Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, which defines the neoliberal capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public of their wealth or land. These neoliberal policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.
While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra-economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalists overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets.
In the introduction to the paper he writes:
Between 2000 and 2005, the Indian government evolved a legal framework that opened the way for private companies to create hyper-liberalized export enclaves on the Chinese model. As in China, SEZs in India were intended to be spatially delimited experiments with extreme levels of liberalization that, because of political constraints, could not be applied to the country as a whole. But whereas China’s SEZs were state developed, in India the private sector would be enticed with offers of cheap land to develop the zones themselves and create ‘world-class’ industrial and commercial infrastructure. Streamlined bureaucratic procedures and blanket tax and tariff concessions would then draw exporting companies to set up offices and factories in the zones. Supporters within the government believed that SEZs would help to overcome India’s infrastructural deficit, spur foreign and domestic investment, bolster exports and foreign exchange, and generate employment. Since 2005, the Indian government has approved 581zones across the country, ranging from 10 to 5,000 hectares in size.
But the carving out of these ‘spaces of exception’ (Ong 2006) from the sovereign territory of India has run into an unexpected stumbling block. Farmers across India have opposed the Indian state’s use of eminent domain to seize their property and transfer it to private companies for SEZs. As a result, many large proposed SEZs have been stopped, have stalled or are proceeding slowly and with great difficulty. From the Salim Group’s petro-chemical SEZ in Nandigram, West Bengal, to Reliance’s multi-purpose SEZ outside of Mumbai to the Korean POSCO steel SEZ in Orissa (at US$12 billion, India’s largest proposed FDI ever), farmers have humbled many of the largest companies operating in India and put the Indian government on the defensive. The breadth and tenacity of this resistance has led many observers to worry that farmers refusing to part with their land might become the largest obstacle to India’s economic growth.
The proliferation of land conflicts over SEZs exposes the central political–economic importance of land in India today.While land has always been the single most important asset in rural India, that land is also now increasingly desired by domestic and international capital looking for space to create factories, offices, residential townships, shopping complexes and various forms of infrastructure on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) basis. The contradiction between these sources of demand for land is intensified by the fact that farmers often find themselves poorly equipped to benefit from the kinds of economic activity for which their land is desired. So while the state’s role in transferring land to private capital has increased with the onset of liberalization, farmer resistance to land dispossession has metastasized into a series of small wars across the subcontinent, with SEZs as a prime target.
The Singur Tata Nano controversy - including the implementation of a colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894 to expropriate the farmers fields
Tata Nano Singur Controversy refers to the controversy generated by land acquisition of the proposed Nano factory of Tata Motors at Singur in Hooghly district, West Bengal, India.
Singur gained international media attention since Tata Motors started constructing a factory to manufacture their $2,500 car, the Tata Nano at Singur. The small car was scheduled to roll out of the factory by 2008.
The state government of West Bengal facilitated the controversy by using 1894 land acquisition act rule to conduct an eminent domain takeover of 997 acres (4.03 km2) of farmland to have Tata build its factory. The rule is meant for public improvement projects, and the West Bengal government wanted Tata to build in its state. The project was opposed by activists and opposition parties in Bengal. The choice of Singur was made by the company among six sites offered by the state government. The project faced massive opposition from displaced farmers. The unwilling farmers were given political support by West Bengal's opposition leader Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee's "Save Farmland" movement was supported by environmental activists like Medha Patkar, Anuradha Talwar and Arundhati Roy. Banerjee's movement against displacement of farmers was also supported by several Kolkata based intellectuals like Aparna Sen, Kaushik Sen, Shaonli Mitra and Suvaprasanna. Leftist activists also shared the platform with Banerjee's Trinamool Party. The Tatas finally decided to move out of Singur on 3 October 2008. Ratan Tata blamed agitation by Banerjee and her supporters for the pullout decision. On 7 October 2008, the Tatas announced that they would be setting up the Tata Nano plant in Sanand, Gujarat.
While the ruling party had gone all out for acquisition of 997 acres (4.03 km2)[2] of multi-crop land required for the car factory, questions were been raised about the partly forcible acquisition which was made under the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The land earmarked for the project was taken control of by the state administration amidst protests and fencing off the area began on December 1, 2006. Mamata Banerjee, who was prevented from entering Singur by the state police, called a statewide bandh in protest while legislators belonging to her party turned violent in the legislative assembly causing damage to furniture. Later, she went on a 25-day hunger strike . During this period she presented affidavits of farmers apparently unwilling to part with their land.
