This land is not yours to give

It was a happy day for the citizens of Calcutta yesterday, when the Supreme Court quashed the land allotment made by the recently ousted Left Front govt of West Bengal to former cricketer, Saurav Ganguly. The cricketer had been granted a sizeable chunk of prime land in Salt Lake to start a private school, with all norms being given a go by, thanks to his friend, Asok Bhattacharya, the former urban development minister. The Supreme Court rebuked the Left Front government for adopting “questionable means” to provide the plot and “failing to discharge its constitutional role”.

Read the report here.

Jyoti Basu's Bengal

Kanchan Gupta has written about Jyoti Basu.

While his piece helps to put in perspective the pathetic outpouring of praise in the mainstream media, the comment leaves one with a feeling of the main things remaining unsaid.

Bengal's present plight owes significantly to JB, but the story begins much earlier. The CPM in West Bengal is but one aspect of Bengal society and politics, it is a natural expression of the immense cleavages and distortions characterising the society.

Calcutta and Bengal's economy, in 1947, was overwhelmingly an obsolete colonial edifice. While those nurtured and groomed by this colonial city and its institutions - like JB himself - went on to do well for themselves, there was no thought for the public domain, and in particular industry and manufacturing. That called for a massive renewal, and when the soil's brightest and best were most needed they were nowhere to be found. But that was only to be expected in the barna bibhakto samaj that is Bengal.

The 60s and especially the mid- and late-60s were a bad time for India as a whole. It was a huge signal for change and renewal. Our much-lauded green revolution is an example of a mission that was prioritised by the Indian state, and completed. But West Bengal simply had to suffer the "structural adjustment', of being rendered redundant and irrelevant. And by that juncture, the mid-60s, the fragile and tenuous (formal) political environment in the state had also collapsed to yield outcomes such as the UF govts. The iron fist of the Indian state asserting itself - was seen in the SS Ray period. But with the massive anti-Congress sentiment in the state (and the manufacture of electoral outcomes by the CPM, despite the fact that the state has, even since 1977, had a Congress vote share which is only a little less than the Left votes), Indira-is-India could not reclaim Bengal. And the state has had to be embroiled in its own contradictions and discontents.

JB's record is a classic example of TINA, there was no alternative. What this means is the utter bankruptcy of the Bengali bhadralok society, its erstwhile education and institutions and its political ideologies and formations, in conceiving and rendering a socio-economic order other than the inherited one. A bhadralok society that lives off the subaltern folk who comprise the common people of the land. All that one instead saw was an endless cycle of negativism, self-destructiveness, violence and breakdown, demolition of all that was. JB presided over an order which was simply like gaseous vapours emanating from a dung heap, or maggots in a carcass. And he ensured that the party would reign supreme in that dungheap order.

Bengal today is not anything, it is only a non-thing, it is the negation of the British order that was salubrious for the bhadralok and viscerally hated by everyone left out of the circle of privilege.

Everyone likes to partake of the benefits of a place or a situation, but a few must build, conserve and renew. In Bengal, everyone fled when things got difficult. Or huffed and puffed, in parodies of revolution.

It was not labour militancy which scared off capital and led to capital flight; rather, labour militancy itself was the knee-jerk reaction of the (babu-led) trade unions' leadership in a situation of all-round industrial collapse owing to technological and economic obsolescence. Of course, the insanities of the late 60s - early 70s also led to capital and human flight. But it is also important to note that the lion's share of industrial disputes was claimed by lock-outs. That is a telling indicator of the the real power balance in society as far as the proletariat was concerned.

The CPM's tenure in the state has been accompanied by the transformation of the economy into a non-industrial one, the decimation of the industrial proletariat and the growth of a lumpen proletariat. The contribution of SS Ray to the creation of the culture of a politically patronised lumpen army, cannot be forgotten.

JB's bile against the class / community he himself belonged to - but disavowed in his public life - led him to destroy everything held sacred by them. He only mirrored the hatreds organic to the parasitically ruled society. And securely installed was a party ruling the roost over the debris of all that was. The common folk of the land benefited to an extent that the apartheid bhadralok order, in its natural / inherent tendency, would never have enabled. They were psychologically empowered by the party, but otherwise entirely feeble and dependent on the party for survival. But in the main, the CPM order was about keeping people poor and backward, whipping up class hatreds so that a dog-eat-dog environment prevailed, in which it could consistently emerge victorious (in the polls). And the party could be the sole arbiter of everything.

Given what the CPM was, and in a sense what left-ism had been reduced to in the state, that was all that could be expected.

The result of western communist / left ideology in a backward, caste-divided society ruled by Bengali bhadralok.

Nandigram represented the violent revolt of the masses against party rule.

JB epitomised all the contradictions, ironies and irrationalities of Bengal. The unsmiling, emotionless mask that he seemed to wear was actually quite real. He was simply a "virtual' entity, not human, just an abstract compound of all the negatives of Bengal. His personal life and tastes were very far removed from the party he was a major part of. It is actually quite amazing that a man could so completely efface his human-ness all day long, for so many years. He gave himself up fully and completely to and for the party, he made the party his all, and in return the party made him the supreme leader. And he ensured the party reigned supreme. A person completely empty, a polished mirror of the society and the party. And after he left office, he disappeared from public view, leaving the CPM to manage its fiefdom. But we see now that this fiefdom is nearing its demise.

So it is the CPM that should be grateful to Basu.

Bengal never got a Deng, or technocrats. The contradictions and discontents within Bengal society were too powerful for that.

But yes, one cannot fail to recognise Basu's consistent and steadfast abhorrence of communalism. A communal mindset is actually at the core of Bengali bhadralok society, and Basu represents the disavowal of that too. Such a disavowal is also very much a part of the soil of Bengal. But the party he was a part of could not hold on to that for very long. Party membership was no longer an ideological thing, it was simply a means for opportunism,

Hence Basu's rule was a period of absence of communal riots. He ensured that communal disturbances were stamped out at once. As a pre-independence CPI man, he knew all about communal riots. But just as the absence of communal bigotry, a negative, was not accompanied by anything positive at its core, Bengal's record of being free of communal riots was also a record of all-round marginalisation of the Muslim community. And that too was only an indicator of the deeply entrenched communal mindset in the society and its institutionalisation. Basu could not do anything about that. Basu also made the mistake of failing to recognise the rise of Hindutva in the latter part of the 80s, and so he tried to make amends by being the most ardent national champion of so-called "secular" politics, from the latter part of the 90s. That ensured that the BJP was held at bay.

So besides the CPM and the formal Left, it is the Congress at the centre that should be most grateful to Basu.

"West Bengal, with its huge pool of talent, could have led India from the front" ... No. That required leadership, and above all, self-leadership (swaraj), something sorely lacking in the gene pool of the sick bhadralok society. So though independence and freedom was achieved by driving out the British (and then the bhadralok), though swa-desh, self-rule was achieved, real freedom, swa-raj, is still an elusive dream.

Image: Maggots in a carcass, courtesy Bear Blog and Carcass Cam.

Literate city?

Too bookish for crime? Photo: Piyal Adhikary.

I have written earlier about how 'literate' my city, Calcutta is (see here and here.

Well, now the great Amartya Sen no less, has given the ultimate certificate to Calcutta.

I reproduce the report from today's The Telegraph on Amartya Sen's lecture in London.

.....

Calcutta low crime linked to books: Sen

by Amit Roy

London, April 20: Calcutta has the lowest crime rate in the world because of the civilising effect of books, Amartya Sen said today in his keynote opening address at the London Book Fair.

Even by Sen’s exacting standards, it was by common agreement one of the Nobel Prize winner’s most brilliant speeches when he spoke on “India in the Modern World”.

With India chosen as the “market focus country” at the London Book Fair this year, the economist and moral philosopher examined the possible relationship between a love of books and low crime.

After his speech, Sen told The Telegraph: “I don’t know the answer but it is something worth looking into.”

This year the British Council has brought nearly 50 authors from India who, between them, represent 15 languages. Nearly 100 publishers from India have also made the journey to the Earl’s Court exhibition centre in London.

It was pointed out that India is now the third largest publishers of English books in the world. This works out to 15,000 titles a year.

The Indian book market, now worth £625 million, is growing at 10 per cent a year, with Hindi titles making up 26 per cent of the market.

Sen, however, did not deal with dry statistics. His speech made Calcutta sound the most exciting literary city in the world.

