More Than A Nano Storm

Skilfully exploiting the Tata-Singur fracas, Mamata Banerjee is beginning to rattle the ruling Left Front in West Bengal. Can she now inject some corporate savvy into her earthy politics to carry the day? An on-the-spot report by SHANTANU GUHA RAY

FOR HOURS on August 24, Tarit Sikdar stood under a blazing sun that made him swelter and tire. An executive with the State Bank of India, Sikdar had traveled over three hours to join the anti-Nano rally, which brought more than 800,000 to Singur, to hear Mamata Banerjee perched atop a makeshift dais overlooking Tata Motors’ Nano plant.

People’s power Mamata Banerjee is riding high on her recent success in the May Panchayat polls

Every now and then, the Trinamool leader interrupted her co-speakers with her one-liners that included warning her supporters to practice restraint and not gatecrash the plant. Sikdar, who follows politics like many in West Bengal, understood why Banerjee was super alert: this is a moment that could actually catapult her into a position of formidable opposition sorely missing in the three decades of the state’s Marxist rule.

A hundred miles away, in the air-conditioned comfort of the imposing Writers Building, the seat of the state government in Kolkata, sat Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, surrounded by half his Cabinet who constantly updated him on their rival’s movement. CPM insiders admit that hours before the start of the Singur rally, the Left Front — a bloc of 13 political parties – had no gameplan to take on the feisty leader. Political observers in the state admit that the last time the entire Left Front went in an overdrive to keep the opposition at bay (it was Mamata then, too) was over a decade ago when TMC and Left Front supporters openly clashed in the heart of the city, leaving hundreds — including Banerjee — injured in hospital.

“She is riding a tiger but then, till now, she has been riding it successfully,” says Congress politician Nirbed Roy. “She is eyeing the Writers Building and this is her biggest comeback chance. The Left Front is genuinely worried because someone else is also getting to control the crowds, and the votes.”

A former TMC leader, Roy should know. Crucial to the context is not industrialisation but the politics of power. Consider this from Banerjee at the Singur rally: “We do not want the car over the farmers’ tears.” The instant thunderous response from her supporters swung on a different agenda: Lal Bhagao, Bangla Bachchao. Who cares about Nano when the focus is on wresting power from the Left?

Expectedly, many agree that the importance of the current anti-Tata agitation lies in consolidating the TMC votebank, which swelled after party workers last year forced Indonesia’s Salim Group to abandon Nandigram and set up its chemical hub in the adjacent region of Nayachar. Last May, TMC won two Zila Parishads out of 17 and nearly bagged four more. What does it mean for those oblivious of rural power? Two Bangla TV news channels recently predicted that TMC could pick up 20 of West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats if elections are held today. But many say Banerjee needs to know where to draw the line.

“She is the Mayawati of the East, the buck stops with her,” says the state’s Urban Development Minister, Kshiti Goswami. “She should have actually entered into a negotiation with the Tatas and the state government and worked out a compensation for the farmers. That she is aiming for the rural vote bank is amply clear.”

TATA MOTORS, India’s biggest truck maker, which bought the Jaguar and Land Rover luxury units from Ford Motor Corporation for about $2.4 billion last June, is betting that its ultra-low priced Nano will entice first-time car buyers in India where more than 45 million people use motorcycles. Tata supremo Ratan Tata unveiled the car in February at an auto fair in New Delhi and said it would roll out in October this year.