The fenced off area has been regularly guarded, by large contingents of policemen, and by cadres of the CPI(M) party.
Politically motivated violence It was these same contingents of police and party members who were later were accused of the multiple rape, murder and the burning to death of a teenage villager Tapasi Malik who had been active in the protests. This atrocity was committed on December 18, 2006, but deliberate negligence and political interference in the investigation of her death delayed the due process of justice. Later, CPI(M) activist Debu Malik and CPI(M) zonal committee secretary Suhrid Dutta were arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation in connection with the crime.
Singur: Even as West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee restored the possession of land to Singur farmers on Wednesday, she held out an olive branch to Tata Motors Ltd, saying that the carmaker was still welcome in the state and that if it wished to set up a factory here it could be given close to 1,000 acres of land, free of any dispute, from the state’s own land bank. “Take a month and think about it afresh,” Banerjee said in Singur on Wednesday as the sun set over Tata Motors’s abandoned factory a few hundred metres from the dais where the state administration celebrated the legal defeat of its own action 10 years ago. Though it turned out to be a platform to look back at a political movement, triggered by the land acquisition in Singur in 2006, it was an administrative event attended by all key officers of the state.
The Supreme Court had on 31 August ruled that the West Bengal government had not followed the due process of law to acquire 997 acres for Tata Motors’s proposed small car factory where the Nano car was to be manufactured.
On Wednesday, within two weeks of the verdict, the state administration handed out ownership documents to 9,117 owners from whom land was previously seized. The process of restoring possession of the entire plot of 997 acres will be completed within 7-8 weeks, well ahead of the deadline of 12 weeks set by the Supreme Court, the chief minister said. The district administration, she said, had already completed the demarcation of 623 acres for being returned to their original owners.
To make amends for past mistakes, Banerjee announced that the state government would give a one-time grant of Rs.10,000 to each farmer who got back the land so that they could restart farming. To make up for lost time, the state government will also facilitate access to easy credit for Singur farmers to buy farm inputs and implements, the chief minister announced on Wednesday.
The entire 997-acre plot will be made cultivable again, scooping out landfill and razing concrete structures, she reiterated on Wednesday, and the state, at its own cost, will create irrigation facilities so that the original character of the land is restored. The land taken for the Tata Motors factory used to have abundant irrigation facilities and yielded several crops a year. Some 13,000 people were affected by the now quashed acquisition.
The first to receive the ownership deed on Wednesday was octogenarian Mukundaram Chakraborty. He was among the 800 so-called unwilling farmers, or those who refused to accept the compensation given by the state previously for land seized from them. On Wednesday, Chakraborty also received a cheque for about Rs.78,000—the money he refused to take for 10 years in protest. Though he was overwhelmed, Chakraborty rued that his sons had already flown the nest and wouldn’t come back to join him in farming.
“I am happy, but what next?” he asked.
Singur was born out of the Left Front government’s conviction that farming didn’t hold much promise for future generations and that agrarian families were looking for other options for their children. Jobs were on the lips of Banerjee, too. Pacing up and down the 4,000 sq. ft dais, she announced in Singur that the state had selected some 60,000 young men and women to be hired as teachers.
The celebration was muted among those who had agreed to give up on farming. Such farmers said the landholdings were too small to sustain families and that gains would have been much higher in the long run had some industrial project materialised in Singur. Brothers Nitaichandra and Nemaichandra Dey, who queued up to receive their ownership deeds, said they needed some alternative for their children and that the return of land didn’t hold out much promise for them.
The Singur backstory
The closed Tata Motors Ltd car factory in Singur.
