As popular opposition mounted, the government imposed Section 144, which prevented more than four people from moving together in Singur. When 15,000 unarmed people demonstrated on December 2, over 20,000 police and para-military forces met them with lathis (long batons), rubber bullets and tear gas. This overwhelming show of force made it possible for the Tatas to start erecting a wall along the boundary of the land grabbed by the West Bengal police on their behalf.
The CPM and the West Bengal government believed that the events at Singur would demonstrate the futility of resistance to other planned SEZs in the state. The peasants of Nandigram, on the other hand, drew very different lessons from Singur.
Nandigram Erupts
Nandigram is a block of 38 villages located in a coastal area of East Medinipur district, 150 kilometers southwest of Kolkata. Most of the villages here have no electricity. The 440,000 villagers living in Nandigram are mainly lower-caste Hindus and Muslims. The people of Nandigram are small farmers, garment workers, laborers, fisherfolk and shop owners. They have a proud history of struggle, going back to the anti-British Quit India Movement in 1942 when they liberated the area and set up their own government for 17 months.
On December 28, 2006, the CPM representative for the Nandigram area announced that 14,000 acres of land would be acquired for a “mega chemical hub” and a ship building center. One of the investors was to be Dow Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide, a company responsible for 5,000 deaths in Bhopal, India in 1984. The developer chosen by the CPM was, ironically, the Salim group of Indonesia, whose founder was a close supporter of the Suharto military dictatorship that came to power in 1965 after massacring over one million members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia.
This SEZ would have displaced 95,000 people in Nandigram. A total of 130 schools, 112 temples, 42 mosques were to be razed. Thousands of people organized themselves under the banner of Bhumi Uchhed Protirodh Committee (Committee against Eviction from the Land). The BUPC included representatives from Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, various leftist groups, the TMC (a right-wing opposition political party) and even some local CPM cadres who were opposed to giving up their land.
On January 3, as over 3,000 villagers gathered at a meeting to discuss the land acquisition, police opened fire, wounding four people. The peasants retaliated, beating up a number of policemen and torching a police van. The peasants knew that more police would be coming, so they worked through the night barricading the roads to prevent the entry of police jeeps. For the next few days, the villagers came under attack from CPM cadres from nearby Khejuri and harmads (goons) hired by the CPM. After three members of the BUPC were murdered, the people’s resistance stiffened. Several attackers were killed and the offices of the CPM were destroyed. On January 7, the people succeeded in driving the CPM cadres and harmads out of Nandigram.
From early January until March 13, Nandigram was in the hands of the people themselves. They formed resistance groups to protect themselves from the police and the armed CPM cadres. This situation was unacceptable to the Left Front government, particularly its Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. In mid-March, the state and local authorities planned a massive military operation to take back Nandigram. The force consisted of Eastern Frontier Rifles, Central Reserve Battalions and more than 20,000 police armed with tear gas and high-powered weapons.
A massacre ensued on March 14, 2007 in Nandigram. 10,000 unarmed villagers underestimated the ferocity with which they would be attacked. The first line of women– Hindus who were praying to a goddess to save their homes, and Muslims who were reading from the Quran–were fired at without warning with tear gas and live ammunition. The initial attack of the paramilitary and police forces was followed by CPM cadres dressed in police uniforms, who proceeded to brutalize the villagers and rape dozens of women. Leaders and members of the BUPC were particular targets. Afterwards, the authorities claimed that 14 villagers were killed on March 14th, but eyewitnesses saw many more bodies of people being dragged onto trucks and driven away for secret burials.
In the CPM’s version of these events, “the mob started hurling bombs followed by opening of fire…. Ultimately the police had to open fire in self-defense causing dispersal of the mob…. However, a number of people were injured in the police firing and it is believed that some of the agitators were also injured by the bombs they were hurling.” (from Bhattacharjee’s speech at the West Bengal Assembly on March 15th) In contrast, even the Central Bureau of Investigation team sent by the High Court in Kolkata concluded that the police firing was “unprovoked.”