The question he posed was: “Does the culture of books influence the life of the city in any profound way?” He then offered an intriguing theory which even the people of Calcutta might not have considered.

“To consider one remarkable feature, Calcutta has, by a long margin, the lowest crime rate in the world, including the incidence of homicide and murder,” he said. “While the number of murders per hundred thousand people per year varies between 2 and 10 per year in many cities in Europe and America, and between 15 and 50 per year in many cities in Africa and Latin America, the homicide rate in impoverished Calcutta is only 0.3 per cent — a fraction of the rate in any other city in the world.”

He then drove him his point: “Indian cities generally have low murder rates, around 2.7 on the average (rather like London but much lower than American cities like New York or Chicago), but Calcutta in particular beats them all — even the famously peaceful towns of Singapore and Hong Kong — in terms of the lowness of homicide rates.”

He came round again to his fundamental question: “Does the peculiar love of books and culture, and here I would add Calcutta’s fondness for theatre, too (often produced at very low cost), have a role here? I don’t really know, and there is no rigorous work on this that has properly tested any of the possible hypotheses.”

He had cleverly planted the germ of a revolutionary thought: “It is abundantly clear that the standard explanation of crime in terms only of economic poverty does not tell us much about the incidence and causation of violent crime, including homicide. There is certainly some research to be done here.”

Sen appeared to speak not so much about modern India but why Calcutta was just about the most fantastic city in the world bar none. In terms of the number of people who attended, the Calcutta Book Fair was the biggest in the world — bigger than even Frankfurt, he stressed.

He said that “the city I came from, namely Calcutta, has a huge book culture”.

He remembered the pavements in College Street with their spread of books and nearby stores jammed with volumes of every description. “I should perhaps mention here, in these precarious roadside shops that the future film director, Satyajit Ray, read publications on films from across the globe, which introduced him to the traditions of world cinema. A considerable part of Satyajit Ray’s affection for the city that he loved despite finding it ‘monstrous, teeming, bewildering’ (perhaps because of that) related to the book culture that expanded his horizon so radically, even on the sidewalks of Calcutta.”

He also disclosed how his own life had been changed by Calcutta’s book culture. “It was in one of the College Street bookshops, called Dasgupta’s, that my friend Sukhamoy Chakravarty found at the end of 1951 a copy of a recent book by a brilliant economist Kenneth Arrow.”

On his friend’s recommendation, Sen read the book “which would radically influence my direction of work. I often wondered whether my life would have gone very differently had my friend, Sukhamoy, not been such a book hound.”

Perhaps Sen’s keynote address should have been called, “Calcutta: why you should book your ticket this afternoon.” Sadly, there are no longer any direct flights from London to Calcutta, a city increasingly isolated from the rest of the world by political and economic Luddites, most analysts would say.

During the question and answer session, Sen demolished the logic behind Mulayam Singh Yadav’s manifesto commitment to downgrade the English language. He argued this would only serve to increase the admitted inequalities between those who knew English and those who did not. The answer, as far as Sen was concerned, was to ensure more people had the opportunity to learn English.

.....

Reading the report this morning, I was seething with annoyance. I wrote to some friends: "I have never heard such piffle in my life! I'm, sure you too would agree, on the basis of whatever you know about Calcutta, how abominable his comment is. Sadly, all the not-so-wonderful "Calcuttans" are going to be full as rosogollas with pride reading this. Would be great if you fired off a riposte! I would love to carry that on my blog.

.....

Sumanta Banerjee wrote:

Amartya Sen seems to have been swept off his feet by his nostalgic memories of childhood and youth in Calcutta, before it became "Kolkata". Being an `argumentative Bengali', and fond of theorizing, he has come up with this rather fanciful notion that the city's low rate of crime (is that substantiated by facts?) is due to its love for books!

To start with ... there are crimes and crimes, various nuances and shades. If burglaries, rape and murder are cognizable crimes, what about nursing-home doctors fleecing their patients and botching up operations (a regular phenomenon in Kolkata), or private tution-hungry college teachers exploiting their students, or a chief minister ordering the police to fire upon unarmed protestors and encouraging his party goons to burn villages? Aren't these crimes ?

And more importantly, aren't the perpetrators of these crimes great book-lovers - the doctors poring over medical texts, the teachers parading their erudition with volumes tucked under their arms, the chief-minister quoting poetry while inaugurating book fairs ?

In fact, by concentrating only on cognizable offences as defined in the Indian Penal Code (like murder, theft, burglary, etc) which are usually attributed to the illiterate, uneducated plebs (those bereft of the knowledge of books), we deliberately wink at the crimes of the educated book-lovers, and thereby betray a class bias.

May I go a bit further? During my research in crime in 19th century Calcutta, I found an interesting connection between the increasing availability of books (on modern chemistry, for instance) to the educated Bengali middle classes with the emergence of new types of criminals (although few in number) from among these classes - quack doctors learning to concoct medicines that could slow-poison some unsuspecting victims, or forgers learning from the texts how to manufacture inks that would delete portions from a will and replace them with a different version without arousing any suspicion. From this finding however I wouldn't jump to the reverse conclusion - that books lead to crimes!

I would have expected Amartya Sen to refrain from a similar simplistic conclusion that a city's crime rate rises or dips in proportion to its love of books. What about other metropolitan cities like London, Paris, New York? Are they less book-loving? Yet, as far as I know, crime rates there are quite high.

.....

Dulali Nag wrote:

Wonder what prompted him to utter such inanities... I believed he was not one to bow to the demands of political correctness. And what about some statistics on the number of book-lovers in New York, London, Chicago, and Mexico City vis a vis the number in Calcutta? And I cringe in my imagination faced with those "Calcuttans" who would be "full as rosogollas with pride reading this". These are the people who actually line the divide between the upper crust and the lower class in Sumanta Banerjee's essay on crime in Calcutta. These are hypocrites of the first order, 100% complacent, and exercise their agency only when it comes to deriding others.

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Ravi Vyas wrote:

Sumanto, a dear friend, kindly forwarded Amartya Sen's lecture at the London Book Fair that you had sent him, about low crime rates in Calcutta becoz of the Bengali's love of books. I fully endorse your view that this is a lot of bullshit but I want to add to it.

I was a publisher for almost 25 years and can claim to know the state of the book market in Calcutta - at least much more than AKS does. Publishers not only publish but also take on the much more onerous task of promoting and selling the books. As chief editor at Longman and later in Macmillan, I know the ground realities. I have walked the streets - College Street and all the rest - like a male prostitute, marketing and selling my wares. So have my colleagues who supported me.

There is a myth about the Bengali intellectual that needs to be exploded. True, long ago there were some pioneers but that is long since over. Besides, the best of them migrated (this includes AKS) to Delhi and elsewhere, where they have done good work. It is NRBs (non-resident Bengalis), not those in Calcutta, who should be commended.

The Calcutta book market is moribund. Nothing moves; it is stagnant. College Street only has the remains of the day. The long and short of this is: AKS has become obnoxious. He pontificates on just about everything - nurition, the virtues of the free press, India-China and all the rest - things he knows little about.

Cynical?

I am often accused of being cynical. But I think I am critical, and discern things that most people are either insensitive to or disregard. In the last 2-3 years, whatever is happening around me, here, in the city of Calcutta, is impossible to bear. I have expressed my sense of depair in earlier posts (see here or here). It is driving me insane. For instance, the air pollution - thanks to polluting buses and auto-rickshaws whose owners have the patronage of the ruling party to remain above the law - is such that people are beginning to drop dead like flies. Or take the testimony of my colleague Amina, whose mother was recently admitted to Calcutta's leading govt hospital; she said its not a hospital but a slaughter-house, run by a mafia of looters. Or consider what one Mr Sourav Sengupta writes in a letter to The Telegraph: "...the culture of unbridled hooliganism that prevails in Calcutta and the rest of Bengal, which have been nurtured by decades of misrule and political nepotism, which in turn have given birth to roughnecks who treat state property as their own. ... Our so-called bhadralok culture is but a thin veneer concealing a rot consuming both Bengal and Bengalis."

So I was glad to re-read a talk by Robert Jensen (2001), which too begins by making the distinction between "cynical" and "critical". He goes on to say: "every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause", and "the joy is in the struggle". I reproduce Jensen's talk below.

Critical Hope: Radical Citizenship in Reactionary Times

After a recent antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he looked at me funny and said, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"

The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance.

Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice. At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary
times.

I don't use radical and reactionary in this case to describe specific political positions, left versus right. I am talking instead about an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. I think the world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. I want to argue that our only hope is to be radical, to be political, and to be radical in public politically.

To do that, I will talk about my own journey from cynicism to hope, my own struggle both for greater understanding of my self and an understanding of something greater than me. I am going to talk about love and justice. I am going to risk being seen as naive or self-indulgent or just plain silly. That's OK; I'm just a good-natured hick from North Dakota. We're generally plodding and slow and often don't realize we're being naive, or when people are making fun of us for it.

Let me start the story when I was younger, in my teens and 20s. I saw that the world was in pretty awful shape. When I looked around at the world, I saw a whole lot of pain. The United States had just ended its terrorist campaign in Southeast Asia -- what we commonly call the Vietnam War -- and was pursuing another by proxy in Central America; rich people seemed unconcerned that their luxury was built on the backs of the suffering of literally billions of poor people around the world; people all over the place were still getting kicked around simply because they were women or non white or gay or different in some fashion; and many people seemed not to care that the ecosystem that sustained our lives was in collapse.

I looked around at all this, and I got cynical. Human beings, it seemed to me, were pretty unpleasant creatures. Human nature, I assumed, had to be pretty rotten for all this suffering to go on and on, generation after generation. Even with the advances in social justice -- and there have been advances, such as the end of slavery, greater recognition of the basic rights of women, etc. -- it is hard to be upbeat moving out of the 20th century, one of the most brutal and bloody in human history, into the 21st century, which promises to be just as, if not more, brutal.

Being cynical appeared to have some advantages. I could step back from all the chaos and be hip. I could make jokes about how stupid people were. I could pretend not to care. I could turn away from the suffering of others because I, one of the hip and cynical, understood just how pathetic a species we were. I thought I was the one who saw it all so clearly.

I stayed cynical, and disengaged, for some time. The fact that I was working at newspapers didn't help; for journalists, cynicism is an occupational hazard that takes great intelligence and maturity to resist, and I didn't possess either quality in adequate amounts. So cynical I stayed, until I went to graduate school and was given the luxury of time to read, think, and study. Lots of people go to graduate school and become cynics, or their cynicism deepens; universities can do that to people. But I got lucky and met some exceptional people -- many of them outside the university -- who helped me see another way.

For me, that way began with feminism. I read a lot and listened to women. I started to not only learn about gender and sexism, but I also picked up a new way to understand the world, a new method of inquiry for examining the ideas and institutions that shape our world. I learned to look at how systems and structures of power operate. I learned to see past the surface to the core elements of those systems and structures. When I did that, I realized that things were far worse than I had thought -- the world was in more trouble than I had ever imagined. I learned about new levels of suffering and oppression.

That's when I stopped being cynical and began to feel full of hope.

That may seem counterintuitive. How did a deepening sense of the scale and scope of injustice and suffering make me hopeful? The answer is simple. For all those years, I was cynical for two basic reasons: I had the wrong view of human nature, and I didn't understand how the world worked. I thought the evil and stupidity all around me were the product of an inherently evil and stupid human nature, and therefore I didn't see any way to fight against injustice. It all seemed beyond our control.

Once I started to understand the nature of illegitimate structures of authority, I realized that in fact people (including me) were not inherently evil or stupid, and that human nature (including mine) was complex and sometimes maddening, but not inherently aimed at the destruction of the world. I came to realize that the authority structures that so bent our lives were powerful and deeply entrenched.

I also realized that most of the channels that the dominant culture offered us for working to make the world a better place were themselves deeply embedded in those authority structures, so that often the solutions were part of the problem. I realized that the analysis and action that could save us had to be more radical than I ever could have imagined. I also realized that at the moment in history in which I lived, there were relatively few people who wouldagree with any of this: People had begun to talk about a "postfeminist" age; the attacks on affirmative action and ethnic studies were emerging; the fall of the Berlin Wall "proved" that capitalism was the only possible economic system; and the United States was celebrating the slaughter of the Gulf War.

So, at the moment I realized the depth of the problem and the forces stacked against justice, I got hopeful. The hope comes not from some delusional state, but from what I would argue is a sensible assessment of the situation. Cynicism might be an appropriate reaction to injustice that can't be changed. Hope is an appropriate response to a task that, while difficult, is imaginable. And once I could understand the structural forces that produced injustice, I could imagine what a world without those forces -- and hence without the injustice -- might look like. And I could imagine what activities and actions and ideas it would take to get us there. And I could look around, and look back into history, and realize that lots of people have understood this and that I hadn't stumbled onto a new idea.

In other words, I finally figured out that I should get to work.

So hope emerged out of cynicism. I began to see the power of radical analysis and the importance of collective action. I began to take the long view, to see that we face a struggle, but that it is not a pointless struggle. The exact choices we should make as we struggle are not always clear, but the framework for making choices is there.

Hope and optimism

I have hope, but that does not mean I am optimistic.

Just as we have to distinguish between critique and cynicism, we have to realize that hope is not synonymous with optimism. I am hopeful, but I am not necessarily always optimistic, at least not about the short-term possibilities. These systems and structures of power, these illegitimate structures of authority, are deeply entrenched. They will not be dislodged easily or quickly. Optimism and pessimism should hang on questions of fact -- we should be optimistic when the facts argue for optimism.

For example, I am against the illegitimate structure of authority called the corporation. I want to see different forms of economic organization emerge. I am hopeful about the possibilities but not optimistic that in my lifetime I will see the demise of capitalism, corporations, and wage slavery. Still, I will do certain things to work toward that.

The same can be said of the problem of U.S. aggression against innocent people in the rest of the world, particularly these days in Afghanistan, where the aggression is most intense. Given the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience, I must confess I am not optimistic that such aggression will stop anytime soon, in large part because those corporate structures that drive the killing are still around. But I will do certain things to work against it.

Or take the large state research university. I am concerned about how the needs of students are systematically ignored and the needs of corporate funders are privileged, how critical thinking is squashed not by accident but by design. I am concerned about the illegitimate structures of authority that I work in and that compel me to act in ways against the interests of students. I am not optimistic that the structure of big research universities is going to change anytime soon. But I will do certain things to work against the structures.

So, why would I do any of those things if my expectations of short-term success are so low? One reason is that I could be wrong about my assessment of the likelihood of change. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life; the list grows every day. For all I know, corporate capitalism is on the verge of collapse, and if we just keep the pressure on it will start to unravel tomorrow. Or perhaps public discontent with murderous U.S. foreign policy is just about ready to crystallize and mobilize people. Or perhaps the contradictions of these behemoth universities are becoming so apparent that the illegitimate structures of authority are about to give way to something that deserves the label "higher education."

History is too complex and contingent for any of us to make predictions. We simply don't have the intellectual tools to understand with much precision how and why people and societies change. History is a rough guide, but it offers no social-change equation. Still, there's really no reasonable alternative except to keep plugging away.

Basically, there are two choices, which are common sense but that I didn't figure out until I heard them articulated by Noam Chomsky: We can either predict the worst -- that no change is possible -- and not act, in which case we guarantee there will be no change. Or we can understand that change always is possible, even in the face of great odds, and act on that assumption, which creates the possibility of progress. (See Chomsky's interview with Michael Albert.)

Every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause. When Gabriel Prosser made plans to take Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the first large-scale organized slave revolt, he was fighting a lost cause, for which he was hanged. When eight Quakers got together in 1814 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, to form the first white anti-slavery society in the United States (the Tennessee Society for the Manumission of Slaves) they were fighting a lost cause. A lost cause that eventually won.

But that can't be the only answer to the question "why should I be politically active." We are human beings, not machines, and we all have needs. It is hard to sustain yourself in difficult work if the only reward is the possibility that somewhere down the line your work may have some positive effect, though you may be long dead. That's a lot to ask of people. We all want more than that out of life. We want joy and love. At least every now and then, we want to have a good time, including a good time while engaged in our work. No political movement can sustain itself indefinitely without understanding that, not just because people need -- and have a right -- to be happy, but because if there is no joy in it, then movements are more likely to be dangerous. The joy -- the celebration of being human and being alive in connection with others -- is what must fuel the drive for change.