Singur is still a slippery slope. Nearly all analyses about the Supreme Court judgement of 31 August on returning to farmers the land acquired for Tata Motors Ltd’s Nano project at that site in West Bengal avoid root causes for the fracas that ended in grief for citizens, the state’s Left Front government at the time and the company. This includes aspects of business and human rights that intertwines government with business. Some analyses have gone to the extent of unquestionably quoting the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which led the government, that had Singur operated within the land acquisition law enacted in 2013 instead of the law of 1894 it replaced, the violence and chaos at Singur over 2007-08 that ultimately led to Tata Motors relocating the project to an eager Gujarat would not have happened. This is untenable, as under both laws the matter at the most basic level involves free, prior and informed consent, not only enhanced compensation and remedial safeguards. At Singur, Marxist cadres strong-armed land acquisition—with threats, beatings, molestation, rape and killing. Their opponent, the Trinamool Congress party, currently in government, used the incident to reinforce its own political strength. One of the key observations in the Supreme Court judgement is that Singur was hardly the only option for Tata Motors. I wrote about it in my book Clear.Hold.Build. The book contains detailed case studies of human rights culpability of businesses that ride on the shoulders of government; and how such situations could have easily been avoided, opportunity costs lessened—all to the benefit of what corporate social responsibility executives love to call “stakeholders”. As the court noted, the principal secretary at the commerce and industries department of the government of West Bengal sent a letter dated 23 March 2006 to the “Deputy General Manager, Government Affairs and Collaborations of TML” (Tata Motors Ltd) recalling earlier letters and meetings to set up a “Special Category Project” for the Nano, and with immense state-provided benefits to the company. The letter recorded that there was agreement “… from TML to set up a plant on 600 acres of land near Kharagpur to manufacture a new car addressing the lower end of the market, with annual capacity of 250,000 units on maturity... the targeted date of commencement of commercial production being the year 2008.” The court noted that six days later the “then Chief Minister of West Bengal”—Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee—wrote to “the then Chairman of TML”—Ratan Tata—“regarding the project”. “During our discussion today, you had mentioned the allocation close to Kolkata may be considered,” Bhattacharjee wrote. “As you are undoubtedly aware, land around Kolkata is difficult to come by and the cost of such land is also very high. Also, land has to be suitable for industry…” “We had at first proposed location of this project at Guptamoni, which is about 25km west of Kharagpur towards Jamshedpur on National Highway 6. Thereafter, based on the suggestion given by Shri Ravi Kant”—Tata Motors’ managing director at the time—“during his meeting with Shri Nirupam Sen”—industries minister at the time—“we have now selected a site right next to Kharagpur town, on National Highway 6……The distance to Kharagpur from Kolkata can now be covered in approximately 90 minutes. Haldia Port is at a distance of 100 kms from this location, while Jamshedpur is about 2 hours away.” He added: “I can assure you that this is one of the best locations in West Bengal for locating your plant.” Bhattacharjee had personally visited Paschim Medinipur district to request officials to allocate hassle-free land for the project. Officials had readily complied—they had at their disposal vast amounts of “vested” land, acquired, hassle-free land (Gujarat would later offer vested land to Tata Motors). Kharagpur is a few minutes’ drive south of the district headquarters town of Medinipur. But Tata Motors executives went for Singur. As the court notes, “good connectivity and proximity to airport, as well as quality urban and physical infrastructure” won. But farmland had to be acquired. Farmland meant compensating people and livelihoods. The company bet on the government to come through for it. The government bet on the company. Both lost. A senior bureaucrat close to the negotiations first told me the inside story. I published it. But it’s nice to have the Supreme Court certify it is true.
"Anarchy (as was sated to be prevailing at Nandigram) would not be tolerated and would be crushed with a heavy hand."
West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya at a March 11 rally in Calcutta organised by the peasant's wing of the CPI(M).
The chilling words from Buddhadeb, with all their old Soviet punch, came to life two days later in troubled Nandigram. A 5,000-strong police force converged on this east Midnapore block—off-limits to the ruling CPI(M) in a two-month-long, sustained act of political defiance—to quell protesting villagers daring the might of the state machinery. Their land was at stake, about to be written away by the state to the Salim group of Indonesia to set up a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Predictably, things caught fire—literally. In the end, the police had gunned down 14 protesters, wounded 71. They were certainly aiming to kill—the bullets had all hit the dead above their waist. For the CPI(M), it was nothing short of a gigantic tactical blunder, at all levels. For one, Nandigram is in no way subdued—if anything, the ground seethes with calls for revenge. And then there's the stain on their cultivated image of political morality. All hell broke loose at the Left Front meeting on March 15. The CPI(M)'s allies—CPI, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Forward Bloc—erupted in rage and contrition. Its own leaders were shocked by Buddhadeb's action. Said a furious Jyoti Basu, ex-CM and party titan: "This is no way to run a coalition government. Things are being decided unilaterally without consulting our allies in the Front. This can't go on." For over two months, Nandigram has been a 'no-entry' zone for the state administration. CPI(M) cadres had all been driven out. Deep trenches were dug in all approach roads and bridges were damaged to prevent vehicular traffic. The March 14 drive was meant to reclaim Nandigram for the cadres, with police help—a show of state force, it was thought, would end the blockade. But it all ended in a mess of plucky protesters facing police bullets. The administration claimed the police firing was "in self-defence". But nobody was convinced. It only deepened fissures within the Left allies over the SEZ issue. Even West Bengal governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi put it on record that he was filled "with a sense of cold horror". He also said he had been advising the state government against hasty action, based on reports of rising tension at Nandigram . Now, the Calcutta High Court has ordered a CBI inquiry into the incident. CPI state secretary Manju Kumar Majumdar calls the police action "brutal and unprecedented" while Forward Bloc state secretary Ashok Ghosh even said Wednesday's firing has "irrevocably harmed" Left unity. Given such a potential risk to its overall equations, which it could have well foreseen, why did the government go ahead with its plans? Buddhadeb told the state assembly a day after the incident that "no government could tolerate the absence of law in a part of the state for two months", indicating it was a planned action. In fact, on March 12, state home secretary P.R. Roy said massive police reinforcements were being dispatched to Nandigram. This was backed by a similar massing of CPI(M) cadres. As this build-up continued over three days, reports trickled in of mounting tension in Nandigram—of the local farmers affiliated to an opposition coalition comprising Trinamool, fringe Left and Muslim groups preparing to put up resistance. Raj Bhavan sources told Outlook that the governor had, in fact, twice discussed the issue with the CM and urged him to avoid a showdown. "The governor specifically warned that things may spin out of control and lives could be lost," a senior officer privy to the events told Outlook.
