Its past sins visit its present predicaments?
Now, Mr.Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee tells, as he did to the NDTV, that there is a generational change, village youths don’t want to engage in agriculture and they want non-agri jobs. That can be created, as the CM said only through rapid industrialisation. Now, Rs.25,000 crore worth of investments are lined up, he says. We welcome the mind change on the part of the CM and his team.
But you can’t wish away your past sins, can you! You still worship Stalin, his pictures adorn your offices, in Kolkatta and New Delhi and it is the “Stalinist collectivisation” model that ruined the rural Bengal. The result is the present emotional crisis for the many stakeholders, including the government which now wants to acquire land on a big scale for industrialisation. Even to sustain agriculture, we need modern industry and infrastructure! CPM in West Bengal is caught in its own contradictions. Till yesterday, they spoke one thing. Today, they fall in line! There is still in India a cynical glamour about Communism!
So, let not everyone who sheds crocodile tears for the affected farmers, pretend to be unaware of the need for land acquisition for industrial development purposes! Land acquisition through due process of law in the public interest is recognised for long. It is also now like that. Also, don’t also pretend, as” economic reformers”(another political class of pretenders in Delhi!) do, that free market forces won’t deliver here! No capitalist will do justice to affected farmers, as only an elected democratic government, sensitive to the issues on the ground level, has to sort out issues. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has to go through the process of “hell” if it is a hell! All the more important he stands up and face the many challenges. Let W.Bengal prosper through industrialisation! The world of globalisation was an illusion to the comrades! Even the visiting Nobel Laureaute economist, Joseph Stiglitz, an expert who had advised the US government, says “there is lot things about globalisation we have to guard against, governments have to intervene, the very growth process has to be more people participating in it, in the growth process”.
These are very timely words, of warning and positive encouragements, for India is in economic reforms. But the urban, white collared, pant and belted “comrades” who make up the Communist party elite command an urban, though dwindling following to imagine about a so-called alternative economic growth path. It is the great illusion. The Communists are obstructing the Central government all these years to go for radical changes that would justify the needed high growth. Because of their surprise win in the last elections, the Congress has to humour them with all illusions of camaraderie! At least now, can we hope the comrades would shed their self-delusion somewhat so that there is at least progress in W.Bengal?
And they exploit the poor and the ignorant with their own twisted jargon! And that is how West Bengal missed the industrialisation “bus”! Because it is CPM government, every other party paralysed by the CPM near monopoly of power ,are now bracing up for some piece of action! Trinamool is okey! Congress? It eyes a chance! So too BJP, with Advani jumping into the fray. Even V.P.Singh wants to have a say! So, the CPM government difficulties make full page news in all English language national dailies!
The West Bengal government is caught in the web of its own development self-delusion, a political maya of sorts till yesterday! For what it is doing now and what it has failed to do all these years. Who said agriculture alone is good enough? It is the very same CPM under the more venerable but dogmatic Jyoti Basu which went for the more extremist politics of farm reforms in the name of making share croppers owners of the lands they cultivated. This is a myth the CPM perpetuated all along. Only when it realised under the change of leadership, under the more pragmatic Buddha, as he is affectionately called, things started changing for the better.
Buddha, faced with the multiple problems of growing unemployment, the spread of education giving rise to more educated youth and also with the IT revolution happening in other states, the CM realised that the development strategy has to change. Rather change with the international trends. In a more ironic twist, the CM realised it is the capitalist path, the private sector taking the lead there was hope for the state to take to industrialisation in a big way.