No trade Trucks with perishable goods are stuck on the highway Photos: Tumpa Mondal

Auto experts say the 623-cc Nano is crucial for Tata Motors to boost sales as seven-yearhigh interest rates and the fastest inflation in more than 16 years have dampened demand for vehicles in India. Worse, Tata’s sales fell 8.9 percent in July, while car sales in India dropped 1.7 percent, the first monthly decline since November 2005. The group also has competition from Renault SA, France’s second-largest carmaker, and its affiliate Nissan Motor Co., which plan to build a $2,500 car in India with Bajaj Auto Limited as partner. The car, codenamed ULC, is expected to go on sale in 2011 to challenge Nano as the nation’s cheapest car

Tata’s trouble with the villagers started last year when the state government started acquiring the land. Of the 997 acres allocated for the project, 70 percent is already acquired. Nearly 11,000 land title-holders have had no problems with the project. Those owning around 400 acres of land are the holdouts for whom Mamata Banerjee is fighting. She has demanded land, not money, as compensation for them. The crisis is handy for Banerjee, who has been for almost a decade espousing the farmers’ cause in the state. Her critics say she only wants rural votes.

“Rubbish. Didn’t the Left seek the rural votes to cock a snook at Kolkata for decades?” asks Derek O’Brien, India’s top quizzer who is currently a key advisor to the TMC. “India needs industrialisation with a human face,” says O’Brien, arguing that his party has been consistent in its demand and not played a game of shifty politics like the Left. “They are saying sorry for the misses in the last 30 years and hyping the Nano plant as the state’s only saviour. That’s ridiculous.”

O’Brien’s arguments are perfectly in place. Insiders say he was instrumental in pushing Banerjee to publicise that the state government had not made public its memorandum of understanding with the Tatas but were clamouring to see the one the UPA Government had signed with the US for the 123 nuke deal. The media lapped it up and Bhattacharya & Co were suitably embarrassed.

BY TAKING on the Red Brigade lock, stock and barrel, Banerjee has triggered one of the biggest challenges for the ruling Left Front. To be sure, Banerjee has a big gap to cover to make a dash at power in West Bengal. In the last Assembly elections of 2006, her party crashed to just 29 seats out of 294. Five years earlier, that tally had stood at 80. Yet, such is the alarm at her revival, that Left Front Chairman Biman Bose, who is also the CPM state secretary, calls the current imbroglio in the state as “Left is Right and Right is Left”. Earlier, many could call it apocryphal but no longer. Reminded of Banerjee’s astounding victories in the panchayat elections of May, Bose simply says: “One swallow does not make a summer.

Rejecting the demand of land for land, Bose wants to take the battle back to Banerjee. “Let TMC come back to the table to ascertain the actual number of unwilling farmers. Our figures show only 167 acres belong to genuinely unwilling farmers. But TMC is demanding 400 acres. Whatever the figure, there is no point in holding talks if they continue to insist on the return of any portion of the project area. They need to talk and not create chaos.”

Adds the state’s Industry Minister, Nirupam Sen: “Disruption of work cannot continue for long. TMC has to show the people of Bengal that its agenda is better than ours. She has none.” (see interview)

But political grandstanding apart, the pressure is mounting on the Left Front, as State Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty admits. He now seeks to run down Banerjee by saying the Left Front Government had helped Indian Railways acquire 40,000 acres when Banerjee was railway minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. “It happened the same way land was acquired in Singur. Now tell me, if those who gave land then claim they were unwilling, is it possible to return that land? Once a mechanism sets in, then it is difficult to reverse the process,” Chakraborty told TEHELKA.

That the Left is worried is reflected in statements made by the party’s various leaders. After Banerjee denied that she was “anti-industry”, Chief Minister Bhattacharya told a meeting of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry on August 26 that he “hated bandhs” or shutdowns, a statement that was unthinkable by a Left leader till recently.

“These are anti-growth. Shutdowns do not help anyone. I personally do not support strikes. It is not helping us. Unfortunately, I belong to a party and when they call strikes, I keep mum. But I have finally decided that the next time I will open my mouth,” the chief minister told the interactive session.

Left crisis More than six lakh joined the TMC rally outside the plant

BUT THEN, pressures are mounting. While solving the Nano crisis remained uppermost on the minds of the mandarins of Alimuddin Street, the headquarters of the CPM, another issue worrying the state was the impact of the TMC Singur sit-in: traffic blockade on the four-lane Durgapur Expressway that allows fast communication between Kolkata and Durgapur and is the state’s busiest freight corridor. Transport Minister Chakraborty said soon, food prices may be badly hit as many of the 25,000 trucks stranded by the shutdown are carrying perishable goods and are incurring losses of Rs 2 crore a day. But Banerjee would not budge from her stand, saying it was the state government, and not her party, that was responsible for it.

