“Nandigram - 14 March”
Artist : Subhaprasanna, Courtesy : Dainik Statesman
Nandigram, a cluster of villages in East Midnapore, a district in West Bengal, India has erupted into a spontaneous peasant resistance since January 2007 against what they correctly apprehended as the West Bengal government’s intention of acquiring their land for the sake of a proposed chemical hub that the government envisaged as a Special Economic Zone. Almost immediately after a local public authority - Haldia Development Authority - issued a notice on 29th December, 2006 declaring the impending acquisition of land in Nandigram, the people of Nandigram (mostly middle to small peasants, including agricultural and other rural labourers) irrespective of whether they were Hindus or Muslims, mobilized themselves into what was obviously a people's movement against land grab. It is significant that this was a mobilization that did not depend on any political party for its initiation. The people of the village as a body, irrespective of political affiliations, decided upon a strategy of digging up the roads, bridges and all other approaches to Nandigram to prevent the police or the administration from entering the village and implementing the notified acquisition. The ruling party, in its desperate resolve to push through a policy of acquiring agricultural land for industry, retaliated though its local cadres, by killing seven villagers of Nandigram on 6th January 2007, and snapping Nandigram’s vital economic lifeline - the ferry service to Haldia. Acting upon the public declaration of a front-ranking leader of the ruling party, the local unit of the party deployed its cadres to ‘make life hell for the people of Nandigram’ by encircling the cluster of villages and subjecting it to incessant gunfire and bombarding from the nearby village of Khejuri - a stronghold of the ruling party cadres. With no sign, however, of Nandigram relenting, and with the villagers expelling the cadres of the ruling party from the precincts of the village, the district administration, with the connivance of the state administration and with disdainful disregard for human rights, launched a massive operation in which the ruling party cadres were given indulgence to severally reinforce the massive police force sent to ‘punish’ Nandigram. The cadres, who masqueraded as policemen complete with police uniform, joined the police in a massacring spree killing at least 17 people, raping several women, severely injuring about a hundred more (including children), and leaving hundreds more with minor injuries and a teargas-induced semi-blindness that has endured even today.
Though the notice of land acquisition served on Nandigram has been withdrawn by the state government in the meantime, the state-backed terror has completely shaken the villager’s confidence in the state and administration and created an enduring environment of distrust for the supporters of the ruling party who happen to be residents of the village. With the gunfire and bombing from Khejuri tapering off only very recently Nandigram is still in the grip of trauma, sleeplessness, suspicion and bitter resentment, even while life in the village is limping back to normalcy, that too with social and psychological wounds that promise to fester for long.
There is an eminent sense in which the people’s movement in Nandigram has been one against the arbitrary exercise of power by a party that has unbrokenly ruled for the last thirty years in West Bengal - a party that ironically swears by communism and calls itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Thus the movement is an assertion by the villagers of their democratic rights - rights to land, life, livelihood, human dignity, sexual inviolability, information and against assault (physical and sexual) and all kinds of human rights violation - against a virtual police (read cadres as virtual police) state.
But in a more fundamental sense, the people’s movement in Nandigram is one of the several movements in the global South against the thrust of capitalist globalization to convert farmers’ land into industrial base or real estate. Indeed the recent agitation over Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal has symbolized scathing criticism by peasants in particular and civil society in general against the way in which the ruling party, already turned near-Fascist by its long continuance in power with a gigantic cadre base that has largely appropriated the forums of civil society, has openly espoused the neoliberal agenda of promoting monopoly capital and giant corporations (national and transnational). It is not to be missed that the proposed chemical hub which Nandigram has resisted but which threatens to materialize somewhere in the fertile tracts of East Midnapore, with all the hazards of fatal environmental pollution, has been envisioned by the West Bengal government as a Special Economic Zone, with all the extra-territoriality and violation of labour standards and human rights that come with a typical SEZ.
The power of humble people ’s militant resistance has been explicated by the rural poor of Nandigram time and again. They have broken the ‘cultural silence’ defining the intelligentsia and middle classes. There are reasons why many of the critical tensions of our time have found a volcanic mouth in Nandigram which lies in the East Midnapur district of West Bengal (formerly undivided Midnapur). It has been the crucible of the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930), The Quit India Movement (1942) and the Tebhaga Movement (1946-47). Moral and physical defiance of authority signified a quintessential element in political involvement and consciousness among the people there. During the national movement, the peasant women underwent a silent revolution as resistance and repression reached new heights with the likes of Urmibala Paria and Matangini Hazra sacrificing their lives for the cause of the nation. In recent times, we once again found them shedding their prescribed sensibilities and inhibitions evoking the latent strength in female psyche and standing defiant before the neo-liberal globalising West Bengal Left Front Government carrying forward their tradition of resistance.
