Beyond the Immediate Tragedy

Editorial of EPW
There is a need to go beyond the immediate tragedy of
Nandigram and examine the underlying process that gives
rise to such episodes. In the neoliberal times that we are
living through, governments, whether at the central or a state
level, are essentially for the markets, by the markets and of
the markets. Indeed, the parliamentary political process is
increasingly governed by the logic of the market. But at a
more basic level, the process of capitalist development, which
is now driven largely by private investment, is creating
progress and wealth at one pole, while at the same time
dragging masses of people – poor and middle peasants,
landless rural workers, urban workers weakened by the
decline of effective trade unions, and non-wage earners in the
informal sector – “through blood and dirt, through misery
and degradation” at the other.
Classically, the “peasant question” has been articulated in
terms of class differentiation of the peasantry, ultimately
tending to polarisation into capitalists and proletarians.
However, the process of industrialisation also demands the
mobilisation of agricultural land that leads to displacement
of peasants, leading to their “proletarianisation” or
“marginalisation” in an urban environment, a process that has
accelerated in India since the 1980s. Of course, before the
reforms and the drive towards free trade in agricultural
commodities initiated at the World Trade Organisation, such
effects were mitigated through state support to agriculture in
various forms. But now the “commodification” of food is at
high tide. The “peasant question” of the 21st century, more
than in the past, thus brings to the fore issues of landlessness,
hunger, “informalisation”, homelessness and environmental
destruction. Millions of people have been victims of displacement
and dislocation, and many more will follow, if the
many proposals on the anvil to set up special economic zones
(SEZs) go ahead in the country.
In West Bengal, to the credit of the Left Front (LF) government,
land reform – implementation of the land ceiling
and the redistribution of land, as also “Operation Barga” –
improved the distribution of income and changed the incentive
structure in favour of those who tilled the land, though
subsequently some land transfers may have been reversed via
the market. But over time there has been the inevitable rising
disproportion between the rural population, land resources
and jobs, what with the failure of rural industry to take off.
The CPI(M) has been rightly quite concerned about the
future of the small and middle peasants, given the decline of
landholding areas and the limits of the diffusion of technical
progress, and with the increase in population density also
about the landless. After all, with the land reform, around 80
per cent of the cultivated land is now with small and middle
peasants, whereas elsewhere, where the implementation of
the land ceiling and redistribution was a failure, this proportion
is less than half that figure. And, post-land reforms, the
Chayanovian tendency of demographic differentiation has
also asserted itself. But will industrialisation in the form of
a “mega-chemical hub” and multi-product SEZ over 10,000
acres of land in Nandigram or elsewhere and other such
projects serve to address the question of alternative livelihood
opportunities? An enormous number of people who are
involved in agriculture and allied activities will be expropriated
and displaced as a result, leading to a further increase
in the huge mass of people in the informal sector, living on
the margins of existence.
Should not the CPI(M) then be thinking and acting at least
along social-democratic lines? In agriculture and allied
activities, the LF government, with the active participation
of the Kisan Sabhas, can help form mutual aid teams in which
households can pool resources (tools, implements, draft power,
occasional labour) but still cultivate the land on an individual
basis. When this is successful, they can then move to the
formation of elementary cooperatives in which land as well
as other resources can be pooled, but individual ownership
rights maintained, and where incomes can be based partly
on property ownership and partly on labour time committed
to cooperative production. In industry, the LF government
should be pursuing more vigorously its policy of industrial
clusters based on specific products/skills of small and
medium units with common infrastructure services that
improve the viability of the units. Here too, cooperative forms
of organisation can be given precedence, with the trade