It's now clear that many in the state government knew any bid to wrest control of Nandigram by the administration and the CPI(M) would be met with stiff resistance and could well spark off violence. Says PWD minister and senior RSP leader Kshiti Goswami: "I don't think those who planned the operation were unaware of the ground situation. They very well knew things would go out of hand and lives could be lost. They went ahead despite that. It was nothing short of barbaric." Adds senior Trinamool Congress leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay: "There was no way the people of Nandigram would have allowed the police and CPI(M) cadres to re-enter without any resistance. Everyone knew they would put up stiff resistance, and that blood would be shed if the police tried to bulldoze its way. That the government went ahead with its plans only showed it was ready to kill people."
The feedback from Nandigram, coupled with these warnings from the governor, proves the government was determined to go for a police crackdown, risking bloodshed. It had seen the fact that CPI(M) men, along with their families, were forced to flee Nandigram and take shelter elsewhere as unpardonable. Says lawyer and former Trinamool MLA Arunava Ghosh: "There was massive pressure on the CPI(M) state leadership from the party cadres in Midnapore to reclaim Nandigram. The party's setback at Nandigram, it was told, would set a dangerous precedent and could embolden opposition forces elsewhere to try similar tactics." Even the CPI(M) unwittingly attested to this view when its leaders drew parallels between Nandigram and Keshpur, also in Midnapore, where the Trinamool had displaced the CPI(M) through violence a few years ago before the comrades re-stabilised control through brute force. But then Keshpur's clashes were purely political in nature. Nandigram is a different story altogether—the opposition to the CPI(M) is not political; it is over the highly emotive issue of land. Many within its own ranks feel the party has gravely erred in drawing this parallel between Nandigram and Keshpur. The operation was seen as one needed to keep CPI(M) cadres happy and allow them to stake control over the area. Says Goswami: "We (RSP and other LF partners) were kept totally in the dark over this crucial decision. I wonder, what's the point in remaining in the Front if crucial decisions are going to be taken unilaterally by the CPI(M) and the CM." Meanwhile, the police firing hasn't cowed down the people of Nandigram. On March 15, they ransacked and tried to torch the Block Development Officer's office. The locals have vowed to drive out the police and the CPI(M) from the small pockets over which they regained control the day before. Clearly, we haven't heard the last of Nandigram's sordid saga. The ides of March don't bode too well for Buddhadeb.
