Behind the IAEA Safeguards Agreement: What the Nuclear Deal Entails
By M.V. Ramana, Guest Contributor.
With the submission of the safeguards agreement to the IAEA and the challenge to the government from the left parties, there is now renewed widespread debate about the nuclear agreement with United States. Much of the debate on the deal has been between what can be broadly called the nuclear hawks and the nuclear nationalists. The nuclear hawks believe India’s nuclear programme is a great success and more than able to take care of itself. They see the deal as imposing unnecessary constraints on the programme and making more difficult the creation of the large nuclear arsenal, including thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs), that they believe is essential for India to be a ‘great power.’
The Indo-US Nuclear Pact and the Hoax of Nuclear Power
The Indo-US Nuclear Pact and the Hoax of Nuclear Power - By Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri
India’s Nuclear History: A Brief Outline
Choosing the Wrong Future: The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal - By Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana
Wrong Ends, Means, and Needs: Behind the U.S. Nuclear Deal With India - By Zia Mian and M. V. Ramana
Talk To Naxals; Focus On Development, Land Reform
By Suhit Sen, The Statesman
A team of experts constituted by the Planning Commission has cottoned on to something the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to comprehend. It has pointed out that Left-wing extremism is not just - we could go further and say not at all - a law-and-order problem. It is a phenomenon that arises from a complete lack of development, desperate poverty and the dehumanisation that arises from it, and injustice and inequality. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh does not agree, of course - not long ago he had characterised extremism as the most virulent disease that afflicted India’s body politic and Naxals as the Public Enemy Number 1. He should take time off his admittedly onerous duties to pore over the report.
On the Naxalite Movement: A Report with a Difference
An EPW commentary by Sumanta Banerjee on the recent Planning Commission Report, “which while meticulously arranging the latest facts and figures, rigorously examines the causes of the continuing economic exploitation and social discrimination in the adivasi and dalit-inhabited areas even after 60 years of independence. It is significant that this particular expert group was set up by the government in May 2006, in the background of increasing Naxalite activities in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa.”
Enemies of the State - Women and men who choose the margins
Enemies of the State: Women and men who choose the margins - By Ashok Mitra
Mumbai’s Rebels: Those Who Couldn’t Remain Unmoved. Profiles of Anuradha Ghandy, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Shridhar Shrinivasan - By Bernard D’Mello
They insist your show must be cancelled! - cultural coercion in a post-Nandigram Bengal
By Tapas Sinha. Translated by Suvarup Saha, Sanhati
The phonecall came on the 10th of April. One of the organizers of the Champdanga Theatre Festival was on the line. On the receiving end was thespian Koushik Sen, who has been active in the civil society movement of Nandigram.
From Chhattisgargh to Manipur: The many faces of Salwa Judum
Manipur will arm its civilians to fight militants: A Salwa Judum in the making? - May 3, 2008
Chhattisgargh’s purification hunt - By Shubhranshu Choudhary
4 farmers commit suicide everyday in Chhattisgarh - the highest in the country - By Shubhranshu Choudhary
Looking back at Khejuri: Our men, their men – the straw men
This eyewitness account appeared in November 2007, and presents an alternative first-hand view of the highly publicised Khejuri camps. It has been translated by Atreyi Dasgupta, Sanhati.
…One of the little ones, when asked his name, immediately parroted, “We need industry, or else how can we have development”. He was ten years old. His sister was just beside him, and she said, “We don’t know how long we have to stay in this condition. If we ask these people, they say, everything will go back to normal in a few days. But where is that happening? You know didi, our friends in Nandigram told us that they have resumed their studies. What will we do?”
Chemical Hub at Nayachar: Citizens’ Expert Committee Report
In view of the appalling lack of transparency pertaining to various aspects of the West Bengal Government’s proposal for, and efforts towards, setting up a Chemical / Petrochemical Hub at Nayachar and the numerous urgent issues of public interest thrown up by such a project, a Citizens’ Expert Committee was constituted to look into the desirability and viability of the said project. The Committee comprises of eminent specialists drawn from various disciplines – geology, chemistry, physics, river science, medicine, economics and fisheries. Presented below are the preliminary observations of the Committee, covering environmental, geological, and economic aspects.
You see, we do back calculations here - Rural employment and Panchayet realities in Bengal
By Swati Bhattacharya. Translated by Debarshi Das, Sanhati
We want work, work, work, work and work. - Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister, West Bengal
Anukul Das was from Sonaga village, Gosaba Gram Panchayat (South 24 Parganas District, the Sunderban region). He demanded the right to work for minimum hundred days from Panchayat. Presently he is in the Andamans seeking work. His wife Shikha Das says, he got only nine days of work in two years. So, he went to submit the application for unemployment dole with some other villagers. Panchayat did not want to accept to application, hence they forcibly submitted it. A few days later, works started in the area, and they did not find any. They were allotted works in Rangabelia, about four kilometres away. Cost of travelling to and fro is twenty two rupees per day. One hour by boat, one more on foot. It was absurd to accept such a proposal. Panchayat members had told them openly: you complained about us, we will provide no work to you.
On the CPIM’s draft political resolution
Capitalistic socialism: New Oxymoron - By Sankar Ray
Irony of recent history - A critique of the CPIM’s draft political resolution - By Sankar Ray
Singur brutalizer gets medal, cadres get Nandigram land, cash incentives for officials: Laissez-faire in action
Friedmanite neo-liberalism advocates minimization of the involvement of the state. In reality, neo-liberal policies are imposed and facilitated by the state - from nepotism and incentives to disappearances and massacres.
1. Singur: IPS officer accused of torture awarded Seva medal by Chief Minister - March 3, 2008
2. Bengal govt to distribute vested Nandigram land to party supporters - February 27, 2008
3. Cash Incentives for Officials Who Take Initiative for Land Acquisition - February 2, 2008
Economic Growth: A Meaningless Obsession?
By Amit Bhaduri, B.N. Ganguly Memorial Lecture; CSDS, Delhi, November 2006.
We are living in India at a time when the media is continuously transmitting confusing, even conflicting, economic signals. If we restrict ourselves to the English language print as well as electronic media, our comfort level is likely to be high. The economy is growing at a high rate, the stock market is booming, our foreign reserve is at a comfortably high level, and freer trade is bringing to our doors a variety of goods and services simply unimaginable even a couple of decades ago as a mark of the benefits of globalization. What is more, we are daily reminded that India is poised economically and politically as an emergent world power.
