Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
West Bengal had been run for over 30 years by a Left Front government led by the CPI-
M, with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee as the chief minister from 2000 (till he was defeated in
2011). A mild and somewhat scholarly looking white-haired man in his mid-sixties, Bhat-
tacharjee had been feted internationally as a forward-looking economic reformer, who saw
the need to modify leftist policies with private sector (including foreign) investment in or-
der to revive his intellectually strong but industrially backward state. An interview with
him was a must for visiting editors of foreign business magazines and newspapers who
were bemused by his inherent contradictions. But he misjudged people's growing exasper-
ation with decades of harsh and increasingly corrupt and ruthless communist rule. Amaz-
ingly, he expected them to accept that the government, which had implemented admired
land reforms earlier in its 30-year rule, was now giving agricultural land to rich private sec-
tor corporations such as Tata.
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The storm started at Nandigram, a poor rural area in East Midnapur district, 170 km from
Calcutta. Nandigram had a history of opposition to its rulers, initially the British, which
had helped it to become a leftist stronghold with relatively low literacy and little industrial
ate whose interests range from noodles to real estate, to build a chemical complex there
in a newly designated SEZ. The deal could ultimately have grown from 10,000 acres to
40,000 acres, but opposition to the transfer of land had been building up months before the
deal was signed in mid-2006. By then, resistance was also growing against Tata's car fact-
ory at Singur, which had been announced in May. Bhattacharjee wrongly expected that his
party's political clout and street-level muscle, especially in Nandigram, would push both
deals through.
Violent demonstrations and clashes between villagers and police-supported CPI(M)
cadres built up at Nandigram in 2007, generating some of the worst riots seen in the
state's history. In January, after violencefirst erupted, thousands of local farmers blockaded
the area against government officials. Then West Bengal opposition politicians moved in.
Mamata Banerjee, a maverick and temperamental leader of the anti-communist All India
Trinamool Congress (TMC) party, realised she could use the growing disputes to rebuild
her faltering career as a regional politician. Having set up her Trinamool (grassroots) party
in 1997 when she broke away from the national Congress party, Banerjee successfully used
the land disputes to burnish her populist image. It led her to victory in the assembly elec-
tions in 2011 when she became the state's chief minister, ending 34 years of leftist rule.
Other opponents of the CPI(M) united to fight the Nandigram plans, culminating in 14
people being killed in March 2007 when police clashed with villagers protesting against
land acquisition.
A month after those killings, Salim abandoned the Nandigram project. (A local financial
associate planned a replacement chemical complex on a largely uninhabited 13,000-acre
