Time to turn the tables

I saw my daughter being raped and then brutally slaughtered,” says a mother, the words coming out with difficulty as she cries uncontrollably. “These kind of things shouldn’t happen, but they do when people are angry and are reacting to the violence that came earlier,” says the Chief Minister when confronted with story after story like the woman’s.

Narendra Modi and Gujarat? Yes, but also…. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Bengal.

Who would have thought it possible? Who would have thought that the one and only ideologically pure, the one and only incorruptible, the one and only conscience keeping political party in the country would  echo the shameful happenings in Modi’s murderous Gujarat!

But there you have it: as Gujarat’s Chief Monster let loose his murderous hordes, gave them three clear days to kill and rape Muslims in supposed revenge against the Sabarmati Express killing of Hindus (still not clearly proven), Bengal’s lilywhite Chief Minister gave his murderous cadres more than three days to wreak ‘revenge’ for the earlier assaults of Mamata Banerjee’s own dirty little hordes on Nandigram.

In any civilised democracy, Bhattacharjee and his government would have lost the moral right to govern.

But then, so had Modi lost that moral right, but he has been firmly in the saddle for five whole years and may well go on for another five. And what about the ‘People’s’ leader, Mamata Banerjee? How many of her followers is she willing to sacrifice in the battle to save them? And what was Medha Patkar doing there? Is she now a celebrity protestor for hire, jumping in whenever there are people to be ‘saved’? Did she not know — or more pertinently, did she know and didn’t  give a damn — that her presence in an already explosive situation would make things worse?

I suppose, in the end, the difference between Modi and the leaders in Bengal is that Modi wasn’t claiming to save anyone. Either way, the ones who suffer, who get killed or raped or have their homes destroyed are the ones who don’t have too much to begin with anyway.

What’s happened in Singur and Nandigram, and is beginning to happen elsewhere in the country, is a complete failure of political leadership. In Bengal, the two projects were largely greenfield engineering works whereas elsewhere, work has begun on SEZs. In either case, the governments formulated a policy, entered into negotiations with industrialists and signed agreements which, in the long run, would be of benefit to the country.

The problem in all this, is that the discussions, negotiations and finalisation of the scope and terms of the projects have been between two parties, industrialists and governments. If there are problems in implementation, it’s because it has been forgotten that there is a third party involved, an entity not brought into the discussion table at any point in the whole process. The people who  comprise this third party own the land on which the projects are to be implemented. Yet, because they are generally small and marginal farmers, they are taken for granted.

 How did this happen? How did governments of different political ideologies, working in different parts of the country, make the same mistake? The answer is really simple: politicians, for all their grassroot connections, surround themselves so much with the trappings of power and privilege that they lose touch with the people who voted for them. 

At best, they see the electorate only in terms of vote banks, but not every human activity can be neatly pigeon-holed into categories like caste, religion, special interest groups etc. Some issues affect everyone, and farm land is certainly one of them.

But these events make it clear that the days of riding roughshod over people are over. It’s time for friendly persuasion. And fair compensation.