Supriyo Mukherjee in Kolkata writing on 05 April 2007 for In Defence of Marxism reports from India on the recent events that had taken place in the village of Nandigram:
"the brutal massacre of peasants at the hands of the ‘Left’ front government"
On March 14 up to 100 peasants in Nandigram, West Bengal, were brutally massacred by the police as they protested against land-grabbing operations. The leaders of the CPI-M in the local government have justified this action as part of their so-called development model. The contradictions between the leaders of the Indian communist movement and the millions of workers who support them are posed here sharply. Nandigram, a village in East Midnapur, West Bengal, was drowned in the blood of poor people, among which women and children on 14th March, when 3000 strongly armed policemen and armed goons sent by the ruling CPI-M (Communist Party of India -Marxist) surrounded the villages and fired aimlessly at the protesting people. This day will be remembered as a dark day in the history of the Indian Communists. Nandigram has been a focal point of struggle in West Bengal, for the last two months, after the chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya announced that thousands of acres of agricultural land would be grabbed by the government for the purpose of building a chemical hub and a Special Economic Zone, whose owner will be Salim, a crony capitalist of Indonesia. Salim gained some special ‘notoriety' during the Suharto regime, where he was seen as being responsible for murdering thousands of Indonesians and common people. Unfortunately Nandigram is not an exception, a lone example, in West Bengal, where there is an ongoing attempt on the part of the government - in the interest of the capitalists - to forcibly acquire fertile agricultural land from the peasants. The process started with South 24 Parganas, where, in the name of "developing real estate" in the interest of Salim, land will be taken from peasants. In Singur in the Hooghly District nearly 1000 acres of land is being taken from the peasants to allow Ratan Tata to build his small motor vehicle producing factory. The incredible thing is that the leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) theorize this process of vulgar industrialization in a two-fold fashion. It is clear they are following the same line as the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, which is carrying out a similar policy in relation to the peasantry, brutally expropriating them in favour of capitalist development. Their argument is as follows. Firstly, they say that today agriculture is not profitable; hence developing new industries will create new jobs. By getting the compensation for land, peasants can then put this money into bank and earn interest which will be greater than their present monthly income. Secondly: as the state-run sectors, the public sector, are increasingly becoming sick, in the changed scenario it is now the task of the Left Front government to invite multinationals to invest in the area. In this process jobs will be generated, productivity will be increased, which will further... pave the ground for socialism!
This is exactly the same thinking as the Chinese leadership! They actually say that they are building communism "via capitalism". It is incredible to see how far they have gone in their thinking. In reality they have abandoned any socialist perspective, and simply see their role as managing capitalism.
The entire logic of the CPI-M Central Committee is based on the false assertion that they must fool the people. Firstly, the present phase of capitalism is entirely different to that of the industrial revolution, when it abolished the old patriarchal, feudal productive system. During that phase there was also a merciless displacement and dislocation took place, but from the point of view of the mode of production it was an historical advancement. Today we live in the senile stage of capitalism and imperialism. The system is no longer able to develop the productive forces and generate sufficient jobs. Agricultural land grabbing and building real estate is a new phenomenon of worldwide capitalism. In this entire process of globalisation, huge numbers of people are losing their jobs, whereas only a small minority are getting any benefit. If we observe the case in Singur, nearly 15000 people (peasants, agricultural labourers, Bargadars) will be made jobless, and the industrialization process will generate at most 4000 jobs (nearly 300 people in the Tata factory and the rest in subsidiary factories and sectors). In Nandigram, the amount of land that will be taken will equal to nearly 10,000 acres and one can see how many people will lose their means of survival - the agricultural land. This is the natural consequence of globalisation, but what is quite revealing is that the so called Left, which still holds the name of Communist Party, is putting forward this new theory of "model of development", which is nothing but the classical bourgeois model. Although the CPI-M and the Left Front had long ago departed from revolutionary Marxism, their policy was at least based on reformism, i.e. trying to gain some improvement for the workers under capitalism, at least in theory. Now they have made their objectives very clear by promoting the concept of the development model, which is the model of globalisation, and they are educating their cadres in this philosophy. The party is now in a contradictory situation. In states like Maharashtra and others, their activists are raising their voices against Special Economic Zones. But in those states where they are in local government, especially in West Bengal, they are clearly taking the side of the capitalists and all across India they have theorized this new ‘development model' as a viable alternative. Among the party's ranks, especially inside the trade unions, the mood is one of struggling against the new economic policy. But overall, the party has moved very far from the old reformist traditions. Although the party is Communist in name, in practice it has become like a right wing social democratic party, and its leaders are being sucked into the bourgeois milieu. The incident that took place on March 14 can be cited as a black day in the history of independent India. Violence between parties, or the police acting in the interests of the government firing on crowds and killing people is not a new thing in India. That has been the general characteristic of this bourgeois state. Already in West Bengal in the period of the United Front and Left Front government the killing of peasants in Naxalbadi took place back in 1967, later there were the killings in Marinchjhapi, and many more examples of a similar type can be quoted. But the recent March 14 incident is much worse. Not only did the police fire on and kill protesting men, women and children, but armed cadres and antisocials also entered the villages and killed people, raped women, dragged children from their mothers and killed them mercilessly. The level of brutality is what is striking compared to past killings. The aim of this barbaric attack is to create an atmosphere of terror, so that the backbone of the protesting peasants would be broken, and thus the policy of grabbing land in the interests of the Salims of this world can be implemented unopposed. Initially the Left Front government, under the leadership of the CPI-M, thought that their new concept of ‘development model' could be implemented easily, but they then faced widespread protests of peasants in Singur followed by the recent events in Nandigram. Nandigram, which was a traditional stronghold of the CPI and CPI-M, erupted into violence after an announcement was made of acquisition of land. CPI and CPI-M activists came out and protested widely against this undemocratic, pro-capitalist decision of the government. The mafia CPI-M leader in Haldia, Lakhan Seth, deliberately tried to use terror tactics against the protesting crowds, but Nandigram has a tradition of peasant struggle. Even after two months of violence the CPI-M leadership failed to regain its ground. The violence took the lives of almost 20 people on both sides and the local government began to realise that Nandigram could never be won back under their control. Hence the mass killing that occurred in Nandigram at the hands of 5000 strongly armed policemen and the armed goons and antisocials hired by the CPI-M.
