peasants' struggle against Forced land acquisition in india's west bengal

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Mar 30, 2007 - in west bengal's singur bloc. the case from singur is paradigmatic of new forms ... present their particular stance using the language of development and justice, ..... rural poverty does not indicate an absence of poverty. during the early post- .... these barriers, the tribal activist suggested that officers of the ...
Chapter 11

‘Not on Our Land!’ Peasants’ Struggle against Forced Land Acquisition in India’s West Bengal Kenneth Nielsen

Introduction The focus of this chapter is an analysis of two significant government-initiated development initiatives in the Indian state of West Bengal. In the late 1960s, and again in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Government of West Bengal (hereafter state government) initiated major land reform programmes with the aim of poverty reduction, particularly in rural areas of the state. These efforts initially produced favourable results from the point of view of the rural poor, but in recent years their impact on poverty has been declining. In response the government has opted for a strategy of acquiring land to set up industries in the hope that a successful spurt of industrialisation will stimulate the state’s economy sufficiently. Yet while both land reforms and land acquisition were ostensibly intended to empower or benefit the rural poor in the long run, the development induced displacement involved in the latter initiative has met with widespread resentment and resistance among the rural poor, who have experienced this as disempowering rather than re-empowering. The chapter uses the case-study of the ongoing conflict between peasants and the government arising out of state-directed land acquisition for a proposed car factory in West Bengal’s Singur bloc. The case from Singur is paradigmatic of new forms of development (Bidwai 2006) which rely heavily on the influx of governmentsubsidised private capital. The case-study of the peasants’ struggle against land acquisition explores how controversies over legal entitlements, property rights, and indeed ‘rights’ in a broad sense, have come to the forefront in the conflict between the peasants and the government. The complexity of the situation is brought out by the fact that both parties to the conflict have engaged in determined efforts to present their particular stance using the language of development and justice, only in widely different ways. The chapter places the political struggles of project affected peasants to have their voices recognized at the centre of analysis, and argues that the legal  According to one estimate, the car factory in Singur has been directly subsidised to the tune Rupees 850 crore (Bidwai 2008, 117).

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empowerment of the poor remains a deeply political process. During their struggle the peasants have successfully mobilized and enlisted the support of activists, politicians, lawyers and intellectuals in challenging the government. The findings from West Bengal suggest that the agency and organisation of the poor are powerful vehicles for articulating demands for citizenship and promoting access to justice. However, the intervention of influential intermediaries with the capacity to formulate the specifics of a particular land struggle in the universal language of rights and citizenship remains important. The study also suggests that it may be fruitful to distinguish analytically between legal empowerment in an immediate sense – as in achieving a particular goal however defined – and in a long-term sense as a process of enhancing capabilities and of remoulding the poor into full citizens. While the LEP-agenda generally emphasises the latter, the poor often attach at least equal importance to the former. Brought to bear on the case from Singur, this distinction brings to light the paradox that although a particular struggle of the poor may be experienced as an immediate and deeply disenchanting failure, a reliance on the powerful discourse and political language of legal empowerment and citizenship may still produce beneficial long-term outcomes. Yet the case of West Bengal also suggests that while the poor work towards achieving the status of full citizens, the politics of violence and rebellion remains a very useful tool of struggle, and still proves successful in evoking a response from the state. The Politics of Legal Empowement Conceptualising the legal empowerment of the poor as first and foremost a political struggle, where collective organisation and political mobilisation from below is essential, implies going somewhat beyond traditional approaches to legal empowerment that have tended to focus on how empowerment may be brought about ‘from above’ by implementing changes in policy or legal frameworks. Wellknown examples of this, identified in a recent review by Palacio (2006), include the creation of a coherent legal order, the formalisation of property rights and the simplification of business rules. Important as these may be, a focus simply on such technical fixes is clearly too narrow and neither addresses the question of whether the poor have the means to assert their rights, nor whether the state is prepared to respond to the needs and rights of the poor (Palacio 2006, 23–25). For example, agrarian reforms and the redistribution of rural assets with the purpose of tackling the problem of rural poverty in India was high on the political agenda already prior to and immediately after the country gained independence in 1947, and the legal framework for carrying out such programmes has long been in place. Yet the actual achievements of most Indian states in this field remain generally unimpressive (Jannuzi 1994). Favourable rural credit systems set up by the government are widespread in India, but the time it takes to clear the formalities, the amount of paperwork that needs to be done, and the time and money the poor have to spend travelling to and from the office often means that farmers take the easy

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and quickest way out. This means going to the local moneylender, who charges exorbitant interest rates, which in the long run further impoverish the rural poor (Assayag 2005). An impressive bundle of rights related education, development, and the environment are enshrined in the ‘directive principles’ section of the Indian constitution, but there tends to be severe confusion (not just in India but in many developing countries) as to whether these rights can be enforced in a court of law. Moreover, the poor continue to face difficulties in accessing justice and the courts remain notoriously slow in handling cases in part due to the large volume of cases filed (Chandrachud 2002; Vittal 2003). This can mean that the process of redistribution of agricultural land earmarked for the poor is often severely affected by court injunctions which create long delays. While the case is pending, the landlord can avoid expropriation by selling the land, or by converting it to nonagricultural purposes (Basu 2002, 331). At other times the poor find themselves at an informational disadvantage. This is often the case when agricultural land is converted into real estate. Here the poor – to the extent that they are formally landowners – seemingly have the option of using their right to navigate the market as individual actors and to refuse to sell their land; alternatively they have the possibility of making a fortune because the price of land tends to soar when it is earmarked for real estate. However, the poor are often cheated as speculators obtain inside information from their business and political connections about upcoming real estate projects long before the peasants do. Consequently, many of the peasants end up losing their land to speculators years before they come to know about any profitable real estate project in their area. And should they attempt to stand their ground, they risk succumbing to the pressure of the ‘politician – real estate nexus’ (Reddy and Reddy 2007, 3237–39) and muscle power. I will argue, in line with a recent critique by Ana Palacio, that legal empowerment of the poor must be seen as a broader concept in which empowerment is understood as part of political empowerment. The advantage of doing so, particularly from an anthropological perspective, is that it includes a focus on not only the empowerment from above dimension (or the supply side of governance) but also takes account of the importance of the demand side of governance. This includes the question of how the voice of the poor is raised, and how their capacities to articulate demands can be strengthened. It also directs our attention to the organisation and mobilisation of the poor (Palacio 2006, 24) and to alternative sites of political empowerment which the poor are already occupying and developing in the course of their actual struggles. In Palacio’s broadened understanding of legal empowerment as political empowerment, the notion of citizenship is central. The aim of the LEP process therefore becomes to ‘transform the poor into citizens who are aware of their rights,  Speculators often know well in advance, and much before the peasants do, where and when agricultural land will be converted into real estate. It is not unusual that they use this information to buy up agricultural land cheaply and sell it on at much higher prices later. They too are known to use heavy handed methods from time to time.

