The Heart Of The Matter

The heart of the matter: Deeper asymmetries to be cured By: Procyon Mukherjee Zurich 20th May 2009 The recent debacle of the Left, particularly in West Bengal, should never be looked at from a political stand point and judged by the underpinnings of strategy against available options that were orchestrated from the center of the organization; that could be just a small part of the many reasons that could be tabled for scrutiny. Not much effort has been put in so far, apart from an etiolated attempt to defend moral positions, to question the very root cause of the shift of support base in the deep roads of rural Bengal, where three decades ago a process was initiated that provided the seeds for the emboldening of a polity that almost made elections a matter of a foregone conclusion, until it all changed in the recent case. The ubiquitous nature of the defeat cannot be left to the vagaries of high level analysis that some have put forth, most of which is directed to the fringes of the puzzle, not the root, as defenses have shirked to define the puzzle itself. The puzzle as I define is: Did the rural poor feel at the end of three decades that land reforms, which provided a deep restraint to the continuity of poverty, make a lasting contribution to the continuity of employment creation and wealth in turn, for the masses of rural Bengal? If the answer to this puzzling question is that the reform process, although providing a discontinuity to poverty, had actually hit a wall at the end of three decades as neither more land is being made available to the rising numbers in the rural heartland, and being done with semblance of judicious equity as before, nor is there a transparent process created for the polity to deal with the issue of industrialization where arable surplus would need to be deployed for gainful employment for industry, then we hit the right chord to set the debate in motion. The pace of reforms slowed on one hand and the limited benefits of livelihood sustained by the process was inadequate to temper the effects of involuntary unemployment in the rural poor. The deeper endemic nature of the problem leads one to look at the iniquitous nature of land dealings for the sake of industrialization, the issue of preferential access to land creating an asymmetry on both sides in terms of gains to be shared; the gains of the Industry participant far dwarfed the gains of the landless and this inequity pervaded all through the series of deals that eclipsed in Nandigram and finally in Singur. The meek response of the party to settle the disputes leaves a lot to be desired and the failure to create a polity that would be able to deal with the crisis in good time points to the inability of the leadership to create alliances that go beyond the needs of politics. Land reforms by itself is never an end in itself to quench the needs of poverty alleviation, the process is just a beginning, a very unavoidable beginning, but never an end in itself. With distribution of land, the landless labor starts to breathe but that is never sufficient unless the programs that are needed to sustain the process of generating surplus value

from land can be made effective. It was put in place and it served the needs for almost two decades, but in absence of parallel diversification of agriculture and creating conditions of industrialization of agriculture that balances the need of creating productivity growth in agriculture, the process had its own short-comings. The world had learnt to move expeditiously to the process of industrialization after agriculture provided the natural fillip to the issue of degenerative employment in pre-reform era in agriculture. In simple terms by distributing land, the land remained to be far less for an individual to get access to credit that would have improved the productivity of the produce and thus provide a surplus value. On the contrary, the Panchayats, that were created to provide the support to these activities, turned out to be ‘reform centers of distribution of the little surplus’ that the reforms created and not the centers of initiation of programs that could build the case for productivity growth, without which it is impossible to generate any surplus after discounting all costs. I have not seen efforts to either reduce transaction costs, or distribution costs, or efforts to diversify to move up the value chain in a systematic manner through planned investments. In absence of these three processes, reforms is bound to hit a wall and the growing need of employment generation to be quenched outside of the prospects of land became quite imminent towards the end of the late eighties. The period of the late eighties to the late nineties was the lost decade of opportunities where almost every state made rapid strides towards industrialization as the liberalization process was set in the early nineties and the process of globalization was also concurrent. The ‘resurgence’ story, although it began in the early part of the current decade, lacked any ammunition as the work culture in the bulk of the government offices kept on declining. The government therefore lacked credibility apart from the verbal prowess of some of the self chosen advertisers for the cause; it never touched the fancy of the industrialists, both domestic and foreign. There is otherwise little reason how Chennai became the centre of auto ancillary industry and auto industry, Hyderabad and Bangalore the center for knowledge industry and the whole of Gujarat the chemical hub for India, to name a few. Foreign direct investment in India although meager, never touched the shores of Bengal. Do we remember the names of any of our Bengal Industry ministers before the current one? Did they venture outside their turfs to scout for opportunity to bring in investments into the state? Did they create alliances with the industrialists of the state? This was entirely left to the Chief Minister, and he perhaps missed to apply the much needed perspicacity to this duty entrusted on him. The land reforms programs and its success put too much on display than what it deserved and the shift in focus needed was only too late and when it happened it was orchestrated as a divisive agenda than a concerted one. The denouements of land acquisition for industrialization and the process of redressing of the disputes needed a far more disciplined approach than that what was meted out with a customary mix of ineptness that varied between arrogance and ignorance.

In fact the center of gravity had already shifted. The rising prospects of land acquisition for the booming housing market provided other more lucrative opportunities for the many in the ranks of power and were never lost sight of. This shift of focus from rural to urban land and prospects of wealth creation in the short-term is a reflection of the new face of the party, which no one wanted to confront. This was the greatest remiss and this provided the most crushing defeat to all lofty ideals that the two successive generations fought to create and stand for. The political strategies would undergo changes, but the basics have now changed. The power center had now shifted to the urban quasi-elite, who have little moral difference in their dealings with day to day problems with the more rightists in the state. This is not the Left that people have known them for. The masquerading charlatans were exposed, rightfully so. The people punished them for the time being till they understood the need for resurrection. Let us hope they do. 20th May ‘09 Zurich