What really happened in Nandigram on March 14th
To get a good understanding of the full meaning of what has happened we need to describe the events in Nandigram on the basis of some fact-finding reports and eye witness accounts. The following information was based on material published in www.countercurrents.org. A 20-member CPI-ML team including the party's General Secretary visited the areas of Nandigram where the massacre took place and also talked to injured victims undergoing medical treatment. They heard reports of the most horrendous killings of unarmed people, gang rapes and brutal assaults on women and children, and the following facts emerged about the events of March 14. The villagers were worried that there might be a police crackdown. They did not want to give the police any pretext for attack and so they gathered women and children and put them at the front. They did not believe that the police would fire on women and children Thousands of villagers were determined to prevent the police and cadres from entering the village. They knew full well that in the name of "restoring peace" the police and local administration wanted to take back control of the village by reinstating CPI(M) cadres so that the task of land acquisition would become easier. Unfortunately the villagers were to receive a bitter lesson in how brutal the police can be when defending the interests of capitalists. "The police lobbed teargas shells and fired rubber bullets - not to disperse a violent or unruly mob, but rather to literally create a smokescreen and confuse the crowd of people. Having done so, the firing began. The bullet wounds on the bodies of the people at hospitals are mostly in the waist, chest, back - bullets were cold-bloodedly aimed to kill. Local CPI(M) leaders oversaw the entire operation, and many villagers recounted how several of those in police uniform and helmets wore chappals on their feet, indicating that they were actually CPI(M) goons in uniform. "A particularly brutal feature of the attack is the aspect of sexual assault on women and massacre of children. Women have recounted having seen little children being torn apart. They said many children were still in school uniform, having just returned from morning schools, and were brutally assaulted. A large number of children are still missing; it is not clear whether they have run away, been abducted, or been killed and the bodies disposed off. The local people suspect that the missing children have been killed." The injured people were admitted to the Tamluk, the Nandigram Health Centre, and the SSKM hospital in Kolkata. From conversations with these people it appeared that the number of people killed may surpass the official number of 14 and may even reach a number close to 100. Dead bodies have been burnt or buried. In Tamluk Hospital 14 dead bodies were brought in on 16th March (12 male, 2 female). Another person died later in hospital. Among the injured brought to the hospital, 31 were male, and 14 female. 7 dead bodies are yet to be identified. "At the Nandigram hospital, 65 injured were brought in, (32 male and 33 female). Both these hospitals are understaffed, there is no sweeper, only two ambulances. Life saving drugs not available and are locally purchased on an ad-hoc basis. The injuries of those in hospital and the reports of the state of the dead bodies tell their own tale. Many had bullet injuries - above the waist, in the chest, abdomen, frontal side of shoulder. In Tamluk hospital there were 2 rape victims - Gouri Pradhan (25), of Adhikary Para of Gokulnagar and Kajal Majhi (35), mother of 4 children, of Kalicharanpur. One of the latter's breasts had been lacerated by a chopper/sword."
Communism or barbarism?
However shocking this may be to all genuine socialists and communists, the red flag has become the symbol of terror to the peasants in Nandigram, Singur and elsewhere, where the question of land acquisition in the interest of capitalists has become a key one. The extent of the violence at Nandigram indicates that it was not simply the case of a group of police that reacted in an uncontrolled manner. All the evidence seems to indicate that it was a consciously planned attack on the villagers. The aim is to create a regime of terror, as a warning to other peasants. "The people at the hospitals as well as in the three affected villages told us they recognised CPI(M) leaders who directed the entire operation -Lakshman Seth, MP and chairman of the Haldia Development Corporation, CPI(M) district leaders and panchayat functionaries like Ashok Guria, Ashok Bera, Debal Das, and Sureshwar Khatua. These leaders also ensured that almost no media reached Nandigram - several newspapers reported how their reporters and camera persons were roughed up by the CPI(M) goons." Unfortunately, the entire operation got approval of chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya and the CPI(M) politburo. Afraid of widespread mass reaction, the CPI(M) leaders have been trying to come up with different stories. CPI(M) MP Sitaram Yechury has said that SEZs and land acquisition had nothing to do with what happened at Nandigram. According to his version of events, 'outsiders' and 'extremists', frustrated by their inability to mobilise local support, indulged in violence against the police.