Growth of a Wasteland
By Amit Bhaduri
Economic growth tends to be sustained over a period of time by mutually reinforcing tendencies. This process has appeared in different guises in various fields of enquiry to describe essentially similar phenomena. Biologists have long known it as symbiosis or mutualism between two species; they appear as autocatalysis in chemical reactions, and engineers dealing with electrical circuits call similar mechanisms systems of positive mutual feedbacks. Economists Myrdal and Kaldor tried to capture this phenomenon occurring during the process of economic growth as the mechanism of ‘cumulative causation’, and ‘dynamic increasing returns’ respectively. While most processes of economic growth sustained over a period of time might be characterized by this somewhat abstract notion of mutually reinforcing tendencies, each historical process is also different in so far as it generates it own specific tendencies. It is the specificity of these reinforcing tendencies that determine to a large extent the developmental politics underlying this growth process. The growing despair and anger in large part of Indian countryside about India’s recent and unprecedented high growth has to be placed in this context.
Some critiques of CPI(M)’s 19th Congress and stance on capitalism
On Jyoti Basu’s Embrace of Capitalism as the Only Road to Industrialisation - By P.J. James
CPI(M)’s 19th Congress: The Social Democrats Stand Further Exposed - By K.N. Ramachandran
Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda
Click here to watch documentary: Buddha weeps in Jadugoda [Youtube video, six parts]
Click here for photos of affected children
Ragi Kana Ko Bonga Buru (Buddha weeps in Jadugoda) documents the devastating effects of uranium mining by Uranium Corporation of India Limited at Jadugoda, in Jharkhand. For the last thirty years, radioactive waste has been dumped into the rice fields of Adivasis. The complete disregard of the authorities to radioactive waste management rules wreaks havoc on the daily lives of villagers and children, with genetic deformities becoming quite common.
About director Shriprakash Prakash: Shriprakash has directed and produced many documentary films during the last 15 years. He is also the chief co-ordinator of Kritika, a group working in the Jharkhand region since 1990 in the areas of culture and communication. With his films he has attempted to capture the struggles and aspirations of indigenous local communities in Bihar and Jharkhand, and to give them a voice.
NREGA - Employment guarantee: beyond propaganda
By Jean Drèze
The extension of the NREGA to the whole country is an unprecedented opportunity to build the foundations of a social security system in rural India, revive village economies, promote social equity, and empower rural labour.
Kalboishekhi in Poush: The Aftermath of Nandigram
By Garga Chatterjee, Sanhati
The events in Nandigram have possibly changed the trajectory of contemporary political discourse for good. West Bengal’s “leftist” government started a policy of forcibly acquiring land from peasants, dependents on soil and other communities that live off the soil. Incident after incident followed where discontented locals spontaneously organized, into Krishi Jami Raksha Committee, Bhumi Uchhed Protirodh Committee, Uchhed Birodhi Committee, and more.
What the myopic can’t see
For some time Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has been advising the Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee to disband the organisation since the state government has “abandoned for good” the plan to acquire farmland at Nandigram, while the outfit’s nomenclature means it was formed for resistance against displacement from land.
Ration debacle in Bengal - corruption, crisis, condoms
A The Statesman Report, December 20, 2007
Recently the West Bengal government, after facing violent protests throughout the state against large scale irregularities in the rationing system, has decided to distribute condoms through the ration shops. This is perhaps to minimise the number of poor mouths to demand food from the government and thereby reduce its rationing responsibility. But condoms alone will not suffice to reduce the population as the government expects.
Singur sharecropper commits suicide
Kolkata, Dec. 17. A The Statesman report:
Acute financial crunch drove a 50-year-old non-recorded sharecropper, Shankar Patra, to suicide this afternoon. He is the fifth farmer of Singur to have committed suicide following land acquisition there. Patra took his life at a cowshed adjacent to his house near Khaserveri in Singur.
The Left: Rethink or Perish
By Praful Bidwai, ZNet, Dec 9, 2007
The Indian Left survived, even extended its influence, in the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism collapse. Yet in one year it has undone this and seriously damaged its credibility as a force which speaks for the underprivileged, the excluded, and which upholds the values and practices of inclusive democracy. In West Bengal, 2007 witnessed forcible land acquisition for a car factory in Singur, two planned episodes of armed violence in Nandigram, starvation deaths among long-unemployed tea-garden workers in Jalpaiguri and dirt-poor Adivasis in Purulia and Bankura.
Singur - ways of life, before and after
By Kuver Sinha, Sanhati. Translated from a Manthan fact-finding report, August 2007
This article describes the way of life in Dobadi, a village of Khetmajoors (agricultural workers) in Singur. It tells the story of things as they were then, and as they are now. It is told at the personal level, from the microscopic changes that life has undergone under the dictates of over-arching political forces. It describes, for example, how Sankar Das, the man who died of starvation recently, might have lived and ended. Or why Prasanta Das of Khasherbheri may have killed himself.
Chengara, Kerala - land grab, Adivasis, and peasant struggle - A citizens’ report
December 4, 2007
Chengara speaks to India through the Chengara Pledge. It is the pledge of thousands of people, struggling for the last 120 days in Chengara Harrison Malayalam Estate, (also called as Laha Estate) seeking ownership of cultivable land to all 5,000 families there.
Chengara Pledge: As Recited by Soumya Babu, an 11 Year old Girl who said she will go to school only after she gets land
I love my country. I will try to learn about the Constitution and laws of my country. I will work for fulfilling the pristine objective of the Constitution. I will take part in the nation building process in my own way. I will not discriminate against any Indian on the basis of religion or caste. I understand us as owners of a great tradition as well as protectors of a great democracy.
Country for the people (/Janangalkku Vendi Raashtram)/ People for the country /(Raashtrathuinuven di Janangal)/
Has the Left taken one Right Turn too many?
By D. Bandyopadhyay
There is a lingering belief among quite a few in West Bengal that there is something of “Leftism” still left here. That the pro-poor radicalism that the “Left” once had, had been reduced to ashes due to the malignant heat of authority and pelf being in power for the last three decades in this State, escaped notice of many a non-discerning onlooker.
Nandigram and the Fight Against the War in Iraq
By Saroj Giri, Sanhati
Is the war in Iraq essentially an ideological subterfuge to keep the capitalist machinery going or is it the capitalist machinery itself? Does limiting one’s struggle to opposing the US invasion of Iraq, and now maybe Iran, amount to the fight to bring down capitalism in the US or can it sometimes mean concentrating only on the symptom of war and letting the actual beast of capitalism survive and flourish? Thus it looks like there is a division between those struggling against the war in Iraq, the ‘global war on terror’, supposedly the real struggle worth its salt, and those struggling against not such highly visible and media-projected symptoms and manifestations of capitalism but fighting it at its very hidden-away but fundamental bases on which it stands, in the factory floor or plant site itself.