Organisational Reports
:: Report by Association of Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) and Paschimbanga Khet Majoor Samity (PBMKS) [ link ]
:: Medical Report by Nandigram Swastha Udyog [pdf, 132 KB]
:: Report by Teachers And Scientists Against Maldevelopment (TASAM) [pdf, 212 KB]
:: Report by Amnesty [pdf, 40 KB]
:: Report by Manthan Samayiki [pdf, 1.37 MB]
:: CRY Volunteers' Status Report on Child Rights in Violence Affected Areas of Nandigram and Khejuri [link, 196 KB]
Personal Reports
:: Report by Dr. Gautam Ghosh [pdf, 40 KB]
:: Report by Dr. Surasri Chaudhury[pdf, 20 KB]
Other Reports before 15th March, 2007
:: People’s uprising against forced land acquisition : All disquiet on the Nandigram front [pdf, 489 KB]
:: Interim Report of Citizens’ Committee on Singur and Nandigram [pdf, 40 KB]
:: Notification and Terms of Reference of the Tribunal [pdf, 92 KB]
:: Report of the Tribunal [link]
:: “The news of deaths by police firing in Nandigram this morning filled me with sense of cold horror ” — so said the Governer of West Bengal, Gopal Krishna Gandhi. Read his statement. [pdf, 28 KB]
::“ ... the terror practiced yesterday at Nandigram fills me with dread and disappointment. The illusion of exploitive power has led the ministry to govern by gun” — writes Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer to Prakash Karat on 15 March, 2007. Read his letter. [pdf, 20KB]
:: Collection of poems by Joy Goswami from his recent book &ldquo Shashoker Proti” [link]
:: Lend your ears to CPI(M), if you like. Here is a collection of articles on Nandigram and published in People’s Democracy. Get it here. [pdf, 248 KB]
:: Rejoinder to the untruths by CPIM from PBKMS. [pdf, 56 KB]
:: Nandigram : chronology of events that led to the incidents on March 14, 2007 [pdf, 224 KB]
:: Nandigram on and after 14 March, 2007 [link]
No Diwali in Nandigram
— Dipanjan Raichaudhuri, [ pdf, 28 KB ]
Behind the Present Peasant Unrest in West Bengal
This article discusses the industrialisation policy of the Left Front government in West Bengal with respect to rural reforms and democracy, and comments on how these have been negated in the recent land acquisition drive. — Partha Sarathi Banerjee and Dayabati Roy in EPW, June 2, 2007. [ pdf, 24 Kb]
Nandigram and the Question of Development
While ill-founded rumors of many kinds contributed to the build up of tension in Nandigram, there is no question that the people of the area had genuine fears of what industrialisation and displacement held out for them if a special economic zone was established in the area. These concerns have taken a new dimension in the context of the countrywide agrarian crisis which has had an impact on West Bengal as well. — Malini Bhattyacharya in EPW, 26 May, 2007. [ pdf, 24 KB]
In the Aftermath of Nandigram
Tragedies like Nandigram are inherent in the operation of a neoliberal policy regime. These tragedies are being debated as a conflict between the needs of industrialisation and peasantry, as if the corporate nature of the industrialisation did not matter. Nandigram should make us look beyond scapegoats at the process of “accumulation through encroachment”, which has neoliberalism has unleashed in the country. — Prabhat Patnaik in EPW, 26 May, 2007. [ pdf, 24 KB]
Reports etc.
- Full Text of the Judgment of Calcutta High Court on Nandigram Massacre [ pdf, 529 KB ]
- “Nandigram : Peasants’ Demands for Democratic Rights and Political Choice” — Report of an Independent Citizens’ Team of Concerned Citizens from Kolkata [ pdf, 104 KB]
Statements
- Statement by the Governor of West Bengal on 9 November, 2007 [ pdf, 32 KB ]
- Statement from Sumit Sarkar and other concerned citizens on the shameful events at Nandigram [ pdf, 12 KB ]
- Chomsky et al call for left unity. [ link from The Hindu] Susan George withdraws her signature from the statement.
- Response to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn et al on Nandigram — Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Sumit Sarkar and others [ pdf, 36 KB ]
Silent Protest March — 14 November, Kolkata. (more in archive)
In Solidarity. Rome, 2 december, 2007. [Courtesy : Piotr Pagliani]
Articles
- The Doctors have no right to opine on the occurrence or otherwise of rape — Sujato Bhadra [ link ]
- Nandigram : Another Symbol of Challenge to Democracy in India — Arun Kumar (courtesy Mainstream) [ pdf, 64 KB]
- Sing along, or else — The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police — Bhaswati Chakravorty (courtesy The Telegraph, published on 13th November, 2007) [ pdf, 36 KB ]
- Suman Mukhopadhyay's eyewitness account of what happened in the peaceful rally of intellectuals in front of Nandan on 11 November, 2007 (courtesy Anandabazar Patrika, published on 13 November, 2007) [ pdf, Bengali, 48 KB ]
- The split in civil society and Chomsky letter — Dipanjan Raichaudhuri [ pdf, 20 KB ]
Other Stuff
- Buddhaspeak : “Our People Their People ” — Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s controversial statements on 13th and 14th November, 2007 [ pdf, 32 KB ]
