Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India - Hardcover

Nielsen, Kenneth Bo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783087471 ISBN 13: 9781783087471

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2018

Synopsis

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground. Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India analyses the movement by Singur’s so-called unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. By foregrounding the everyday politics of popular mobilization, the book sheds new light on the movement’s internal politics as well as on contentious issues rooted in everyday caste, class and gender relations.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is associate professor of South Asia Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

By Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2018 Kenneth Bo Nielsen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-747-1

Contents

List of Tables, vii, 
Acknowledgements, ix, 
List of Abbreviations, xi, 
Introduction, 1, 
Chapter One Situating Singur, 17, 
Chapter Two Land, Identity and the Politics of Representation, 37, 
Chapter Three Law, Judicialization and the Politics of Waiting, 61, 
Chapter Four Class, Caste and Community, 89, 
Chapter Five Gendered Mobilization: Women as Activists and Symbols, 117, 
Chapter Six Activist Leadership, 147, 
Chapter Seven Ma, Mati, Manush – Mamata, 165, 
Conclusion, 189, 
Glossary, 195, 
Bibliography, 199, 
Index, 217, 

CHAPTER 1

SITUATING SINGUR

I first met Prasanta Das in his spacious two-storey house in Beraberi village in the latter half of 2007. By then, the 997 acres of farmland in Singur had long since been acquired, but Tata was yet to depart. I was in the company of a good friend from Kolkata, who knew Singur well, and we had hired a car for the day to make the journey to Singur as quickly as possible; but simply getting out of Kolkata took us nearly 45 minutes. Yet once we had made it to the highway, we were able to reach Singur in just over half an hour. Along the way the scenery changed dramatically as the metropolitan intensity of the state capital gave way to the peri-urban industrial sprawl north along the western bank of the Hooghly River, and finally into the interior of Hooghly district to the census town of Singur, after which the block, or administrative subdivision, took its name. Singur town, with roughly 20,000 inhabitants, was a bustling place with a cinema hall, colleges, its own annual boi mela (book fair) and more than 1,000 shops-selling products ranging from televisions and electronics to agricultural machinery, clothes, jewellery, fertilizers and books, besides restaurants and fast food stalls of many kinds. Singur town was well connected by rail and the national highway to Kolkata and other parts of the state and country. It was an administrative centre, home to the block development office (BDO), the thana (police station) and the zilla parishad, or block-level local government.

As we left Singur town behind, the scenery soon turned increasingly rural, with agricultural fields stretching almost as far as the eye could see. We made our way down the single-lane Bajemelia-Kamarkundu tarmac road, raised in some places half a metre or more above the adjacent fields to protect it from flooding during the monsoon. The fields appeared brown and barren, the amon paddy having only recently been harvested and the potatoes not yet planted. Here and there a couple of cows or goats grazed the fields, birds picking at the soil, but apart from that there was little activity to be seen since most agricultural labourers generally took a long break, ate lunch and rested during the hottest hours of the day. Even the Beraberi bazaar, which we soon reached, was deserted, the traders having closed shop. Turning right at the junction near a well-maintained Kali temple, we made our way along the dirt track that led into Shantipara, a neighbourhood in the southern part of Beraberi.

Apart from having been told that Prasanta was an important SKJRC organizer in Beraberi, and that he had been very active in mobilizing local support for the SKJRC's programmes, I knew little else about him or his family. We parked our car in a small square right next to Prasanta's large, two-storey concrete house, nicely painted in bright colours. As we entered the compound, my companion called out Prasanta's name a couple of times, until a voice responded that we should enter and come upstairs. Here Prasanta welcomed us in his air-conditioned bedroom.

