A couple of years ago, when the intense tug-of-war over the issue of setting up industry on farmland was gathering strength in West Bengal, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had argued in a public speech that the era of idyllic self-contained village life was over. He quoted Tagore’s verse, exhorting people to move beyond bucolic images of “chhaya shunibir, shantir neer, chhoto chhoto gramguli” (roughly: little hamlets, havens of peace under shady groves).

Bhattacharjee may or may not have been aware of the equivocating nature of prophecies, but he definitely did not foresee that the idyll was to be consumed by forces directed against his own party.

Villages, the CPM has discovered, are not mere habitational units filled with an amorphous conglomeration of people, who diligently voted for it — constituting the bulwark of the party’s famed rural bastion; where the whole-hearted acceptance of party-highhandedness in every sphere of life was enough guarantee that they would be gleeful when industry was set up on their land. That myth was busted at Singur, more violently at Nandigram, beginning an official policy of ‘restraint’, a fear of committing excess — in effect, administrative paralysis, something that was laid bare in the conspicuously minimal role of police and ground-level administration in the post-May 16 eruption of political violence (both CPM-Trinamool clashes as well as intra-CPM feuding) in several districts across the state.

The government’s popular support base was a phenomenon highly visible: at its frequent mega rallies, party workers would ensure that hordes of villagers from remotest corners would be brought to Kolkata. Thousands of men, women and children obediently queued, cogs in a vast party machinery, waving their red little flags till each one was submerged in an ocean of red, the lifeblood of the leaders’ egos as they condemned US imperialism in Iraq or South America from the dais, while the party supporter, having tucked into the free lunch, waited for an opportunity to sneak away to enjoy the sights of the city. A devoted party worker was not supposed to feel any disconnect, or falter in her/his loyalty, even if she/he had to return to a home without electricity, to a hamlet without decent roads, where the local strongman may have enriched himself enough to revel in luxuries his neighbours could only be envious of. No wonder the bewilderment then, when armed activists of the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities attacked the plush residence of a zonal secretary in Dharampur in West Midnapore with pickaxes a few days ago, to bring it down to the level of the dire poverty around. No wonder the question: whence, and whither, this rage?

... contd.