[Marxism] Communist plans can backfire in India

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, May 3, 2009
Communists’ Land Plan Could Backfire in India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

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.