People find joy in many different ways. As many people over the years have pointed out, one source of joy is in the struggle. I have spent a lot of time in the past few years doing political work, and some of that work isn't terribly fun. Collating photocopies for a meeting for a progressive political cause isn't any more fun than collating photocopies for a meeting at a marketing company. But it is different in some ways: It puts you in contact with like-minded people. It sparks conversation. It creates space in which you can think and feel your way through difficult questions. It's a great place to laugh as you staple. It provides the context for connections that go beyond superficial acquaintanceships.

The joy is in the struggle, but not just because in struggle one connects to decent people. The joy is also in the pain of struggle. Joy is multilayered -- one key aspect of it is discovery, and one way we discover things about ourselves and others is through pain.

Struggle confronts pain, and confronting pain is part of joy. The pain is there, in all our lives; there is no human life without pain. Pain can become part of joy when it is confronted. Struggle confronts pain. Struggle produces joy.

The joy is in the struggle. The struggle is not just the struggle against illegitimate structures of authority in the abstract. The struggles are in each of us -- struggles to find the facts, to analyze clearly, to imagine solutions, to join with others in collective action for justice, and struggles to understand ourselves in relation to each other and ourselves as we engage in all these activities.

I realize that this struggle doesn't seem appealing to many. I have heard lots of people lately say that they can't cope with the complexity of politics. It seems too much, too big, too confusing. All they can handle, they say, is to focus on their individual lives and do the best to fix their lives. I think these folks misunderstand not just their moral obligation but the nature of progress, individual and collective. We don't fix ourselves in isolation. We don't build decent lives by cutting ourselves off from problems just because they are complex. Yes, there are times when difficult situations force us to turn inward and deal with pressing problems in our lives. I have done that, and I see no need to apologize for it. But I am arguing against the permanent division of our lives into these artificial categories.

Our problems are never wholly individual, and hence they can't be fixed in individual ways. Part of the solution is always to be found in the bigger struggle, in which we all have a part.

I have learned that there is great joy in that bigger struggle. And that leads us back to the abandonment of cynicism and the embrace of hope. Cynicism is a sophomoric and self-indulgent retreat from the world and all its problems. Hope is a mature and loving embrace of the world and all its promise. That does not mean one should have unfounded or naive hope. Wendell Berry reminds us that history shows that "massive human failure" is possible, but:

"[H]ope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found." [Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 11.]

Hope is one of our duties. But that does not mean it is always easy. There are many times, especially since September 11, that I have had to struggle to hold onto hope. The combination of seeing the World Trade Center towers fall in an instance and then watching the unfolding of an illegal and immoral war on Afghanistan has tested my own sense of hope. I managed to hold on for a couple of months, but in the few days before I sat down to write this I could feel my sense of hope fading. At the same time that I have been writing and thinking about the war, I also have been continuing my work on sexual violence and pornography. Both spark the same feeling in my gut -- despair over how cruel people, especially men, can be. When I have to face humans' willingness to inflict pain -- and ability to find pleasure in inflicting pain -- whether in the realm of the global or the intimate, some part of me wants to die; I can't bear it. Maybe some part of me does die.

In the few days before I wrote this, I especially was having trouble in the mornings; lying awake in bed in the dark; trying to reclaim that sense of hope so that getting out of bed would make sense; trying not to think about the war but realizing that not thinking about it would be even worse; dying a little bit inside every morning, in the dark.

But those authentic underpinnings of hope remain. On the day I wrote this, I had a meeting with a student on my campus who had read something I had written about the war and wanted to talk. She said she didn't have anything in particular to ask me. She just wanted to talk to someone who didn't think she was crazy. All around her at work and school, people -- pro, con or neutral -- were refusing to talk about the war, she said. So we talked for a bit. We did politics, in a small way, the way politics is most often done. We talked about how she might organize a political group on campus. But maybe more important, we shored up each other's sense of hope. We could talk about the pain and craziness of the war without turning away.

Real hope -- the belief in the authentic underpinnings of hope -- is radical. A belief that people are not evil and stupid, not consigned merely to live out pre-determined roles in illegitimate structures of authority, is radical. The willingness to act publicly on that hope and that belief is radical.

We all live in a society that would prefer that we not be radical, that we not understand any of this. We live in a society that prefers productive but passive people. I work at a university that is part of that society, and has many of the same problems. Many classes at the university are either explicitly or implicitly designed to convince students that everything I have argued here is fundamentally loony. The same goes for much of what comes to us through the commercial mass media. Some of what I say indeed may be misguided; as I said, I understand that I could be, and often am, wrong.

But, even if I'm wrong in some ways, I'd rather be wrong with hope than cynicism. I'd rather be naive than hip. I'd rather work for a just and sustainable world and fail than abandon the hope. I understand that this position is not wholly logical; it is based on a sense of how we can best make good on the gifts that come with being part of the human community. It is based on a faith in something common to us all, a capacity that is difficult to name, but which is perhaps best summed up by a phrase once used by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Our task simply put, Freire said, is "to change some conditions that appear to me as obviously against the beauty of being human." [Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 131.]

In the end, that is the central hope: We can join together to help build not a utopia but a world in which we can struggle -- individually and collectively, through the pain and with joy -- to get as close as we can to the beauty of being human.


Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He can be reached at www.rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other writings are available online here.

Mr Tata's unpaid bills

Ratan Tata, his puppy Buddhadev
Bhattacharjee on a leash, wonders,
"What happens to it nowadays when it
sees poor people?"

Please Pay Your Bill Before You Leave, Mr Tata!

by D. Bandyopadhyay

Published in Mainstream, Vol XLVI, No 51, 12 December 2008

I

On October 3, 2008, at a press conference at Kolkata, Ratan Tata formally announced his decision to move out the Nano Project from West Bengal squarely blaming the agitation led by the Trinamul Congress for his decision to relocate the plant. This statement clearly reflected some of the discussions that he had with the Chief Minister of West Bengal with whom he was closeted for two hours before the press conference. He spoke persuasively with unwarranted venom.

One cannot blame Tata for his lack of knowledge of the character, trait and heritage of the popular upsurges in West Bengal. Singur was one of the epicentres of the Tebhaga movement in the late forties of the last century led by the old and unsullied Communist Party of India. There is a famous story by Manik Bandyopadhyay called "Chhoto Bakul Purer Yatri" on that episode. Its locale was Bara-Kamalapur in Singur. A blue-blooded bourgeois totally alienated from the common people cannot have any perception about any popular movement against gross violation of their basic right to life and livelihood. He cannot be faulted for it.

After all, the Tatas made their primary accumulation of capital through opium trade in China in the nineteenth century. Use of opium was prohibited under law in China. The East India Company and its minor trading partners, among which the Tatas were one, started illegal importation of opium into China from India. The Chinese
Government strongly objected to this. The British waged the first Opium War (1839-42) in which China lost resulting in the Treaty of Nanjing, 1842. It imposed insulting and highly unfavourable conditions against China and in favour of the British. Then there was a second Opium War in 1856-60 wherein the British triumphed again and forcibly legalised contraband trade in opium in China. The Tatas and a few other Indian traders made enormous profit from this trade in a contraband commodity in China. Wealth creates hauteur. Hence we may excuse Tata for his slightly less than civilised behaviour in slandering Ms Mamata Banerjee at the press conference. He did not show any concern for or kindness to the land losers of Singur but it is reported that he donated US$ 50 million to Cornell University only recently.

But what about the Communist Party of India-Marxist? Did it not take a Royal Charter of monopoly for representing the "oppressed" who stood in constant opposition to the "oppressor" and who are in a constant fight, "a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes"? The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, while opening a SEZ project at the New Town Rajarhat on October 5, 2008, declared that he had "lost a battle, but not the war". A question naturally arises: for whom is he waging this war? While commenting on the adverse economic effects of SEZs, Professor Amit Bhaduri observed: "The devil in angel's guise would soon appear when large populations in rural areas would be rendered landless, jobless, homeless, incomeless, rootless and displaced making way for SEZs, the so-called epitomes of economic development." Bravo Mr Chief Minister, for so transparently exposing the class affiliation of yourself and your party! You have openly promised to wage a war in favour of the oppressors and against the oppressed. It is only to be hoped that it ends in the reconstitution of the society in favour of monopoly capital. In ensuring this objective, the CPI-M would fulfil its historic mission of total subjugation and annihilation of workers and peasants making the world safe for the bourgeoisie. It perhaps validates the saying "Money Speaks"!

