As the dust settles following the abandonment of the Nano plant in Singur by the Tatas, there are plenty of lessons to go around. One is that no state and no chief minister can afford to forget now is that India works on international schedules, and that local politics must bend to those schedules — the Tatas simply could not afford to delay their plant any longer if their small car, eagerly awaited worldwide, was to go out on schedule. Another is that no individual state can expect capital to be “captive” — one state government may offer, say, a useful location or favourable terms, but other state government might be able to match them. There is no substitute for improving a state’s all-round investment climate.

Most importantly, however, there are lessons that India’s entire political class needs to take away. And those are lessons about irresponsibility and short-sightedness. The time when striking populist poses for notional short-term gain could be considered a useful strategy, if it ever existed, is definitely over. Mamata Banerjee believed she was on to a good thing: she could, she thought, revive her Trinamul Congress by hitching her political star to the fate of those in rural Bengal not directly benefited by the Left’s successive waves of land reform and, now, attempts at industrialisation. The strategy might not be problematic: her execution was deeply flawed. By creating a force which was, from the start, deeply obstructionist, she painted herself into a corner — a corner from which there was no escape without a massive loss of face.

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