Prasanta listed attentively as I explained my interest in their movement to save their farmland, and the research interests I had developed around it, while also hinting that I was in need of a place to stay While I made my introduction, Prasanta's wife appeared at the door, accompanied by two young boys. 'This is Tanika, my wife, and my two sons,' Prasanta said. 'Come, I will show you the room,' he added. As we walked down the stairs, Prasanta explained that he and Tanika lived in the house along with his parents, his old widowed aunt, his three brothers and their wives, and his two nephews - 15 people in all. Prasanta looked content as he said, 'If you want to know about our movement, you have come to the right place. In our village, the large majority of families have not given their land willingly. Still they are fighting to get it back.' About a week later I moved into Prasanta's house.

This chapter situates the story of the Singur movement through an account of events that unfolded during and after the acquisition of the farmland. It also embeds these events in the longer history of industrial development in West Bengal and outlines the LF government's official position on the land acquisition. I briefly introduce the Singur area not only as the locus of an intense conflict over the would-be fate of a large patch of agricultural land, but also as a place of agricultural production; social reproduction; myriad livelihood strategies; and of dense everyday social relations and interactions structured along the lines of caste, class and gender. These themes are then elaborated in later chapters. I begin, however, by a brief account of what actually happened in Singur when news of the land acquisition first broke in 2006.

The Trajectory of Singur and Its Politics

The early months of anti-land acquisition protests from May 2006 onwards, when the news of the land acquisition first leaked, constituted a phase of intense mobilization in several respects akin to what Alberoni (1984, 20) calls 'the nascent state', that is, a phase of discontinuity and disruption from both institutional and everyday points of view. With the imminent threat of dispossession and displacement looming, the villagers responded with the kind of urgency that Levien (see the introduction) defines as characteristic of anti-dispossession movements. Within days of the land acquisition being announced, the SKJRC was formed; the local Member of the State Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the TMC, Rabindranath Bhattacharya, was appointed president, while another local TMC leader, Becharam Manna, was appointed the SKJRC's convener. Manna shared this position with Sandip Samanta, a local representative of the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), a minor political party on the non-governmental left. But although the leadership of the SKJRC was thus drawn from political parties, the SKJRC declared itself to be, as its name suggests, a non-party political committee, working solely towards the one-point agenda of saving the farmland. It was thus in principle open to everybody who subscribed to this agenda, regardless of political affiliation, caste or gender.

In the early days of the mobilization, rallies or demonstrations were taken out almost every day. Thousands of locals like Prasanta and Tanika marched under the banner of the SKJRC, shouting slogans like 'We will give our lives but not our land' or venting their anger at the state government by shouting, 'The farmland is our livelihood, but look at [Chief Minister] Buddha's immoral misdeed!' and 'Land tout [Industries Minister] Nirupam Sen, leave Singur!' At one rally held by the SKJRC outside the Singur BDO on 31 May 2006, the unwilling farmers declared 'war' on the state government and vowed that any attempt to take over their land by force would lead to 'bloody battles'. And from June onwards it became ever more common to hear the unwilling farmers proclaiming their resolve to resist with all their might any attempt by the government to acquire their land. As part of their repertoire of contention (Tarrow 1998, 20-21) the SKJRC undertook rasta roko and rail roko (blocking roads and railway tracks) and staged demonstrations in front of public offices and government buildings, including local panchayat (village council) offices, the office of the district magistrate (DM) and the local BDO.

