Professor Amartya Sen has written a remarkable book, The Idea of Justice. He has recently visited India and given interviews to the press where he has expressed his closeness, attachment, even fondness, for the leftist parties in India’s polity. According to Sen, leftists carry the torch of “concern for the poor” and “social justice for the underprivileged” in India. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Contemporary Indian leftists represent their own selfish party interests and their sense of misplaced historical determinism which is locked in a time-warp. They do not care for underprivileged citizens and certainly do not care to improve the lot of the poor. In Sen’s own paradigm, Indian leftists pursue purist, ideologically correct “Niti”. They have no concern for “Nyaya” or just consequences.

The Left takes credit for land reform in Bengal. Land reform could and should have been a one-time change in endowments with the poor getting clear title to identified parcels of land. But this runs the risk of the poor turning into free property-owners and then deserting the Left parties. Hence, the leftist version of land reform has merely conferred “tenancy rights” on West Bengal’s rural poor. These rights are not tradable; they inhibit mobility for the rural poor and lead to disputes among siblings, one of whom may want to migrate. Effective assertion of these tenancy rights requires the blessings of the local CPM party boss thus ensuring that the poor peasant is now beholden not to the zamindar or jotedar, but to the local apparatchik, who more often than not lives in a palatial house! When the Politburo wants to acquire land from poor peasants and transfer this land to capitalists (not all of whom are party cronies, merely honourable men, or shall we say honourable persons in the interest of gender-insensitive political correctness?), it turns out that valuing legal tenancy rights and several unregistered tenancy rights, which exist by courtesy of the party boss, leads to serious misgivings and disputes.

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