Message from Haldia

West Bengal Commerce and Industries Minister Partha Chatterjee is right. The decision taken by Haldia Bulk Terminals HBT to immediately pull out of the Haldia port will not have any impact on the states industrial revival because Bengal,at Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees pleasure,has little hope of industrial revival left. The HBT pull-out in itself is not a disaster of the magnitude of the Tatas abandoning of Singur. But the case is symptomatic of Banerjees style of governance,which has coupled dangerously with Bengals old politics of vendetta that merely changed colour with the change of regime last year.

Strong-arm tactics,such as unleashing the unions on private businesses,are nothing new to Bengal and were the bane of industry under the Left Front. Banerjees militant opposition to crucial issues at the national level,related to land acquisition or FDI in retail,assumes yet more unfortunate dimensions in the state she runs. Bengal cannot attract investment because it cannot build the necessary infrastructure. With the TMCs exit from the UPA,chances of a bailout for the Rs 2 lakh crore debt are non-existent. The Asian Development Banks offer of a 400 million loan depends on Banerjee ending her wasteful populism. But ending her populism,right down to her opposition to cable TV digitisation or electricity and fuel tariff hikes,is anathema to the CM. Meanwhile,her rhetoric against business and industry has sharpened.

Banerjee has demonstrated over and over again that,as CM,she continues in her oppositional,agitationist mode,while reinforcing Bengals abysmal work culture and violent politics. The decaying industrial town of Haldia falls in the area where the TMCs turnaround began in 2007,and where its self-assurance was dashed in June this year when it failed to wrest the municipality from the Left. In hounding out the operator of Haldia ports only two mechanised berths the non-mechanised berths are operated by a firm owned by a TMC-backed MPs family the government has put the writing on the wall for industry and investment: Dont even think of coming here.