Filmmaker Mrinal Sen, also seen to be a fence-sitter, is simply cautious: “I don’t want to say anything on this. Media often misquotes me.”

But perhaps the most quoted person in this debate has been Noam Chomsky, as close as the Left gets to an international presiding deity. Last month he headed a list of signatories to a letter to their “friends in Bengal”. They underlined the dangers in allowing Nandigram to divide the Left, at a time when “a world power has demolished one state (Iraq) and is not threatening another (Iran)”.

The letter said: “We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who have been forcibly dispossessed. We understand that the government has promised not to build a chemical hub in the area around Nandigram. We understand that those who had been dispossessed by the violence are now being allowed back to their homes, without recrimination. We understand that there is now talk of reconciliation. This is what we favour.”

The signature campaign is believed to have been coordinated by Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Among the signatories: Tariq Ali (editor, New Left Review), Howard Zinn (American historian), Mahmood Mamdani (professor at New York’s Columbia University and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim) and Akeel Bilgrami (philosophy professor at Columbia).

It instantly drew forth a response from the India-based Left. Signed by, among others, Mahashweta Devi, Sumit Sarkar and Arundhati Roy, it said: “Regaining control over Nandigram is vital for the CPM to reassure its corporate partners that it is in complete control of the situation and that any kind of resistance will be comprehensively crushed. The euphemism for this in the free marketplace is ‘creating a good investment climate’.” And: “History has shown us that internal dissent is invariably silenced by dominant forces claiming that a bigger enemy is at the gate. Iraq and Iran are not the only targets of that bigger enemy. The struggle against SEZs and corporate globalisation is an intrinsic part of the struggle against US imperialism.”

... contd.