SITUATING SINGUR

I first met Prasanta Das in his spacious two-storey house in Beraberi village in the latter half of 2007. By then, the 997 acres of farmland in Singur had long since been acquired, but Tata was yet to depart. I was in the company of a good friend from Kolkata, who knew Singur well, and we had hired a car for the day to make the journey to Singur as quickly as possible; but simply getting out of Kolkata took us nearly 45 minutes. Yet once we had made it to the highway, we were able to reach Singur in just over half an hour. Along the way the scenery changed dramatically as the metropolitan intensity of the state capital gave way to the peri-urban industrial sprawl north along the western bank of the Hooghly River, and finally into the interior of Hooghly district to the census town of Singur, after which the block, or administrative subdivision, took its name. Singur town, with roughly 20,000 inhabitants, was a bustling place with a cinema hall, colleges, its own annual boi mela (book fair) and more than 1,000 shops-selling products ranging from televisions and electronics to agricultural machinery, clothes, jewellery, fertilizers and books, besides restaurants and fast food stalls of many kinds. Singur town was well connected by rail and the national highway to Kolkata and other parts of the state and country. It was an administrative centre, home to the block development office (BDO), the thana (police station) and the zilla parishad, or block-level local government.

As we left Singur town behind, the scenery soon turned increasingly rural, with agricultural fields stretching almost as far as the eye could see. We made our way down the single-lane Bajemelia-Kamarkundu tarmac road, raised in some places half a metre or more above the adjacent fields to protect it from flooding during the monsoon. The fields appeared brown and barren, the amon paddy having only recently been harvested and the potatoes not yet planted. Here and there a couple of cows or goats grazed the fields, birds picking at the soil, but apart from that there was little activity to be seen since most agricultural labourers generally took a long break, ate lunch and rested during the hottest hours of the day. Even the Beraberi bazaar, which we soon reached, was deserted, the traders having closed shop. Turning right at the junction near a well-maintained Kali temple, we made our way along the dirt track that led into Shantipara, a neighbourhood in the southern part of Beraberi.

Apart from having been told that Prasanta was an important SKJRC organizer in Beraberi, and that he had been very active in mobilizing local support for the SKJRC's programmes, I knew little else about him or his family. We parked our car in a small square right next to Prasanta's large, two-storey concrete house, nicely painted in bright colours. As we entered the compound, my companion called out Prasanta's name a couple of times, until a voice responded that we should enter and come upstairs. Here Prasanta welcomed us in his air-conditioned bedroom.

Prasanta listed attentively as I explained my interest in their movement to save their farmland, and the research interests I had developed around it, while also hinting that I was in need of a place to stay While I made my introduction, Prasanta's wife appeared at the door, accompanied by two young boys. 'This is Tanika, my wife, and my two sons,' Prasanta said. 'Come, I will show you the room,' he added. As we walked down the stairs, Prasanta explained that he and Tanika lived in the house along with his parents, his old widowed aunt, his three brothers and their wives, and his two nephews - 15 people in all. Prasanta looked content as he said, 'If you want to know about our movement, you have come to the right place. In our village, the large majority of families have not given their land willingly. Still they are fighting to get it back.' About a week later I moved into Prasanta's house.

This chapter situates the story of the Singur movement through an account of events that unfolded during and after the acquisition of the farmland. It also embeds these events in the longer history of industrial development in West Bengal and outlines the LF government's official position on the land acquisition. I briefly introduce the Singur area not only as the locus of an intense conflict over the would-be fate of a large patch of agricultural land, but also as a place of agricultural production; social reproduction; myriad livelihood strategies; and of dense everyday social relations and interactions structured along the lines of caste, class and gender. These themes are then elaborated in later chapters. I begin, however, by a brief account of what actually happened in Singur when news of the land acquisition first broke in 2006.

The Trajectory of Singur and Its Politics

The early months of anti-land acquisition protests from May 2006 onwards, when the news of the land acquisition first leaked, constituted a phase of intense mobilization in several respects akin to what Alberoni (1984, 20) calls 'the nascent state', that is, a phase of discontinuity and disruption from both institutional and everyday points of view. With the imminent threat of dispossession and displacement looming, the villagers responded with the kind of urgency that Levien (see the introduction) defines as characteristic of anti-dispossession movements. Within days of the land acquisition being announced, the SKJRC was formed; the local Member of the State Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the TMC, Rabindranath Bhattacharya, was appointed president, while another local TMC leader, Becharam Manna, was appointed the SKJRC's convener. Manna shared this position with Sandip Samanta, a local representative of the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), a minor political party on the non-governmental left. But although the leadership of the SKJRC was thus drawn from political parties, the SKJRC declared itself to be, as its name suggests, a non-party political committee, working solely towards the one-point agenda of saving the farmland. It was thus in principle open to everybody who subscribed to this agenda, regardless of political affiliation, caste or gender.

In the early days of the mobilization, rallies or demonstrations were taken out almost every day. Thousands of locals like Prasanta and Tanika marched under the banner of the SKJRC, shouting slogans like 'We will give our lives but not our land' or venting their anger at the state government by shouting, 'The farmland is our livelihood, but look at [Chief Minister] Buddha's immoral misdeed!' and 'Land tout [Industries Minister] Nirupam Sen, leave Singur!' At one rally held by the SKJRC outside the Singur BDO on 31 May 2006, the unwilling...