Nandigram, as a proposed plant site, stands for such a fight at the very bases of capital. Moreover if in this fight, those supposedly involved in the fight against the war in Iraq are found to be colluding with capitalism on the ground, then we are supposed to overlook this in the larger interests of keeping the left together and not splitting it. Thus when today the success of the struggle against the most capitalist of devices, the Special Economic Zones (SEZ), in India involves a struggle against its most vociferous proponent, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), some anti-war activists see this as the weakening of the Left.
Perspectives on Nandigram - articles by Dipankar Bhattacharya (Liberation), Mazdoor Mukti, and RDF
Contents:
Nandigram-III: Lessons and Challenges - Dipankar Bhattacharya, CPI(ML) Liberation
Nandigram Dared to Spread its Wings - A Mazdoor Mukti Publication
Nandigram, Salwa Judum and Post-Godhra - Many clothes of the Emperor - Article from RDF
Criminal face of a cognoscente
By Sankar Ray
West Bengal chief minister and CPI(M) polit bureau member Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has a split identity: one, pushing through his open-door policy about investment, assuring business tycoons unequivocally of not brooking ‘militant trade unionism’ and two, shielding party-backed criminals to drive out opponents from CPI(M) strongholds that turned against the latter. The first role of wooing MNCs successfully brought for the first time the controversial former US secretary of state Henri Kissinger to Writers’ Buildings, Bhattacharjee’s headquarters. The other role has achieved the unleashing of violence at Nandigram by armed cadres and mercenaries while keeping police forces in the barracks to ensure indiscriminate killing of unarmed protesters. The results: the pogroms of 14 March (coincidentally the death anniversary of Karl Marx) and 7-12 November, 2007.
Lifting the veil : Marichjhampi then, Nandigram now
By Jai Sen
I would like to put forward a few background thoughts on what is going on in Nandigram today, and also around it, in Kolkata and elsewhere.
What is happening also needs to be understood within a history of how the Left Front, and in particular the biggest party, the CPI(M), has handled such situations previously.
And secondly, I suggest that the widespread reaction to what has happened that is being expressed in civil and political society in India today can perhaps be understood in part as a function of the huge changes that have taken place over these past three decades, especially in that part of the country but also elsewhere.
I will try and sketch this out by comparing this to an ‘incident’ that took place back in West Bengal in 1978-79.
Nov 16, 2007: Nandigram Redux: Reading Sudhanva Deshpande
By Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Kafila
Contents: (1) Nandigram and Gujarat - critically examining the analogy (2) Violence - examining exaggerations, minimum figures, the CPI(M)’s number game, and the party’s description of its opposition (3) The notice that there would be no land-acquisition in Nandigram - examining the CPI(M)’s delicate language game in the light of Singur (4) The people and their consent.
Lessons From Nandigram’s Heroic Land Struggle - 14 Nov, 2007
By Vidya Bhushan Rawat, Countercurrents
Nandigram is burning and the Neros of the left front governments are watching it with great patience. Those who are up in arms against any displacement elsewhere remain mute spectators at the butchering of people in this ‘war zone’, as the governor of the state Mr Gopal Krishna Gandhi mentioned in his statement. CPM and its leadership were prompt in condemning the governor for his remark as unconstitutional. If governor’s remark is out of the touch of Bengal’s reality then how can one justify the ‘call’ for ‘recapture’ of land by the top leadership of CPM?
You are not what you were - Ashok Mitra after 14th November, 2007
By Ashok Mitra. Translated from Bengali by Debarshi Das, Sanhati.
Till death I would remain guilty to my conscience if I keep mum about the happenings of the last two weeks in West Bengal over Nandigram. One gets torn by pain too. Those against whom I am speaking have been my comrades at some time. The party whose leadership they are adorning has been the centre of my dreams and works for last sixty years.
The Chemical Hub - what are the socio-economic costs and why should we bear them?
Translated by Kuver Sinha, Sanhati
When the whole world has set up stronger and stronger control over chemical industries due to the hazards involved, how well-advised is it to set such an industry up in a densely populated country like India , or a state with the huge population of West Bengal ? Where the government has no infrastructure for protecting public health, no machinery for controlling environmental pollution, what is the pressing reason to set up a hazardous chemical industry? Will we be the beneficiaries? What is the overall plan of industrial development? What products are being produced, and what are the laws of their use?
Tea garden closures, underfed families, and starvation in Bengal - some hard facts
By Ashok Ghosh, State General Secretary, UTUC. Translated by Soumya Guhathakurta, Sanhati. Sept. 5, 2007
The existence of starvation in West Bengal after 30 years of left front government although the foodgrain availability per capita in the state is 0.2 tonnes per annum or 550 gms per head per day, raises uncomfortable questions about the distribution system and the purchasing capacity (or entitlement) of the rural population. This after claims of successful land reforms and land re-distribution through operation Barga.
The Presidency Consolidation, mass movements, and Left orthodoxy - Thinking afresh in the wake of Nandigram
By Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri
I am reminded of a spontaneous formation of forty years ago, the Presidency Consolidation (PC). The PC developed on the lawn of Presidency College in the wake of the spring thunder of 1967. The Presidency college students’ struggle of 1966 against the expulsion of eight undergraduates and the refusal to admit three graduates, including Ashim Chatterjee ‘Kaka’ and the present Minister of Higher Education Sudarsan Roychowdhury into the M.A. class, because of their Left affiliation, had been supported by the CPI(M), and had developed into a widespread movement which had captured the interest of students and young people all over the state. When Naxalbari erupted, the band of Left students of Presidency college, trying furiously to arrive at their own understanding of the politics of revolution, was among the first to put up posters supporting the movement on the wall of the Hindu School opposite to the gate of the college.
Whose interests does Amartya Sen take care of?
By Sankar Ray
Prof Amartya Sen’s arguments in an interview to a Kolkata-based daily seem somewhat delinked from reality. In fine, he tries to sell his ideological allegiance to market-driven economy in the setting of globalization.
Penetrating the Retail Sector in Bengal - the Reliance Juggernaut (Blog article, open for comments)
By Partho Sarathi Ray, Sanhati
The latest neo-liberal onslaught on the lives and livelihoods of working people in India is taking place in the retail sector. After agriculture, the retail sector employs the largest number of people in India. Of the 40 million people involved in retailing as an economic activity, 0.5 million are in organized retail whereas around 39.5 million people are employed in unorganized retail trade. This includes all sorts of small retailing operations ranging from neighbourhood “mom-and-pop” shops to street vendors to small farmers who travel to cities daily to sell their produce to the small-scale transporters who transport the retail goods. These 40 million adults in the retail sector roughly translates into 160 million dependents, making the retail sector the source of livelihood for approximately a sixth of India’s population. The decade of liberalization, which has seen stagnation in the agrarian economy and large scale job losses in the manufacturing sector, has pushed more and more people into different aspects of retailing in absence of any other opportunities.
