"Buddha's police kill 12". This is how the headlines read yesterday (Wednesday). This is about the number of villagers shot dead by the West Bengal police in Nandigram. Of course this is not the final figure of the dead as the CPM government statistics is disputed. The Nandigram firing is not like action by any other police or by any other party. The Nandigram villagers were not allowing the government to come into their village fearing that their lands would be taken over by the state. What an anti-climax?

If the CPM is entrenched in power in the state as if perpetually, the singular reason is that it acquired agricultural lands from the exploitative zamindars with the militancy that is its brand and distributed them to the landless. The ideological anti-climax at Nandigram is that the very government which acquired the lands from the `exploiting landlords' distributed the lands in small lots is reacquiring them by force and in bulk to be handed over to `exploiting capitalists'! To those who have loved and hated the CPM, the CPM killing the villagers at Nandigram to grab their lands and shift them to corporates is something like the BJP rebuilding the demolished mosque at Ayodhya! One can understand the explosive consequence of such political U-turn.

What consequence Nandigram has in store and where it will lead West Bengal politics and the CPM there and elsewhere to are unthinkable now. But one thing seems clear. What started as government-inflicted suicides in Singur and has ended as killings by the police in Nandigram has aborted the emergence of Buddha as the Deng of Indian communism. It is bad for Bengal, may be for even India. But the fault is of the economic elites in India. It is their inability to understand the deeper implications of India as an economy and polity that terminates even desirable changes in Marxist-led Bengal.

Bengal is doubly unfortunate. Earlier it was a victim of ideological economics and today it is a victim of elitist economics. But the issue that Nandigram has thrown up is not just Bengal-specific. The days to come will unfold its full effect on the CPM and West Bengal. Nandigram may well be the waterloo of economic liberalism in West Bengal. But more, it may well be the waterloo of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) economics so vigorously promoted by all states led by parties ranging from the BJP to the CPM. This issue is assuming serious proportions. Yet even many well-informed in the country have no idea of what the SEZ means to rural India and what consequence it bring when it is mishandled in a country where land is in short supply.

The issue in SEZ as a concept is ownership and use of agricultural land belonging to the villagers and in their place. Agriculture concerns two- thirds of India's population _ part of which own the lands and the rest, though landless, are dependent on the lands for their survival. If the Indian economic elites dismiss Nandigram episode as an anecdote, just the shocked response of the people used to the hard ideology of the CPM turning soft, they will soon be in for shocks just as the CPM, with its militant cadre to defend what it does, is in today.

What is SEZ? The history of SEZs started with Spain adopting this model way back in 1929 to promote exports and it helped Spain to overcome the effect of the depression of the 1930s. Quickly captured, SEZ is a politico-economic island within, but distanced from, the mainland of a country. The IMF and the World Bank commended this concept as a global idea in 1960s. Many industrialised countries used SEZ as a tool to promote their global trade.

In recent times it is China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan that have made this idea popular. China adopted the SEZ idea from the day it decided to team with the IMF, World Bank and the US. China, which had virtually extinguished its entrepreneurial class and culture by design, was forced to reinstate business and business culture by this island-cut-off-from-the-mainland formula of SEZ. It was understandably a big success in China. That the SEZs were the only entry gates for expatriate Chinese to enter China without questions over their past and their funds at present was the special reason for their success in China.

Look at the emergence of SEZs in India. What was originally Export Processing Zones with tax exemption for promoting exports has been expanded into SEZ now. Impressed by the Chinese success in attracting annually $45 billions as FDI and distressed by our inability to attract even a tenth of it, the Commerce Minister then, Murasoli Maran, commended this model for India also. So SEZs were conceived during the NDA rule to bring in foreign investment into India and to promote exports.

The NDA tried to carve out SEZs as a tariff-free zone with liberalised industrial laws. But it did not take off as a mere government order would not achieve it. But after the `Aam Aadmi' conscious UPA came to power, the government passed a law in the year 2005 to carve out SEZs as not just a tax-shelter but as a territory almost independent of Indian laws!

The foreign trade policy announced by the UPA government on August 31, 2004 stated that "the SEZs shall be deemed to be a foreign territory"! This made the SEZs more than pieces of real estate. That the SEZs have the advantages of being in India but without the disadvantages of being part of it added hundred times to their real estate value. This value accrued not to the government or the farmer from whom the land was taken but to the Developer of the SEZs under the law. Nandigram has questioned this wholesale fraud sanctioned by law.

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, March 16, 2007