TMC members strongly believe that the ruling coalition is getting desperate. “The Left is a victim of its own game plan. It came to power on a huge rural vote, telling the world that Capitalists are friends of none,” says Partha Chatterjee, a top TMC member and leader of the opposition in the state assembly. “Then, for three decades, they did nothing to further the cause of the state’s growth. Now, pushed to the wall, they have started clamouring for growth and are clinging to a single project”.

Sitting close, Banerjee merely smiles. On the face of it, she is not denying that she and her party are still weaklings in face of the massive Red power, and that she has a long way to go if she has to effectively dislodge Bhattacharya and his company from power. In the early 1980s, the Left Front unveiled agrarian reforms that helped formalise land holdings and cropping patterns and also consolidate votes in rural Bengal. Whenever the grip loosened, the prowess of the Left Front’s 1.6 million cadre ensured its brute support. But Banerjee, with victories in Nandigram and Singur, has proved even the cadres can be pushed back. That is a great psychological victory.

“I am not saying safeguarding the farmers rights is my only agenda. We need to put Bengal back on the growth path,” Banerjee told TEHELKA (see interview).

She says Singur is not the only one in crisis. The Barasat-Raichak Expressway, a multi-lane highway that was to connect the Kolkata airport with the Haldia port, is on hold. Earlier, the chemical hub in Nandigram was abandoned in the face of violent protests. Although there is talk of relocating the chemical hub to Nayachar, top bureaucrats say it has been put on the backburner considering the huge investment and environmental clearances involved. A giant power plant planned in the Burdwan district had to be shelved because of protests over land acquisition. The DLF’s proposed township in Dankuni over an area of nearly 4,500 acres and an investment of over Rs 30,000 crore is also hanging fire

Banerjee also knows that in her pursuit of the chief minister’s chair in the Writers Building, she has to checkmate what Bengal’s top writer Moni Shankar Mukherjee calls a race of denial that is causing India’s biggest migration. On an average, more than 25,000 young graduates leave West Bengal every year for better opportunities in other states. Some go abroad. The figure, as per state government records, is the highest among all Indian states.

“For generations, we have viewed everything with suspicion and eventually, ended up with nothing. Can someone change this? Looks tough,” quips Mukherjee at his sprawling office of the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC), once a state government organisation, now owned by the Rs 11,000 crore RPG Group of Enterprises.

Interestingly, almost two decades ago, a predicament similar to the Tatas’ was faced by the RPG Group, when they were the frontrunners for the much-hyped Haldia Petrochemicals that the Left Front Government had then showcased as the state’s starting block for global investment. But the Rs 5000 crore project went to the Tatas. Many had found the move completely out of sync because the RPG Group, unlike the Tatas, had shown more investment promise in the state. Nearly two decades later, as the same government struggles to appease the Tatas and TMC to seal the Nano deal, a climate of unpredictability clouds the atmosphere. Mukherjee suggests that Banerjee is walking a tightrope, for any leader that wishes to seize power in Bengal will have to engage with industry: “Any new leader must help change this mindset and put the state back on the rails. Gimmicks won’t work.”

Agrees Harshvardhan Neotia, CMD of cement major Bengal Ambuja: “Getting projects off the ground is almost the same everywhere but there are states where you get an advantage because of the positive climate. It exists in patches in Bengal. It needs to change if Bengal is seeking the big bucks investment.

