 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | LONELY AT THE TOP: Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya | | It is glorious to be rich. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya never said that. No Indian communist could have afforded to utter such a pro-capitalist blasphemy. The line belongs to the Communist who banished Marx to the backyard of shopping malls. He was the comrade who first talked about business other than labour camps-about modernisation and special economic zones. He gave China Shenzhen and Shanghai. Deng Xiaoping formally laid Mao to rest. What did Bhattacharya, who aspires to be the Bangla edition of Deng, give to his state? Nandigram. It is no longer a nondescript small town in East Midnapore, but a headline-worthy synonym for Marxist bloodlust. Or a sub-rural Tiananmen Square? Or a small price for a larger cause? Silencing a few for the salvation of millions, in communist methodology, is no big deal after all. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | HEALING TOUCH: Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee speaks with injured villagers in Nandigram | | "It was a case of State-sponsored terrorism in the name of land acquisition."
MAMATA BANERJEE, TRINAMOOL CONGRESS LEADER | | Suddenly, the McMarxist is a lonely man at home, chastised and isolated. The sight of a blood-stained Buddha is an extreme makeover. The questions are multiplying in Kolkata and elsewhere. Was the carnage in Nandigram a result of the dictatorial temptations of the chief minister? Was he getting impatient with the resistance against his New Bengal project? Why was he not taking the allies into confidence? Nandigram, where 14 people died and many more were injured and went "missing" after police fired to end a farmland siege, has taken the sheen out of Buddha the compassionate. Those villages with names like Sonachura and Bhangaberia have already become the new destinations for the aficionados of red horror. To be fair, that was not what Bhattacharya wanted. Nandigram was just another name in the glossary of the Buddha revolution in the marketplace. It was the site for a special economic zone, a landmark project in the privatisation of Bengal. The villagers revolted against the Government's land acquisition drive. They banished Marxist cadres from their homes, and Mamata Banerjee, leader of the Trinamool Congress, doubled as the voice of Mother Earth. For a while, the struggle in Nandigram acquired the pretence of a liberation movement. It was a pretence; politics at its elemental worst was at play. The villages remained inaccessible to security forces and Marxists who stood by the diktat of the state for almost two months. The storming of Nandigram was the state's desperation aided by the party. | | DISSENTING PATRIARCH | | |  ON NANDIGRAM
"Nandigram was surely a mistake. What had never happened earlier has happened now."
ON CPI(M)'S INVOLVEMENT
"Ten people have been arrested. Someone told me most of them are our people. This is a blow to us." ON BUDDHADEB
"Personally he doesn't meet me. It would have been good if he did. Even in the Government, he doesn't discuss things with others. This must change." ON HIMSELF
"I am 93 and I still have to go to the office. What can be done?" | | | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | UP IN FLAMES: Congress party workers burn an effigy of Buddhadeb | | For a while, it looked like Bhattacharya himself would be a casualty of his reformist zeal. The little brothers in the Left Front, CPI, RSP and Forward Block, threatened to quit the Government against the one-party tyranny of the CPI(M). It was the persuasive skill of Jyoti Basu that saved the situation. Then party General Secretary Prakash Karat took a fact-finding mission to Kolkata. Basu, quite sprightly at 93, today feels hurt by the attitude of his former protégé. And the patriarch is enjoying his every moment as the conscience keeper of the Left. When INDIA TODAY meets him at Indira Bhavan, his Salt Lake bungalow in Kolkata, Basu is ready with a brief history of his experiments with industrialisation. "I'm sorry to say that Nandigram was a mistake," he tells you. "What has never happened earlier has happened now. CPI, RSP and Forward Block met and said they would withdraw from the Cabinet, but would continue in the Left Front. I'm not in a condition to attend meetings but I had to go. They listened to me. Buddha was also there. I said popular perception was that this is a one-party government. I also have that perception. We have a core committee comprising representatives from all parties, but you never talk to them. This lack of communication, and mistrust of others, was a mistake on our part. He did not speak but agreed." | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | THE RIGHT CONSOLATION: BJP's L.K. Advani and Sushma Swaraj visit injured villagers in Nandigram | | However, he says, the resignation of the chief minister has never been on the agenda. What pains him most is the change in his erstwhile protégé's style. He is "disappointed" by the chief minister's reaction. "Buddha had said that if people didn't want the chemical complex at Nandigram, he would not bring it there. People did not believe him and his ministers. People thought they were bluffing." Bhattacharya no longer takes any pilgrimage to Indira Bhavan. "Personally he doesn't meet me. The only time we meet is at the secretariat meeting every Friday. It would have been good if he did. Anyway..." He pauses; he can't hide the sense of hurt. "I'm outside the Government, but even in the government, he doesn't discuss things with others. A change has to come after this bitter experience." | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | "Women have been raped just because men in the family were CPI(M) supporters."
