Mamata Banerjee’s coalition of the unwilling in Singur is understandably getting all the headlines. But, as always in Bengal, the main protagonists are the Marxists. The plot has changed, though. For the first time in 30-plus years, the CPM is not the sole manager of Project Bengal.

The party’s Bengal project began when a young Mamata may have been deciding whether to be a painter or a politician. A Nano-sized summary of how the CPM managed the fallout of the first major policy, the now mythical land redistribution, can be thus: Marxists were responsible for a fifth of all land redistributed in India; a huge project considering Bengal occupies less than a twentieth of India’s land area. An astounding 40 per cent-plus of Bengal’s rural population got either no-eviction rights (barga) or titles to redistributed land (patta).

The political management of this big social change was done via sharply increasing the representation of the beneficiaries in the panchayat system. It is not for nothing that the CPM takes panchayat elections in Bengal dead seriously and that dead seriousness often produces dead political opponents.

But, and this is where the CPM often has been a victim of bad analysis in the “bourgeois” press, the party was clever enough to realise politics alone won’t cut it. Economics was essential. Beginning in the late ’70s and up to the middle ’90s, agriculture in Bengal grew impressively, with the high-yield boro rice leading the pack and posting double-digit annual growth rates. This was a reddish green revolution — the output growth happened in small plots and with labour intensive techniques. This suited the CPM because land reform had reduced average plot sizes and labour intensive production kept a lot of people employed.

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