Rejoinder to Amartya Sen’s interview in The Telegraph, July 23
By Prof. Dipanjan Rai Chaudhuri
Professor Amartya Sen’s interview (The Telgraph,, July 23) makes us sad.
1. “The market economy has many imperfections, on which I have written extensively. But it also creates jobs and incomes, and if the income goes up, government revenues go up, so there is money available for education and healthcare and other things.” So said Amartya Sen.
Textbook (neoclassical) economics is a strange discipline. It is timeless. There is a history of economic thought but no history of economic phenomena. Prof Sen has given above a perfect textbook lecture, which he applies, in the best traditions of textbook economics, equally to the early capitalism of 17th century England, the colonial economy of 19th century Bengal, and the late capitalism of present-day India.
Agrarian Confusion - Singur, farmers’ consent, and the Left Front’s statistical misrepresentations
By Sankar Ray (published in The Statesman )
Ever since the dubious duo in Left politics - the West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his second-in-command on industrialisation, commerce and industry minister Nirupam Sen - took the centre-stage in the arena of industrialisation in the state and policy-angle thereof, the magnitude of confusion about the land or agrarian question has been expanding awkwardly.
The latest one - how many land-owners at Singur gave written consent for acquisition to the department of land and land reforms through the district collector - is its symptomatic manifestation, thanks to the ignorance of an overwhelming majority of not only lay readers but also political activists about rules and statutes on land acquisition and utilisation thereof. But for the assertive statement by the land and land reforms minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah that 2,552 farmers owning 326 acres did not accord consent casts, the duo had staged a walkover as they have the unmixed blessings from the Left Front chairman and CPI-M Politburo member Biman Bose and general secretary Prakash Karat.
Missing the Wood for the Trees - A paper on land acquisition, past and present
By Abhijit Guha
The discourse on land acquisition revolves round the location of industries, compensation and employment of the displaced persons and above all the relationship between agriculture and industrialisation in the state of West Bengal. While all these issues are hotly debated among the stakeholders amidst claims and counter-claims no one really seems to be serious or even knowledgeable about the nature and functioning of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (LA Act) which is the legal instrument of acquiring land for private companies in India even after 59 years of Independence. Everybody is now busy with the Special Economic Zone Act and its various undemocratic and authoritarian characteristics but nobody demands or makes any concrete plan or suggestion to overhaul the LA Act which stipulates only monetary compensation at market rate, ignores the local self-government, shows no concern over communal property rights and the environment, gives supreme power to the government to acquire land for a ‘public purpose’ which remains undefined and makes no provision for resettlement and rehabilitation for the displaced persons.
EPW letters on Nandigram and the role of intellectuals like Patnaik
What should be the role of a Communist party in a situation as exists in India? Should they say that the middle class demand industrialization, and therefore industrialization must take place at any cost, even if it means pushing farmers off the land? Is it sufficient to say that the capital for industrialization can be raised only by the private sector, and that all states are wooing them, and therefore West Bengal should do the same?
The beautiful, expanding future of poverty
By Ashis Nandy
It is becoming increasingly obvious that all large multi-ethnic societies, after attaining the beatific status of development, lose interest in removing poverty, especially when poverty is associated with ethnic and cultural groups that lack or lose political clout. Particularly in a democracy, numbers matter and, once the number of poor in a society dwindles to a proportion that can be ignored while forging electoral alliances, political parties are left with no incentive to pursue the cause of the poor. Seen thus, the issue of poverty is a paradox of plural democracy when it is wedded to global capitalism. And the paradox is both political-economic and moral. Presently the trendy slogan of globalisation can be read as the newest effort to paper over the basic contradiction; globalisation has built into it the open admission that removal of poverty is no longer even a central myth of our public agenda.
Click here to read article [PDF, 39 KB] »
A critique of the writings of Malini Bhattacharya, Prabhat Patnaik, and others after Nandigram
By Kavita Krishnan
We consider three articles that appeared in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW): former CPI(M) MP Malini Bhattacharya’s ‘Nandigram and the Question of Development’, and economist Prabhat Patnaik’s ‘In the aftermath of Nandigram’, EPW May 26, 2007; and ‘Reflections in the aftermath of Nandigram’, by ‘A CPI(M) Supporter’, EPW May 5 2007.
Chomsky asks for Binayak Sen’s release - Political prisoners all over the country - Arun Ferreira, Shantanu Kamble, Piyush Sethia, etc.
June 16 2007 - Chomsky, Thapar, and others demand release of Binayak Sen
May 9, 2007 - Arun Ferreira, Ashok Satya Reddy, Naresh Bansod, Dhanendra Bhurle arrested in Nagpur under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
April 11, 2007 - Piyush Sethia, Ko Seenivasan, Manimaran, Poomozhi arrested in Tamil Nadu for protesting Nandigram massacre
Spetember 2005 - Poet Shantanu Kamble arrested, kept in custody and tortured for 100 days
The Arrest of Dr. Binayak Sen - When the State turns Lawless
By Praful Bidwai
The detention in Raipur of human rights activist Binayak Sen under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (PSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has rightly attracted nationwide condemnation from citizens’ groups. Dr Sen, general secretary of the Chhattisgarh People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and the union’s national vice-president, was arrested for his alleged links with banned Maoist groups. The critical allegation against Dr Sen is that he met senior Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal more than 30 times in recent months in the Raipur central jail where he has been detained.
On the very face of it, the charge is utterly preposterous. Dr Sen met Sanyal with the authorities’ knowledge and consent and always in the presence of a jailer. In fact, as a civil liberties activist, it is his legitimate job and function to meet detainees and ensure that their fundamental rights are respected and they are treated in accordance with the due process of law.
Introductory Booklet on SEZs prepared by Citizens’ Research Collective, New Delhi
This booklet answers basic questions such as What is a SEZ, Why SEZs, How many SEZs, What has been the experience with SEZs so far, Will SEZs create jobs. It looks at the attendant displacement and loss of livelihood, the features of the emerging new corporate-city-state, and the immense usage (upto 75%) of SEZ land for real estate. It ends with a look at the many faces of resistance to neoliberalism, like the Coca-Cola Virudha Samara Samiti, Muthanga Forest Land Struggle, protests against land acquisitions for the Bangalore-Mysore highway and mining in the Krishna river by the Reliance Group, the Dalit struggle for Gairan under the Jameen Adhikar Andolan, struggle against Reliance Gas lines in Maharashtra, the 26 Gaon Bachao Sangharsh Samiti fighting SEZ in Raigad, etc.