The Government of West Bengal (GOWB) published 13 notifications under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act 1894 in July 2006 declaring its intentions to acquire roughly 1000 acres of land in five mauzas of Singur abutting the Durgapur Express Highway. All the 13 notifications had the same common clause. It stated that land mentioned in the Schedule below is likely to be needed to be taken by Government/Government Undertaking/Development Authorities, at public expense for a public purpose (emphasis ours), viz., employment generation and socio-economic development of the area by setting up of Tata Small Car Project, etc., etc.

Since the government cannot acquire any land for a private company except through the procedure laid down in the Chapter-VII of the Land Acquisition Act, the GOWB openly committed a fraud on the law and on the public by acquiring the land in the name of the West Bengal Industries Development Corporation (WBIDC-a government company) for leasing out the land to Tata Motors Ltd (TML). This chicanery on the part of the GOWB enabled the Tatas to get hold of 643 acres of land on lease without paying a paisa. But under this procedure land could be acquired only for a "public purpose". Section 3(f) of the LA Act defines "public purpose". There are eight items under it. But the caveat to this definition is very significant. It says "but does not include acquisition of land for companies". Thus the acquisition of land for the TML was totally illegal. The issue is now pending before the Apex Court. For the exercise of the doctrine of eminent domain a "public purpose" is essential. Hence the GOWB deceitfully tried to make out a case by stating that the small car factory would generate employment and result in socio-economic development in the area. There is no basis for this assertion. Firstly, it did not disclose how many direct jobs would be created in the factory. Secondly, it did not specify how many land losers would get direct employment. Thirdly, the promise of the process of economic development and the resultant prosperity was a rehash of the discredited and discarded "trickle-down theory". Hence it was an exercise in falsehood. Though not conceding the point, let us accept these contentions for the sake of argument. The whole thesis is predicated by the fact that the TML would set up a small car factory. Now that they have decided to move out and are relocating the factory outside West Bengal, the whole thesis vanishes into thin air. There is no small car factory. There would be no employment generation. There would be no socio-economic development of the area. Therefore, there would be no "public purpose". Thus the expenditure of public funds for this non-existing project was a total waste and, therefore, fully unjustified. It calls for criminal action.

This has very grave and serious consequences. The whole exercise of acquisition of 1000 acres of land through the use of force, building up of infrastructure for the project which does not exist, supply of free electricity and water, round the clock police protection for two years, construction of an 18.75 km of eight feet high boundary wall with watch tower at regular intervals, were done for nothing. Who would bear this cost? Even with a contrived and convoluted argument of "public purpose", there could have been a fig-leaf of justification of such enormous public expenditure. With the withdrawal of the Tatas all these expenses lose all validity. Some heads should roll.

The Tatas withdrew from Singur on their own volition. Therefore, they would have to pay for the cost. That is the logic. That is also the ethics. In fact, the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of India should conduct a due diligence audit of the WBIDC, Commerce and Industries Department, West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO), Bhangore-Rajarhat Area Development Authority (BRADA) and the Police Directorate to compute exactly the loss to the public exchequer due to this abrupt decision of the Tatas to move out from Singur. The CAG should also fix responsibility for this wanton waste of public funds. It would be a slightly time-consuming process but it has to be done for the sake of public accountability, transparency and good governance.

Meanwhile to present a provisional bill to the Tatas an attempt is being made here to compute a figure based on the facts and figures as published in the print media about this issue. The Tatas caused enormous loss of public funds for their misadventure in Singur. This provisional figure would be altered once the CAG's report is made available. But it is fair that the Tatas should have an indication of how much they would have to pay back.

In the first place, but for the fraud perpetuated by the GOWB the Tatas would have to pay upfront the estimated cost of land acquisition under Chapter VII of the LA Act 1894. Now that there is not even a fig-leaf of public purpose, they would have to reimburse to the State Government a sum of Rs 200 crores, the paid out cost of compensation for the acquisition with some visible overheads.

Secondly, the WBIDC or some other State agency constructed an 18.75 km long boundary wall along the outer periphery of the acquired property. We do not know its specifications. It is locally said that the wall is eight feet high with a two-feet foundation underground. Estimates made by a couple of A-class CPWD contractors indicated that it would cost Rs 275 per running metre for a wall of this type with supporting pillars at regular intervals. Thus the estimated cost of construction of this wall would not be less than Rs 51,56,250, that is, roughly Rs 51.56 lakhs. With this one has to add the cost of five big gates. At a conservative estimate that would cost not less than Rs 25 lakhs. Thus the wall with gates would cost not less than 76.56 lakhs.

Thirdly, the government provided round-the-clock police protection both during the process of acquisition and after the land was leased out to Tatas. Newspaper reports indicate that approximately 2000 policemen were deployed day and night for the last two years and several months for the protection of the property of the TML. The government did not come out with any fact about it. But the Police Directorate of West Bengal has a standard formula of cost for deployment of 1000 policemen (one battalion strength) including ASI and SI but excluding the salaries of officers of the ranks of Inspector and above. The salary cost per month comes to Rs 80,70,000 which is 83.01 per cent of the actual cost. To this one has to add the cost of uniform, boots and some other basic equipments which would come to Rs 16,51,100 constituting 16.99 per cent of the total monthly cost. Thus the total comes to Rs 97,21,800 per month. This figure does not include the expenses of vehicles, POL, and other heavy equipments without which a police force cannot function. Excluding these items the annual cost of deployment of a battalion of police men comes to Rs 11.67 crores. For two battalions deployed to protect the Tata property the cost would be Rs 23.33 crores. For two years it would be Rs 46.66 crores. This is basically the salary component. The actual cost is much higher.

Fourthly, the GOWB committed another act of deception to give financial benefit to the Tatas. The Principal Secretary, Commerce and Industry Department of the GOWB wrote a letter on 12.10.2006 to the Managing Director of the WB Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO) in which, inter alia, he mentioned:

"In order to bring investment (obviously NANO Unit) in West Bengal, we had to face competition from other States, in particular, Uttaranchal which enjoys zero excise duty benefit in a car proposed to be priced at Rs 1 lakh, the exemption of 16 per cent excise duty makes a major difference. Therefore, in order to make the investment attractive to the TML, the State Government has to offer significant support in the form of upfront infrastructured assistance."

So the Tata Housing Development (THDC) would enter into an agreement with the WBIDC to form a joint venture company. Five hundred acres of land belonging to Bhangore Rajarhat Development Authority (BRADA)would be given at a concessional rate to the THDC+WBIDC combine. And 50 acres of high-value land of New Town Rajarhat should also be given to that combine. The letter clearly mentioned 20 acres should be given for commercial purpose and 30 acres for residential purpose at rates which were half the prevailing rates. The letter went on to state that the profit generated by the WBIDC would be used by it "to meet its commitment of infrastructure assistance to the TML project without having resort to budgetary support". The term "infrastructural support" was deliberately used to hide the real intention of giving subsidy to the TML. This directive of the C and I Department violated several laws apart from being ethically unsupportable. But we are not going into it here.

In one stroke, HIDCO suffered a loss of Rs 60 crores for 20 acres of commercial land and a loss of Rs 75 crores for the residential land making a total loss of Rs 135 crores.

On the 500 acres of BRADA land, one could make some conjecture in the absence of hard facts. Assuming that price of land per cottah was Rs 1 lakh and that BRADA had to sell it at Rs 50,000 to ensure the profitability of the TML, BRADA lost Rs 150 crores straightway. (1 standard acre = 60 Cottah)

Two separate companies/authorities had been ordered to suffer loss to ensure profitability of the TML. The whole idea is preposterous apart from being totally illegal and unethical. A future Commission of Inquiry on "La Affaire Nano" would have to untangle the knots within knots of these totally unwholesome and messy transactions to assess the damage and fix responsibility. It was as well that the Tatas have left, otherwise most of these worthy gentlemen would have got themselves further entangled in illegality verging on corruption that they might have resulted in spending their residual tenure of life in some State Correctional Homes. Incidentally, with due diligence audit followed by a Commission of Inquiry, the possibility of their short-term stay in these Homes is not beyond the realm of possibility. It would be good if they improved the living conditions of these Homes when they were still in service. Now let us get back to the point.

