Left’s latest worry: Old enemies make new friends

The ultra-left parties, which were silent for years, are now even ready to collaborate with partners of the National Democratic Alliance like the Trinamool. At the grassroots, the Naxalites have dropped the view that Mamata Banerjee as the BJP’s friend is untouchable. The Naxalite leaders even drafted the Trinamool document on “forcible land acquisition” that the party submitted to Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

And beneath the politics is the notion gaining ground that the CPI(M)’s land reforms ultimately ended up strengthening the party itself. When government officials pushed ahead with the land acquisition at Nandigram despite the state halt, they were attacked by violent villagers, many of them local CPI(M) leaders. Why did the comrades turn against their own party?

West Bengal had around 1.37 crore acre under agriculture, of which, till 1972 March, 3.63 lakh acre had been “vested” in the government and distributed among marginal and landless farmers. From Independence to January 1977, various governments had distributed five per cent of the total land under agriculture.

The CPI(M) had continued a campaign of violence over land against the government of the day and the so-called ruling classes, right from 1964 when the party was born from a split in the Communist Party of India. Between 1969 and 1972, the Naxalites grabbed the spotlight with their cry for armed revolution to restore rights.

In 1977, the Left initiated its historic land reforms. The CPI(M) declared that 33.3 per cent of the total land under agriculture would be vested in the government. The government would vest 45.3 lakh acres with itself and distribute it to landless and marginal farmers. Against the 6.2 lakh acres distributed in the 30 years since 1947, the Left proposed to distribute 45.3 lakh acres. That was the promise.

According to the latest monthly progress report of the land reforms department, only 13.9 lakh acre of the total agricultural land has been vested since 1947. The Left’s achievement then – 7.7 lakh acre.

In fact, distribution – which follows vesting – is much less, around 11.07 lakh acre. So the government still has around 2.2 lakh acre that it vested in itself but has not distributed so far. Patches of such land exist in Singur and Nandigram, the epicentres of the movement against farmland acquisition for industry.

So, in both these places, there are farmers willingly giving up land because they will get compensation as their name is still on the land records. And there are farmers up in arms because they do not exist in government records despite having farmed the land for two decades and there is no money for them. Then, there are the unrecorded sharecroppers or bargadars who are each supposed to get 25 per cent of the compensation for the land being acquired in the state’s fair-to-all package. Trouble is, no registration, no money.

Which is where the Naxalites come in.

The Naxalites have been at work since last September, talking to people on the ground, shortly after the Left Front government of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee began announcing a series of big projects requiring land acquisition.

At Singur, the Naxalite-backed Sanghati Udyog, an ally of the National Alliance of Peoples Movements led by Medha Patkar, was the most active in this ground survey job. They put the Left Front government on the backfoot with their claims that the landless farmers would be the worst hit.

At Nandigram, the CPI-ML (Liberation), the biggest Naxal faction in West Bengal, did the ground survey quietly. They raised the same cry: the CPI(M) had betrayed the landless and marginal farmers.