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are able to assert them, and also to hold the state accountable for their adequate enforcement’ (ibid, 21). With the risk of being unfair to Palacio, the poor here seem to appear as ‘not-yet’ or ‘not-quite’ citizens waiting to be rather passively granted the status of ‘full citizens’ who will then assume their legitimate place in civil society from where they will exert their influence on the state and hold it accountable. This distinction between ‘not-yet citizens’ and full citizens resonates with ongoing debates in the Indian context on the nature of popular politics. Here, an influential line of thought holds that the full citizens are usually the privileged few of the educated urban middle classes, who are comfortable using the language of universal rights and who master the deliberative forms of politics we associate with civil society (Chatterjee 2001; 2003; 2004; Harriss 2006). The reason for this, as Palacio rightly suggests, is that poor people and other ‘denizens’ governed as subjects rather than citizens, often lack the material and symbolic resources to navigate civil society, and have little command over the language of universal citizenship. But this does not imply that the poor are passive subjects with no politics of their own. As Chatterjee’s (2004) study of urban slums in Kolkata has shown the poor exert an influence on the state and extract benefits in their own ways: they occupy and live on public land illegally; they resort to power theft, and do not pay for many of the public utilities they often manage to secure for themselves. Sometimes this is the result of clandestine arrangements forged with influential politicians, whose clout can make law enforcers look the other way. However, the fact that the poor violate the law in all the above instances makes it difficult for the state to recognise them as proper citizens in the fullest sense of the term. Chatterjee (2004) suggests that the politics of the poor, or ‘the politics of the governed’ tends to be much messier than the deliberative politics of civil society. It sometimes turns violent, and often bases itself on group claims rather than on individual rights. Chatterjee thus labels the sphere in which this kind of politics takes place as ‘political society’. This is the domain of political parties, movements, and other non-party political formations through which the poor as a collective raise their demands for public services and benefits. This form of making claims on the state is often inherently particularistic rather than universalistic: demands are for electricity for our slum; a health clinic in our bustee (slum); no car factory on our farmland, etc. The way the poor manage to raise their voice and gain access to benefits is often the result of local organisation and subsequent alliances built with local politicians – for whom the poor may not be seen as individual voters but rather as a vote-bank to be captured – political parties, NGOs and other activists. The politics of the governed may lack many of the niceties associated with civil society and abstract universal citizenship. But for the Indian poor it remains an important site of struggle for empowerment from below, and is perhaps the most accessible sphere from where they can hope to raise their voice loudly enough to force the state listen. I will, in addition, argue that it is a site for political creativity and innovation, where new political identities may be forged, strategic and unexpected alliances built, and creative solutions to political challenges arrived at.

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The historical background and the case study of the car factory in Singur analysed in this chapter highlights the political agency of the poor in building alliances and enlisting support in their struggles for land. While West Bengal’s historical experience shows how the state may sometimes emerge as a powerful ally, the case of Singur brings out how it at other times may emerge forcefully as the prime target of the struggles of the poor. In Singur, the peasants have found useful allies among opposition politicians and civil society groups who have efficiently performed the role of advocates and brokers (Tilly and Tarrow 2007, 31–33). What began there as a local agitation against land acquisition was thus quickly transformed into a national political issue, and drawn into the orbit of ‘proper’ civil society, the world of the legalese and the language of citizenship. For the peasants this experience has been deeply fraught with tension and contradictions. So far they have not succeeded in reversing the expropriation of their land, and many peasants currently are deeply disenchanted with the experience of working through civil society organisations and the legal system. However, I will argue that they have in the process become familiar with the language of law, rights and citizenship, and have built up and strengthened a collective capacity to invoke this knowledge in the future. They have also built up strong links with several groups and organisations, to whom they might again turn for assistance should the need arise. Lastly, their struggle has indirectly forced the governments at state and national levels to bring about significant changes in policy and practice. The chapter thus shows that in the midst of more sterile debates on legal reform, property rights, and good governance, we should not lose sight of the inherent importance of political mobilisation and struggle from below. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part of this chapter provides a historical overview of a remarkably successful collaborative venture between the state and the poor, the land reform programmes carried out in West Bengal in several phases from the late 1960s onwards. This part forms an introduction to the chapter’s main case study, but is in itself an important illustration of the importance of the mobilisation and agency of the poor in land struggles. The second part introduces the case of peasant resistance to the upcoming car factory in Singur. The third part explores the attempts by peasants to enlist the support of various political and civil society actors, and analyses some of their efforts at translating a particular and localised land struggle into the language of rights and citizenship. The fourth part analyses the difficulties in challenging the land acquisition process legally, while also highlighting some of the creative solutions brought forth by the peasants and their allies. The chapter ends by offering some concluding reflections on the role of political mobilisation from below in achieving not only immediate goals, but also in effecting long-term positive transformations in state – citizen relations.

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Land Reforms and the West Bengal Experience When the Indian Constitution was finalised in 1950 after years of work and intense discussions, the result was a document which set out a series of very ambitious goals intended to transform both society and the economy. Universal suffrage was granted, the caste system was officially abolished, and special quotas and reservations were introduced to bring about rapid improvements in the quality of life for the country’s backward communities – the now ex-untouchables or Scheduled Castes (SC) and the tribal population (Scheduled Tribes, ST). According to the section entitled ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ in the Indian Constitution, a major aim of the Indian government is ‘to promote the establishment of an economic system characterised by the empowerment of the people, where necessary, by the redistribution of economic assets so as to limit sharply the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment’ (Jannuzi 1994, ix). Being a predominantly rural economy, agrarian reform was envisioned as the principal means by which this was to be achieved. As Jayal (2001, 24) has observed, the result should have been explosive. It threatened to dissolve traditional hierarchies based on caste and gender, to abolish the rural feudal structure, to redistribute the assets of the rural rich to the poor, and to seriously address class inequalities and poverty. Yet in practice, the results of developmental efforts have often been less impressive, particularly in the field of agrarian reform. And as Alam (2002, 306–7) argues, after the abolition of the zamindari system and other large landed estates, the remaining land reform programmes were left half implemented. The reasons for the failure to implement rural reforms are many and complex. The Congress party which assumed power in Delhi after independence had, when it was at the forefront of the movement for independence, tried to suppress most forms of social conflict that might have created fissures in the nationalist movement. For the Congress, national unity had always been considered more important than addressing for example landlord – tenant conflicts (Shah 2004). Such an outlook continued to exert its influence on the Congress leadership in the years following independence, when the Indian state continued to be suspicious of popular agitations and more radical movements demanding entitlements to land and other resources. Most of these movements were perceived to be anti-national and were accordingly either pushed back, contained or repressed. Others have pointed out that the class character of the Congress regime, and the important role played by the rural elite in the ‘Congress system’ (Kothari 2002) of political patronage and mobilisation, meant that there was in fact very strong intra-party resistance to any major land reforms that would  Reservations have later been extended to also include communities that are otherwise considered backward (OBC).   The problems the Indian state faced in integrating Hyderabad and the conflict in Kashmir were also important in making the state more suspicious of any movement that may threaten to disrupt the unity of the Indian Union. See also Brass (2000).

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come at the expense of the rural elite. This appeared to be the case in West Bengal during the early years of independent India when the Congress party, under the leadership of chief minister B.C. Roy, rose to power based on the support of the rural elite. These elites were an important link between the Congress leadership and the rural masses in what has subsequently become known as the ‘Ghosh Machine’ (Sengupta 1985, 33), the local variant of the Congress model of machine politics for distributing spoils and patronage in exchange for political support. Indeed, the track record of West Bengal’s Congress government on the issue of rural poverty, land reform and inequality from 1950 onwards was not very impressive. By 1967 it had managed to vest merely 300,000 acres of land for redistribution and most of this land was either infertile, or was disputed property (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 75–8). Yet the failure to politically address the issue of rural poverty does not indicate an absence of poverty. During the early postindependence decades there was a continued pressure on land, swelling the ranks of the landless and the poor. Thus while the official poverty line for a family of five was a holding of five acres, three quarters of rural households in West Bengal held less than half of that. As Ruud (2003, 25–6) notes, the dependency and vulnerability of the rural poor at the time was obvious and there appeared to be no escape from poverty for a large section of the population (Webster 1992, 10). Several laws aimed at addressing the problem of rural poverty were, however, introduced early on. For example, the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act (1953) introduced ceiling provisions (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 14) limiting the maximum area of agricultural and non-agricultural land that could be legally held by any one person. Any land held in surplus of the legal ceiling was to be vested in the state for redistribution. However, no limits were introduced on land used for plantations, orchards or tank-fisheries, nor were there any limits to how much land religious or charitable trusts could own. Predictably, the provisions of the Act did not prove difficult to evade as loopholes were literally built into them (Doreen Warriner in Mitter 1977, 13). For instance, the provisions specifying the limit to the amount held by any one individual meant that a joint family household could in effect legally own large tracts of land. Predictably, and immediately after the Act was passed, there was a spate of transfers of ownership from landowners, who did not wish to see their ceiling-surplus land expropriated, to their sons, relatives or other persons real or imaginary.  Named after the powerful Congress politician Atulya Ghosh.   In 1951, sharecroppers cultivated approximately one-fifth of the total cultivated land in the state. As they enjoyed no security of tenure, and as no laws regulated the division of crops or the terms of eviction (Ghosh and Nagaraj 1978, 51–52), their position was particularly precarious.  The ceiling was put at 25 acres of agricultural land and 20 acres of non-agricultural land per individual.   This could include not only fictitious persons, but also unborn children and pets (Mitter 1977, 17). Such transfers, where people would “lend their names” as pro forma

