Nandigram and Beyond

If Singur in Hooghly was the first flashpoint, Nandigram was the second, where Bengal’s peasants resisted eviction from their lands. They fought for their right to their land, faced wide-spread torture and rape at the hands of the ruling party’s goons. Finally, Nandigram has been ‘recaptured’ by the ruling party, or so it seems for the time being, by evicting the peasants at gunpoint with the state machinery allowing the marauders a free run. But Nandigram is just one of the cases where globalised corporate capital is swooping down on the fertile holdings of peasants inside Bengal and also outside it. The SEZs are coming up in right earnest. The leftist government of the state, led by its chief minister, is forcibly acquiring lands from peasants in the name of industrial development. Here some historians, experts, activists and intellectuals have expressed their views on the goings-on in the state.