People's Democracy

Small motor car project�People Shall Defeat Politics Of Destruction�

B Prasant

A SECTION of the media has started to speak in mournful tunes about a �dream having been wrecked.� What is this �dream� they speak about? It apparently comprises the shifting of the small motor car factory that was to have been set up in south Bengal, in Hooghly, at Singur. Was the motor car factory ever a dream? What is a �dream?� This anti-Marxist perception (Freud and Jung coined its social �reality�) -- is not included in the tough, backbreaking struggle for the wonderful thing called life amongst the toilers of the world, of this nation, of Bengal, of Hooghly, of Singur.

On March 24, 2009 when this writer visited Singur and the hamlets of Bajeymelia, Singer Bheri and the adjacent village areas, there is no dream that the villagers and the townsfolk feel they have had wrecked and lost when the small car started production elsewhere. Not one person that we spoke to would say that he/she had ever any dream about any sea-change the small motor car production would bring into the vast economic sweep that Bengal witnesses under the pro-poor LF government even as the nation wallows in the supply-side economy-driven market-centred capitalist crisis. It would have been good to have the factory, though, was the general consensus, for it would have brought more employment. That was about all.

What we found amongst the people of Singur was anger -- raging, roaring anger -- at the deceit, the sham, the trickery, the anti-poor charade played on the masses and the small-holders by the right-left combination of the Trinamul Congress and the Pradesh Congress, the BJP, on the one hand, and the SUCI, the killers of the so-called Maoists and the Naxalites, backed up by foreign-funded organisation including so-called NGOs, on the other.

Nirupam Sen who is a member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau and the industries minister of the Bengal LF government told the press in the afternoon of March 23, 2009 that the shifting of the car manufacturing unit from Singur was a sad event. The destructive politics of the opposition parties worked to malign the economy and the image of Bengal, whereas they as residents of this state should have known better than to encourage the shift. The minister said that everyone concerned should go back and re-evaluate their role in the going away of the small car from Singur in Bengal, to Sanand in Gujarat and to Panthnagar in Uttarakhand. Nirupam nailed effectively all the quantum of untruth uttered about the role of the Left Front government vis-�-vis the small car project. The people, he concluded, would judge what the role of the opposition had been in the entire affair.

Elsewhere, true to form, the Ananda Bazaar Patrika has started to organise �opinion polls� that are specifically, frankly, shamelessly aimed at encouraging the electorate into voting against the CPI(M) and the Left Front. Such predictions have gone very wrong in the past, and shall go very wrong in the days to come.