Documentary : Abad-Bhumi or Right To Land on Singur About the Film Abad-Bhumi is an attempt to explore the high-handedness of the state

on one hand and peoples resistance on the other. Shot over a long period of time the film takes us into an Orwellian world of doublespeak of Left credentials. After peering into the abyss of future we had 1984. But this time Future seems to be too ominous to take us anywhere. The doublespeak has revisited again. This time it is Singur. It was a major sphere of the Tebhaga movement. Now Tehbhaga has become an arena of Singur. Yei shamhalo dhan ho was not just an aesthetic outcry of Tehbhaga Movement. It had prognosticated Singur. Salil Choudhuri's immortal song on the Tebhaga movement is echoing in the lush paddy fields of Singur. Almost every farmer family in Singur is saying, 'We'll give blood but not our land.' The land that gives them the golden harvest is their mother. The narrative of the film touches a chord and shot on specific factual details. Singur has become the name of a new peasant struggle, a name that has created ripples in the stagnant political waters of West Bengal.

Singur under siege Singur has turned into a battlefront since November 7. Battalion after armed police battalion and the RAF are pouring in from the districts and setting up a camp at the Bajemelia Hospital ground. Two other camps are being set up at Bajemelia and Khaser Bheri. Plainclothes police informers are openly moving around in the villages gathering information about resistance plans. Policepersons, rifles in hand, are posted in the village squares and the markets to keep watch on the villagers' movements. Village life has been disrupted as women are unable to bathe in the ponds, children frightened of playing in the open and men fearing to venture out alone or after dark. The presence of such a huge police force in the otherwise peaceful villages has raised the heat in Singur. An atmosphere of terror prevails. CPI(M) 'cadres' are also being mobilised from across Hooghly district for the 'final' assault. Ordinary villagers who are unwilling to give away their lands and activists are being harassed, beaten up and threatened with dire consequences. On the hand, CPM leaders are renting the air with fiery speeches against the countrywide acquisition of agricultural land for SEZs and industrial projects. The government is clearly heading for a showdown with the farmers. Section 144 has already been imposed restricting all kinds of freedom. Police contingent is heavily deployed to prevent the villagers from coming out and to welcome TATA officials. The camps set up by the agitating farmers and political groups to keep vigil are demolished and all roads and railway stations are sealed to stop the activists and sympathisers from entering the villages. 'Industrial resurgence' is being ushered in the so-called 'red bastion' with brute force. On their first visit on May 25, TATA officials had to face a demonstration by a huge crowd of farmers. Men, women and children blocked their convoy and the officials had to be rescued by the police. So, to show the Tatas how welcoming the farmers are, the roads through the villages to the project site is encircled with rifle-wielding forces and the villagers stopped from venturing out in their own villages. The government, pathologically obsessed with 'industrialisation' is indulging in provocative action and the police deployment will be intensified even more in the coming days. The entire project site is sealed with barbed wire. The land-losing farmers are obviously resisting such a move and now bloodletting seems to be inevitable. An intransigent government is pushing West Bengal towards a violent civil strife.

Struggle everywhere Meanwhile, farmers' movements are building up wherever the state government is acquiring farmland for the so-called industrial projects: A Krishijami Raksha Committee has been formed in Kharagpur, West Medinipur district, where vast tracts of multi-crop farmland is being taken over for the Tata's construction vehicle factory. Interestingly, the movement is being led by the local CPI(M) activists. In Nandigram, East Medinipur district, CPI's Krishak Sabha has launched a strong farmers' movement against land-grabbing for the proposed 10,000-acre chemical industrial hub to be set up by the Salem group. Several political parties and groups have come together to launch an extensive movement against farmland acquisition in north Bengal for the proposed Videocon SEZ and other real estate projects. The Left Front partners CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc are getting increasingly vocal in opposing the government's land acquisition policy which is pandering to the interests of corporate capitalists. They have warned the government of facing the wrath of the people if Singur farmland is forcibly taken away from the farmers. Strong sections within the government and the ruling party have also opposed the government on the Singur issue. The Karmachari Samiti of the government's Land and Land Revenue department has supported the Singur farmers. The mouthpiece of the state government employees union has carried very strong words against forcible land acquisition in Singur and elsewhere. The district conference of CITU's North 24-Parganas district has passed a resolution opposing forcible occupation of farmland. A clear polarisation is taking place between the CPI(M)'s ruling clique and the people of West Bengal, whatever political configuration they are mobilised under. The five villages on whose farmland the Tata factory will be built are Gopalnagar, Beraberi, Bajemelia, Khaser Bheri and Singher Bheri. These are typical Bengal villages, tranquil, charming and green. The residents are mostly farmers, yet a touch of the urban breeze is palpable. Most of the houses, lining the winding, unpaved village road, are pucca, every home has electricity and television, quite a few of the village youth ride motorbikes, the children go to school and some have achieved higher education. The major reason for this is that Singur's land, coated with silt from the Hooghly and Damodar rivers and their tributaries, is extremely fertile. To say that it is single-crop is to blatantly distort the truth. What doesn't grow here paddy, jute, potato, cauliflower, pumpkin, brinjal, cucumber, so many types of greens and vegetables! About six to 12 crops grow on Singur's highly productive fields. Paddy and potatoes grown here are the finest. There are five cold storages, five deep and 27 mini tubewells in the locality, a clear indication that the land is well irrigated. No wonder, the areas of darkness, like Amlasole and Belpahari, where starvation deaths are common, have been far from casting their long shadows over the villagers of Singur. It is around land that Singur's economy revolves. Not only the landowners, a sizeable population of bargadars, wage-labourers and sharecroppers mostly belonging to the lower castes or the adivasi community depend on the land for their livelihood. Besides, there is the migrant agricultural work force coming from Burdwan and other parts of Hooghly districts during the peak harvest period. There are also land-related occupations that help feed several families. For instance, the cycle-cart (called 'van') driver who carries the land's produce to the cold storage or the wholesaler, the vendor

