Brand Bengal that Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacherjee had so meticulously built over the last few years, is currently in a state of severe conflict with ‘Battlefield Bengal.’ While the brand itself is bruising heavily, Bhattacherjee and his party have, for the first time in 30 years, been caught in a Catch 22 situation.
Hardly had the guns in Nandigram fallen silent after six days of mayhem, drawing curtains on the 11-month-old anarchy, when the city of Kolkata was left bleeding, having exploded in mindless violence.
Ironically, if Nandigram was an issue agitating the minds of many, far and wide, Wednesday’s violence was totally unexpected. A city fabled for its peace and communal harmony, suddenly turned into a veritable ‘war zone.’
While the Buddhadev baiters might say the Marxist leadership is under tremendous pressure nationwide, in the wake of the killings in Nandigram and the corollary fallout, Wednesday’s utter lawlessness and orgy of violence by a section of the minority community in the heart of the metropolis clearly left even the critics speechless.
The CPM top brass, considered to be a progressive one by the state’s intelligentsia, has already buckled under the pressure of the fundamenlists forces and banished Taslima Nasreen from the borders of Bengal. This may turn out to be a bigger embarrassment to the Left Front at a time when the bruises of the bloodbath in Nandigram are yet to heal.
“A large section of the minority community had been feeling slighted owing to Nasreen’s continued stay, harassment suffered by Rizwanur Rahman and the murder, rape and violence against minorities in Nandigram. Mobsters going berserk during Wednesday’s outburst is a direct fallout of all this,” observed a senior
resident of Park Circus whose son took an active role in the pitched battle with police.
Horrific method
As for Nandigram, the first big question that went round in all sensible corners is what had prompted a well organised party like CPM to resort to this “bloody recapture” of the lost turf. There are few takers for this horrific method of recapture of a liberated region from the clutches of rebellious farmers, who were once, ironically, supporters of this Left Front and formed an integral part of its massive votebank in Nandigram. In this episode, one of the major blunders committed by the Buddhadev government was its failure to read the pulse of the masses.
Driven by a gripping fear of losing their land for the proposed SEZ and chemical hub without proper compensation and effective rehabilitation package, the farmers in the 100-odd villages spread over two blocks were compelled to forget the party hue and ideology and take shelter under the banner of the Farmland Eviction Resistance Committee (FERC). But shaken by the volley of criticism and tragic loss of lives in the March 14 police firing on villagers in Nandigram, the Left Front government finally backtracked and announced scrapping of the hub as also the SEZ.
Anxious to retain their hold, the FERC leadership prevailed upon the villagers not to believe the government’s assurance. The anti-farmland leaders argued that since a substitute site for the SEZ and the hub was not chosen, the announcement for scrapping the project was just a ploy to hoodwink the innocent villagers. The logic was instantly bought, giving a fresh lease of life to the land resistance movement.
However, more than 1,000 CPM supporters and their family members who were evicted from their homes in various parts of Nandigram in January, began exerting tremendous pressure on the party leadership to end their 11-month-long plight in refugee camps at Khejuri, a CPM stronghold.
Nandigram could be one provocation as 70 per cent of the population there is from the minority community; but it is difficult to believe that one Taslima Nasreen could estrange and alienate such a large chunk of the minority community from the CPM. It was shocking to see Muslim youths who were party’s assured votebank in the last 30 years, ransack and torch a CPM party office in Beniapukur, within walking distance from the CPM headquarters on Alimuddin Street.
Leading Left intellectuals including eminent literatteur Sunil Ganguly slammed the demand of the fundamentalists for the ouster of Taslima, saying that once the government yields to this, there won’t be any end to this and the “fatwas” would keep spiralling. A flustered Biman Bose, LF chairman, felt that Taslima ought to leave Bengal, only to retract his words later.
In Nandigram, according to one school of thought, Buddhadev Bhattacherjee had little approval for this armed aggression as it would obviously lead to bloodshed, impairing in the process the image of the state which, under his leadership, has been on the path of rapid industrialisation and he would loathe to commit a hara-kiri of this sort.
However, notwithstanding the flak, the West Bengal government’s mega projects including the Tata’s Rs 1 lakh car project at Singur are on schedule. A team of executives of the Time Warner group led by its Time Warner Group CEO Richard Parsons met Bhattacherjee early this month and expressed that the entertainment company Warner Bros is keen to set up an animation studio in Bengal.
The Marxist chief minister could again pull off a spectacular surprise in January when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected in India heading a large business delegation.
For the beleaguered Bhattacherjee, Schwarzenegger may offer some tricks of his own.