None of this corresponds to the truth. Nandigram is a traditional CPI-CPI(M) stronghold, an old area of the Tebhaga peasant struggle. The local MP is from the CPI(M), the MLA from the CPI, and most panchayat members are from the CPI(M). The only reason why this strong mass base suddenly turned against the CPI(M) was the proposed land acquisition for the planned Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be developed by Indonesian MNC Salem International. The fact is that Nandigram was becoming a focal point for resistance to SEZs and corporate land grabbing. That is why it was picked out for such brutal treatment. It had become a thorn in the side not just of the local CPI(M) leaders or the Left Front government, but of all governments right across India. In the true sense of the word, the events in Nandigram were genocide, which can be compared with the 2002 Godhra carnage in Narendra Modi's Gujrat, when at least 1000 people died. The difference is that in Gujrat the killings were the result of chauvinist attacks on the Muslim minority. Here that kind of jingoism was absent, because of the difference in politics between the CPI(M) and the BJP. The CPI(M) leaders could not use the ethnic question, but they did try to raise the spectre of so-called "extremists" or outsiders, but this failed to convince the masses. It should not be assumed, however, that the rank and file of the CPI(M), CPI, RSP, i.e. partners in the Left Front, accepted this role easily. There are grievances within the rank and file of the CPI(M) and other parliamentary left parties against this barbarous act of the leadership. In West Bengal, where they have been in power now for30 years, the rank and file of the CPI(M) and other left parties have undergone a long process of depoliticisation, but still there are echoes of opposition against this monstrous act that may be heard. In the states other than West Bengal, and where the CPI(M) is not in power, this so called "Communist" Party leadership is greatly discredited, which arouses a certain discontent within the rank and file.
Which way forward for the revolutionary left?
Nandigram has now become a symbol to the whole of India, because it finally forced chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya to announce that no agricultural land will be taken in Nandigram to build the SEZ. The peasant struggle in Singur and Nandigram started spontaneously and the struggle was in a certain sense directed against the capitalist offensive. But due to the lack of a revolutionary alternative, the rightist forces like Trinamul gained. [This is a nationalist, bourgeois with roots in Congress]. It may be surprising to some, but it is a fact that Trinamul on certain occasions at least pretended to lead the struggle. However, this is not so astonishing, when one considers that it is a regional bourgeois party and it is not so committed to the interests of Tata, like the national bourgeois party Congress-I or the BJP. Its ideology is definitely reactionary and pro-capitalist, but at the moment it is aiming to regain its prestige as an opposition force in West Bengal. In the absence of a mass revolutionary party, it can sometimes appear to sections of the struggling peasants as an alternative, but it tactfully avoids mobilisation of the people based on any anti-capitalist consciousness, and rather focuses on capturing new territories by involving people with armed clashes with CPI(M) activists. Even the BJP has tried to gain nationally from this incident by pointing to the brutality of the ‘communists'. Congress(I), as it has an alliance nationally with the CPI(M) and other constituent parties, apparently seems silent, but it is also trying to gain from the situation. Of course the contradiction between the CPI(M) and CPI on the one hand and the BJP on the other is not the same as that between two capitalist parties. What still worries the Indian big bourgeoisie is the mood within the trade unions CITU, AITUC. Although this militant mood is held back by the pro-capitalist leadership of the CPI(M), the trade union leaders are occasionally forced to mobilise against the offensive of capital. The CPI(M) is a massive force within the Indian working class and has close links to the trade union movement. Within it there are many good class fighters, but the leadership is another question. In practice they have adopted the outlook of the social democracy. They have swallowed all the propaganda of the bourgeois and see no alternative to capitalism. That is the tragedy of the situation. The presence of other left forces in Singur, Nandigram was marginal. The radical forces such as Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), a Stalinist party or the CPIML(Liberation), followers of Mao Zedong were present in the struggles in their own capacity, but unfortunately it is mostly the Trinamul Congress that gained. But this fact cannot undermine the significance of this anti-corporate struggle. In West Bengal the CPI-M and Left Front have seriously been put to the test by the events in Nandigram. Many honest rank and file members of the CPI-M will be asking themselves how this could have happened. It exposes the leaders of the party before the ranks. The problem is not one of this or that degenerate leader of the party. The problem lies in the ideology they have adopted. They have accepted in practice that socialism is no longer possible. In this they are heavily influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy. Once you have bought the idea that the only kind of development is capitalist development then you end up defending the interests of the capitalists. What has to be questioned within the ranks of the Indian communist movement is this turn of the leadership. The future of the Indian communist movement is in the hands of the millions of honest communist workers and youth. The struggles of the peasants together with the many mobilisations of the Indian working class over recent years indicate that the will to struggle is there. What is lacking is a leadership up to the task. The history of betrayals of Social Democracy is well known, as is that of the Stalinists, what is now needed is to put forward a revolutionary alternative to the masses. This is the real challenge facing genuine Marxists in India.
