Therefore, the party had two big political economic paradigms, urban and rural. But one of the CPM’s paradigms, as paradigms often do, shifted. Beginning in the early-middle ’90s, Bengal started experiencing what always happens with agrarian transformation, of whatever kind: growth petering out. Slowing farm output made the CPM’s reddish green strategy look particularly inadequate — when stagnating production meets labour intensive production techniques and small-scale operations, small producers and labour are always big victims. The economic bit of the village political economy wasn’t working well because rural income, job creation and consumption started taking a hit.

This was another change, a hugely critical one, the CPM had to manage. Formal industrial employment was the party’s answer. A lot of rubbish has been said and written about how the CPM planned this wrong from the very start. More than 60 per cent of Bengal’s land is used for cultivation. Even massive industrialisation — let’s say a 100 projects the size of Nano’s — will occupy less than 1 per cent of agricultural land (Sarkar estimates this in another analysis; EPW, April 21, 2007). So the “huge loss of farm land” argument is a load of manure.

The use of land acquisition laws to acquire the Singur land discomfited even economic liberals. But negotiating with thousands of owners of very small plots is an understandable turn-off for any capitalist. Ideally, a government should help small landowners form a sellers’ group and referee the process of price discovery. That way the land acquisition law’s bias for underpricing can be corrected. Against this theory is the fact however that a substantial majority of landowners sold their land in Singur.

... contd.