Nandigram: The real face of Indian communism
The violent atrocities visited last month by party cadres upon the people of Nandigram district in West Bengal which has been ruled by a coalition of Left parties dominated by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) for over three decades, has exposed the real face of Indian communism and the CPM in particular. In the past four decades, during which it has risen to power in Writers Building, Kolkata and won 66 seats in the Lok Sabha in the general election of May 2004 (which has given it the power of life and death over the Congress-led UPA government in New Delhi), the CPM leadership has perfected the art of paying mealy-mouthed allegiance to democratic governance — a practised deception which has fooled a large number of people, particularly academics, across the country.The overwhelming weight of evidence currently available indicates that the violence in Nandigram, which resulted in the death of 32 villagers and the displacement of an estimated 3,500 families from their homes was retribution by the party cadres (as the state police stood idly by) for the temerity of villagers under the leadership of the opposition Trinamool Congress party successfully challenging a government order mandating forcible land acquisition to establish a SEZ (special economic zone) for industrial units in the district. The brazen attack launched by armed party cadres to "recapture" Nandigram, is clear proof that all its rhetoric about democratic debate to resolve political or socio-economic issues notwithstanding, at its core the CPM is essentially a totalitarian political party impatient with democratic processes.
More disturbingly, the open collusion between CPM cadres and the police in Nandigram has raised doubts whether the state assembly election held last year in which the Left Front alliance parties and the CPM in particular, defied traditional anti-incumbency norms to win a sweeping electoral victory, were fair and above-board. With Nandigram having conclusively proved that the state government machinery is pathetically subservient to the CPM politburo and its Red Guard party cadres, there is sufficient cause to question the legitimacy of the CPM-dominated Left Front coalition government which rules West Bengal with an iron hand.
Although it’s perhaps too late to undo last year’s electoral verdict in benighted West Bengal which following three decades of Marxist rule has become one of the country’s poorest and most backward states, the Nandigram episode and the CPM party leadership’s intemperate statements justifying murder, mayhem and worse in this Muslim majority district which has aroused the sleeping dogs of Islamic fundamentalism, should be an object lesson for the state’s intelligentsia to — in the Dengist dictum — learn the truth from facts. To a substantial degree the arrogance of power displayed by the CPM leadership and its Red Guards, is the outcome of the sympathy and ideological affinity exhibited by Indian academia and the intelligentsia towards the comrades and commissars of the communist parties whose commitment to democracy and rule of law is shallow and superficial.
Farmer suicides: Failure of academic research
The stunning revelation by the Madras Institute of Development Studies that over 150,000 farmers across the country took their own lives during the period 1997-2005 with over two-thirds of the toll recorded in the four most ‘advanced’ states of the Indian Union — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh — has seared the conscience of a nation inured to the droughts, floods, famines and the thousand unnatural shocks that Indian society is heir to. Quite clearly there is a structural fault within the rural Indian economy which fleeting prime ministerial visits from imperial New Delhi, and the dispensation of soft credit packages by patently reluctant nationalised banks is unlikely to repair.
A major share of the blame for the prolonged poverty, deprivation and despair which pervades rural India must be laid at the door of Indian academia, which given its aversion to genuine research — the prime duty of the country’s 350 universities if not of its 18,000 colleges — has failed and neglected to adequately research the deep rooted problems of India’s 140 million rural households. This is particularly strange given that village India grudgingly hosts an estimated 66 percent of the national population.
Although formal academic research has failed the nation, there’s no shortage of media analyses which have identified the fundamental problems of incrementally suicide-prone rural India. Under-investment in infrastructure has grievously impacted village economies by way of grave shortages of grain silos, cold storage chains and downstream food processing businesses, forcing the nation’s farmers to resort to year-round distress selling of their produce to middlemen, experts in the art of buying cheap and selling dear.
Perpetual indebtedness which is a defining characteristic of rural India is attenuated by the bureaucratic processes and procedures of nationalised banks unwilling to service illiterate rural customers who also tend to be burdened with faulty and incomplete land titles. Thus a fatal combination of illiteracy and local government corruption drives them into the clutches of professional moneylenders and loan sharks who tend to take full advantage of the almost complete absence of the rule of law in village India.
Yet this cursory analysis is hardly the last word in determining the root causes of rising suicides in rural India. At best it is a hypothesis and a pointer for serious academic research into this Achilles heel of the Indian economy. Why isn’t the astonishing recent prosperity of fast-track, post-liberalisation India testified by continuously rising stock exchange indices and soaring urban real estate prices, permeating into the rural hinterland? What are the public policy and structural road-blocks which are impeding natural linkages between town and country and the free flow of urban prosperity into rural India? The price being paid in terms of farmer suicides and widespread rural despair for the failure of Indian academia to clearly identify the structural fault lines of post-independence India’s national development effort, is too high and could well destabilise the country’s 60-year experiment in democratic governance.