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The West Bengal Land Reforms Act which was passed in 1955 did little – despite several subsequent amendments – to plug these loopholes (Ghosh and Nagaraj 1978, 55). In addition, the administration of the then Congress government often appeared less than earnest in its efforts to bring about rural reforms. The bureaucracy in turn generally maintained at best a stance of hostile neutrality to the issue of land reforms (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 68), or sided openly with landlords during disputes (Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 2002). This meant that although the zamindari system had been abolished in 1951, a class of landlordscum-moneylenders retained a stranglehold over land, labour, money and markets in West Bengal (Harriss-White 2008, 5). With the decline of Congress in the 1960s, the political scenario in West Bengal began to change. The death of chief minister B.C. Roy and the gradual disintegration of the ‘Ghosh Machine’ opened up a political space which a number of Leftist parties sought to fill. In the process the land question and the issue of rural poverty emerged forcefully in the politics of the state. In 1964, the Communist Party of India (CPI) witnessed a split, ostensibly over how to respond to India’s war with communist China. But while the original CPI largely retained its hold over the urban working class, the new faction – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) – turned its attention to the countryside in search of a constituency. This marked the beginning of a prolonged period of mobilisation of the rural poor, first by the CPM and subsequently by most other political parties of the Left. Two years of severe drought and harvest failure in the mid-1960s made the rural scenario even more explosive. At the 1967 elections, the Congress party was defeated for the first time in West Bengal by a United Front (UF) coalition consisting of fourteen political parties. The UF government was dismissed after a mere eight months, only to resume office again in early 1969 (Franda 1969). In both UF governments, however, communist peasant leader Hare Krishna Konar served as the minister for land and land revenue. In this capacity Konar worked out a series of initiatives aimed at improving the conditions of the rural poor. Administratively Konar was initially sensitive to the importance of chiselling out a reform programme that paid attention to legal details. This was important insofar as a land reform programme carried out within the framework of the law would be difficult to reverse or undo by subsequent non-Leftist governments. To this end Konar formulated what Bandyopadhyay (2007) has termed the ‘Konar Recipe’ for legal land reform with popular participation. The recipe worked through a particular logical and yet very innovative combination of constitutional and legal rights. Bandyopadhyay summarises the modus operandi of the ‘Konar Recipe’ as follows: owners, are known as benami transfers. Moreover, agricultural land could easily be hidden if recorded as orchards or tank-fisheries.  Moreover, any transgression of the law in redistributing land could have led to a dismissal of the entire UF government by the less-than-friendly central government of the Congress.

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The Constitution of India guarantees the right to form associations and unions and to assemble peaceably. The Indian Evidence Act permits disbelieving of documentary evidence on the strength of overwhelmingly reliable oral evidence. The Criminal Procedure Code allows some sort of public participation for gathering evidence against a person allegedly engaged in “bad livelihood”. If the agricultural workers and sharecroppers assembled peacefully to espouse a cause, if public order was threatened by landowners, the latter could be retrained under the CrPc10 in the interest of public order. (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 95).

However, when Konar returned to the office of land and land revenue minister in 1969 he had become somewhat disenchanted with the capacity of the administrative apparatus to bring about the desired changes in agrarian relations (Ruud 2003, 106). Konar complained of ‘the limitations of the law courts, the constitution and all the rubbishes of false documents’ (in Webster 1992, 11) and often trumpeted a radical revolutionary rhetoric of militant confiscation of land by peasants (Kohli 1997, 349). Consequently, the mass mobilisation of the rural poor and the peasants by the United Front government took the form of land occupations or land-grabs, often violent in nature. Thus, while the combination of legal empowerment through public mobilisation and mass organisation of the poor succeeded in vesting somewhere between one and three hundred thousand acres of land in the state over a period of 18 months, the law and order situation deteriorated considerably.11 Eventually the second UF government – already crumbling under internal pressure – was dismissed by the central government in Delhi and was replaced by a period of President’s Rule12 and eventually by the Congress government of Siddharta Shankar Ray, who won the widely rigged 1972 assembly elections. From 1970 onwards radical changes were made in the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955. Through a list of amendments, a comprehensive set of rights were gradually extended to the bargadars (sharecroppers) who were conferred fixity and heritable right of tenure, and provided some protection against arbitrary eviction. The share of the crop accruing to the bargadar and the landowner respectively, was also improved and fixed (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 20) while land ceiling was significantly lowered.13 Yet in practice none of these efforts had much 10 The Criminal Procedure Code. 11 The decade beginning in 1967 and lasting up to the lifting of Indira Gandhi’s emergency in 1977 has been described as a decade of increasing ”breakdown” leading to a massive crisis of governability (Kohli 1997). 12 Article 356 of the Indian Constitution empowers the President to dismiss a state government on account of a breakdown of law and order. The state is subsequently placed directly under the President’s rule, which de facto means the rule of the central government in Delhi. 13  To 12.5 acres of irrigated land for a family of five, plus 1.25 acres per additional family member, up to a maximum of 17.5 acres. Orchards were allowed five acres and charitable organisations up to 17.5 acres (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2005, 6).

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impact and the new legislation suffered from severe problems of implementation (Ghosh and Kumar 2003, 161). It was not until a Left Front (LF) coalition government assumed office in 1977 that a renewed and concerted effort at tackling the problem of rural poverty was undertaken. In the meantime, the percentage of the rural population living below the poverty line in West Bengal had reached an alarming 66 per cent in 1973–74 (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 59). The LF government almost immediately upon assuming office initiated a comprehensive programme of land reform. Elements and methodologies from the Konar Recipe were kept in mind while new measures were added. Webster (1992, 9–10) notes that among the most important measures were the following: • • • • • • •

Operation Barga: recording the names of sharecroppers and securing them the legal rights they were entitled to Distribution of available ceiling surplus vested land among the rural poor Efforts to detect and vest more ceiling surplus land Giving institutional credit to the recipients of vested land to break the ties of debt and bondage Assigning permanent title for homestead purpose to forestall eviction of landless agricultural workers and sharecroppers residing on the landowners’ plots as permissive occupiers Restoration of land alienated due to distress sale Providing irrigation, subsidies, exemption from revenues, and designing food-for-work programmes

As with the Konar Recipe, the novelty of the Left Front government’s programme lay not so much in formulating the targets it set for itself, as in the way in which it went about meeting these targets. Again, the main methodology was one that relied on political mobilisation from below, and a considerable degree of legal creativity. A case in point was the programme for registering bargadars, ‘Operation Barga’. Although Operation Barga is essentially merely a tenancy law that offers security and regulates the sharing of crops, it can in effect be seen as affecting a limited but still ‘major change in property rights’ (Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 2002) to the extent that it de facto confers quasi property rights to the sharecropper (Raychaudhuri 2004, 19). The ingredients of the methodology of Operation Barga were actually suggested by a tribal sharecropper activist (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 114–15) who argued that sharecropping did not involve any point of law – it was a verifiable fact. He therefore proposed that the process of legally recording sharecroppers should be reversed. The typical bureaucratic methods of recording sharecroppers often disadvantaged this group. For example, the sharecropper had to travel some distance to get to the tribunal, and he was often asked to present legal papers that either did not exist (most sharecropping agreements were oral in nature) or which he did not possess. And typically, while the rich could afford to engage lawyers to present their case, the rural poor could not. Moreover, the individual sharecropper often hesitated to come forward to register his claim, fearing

