The stand taken by Mr. Harish Salve, Counsel for the Tatas in the Supreme Court, added a new twist to the ongoing tussle between the group and West Bengal Government. The petulant reaction of Mr. Kalyan Banerjee appearing for the State government, exposed only his unpreparedness and poor homework in a difficult legal battle.

For the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal, however, far more than scoring legal points was at stake. Its proud pre-election pledge of “returning their plots to unwilling landlosers, come hell or high water, has come under the scanner. The slogan itself was sounded in 2007. As 2013 draws to a close, it still remains just that — a mere slogan! Meanwhile, the party that coined it has graduated from opposition to ruling status.

“Even for the mass populism-driven, high pressure politics of our times, this outcome must be considered highly unusual in terms of political dividends,” says an observer,” a party coming to power on the basis of a pre-election pledge that remains unfulfilled…”

As expected, opinion in Singur remained divided. The mood was gloomy, but some brave souls still maintained they would “see the end of this, no matter what the cost”. This summed up the mood in the TMC camp, presumably the product of a command performance.

But there was hardly the kind of across-the-board unanimity as before. “Nearly seven years have passed, and we have got nothing — God only knows how long will this go on,” muttered one small farmer. Local media reports quoted others as saying that if the authorities renewed their compensation offer, they would not refuse it as before.

This was hardly surprising — seven years on, all that the 'reluctant' landlosers who have ended up losing both their plots and a reasonably substantive compensation package, have got for their pains, is the officially ensured weekly supply of rice at Rs 2 a kilo from the government! This is their reward for having helped the TMC win the elections in 2011. Most of the 1200 families have neither their plots, nor new jobs to fall back on, living on a day to day basis.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, along with her senior Ministers rarely finds any time to visit Singur these days, too busy with attending cultural functions or re-inaugurating old projects started by the Left front.

It needs stressing that reluctant landlosers constitute only about 10% of all landlosers, a pathetic minority locally. The majority of farmers accepted the compensation package, supporting the small car project. Work was about 85% complete when it had to be abandoned owing to violent TMC-led agitations. “ As an instance of a misguided, messed up agitation, this one really takes the cake,” says a Left TU leader.

The Tatas incidentally did not put any time frame while rekindling fresh speculation over the project at Singur. There was reason to believe that they were stalling for time, making the state government and the ruling TMC pay for a high price.

Their present stand: Singur could represent the second stage of their small car project, now that commercial production was under way at Sanand, Gujarat. However any resumption of work could take a year, maybe two. It was also contingent on a future economic recovery, if any, depending on the situation, etc etc. After all the sale of the small car had not really picked up during the ongoing downturn.

The bottom line: the Tatas have no plans to to vacate the land with or without compensation as the state government wanted them to.

They wanted to prolong the legal wrangle and shift the balance of legal debate to the main point of the contention — whether the state government took over the already requisitioned land through an invalid legislation sponsored post haste in the state Assembly, without observing due legal procedure.

In this they succeeded. The Apex court announced its intention to resume hearing on the main question some time in April 2014. This meant the TMC was denied any opportunity of claiming any kind of relief for the sullen landlosers, going into the next Lok Sabha polls. Banerjee’s efforts to bring the date forward did not succeed.

Would the new stand taken by the Tatas encourage fresh investments in West Bengal? No one thought so. The state has attracted the lowest amount of investments during the present fiscal so far, a pathetic Rs 3000-odd crore, whereas neighbouring Orissa and Jharkhand, despite facing Maoist insurgencies, each netted several times that amount.

West Bengal Chief Minister again had nothing new to say to industrialists and entrepreneurs when she met them earlier this week, apart from promising to speed up clearance and implementation of “pending projects” which remained unspecified. She also spoke of the rich man power potential and possibilities in tourism sector, urging people to invest in Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nagaland.....' It was difficult to locate the focus of her message, if any,' said one industrialist, guardedly.

A key to the gap that separates her vision from that of the investors was available in the brief interface. One industrialist complained of the lack of skilled manpower in the state, which has seen a virtual drought in investments post-Singur developments in 2007. The Chief Minister’s response: Yes, there was no unemployment problem in West Bengal, now that an “employment bank” had been set up. Investors could recruit people directly from this “bank'.

This, when the unemployment figure was the highest in the country in West Bengal! Further comments were unnecessary and no one present at the meet sought any clarification. There was no point, really. (IPA Service)