Nandigram is an extreme example of the attitude of the Indian state towards the poor and it is fascinating that it should be a Marxist government that behaves in such a thuggish way. But every day, anywhere in India, if you know people living below the poverty line you will hear stories of the weakest of our citizens being marginalised by the state. Most of the people I know living in extreme poverty live on Mumbai’s mean streets. I know them because of an attempt on my part some years ago to try and lure street children into going to school by giving them a hot breakfast every morning under a programme called Nashta. My effort failed but I keep in touch with them and some of the girls are now married with children of their own.

One of them came to me last week and asked if I could help her husband get into driving school. I had earlier paid for other street kids to learn how to drive and thought it would be as simple as it was before, but when Surekha took her new husband to the Good Luck Driving School she was asked if he had a birth certificate, school leaving certificate, or a voter identity card. When she said he did not, she was told that as he could not prove that he was Indian, he could not be admitted because the local transport authority can only give licenses to Indians.

This seemed so absurd I rang the school myself and was told politely by a man called Sufiyan that he was helpless because of the new rule that came into force three months ago. “Even if I teach him how to drive,” he said, “it would be no use because it is the RTO that gives the license and they will not give it without proof of citizenship.”

How do people below the poverty line prove this? The Indian state excels at making rules that keep our poorest citizens in poverty and they do this most brutally by imposing a license raj on pavement shops and hawkers. Licenses are almost impossible to get but when an unlicensed hawker is caught by municipal officials, his goods are confiscated and his pathetic little stall smashed. The license raj has created a vast infrastructure of corruption that thrives on takings from India’s poorest citizens.

Street vendors exist in every city in the world and make an honest living and should be allowed to exist in a country that provides so few other opportunities. All that is needed is a few simple rules that regulate numbers and cleanliness. Millions of Indians would lift themselves out of poverty if this happens, but it will not because hafta to policemen and officials is too large a vested interest.

Now let’s talk of Nandigram. If you look beyond the bloodshed and the horror, what is happening is quite simply that the state is grabbing land from people for whom it is their only livelihood. That it happens under a Marxist government makes it worse but this kind of land grabbing from the poor happens all the time because they usually cannot fight back.

Nandigram is proof that the state can no longer get away with its high-handedness. If land is needed for building factories, roads and power plants, it must be paid for at a proper market price and people who still wish to hang on to their land should be given the choice to do so. When they see the benefits that development and progress bring, they will themselves participate in the process, as we have seen in hundreds of villages around our metropolitan cities where land prices have gone from a few lakh rupees an acre ten years ago to crores of rupees an acre.

The state must learn to pay a proper price and our officials must learn that the times have changed. They can no longer get away with bullying ordinary people by terrorising them with the might of the state. Meanwhile, though, as someone who thinks of Marxists as the most morally corrupt of our politicians, it gives me a certain pleasure to see them try to defend the indefensible in Nandigram. More power to the people!