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possible retaliation from the landowner in the form of pre-emptive annulment of sharecropping agreements or eviction from homestead plots. To overcome these barriers, the tribal activist suggested that officers of the revenue tribunal be directed to visit the fields and verify the facts of sharecropping in situ (ibid, 79). The solution that the LF government came up with was to have group meetings between sharecroppers and officials. Such meetings were ostensibly aimed at increasing the confidence of the individual (and often vulnerable) sharecropper. During these public meetings officials would explain to the sharecroppers the rights they were legally entitled to, and the sharecroppers could in turn narrate their own grievances to the officials. Lacking written evidence that would hold up in court, this reliance on oral testimony produced and verified in public was deemed the most appropriate way of addressing the concerns of sharecroppers. Following such meetings, lists of claimants were collectively drawn up. This was again followed by public verification of the claims in the field in the presence of both sharecroppers and landowners. Subsequently, certificates of sharecropping were distributed to sharecroppers.14 While notions of property rights and legality thus played an important part in the land reform process, it did not prevent those who stood to lose their land from challenging the reforms in court. The courts in turn responded by issuing ex parte injunctions ‘with the intensity of monsoon showers’ (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 63) and in 1980, during Operation Barga, over a hundred and seventy thousand acres of land were affected by injunction orders15, and nearly 50,000 cases were pending in the Calcutta High Court or the Civil Courts for long periods of time. The implementation of Operation Barga also encountered opposition due to the clandestine arrangements that landowners had with the lower echelons of the bureaucracy, and the failure of the legal profession to ‘rise to the occasion’ in the ensuing legal battles (Bandyopadhyay 2007, 63–8). Despite the numerous obstacles the LF government’s land reform programme encountered in its initial phases, most analysts now regard it as being very successful. Rural poverty in West Bengal declined significantly, and the condition of the rural poor gradually improved (Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 2002, 3; Sengupta and Gazdar 1996, 196; Webster 2005, 319; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2005, 3).16 Contrary to one strand of economic theory, the case of West Bengal thus 14 Hanstad and Brown have analysed Operation Barga as a process in six stages: 1. identification by officials of areas with large concentration of bargadars. 2. Organisation of squads of officers. 3. Settling dates of evening camps. 4. Explaining in the evening camps the benefits that bargadars will enjoy after registration. 5. Investigating the bargadars’ claims by field officials; and 6. Recording the names of bargadars and of any objections (Hanstad and Brown 2001, 36). The verification of claims in situ and in public was ostensibly intended to make it more difficult for landowners to get away with a blatant lie. 15  Chakraborty (1985, 168) puts the figure at 1.17 lakh. 16 See however Mallick (1992), who argues that West Bengal’s agrarian reforms have failed, and that no significant Left Front program can be considered a success from a

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points to a positive correlation between empowerment and efficiency in the transfer of property rights from the rich to the poor (Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak 2002, 2). In terms of agricultural output, a century of agricultural stagnation gave way to a decade of sustained agricultural growth in the 1980s. Rice in particular, the main crop of the state, witnessed a spectacular increase in production (Raychaudhuri 2004, 8).17 However, during the 1990s it became evident that the impressive growth rates of the previous decade could not be sustained. In stead there was a relapse into relative stagnation (Harriss-White 2008, 2) with severe negative implications for employment generation in rural West Bengal (WBHDR 2004, 94). In 2002, Ghosh and Harriss-White (2002) described a veritable crisis in the rice economy in parts of the state, while the West Bengal Human Development Report (WBHDR) in a less alarming language noted that emerging difficulties in agriculture had created a situation where non-agricultural activities had become ‘preferable’ for many small-holder rural households (WBHDR 2004, 42). However, the WBHDR also noted that there was ’quite simply … not enough jobs for all the people who are willing or forced to work’ (ibid, 89). The LF government’s policy response since then has been twofold. In agriculture it has encouraged crop diversification and a shift towards growing commercial crops (Basu 2007, 295). Simultaneously it has sought to generate employment diversification out of agriculture by embarking on a programme of industrialisation. To capture the essence of this policy shift, the LF government and its chief minister – in the period leading up to the 2006 legislative assembly elections – coined the slogan ‘Agriculture is Our Base, Industry Our Future’. The slogan ostensibly sought to convey a sense of change (‘our future’) as well as a sense of continuity with the successful land reform programmes of the past (‘our base’). Emphasising this continuity between the policies of the past and of the present the chief minister explained that industries were needed so that the sons of farmers could get jobs. Hence it was now a matter of ‘moving towards rapid industrialisation based on our success in agriculture’ (Buddhadeb Bhattacharya

lower class perspective. Corbridge et al. have argued that Mallick’s claims are overstated (Corbridge et al. 2003, 2378). 17 However, the question of causality between land reforms and increased agricultural output is a complex one as developments over any long time-series will be influenced by a number of factors. In the context of West Bengal there is an ongoing debate over how much of the increase in output that can be reasonably attributed to the LF’s land reforms. It is not possible here to go into a more detailed discussion on this issue, but it is worthwhile pointing out that other factors have contributed to the increase in agricultural output as well. This includes the introduction of HYV seeds; extensive cultivation of irrigation-dependent boro crop (dry season/summer crop grown in Bengal from January to April-May) which in the 1960s was largely insignificant (cf. Mitter 1977, 9); large-scale use of groundwater; and increased use of chemical fertilizer (Harriss 1993; Bandyopadhyay 2007, 77).

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quoted in Chattopadhyay 2007).18 And the car factory in Singur – owned and operated by India’s industrial giant, the Tata company, was projected as a flagship project in this process. The Tata Small Car Factory The Tata car factory is currently under construction in Singur on a 997.11 acres plot of land acquired in 2006 by the Government of West Bengal.19 Almost the entire area was under agricultural cultivation prior to the acquisition, nearly 2/3rd being highly fertile farmland yielding two or more crops per year. The acquisition of this large plot of land has now affected an estimated 12,000 people in one way or the other: it has left many small farmers wholly or partially landless; it has meant a loss of relatively secure income for the area’s landless labourers; it has meant a loss of tenure for the area’s bargadars,20; and thousands of migrant labourers from neighbouring districts of West Bengal have been deprived of an important source of income and livelihood. The Tata company has invested a large sum of money, estimated to be over Rupees 1,000 crores on the project and a prototype of the car called ‘Nano’– to be produced in the Singur factory – was unveiled amid much fanfare and media praise at the Delhi Auto Expo in January 2008. With a price tag of only a hundred thousand rupees (approx. $ 2,500),21 the Nano is targeted at a middle class audience whose ambition of car ownership has hitherto remained unfulfilled. The fact that other automobile manufacturers have been competing to be the first to produce a car in this price segment – and the fact that Tata chairman, Ratan Tata, has made no secret of his ambition to produce such a car – indicates the importance of the project for the company and for the Government of West Bengal, for whom 18 The CPM had made this clear earlier when they had explained that “agriculture is not the last word in development” (in Basu 2007, 294). More recently the state industries minister Nirupam Sen elaborated that land reforms were never meant to be an end in themselves. The industries minister has from time to time trumpeted a more alarmist rhetoric which points to a policy revolution rather than a policy evolution. He has warned that agriculture was rapidly becoming unviable, and that if the government did not now go for industrial development the entire economy of the state would go to ruin (in Chattopadhyay 2006b). 19 Approximately 300 acres are reserved for the car factory, while the remaining 700 acres have been set aside for vendors. The first small car is expected to roll out from the factory in June or July 2008. 20 Many sharecroppers in the area were not registered during Operation Barga. The above distinction between landowners, sharecroppers and landless labourers is a blurry one at best. I know of several families in Singur who own land and hire in extra labour during the peak harvest season, while they at the same time sharecrop the land of others, or work as daily wage labourers whenever they have time. 21 The on-road price is expected to be Rupees 1.25 lakh.