PRAKASH KARAT, CPI(M) GENERAL SECRETARY | | Can Bhattacharya change himself while changing Bengal? He may have owned up moral responsibility for the firing, but there was no full-fledged mea culpa. Is it the rigidity of conviction-or frozen conscience? Nandigram is steeped in an irony. In another era, it could have been a site of Marxist martyrdom. The victims were poor farmers and their families; the killer was the state. A text book scenario of proletarian struggle. (Though the CBI enquiry points towards the involvement of party workers in the carnage.) Bhattacharya has shattered the stereotype. His quiet refusal to be apologetic is a repudiation of tradition. It is the arrogance of a rebel who wants to be the redeemer as well. Banerjee, the frontline defender of the shirtless in Nandigram, will personally answer your telephone call and shriek into the receiver that what happened on March 14 was state-sponsored terrorism, that it was not politics or power for her but a question of human life, that she is fighting against the colonial clause of land acquisition. The chief minister alone has chosen to be least argumentative now. Anyway the Government has already abandoned acquisition for the time being. If Nandigram doesn't want to be Bengal's Shenzhen, the chief minister will go elsewhere. "We need capital to develop socialism", says Bhattacharya's confidant and Central Committee member Binoy Konar from his room-"I live here"-in the party office on Alumuddin Street. That is an ideologically correct way of saying it. "What about all those college students? They should all become agriculture labourers?" This is the spirit of market-friendly 'Buddhism', and it has adherents within the party, like Konar. It is unlikely that you will hear such a sentence from some of the much younger residents of AKG Bhavan in New Delhi. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | BURNING QUESTION: People set fire to a railway track in Siliguri | | In Kolkata, the admirers of the chief minister would argue that the path of Buddha is the only viable way ahead. "You cannot get anything without a cost," says economist Dipankar Dasgupta, who was Bhattacharya's one-year senior in college. "We have a strong agricultural base. We can do nothing more." He endorses the chief minister's principle, but not his method. "The Government has not been transparent, especially in its deal with the Tatas in Singur (the project of the Rs 1-lakh car). Why have we given so many concessions to the Tatas who are competing in the global market? Why have they been given a soft loan and excluded from vat? Why is the Government buying the land for the Tatas without paying the farmers the market rate?" he asks. He is an admirer of the chief minister. Still, he has so many questions that remain unanswered. Maybe because he is an economist, not a businessman. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | "Buddhadeb is the best thing that has happened to Bengal. He should continue."
SANJIV GOENKA, VICE-CHAIRMAN, RPG ENTERPRISES | | The industrialist has no complaints. Sanjiv Goenka, vice-chairman of RPG Enterprises, whose assets in the state are worth Rs 8,000 crore, is also a fan of the chief minister. "He is the best thing that has happened to Bengal. For the sake of the state, he should continue," Goenka says from his top floor office, which is also home to some fine pieces in contemporary painting, in Chowringhee. He knows that "it is not fashionable to say this now." He stands by his faith in "the architect of new Bengal". "History will remember him for that," he says. History is what Bhattacharya is arguing with. The communist history of stagnation and savagery. The principle behind the Nandigram project was a rejoinder. He has been reprimanded for bad planning. He has not retreated. He won't. The apparatchiks in AKG Bhavan may have nothing at stake except the book. He has an entire state. This is one Indian communist who can consign communism to the junkyard somewhere in the special economic zone. He should be given a chance. The idea must be making him nervous. Unlike Deng, he is not playing bridge to relax. He is apparently smoking manically. | | THE BATTLE GROUND | | | The CBI enquiry points to CPI(M)'s involvement
| | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | THE DAY AFTER : Villagers at Bhangaberia | | In Khejuri, 20 km from Nandigram town in West Bengal's East Midnapore district, it is said that before a leaf falls, it seeks the CPI(M)'s permission. The 27,000 acres of fertile land that were to host the cursed SEZ are witness to the price people pay for doing something the CPI(M) doesn't want them to do. According to the state Government, 14 died and 63 were injured in the carnage in Nandigram on March 14. If one counts those missing, the figure could be well over 100. After the CBI found 10 CPI(M) men hiding in a brick kiln in Khejuri-where arms and papers stamped by a local Panchayat leader, listing the houses that had to be attacked and the people who had not voted for the Left in the last state elections, were discovered-it is now established that the CPI(M) had as much to do with the massacre as the police. The reason: the party's own men turned against it when they realised their lands were at stake. When Nishikanta Mondal, an erstwhile CPI(M) member, became the convener of the Bhoomi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (Land Losers' Resistance Committee), many others followed him, blocking the 27 entry points to the proposed SEZ area. Reacting to this, CPI(M) MP Lakshman Seth issued notices of land acquisition despite having no such order from the Writers' Buildings. Just over a week after Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya announced that the SEZ would be shifted, 2,500 policemen were sent to enter the area, allegedly with 400 men from the CPI(M)'s "action squads". The timing was perfect, and the planning careful. March 14 was the day of the Gouranga Puja and the attackers opened fire on mass gatherings. An eerie silence prevails over Nandigram now. Looking at the torched houses with bullet marks all over, one cannot help but feel, like Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, one's "blood running cold."
-By Swagata Sen
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