At a Left Front meeting today, the West Bengal unit of the CPI(M) took up the Indo-US nuclear deal to steer the discussion away from controversial and deadlocked issues like post-Nandigram land acquisition and the setting-up of a chemical hub. For over one-and-a-half hours, the Left Front meeting discussed the route and details of a proposed march on September 4 to protest against the 123 nuclear deal. The jatha, or march, is to begin at Kolkata and end at Visakhapatnam.Just last Friday, after the CPI(M) state secretariat’s weekly meeting, former chief minister Jyoti Basu had said the LF partners would discuss alternatives to Nandigram for the proposed chemical hub or Petroleum, Chemicals & Petrochemicals Investment Region (PCPIR), which was to have been centred around some existing units at the port town of Haldia. The PCPIR is to include a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) dedicated to chemical industries, in which the main promoter is Indonesia’s Salim group. The Salim group has also proposed to set up a multi-product SEZ in the area, while the government-owned Indian Oil Corp is to be the anchor investor for the 250 sq km PCPIR.Earlier this week, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had written to all political parties in the state, including the eight LF allies, explaining the idea of the PCPIR and what it would mean for the state in terms of investment and industrial growth.But at today’s briefing, Left Front chairman Biman Bose said that the meeting had discussed only the Indo-US nuclear deal. “We shall resolve the other controversial issues through bilateral talks,” said Bose, in a reference to the location of the chemical hub and the situation at Nandigram, where villagers opposed to land acquisition ousted CPI(M) supporters in January.“We had suggested the formation of an expert committee to consider the environmental consequences of a chemical hub, but the CM has explained that this provision exists in the Union Government’s guidelines for a PCPIR,” said Manjukumar Majumdar, the CPI’s state secretary. “But right now we feel that the nuclear deal is a much more important issue than the chemical hub.”
