Content area
Full Text
Abstract: This article discusses the events at Nandigram in West Bengal where in 2006-7, a Left Front government collaborated with an Indonesian corporate group to forcibly acquire land from local peasants and construct a Special Economic Zone. The events are placed against the broad processes of accumulation by dispossession through which peasants are losing their land and corporate profits are given priority over food production. The article looks at the working and implications of the policies and the way in which a Communist Party-led government had become complicit with such processes over the last decade. It critically examines the logic that the government offered for the policies: that of the unavoidable necessity of industrialization, demonstrating that industrialization could have been done without fresh and massive land loss and that industries of the new sort do not generate employment or offset the consequences of large scale displacements of peasants. The article's central focus is on the peasant resistance in the face of the brutalities of the party cadres and the police.We explore the meaning of the victory of the peasants at Nandigram against the combined forces of state and corporate power, especially in the context of the present neo-liberal conjuncture.
Keywords: land struggles, Nandigram, neo-liberalism, peasant resistance, West- Bengal
Nandigram is the name of a cluster of villages in Purba Medinipur district in West Bengal, the Indian state that has been ruled by a Left Front government uninterruptedly since 1977-the longest period that communists have been democratically voted into power anywhere in the world. Many poor farmers live in Nandigram, most of them Muslims and the rest are "low" and "scheduled" (ex-untouchable) castes. For much of 2007, they managed to keep all state functionaries, including the police, out of their villages as they resisted the forced takeover of their land by the state on behalf of a foreign multinational company.
The name has, therefore, come to signify much more than a place. Nandigram is invoked wherever peasants in India oppose the forced acquisition of their land.Multinationals and state governments worry about peasant action when they remember Nandigram. It is uncanny that such mighty powers should be haunted by mere peasants. What is most uncanny is that Indian leftist parties, previously strident critics of corporate land...