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the project is also symbolic of its new development policy and hence a matter of great prestige.22 The car factory itself is expected to generate a maximum of two thousand jobs, while the large-scale manufacturing activities in both small and medium-scale enterprises expected to come up alongside the mother plant is expected to generate a further ten thousand new jobs (Chattopadhyay 2006a). In addition, several temporary and low-skilled jobs in construction, transport and security will be created for the purpose of constructing the factory. While the government thus appeared to have legitimate grounds for believing that a car factory in West Bengal would make a positive impact on employment, it did not provide valid arguments as to why a car factory situated in Singur (and not in an alternative location) would be the best solution, nor did it explain how a highly computerised and capital intensive car factory would be capable of including everyone in the growth process, as the industries minister had stated was the aim of the government’s policy (in Chattopadhyay 2006b). Singur has a strong agricultural economy, fertile agricultural land, is prosperous and already well developed in terms of infrastructure. Many land losers therefore saw the car factory more as a threat to their livelihood than as a boon for the area. Knowing that they lacked the technical skills required to work in modern computerised factories, they chose to resist the government’s land acquisition plan. Their resistance is the focus of the remainder of this chapter. Peasant Resistance and Alliance Building in Singur The peasants’ resistance to government acquisition of their land has relied on a ‘repertoire of contention’ (Tilly and Tarrow 2007) that is readily recognisable to civil society activists in many parts of the world. The peasants have formed a committee – the Singur Krishi Jomi Raksha Committee (hereafter SKJRC)23 – to coordinate their struggle; they have written and submitted petitions, sent deputations to important officials and politicians and have held public protest meetings and rallies. They have also used a culturally more particular repertoire that includes waving black flags at unwelcome visiting (official) dignitaries; gheraoing (crowding, blocking) government offices; sitting dharna24 and going 22 The chief minister has repeatedly explained how the project would change the face not only of Singur but of the whole of West Bengal (in Chattopadhyay 2008, 49), as it would “set in motion the other wheels of industrial progress in the state” (Bhattacharya in Chattopadhyay 2006a). At the same time he has voiced concern that if the Tata project fell through it would have an adverse impact on industrial investment in the state. 23 Translated from Bengali, this stands for the Committee to Save the Farmland of Singur. 24  Dharna is an act of fasting aimed at settling a dispute. If the fasting person dies, the curse of the death as per tradition falls on the person against whom the act of sitting dharna was directed.

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on fasts. Simultaneously they have used methods of resistance that have been somewhat less civil and have bordered on the illegal. These include attacking vehicles belonging to the Tata company and destroying the boundary wall of the factory that now surrounds their farmland. There have also been several clashes with the police guarding the factory which has resulted in hundreds of people injured, and one dead. It has also meant that hundreds of peasants have of late spent shorter or longer periods in government jails. While the peasants have staked a universal political claim of sorts by arguing that it is morally wrong of the government to deprive rural families of their prime source of livelihood, their strategies and the politics of their organisation, SKJRC, has from the outset been predominantly particularistic. While not articulating any opposition to the government’s overall strategy of industrialisation, they have simply focused their efforts in trying to ensure that the factory was moved elsewhere.25 Their main argument has therefore been that it is wrong to acquire very fertile farmland, which Singur possesses in abundance, for the purpose of industrialisation. But they have expressed no great reservations about acquiring barren land or less fertile mono-crop land elsewhere for similar purposes. Indeed, the SKJRC’s initial statements made no attempt to oppose ‘developmentinduced displacement’, or critique the dominant model of ‘capitalist-industrial development’. What has made the Singur resistance model quite exceptional, however, is that whereas peasant resistance to perceived livelihood threats are not uncommon, they often take place well below the radar screen of the media and the general public. In contrast, the SKJRC quickly proved very adept at enlisting the support of others in their struggle. And since their struggle is being waged against the state government, it could not immediately become an ally as it had been for poor peasants in their land struggles in earlier decades. Allies would have to be found elsewhere. As an indication of how successful they have been in forging alliances, the SKJRC had nearly 20 member organisations, and another 65 organisations publicly supporting their cause in 2007 (Sen and Bhattacharya 2007, 17–18). Most prominent among them is the Trinamul Congress (TMC), the major opposition party in West Bengal, whose local representatives occupy the top positions in the SKJRC. The TMC and other allies have thus acted as movement brokers (Tilly and Tarrow 2007, 31–33) who by virtue of their socio-political connections, have the potential to link the Singur struggle to multiple political sites, and who due to their mastery of the language of governance and citizenship can articulate the particular land struggle of Singur in more universal idioms. These allies can therefore be roughly grouped into two main categories: Opposition politicians (including most prominently leading opposition leader Ms. Mamata Banerjee from the TMC and various other parties and groups, including Naxalite-factions) and urban NGOs or mass organisations, 25 Many villagers actually do not envision a future for all of their sons in agriculture. They are therefore willing to extend their support to policies that seek the generate employment in other sectors, and therefore do not oppose industrialisation as such.

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as most of the groups on the left prefer to be called, though they often do not have any broad mass base. Some of them regularly monitor developments in rural Bengal and do their best to highlight human rights violations and state repression. In addition, a number of activists have made film documentaries on Singur, and have written articles for journals and the news media. Opposition politicians have been of crucial importance in focusing the media’s glare on the land acquisition conflict in Singur. The TMC leader, Mamata Banerjee, in particular has time and again proven herself particularly adept at this exercise. In December 2006, for example, she embarked on a 25 day fast in Kolkata in support of the peasants, which in addition to the media also captured the attention of political dignitaries from all over the country, many of whom came personally to visit her. In the process Singur became a household name in Indian political circles. Apart from drawing the media in her wake and elevating Singur to a national political symbol of government highhandedness, Mamata Banerjee and the TMC have also addressed a range of socio-economic needs – often surprisingly forgotten by those who emphasise the importance of ideology to social movements – without which a movement of the poor could scarcely be sustained. Thus, for example, there has been a focus on regular relief and food for those deprived of their livelihood; medicines for those injured in clashes with the police; bail payments for imprisoned farmers; and paying hospital bills for those in need of professional treatment. Being capable of mobilising resources from an organisational network and public support base that no West Bengal-based civil society organisation could aspire for, the intervention of the TMC has been of crucial significance in sustaining the Singur protests. However, Mamata Banerjee’s forceful intervention has also generated some tension within the movement. She is viewed with scepticism by many supporters of the movement who profess a leftist outlook. And these individuals remain deeply suspicious of Ms. Banerjee’s apparently ideologically non-committed and conspicuously inclusive style of politics (Banerjee 2004, 301). They see the TMC as an opportunist party on the right and fear that her embrace of the movement would be of the smothering kind (Meyer 2003) which would divert the political momentum to her party at the expense of the peasants’ struggle. In addition to political parties, the peasants have found their second major alliance partner in urban civil society groups, including NGOs and mass organisations. These have included the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), one of the oldest civil liberties groups in West Bengal (formed in 1972); the West Bengal branch of Medha Patkar’s National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM);26 and the joint efforts of the Institute for Motivating Self Employment (IMSE) and the international NGO, Food First Institute and Action

26 Medha Patkar is one of contemporary India’s most prominent social activists. She acquired her reputation as the leader of the most celebrated tribal assertion in the 1990s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), which aimed at stopping a massive dam on the Narmada River which would render some 200,000 people homeless.

