When she travels to Germany, therefore, to meet potential investors, she is unlikely to come across too many industrialists who will be easily convinced by her sales pitch. Before putting any money in the state, they are likely to ask why has a state, which once was one of the foremost industrial and commercial centres in India, become an industrial wasteland.

The reason for West Bengal’s decline can be traced to the donmination of the left in the 1970s when trade union militancy led to the flight of capital. But the irony is that when the Marxist chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, decided to undo the damage by inviting the Tatas to build their first Nano factory in Singur, the firebrand Trinamool Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee, imitated the earlier communist tactics to hound the Tatas out of the state by using her talent for rabble-rousing.

There wasn’t any controversy at the time over the use of the 1894 land acquisition law, which has since been replaced by a far more stringent piece of legislation. But the verdict points to the left front government’s subterfuge during the acquisition process by maintaining that an inquiry had been held to select the plot when the government had already decided to hand over the land to the Tatas at their behest. The judgment calls the process, therefore, a “farce” and an “eyewash”.

But these were not the only blunders of the government and the company. The latter, for instance, erred in choosing the plot because of its proximity to Kolkata while ignoring its rich fertility. The Tatas also apparently believed that the ruling Left Front’s comfortable majority made their investment secure and that there was no need to take other contrary opinions into account. What they did not realize was that in a democracy, the government’s word is not always final.

The government, on its part, made the mistake of selecting a highly productive multi-crop land. Had it chosen an arid region in, say, Purulia, there might not have been the kind of protests which marked the takeover. Eager to attract a major manufacturing project after many years, the government was evidently in a hurry. Having been in power for three decades at the time, its attitude was also undoubtedly marked by hubris.

At the same time, Bhattacharjee was unable to adequately explain the rationale for industrialization presumably because of opposition from the CPI(M) hardliners who were unhappy over his bonhomie with the capitalists.

However, the difference of opinion between the two judges showed that the government and the Tatas were not quite the villains as Mamata Banerjee made them out to be. For instance, while Justice V. Gopala Gowda argued that the use of the phrase, public purpose, could not justify the acquisition “in favour of a company … on the ground that the setting up of industry would generate employment”, Justice Arun Mishra thought that this was reason enough because of the benefits which an industry would provide. It was only the lack of transparency in the acquisition process on which they agreed.

Singur was the episode which led to the new land acquisition law. But the Narendra Modi government has been trying to modify it because the corporate sector believes that its provisions make it extremely difficult to acquire land.

Even in Singur, the question can be asked whether it would have been better for the peasants to sell off the land against an adequate compensation instead of clinging to it despite being aware that its fragmentation over the years among the succeeding generations will reduce its productivity. It is this possibility which is behind the worldwide trend of peasants moving from farms to factories and from villages to towns.

It is also undeniable that narrow-minded politics rather than a broad economic vision was behind Mamata Banerjee’s agitation against the Tatas. The fallout, therefore, is that there are no winners in Singur – neither the peasants, for it will take years for the land to be productive again; nor the chief minister, for she will continue to preside over a state whose memories of past industrial glory is becoming a distant, unattainable dream; nor the communists who have paid a heavy electoral price for their ideological rigidity of the ’70s and subsequent tactical bloomers.

The rusting industrial sheds in Singur recall Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s biting castigation of West Bengal’s present condition when he compared the impressive, but empty, Kolkata airport to Fatehpur Sikri, Emperor Akbar’s abandoned capital. It is pity that after the visionary B.C. Roy, who initiated projects like the Durgapur steel plant, made the marshy Salt Lake near Kolkata habitable and set up Kalyani as an industrial centre and a satellite town, West Bengal has seen a succession of chief ministers who have presided over its industrial decline.(IPA Service)