It's good that Calcutta High Court has responded to the state atrocities perpetuated in Nandigram area and called in CBI to probe.
We witnessed on TV a big contingent of armed policemen marching towards a gathering of innocent rural people, women and children among them standing in the front. Shortly came into the focus a few bloodstained bodies, dead or half-dead, being carried away by a few others. The police are of this free country and the people are also of the same very free country. A country that, we say, has the biggest democracy on earth! The place is Nandigram, a village in the rural Bengal, where a pro-people, communism-preaching party leads the Government for thirty long years.
A few recent incidents made me thought a lot. But I am not wise enough to find an answer yet to the question: what public interest is served in horrifying public by implementing or threatening immediate acquisition of lands that they peacefully plough or reside in? Perhaps I will remain ever-stupid and will never understand how a state can acquire so much of cropping land so hurriedly and so securely, as it happened in Singur, snatching out from so many poor men and women for handing over to so big an industrial house like Tata, that is so private an enterprise. I get puzzled when I see that lands for projects like the Metro Railway lines or highways or bridges or flyovers take years and even decades to take over by the state, for the state and sometimes from the state. I cannot understand how a state preaches magical uplift of poor population simply by inviting Tatas or Salims to places where the Government failed to provide the people with safe drinking water, food grain, habitable habitat and electricity in six long decades after independence.
It%u2019s true that the State of West Bengal has ushered into an era of no-discussion, non-consensus governance by a select few, advised by another select few where popular opinions hardly matter in issues of immense state importance. If one looks from Singur to Nandigram, from IT to real estate, from film festival to cricket, from book fair to environment, it%u2019s the same rigidity, same intransigence and same audacity that prevail.
removing a popular Government is no good. Future Governments can even be worse. But still, containing atrocities by the State to the people of the State is a necessity, in whatever ways possible or feasible.