Click to read booklet on SEZ [PDF, 2.88MB]
Emerging Contours of Peoples’ Resistance : Ranchi, Jadugoda, Jagatsinghpur
Ranchi : First taste of fury for Reliance Fresh
Jadugoda : Living next to India’s uranium mine
Jagatsinghpur : Under siege: Twin pillars of business - Posco blinks in land war
Update on detention of Dr. Binayak Sen, Vice-President of the National PUCL
Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) mobilizes public opinion in favor of a better climate for the protection of civil liberties in the country; energizes and creatively uses existing institutions like the courts and the press so that they may become more sensitive to the human rights situation in the country; conducts investigations into incidents of violations of human rights reported by victims, the press, PUCL members, or any concerned individual; publishes the findings of investigations and releases them to the press, or makes them public by other means such as public meetings (seminars and lectures); raises its voice against various black-laws and lobbies for the enactment of progressive laws in the country and files petitions in court on the basis of these investigations, or even otherwise.
Struggle for Land is Struggle for Rights
By Subhendu Dasgupta (courtesy Dainik Statesman). Translated by Prithviraj Guha, Sanhati
The foremost point posed by this land struggle is the question of cultivable land being taken and put to non-agricultural use. But there’s more to the issue than this. If we look deeper, then it can be understood that the issue is fundamentally about control over natural resources – by the State, and by capital. There is tremendous pressure to legitimize this hegemony - not just over land but also over all kinds of natural resources - water, river, sea, hills, minerals, forests, crops and then, define this as the process of development. The current struggle is to contend this very idea.
Articles on Reliance SEZs in Maharastra
People Up Against SEZ [PDF, 2 pages] By Sanjay Sangvai, Ulka Mahajan
Unreliable Reliance and Special Exploitation Zones [PDF, 3 pages] - By Simpreet Singh
Land-Grab by the Rich : Politics of SEZs in India [PDF, 4 pages] - By Sanjay Sangvai
Tea Garden Workers Starve in Bengal; Worker-Turned- Owners Revive Failing Tea Estates in Munnar
Bengal - Pipli Mahali, 34, was a permanent worker in Mujnai TE living with her husband Mani Mahali and a two and a half year-old son. However, she found it difficult to manage the household after the crisis in the tea estate began. Her husband was suffering from tuberculosis but, as the hospital was not equipped with any medicine, he died a slow death in early 2002. When the employers abandoned the tea estate in November, 2002, there was no foodstuff available in the estate at all. Hence, Pipli was forced to feed her son whatever fruits and vegetables were available in the nearby jungles. Unable to digest these wild fruits, her son succumbed to blood dysentery in November, 2002. Pipli now lives alone in a house and has sold off all her belongings in order to survive. She is suffering from tuberculosis and very few people visit her at home. She is helplessly awaiting her death.
MUNNAR, Kerala, Apr 25 (IPS) - Faced with unemployment in their failing tea estates, about two years ago, tea pluckers in the rolling highlands of this southern state responded by forming cooperatives to buy out their former employers Tata Tea and turn the gardens into profitable enterprises.
Special Economic Zones (SEZ) of India and the “China Model”: What is going to Happen?
By R. Ali, For A Proletarian Party Journal
In 2000, when the blueprints of the SEZs had been drawn, it was proclaimed by the commerce ministry of GoI that India must emulate the path of “export-led economy” of China for the following reasons: to progress within the fierce competition in the era of globalization; to accelerate the rate of growth of economy; to create jobs, etc. At the same time, the big houses of business like CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, etc. endorsed this policy-statement with whole-hearted support. Even the imperialist countries/agencies supported these policies of the GoI. Some of them (World Bank, McKinsey, several international financial organizations and the USA), in fact, helped to charter the path of moving forward with the blueprints of SEZs.
Nandigram, Comprador Intellectuals and an Exchange
Imagine how much pain we have caused to a man who loves flowers so much - Dilip Roy gives flowers to Buddha
There are some intellectuals who rush to Nandigram just to hog the limelight so that they may get the Magsaysay Award. - Buddhadeb Guha
no private investment was made in West Bengal between 1947 and 2005 - Debesh Roy
Abhijit Guha answers the sycophants with facts.
Resistance to Neo-Liberalism in Singur and Nandigram
N. Bhattacharya, Revolutionary Democracy Journal, April Issue
During the 60 years after Independence, the Indian people became wiser and more responsible. With great difficulty they maintained the institution of democracy despite lot of deficiencies. During the national emergency, every one stood up united and faced the crisis. But on the issue of priorities there is yet to be consensus. The ‘haves’ have virtually hijacked the country and the ‘have-nots’, whose number is increasing every day due to wilfull wrong planned strategies, are the majority in number and they are made to suffer in the hands of the microscopic section of the society. This handful of people in the executive, judiciary and the legislatures are running the show for their narrow selfish interest dictated by imperialists. At the macro level they have already sold the country to imperialists. After quite long period of time of the Tebhaga and Telengana struggle in late nineteen-forties, our farmers and countless agricultural workers are standing united on their cultivable land and telling their state governments that not a single inch of land will they surrender to corporations so that the latter can earn higher profits. It is advisable that ruling class should go slow and take people into confidence and adopt a rational policy so that the vast majority of the deprived population who were marginalised during last 6 decades are given their due share in framing the policies and programmes to reconstruct this country as a civilised society.
I was always Leftist. Economic reforms made me completely Marxist
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
A few weeks ago the newspapers reported that the number of Indian billionaires had exceeded the number of billionaires in Japan, and there was a considerable amount of self-congratulation on this. I understand from P. Sainath that we rank eighth in the world in the number of our millionaires. And we stand 126th on the Human Development Index. I am glad to report that last year we were 127th.
A review of India’s Draft National Displacement Policy, 2006
Not too long ago i.e. in February 2004, the government of India promulgated the “National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families”. Within two years time, the government of India was forced to issue Draft National Rehabilitation Policy 2006. In its Draft National Rehabilitation Policy 2006, the government of India acknowledged “A National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation for Project Affected Families was formulated in 2003 and it came into force w.e.f. February, 2004. Experience of implementation of this policy indicates that there are many issues addressed by the policy which require to be reviewed”.
