Singur back on poll radar

Kolkata: The place is Singur, and the time is ripe “to expose betrayal”. With chief minister Mamata Banerjee busy warding off newer anti-incumbency issues (the flyover collapse being the most uncomfortable one), the focus is back to an old one for people like Ardhendu Sen.

Next Sunday, the former chief secretary will be campaigning for Congress-backed CPM candidate Rabin Deb on “Ground Zero” to highlight the “story of betrayal that began with Singur.” Sen’s sudden landing in the Bengal election arena, six years after his quiet superannuation, and that, too, as a political campaigner, has raised quite a few eyebrows. “The idea is to alert the people against a leader who has let everyone down,” was how Sen would explain his presence in the 2016 Assembly elections.

He has campaigned for CPM-backed Independent candidate Ambikesh Mahapatra, the JU professor who was arrested for circulating a picture spoof on Mamata and fellow party member Mukul Roy. Sen also walked Raidighi for CPM candidate Kanti Ganguly, whom he is especially fond of.

He had kept everyone guessing about his next choice of support. Now we know it will be Singur. Ask why and Sen will say it’s not the candidate he has chosen this time, but the place.

“The Trinamool Congress has not delivered on its promise in five years. This shows its lack of competence. The party has vacillated between court order and out-of-court settlement,” Sen said on Monday, adding “the Trinamool leaders have made statements at cross purposes. It makes no sense to vote for the party again.”

The movement against forcible land acquisition in Singur had paved the way for Mamata’s historic victory in 2011. Though a section of the Singur farmers is still behind the Trinamool, Mamata’s failure to keep the promise of returning the land acquired for the Tata Motors factory from unwilling farmers remains one of the biggest embarrassments for the ruling party. From a harbinger of change in Bengal’s barren industrial landscape, the Tata project ended up showing the state’s inadequacy and hopelessness. The Nano factory was relocated to Gujarat.

Eight years later, when Mamata is busy showing off plethora of investments in Bengal, the Left is using the unused land to call the bluff on her claims. According to actor Kaushik Sen, “the biggest mess” has been Mamata’s enactment of the law to return land to unwilling farmers. “Now it is in the court. If the court takes five years or 50 years to adjudicate we are helpless,” were Mamata’s words.

“I have recently been to Singur because I wanted to voice the pangs of the farmers who have been the first among those victimized by this government.” The “anti-Mamata” intellectual felt it would have been appropriate to organize a bigger meet in Singur, by like-minded people. “The problem is … the intellectuals are still divided on voicing their stance against the present government’s atrocities,” said the actor.

Retd Justice Ashok Ganguly, who has formed a “save democracy” or “Akranto Amra” forum against the Mamata Banerjee government, was in Singur on Sunday told TOI, “Singur is the symbol of injustice meted out by this government. The people of Bengal shouldn’t be allowed to forget Singur – the hypocrisy of behind the anti-land grab agitation led by Mamata Banerjee in 2008. Now Singur is only the land of lost opportunities in Bengal.”