Vision in division?

The last time Nandigram hit the headlines, as CPM cadres were ostracised from the area by a variegated resistance to the government’s proposed plans for land acquisition, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee found solace in Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. The choice of reading seemed apt, with its message of the fruitlessness of an ideological purity that discounts other ways of imagining a society’s future. The toll these intervening months have taken on the CM can be gauged from the harshness of the sentiments he now expresses, and then defends. On Wednesday, he stuck to his justification of the brutal way in which CPM cadres ‘retook’ Nandigram: “The opposition has been paid back in the same coin.”

This completes a shameful cascade of abdications that have made Nandigram more than just a law and order problem. It was disconcerting enough to know all these months that the police had kept away from Nandigram, with its earlier interventions having been little more than to provide cover to CPM cadres. That appears almost insignificant compared to the spectacle of the CM of a state justifying, “morally and legally”, strong-arm, unlawful tactics of his party men and women to evict lawful residents from their homes. What is Bhattacharjee suggesting? That as CM he bears responsibility just for CPM’s rank and file? That for persons with other political affiliations, the law of the land can be held in abeyance?

Bhattacharjee has in his tenure inspired hope with his agenda to modernise Bengal’s economy, hasten industrialisation to lift people out of poverty and the limited possibilities of subsistence agriculture. After violence claimed Nandigram, he saw the importance of carrying everyone along when he said the site of industrial project would be shifted if the local communities were not convinced. Good economics, he implied, needed good politics. Now, alas, Bhattacharjee speaks only for members of a political party. This is bad politics, Mr Chief Minister, this division of one’s state into Us versus Them. And allowed for a moment longer, it will beget bad economics.