About Singur

The following was written in response to a mail on Singur:

We in Kolkata have been closely following the developments in Singur through newspaper reports.
The first thing I agree to is that the Tatas are not to blame at all for this fiasco. They are businessmen and will go wherever they can make profit. Also, I know that the Tatas have the most humane face among all the industrial houses in India. So, no stigma on them.
Now, Mamata. She is a politician. Not a very wise or crafty one. But she has a large following due to her sincerity and many believe that she is not a hypocrite. She is doing all this for votes, as any other politician would do. Once we have blamed the CITU for closing down thousands of factories, making the workers unemployed and ruining them, and ruining West Bengal. Now it is Mamata's turn to 'pay them back in their own coin'. I do not say that it is ethical. But is there anything ethical in today's Indian politics?
I would blame the CPI(M) equally for this mess, since they went into a "secret" deal with the Tatas. No public dealing can be secret unless it concerns the country's security. To this day that secret deal has not been revealed.
A government can acquire land for a public purpose. But gifting away multi-crop agricultural land to a private company for building a factory for their own profit is not acceptable. This is not a 'public purpose'.
Lastly. Industrialisation of West Bengal.

Industrialisation does not come through building factories only. It comes from the cooperation of the employees, from the will to work, from the love of work of the workers. Now, this love for work has been totally destroyed by the CPI(M) in their thirty years' rule. Now the very moment a worker joins a company, he views his employers as exploiters, as his enemies. This way no state, no country can be 'industrialized'. Tell me if I am wrong.

Singur and Industrialization

In a "Letter to the Editor Mr. S. N. Datta of Katwa has been naïve enough to draw the conclusion that the Supreme Court ruling that “the government as a sovereign power can acquire land for public purpose" should set at rest the vexed Singur issue (Letter: SC judgment should set at rest….23 Sep).

He has not noticed that the West Bengal Government acquired the land at Singur not for “public purpose” but, on the one hand, to gift it to the Tatas under a “secret” agreement to enable them to use it to profitable business and, on the other, to deprive the farmers of Singur of their land because they had voted for Trinamul Congress in the last election.

Now, one argument in favour of acquiring the multi-crop fertile land in Singur (on the strength of an archaic Imperialist British Act of more than 200 years old) is that West Bengal is in need of ‘Industrialization’, which seems to be the present-day catchword instead of the old-fashioned terms like ‘revolution’, ‘class-struggle’ and ‘building a class-less society’etc. that we had been hearing for the last seventy years. West Bengal was known as the most industrialized state before the Communists came to power. Then the CITU, the wrecking machine of the CPI(M) closed down sixty thousand factories in West Bengal to bring it to the present state. Now, if we want to talk about bringing West Bengal back to the same level of industrialization, we should either reopen the closed factories or acquire those to be run on a profitable basis. No one seems to be thinking on these lines.
One more point. It is argued that the Tata small-car factory will generate employment. This is an eye-wash. In the capital-intensive industry in its modernised factory, almost everything is done by automated machines, and the generation of employment opportunity is very limited. Why couldn't the Tatas employ at least one member from each family of the farmers who lost their land??

The final NSG condition

The signing of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty at one go, albeit by a different name, has been hailed by the media as “India’s Nuclear isolation ends” and “India’s victory in Vienna”. This landmark incident will go down in history as ‘The termination of India’s Nuclear-weapons research’; or even as “India’s surrender to the USA hegemony after 60 years of resistance”
Be that as it may, it has been proved beyond any doubt that our government had all along been hoodwinking the Indian public by saying that the Hyde Act was a domestic Act of the USA and India was not bound by that Act. Some spokespersons also said that even if, in the event of a Nuclear Test by India, the USA stops N-fuel supply, we can get it from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG). Now, in the final ‘trump card’ of the USA-NSG group, the condition that NSG will also stop the supply of N-fuel to India in such an event has been incorporated in the ‘conditions’, as amended by the USA. So now, how is this short of a total surrender to the USA and its orbit of nations? To top this up, we now will have the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) breathing down our neck all the time. The IAEA will be free to come and inspect all our nuclear establishments and be the watchful hawk-eye of the Big Brother.
I wonder why we are not a member of the NSG. We have an enviable deposit of Thorium which we are capable of converting to Plutonium in our existing nuclear plants, which then can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors. Of course, for that matter, one may ask why aren’t we member of, for example, the ASEAN. That, again, is another story.