The Duckponds of Jibanananda
It was the mention of duckponds that brought Jibanananda Das to my mind. If only the poet of Ruposhi Bangla had been alive today. More than seventy years ago, mesmerized by the beauty of his native land, Jibanananda mused on his own reincarnation and wrote some of the most celebrated lines in all of Bengali literature:

When I return to the banks of the Dhanshiri, to this Bengal,
Not as a man, perhaps, but as a shalik bird or a white hawk,
Perhaps as a dawn crow in this land of autumn’s new rice harvest,
I’ll float upon the breast of fog one day in the shade of a jackfruit tree.
Or I’ll be some young girl’s pet duck — ankle bells upon her reddened feet —
And I’ll spend the day floating on duckweed-scented waters..
(Clinton Seely’s translation)

What then would he have made of Nandigram? What would he have made of Singur? The Tehelka reporter Shoma Chaudhury starts her exposé with a vivid description of shujola-shufola rural Bengal:

Singur is emerald country. Even an urban cynic, unmoved by pastoral idylls, can see in an instant that this is no poor man’s burden. Land here is wealth. Singur is merely 45 kilometres from Kolkata… Almost every villager’s house here is pucca, a secure shelter of cement and polished red stone. The fields are lush with crop — rice, jute, potato, and a myriad vegetables. And every 500 yards there is a pond swimming with ducks.

The next line reads:
Beauty never plays a role in the reckonings of macroeconomics.

The Bullets of 14th March, 2007
On Wednesday March 14, clashes between villagers and police forces took place in Nandigram in East Medinipur district in West Bengal. The police opened fire. 14 villagers were killed according to official figures; the true number is said to be higher. CNN gives the background to the clashes:

The trouble in Nandigram began January 7, after the leak of government plans to acquire 22,000 acres of land and build a petrochemical plant and shipyard in a Special Economic Zone.

The disturbances of March 14 prompted the government to temporarily suspend plans for scores of so-called Special Economic Zones, which are meant to attract investors with generous tax breaks. Most of the zones, including the one planned for Nandigram, were to be built on farmland.

The SEZ was to be developed by the Salim Group of Indonesia who had signed a deal with the West Bengal government. As mentioned, the SEZ would require the acquisition or confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of fertile farmland. As many as 29 villages in East Medinipur would be affected by this programme of land acquisition designed to support greater industrialization. It would dispossess the villagers of their lands and livelihoods and displace them from their ancestral homes.

What is remarkable in this tragedy is the arrogant attitudes and brutal actions of a government that is democratically-elected and that is filled with nominal socialists and communists. In true deshi fashion, the police forces’ brutality has been backed up by the ruling party’s hired goons. Pro-government papers such as Ganashakti have been justifying the tragedy in the name of Shilpayon (industrialization) and Unnoyon (development). The government’s mouthpieces accuse various parties – Trinamool, Naxalites, Jamayet, environmentalists - of forming a conspiracy against the development of West Bengal.

Some might argue that communists have a long and inglorious history of brutalizing the peasantry (cf. 1930s Ukraine, 1950s China). Rather early in their theological training, they fall in love with the process of industrialization and the creation (forcible, if necessary) of an urban proletariat. However, the present government of West Bengal can hardly be said to be attuned to the teachings of Marx and Mao. What motivates them instead is the dollar sign, the siren song of big business.

Large parts of West Bengal are now seething in protest. The ever-vocal intelligentsia is up in arms. Leading lights of Kolkata culture – from Aparna Sen and Indrani Halder to Gautam Ghosh and Suman Chatterjee - have demanded the chief minister’s resignation. Renowned poet Shankha Ghosh has resigned his membership of the Bangla Akademi. Novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya (son of Mahasweta Devi) has not only renounced the Bonkim Award he won for his novel Herbert, he has also handed over his prize money to the people of Nandigram. Others too have been resigning their seats at various state-sponsored cultural institutions and returning their Robindro Awards, Bidyasagar Awards etc.

A collection of articles on the crisis:
* Shoma Chaudhury’s reportage - Bengal shows the way
* Arundhati Roy’s ferocious interview with Tehelka- ‘It’s outright war and both sides are choosing their weapons’. If you have time to read only one piece, read this.
* Well-known columnist Praful Bidwai reviews the situation
* Professor Amit Bhaduri, one of India’s leading economists, wonders: Development or Developmental Terrorism?
* The Financial Times has an overview of SEZ and its discontents - India’s farmers grumbling as SEZs eat up land

Economic Growth and the Rule of Law
The killings in Nandigram may not concern us in any obvious way. But Purbo Medinipur is also a part of Bengal. It is not a million miles from Bangladesh, nor are the larger issues completely irrelevant to our own development path. In fact, anyone who followed the protests in Kansat or Phulbari in Bangladesh last year will experience a peculiar sense of déjà vu when reading the reports of the villagers’ resistance in Medinipur.

Phulbari and Kansat, Singur and Nandigram – these are the faultlines, the stress fractures of our rapidly changing world. On the one hand is our pastoral past. Or should we call it our pastoral present? The vast majority of our people are still connected to the land, their lives governed by the rhythms of the seasons. Their traditions and cultures accumulated over generations and are inseparable from the land - the land which is the key element of their lives, the same land which is at stake in Nandigram.