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Network (FIAN).27 These groups have conducted field surveys, livelihood impact estimates, undertaken fact finding missions and have organised people’s courts, people’s hearings and tribunals. Many of these efforts have resulted in the production of a large number of what Marc Edelman (1999) has called ‘NGO artefacts’: fact finding mission reports, survey results and reports from people’s hearings. Such NGO artefacts speak the language of governance which allows the organisations to challenge government policies on its own turf and in its own specialist language. They have recorded and quantified the emotive expressions and subjective feelings of loss among peasants in the powerful language of rights, citizenship and democracy. IMSE and FIAN have, in particular, used their well-established international networks to propel the Singur struggle onto the international scene. Petitions and ready-made protest letters that can be downloaded, signed and sent to West Bengal ministers have been made available on the Internet. And at one international conference, these two groups obtained the signatures of representatives from organisations from more than 50 countries on a petition protesting the land acquisition in Singur. Moreover, when IMSE and FIAN have conducted their fact finding mission and hearings they have used their network with other NGOs28 to include representatives from other South and South East Asian countries in their teams, thereby giving such missions an international flavour. APDR and NAPM have likewise played a significant role as alliance partners of the Singur peasants. Members from both groups have jointly formed the Sanhati Udyog (Integrated/United Initiative) to assist the peasants, and they have carried out fact finding missions and surveys in Singur, and published reports on their findings. The NAPM has also been an important intermediary in bringing high profile social activist Medha Patkar, known from the Narmada struggle, into the Singur conflict.29 On several occasions, Patkar has taken villagers from Singur on tours of the country, linking the Singur struggle up with people’s movements in other parts of India including Narmada, Kerala, Maharashtra, Bihar and Jharkand. Some villagers even went to New Delhi to meet both the President and Prime Minister of India. With every visit to Singur, Patkar was able to generate considerable media interest on the topic of land acquisition. However, she also helped organise and presided over a large ‘people’s tribunal’ in Singur. Here the purpose was to give peasants a microphone and have them deliver their testimony on the land acquisition. With Medha Patkar playing the role of a judge together with 27  Other organisations that should be mentioned include the Khet Mazdoor Samiti and the All India Legal Aid Services Forum. Various fora of intellectuals and artists have also been active. 28 Notably the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), and the Pesticide Action Network for Asia and the Pacific (PANAP). 29 That Medha Patkar in other Indian states is often seen protesting side by side with activists of the CPM, but was now seen to be opposing them in West Bengal, added to the drama surrounding her intervention in Singur.

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other local and national activists, the evidence was systematically documented. The NAPM even invited representatives of Tata and government functionaries although these did not show up. Often such public meetings and hearings follow a somewhat ritualistic formula where the voices of leaders and dignitaries tend to figure more prominently than the voices of the crowd. However, the people’s tribunal in Singur appeared quite interactive. Many locals took the microphone and narrated their stories of suffering and loss while the tribunal judges noted their testimony. In its verdict the tribunal declared that the land acquisition process was illegal and demanded a stop to any further steps taken in that direction. IMSE has followed a similar format when organising their International People’s Tribunal. Here too the purpose has been to gather evidence in the presence of six presiding judges (retired High Court or Supreme Court judges) and subsequently a report on the hearing was published (IMSE 2007). Representatives from the government and corporate houses were also invited but did not show up. The voices of the peasants are well-represented in the IMSE report and individual statements and grievances are contextualised using much more universalistic concepts such as the right to food, right to livelihood, resistance to neoliberal globalisation, etc. Thus, both NAPM and IMSE have used what can be termed as a quasi-legal setup (using the court room format with activist judges and testimony from witnesses) in order to challenge the government’s acquisition plans in Singur. By relying on this powerful vocabulary, and by conducting their courts and tribunals in the name of The People, they have delivered an indictment against an unresponsive state. In the process many Singur peasants have become more familiar with the language of citizenship and the institutional forms of legal justice. Yet although these tribunals strive to give the appearance of being quasilegal and hence binding on the government, they remain ‘Tribunals of Conscience’ (IMSE 2007, 1) intended to shame or embarrass the government into action. Thus the government has easily been able to ignore the ensuing indictments and has in fact continued to its original acquisition plans. And in December 2006, it went ahead and fenced and walled the 997.11 acres of factory space in Singur, placing it under heavy police protection. It also imposed section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, banning public gatherings of more than five people in order to keep the area calm. From then on, the peasants have largely shifted their struggle from the streets to the courtroom. Here they have relied heavily on indirect access to the High Court facilitated by their allies, mainly petitions filed by organisations like APDR, FIAN, and the All India Legal Aid Services Forum. Tellingly, the majority of the petitions the peasants filed on their own were eventually dismissed by the Court. All eleven petitions were grouped together by the High Court and tried in a single hearing that took place in July and August 2007.30 The final part of this 30 According to one informant from FIAN many peasants went to attend but found it difficult to follow the proceedings conducted in English.

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chapter looks at the peasants’ struggle to get their case to court and analyses how they and their allies have challenged the land acquisition process. Accessing Justice or Merely Going to Court? As land acquisition in West Bengal must be carried out in accordance with the directives laid down in the Land Acquisition Act (1894), it is instructive to present a brief overview of its contents here.31 The Act – essentially a colonial measure intended for use when acquiring land mainly for roads and railways – empowers the state government, upon proper preliminary notification, to acquire land in any locality where such land is likely to be needed for any public purpose or for a ‘company’ (Land Acquisition Act 1894, 4,(1)). While land may be acquired for government companies with some restrictions, the acquisition of land for a private company is very restricted. Those affected by state attempts to acquire land have the right to object to the District Magistrate (or Collector) who in turn will forward his recommendations to the government (Land Acquisition Act 1894, 5A). Once a final decision is taken by the government, the District Magistrate initiates the process of marking out and measuring the land, and announces that claims for compensation may be made to him (Land Acquisition Act 1894, 8–9). Section 23 of the Act specifies that the market-value of the land at the time of the publication of the notification for acquisition shall be taken into account when compensation is paid. But in the following section, the Act stipulates that any increase in the value of the land (likely to occur after acquisition) shall not have any bearing on the size of the compensation. Further, the Act also provides that the size of the compensation will not be affected by reluctance on the part of the owners to part with their land. While those affected hence cannot in reality challenge the acquisition, they can nonetheless challenge inter alia the measurement of their land and the amount of compensation awarded in court (Land Acquisition Act 1894, 18–28A). They can also refuse to accept the compensation altogether in which case it will be deposited with the court. The intervention of the state in Singur has meant that land acquisition has taken place outside the market, where the property rights of farmers are limited by the Act described above. Indeed, the space for exercising strategic economic agency that supposedly derives from formalising property rights was thus conveniently unavailable to the poor. And while peasants were assured of some compensation 31 I here rely on Sarkar’s (2007) edited version of the act. Since independence there had existed another state act entitled West Bengal Land (Requisition and Acquisition) Act, 1948. This act is considered more powerful than the 1894 act because the government can use it to acquire land without advance payment of compensation. Because the act was considered to be potentially very coercive it was stipulated that it had to be renewed by the state assembly every five years. Since 31 March 1993 this act is no more applicable in West Bengal (Guha 2007).

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for their loss, they could not legally refuse to sell, nor could they strategically hold out for a better deal from the Tatas.32 The compensation that the farmers were entitled to included – in addition to the estimated market value – a 30 per cent solatium (i.e. compensation for injured feelings as distinct from financial loss or physical suffering), a 10 per cent incentive (offered to those who agreed not to contest the acquisition) and a 12.5 per cent interest (added to the estimated market value of the land as a one-time amount). In concrete terms, the compensation for one acre of land in Singur was fixed at 840,000 Rupees for mono-crop land and one million and two hundred thousand Rupees for multi-crop land. Registered bargadars were offered 25 per cent of the compensation due to land owners while unregistered bargadars (several hundred) together with landless agricultural labourers and seasonal migrants (several thousand) were not offered any compensation. Thus, it was the rural poor – those who had no legal ownership of land – who were most severely affected by the land acquisition process. And those landowners who have refused to consent to the acquisition process have as a consequence had to decline the offer of compensation. Having neither land nor money, many now live off their savings, and financial distress has so far driven a handful of peasants to commit suicide. The 1894 Act has hence been criticised on several accounts. For example, while some farmers were legally assured of some economic compensation, nowhere does the Act make any mention of rehabilitation. Other criticisms include: The responsibility of the state towards those affected by the acquisition appears to end with the payment of compensation; The Act does not provide for compensation to landless labourers, forest land users, forest produce collectors, artisans etc., because they do not have any legal rights over the land; The act recognises only individual property rights, but ignores community rights over land; When village commons are acquired, no compensation is provided (Guha 2007). To this list we can add another, mainly anthropological in nature: land in agrarian societies is not only valuable in economic terms but also in social, cultural and political ways. As the anthropologist June Nash has argued – based on a study of small plot cultivators in Mexico and Guatemala – security for most people is found in the land that provides them with the potential for the regeneration of life (Nash 2005, 182). In such settings, a policy that reduces the value of land to a onetime monetary compensation is often experienced as not just problematic but also as morally illegitimate. As the payment of compensation got underway in Singur, instances of former landowners claiming and receiving compensation for land they had sold years ago began to surface. Many peasants are not familiar with the proper process required for a land transaction officially registered with the authorities. Hence there are 32  Paradoxically, those peasants who stand to benefit the most from the car factory project are thus not those who have had their land acquired, but those who own plots just outside the factory. As investors speculate that a slew companies will be eager to establish themselves near the car factory, land prices in the adjacent area have shot up recently.

