Have We Learnt from Singur?

No one seems to be interested in the ground realities of Singur now, after a decade of the tumultuous 2006–07 in West Bengal. This kind of unconcern for the peasantry is not new among the Kolkata-based academicians and intellectuals, who represented West Bengal to India and the world since the colonial period. The Trinamool Congress government’s enthusiasm to generate capital and employment, either through legal means or by the play of market forces, seemed to be mere populist political rhetoric for contesting election battles in West Bengal.

After the Supreme Court judgment of 31 August 2016, which ordered the West Bengal government to return to the farmers in Singur the 400 acres of fertile disputed land acquired by the then Left Front (LF) government for the Tata Motors Company, there is a queer silence in the media on what is really happening on the ground. Are the farmers really cultivating on the land that was virtually transformed into non-agricultural wasteland? What happened to those farmers who were subsisting on the absentee landowners’ land within the 400 acres? What about the recorded and unrecorded sharecroppers who were cultivating two–three crops in a season in the land area supposed to be returned by the order of the apex court?

No one seems to be interested in the ground realities of Singur now, after a decade of the tumultuous 2006–07 in West Bengal. This kind of unconcern for the peasantry is not new among the Kolkata-based academicians and intellectuals who represented West Bengal to India and the world since the colonial period.