:: Nitish Sengupta

How Nano crisis grew: All sides made mistakes

Nitish Sengupta

Nearly every party in the Singur dispute has made serious mistakes — the Trinamul Congress, the West Bengal government, Tata Motors and the Union government. The result is that a well thought out project with high potential has become almost a non-starter. The Trinamul Congress, with its honourable intention of protecting the interests of local farmers, started off well and managed to get a lot of political support from rural Bengal. But then, as the Nano factory was nearing completion, Trinamul Congress’ intimidatory tactics began. The West Bengal authorities should not, in the first place, have gone to Singur — lying in a prosperous agricultural belt and a stronghold of the Trinamul Congress — without considering alternatives near Kharagpur or Durgapur, where many suitable locations could easily have been identified.

The state’s ruling party, the CPI(M), also made a bad miscalculation by underestimating the Trinamul Congress’ capacity to sustain a prolonged agitation, and it overestimated the ability of its own cadre to browbeat all opposition. The CPI(M)’s public relations efforts were a miserable failure.

The Tatas’ mistake was to put too much faith in West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and to depend only on him to provide them with easy possession of land on favourable terms, and to sort out all political problems. They should have entered into direct negotiations with the farmers, tried to understand their problems with empathy and offered them some carrots: perhaps, a higher price and employment for at least one member of each affected family. They misread the political situation in West Bengal; failed to note the spectacular gains which the Trinamul Congress had made in the panchayat elections and how its sights were set on the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. With its success in Nandigram, Trinamul Congress’ gameplan was clear: continue to champion the interests of farmers to further political prospects. In that scheme of things, the Nano plant at Singur was of secondary importance.

The CPI(M), on the other hand, was complacent due to its overwhelming strength in the Assembly (235 MLAs to the Trinamul’s 30) and its over-reliance on the party cadre.

The Centre, for its part, tried to maintain a position of strict neutrality. It failed to appreciate its role in a situation like this — where the future of India’s automobile industry was at stake. It could have easily played umpire in this dispute, a role that the governor of the state eventually filled.

Tata Motors should not have gone so far ahead in construction before critical land acquisition issues were settled. And it adopted a surprisingly passive posture in the entire dispute. Whatever happened to the Tatas’ century-old expertise in public relations management and long experience in negotiations and dispute settlement? Why did Tata Motors not take charge of the situation, instead of depending entirely on the state government which had its own political compulsions? It did write one letter to Mamata Banerjee, which unfortunately got leaked to the press, driving the CPI(M) leadership to put pressure on Tata Motors to stick to its stand that it could not release any land.

With the October deadline for Nano’s rollout looming close, and with some enthusiastic agitators — whom the Trinamul Congress disowned — assaulting and threatening workers, leading to work being suspended for days on end, with no early end to the demonstrations in sight, Tata Motors did the only thing it could: announcing suspension of work in the Singur plant and relocation of the work on Nano. This was the inevitable result of follies on all sides in this sordid battle of power and prestige.

In the process, not only has West Bengal lost out, the country too has lost a great opportunity. The political parties concerned will have to pay a heavy price: the people will blame them all. One is reminded of a statement by Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the Chinese blamed him, "Those of us who are pulling a string from opposite sides must take care not to pull so hard that it snaps."

Eventually it remained for West Bengal’s governor, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, to create history by calling both parties together to hammer out a settlement. He showed an initiative unprecedented in India’s history and demonstrated rare political skill and patience. An agreement was signed late on Sunday, September 7, between the West Bengal government and the Trinamul Congress, promising an end to a long dispute and resumption of work on the Nano project in Singur.

However, before the ink was even dry, some new issues had arisen, threatening to rock the agreement. The Tatas could have been invited by the state government to be a party to the agreement, but unfortunately this was not done.

Tata Motors has reiterated that the land earmarked for ancillary units was an inseparable part of the main Nano project, and if these ancillary units have to be located far from the mother plant, the economics of the Rs 1 lakh car project would get affected.

The Trinamul Congress and its supporters insist, however, that the maximum portion of land to be given back to the farmers who did not take compensation must be given from the project site itself. This issue threatens to flare up into a new controversy. With any luck, this might be resolved amicably through negotiations. But this time, the Tatas should be included in the consultations and made a party to any agreement.

Dr Nitish Sengupta, an academic and an author, is a former Member of Parliament and a former secretary to the Government of India