The SEZ threat to Water - from South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People (SANDRP)
The Govt of India SEZ Act of 2005 has no mention of the sources of water for the proposed zones, leave aside the question of restrictions or impact
assessment. In fact, the only time the Act mentions water, it is in the context of territorial waters of India. The SEZ acts or orders or notifications of various states give a blank cheque to the water requirement for the zones. For example, the Gujarat Act says, “The SEZ developer will be granted approval for development of water supply and distribution system to ensure the provision of adequate water supply for SEZ units.“ Similar is the situation for other states.
Where’s all the water going to come from?
Analysis of the statement on Nandigram issued by Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, and other CPI(M) intellectuals
CPI(M) intellectuals like Prabhat Patnaik and others issued a statement in the aftermath of Nandigram, saying that ¨Nobody belonging to the Left would ever justify repressive action against peasants or workers…¨
The statement of the seventeen intellectuals is a masterpiece in fudging and dissembling. It is slyly drafted and misleading. Aditya Nigam analyses ¨the political culture of everyday totalitarian terror that the comprador intellectuals have stepped in to support…¨
Liberation answers CPI(M)-sponsored fiction on the Nandigram massacre
Liberation takes a look at facts about the Nandigram massacre and CPI(M)-sponsored fiction. Quotations from CPI(M) leaders are from Brinda Karat’s ‘Behind the Events at Nandigram’ ( The Hindu, March 30, 2007), ‘Some Issues on Nandigram’ also by Brinda Karat, People’s Democracy, Vol. XXXI, No. 13, April 01, 2007, ‘Defeat the politics of Terror’ (PD editorial of March 18), CPI(M) Politburo statement of March 14, ‘Singur: Just the Facts Please’, Brinda Karat, ( The Hindu, December 13, 2006).
Moral Betrayal of a Leftist Dream - EPW article
By Sumanta Banerjee
A sense of public anger in West Bengal over Singur and Nandigram has not added up yet to a state-wide agitation against the Left Front. The electorate is wise enough to realise that there is no viable alternative as yet. But if the CPI(M) continues to be obdurate, public outrage may take desperate forms. Reactionary forces like the Trinamul and BJP are waiting in the wings - the first such ominous signs were evident in Singur and Nandigram.
Click to read article [PDF, 3 pgs.] »
Tata Terror in Bastar, tribal displacement, and the traveling musicians
The chief minister of Chhattisgarh has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with one of the country’s biggest companies, TATA, for iron ore mining in Dantewada. An agreement with the U.S. power company, Texas Power Cooperation, has also been signed. In all, the Chhattisgarh government has signed MOUs worth over $13 billion with mining companies.
What is at stake is clearly displayed on the lips of Rajesh Kumar (a tribal Indian and the head of the musical group) when he sings the tribal song with his group. “The level of state brutality, whether by Naga forces, the CRPF or the Salwa Judum hoodlums is unbelievable.”
Lessons for Haripur - the Santhal Aadivasis of the Jadugoda region, and their exposure to Uranium radiation
By Dayamani Barla
The soil of Jadugoda in the Jharkhand region has provided uranium to run the Atomic Energy program in the country and develop Nuclear capabilities, but the Santhal aadivasis of this region are dying a slow death by uranium radiation. It is a living death that compels people to suffer till their last breath. It is a death the reality of which is being denied by all Government agencies. In the region of the uranium mines, in villages such as Chatikocha, Dumardeeh, Telaitaand, Echada, Bhatin, and Lipighututu, 45 of every hundred women are suffering from spontaneous abortions. The children are dying. Most of the children are becoming physically and mentally handicapped. People are not living beyond 65 years of age. No one wants to marry the girls from this area. The girls who did get married are being abandoned for their inability to bear children. Under the influence of radioactivity, physical malformations, cancer and pulmonary diseases are assuming demonic dimensions.
Tata lobbying for cover-up on Bhopal Gas Tragedy
By Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian
One of India’s richest men has been lobbying for the Indian government to drop a court case against an American multinational to pay for the clean up costs of the world’s worst chemical accident, according to letters obtained by campaigners.
The Train Stops At Nandigram
By Amit Sengupta
Those days, in the early 1970s, the slogan used to be in a fiery rhythm, almost a melody: Aamar Naam, Tomar Naam, Shobaar Naam: Vietnam… Vietnam…Aamar Bari, Tomar Bari, Shobaar Bari: Naxalbari… Naxalbari… Literally, it means, my name, your name, everyone’s name: Vietnam, Vietnam; my home, your home, everyone’s home: Naxalbari, Naxalbari. So it is not unpredictable or jarring, when the slogan, in 10 per cent growth rate, ‘Manmohanics India of March’, 2007, turns out to be as rhythmic and beautiful, almost Gandhian in its rooted simplicity: Aamar Gram, Tomar Gram, Shobar Gram: Nandigram, Nandigram.
State prepares for terror in Jagatsinhpur, Orissa
Sign Petition : http://www.petitiononline.com/Orissa/petition.html
With five days to go before the statutory public hearing – scheduled for 15 April – the Orissa Government has deployed fifteen platoons of paramilitary armed to the teeth. On 9 April, paramilitary forces staged a flag-march aimed to intimidate local opposition. The State Administration has chosen to hold the Public Hearing, as a mere formality, at Kuchang – the stronghold of the ruling BJD party.
West Bengal: The Neo-Liberal Offensive in Industry and the Workers’ Resistance
By Kushal Debnath, Revolutionary Democracy
Website of Hindmotors Resistance : Click Here
The New Economic Policy was adopted by the Narasimha Rao government in 1991 in consonance with the principle of imperialist globalization. This principle propounded by Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh has aggravated the imperialist aggression on our country. Different ‘leftist’ parties including the CPI(M) have cried hoarse against this, but the Left Front government in West Bengal has adopted a new industrial policy in almost full pursuance of the new economic policy of the central government. As a result we find even in this state the working class has been subjected to the most severe attacks as it has been in the rest of the country. The closures or sickness of the industries one after another, appropriation of Provident Fund and E.S.I funds of the workers by industrialists and the stoppage of new employment have become the order of the day.
Some articles on workers movement in Argentina: For a history of the whole movement, issues involved, how the struggles have been organized, what problems have arisen, how workers are trying to solve those problems, etc Click Here . Another article on the Argentine workers movement - Click Here. A case study of the running of a particular hotel - Click Here. Some reflections on the workers movement : Click Here. For Marie Trigona’s homepage, Click Here.
From Socialism To Barbarism?
By Akhila Raman
Be it Right or Left, it is becoming increasingly clear that many Governments across the world are eager to get in bed with the corporations. The message is clear in West Bengal: Economic development will be pursued at any human cost. Protesters will be brutally dealt with and killed if required. Critics will be vilified. Facts will be fudged to justify brutal actions. The Ugly Might of the State has descended in an unholy manner on the farmers in Singur and Nandigram. How can CPIM reconcile its conflicting history of admirable land reforms in West Bengal with the recent brutal repression of farmers in its desperate bid of industrialization?