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several instances where former landowners remain ‘official’ landowners in spite of their land having been sold on one or more occasions. A number of such people have used this discrepancy between a legal title and actual possession to stake an illegitimate claim to compensation, in some cases in collaboration with local officials. But also peasants with legal title to their land have been the target of fraud. One unwilling peasant, a Mr. Das whose compensation of 150,000 rupees has been paid to the former owner of his land, has for more than a year tried to have that payment annulled, but so far to no avail. At a meeting at the local Block Development Office (BDO), Mr. Das produced more than 20 pages of documents proving him to be the legal owner of the plot in question. To his surprise Mr. Das found that his opponent in this case had a matching set of documents, apparently forged, proving that he, and not Mr. Das, was the rightful owner. The BDO has so far not interfered in the matter and Mr. Das is now contemplating if it will be worth his while (and money) taking the matter to court. For Mr. Das having a legal title to his land has thus far not proven particularly useful. When challenging any acquisition process, one of the first hurdles the peasants have to overcome is proving that they exist at all in formal documents. From the outset, the Government of West Bengal had repeatedly denied that there was any significant local opposition to the car factory in Singur. To bolster this claim the government compiled and published, in December 2006, a status report on Singur according to which only owners of a mere total of 40 acres of land were withholding their consent, whereas 958 acres had been willingly relinquished by peasants (Government of West Bengal 2006, 4). These claims confused many local peasants who had a clear feeling, based on their conversations with friends and neighbours and the turnout at SKJRC-sponsored rallies, that the number of unwilling farmers was much higher than the government was willing to recognise. A group of industrious villagers therefore decided to compile lists of unwilling farmers, including their addresses, and the amount of affected land which they had not consented to hand over, complete with the official dag (field index) and khatian (registry) numbers of the plots. The villagers then formed small teams which went from door to door in the five mouzas33 affected by the acquisition to collect the necessary data. Each unwilling farmer was asked to sign a piece of paper with his data as testimony. In this task, the peasants received assistance from outside activists and from the Mazdoor Kranti Parishad (Workers’ Revolutionary Council), a minor political organisation with Leftist sympathies. When the villagers, after weeks of hard work, had completed their task of gathering information from 780 unwilling peasants, they were told that a sworn testimony or affidavit to be used in court would not be considered legally valid if made on the kind of plain white paper that they had used. A lawyer affiliated with a Kolkata NGO therefore visited Singur and explained the proper procedure required – including use of revenue stamp papers – for recording such information. However, such stamp paper, which usually costs Rs. 10 for a single sheet, was not 33  A ‘mouza’ is a small revenue unit.

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readily available. Finally, the leadership of the SKJRC intervened and was able to provide a sufficient number, although several peasants had to rely on a local middleman who charged between Rs. 20 and 50 per page. Before the peasants set about transcribing the information on the white papers onto the stamp paper, they had to correct their data material. Since the initial round of data collection, some peasants had already surrendered their land to the government. Other peasants had, when first asked about how much land they had refused to hand over to the government, answered on behalf of their extended families, i.e. on behalf of brothers or cousins living elsewhere, who they assumed had not given their land. In some instances their assumption turned out not to be false. While the peasants eventually succeeded in producing a legally valid document (SKJRC 2007) that disproved the government’s figure by listing the owners of 337.97 acres of land who had not given their consent to the acquisition, the entire process demonstrates how the poor are disadvantaged when confronting a hostile government. And the peasants of Singur could only manage to challenge the might of the government by engaging in a cumbersome process of producing legally valid data, a process with which they were only superficially familiar. Whereas the peasants were instrumental in proving that there was indeed local opposition to the land acquisition, debates on how best to legally challenge the process has taken place largely in the media, in scholarly articles and in public debates among activists. In doing so, the participants have displayed a considerable amount of legal creativity, using the contradictions between multiple rights and the inconsistencies between different laws to chart out various routes to have the land acquisition process reversed. To this end, FIAN very early on filed a series of petitions to gain insight into the details of the deal between the Government of West Bengal and Tata Motors which for a long time had remained undisclosed. In more than 70 per cent of the cases, the responsible ministers responded with either ‘cannot say’ or ‘it is a trade secret’. As FIAN saw this as tantamount to a lack of transparency in governance, they filed a case against the government for violating the Right to Information Act of 2005. FIAN thereby hoped not only to gain insight into hitherto classified information, but also to have the whole acquisition process declared illegal. While they succeeded in their first endeavour, they failed in the second. However, as the government was forced to reveal what it had hoped to keep as its ‘trade secret’, it became evident that the deal with Tata Motors included significant incentives, cheap loans, tax exemptions, and a lucrative land lease (Mitra 2007; Ghosh 2007; Bidwai 2008, 117). Given this information many activists have questioned the extent to which a project that dispossesses thousands of peasants, while apparently also draining the state coffers of considerable resources, could rightly be serving a ‘public purpose’ as required by law. Other activists have framed this as a violation of the Prevention of Corruption Act, arguing that if land acquisition deprives poor people of their livelihood without rehabilitation and in exchange for only inadequate compensation – and the land is subsequently handed over with considerable state subsidies to a private actor – this could be considered an act of corruption. Still others have questioned whether the 10 per cent incentive

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offered to peasants willing to waive their legal right to challenge the acquisition in court was not tantamount to offering the peasants a bribe. Other charges raised against the government, either in court or in the media, have invoked provisions in the Indian Constitution, the country’s international obligations, and the language of rights and citizenship. These charges include inter alia that: Dispossessing poor people of their livelihood violates the human right to food and the fundamental rights of Indian citizens; in bypassing the local Panchayats in Singur, the government has violated the 73rd Constitutional amendment on local governance; and no environmental impact assessment was done in advance as required by law, which makes the entire process illegal. While activists and others have displayed considerable legal creativity in challenging the applicability of the 1894 Land Acquisition Act and the entire acquisition process using other laws and conventions, two specific provisions of the Act have emerged as key points of legal controversy: the notion of ‘private company’, and the notion of ‘public purpose’. At the outset, the expropriation and subsequent lease of land to Tata Motors appears to be a case of land acquisition for a private company. Had this been the case, it would clearly have violated the stringent criteria that the Act places on acquisition for private companies. However, as the Development Corporation (WBIDC) – the official government agency involved in the negotiations with Tata Motors – had acted as an intermediary in the acquisition, it appears that they rather than Tata Motors are bound by the framework of the 1894 Act. As a public company, the WBIDC is not bound by the same strict rules that would have applied had Tata Motors been the acquiring agency. Yet there is one caveat, namely the Act provides that at the time of the acquisition, its purpose must be made public. And if such purpose was framed as ‘acquisition of land for the purpose of setting up of industry by a private company’, it would have conceivably been a violation of the 1894 Act. While I am not familiar with the exact wording of the initial notification, the Court in its verdict found the notification valid (Calcutta High Court 2008, 12). Thus, while many activists have seen the acquisition by the WBIDC on behalf of Tata Motors as a violation of the spirit of the law, the WBIDC strictly speaking did not violate the letter of the law. The notion of ‘public purpose’ has been rather more at the forefront of legal debates on Singur as well as in court proceedings. The 1894 Act lays down rather clear guidelines for determining what constitutes a public purpose, although the guidelines do not exhaust all possible alternatives. Asked whether a car factory could conceivably be seen as a public purpose the West Bengal Minister of Industries replied: ‘Of course it is a public purpose, industrialisation means employment generation, it means development of society. The entire people of the state will be benefited (Nirupam Sen in Chattopadhyay 2006b). One might conceivably have expected from the minister some reflections on the question of ‘employment generation or development benefits for whom? How exactly would low-skilled and poorly educated and dispossessed peasants or evicted sharecroppers be enabled to share in the benefits of industrialisation,

