What image of Singur will prove to be the most enduring in public memory in the short and rather fragile history of Bengal’s revival of the industrial project? Not as a spot of lush green, fertile agricultural land, nor a brief hub of nascent industrial activity glowing brightly at night amidst the surrounding dark, but as Fort Singur, under siege, where die-hard Marxists try to nurture and protect much-maligned capital from stray trouble-makers and other irritants. What is more likely to be forgotten with time is the amount of verbiage it produced, with key players as well as fence-sitters finding it a ripe occasion for a battle of words and ideas, clouding the real issues at stake.

One might argue that such grandstanding on industrialisation befits the narrative of Marxist rule in Bengal. What we have is a 30-year-old government, whose championing of strikes, bandhs, gheraos, lock-outs, cease work, go-slow and every other variant of militant trade unionism has enriched the lexicon while impoverishing the state. A government headed by a chief minister whose party can call a bandh one day while he condemns it as an unworthy instrument the next. To one drunk on power, it would never occur that any high-handed reversal of industrial decline would route Bengal’s transition from agriculture to industry through a battlefield.

In the fitness of things, the Marxists met their match in the opposition. Not because of the vibrancy or fairness of the cause espoused by the Trinamul Congress-led motley group of agitators, whose raison d’etre under the umbrella of the Save Farmland Committee could range from faith in a communist revolution, to attempts at political resuscitation, to mere publicity. It was because the very nature of their opposition confirmed that they were the true inheritors of Bengal’s Marxist legacy, that they had faithfully mastered the disruptive politics and might-is-right doctrine that has been the hallmark of the past three decades. If the Marxists had made an institution of the Subhash Chakraborty-brand of “democracy”, where biker gangs determined votes, the Mamata faithful could not be far behind, digging up roads, squatting on railway tracks or crucial highways and holding normal life to ransom. If the Marxist bhadralok would drag Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s name through dust for daring to make peace overtures, with prominent leaders thundering from the pulpit that the latter should leave the confines of Raj Bhavan if he has to wave the Trinamul flag, Mamata’s followers ensured that representatives of any media house overtly critical of her actions would get a good thrashing, or maybe even a fractured limb or two.

... contd.