Neotia should know. At least nine German business delegations slated to visit India between now and December have not included Kolkata in their itinerary possibly because of the Singur imbroglio. Some of these delegations are from the key German states of Bavaria, Lower

Saxony and Baden-Wurttemberg, with whom the state government has been trying to forge closer ties to transform Bengal into an automobile hub. Bavaria, the largest German state, is home to car major BMW. Lower Saxony is the headquarters of auto manufacturer Volkswagen. Baden-Wurttemberg is home to Daimler and Porsche. “Last year, we had seven German delegations coming to Kolkata. Unfortunately, the current turbulence has put a spanner in the wheel,” says BG Roy, regional director of Indo- German Chamber of Commerce.

But says TMC Rajya Sabha MPMukul Roy: “It will help the nation understand that despite the industry-friendly face of the chief minister, on ground nothing much is happening in West Bengal because of serious anomalies in the projects planned by the state government. We need to change the climate.”

Stop Nano Tatas have suspended work at their plant in Singur

Indian Chamber of Commerce president Harsh K. Jha says the state needs a total overhaul. “It is like almost acquiring a new house because the present structure is worth only a demolition.” He offers an interesting one to highlight the crisis. Bengal’s much-publicised single-window clearance actually takes 105 man-days to complete the process. “It takes one day in Gujarat, and two days in Karnataka and Maharashtra but obtaining and registering property is the most time-consuming process in this state.” Jha and his team has already recommended a slew of measures in a report on the single-window system to help the West Bengal Government attract more investments.

Banerjee once jokingly said she could relent if the poor in Bengal get 100,000 free Nano cars. In a move that could have wide ranging ramifications, she has already rejected Chief Minister Bhattacharjee’s appeal for talks because it came with the rider that she allow the project to go ahead. “If the Left Front Government can go to the people with the 123 nuclear deal as their political plank, what’s wrong in this movement? At least she is raising some valid points, right?” asks Somen Mitra, who recently quit the Congress Party to float his own.

“The state’s records say Bengal has more than seven million unemployed. All of them, I hope, are not seeking jobs at the Tata plant. Even the much-hyped Haldia Petrochemicals could actually employ less than 500 people at their plant. Look at the way the Left has messed up the industrial climate. The Birlas, who had 550 acres of land for their Ambassador car, recently said they just did not use 314 acres and now they want to turn it into a real estate venture. And the state government agreed. And here, it is raising a hue and cry over 400 acres of highly fertile land,” says Mitra in arguments that are increasingly finding acceptability across the state. Many say his support to Banerjee is crucial because Mitra is still considered an influential vote swinger in the state.

His voice echoes in Singur where Dipankar Ghosh, the deputy village head of Berabari Gram Panchayat, argues for a pension from the government. Ghosh, whose cousin works for the Tatas at the plant, says it is important to understand that agriculture and machinery can grow side by side. “Why kill one for the other?”

AMILE AWAy, Ananta Sahu and Tarun Sahu sit in the shade of their family garden and wonder when work will resume. They both trained for six months in Kolkata before joining as trainees at the Singur plant. Their salary: Rs 1,700 plus food and perks that total Rs 4,500. Both have been unemployed for more than two years after graduating from a local college. “Some villagers want the plant, some others don’t. This isn’t good,” said Sahu. “We could soon become outcaste in the village for working in the plant. Someone needs to solve the crisis.”

Banerjee knows the implication of the showdown because the crux of the crisis is not the issue of the ancillary factories, for which the Tatas want the extra land, nor it is about whether the farmers got adequate compensation or whether India actually needs Nano for its roads. It revolves around Banerjee’s best chance to make it to the top in the state, taking advantages of the 30-year-old mess of the Left rule.

“It is important for Mamata Banerjee to keep the Nano project in the state because that will be her message to the corporates,” says Arun Poddar, a top builder.

Banerjee knows the Tatas will lose some money if the project moves elsewhere and that India will lose some global shine if the universally- anticipated $2,500 car suffers a delay. But if she can keep the signature project in the state and win over the farmers at the same time, she would actually transform Bengal’s image of a state that instills fear in the heart of the doughtiest capitalist.

That’s a big call. Banerjee needs to understand that, and work her way up: Perhaps only then she can genuinely start her ascent to the chief minister’s chair. •