Celebrate the Resistance
By Tanika Sarkar
The true history of the terror at Nandigram between 14 and 16 March will probably never be disclosed in its fullness. Snippets of information that broke through the police cover, and visual fragments that could be shown on television channels have, nonetheless, brought forth an unprecedented upsurge of popular outrage all over the state, from all ranks of people. It is time to open up some old histories and structural characteristics of CPI(M) conduct in the state.
India Is Colonising Itself - Interview with Arundhati Roy, March 26, 2007
There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? Do you think it will grow more in the days to come? What are its causes? In what context should all this be read?
You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts.
Party Games - Yogendra Yadav on CPIM
By YOGENDRA YADAV
Nandigram did not surprise me. I was anguished and angry but not surprised. I had heard the story of Alipurduar from Jugal Kishore Raybir.
This dalit activist, a believer in Gandhian non-violence, was the founder of UTJAS, (Uttar Bango Tapsili Jati O Adibasi Sangathan) an organisation of dalits and adivasis of north Bengal. Through the 1980s it demanded greater regional autonomy and justice for sons of the soil. Not only did the government turn a deaf ear, the ruling party launched an offensive against them, branding them ‘separatist’ or ‘bichhinatabadi’.
The story of Alipurduar goes back to January 10 1987, twenty years before Nandigram. On that day, UTJAS had organised a rally of what they estimated to be about 50,000 people in Alipurduar, the headquarters of Cooch Behar district. As the rally started, they noticed something unusual: The police was nowhere in sight. Soon the rallyists found themselves surrounded by and under attack from the armed cadre of the CPM. The rally was dispersed as unarmed protesters were beaten and chased. The police surfaced, only to arrest the victims, once the party cadre had finished their job.
Listen to the Decentralised Voice
Source : Somnath Mukherji in The Statesman. The author is an electrical engineer based in Boston, and works with AID.
There are certainly reasons for celebrating the 59 years of India’s existence as a sovereign republic. During the period, the state has become for-development, for-growth, for industrialization ~ the only attribute it needs to acquire is for-people, specifically the poor. Getting a passport has become easier, getting in and out of the airports smoother, driving on the highways faster, setting up industries in special enclaves with tax-holidays easier ~ only the existence of the small farmers seems to be getting harder. State repression in India is happening with such frequency that a new incident emerges before the anniversary of the previous one can bemourned. A pro-development State which is turning increasingly anti-people seems to have become an end in itself.
Nuclear Reactor Hazards : Ongoing dangers of operating nuclear technology in the 21st century
Source : Report prepared for GREENPEACE International, April 2005
This report gives a comprehensive assessment of the hazards of operational reactors, new “evolutionary” designs, and future reactor concepts. It also addresses the risks associated with the management of spent nuclear fuel. The first part of the report describes the characteristics and inherent flaws of the main reactor designs in operation today; the second part assesses the risks associated to new designs; the third part the “ageing” of operational reactors; the fourth part the terrorist threat to nuclear power; the fifth and final part the risks associated with climate change impacts - such as flooding - on nuclear power.
The Nuclear Waste Crisis in France
Source : A GREENPEACE report. May, 2006
Since the origins of the French nuclear industry some 50 years ago, the management of nuclear waste been largely neglected. Even today, large quantities of nuclear waste remain in unconditioned and unstable form, inventories of historical dump sites are lacking or were lost and one of the largest dump sites in the world near the La Hague reprocessing plant is leaking into the underground water. Now evidence is emerging that a new nuclear dumpsite in the Champagne region of France is leaking radioactivity into the ground water threatening contamination of tritium and at a later stage other radionuclides.
Click here to read report [PDF] »
India’s Left Going the Lula Way?
Source : Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI, Dec 7 (IPS) - India’s mainstream Left parties, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), are getting into an ugly confrontation with civil society groups and classes that are part of their own core constituency in the state of West Bengal, which they have ruled for three long decades.
The present tussle is over the construction of an automobile factory at Singur village, 45 km from Kolkata (earlier spelt Calcutta), for which the Left Front government is procuring 998 acres of land from peasant farmers.
Doing the “Right” Thing : Industrial Policy of Left Government
Source : January 2007 Special Publication of People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS)
Neo-liberal industrial policy: A paradigm shift of the Left
In the spree for industrialisation and to woo foreign investments to the State, the Chief Minister of West Bengal (India), Shri Buddhadeb Bhattacharya signed several agreements with multinational companies (MNCs) and various national cooporate giants last year, soon after retaining his office for a consecutive second term.
Click here to read report [PDF] »
Singur and the Official Left’s Crisis in India
Source : Pratyush Chandra
The Singur events are signs of a crisis borne out of a disjuncture between the Left Front’s pragmatic policies and the legacy of the movement and class interests that empowered it. For a long time, the open eruption of this crisis was evaded by the West Bengal government’s success in convincing its mass base of its ability to manoeuvre state apparatuses for small, yet continuous gains. It justified all its limitations and inefficacy by condemning the faulty centre-state relationship and a larger conspiracy to destabilise limited reformist gains - for instance, those from reforms in the Bargadari system.
Land Grab and “Development” Fraud in India
Source : Analytical Monthly Review
The land question, the fundamental failure of independent India, has again become one of the most debatable and controversial topics of the day. Although the mass media and the dominant parliamentary political leaders suppress any public mention of revolutionary land reform, land to the tillers or abolition of feudal remnants, the irrepressible reality raises the question in one or another form. Today land grabbing by the private corporate sector, both Indian and of foreign origin, in the name of so-called “development” and with the aid of government agencies and state machinery, has become a subject that cannot be avoided.
The poor poetry of industrialization: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) in wonderland.
Source : Asian Center for Human Rights
The West Bengal Chief Minister and the ruling Left Front (LF) government’s former poet-commissar, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, translator of Mayakovsky, is busy with another kind of poetry these days. He is transposing the ‘poetry’ of industrialization – as it happened on the soil of England – onto the land called Bengal. Dazzled by the dreamworld of capital, Buddhadeb has been quick to shake off the shackles of his earlier convictions and seek aesthetic pleasure in his new role as the ‘Commissar of Industry and Progress’. For quite some time now, Bhattacharya has been trying to convince prospective investors to take the leftists at their word when they say they really are in favour of neo-liberal reforms: “We are realists and we know it’s either reform or perish.” Progress, he understands, entails the death of all that isarchaic – revolutionary convictions and agriculture, for instance.