The provisional exit bill of Tatas would be: (i) Rs 200 crores (LA cost) + (ii) Rs 76.56 lakhs (cost of wall) + (iii) Rs 46.66 crores(police protection) + (iv) Rs 135 + Rs 150 = Rs 285 crores (subsidised land transferred from HIDCO + BRADA) = Rs 532.18 crores (excluding all indirect and invisible costs) = Rs 532.18 crores (excluding all
indirect and invisible costs). The final bill would be computed only after the CAG's audit.

II

This episode cannot be ended unless some tit-bits of the parleys that took place on September 5-6, 2008 at the Council Chamber of Raj Bhavan, Kolkata, are recorded and made public. Since the GOWB unilaterally and unethically repudiated the agreement it entered into with the Opposition, the writer has no moral compunction now to mention some of the inner stories.

In the beginning the Facilitator set the ground rules. There should be no personal attacks. The attempt should be to find an amicable solution of the Singur impasse for the benefit of the "unwilling farmers", agriculture, industry and the general well-being of the people of West Bengal. It must be admitted that both sides adhered to the ground rules and carried on the discussions in a civilised and polite manner.

The discussion centred on the amount of land that could be made available within the project area for resettlement of the "unwilling land losers" on a land-for-land basis. Incidentally the "land-for-land" principle of R&R has been recognised in the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, October 2007. The Leader of the Opposition made it clear initially that, though debatable, his side would not discuss the merit or otherwise of letting out of 643 acres (approx.) for the mother plant of the TML. It was a major concession and it created immediately an amicable ambience for negotiations. Thus discussions centred on the residual 350 acres (approx.).

The government side pointed out that this area 294 acres has been set apart for ancillary units. After an hour of discussions it was found that the matter was not progressing. It was going round and round.

At this stage the Commerce and Industries Minister suddenly offered 40 acres of land in the project area for non-agricultural avocations on the basis of five per cent of the land cost per land losers. He also introduced the concept of R&R "in and around" the project area. With 40 acres already declared in favour of the land losers, there was an attempt to find out how much more land could be made available from the vacant but not yet utilised land in the project area, particularly, from the land earmarked for the ancillary units. Whatever proposal came from anywhere the stock reply of the Commerce and Industries Minister was: "The Tatas will not agree." It was like the repetitive refrain of a song in a cracked voice of a scratched HMV 78 RPM paraffin record. I counted this phrase 11 times before I gave up in disgust.

The Facilitator, a suave, charming and elegant gentleman, did not show any sign of displeasure, but very sweetly he asked the Commerce and Industries Minister "who had acquired the land". The reply was: it was the government. Then there was a further query that if the GOWB had acquired land under the LA Act forcibly, should not it have some view as to how the land should be utilised by the ancillary units? Did anyone ascertain the real requirement of each unit? To that the scratched record croaked: "The Tatas will not agree."

Then the Facilitator sought the permission of the Commerce and Industries Minister to ask a few questions to the MD of the WBIDC. The Minister promptly agreed. The Facilitator then asked the MD who had selected the ancillary units. The reply was -the Tatas. Then he enquired as to who had decided how much land one unit would require. The reply was - the Tatas. Thereafter, he wanted to know who decided where would that parcel of land be located. The answer was-the Tatas. Getting, perhaps, a bit perplexed, though not showing any sign of it, he politely asked to whom did the land belong. The reply was - the WBIDC. To this he further queried: "In that case should not the WBIDC have some say regarding areas to be allotted and their location" This time the Minister replied: "The Tatas will not agree." The MD supplemented the answer by adding that the WBIDC did not have the technical competence to assess the requirement and, therefore, it depended entirely on the Tatas.

Never in my service career of more than three-and-a-half decades both in the State and at the Centre had I seen such shameful subservience of a government to a business house. One felt ashamed to be in the same company.

It is time to relate an anecdote about Dr B.C. Roy. In 1951 he received a proposal from Morris Motor Co. of England for technical collaboration with an Indian entrepreneur for the manufacture of Morris cars in India. After studying the proposal, one day he told his personal staff: "Call him (Oke dako)." Totally confused his personal staff left his chamber not knowing whom to call. Then it occurred to someone that it could be G.D.Birla who had sought an appointment earlier. So they rang up Birla and fixed the appointment at 3 pm on the same day. Birla arrived at the appointed hour. Dr Roy was informed. He told his staff "Request him wait for a while (Oke boshte balo)." After a while Birla went in and stayed with Dr Roy for almost an hour. That was the beginning of the Hindustan Motors at Konnagar, the first motor car factory in Asia after the WW-II. The Chief Minister of Bengal did not kow-tow to any business tycoon to locate an industrial unit in the State.

III

Now what happens after the exit of Ratan Tata from West Bengal? Firstly, to the best of our knowledge on October 4, 2008, the earth went round its own axis at its usual speed of 24 hours per round. Further, the sun rose on that day in East and went down in the west as usual. There was no media report of heaven having fallen or the earth cracking up. The general populace went on their business in the usual manner, so much so that the "bandh" called by the CPI-M collapsed much before time. Life continues in West Bengal in its normal pace and stride since October 03, 2008.

Second, since an area of more or less 643 acres was let out to the TML for setting up a car factory, now that they have decided to go, a notice has to be given for the cancellation of the lease. Similar notices have to be given to all the ancillary units because they were captive to the TML

Third, it appeared from the media reports that about 200 to 250 acres of land where heavy construction had already taken place, agriculture would not be possible without enormous capital cost to restore its original fertility. Hence that area could be kept reserved for a future motor car factory. In fact advice of a reputed consultant should be obtained to ascertain how much land would be required to set up a manufacturing facility of 500,000 small and medium cars per year. On the basis of his assessment an area of, say, 350 or 400 or 450 acres of land could be set apart for the future factory. This should include the built up area of the TML.

Fourth, instead of any sweet-heart agreement with any crony capitalist there should be world-wide advertisement for Global Expression of Interest for setting up of small/medium car factory in Singur. The government should openly advertise what benefits and/or facilities it would offer. Respondents should be requested to indicate what terms and conditions they would offer for the well being of the land losers and for the State in general. After appropriate technical and financial assessement the party whose offer would be best should be selected to set up the manufacturing unit. The agreement should be open and transparent and there should be no secret annexures as in the case with the TML.

Fifth, the rest of land should be returned to the land losers. The Commerce and Industries Minister had been repeating like an untrained parrot that land once acquired cannot be returned. This is not correct. There are various processes of restoring the land. There is Section 21 of the General Clauses Act 1897. Its heading reads as follows: "Power to issue includes power to add, to amend, vary, or rescind notification, order, rules or bye-laws." Under this section lands to be returned could be denotified.

If one wanted to stay within the four corners of the Supreme Court judgement in the Bhaskaran Pillai case (1997- 5 SCC.432), the surplus land should be handed over to the Singur Panchayat Samity for "planned development or improvement of existing village sites". Five mauzas have been devastated by reckless land acquisition proceedings. These villages should be developed in a planned manner as provided for under section 3(f)(I) and (v) of the LA Act, 1894. Land losers should be initially given a 999-year lease.

In due course, a local amendment should be made in the LA Act, on the lines of the Tamil Nadu Amendment to return land to the original owners. It may have to wait for the change of government.

The CPI-M requires to be cautioned that it would be totally illegal to go on a fishing expedition to find out a project which could fit into the definition of "public purpose" to utilise this land. The acquired land has to be used primarily for the purpose for which it was initially acquired.

It is said that "there comes a time in the history of any State when its hypocrisy must be exposed and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced". It was time we did it in West Bengal.

IV

It is a polite submission to Mr Tata. Please do not misunderstand us. We are not begging you to foot the bill. We are not putting pressure on you to pay the bill either. We would only like to remind you of a common saying: "A gentleman always settles his bill before he leaves."

......

The author was the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministries
of Finance (Revenue) and Rural Development, and the Executive
Director, Asian Development Bank, Manila.

Justice for poor Tapasi

From Zeenews Bureau

Former secretary of the CPI(M) Singur zonal committee, Suhrid Dutta, and supporter Debu Malik, convicted for murder of teenage girl Tapasi Malik were awarded life sentences by the Hoogly district court in Chandanagore on Wednesday.

The sentencing came a day after the court convicted the duo in the 2006 murder case. The sensational case had turned high profile after the ruling Left Front government had to handover the case to the CBI owing to the allegations by the opposition that the guilty were being shielded due to their affiliations with the ruling party.

CBI counsel Partha Tapaswi told reporters yesterday, "The verdict proves that our investigations were correct."

