleological reading of history within Marxist tradition (and Buddhadeb has given ample scope for such a reading,) or one can address it at the level of a much broader fascination with capital, industry and modernity that plagues a certain section of Indian society today. Perhaps both are true to some extent. But here a deeper question comes into play. Politically, the mindless droves going into orgasmic frenzy at the thought of industry choose to intentionally misunderstand the opposition’s political ideology- calling them anything from Luddites to much worse. More importantly, this general trend of people screaming endlessly about the virtues of industry is also produced by deeply problematic notions of what development entails. Swapanda’s insights into the Bengal countryside, the challenges of implementing NREGA and the ‘Jean Dreze proejct’ helped me sort out this line of thought. It is curious that Jean Dreze has been silent of an issue as important as this.
Amartya Sen however, has not. In a third-rate piece published by The Telegraph on the 20th of September, Sen- for long much maligned by Marxists of many hues- claimed that the Singur project was “essentially sound.” He went on to suggest that the protestor’s were irrationally following the “old physiocratic illusion of prosperity grounded only on agriculture. The latter piece of romantic thought cannot but fade over time with the influence of realism (no country has ever achieved much prosperity on the basis of agriculture alone). But at this moment realism looks like a distant dream.” It’s hard not to notice the depoliticised (and one would add dehistoricised, but then again, a soul as puny as mine is after all talking against a Nobel Laureate, so…,) voice of development in these lines. An rationalist-authoritarian belief in his own “realism” makes it so easy for him to condemn these people who are fighting for their livelihoods as suffering from old “physiocratic illusions.” One could walk two-centuries down memory lane and examine the effects of rapid and rampant industrialisation on most of the world, but that would just take too long. Instead, I wish to just ask how the Singur project was “sound.” First of all, it is a small car project. Call me what you want, but I don’t think a car is very high up on the list of developmentalist industrialisation. Secondly, in real terms the project is a disaster not only because it deprives thousands of their livelihood, nor because it will never provide the employment it promises to, but because it will lead to an unimaginable space crunch in our cities. I have believed from the beginning that a lot of agitators pointing to the environmental effects of cars have spoken in an elite tone. They have often not taken into account the economic aspirations of those who are less well off. Still, the solution to that problem surely cannot be unleashing the car on populations that will then have- ironically- nowhere to go! Thirdly, I’m frankly a little shocked to hear the Nobel Laureate’s condemnation of the agrarian way of life as a “piece of romantic thought.” (Notice by the way, the underhanded way in which all the actions of his opponents are immediately confined to the domain of the irrational, they are under ‘illusions,’ they have ‘distant dreams,’ they are ‘romantics,’ they are devoid of capacities for realist reflection.) Calculations and testimonies of various sources- from experts to The Citizens’ Initiative team- have across the board said that Singur was fertile, highly so. In fact, Swapanda’s estimates of what is lost are nothing short of shocking.
Development produces monsters in the garb of princes. The Dark Knights of developmentalist projects ride their chariots through our fields. In a strange absurd way public debates have shifted the focus from the violence of development to its endless potentials. According to this narrative the claims made by various authorities are always genuine and can be taken at face value. According to this narrative power doesn’t exist in these contexts. According to this narrative the wiping out of five-crop lands for the sake of a 1lakh car is a-okay as long as the car looks sleek. Credit must go where it’s due: a handful of groups like PBKMS have taken a bold stand on the industries question. They have put their necks on the line, arguing for a way of life that most of us secretly or openly wish to see end. Even among ardent activists there has been, over the last two years, a certain taboo-like reluctance to deal with the industries question head on. Having to qualify any critique of specific industrial projects with a disclaimer that one does not oppose industry in principle is revealing enough of the tyrannical mode in which thoughts and opinions are controlled. As the world becomes freer and freer, it appears, restrictions become more stringent, boundaries of subversive ideas are guarded more fiercely. If nothing else, Singur shows us that this order can- and will- be challenged, that the challenge will set the terms of debate, that success is possible. Could this mark a turning point in the present history of the onslaught of capital? Could this (and other insurrections in days to come) force the fossilised left to rethink development, industry, ideology? One can only be cautiously optimistic. Many battles still remain to be fought. But this is as good a start as any.
