Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition and Protest in West Bengal

Since 2006 Singur in West Bengal has been the centre of a controversy over land acquisition for a Tata Motors car manufacturing unit. A local rural movement challenging the land acquisition soon attracted the support of various activist groups and political parties from across India, and in late 2008 it succeeded in forcing Tata Motors to abandon Singur. This article uses the Singur controversy as a prism on the contested and contentious nature of development in contemporary India. I analyse the arguments raised respectively for and against the model of development embodied in the Singur factory by five sets of actors, who have been involved in the Singur controversy: (1) West Bengal’s Left Front government; (2) economists; (3) Singur farmers opposed to the factory; (4) social activists and NGOs; and (5) and opposition political parties in West Bengal. I argue that in spite of massive public attention that the Singur controversy received, and the fierce criticism of the Left Front that it generated, the voices of those who fundamentally challenged the policy of industrialising through private capital in the name of development have been rather marginal. Rather than opposing and / or promoting alternatives to the ‘neoliberal’ post‐reform models of development pursued in India, the Singur controversy should be seen as part of a popular effort to civilise rather than substitute contemporary forms of capitalist development to ensure that some of the benefits do trickle down. Keywords: IndiaWest Bengalindustrialisationland acquisitioncapitalismresistance Notes * The author would like to thank the editors of Forum for Development Studies and the two anonymous referees for their generous comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Workshop on Livelihoods and the Environment held at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in October 2009. I am grateful for the valuable input and critique provided by the workshop participants, particularly Rohan D’Souza, Mahesh Rangarajan, M Rajshekhar and Guro Aandahl. 1 USD 1 equals INR 45.5 as per 8 January 2010. 2 The compensation offered consisted of the estimated market value of the land at the time of the publication of the land acquisition notification plus a 30 per cent solatium; a 10 per cent ‘incentive’ for those land owners who consented to not contesting the acquisition in court; and a 12.5 per cent interest calculated for the period between the publication of the notification and the actual payment of the award. 3 In addition to the CPM, the LF consists of the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), and the Forward Block, in addition to a number of smaller and electorally often insignificant parties. 4 The factory was shifted to Gujarat. 5 Singur was not an isolated event but rather one of the first of a series of controversies over state‐led land acquisition for industrialisation or for special economic zones (SEZ). In places such as Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur in Orissa, Raigad in Maharashtra, Nandagudi in Karnataka, Satankulam in Tamil Nadu, and Nandigram in West Bengal, local protest movements or outright resistance to land acquisition have emerged. 6 Other important acts introduced to the same effect were the Monopoly and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. 7 There exists a vast body of literature debating whether the 1991 economic reforms proceeded gradually or erratically; and whether they were a necessary and inevitable step or implemented by stealth by or on behalf of social elites. For an overview, see Corbridge and Harriss (Citation2000: 143–172). 8 The CPM came into being following a split in the CPI in 1964. 9 This rural support base has also consistently made the CPM by far the largest party in the LF. 10 There are, however, competing explanations for the rural dominance enjoyed by the CPM. See Bhattacharyya (Citation2009) for an overview. In an influential essay from 1990 Atul Kohli argued that the LF’s electoral success could be ascribed to its pragmatic pro‐poor policies and its ability to provide a government that worked (Kohli, Citation1997). Kohli’s analysis has subsequently been the subject of much critique. Historians Bipan Chandra et al. (Citation1999: p. 317) rightly observe that Kohli’s work is reminiscent of that of a ‘sympathetic political scientist’, while Sunil Sengupta and Haris Gazdar (Citation1996: 196) have criticised Kohli for giving undue pre‐eminence to the ideological discipline of the CPM as an explanation of pro‐poor interventions. Other analysts have criticised the LF’s relatively placid and bureaucratic approach of having at best a marginal impact on the situation of the poor (Mallick, Citation2007). 11 Kolkata is the name officially given to Calcutta in 2001 to better reflect Bengali pronunciation. I here use the name Kolkata consistently, except when Calcutta figures officially in the name of an organisation, institution or title of a publication. 12 Two policies in particular undermined industrial production in West Bengal: the industrial development and regulation act; and the policy of freight equalisation. The latter made steel and coal available at common all‐India prices everywhere, thereby effectively negating West Bengal’s spatial advantages of nearness to sources of supply (Datta, Citation1990: 101). 