The half-burnt body of 18-year-old Tapasi, a farmer's daughter at Singur, who was in the forefront of the agitation of the Krishi Jami Raksha Committee after land acquisition for the Tata Motors Nano project, was found on December 18, 2006 at Bajemelia.

The case, which led to a public uproar, was initially handled by the CID, but was handed over to the CBI by the West Bengal government after demands by the Opposition.

Debu was arrested five months after the CBI began investigations and Dutta was arrested shortly afterwards. The central agency submitted the chargesheet against the two in September 2007.

The Statesman reports: Welcoming the judgement, Tapasi's father, Mr Manoranjan Malik said: “We were confident that we would get justice. I am happy that my daughter's murderers were finally found guilty.” But Dutta's elder brother, Mr Saroj Dutta, who is the secretary of the CPI(M)'s Bara local committee in Singur, said: “The conspiracy against my brother and our party is still on. We will unite the mass against the conspiracy. The legal battle will go on.” In Singur, several hundred locals joined in a rally that originated near Tapasi Malik's residence demanding capital punishment for Suhrid Dutta and Debu Malik. “We want Dutta and Malik to be hanged. They were convicted by residents of Singur much before. Today they were convicted in a court,” said Ms Aparna Dhara, a friend of Tapasi. The Singur Krishi Jami Raksha Committee organised several other rallies in villages across Singur demanding death penalty for the Tapasi murder accused. The CPI(M), however, asserted the two accused were falsely implicated. Reacting to the verdict, Mr Benoy Konar, CPI(M) central committee member said it only “confirmed the Bengali saying that whatever the master wishes is carried out.”

The Trinamul Congress and the Singur Krishi Jami Jiban Raksha Committee will organise a rally at Singur on 5 December in memory of Tapasi Malik.

Read Dr Mrinal Bose's fictional account of the murder of Tapasi here.


Murder mastermind Suhrid Dutta (The Statesman).

Lawless

Calcutta is a lawless city. It struck me that foreign embassies and consulates might well be wary about issuing visas to people from this city, out of a concern for protecting the civic virtues of their land. Perhaps the same can be said about several other cities or states in India, or even all of India itself. I would not blame them. Like with the HIV virus, one can’t be too careful.

Surendra Munshi has written in today’s Telegraph about Calcutta’s lawlessness. I found that quite devoid of any substance. This is a subject I have been thinking deeply about, everyday, for almost twenty five years. And I have also been thinking seriously about this recently, together with some focussed study, in the context of a writing assignment. So yes, I have some perspectives. But this is something every citizen has to think about for himself or herself, making an effort to comprehend the complexity and diversity of the city, looking at one's own daily conduct, coming out of one's class subjectivity and making an attempt at arriving at a public perspective.

Habitual violation of the law – is not something that relates merely to the city’s poor and downtrodden, something they are compelled to do in order to survive. The biggest violator of course is the state itself, the govt of West Bengal. But to be precise, actually we do not have a govt here, we have a political party that is the supreme authority and not a leaf stirs in the state of West Bengal without the sanction of the party.

Callous disregard for law is also something characterising the lives and conduct of Calcutta’s elite and affluent citizens. Not for them such trivialities as law, for how then can they exhibit the power they possess by virtue of their wealth. And thus do they set a definitive example of how power is to be expressed when wealth is acquired by whatsoever means.

The final result of the lawlessness is that the civic fabric, the whole web of cooperation, civilty and ordinary decency without which human co-existence in a metropolis would not be possible, is completely torn. But no one seems to notice, or care or be alarmed. Everybody goes about their daily life as if nothing was amiss. But the results are there for all to see and hear. The bell tolls, for me, for you, for all.

I am reading José Saramago’s Seeing. Its about a capital city where seventy per cent of the voters cast blank votes in the national elections. And at the repeat election, eighty three per cent of the votes are blank. The authorities, seized with panic, declare a state of emergency and decamp from the capital. I just read a section where the president of the country makes a speech on television after escaping from the capital city. Though in the novel the citizens of the capital city were heroic, and the speech of the president is written satirically by Saramago, I thought the speech was a befitting one to deliver in all seriousness to the venal citizens of my city, Calcutta, to describe their epidemic of lawlessness.

“…You are now a lawless city. You will not have a government to tell you what you should and should not do, how you should and should not behave, the streets will be yours, they belong to you, use them as you wish, there will be no authority to stop you in your tracks and offer you sound advice, but equally, and listen carefully to my words, there will be no authority to protect you from thieves, rapists and murderers, that will be your freedom and may you enjoy it. You may mistakenly imagine that, guided by your free will and by your every whim, you will be able to organise and defend your lives better than we did using the old methods and the old laws. A very grave mistake on your part. Sooner or later you will be obliged to find leaders to govern you, if they do not irrupt like beasts out of the inevitable chaos into which you will fall and impose their own laws upon you. Then you will realise the tragic nature of your self-deception. Perhaps you will rebel as you did in the days of authoritarian rule, as you did in the grim days of dictatorship, but do not delude yourselves, you will be put down with equal violence and you will not be called upon to vote because there will be no elections, or if there are, they will not be free, open and honest like the elections you scorned, and so it will be until the day when the armed forces who, along with myself and the national government, today decided to abandon you to your chosen fate, are obliged to return to liberate you from the monsters you yourselves have engendered.”

Zoo story: Goodbye blue sky

Photo: Dr. Debanik

I have written earlier about the criminal theft and privatisation of public space in Calcutta by the govt of West Bengal, acting at the behest of the CPI(M) party (see e.g.here, here and here).

Perhaps the mother of all such scams is the one involving Calcutta zoo. The conspiracy runs from the central govt to the state govt. Using the pretext of the need for more space and better facilities for the zoo, the zoo is to be shifted from its present location in Alipore to the fringes of the city. And the present premises would then be handed over to a private company to convert into a private development. Needless to add, a nice consideration must have been paid for the favour.

The location in Alipore is very, very valuable real estate. Thanks to the secret bilateral deal with the private company, on the pretext of giving the city a new and better zoo, prime real estate is to be handed over to them on a platter.


Photo: Cathryn Game

The zoo is one of the very few open and recreational spaces in the city accessible to the public at a nominal entrance fee. On Christmas day or on New Year day, tens of thousands of people, mostly humble folk, would be found queueing up to spend a few hours amidst green surroundings. It is one of the few places where families with children can spend a day or have a picnic. The zoo also provides much-needed lungs to a city beleagured by politically sponsored air pollution. To take this out of the public domain, hand it over to a private company and have it converted into a private enclave for the wealthy and powerful - is simply diabolical.

The private company is of course one that is adored by the ruling CPI(M). The same company on whose behalf the state govt appropriated fertile farm land, destroying the livelihoods of thousands of sharecroppers and larm labourers.

Will the people of Calcutta stand up and raise their voice against this criminal conspiracy by their rulers?

End of days

It has once again been demonstrated that the prime sport or means of entertainment in India is politics, or rather the antics of political parties in their greed for power (which brings immense loot). Sadly, the coming Beijing Olympics will not enable our political champions to display their prowess. Neither will India's incomparable free media, that great pillar of our democracy, be able to exhibit its dumbing prowess.

Like the froth and foam bubbling over a cesspool, the political arena in again in ferment. The CPI(M)-led Left had suddenly found itself in the position of being able to rail against the USA. Like King Canute, commanding the tide to stop. But the reality is that the CPI(M) is just a criminal mafia pretending to be a political party. All their oh-so-pious pronouncements sound hilarious when juxtaposed with what happens in, through and in the name of the party in its base of power, West Bengal.

If the Left had to pull down the govt - there were many reasons to do this. The current inflation; the farmer suicides; the collapse of public systems; the obscene socio-economic disparities - were all ground enough. If they could be so adamantly against the nuclear deal with the USA, why did they not show that same adamant attitude on matters that affect the daily lives of the masses, those in whose name they claim to act? If the Congress has patently failed in the last 4 years, then so has the Left because they were propping up the govt. They thought they would have power without responsibilities. They thought they would have the cake and eat it too. And now they are the laughing stock of the country, fit to be thrown where they rightly belong, the refuse heap of history.

Thankfully, whatever enabled the CPI(M) to keep returning to power has begun to collapse, and the party is facing one electoral setback after another. It can now only sit back and watch its demise which is unstoppable, like a terminal patient. They are helpless against the poison fruits of all that they sowed and nurtured for so many years.