On the other hand is the juggernaut of growth. Economic Development, we are told, is imperative if our populations are to enjoy a higher standard of living. But runaway growth demands a high cost as well, yet there is precious little discussion of that. The policymakers are mesmerized by glittering GDP numbers and want more and more – 6%, 7%, 10%. The urban middle classes love their new-found affluence. The multinationals, the mass media and the advertising industry are only too happy to feed the frenzy of consumerism to newer heights. But outside their air-conditioned bubble, arable land is hijacked for “infrastructure” (read eight-lane highways), ancestral villages drown under “power projects” (read dams), green fields become industrial wastelands.

The development theorist Arthur Lewis taught us that industrialization is a necessary stage. There are too many people on the farm in poor countries (even more so after the Green Revolution), and some of them should move to the city, work in factories, build roads and bridges, participate in the growth process. But I doubt if even Lewis foresaw what Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had in mind for Nandigram - using naked force to grab property, and turning a settled, prosperous population into vagrants and beggars in their own land.

The problem here is democracy. The problem for the West Bengal government is the rule of law - more specifically, property rights. One of the major bottlenecks, for example, in India’s drive towards double-digit growth is the abject state of its infrastructure. (In any comparative study of China and India, this point comes up repeatedly. Only yesterday, a Financial Times feature on global trade revealed that the port of Shanghai alone shipped 21 million cargo containers last year, whereas the whole of the Indian economy only managed 5 million containers.) Given legal hurdles and bureaucratic bottlenecks, India’s infrastructure and industrial capacity is set to remain lightyears behind China’s. The latter boasts scores of new industrial parks and export zones, a world-class network of roads and highways that is expanding rapidly as we speak, massive ports and airports that literally sprout out of the ground and become fully formed in a matter of a few years. But such dazzling speed, scale and efficiency are only possible within a political system that tramples all over property rights and individual rights. There’s no doubt that China’s political system has helped to deliver the kind of growth that will very soon make it a world power to rival the USA. India cannot hope to match that performance under its present political dispensation.

But what was the cost in China? Who knows how much farmland was illegally acquired to make this miracle possible? (At least 1.5 million hectares, according to one Chinese official.) How many villages were drowned by the dams? How many farmers displaced, how many killed?

Politicians in nominally-democratic countries like India and Bangladesh are caught between a rock and a hard place. They like to boast about their “people’s mandate” but at the same time they are desperate in their desire to prove their pro-business credentials to the corporates and MNCS. They are enthralled by the shonar horeen called “GDP growth”. For its part, big business is only doing what it is built to do – maximize profits. Corporate Social Responsibility is a joke and there is no depth that big business will not sink to in order to make an extra buck - whether it means flattening a score of villages, bulldozing virgin rainforest, even pandering to cheap jingoism over a cricket tournament (ladega to jeethega, anyone?) Hey, if it shifts some more product, it must be alright!

The question is whether democratic politicians should collude with corporate power to push through projects of doubtful legality. The West Bengal government obviously thought that it should – the bloody excess of Nandigram was the result. (Even in China, the natives are getting restless – 20,000 protesters collided with a thousand policemen in Hunan province a fortnight ago over rising living costs. Such protests have been gaining in volume and frequency all across the Middle Kingdom, as the voiceless majority realize just how much the new economic order is loaded against them.)

There is also the insidious mentality spreading these days that whatever is good for the urban middle classes must be good for the nation as a whole. The steep rise in inequality between the classes is largely brushed under the carpet by the mass media, eager as they are for trivial “content” that doesn’t disturb the comfortable repose of the bourgeoisie. The Tehelka article summarizes: The underlying stories everywhere are the same. Land takeover in the name of development or big industry. Summary eviction and displacement. Inadequate compensation. Lack of informed consent. Police action and state oppression. The breakdown of democratic process. And the arrogant sense that unless you have a high, urban standard of living and speak English, you are not a legitimate Indian.

Bangladesh, with its unsustainable and inflationary growth rates of 6-7%, will soon be facing similar questions, if it is not doing so already. Phulbari was an early example of competing demands ending in bloodshed, and there may well be more. The creaking infrastructure of Dhaka, for example, is thoroughly unfit for the capital of a modern economy; some day, the planners and policymakers will come to the realization that the only way to achieve a more rational infrastructure system is through expropriation of (some) private land. Also, as development and industrialization reaches out to the regions, our politicial leaders will be faced with the same questions that plague Bhattacharya babu. What to do about those pesky farmers and their pathetic patches of land standing in the way of some mega-project? What will be the rules of engagement? What will be the policies with respect to compensation, relocation, employment, benefits? What limits on the behaviour of the corporates, what duties towards the surrounding population and the environment? I hope our political leaders spend some time thinking about these questions and reflecting on the West Bengal experience. The welfare of millions will depend upon it.

An interesting side note: It is ironic how the CPI-M’s rule in West Bengal began with a massacre, the little-known Morichjhapi incident of 1978. After 30 years, its electoral decline may yet be heralded by another massacre. A comprehensive analysis of Morichjhapi can be found here.