In June the influential state politician and leader of the TMC, Mamata Banerjee, first took an interest in Singur when she threatened to make the land acquisition the basis for a statewide agitation if even an inch of agricultural land was handed over to Tata Motors. Mamata Banerjee later visited Singur and, as a symbolic act of defiance, planted paddy saplings near one of the villages where land was likely to be acquired, thus signalling that the land in Singur should and would remain under the plough of its rightful owners, both now and in the future. Other parties and organizations also joined the movement to save the farmland. This included, in addition to SUCI, parties such as the Majur Kranti Parishad (MKP; workers' revolutionary council), the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a number of revolutionary Maoist groups, or Naxalites, such as the CPI (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation, CPI (Marxist–Leninist) Kanu Sanyal and CPI (Marxist–Leninist) New Democracy Similarly, a large number of Kolkata-based NGOs and activist groups came out in support of the unwilling farmers. This included, among many others, the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), the Bandimukti Committee (the committee for the release of [political] prisoners), the Institute for Motivating Self Employment (IMSE), the People's Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), the Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti (PBKMS; West Bengal agricultural labourers' association) and the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM). Many of these organizations coalesced into larger networks of cooperation and coordination in the Singur Ucched Birodhi Krishak Sangram Sahayak Committee (committee to support the Singur peasants' fight against eviction) and the Sanhati Udyog (solidarity initiative). These groups and parties criticized the LF government's land acquisition policy on a number of accounts, including the use of the Land Acquisition Act from 1894, which I analyse in more detail in Chapter 3, to carry out the acquisition; and on account of the generous subsidies the LF government offered to Tata Motors to attract them to West Bengal, which, according to one estimate, amounted to as much as INR 850 crore (Bidwai 2008a, 117).

After an autumn of protests, agitation and some violence, government officials finally arrived in Singur on 2 December, under heavy police cover, to begin the fencing off of the area earmarked for the Tata factory Throughout the day SKJRC activists repeatedly clashed with the police as they sought to prevent the acquisition from going ahead but to no avail: after 2 December the land in Singur was in the de facto possession of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC), the official acquiring agency and the premier agency of the state's commerce and industries department for promoting industrialization. But the pitch and scope of the protests did not subside. As I describe in more detail in Chapter 7, TMC leader Mamata Banerjee took the fight to the state capital when she undertook a prolonged 'fast unto death' in Kolkata to (unsuccessfully) force the LF government to withdraw from Singur. Parallel to this, West Bengal witnessed a veritable mushrooming of localized land wars as landowners in many places proved equally unwilling to part with their land for industrial projects akin to that in Singur. During the early months of 2007, local 'resistance committees' modelled on the SKJRC sprang up in many places where industrial or other projects were either already planned or were likely to be started. In Raiganj, in northern Bengal, a Krishi Jomi Bachao Committee (committee to save the farmland) was formed in January to oppose the acquisition of land for a planned army training camp; in Dankuni, near Singur, villagers organized to protest against a land acquisition for a proposed real estate and township project; in Mahishadal, a Special economic zone (SEZ) and biotech park were opposed by a locally formed Jami Bachao Vastu Bachao Committee (committee to save land and homes); in Kharagpur, a Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee was formed in opposition to a land acquisition for a payloader plant under the auspices of Tata's Telcon company; and in Panskura, the Panskura Jomi Suraksha Sangram Committee (action committee to secure land) was established in February to oppose the acquisition of farmland for a proposed project of the Reliance Group, India's largest private sector enterprise. An umbrella organization, the Paschim Banga Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee (later renamed the Paschim Banga Krishi Jomi Jiban Jibika Committee; PBKJJJRC, the West Bengal committee to save agricultural land, life and livelihood) was established at the initiative of the TMC to coordinate the many disparate land struggles. Soon, Singur was but one of the 'thousands of small wars against land acquisitions' (Levien 2011, 66) that raged across West Bengal and elsewhere in India. Yet the diffusion and proliferation of anti-land acquisition movements across the state and nation yielded few concrete results for the unwilling farmers in Singur as the administration retained possession of the acquired land.