People here are now talking about the end of Ceaucescu. Ministers in West Bengal would now know that they may be pulled out of their cars and lynched on the streets. By their own party members perhaps, for thus the latter could hope to evade a similar fate and have a chance for a future under the new regime. Ironically, it is only the Constitution and the rule of law that can save the lives of the party leaders from the visceral ire of the people, when they cared a fig for the Constitution and rule of law in all their time in power and rigorously supervised over the erasure of the rule of law.

But the passing of the CPI(M) rule does not signify anything positive in substantive terms. Status quo will be maintained, but with the spoils of power now being taken by the Trinamul. For instance, the auto rickshaw mafia and the private bus mafia and the land development mafia will all continue, but they will owe allegiance to Mamata didi.

At the centre - anything can happen. Ants are in everyone's pants. Everyone has egg on their face. But the only party really gleeful right now, the only one whose stock is set to rise metorically, is Trinamul. With the stock markets in a tail-spin and with inflation shooting, the best investment right now would be on Trinamul. The gates for entry into a share of the spoils from their being in power will be closed very soon.

Mayavati is a prime PM candidate in the next national elections. I have had a feeling for some time that Mayavati would be assasinated, possibly with US involvement.

But who is at the centre - does that matter at all in terms of making a positive difference to the people? With global economic forces at play, what can a national govt of a poor nation do? The current crisis of inflation and the govt's helplessness to deal with it illustrates that. What is more relevant is the spread of militant insurgency, of the naxal-maoist variety. This undermines the state from below, even as its significance is whittled away from above.

The inevitable civil war / showdown between people in India, essentially the haves and the have-nots, comes closer. No more beating around the bush, no more mediation of the state. So, in Calcutta, maid-servants, cycle rickshaw-pullers, drivers etc would ransack their babu-masters' homes and help themselves to the swag. Those who can, will protect themselves in every way they can. The business of security will flourish.

Believe it or Not!

I was astonished to read in today's newspaper that the infamous Tata group has been hailed as the world's third most transparent and accountable corporation by Britain's One World Trust in their Global Accountability Report!

The assessment is supposed to be "a measure of the extent to which organisations have the policies and systems in place to enhance consistent and coherent accountability to the people they affect."


Victims of police firing, Kalinganagar.

In January 2006, 13 people (including a woman and a boy) were killed in police firing in Kalinganagar, Orissa, when indigenous communities protested against the setting up of a Tata steel plant and demanded rehabilitation of the evictees.


Tapasi Malik's charred body.

And later in 2006, the Tatas were in a hush-hush deal with the CPI(M) in West Bengal to obtain land to set up a car plant in the fertile agricultural zone of Singur. Almost exactly a year ago, Tapasi Malik, a young girl participating in the anti-acquisition movement, was brutally raped, murdered and burnt by the local powers that be, with a view to terrorising the agitationists into submission. (Read Dr Mrinal Bose's story on Singur here, and Sandip Bandopadhyay's article on Singur and Nandigram here.)

Here's my letter to the One World Trust (info@oneworldtrust.org).

Dear Madam or Sir

I am writing from Calcutta, India, after reading about the Tata group in India being named the world's third most accountable and transparent company in the One World Trust's Global Accountability Report.

I am dismayed to read this. In the last year and a half, people in Calcutta, in the state of West Bengal in India, and also elsewhere in India, have been extremely concerned about the secret deal made between the Tatas and the West Bengal state govt, for land in Singur to set up a car manufacturing plant in an extremely fertile agricultural belt. Both the company and the govt have shrouded the whole matter in secrecy. But given the fact that a large number of farmers and farm workers would be displaced, the matter is one of acute public concern. In December 2006, Tapasi Malik, a young girl participating in the anti-acquisition movement, was brutally raped, murdered and burnt by the local powers that be, with a view to terrorising the agitationists into submission.

Though the Tata group had tended to be regarded with a modicum of respect in India for its socially concerned policies, it is evident now that with the intensification of globalisation the company has decided to discard such principles and hunt with the hounds.

The state govt with which the Tatas made this deal - is one which is notorious in India today for its failure of governance, with the state ranking among the lowest in India in human development indicators. It is the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) that is running the state, rather than the govt. It is a parallel state within the state, unconstrained by laws and constitutional strictures. Every aspect of life in the state is controlled by the party. As witnessed through 2007 in Nandigram, another site of proposed land acquisition, the party rules by its murderous might. Yet the Tata group, for its commercial interests, has chosen to make a secret deal with this party, giving short shrift to the interests of people. The party then uses its proximity to the Tatas to boast about its success in attracting investments to the state.

The car plant being built in Singur is to manufacture the very low-cost car being developed by the Tatas. However, much more than cheap cars, what India needs now is a drastic overhauling of transport policy to address paralysing congestion, frightening pollution and escalating accidents. The Tatas have chosen to entirely disregard such concerns.

But in January 2006, well before the Singur land acquisition, 13 people (including 3 women and a boy) were killed in police firing in Kalinganagar in the neighbouring state of Orissa, when indigenous communities protested against the setting up of a Tata steel plant and demanded rehabilitation of the evictees. In its alacrity to make secret deals with pliant govts, all concern for the well-being of the country's people, and especially the poor and vulnerable sections, has been thrown to the wind. Amnesty International had conducted an investigation into this incident and concluded that the land acquisition was shrouded in secrecy, without the slightest transparency or public accountability.

Incidentally, the Global Accountability Report comes close on the heels of the news of the Tata vehicles being rated the worst in South Africa.

In the light of the above, one is compelled to dismiss the Global Accountability Report as something not worth paying any attention to, or even, more cynically, see it as a means to help the Tatas shore up their rapidly eroding credibility with a little bit of cosmetic make-up. However, the govts who make secret deals with the Tatas would undoubtedly be very pleased to read about the "distinction" granted to their friends, the Tatas.

Yours sincerely

V Ramaswamy
Calcutta / INDIA

Nandigram lament

The current issue of the Economic and Political Weekly carries an article titled "Reflections in the Aftermath of Nandigram" by "A CPI(M) Supporter".

Wooly-headed so-called "ideology" and hollow jargon appear to be of more importance to the writer - than reality.

His (I presume it must be a man) heart bleeds for the victims of Nandigram. But his pious plea for the West Bengal state govt led by the CPI(M) to show an alternative way to the neoliberal paradigm of foreign investment based economic growth - is plaintively disingenuous.

It would be no exaggeration to say that today the CPI(M) has no concern whatsoever for the common citizen of West Bengal. The only concern is the short-term interest of the party. The key indicators which reveal the real face of the CPI(M) are in primary education and healthcare. West Bengal ranks among the lowest in the country on these counts. The socio-economic and human development status of the Muslims in West Bengal is also pathetic. And all that can be said by the rulers, after 30 years in power, is that the Muslims have only themsleves to blame for being backward.

The party has eroded the fabric of law and order in the state; it has destroyed the edifice of democratic governance, with the party rather than the institutions of govt running everything. It has supervised an insidious privatisation of the public space, and criminalisation of life and politics.

The lack of any effective and credible opposition in the state has enabled the CPI(M) to attain this character. The party and the govt are completely bankrupt in terms of having any vision, strategy or capability to bring about positive improvement in the quality of life of the labouring masses. Rather, it has ensured that acceptance of living in utter degradation has seeped into the very psyche of the masses. It has crushed the very dignity of the common people, reducing them to servile begggars and ugly criminals.

In that respect, the resistance in Singur and Nandigram are definitely most cheering; they tell us that people cannot be taken for granted endlessly. But with no prospect of emergence of any progressive, anti-communal front to challenge the ruling party - the only thing on the horizon is destructive, violent opposition by various disgruntled elements, leading to growing instability and anarchy.

The true picture of the state of affairs in West Bengal has been given by Sumanta Banerjee in this article (also in the EPW). He writes:

West Bengal is in need of an opposition to challenge the hegemony of a partisan and oppressive CPI(M) governance. ... The alternative ... has to emerge from within a new democratic Left, with constituents that are seriously committed to the ideology of socialism and courageous enough to restore the moral integrity and high principles of the movement.

Related articles:

Sumanta Banerjee on Singur, and on the changing face of crime in Calcutta.

"Strategy for Economic Reform in West Bengal". This was published in 2002, but is still informative, especially the narrative on pg 23 of the document, just before the "Conclusion", about corruption and privatisation of public space.