13 It has been debated whether the trend of low industrial growth was in fact reversed in the 1990s due to a spectacular growth in the unorganised manufacturing sector. See e.g. Sarkar (Citation2006: 343). 14 75 per cent of West Bengal’s assembly seats are located in rural areas. 15 Since the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 state chief ministers have become the marquee players in India’s federal market economy (Rudolph and Rudolph, Citation2001). Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had at the age of 56 replaced CPM’s then octogenarian patriarch Jyoti Basu as chief minister prior to the 2001 state assembly elections. Bhattacharya had previously served as the minister for Culture and Information and had also held the position of Home and Police minister. 16 According to a report prepared for the India Brand Equity Foundation this included exemption from all state and local taxes and levies on transactions with the SEZ and on supply from domestic tariff areas to the SEZ; exemption from stamp duty and registration fees; grants of labour and environment related permits and approvals through a single window mechanism; and permission to generate electricity for own consumption (India Brand Equity Foundation, Citation2005: 15–16). 17 The LF won 235 of the 294 seats in the state assembly. 18 According to Sinha (Citation2004: 92) West Bengal has a history of directing disproportionate attention to large‐scale prestige projects. 19 The figure soon rose to more than 100,000 acres. The complete list of projects for which land would be acquired can be found in Sen and Bhattacharya (2007: 14). 20 The figure is as per a status report prepared by the SKJRC during December 2006. The figure might have declined since then. The argument in this and the following sections builds on Nielsen (Citation2009). 21 A bigha equals approximately 1,300 square meters. 22 Farmers even sometimes used the logic of the free market to critique the LF. In a genuinely free market each farmer would have dealt directly with Tata Motors and would have been free to decide whether or not to sell and at what price. But as it were, the LF’s intervention had distorted these mechanisms, and had deprived the peasants of their capacity to navigate as strategic market actors (Nielsen, Citation2009: 458–459). 23 Sen and Bhattacharya (Citation2007: 17–18) list 86 constituent or supporting organisations. The majority of these are civil society groups. 24 In collaboration with the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific. 25 The NAPM expanded the discussion of the Tata project’s impact on local livelihoods considerably by also including those groups who were only indirectly affected by the land acquisition, such as small traders and artisans. Their situation, NAPM argued, would be no less precarious should Singur’s rural economy collapse. 26 While the Indian government or the Indian states were for long the object of critique from Indian intellectuals and activists, in the era of globalisation many have swung around to targeting the global forces instead, thus redeeming their own state in the process (Madsen, Citation2001: 3735). 27 Personally I often encountered activists from the Mazdoor Kranti Parishad (workers’ revolutionary council) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist‐Leninist) New Democracy in Singur; and many other left parties were supportive of the movement. Yet in contrast to the situation elsewhere in West Bengal, armed bands of Maoist rebels have been few and far between on the ground in Singur. 28 Most notably, Mamata Banerjee undertook a fast in Kolkata for 25 days in December 2006 in order to draw attention to the Singur issue. Accordingly most of the media coverage on Singur inevitably came to focus on Mamata Banerjee and Kolkata. 29 Narodniks was the name given to those segments of the nineteenth century Russian middle and upper classes, who saw the peasantry as the prime revolutionary class. According to Narodism the village commune was the embryo of socialism, and Narodniks generally believed that it was possible to skip capitalism and enter straight into socialism. The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested ‐ often by destroying mechanised looms ‐ against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which rendered them redundant. 30 Anthropologist Dayabati Roy has sought to prove the inapplicability of Gupta’s argument to Singur. According to Roy, the peasants of Singur expressed their overwhelming preference for sticking to agriculture, and they were unambiguous in their opposition to the acquisition of agricultural land (Roy, Citation2007: 3323). As I have indicated in this article I believe that Roy’s latter argument is correct, at least with regards to the ‘unwilling farmers’. I do, however, believe that Roy incorrectly tends to conflate the farmers’ opposition to land acquisition with a preference for agriculture. 31 Chatterjee argues that such civilising or moderating forces are the outcome of the political compulsions of electoral democracy, which ensures that the strategy of generating rapid economic growth cannot be pursued with complete disregard of its negative effects on the victims of ‘primitive accumulation’ – the rural poor, the displaced and the dispossessed.