When the tiger is close upon you, and you can feel its hot breath in your face and see the jaws open and the teeth gleam, reality has a way of breaking through the wordspell. Not all Mr. Zakaria's eloquence could have convinced Singur's residents of the benefits of "liberalization when their lands and livelihoods were the sacrifices demanded. They rose in revolt against the expropriation of their land. The government fought back, using state police and thugs who had long formed the muscle power of the party cadres. A teenage girl, Tapasi Malik, who had been in the forefront of her people's struggle for land preservation, paid a horrific price. She was raped, apparently by a gang, murdered, and her body burnt and thrown in the fields. Others who lost their land committed suicide, acts that the government refused to acknowledge as having anything to do with the forcible dispossession of land when it acknowledged them at all.
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The CPI(M)'s political rivals, the Congress included, were not slow to take advantage of the situation. Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamul Congress, who had long languished in the political wilderness, being the only member of her party to win a parliamentary seat from West Bengal , swiftly cast herself and her party as the new champions of the toiling masses the very people who had been the Left's staunchest supporters. Banerjee also formed a politically convenient alliance with the Congress. The high-handed attempts of the CPI(M) to suppress the popular resistance created a gap into which the TMC quickly and gleefully stepped. The resistance continued for so long that the Tatas were finally compelled to announce that they were withdrawing from Singur, but by then the seeds of distrust in the Left had already been sown in the popular psyche and they would bear swifter and bloodier fruit in the next town to be mauled by the Left's new found capitalist sympathies Nandigram.
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The Defeat of the Left: Nandigram
With Singur, it had been a car factory; in Nandigram, the Left Front wished to set up a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) * for the Salim group of Indonesia , which had first risen to prominence during the murderous U.S.-supported dictatorship of Suharto, and which maintains close ties with the Suharto family. Here again the government attempted to dispossess the farmers to make way for the "free trade savior, but the residents of Nandigram, like those in Singur, proved curiously disinclined to assist in their own salvation perhaps because they did not see it as such. Moreover, they had been alerted by what had happened in Singur and were better prepared to resist. They dug up roads, formed a committee, the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (Land Expropriation Resistance Committee) or BUPC and blockaded their village, refusing access to outsiders.
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This time the government, finding that persuasion was vain, unleashed a series of brutal state terror campaigns 4 . Throughout 2008, on several occasions, government-sponsored death squads, including police, descended on Nandigram and went on a spree of vicious beatings, rapes, lootings, arson and murders. Police refused to register the victims' complaints and the government hospitals refused to provide needed medical care for the injured. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the abuses and subsequent government indifference 5 . More than a hundred people had died and Nandigram had become a national flashpoint for workers' rights when the government finally decided to move its SEZ elsewhere. It left behind a people bereaved, traumatized and a general distrust and seething anger in large sections of the poorest citizens, who had thought of the Left as at least having some concern, however inadequate, for their well-being. Now that faith lay irrevocably shattered.
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The Defeat of the Left: The Muslim Angle
Other reasons also contributed to popular disaffection with the Left, though none of them had to do with some newfound enthusiasm for "free trade. One such incident was the Rizwan Noor case, where Noor, a young Muslim man, was allegedly murdered while in police custody for having a relationship with the daughter of a wealthy Hindu family. Many strongly suspected that government collusion in the cover-up of any investigation into Noor's death, causing widespread resentment among Muslims, who had earlier been largely supportive of the Left because of the latter's secular credentials. The second such blow to the image of the Left fell when the Sachar Committee released its report. The committee found that even though one in four of West Bengal 's population was Muslim, they made up only 4.7% of the nation's workforce. Not unnaturally, many Muslims began to rethink their support for the Left.
Left, Right, Left: The Struggle Continues
At the time of writing, the resistance of West Bengal 's poor against the unholy alliance of big business and a government that calls itself communist still continues apace. The tribal populations of Lalgarh 6 (the name, tellingly, means "Red Fortress ) now face similar dispossession from their land in order to make way for a steel plant, to be built on another such "liberalized SEZ. The tribals, understandably unwilling to buy into this definition of "liberalization' that threatens to deprive them of their livelihoods and reduce them to a sort of economic slavery, have put up a spirited fight to retain possession of their land. This response has resulted in the usual repression by a government determined not to tolerate stubborn citizens who refuse to participate in their own destitution, who see through the spin and will not be deluded. Zen the tiger, if you can; if you can't, send in the militia.
Beyond West Bengal
Although this article has focused mostly on West Bengal , for reasons that I have already explained, the defeat of the Left Front and the victory of the Congress at the Center do not constitute, by any means, a popular mandate for "free trade. As the respected economist Venkatesh Athreya has pointed out, a host of factors, both local and national, have brought about the Congress victory 7 . What has been conspicuously absent is the very thing Mr. Zakaria claims to be largely responsible for the Left's defeat: a public expression of support for big business and its concomitant policies of forced expropriation of land, suppression of dissent by violence, and intended suspension of human rights and environmental protections. On the contrary, the people have rejected strongly the hypocrisy of a Janus-faced party that calls itself "Left, and "Communist, yet aligns itself with powerful capitalists against its own constituents.
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Mr. Zakaria's analysis Zens the tiger. It perpetuates the lie that the economic hardships we now face are temporary, that though slumps may come, they are merely interruptions in a larger narrative of shared prosperity, that capitalism is inherently a sound system needing no outside control. Myths like this are very comforting, especially in a time of crisis, when people cling all the harder to the ideological absolutes in which they have been taught to put their trust. But tigers are not vegetarian; they are not Buddhists; they are not naturally inclined to pacifism. Not very comforting. Not very reassuring.
But the truth.
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