In his paper, Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India, Michael Levien "de-constructs and re-constructs David Harvey's concept bearing in mind the attempts of expropriation found in the Tata Motor plant project at Sigur, in the
proposed Salim Group’s petro-chemical SEZ in Nandigram, both in West Bengal, or to
Reliance’s multi-purpose SEZ outside of Mumbai or to the Korean POSCO steel
SEZ in Orissa.
He writes:
Without the means-specific distinction between economic and extra-economic expropriation, however, Harvey can only define accumulation by dispossession by its function for global capitalism: ‘What accumulation by dispossession does is release a set of assets (including labour-power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Over-accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use’ (Harvey 2003, 149). But if what constitutes ABD is its function in providing outlets for over-accumulated capital, this makes it indistinguishable from other ‘spatial fixes’and the ordinary operation of capitalist expansion that he analyses elsewhere (Harvey 2006b). The concept’s specificity and utility is undermined, as it is no longer clear what ties together the various processes that he clubs under accumulation by dispossession and what makes them distinct from ‘expanded reproduction’ (Brenner 2006, 100).
Moreover, conceiving accumulation by dispossession as a generic response to crises of over-accumulation in the global economy is far too abstract to capture the specific political–economic logics driving variations in ABD over space and time. By reading every instance of dispossession as a result of the global impulses of capital, it fails to answer the question of why impulses towards accumulation would translate into dispossession in a particular context (for example, why land expropriation rather than land purchase through the ordinary operation of real estate markets?). It elides the central role of the state in carrying out the dispossessions that Harvey enumerates and thus eclipses the important transformations of state structures that this entails. Harvey’s rendition of the concept then fails to provide analytical leverage on the politics of dispossession by missing the specificity that coercive state intervention into the accumulation process lends to anti-dispossession struggles. Finally, it does not leave space for understanding the diverse forms of accumulation that dispossession makes possible. What is needed is a precise concept of accumulation by dispossession that does not reduce it to an unfalsifiable economic claim about its role in global capitalism, and where variation in both terms (the type of accumulation and the mode of dispossession) can be empirically studied and compared, not assumed into the definition.
Consequently, I define accumulation by dispossession as the use of extra-economic coercion to expropriate means of subsistence, production or common social wealth for capital accumulation. It is the extra-economic character of accumulation by dispossession that distinguishes it from ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1976, 899) that constitutes ‘expanded reproduction’ and that forces us to consider why and with what consequences this defining characteristic of pre-capitalist surplus expropriation (Wood 1981) seems to have reached new prominence under neoliberal capitalism.
With this definition in hand, I then proceed from the opposite direction as Harvey, examining from the ground up a particular form of accumulation by dispossession, and taking as an object of investigation its role in accumulation at a particular political–economic conjuncture. In the case of rural India today, I show ABD to be a decidedly political process through which the state’s coercive power is deployed to make a key condition of production – land – available for capital in a context where increasing demand confronts the barrier to accumulation represented by smallholding peasants and incompletely capitalist rural land markets. This conjuncture under neoliberalism is giving rise to what I call a land broker state, which takes as one of its chief responsibilities the forcible transfer of agrarian land to capital for industrial, commercial and residential development.
Brenner, R., 2006. ‘What Is, and What is Not, Imperialism?’
Historical Materialism, 14 (4): 79–105
Harvey, D., 2006b. The Limits to Capital. London: Verso.
Marx, K., 1976. Capital, Volume I. New York: Vintage.
Wood, E.M., 1981. ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’.
New Left Review, 1 (127): 66–95.
A critical assessment of David Harvey's concept can be found on the:
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