who sells rice or vegetables in the market, the supplier dealing with seeds and fertilisers, the carpenter and the blacksmith who make or repair farming tools, so on. On any given day, about a thousand people detrain at Kamarkundu junction to work in Singur on jobs directly or indirectly related to farming. The markets at Beraberi and Bajemelia thrive almost entirely on Singur's farming community. Whatever the trade-off between the Tatas and the Left Front government in West Bengal, it is shrouded in secrecy, in spite of the RTI. Apparently, the smaller Front partners and even some of the cabinet ministers have been kept in the dark. A local television channel has revealed that a considerable Rs 140 crores will go out of the state exchequer to buy the land and pay compensations while the Tatas will be gifted that land in lieu of a cheque for Rs 20 crores, that too five years later. The industry house will be spared the ignominy of purchasing the stamp duty; and when the factory is under construction or in operation, it will be provided water free from the burden of taxation even as the power rates will be slashed to what the domestic consumer pays with great difficulty. Needless to add, like many other big real estate and industrial projects coming up in the state, no EIA has been carried out. Orissa and Jharkhand, where the Tatas have invested in steel plants, mines, aquaculture and an assortment of projects in the past seven decades, are the poorest states in the country. Industrial and other ventures by the Tatas have not changed the lives of the ordinary folk in these places. On the contrary, a terrible curse had befallen on the forest-dwelling and pastoral communities wherever the Tatas went. It may be recalled that the Kalingnagar incident earlier this year, in which 13 adivasi men, women and children lost their lives in police firing, took place when the farmers displaced by the Tata steel-plant project were agitating against the non-payment of compensation. The argument put forward by the minister of industries that the Tata motorcar factory will create vast employment opportunities is unadulterated nonsense. In the wake of rising public opinion against the displacement of farmers from their land, both Tata Motors and the government, backed by party luminaries, went into a public relations exercise. Both, citing the examples of its Pune automobile hub and the Jamshedpur steel town, harked back to the Tatas' noble tradition of 'social welfare and community development.' Reality check, however, may not corroborate. Any sensitive soul visiting Tatanagar may well perceive that the beneficiaries of 'social welfare and community development' have been the Tata managerial class living in luxuriant style whereas the original inhabitants have not even received the crumbs but pushed to the margins. Well, the Tatas deservedly have the right to blow their own trumpet because it is their business to blow their own trumpet but how could a Left government and the Left leaders go into raptures over the big, bad capitalist who till the other day was their sworn enemy? Expediency does make strange bedfellows. Since announcing its New Industrial Policy in 1994, the Sangramer Hatiyar (Weapon of struggle) government in West Bengal, backed by the party in power, has been treading the neo-liberal path with great gusto. As the Left leaders elsewhere in the country were fuming against the globalising policies of successive central governments, their counterparts in the state, with full blessings of these same

central leaders, were increasingly taking a pro-globalisation, pro-capitalist stance, albeit in a guarded manner. The Singur farmers' stiff opposition to the Tata project has struck alarm bells. The government's nervousness, its discomfort with the rising popular support for the movement is becoming more and more conspicuous. In the dead of night on 25-26 September, in a pre-planned move, it let loose a reign of terror on thousands of unarmed demonstrators at the BDO office in Singur town. It was the first day cheques were being handed over to those who had agreed to part with their lands and the demonstration against this had begun in the morning. By the afternoon, several cases were detected in which those who had already sold off their land to others, but the mutation process was not complete, were being given cheques, denying the present legal owner. Protesting such illegal deeds by government officials, the demonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, even gheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period. The opposition parties and the Naxalite groups have called for statewide bandh on several occasions to protest the police atrocities The party in government threatened to give a free rein to its cadres on the streets to foil the strike, making people even more stay indoors, fearing violence. The government now taken the 'terror' path to intimidate the protesting farmers. Contingents of rifle-carrying policemen have been posted in every nook and corner of the otherwise quiet and peaceful villages. Any outsider dropping in are 'suspected of being Maoists' and are interrogated. The police are occupying the tea-stalls in the markets where now no one dares to visit, resulting in loss of business for the poor tea-stall owners. They are also camping in the school building that they have turned into a drinking den. Sanity in the line of reasoning seems to have melted into thin air in a resurgent West Bengal. The Singur struggle is a do-or-die resistance movement by the farmers against attempts by monopoly industrial capitalism to establish its hegemony. Everyone in the villages has come together to fight the looming threat to their lives and livelihoods. With loss of land and age-old occupation, thousands of farmers will be reduced to begging in the streets. If the Singur movement gains steam, the farmers elsewhere will be stirred into resisting the neo-liberal aggression. If Singur fizzles out, West Bengal's agriculture and the farming community will head for oblivion. In this sense, the Singur struggle is also crucial for the farmers' fury raging across the country. Sumit Chowdhury is a documentary filmmaker and social activist. He is the editor of Ekhon Sanhati.