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 industrialisation – 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 is archaic – revolutionary convictions and agriculture, for instance.
Rapid industrialisation is the only way forward, and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are the quickest way to industrialise. The idea of SEZs has been directly imported into India – and indeed into West Bengal – from China, and from the neo-liberal's point of view, such units are the important first step in the direction of the brave new world of capital. Eventually, these enthusiasts intend to extend to the entire country the facilities enjoyed by SEZs – tax holidays, exemption from labour laws, unrestricted import facilities, cheap land taken over from Adivasis and peasants, and the freedom of unrestrained exploitation of natural resources.
China is Bhattacharya's immediate inspiration and justification; but alas, unlike in China, he has a democracy to deal with. The process of industrialisation that Bhattacharya and his party, the CPI(M), have initiated would be every bit as ruthless and violent as it is in China – but for this fact of democracy, which allows the peasants to manifest their resistance.
Thus it happened that on 1 December 2006, several thousand police and paramilitary troops descended on a small and obscure place, the name of which very few outside the state of West Bengal had heard of: Singur. They came to fence off an area of 997 acres of prime agricultural land in Hooghly District so that it could be handed over to the Tata conglomerate, who would establish on it a plant for the manufacture of cheap cars.