Singur elegy

It seems the long and winding road to Singur has finally hit a permanent roadblock. Ratan Tata has announced that Tata Motors will relocate its Nano plant. Perhaps it was inevitable, something that could have been effortlessly predicted from the moment the 8220;agitation8221; gathered steam; but so absurd seemed the principles being pontificated upon, so great the issues at stake, so central its continued existence for a struggling state8217;s industry and self-confidence, that hope seemed to have lasted all this time. Perhaps it8217;s time to dash those hopes now.

This is a victory for nobody. Not for Mamata Banerjee, who lost control of another movement she launched for short-term political gain; not for the CPM and the Left Front, which has lost an opportunity to push through much-needed development thanks to its own dismal past record on such projects; not for the unreconstructed radical fringe that captured Mamata8217;s movement, because the rest of the country will have learnt from this example, and will seek to crush such opportunism if it rears its head again. But above all, it is a loss for Bengal: for its rural landless poor, who need the opportunities that industrial expansion will provide; for its small farmers, who needed to see land markets revived and the possibility of getting a good price for their land as well as a future for those children who did not want to enter a moribund profession; for its industrial workers, who would have hoped that a flagship project for the state would revive its long-dead reputation as an investment destination.

There is enough blame to go around. Some of it inevitably attaches to those responsible for the death of that reputation, the Left Front, which opened up a space for the sort of agitation that drove away Ratan Tata, and gave it its methods. Much also attaches, as Tata was at pains to point out, to the current user of those methods 8212; to Mamata Banerjee and the motley coalition of know-nothings and do-gooders that she pretends to lead. In the absence of security for ancillary units, for ordinary workers, Tata could leave 8212; because in today8217;s India, other states will fall over themselves to be more welcoming, to create a secure place for Tata Motors. Bengal is once again living in a past, where there are no options for people that have invested in them. A door to its future has just closed.