The third line of argument maybe termed as the historical necessity of industrialisation. This argument was advanced by Amartya Sen. The proponents of this line of thought claim, by citing examples from the history of Western Europe, that as industrialisation is an inevitable stage after agriculture, the farmers of Bengal are expected to part with their agricultural land for the establishment of industries.

At a later stage, when acquisition of huge tracts of fertile agricultural land began to take place giving rise to peasant resistance in a number of districts, the trend culminated in the Singur and Nandigram crises, and another line of macro-economic argument emerged.

It was stated with facts and figures that since all the land for proposed industrial investment for the coming years was only a very small fraction of the total amount of cultivated and cultivable land, there would be no food crisis in the state if the lands are acquired. Such arguments justified the land takeover for industrialisation. The economist, Dr Abhirup Sarkar, part of the think-tank of the present Trinamul government was the major proponent of this line of thought.

There is yet another argument in favour of the the CPI-M’s high-voltage industrialisation. Interestingly enough, this argument is often leveled by the Opposition leaders of present day West Bengal. The proponents advocate industrialisation on uncultivated or monocrop land in the relatively arid districts of the state ~ Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore in order to protect the highly fertile multicrop lands in Hooghly, Burdwan, and East Midnapore.

This argument may be termed as industrialisation on uncultivated land. It was packaged as principles of the market. The proponents stated that the government should not acquire land for industries. In other words, land should be exchanged between the farmer and the industrialist by the principle of ‘willing buyer-willing-seller’.

A variant of this argument proposed that there should be a ‘land bank’ created by the joint efforts of the government and the industrialists from which land would be bought or leased out on the basis of certain market principles. It did not take into consideration the already existing differential bargaining power of the heterogeneous group of landholders in terms of the quality and size of arable land in the possession of farmers.

While examining these arguments in favour of industrialisation, it needs to be noted that supporters of industrialisation utilised a combination of arguments to strengthen their positions. For example, the employment-through-industrialisation argument was often combined with the historical necessity of industrialisation. Likewise, industrialisation through land reform was often blended with the employmentthrough-industrialisation argument.

Basically, all the arguments have missed the microlevel ground realities which the anthropologists and sociologists have discovered through their painstaking fieldwork. Moreover, none of the arguments dealt with rehabilitation of the displaced farmers or with the violation of constitutional provisions which empowered the local self-governments to implement development programmes within their jurisdictions.

Second, all the arguments were based on a degree of fallacy. For example, the first set of arguments did not consider situations of land acquisition which would drive the perceived beneficiaries to penury and drastically reduce their purchasing capacity. In fact, this is a self-defeating logic.

The second line of argument under the first set also did not take into consideration the fact that in a state where land is scarce and the density of the population is high, as in West Bengal, modern capital intensive and technologically advanced industries might not absorb the so-called extra labour force. The third line of argument was the weakest simply because comparison between Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution and present-day West Bengal was nothing but an irrational exercise by economists.

The second set of arguments totally ignored the fact of household food insecurity and lower purchasing capacity of displaced farmers. This was a common feature of land acquisition irrespective of whether it was mono-crop or multi-crop farmland under the present legal arrangement of providing only cash compensation without any sustainable measure of rehabilitation like sharing of the benefits.

The other variant of the third set apparently looks like a propeasant argument, but it is actually anti-poor because it supports the acquisition of uncultivated and/or mono-crop land as if people did not depend on those lands nor do the departments of rural development and irrigation have any responsibility to transform those lands into multicrop and cultivable lands.

The third set apparently favoured a non-coercive mode of land takeover, but was basically coercive to actual cultivators. The absentee holders of land might be ‘willing’ to sell the land even at a lower price at the cost of displacing sharecroppers and unrecorded actual cultivators of their land who might have been ‘unwilling’ to sell the land on which the livelihood of the latter depended. More fundamentally, the proponents of this school of thought have totally ignored the fact that in India a large amount of land is being used by the rural poor as a common property resource for which there is no provision for compensation to the users in case of acquisition under the existing law.

The Trinamul Congress government is yet to develop any comprehensive resettlement and rehabilitation policy for the thousands of families affected by various development projects. The new government had enacted a law on 14 June 2011 in the West Bengal Assembly named ‘Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act, 2011’.

With this law, the government had reacquired about 1000 acres of farmland from the Tatas, which had been given to the company by the CPI-M government in 2006 for setting up a small car manufacturing factory. The Trinamul government had intended to return 400 acres of farmland to the ‘unwilling’ farmers around whom the agitation against the Left Front government was organised. In another case of governmental land acquisition for housing in North 24-Parganas district of West Bengal, the farmers began to cultivate their farmland which was acquired but remained unutilised.

According to media reports, these farmers were assured by the Trinamul, before the Assembly election of 2011, that their land, would be returned to them if the party could come to power. But now these farmers were turning their backs to the Trinamul Congress, since the party had not kept its pre-election promise (The Statesman, 31 December 2011). The failure of land acquisition in Singur could neither generate a labour force freed from agriculture nor create enthusiasm and hope for the capitalist investors.

The Left Front government’s neo-Marxist theory of riding on the shoulders of land reform to achieve successful capital-intensive industrialisation turned out to be a selfdefeating exercise. The praxis sabotaged both land reform initiated in the past and future industrialisation. On the other hand, the Trinamul government’s enthusiasm to generate capital and employment either through legal means or through market forces seemed to be mere populist rhetoric.

Take for example, the decision on land banks. If indeed such a bank exists, then why should land be given from the bank only to industrialists and not to displaced farmers who would be losing land because of industrialisation? This is the lesson one can learn after a decade of the Singur episode in West Bengal.

(The writer taught Anthropology at Vidyasagar University and acted as an expert of the Standing Committee on Rural Development, Lok Sabha)

(Concluded)