The Displaced India: From Kalinganagar to Singur
Source : Asian Center for Human Rights
Yesterday, the 2nd January 2007 marked the first anniversary of the Kalinganagar massacre in Orissa. Kalinganagar is one of the clearest examples of brutal abuse of power by the State agencies. After one year, justice, compensation and a sound policy on rehabilitation elude the displaced in Orissa as it does in The Displaced India.
The Singur Smokescreen : Twists of the Mainstream Media
Source : Aniruddha Dutta, Feb 8, 2007
A detailed analysis of the twists by the mainstream English Press on the Singur issue.
Much has been debated in the print media - through editorials, solicited op-ed pieces and readers’ letters or website threads - about the macroeconomic issues connected with the acquisition of agricultural land for industry by the state, notably in the case of the Tata Motors
small-car plant in Singur, West Bengal. Most of the mainstream English press (The Telegraph, Hindustan Times, The Times of India) has forwarded the conclusion that such land acquisition is necessary, attended by certain short-term problems and long-terms gains for all.
NANDIGRAM : A REJOINDER TO THE UNTRUTHS OF THE CPI(M) - from PBKMS, March 24, 2007
(Since 14th March 2007 , the CPI(M) has gone into an overdrive to prove that the actions of mass killing in Nandigram were justified (though unfortunate, they add in after thought). We give below their chief arguments to support this view taken from the Politburo statement issued on the 14th March 2007, and the actual facts.)
Point of contention 1. : Was land acquisition only a pretext? Had the Government really categorically declared that no land is being acquired in Nandigram? How serious was the threat of land acquisition?
That Night in Nandigram
Source: Soumitra Basu, Editor, Anyaswar. March 16th, 2007
Subrata and Gourango of TARATV are in the field. This is the horrendous story that they have to say… “I have stopped telling the media the story that I saw and ought to have told them, there is no chance people and our viewers would believe. There is a limit to human belief. They will take me as a mad babbler!
“Bands of CPM goons aided by platoons of Eastern Frontier Rifles and Commando forces are entering every village and paras [mohollas]. They bring out the men folk, they take no prisoners, no witnesses, they shoot them, bayonet them, rip apart their stomachs and then lay them down the canal to the sea and confluence. They then bring out the young girls, gather them in open spaces, open gang rape them multiple times till the girls collapse, they then literally TEAR their limbs, in some cases cut them to pieces and let them down the Haldi river and/or Talpati canal…”
Click here to download the text in Bengali [PDF] »
India: Deaths in West Bengal during protest against new industrial project
Report from : Amnesty International Report on Nandigram
As protests by farming communities fearing displacement from their land as a result of a new industrial project continue to lead to violence in West Bengal (Eastern India), Amnesty International is concerned at reports that state officials may be responsible for, or complicit in, human rights abuses including torture and the death or injury of protestors following the use of excessive and unnecessary force.
At least seven people were reported killed and at least 20 others injured since 7 January in continuing violence in Nandigram, Eastern Midnapore district, West Bengal where farmers are protesting an initiative by the Bengal state government to acquire land for a new industrial project. Among those killed was a 14-year-old boy.
Neo-Liberal Left Behind Peasants’ Massacre
Source : Praful Bidwai, March 16, 2007
By ordering police to open fire on peasants trying to protect their land from being acquired for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the communist government of West Bengal state has indicated the crumbling away of the last bulwark in India against neo-liberal and free market policies.
At least 15 people died and over 50 were injured by police firing on Wednesday in Nandigram leading to serious rifts within the Left Front coalition that is supposed to rule West Bengal but where power is monopolised by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).
The sorrows of Singur are typical of India’s feudal globalization
Source : Aseem Shrivastava, znet.org
“Will I be allowed to harvest the paddy that is still growing in my field or will the police attack me again?”
- Bharati Das, who was brutally assaulted by the West Bengal Police in her own home last week because she resisted the forced acquisition of her land by the state for purposes of industrialization, speaking to the press in New Delhi, December 7, 2006, left hand bandaged and tears in her eyes.
Singur: Looking Back, Looking For
Source: Medha Patkar
Today when the world celebrates the 58th anniversary of the UN Charter of Human Rights as the International Human Rights Day, the people of Singur or Narmada or Raigad (Maharashtra), Dadri-Bajada (UP) cannot. They cannot be out of struggle for survival, for dignity, for life even
for a moment to be able to breathe freedom and enjoy rights not just as citizens but as human beings.
Singur: where the Left turns right
Source : Vijayan MJ
The CPM machinery has gone into overdrive in Singur to secure the Tata deal; it has left the peasantry, its constituency, totally in the cold.
First: Why Singur? On December 7, Rajya Sabha mp Nilotpal Basu told a delegation that the Tatas had been shown five different plots for the car project. He also said that the company did not want any other plot than the Singur one. Now, is it for a company to decide whether it should get agricultural land or barren land for a factory? Why should any state government allow itself to be blackmailed by a private company?
A Singur in The Making
Source : Anand ST Das. Feb 3, 2007
Hazaribagh, Sixty-five-year-old Chandru Sao, 65, a farmer at Barkagaon in Hazaribagh district in northern Jharkhand, says his family has never had to go hungry, thanks to the seven acres of fertile farmland that he owns. But these are desperate times — the public sector giant National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) has started the process of acquiring land for its maiden, ambitious coalmine project at Punkhri-Barwadih, a small town 30 kilometres southwest of Hazaribagh town. Sao says he would rather die than be parted from his land. Thousands of farmers, small and big, in Barkagaon block of Hazaribagh face the same predicament.
Sezophilia and the Coming Mutiny
New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA) falls in the territory of Uttar Pradesh and is administered from Lucknow. But for all practical purposes, it is an extension of the New Delhi metropolis. This teeming township is the brainchild of Sanjay Gandhi, enfant terrible of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. He conceived Noida as an urban cluster that would take the “immigrant load” off the stately boulevards of New Delhi.
The “Special Economic Zone” Debacle of the Left Front in West Bengal
Source : Analytical Monthly Review, Jan 24, 2007
The global counter-revolution of these last thirty years has only added a more vicious aspect. It is only in these last few decades that global trade and capital flows — as a share of world production and savings, respectively — have again risen to the scale of the prior imperialist golden age that preceded the First World War. But this increased transnational dominance of the capitalist market (”globalization”) does not mean that national states — even those not of the imperial center — are becoming obsolete. Rather, ruthless state actions associated with neo-liberalism, policies designed to enhance “competitiveness” and “flexibility,” not just for individual firms but for whole national economies, are required.