The CPI(M) central committee on Monday endorsed the strategy adopted by the party’s West Bengal unit in handling the Singur situation and gave a stamp of approval to Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for not using force to frustrate agitation organised by Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee.“Our Government had tried its best to convince Mamata about the necessity of the Nano factory in our state. But she was adamant from the very beginning and organised her agitation in such a manner that the Tatas were forced to quit Singur. Application of force by the state Government would have worsened the situation,” party sources said. Singur figured in the national issues discussed by the party’s central committee during its meeting on Monday.There had been a division in the party’s West Bengal unit on the issue of handling the Singur agitation. Earlier, while some state party leaders like Amitava Nandi and Tarit Topadar felt that the state Government could have handled the agitation more firmly by forcibly removing the agitators from the Durgapur Expressway, others felt that such an action might have helped the Trinamool Congress to instigate violence at the factory site and create another Nandigram-like situation.The central committee on Monday disapproved Nandi’s view that the Government could have used force to quell the agitation. It expressed satisfaction on the way the state Government handled the situation.“For the past two months, Mamata had been maintaining a close rapport with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. She had been also making irrational demands regarding return of land from within the factory premises knowing well that the project could have come up in the same premises as that of the vendors,” said a senior party leader.