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and not simply end up as ‘collateral damage of development’ (Bandyopadhyay 2006)? In contrast to the erstwhile land reforms of the 1960s and 1970s – which operated with a clear analytical understanding of the relationship between the transfer of (quasi)property rights, the importance of security of tenure, and propoor development – detailed considerations on the latter seem to be absent in the present policy of land acquisition for industrialisation. There is no doubt a political belief that a stimulated economy will have sufficient trickle-down capability to ensure that economic growth does not bypass the poor altogether. However, since this new paradigm of development relies heavily on subsidised private industrial capital and the waiver of certain rights of taxation, it is less clear how governments can exercise their political clout in making employment generation and development pro-poor in nature. The legal team representing the Government of West Bengal in court has argued along similar lines when defending the government’s position on the public purpose of the car factory. When the Court delivered its verdict in January 2008, it accepted the government’s trickle-down conception of economic growth and development as valid. Presenting its 217-page judgement, the Court firstly dismissed more than half of the eleven petitions as not maintainable. Treating the remaining petitions as ‘almost identical’ (Calcutta High Court 2008, 9), the Court subsequently asserted that the acquisition of land by the state government was legal insofar as it was carried out for the public purpose of employment generation and socio-economic development of the region, and not in the interest of conferring special benefits on any private company (Chattopadhyay 2008, 49). Here, the Court’s ruling effectively echoes the government’s use of a discourse that Reddy and Reddy (2007, 3239) have described as ‘ever widening definitions of what a development activity is’, a discourse that appears to devote little attention to the actual impact of development on the poor and the marginalised. The Singur case is now being appealed in the Supreme Court. And since the apex court had earlier delivered a verdict in favour of unwilling farmers in Punjab in a comparable case (Ray Choudhury 2008), the peasants of Singur continue to entertain some hope of having the earlier court verdict overturned.34 However, as long as the Supreme Court uses up precious time in considering the case and delivering its judgement, it is highly likely that the situation in Singur will become increasingly desperate for many of the sharecroppers and the landless labourers who already now have to travel great distances to find work, and who are chronically underemployed. It is also a very real possibility that more peasants will 34 The verdict in the case of the Punjab was delivered after the hearing on Singur had been completed. However, a barrister appearing for the farmers requested and was granted an additional day’s hearing in the wake of the Punjab verdict which, he argued, had great relevance for the Singur case. Thus, the Calcutta High Court had already taken account of the verdict from the court in Punjab and found that the two cases were not comparable (Calcutta High Court 2008, 13–14). However, other legal commentators dispute the Calcutta High Court’s decision and are of the opinion that the two cases are in fact comparable.

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give up the fight and claim the compensation as soon as they no longer can depend on savings or relief from non-state actors. Moreover, as the Calcutta High Court has not ordered a stay on construction of the car factory, most of the acquired land is already being used as roads or construction sites, and it will take considerable time and effort to bring these areas under cultivation again. Conclusion According to the conceptual framework discussed in the beginning of this chapter, the peasants of Singur have done most things right. They have mobilised from below and have enlisted the state’s most powerful opposition politicians to pursue their essentially particularistic agenda of ridding Singur of the car factory; the Singur case has attracted considerable and favourable media attention; peasants have linked up with important actors in civil society who have formulated the local struggle in grand narratives of human rights and citizenship; and the poor have engaged constructively in the legal process, having placed their faith in the impartiality of the judicial system. Does that mean that in spite of having done everything right the peasants are likely to fail in the end? If one looks at the particular goal of blocking the construction of the car factory as an isolated goal, the answer is yes. To achieve this immediate goal a politics of violence and rebellion such as that witnessed in the villages of Nandigram (also in West Bengal state) in 2007 would possibly have proven more effective. Here, the government had planned to expropriate 10,000 acres of land for a Special Economic Zone and chemical hub to be developed by the Indonesia-based Salim group. When villagers learned about the plan they decided to oppose it in a form that took a violent turn. And in March 2007, an extremely violent clash pitting peasants against the police and cadres from the ruling CPM party took place in which 14 peasants lost their lives and many more were injured or raped. Since then thousands of peasants have been living in fear of retaliation from the state administration and CPM cadres. Subsequently, Nandigram was ‘recaptured’ by the government in November 2007 and the rebellious peasants ‘paid back in their own coin’, as the chief minister chose to phrase it. But the violence and rebellion paid off as the SEZ and chemical hub project will now be relocated, albeit not scrapped. The government has also now announced a massive development package for Nandigram, and has embarked upon a renewed programme of land redistribution to landless and marginal peasants. Recent cases of widespread rioting by poor peasants who have targeted corrupt rural ration-shop owners in rural West Bengal also point in a similar direction. In many places ration shops have been looted, and locals have demanded large amounts in compensation from shop owners for years of corruption and fraud. Both examples indicate that often the peasants and the poor are most successful in making the state respond to their needs and aspirations when they riot as a mob, rather than attempting to protest as law-abiding citizens. And in such successful cases it has neither been enlightened dialogue nor embarrassment, but fear that has evoked a response from the government. This suggests that as while the poor engage

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in the process of becoming full citizens, it might be to their own disadvantage were they to abandon their less-than-civil and oftentimes violent confrontational political forms. Nonetheless, if one were to look at legal empowerment as a transformative process with a long-term agenda reaching beyond the achievement of particular goals in the immediate future, the Singur peasants have indeed achieved remarkable results in terms of both policy and collective capacity. By virtue of their own mobilisation, they have become familiar with notions of citizenship and constitutional rights, and are more comfortable than before with the idioms of such language. Their collaborative engagement with urban groups and organisations have also given them insights into organisational methodology and have embedded them in socio-political networks than can be activated again in the future. The peasants now also have many contacts in the news media and know that challenging the state on particular issues of policy is not only a matter of politics and organisation, but that it is also a public relations exercise. As regards policy issues and state practice it can plausibly be argued that the peasant struggle in Singur has been important in bringing about a review of the law on SEZ, as well as major revisions in the laws governing land acquisition in India. The new law, being formulated by the central government in Delhi, will lay down stricter limitations to the power of state governments to acquire land from unwilling landowners using force; it will also specify guidelines for rehabilitation, including land-for-land rehabilitation; and it provides scope for part of the compensation to be made payable in shares in the company operating on the land. More recently, the Government of West Bengal has also announced a decision to refrain from setting up industries in densely populated and agriculturally rich districts in the future. Moreover, the newly presented state budget for the fiscal year (2008–2009) also includes a special fund of rupees 100 crore set aside for land losers. Many peasants, in the midst of their frustration at having lost their land, take pride in having inspired others, and in having effected changes in government policy and practice. The failures and the successes of the peasant struggle in Singur are the outcome of processes that are inherently political and have conflict and mobilisation as their driving forces. They also show the deeply ambiguous experience the peasants have had while engaging in these processes. Thus, while the language and concept of legal empowerment can indeed be powerful tools for the poor, the politics of struggle and mobilisation from below remains an essential component in any meaningful process of empowerment. References Alam, J. (2002), ‘Communist Politics in Search of Hegemony’, in Z. Hasan (ed.), Parties and Party Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Assayag, J. (2005), ‘Seeds of Wrath: Agriculture, Biotechnology and Globalization’, in J. Assayag and C.J. Fuller (eds), Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below (London: Anthem Press).

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