Before the new cycle of mobilization that began shortly before the massive demonstration outside the factory gates in 2008, and which eventually led to Tata Motors' pull-out, the unwilling farmers had, as I analyse in Chapter 3, unsuccessfully sought to contest the legal standing of the land acquisition in the Calcutta High Court. Their leading representatives had even entered into a negotiated compromise with the state government over the return of a portion of the acquired land to its erstwhile owners. After a few brief rounds of talks presided over by Governor of West Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had entered into what came to be known as the Raj Bhavan (governor's residence) accord on land-based rehabilitation for the unwilling farmers. Reading out the accord, the governor said,

The government has taken the decision to respond to the demand of those farmers who have not received compensation [i.e. the unwilling farmers], by means of land to be provided to the maximum within the project area and the rest in adjacent areas as early as possible. (The Statesman, 9 September 2008)

When the accord was signed, I received a jubilant email from Tanika, Prasanta's wife, just minutes after she had been informed of the accord. I reproduce the email in full here to convey the kind of intense emotional investment that characterized the unwilling farmers' movement. Tanika wrote (in English),

We are so happy our demand for the return of the land, for which we were continuing our movement for two and half years, has been met. Today the state government has decided to return the land just 10 minutes ago. The Chief Minister in a sitting with Mamata Banerjee and the Governor has taken this historical decision to bring the smile of truth to the face of the farmers. Our pleasure knows no limit. If you could see the flood of joy in our village! The very moment when TV announced the news, the sound of cheers and holy cries filled the air. My eyes filled with tears. Mother is now worshipping god. Everybody, both men and women, rushed to the dharna manch (the stage from which the dharna was conducted) to greet our leader, even at 11.30 pm! Every house is full of joy and celebration. The people have come out from their houses and are celebrating. This is a historical triumph of democracy over the cruelty of the state. We are so happy! We recall the days when the police beat the farmers so cruelly. We thank Mamata Banerjee and all the persons who supported our movement. Again and again my eyes are filled with tears – I think this must be the kind of joy people felt on 15 August, 1947 [India's Independence Day]. 7 September is like Singur's Independence Day. Maybe you will think I sound overly emotional, but if you could see the joy that is expressed in front of the dharna manch you would know that what I am expressing here does not even begin to describe what is actually happening.

Yet, for Tanika, the story of Singur after the initially unsuccessful legal challenge and the soon-to-be shipwrecked Raj Bhavan accord would be one of disappointment and unfulfilled promises. No land was returned and not even the eventual departure of Tata Motors in late 2008 would alter the situation on the ground: the company continued to renew its 90-year lease on the land and therefore retained the right of use, thus effectively barring the return of the land to its erstwhile owners. Only in late 2016 did the Supreme Court ruling mentioned in the introduction finally break the stalemate.

'From Agriculture to Industry' – Singur and LF Industrial Policy

The zest with which industrialization was pursued and land dispossession carried out in Singur from 2006 needs to be seen within the broader context of industrial development and decline in West Bengal. The LF government that executed the land acquisition first assumed office in West Bengal in 1977. The Left parties had consolidated their presence in West Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period which has been described as 'a decade of chaos' (Kohli 1997, 342) marred by several periods of emergency rule, urban terrorism, a Maoist-inspired rural insurgency and often violent land-grab movements encouraged by the Left parties themselves, particularly the CPI(M) (Ruud 2003). When the LF government came to power, the CPI(M) in particular had built up a massive rural support base. In power, the LF carried out a number of rural reform programmes that centred on pro- poor agricultural development through the redistribution of ceiling surplus agricultural land, that is, land held in excess of the legal ceiling. Many of the smallholder farmers ('willing' as well as 'unwilling') in Singur who were affected by the land acquisition had been beneficiaries of these land reforms at some point (Majumder 2012; Majumder and Nielsen 2017). Other important rural policies included the revamping of the panchayat (village council) system of decentralized governance; recording the names of bargadar and securing them the legal rights to fixed and heritable tenure and a fixed share of the harvest; giving institutional credit to the recipients of vested land to break ties of debt and bondage; assigning permanent title to homestead plots in order to prevent eviction of landless agricultural workers and sharecroppers residing on the landowners' plots as permissive occupiers; and providing irrigation, subsidies, exemption from revenues and designing food-for-work programmes (Webster 1992), to name but some.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783087471
• ISBN 13: 9781783087471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 234