Communists’ Land Plan Could Backfire in India

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

May 3, 2009

NANDIGRAM, India — Promising land to the landless, the Communists won Abdul Bakir Shah’s heart decades ago. Under an ambitious land reform drive, Mr. Shah, a sharecropper all his life, got title to nearly one fertile acre. His village and others like it have voted Communist since, keeping the party in power for an uninterrupted 32 years here in West Bengal State.

But things went topsy-turvy two years ago. As Bengal belatedly joined India’s slow but inexorable march to capitalism, the Communist-run state government sought to scoop up this entire cluster of mud-and-thatch hamlets to make way for the construction of a multinational chemical industrial complex. The Communists, under whose leadership factory after factory had been shuttered across this state, said it was time to bring private industry and jobs back to Bengal.

“Reform or perish,” became their rallying cry.

That is when the Communists lost Mr. Shah’s trust.

“We don’t have any faith in them anymore,” he said.

Now, in the parliamentary elections under way, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) faces one of the toughest political fights of its long history. It is a party divided between the pull of industrial capitalism — not unlike in China — and its tradition of championing the rural poor. That struggle reflects much of the conflict that has bedeviled India in recent years, and bitter discord over land acquisition has broken out in many parts of the country.

How the Communists perform here in their stronghold of West Bengal will, to a large extent, determine how much influence they have over the next government of India, and by extension, over the nation’s economic and foreign policy.

Even though the Communists here are unabashedly capitalist, at the level of the central government they hew to more traditional ideology, blocking a slew of economic reforms and raising a ruckus over India’s deepening friendship with the United States.

In the past five years, controlling one in 10 seats in India’s 543-member Parliament, they have been particularly influential. This time, they may not be, having been made vulnerable by the turn away from their old core principles. The fight for the hearts of men like Mr. Shah is at the heart of their challenge.

“Our basic constituency is the rural poor,” insisted Mohammad Salim, a veteran member of Parliament in the party. “Their thought processes were hijacked by a powerful coterie, by big noise.”

Much of that “big noise” has come, on the one side, from the feisty political opposition leader, Mamata Banerjee, who has usurped the Communist Party rhetoric and cast herself as the savior of the rural poor.

On the other side, Maoist guerrillas have begun gaining ground, particularly among indigenous people in remote, destitute corners of the state. The other day, wielding bows and arrows, hundreds of them blocked traffic in the center of the state capital, Calcutta.

As Bengal’s voters went to the polls on Thursday, suspected Maoists planted bombs, ambushed a car, killing three election workers and imposed a fairly successful boycott call in pockets of the state.

Acquiring the land of folks who know no other life is difficult any way. But here in Bengal, the fury is even greater than elsewhere. The land is fertile and exceptionally crowded — with an average of 904 people in each square kilometer — and, as Mr. Salim acknowledged, all the more coveted by those who were landless for so long.

Ms. Banerjee has seized on that anxiety, and has succeeded in blocking several industrial projects that the Communists sought.

A factory to build the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, was forced to move out of the state. Plans for a nuclear power plant have been scrapped. The same has happened to the would-be chemical plant, which the state proposed relocating near the Sunderbans delta; that, too, has faced protests. A steel plant farther east is a target of Maoist attacks.

Ms. Banerjee, for her part, once aligned with the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, has turned herself into a friend of the have-nots. “You used to say, ‘Long live Karl Marx,’ ” she said of the Communists while on the campaign stump the other day. “Now you say, ‘Long live Tata, Karl Marx, you go.’ ”

She promises reopening factories shuttered under the Communists. She pledges more money for those who lose land. She accuses the Communists of intimidating voters. Ms. Banerjee is often seen on television scuffling with the police at street protests.

“Today they will take your vote, tomorrow they will take your land, the third day they will ask for your daughter, your son,” she warned darkly. “This fight is for your survival.”

Her critics call her an opportunist. A Communist Party campaign billboard, in the center of Calcutta, shows a young man with a briefcase and his head hung low, and a slogan that blames Ms. Banerjee for driving jobs out of the state.

Another, a cartoon, shows a portly Ms. Banerjee, holding a begging bowl and placards that read: “No Industry,” “No Progress,” “No Roads.”

Each party accuses the other’s cadres of murder and mayhem. Their campaign posters contain graphic images of maimed, charred bodies.

Part of the problem is that Bengal, after more than 30 years of leftist leadership, remains among the country’s most destitute and dysfunctional states. It has one of the highest school drop-out rates. Nearly half the poor do not have access to public food subsidies, as they are supposed to. Land reform slowed to a crawl in the last decade.

In Nandigram, discontent had piled up against the government. It exploded over its bid for the land. In the spring of 2007, at the height of the troubles, at least 14 people died in clashes between Communist Party supporters and opponents.

A year later, Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party swept the local village council elections for the first time in more than three decades. So tense does it remain that in one hamlet, a conversation with visiting journalists nearly brought supporters of the two rival parties to blows.

The people of Mr. Shah’s hamlet were all once Communists. Now, the few Communist holdouts cluster together on one side of the main road. They say they are forbidden from the tea shop on the main road. They are afraid to vote. They seethe at Ms. Banerjee for having driven a potential factory from their area.

“She just wants the poor to stay poor,” said Zahidul Mullick, who guessed his age to be around 18. He said he dropped out of school after the fifth grade and worked as a tailor, as most of the men in the hamlet do.

“Look, we are not educated,” said Halima Begum, 22, balancing a baby on her hips. “We couldn’t work in the factory. But we could clean the houses of the people who come to work there.”

Across the street, Mr. Shah said he was immediately suspicious of the proposed chemical complex. He was terrified of being displaced. For the first time in more than 30 years, he and his neighbors turned against the Communists.

“They thought the party was so strong we would do whatever they say,” said one of his neighbors, Atibul Shah, 22.

His family, he said, had voted Communist for three generations. This time, he had ridden the train for two days from Mumbai, where he works in a garment factory, for the chance to vote the Communists out.