Rural Politics in India : Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal 9781107503984, 9781107042353

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Rural Politics in India Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal

Dayabati Roy

Cambridge House, 4381/4 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi 110002, India Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042353 © Dayabati Roy 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raya, Dayabati. Rural politics in India : political stratification and governance in West Bengal / Dayabati Roy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the everyday politics of rural India and tries to validate the analytical frameworks available for studying the social and political phenomena”-Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-107-04235-3 (hardback) 1. West Bengal (India)--Politics and government. 2. Rural development--India--West Bengal. I. Title. JQ379.5.A58R39 2013 320.8’4095414--dc23 2013010247 ISBN 978-1-107-04235-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Tables

v

List of Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

1. Introduction

01

2. Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal

27

3. Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal

51

4. Seeing the State and Governance in the Grassroots

74

5. Party and Politics at the Margin

107

6. A Narrative of Peasant Resistance: Land, Party and the State

156

7. Caste and Power in Rural Context

193

8. Women and Caste: In Struggle and in Governance

216

9. Conclusion: A New Kind of Peasant Mobilization?

235

Glossary

255

References

259

Index

269

List of Tables

2.1 Pattern of Landholding Distribution According to Size Class (1961–81)

29

2.2 Pattern of Landholding Distribution According to Size Class (1985–96)

30

2.3 Rate of Growth of Foodgrain Production (1950–95)

31

2.4 Percentage of SCs–STs among the Pattadars and Bargadars

38

2.5 Percentage of Gram Panchayat Seats According to Landholding Size Class

41

2.6 Percentage of Women and SCs–STs among Total Gram Panchayat Seats

41

2.7 Percentage of Gram Panchayats with Women and SCs–STs Pradhans

42

2.8 Number and Percentage of Gram Panchayat Seats Won Uncontested

45

3.1 Distribution of Households According to Social Groups

56

3.2 Distribution of Households According to Different Landholding Class (caste and religion wise)

57

3.3 Percentage of Households Belonging to Different Social Groups in Each Landholding Size Class

58

3.4 Average Village Agricultural Land in the Hands of Different Social Groups

58

3.5 Distribution and Percentage of Households as Per Landholding Size Classes in Different Social Groups

59

3.6 Distribution and Percentage of Households in Each Social Group According to their Primary Occupation

60

vi  |  List of Tables

3.7 Distribution of Households in Each Social Group According to their Secondary Occupation

60

3.8 Distribution of Households According to Different Castes

68

3.9 Distribution of Households According to Different Landholding Classes (caste wise)

69

3.10 Percentage of Households in Different Landholding Classes (caste wise)

69

3.11 Average Village Agricultural Landholding in the Hands of Different Social Groups

70

3.12 Caste-wise Distribution and Percentage of Households (land size wise)

70

3.13 Caste-wise Distribution and Percentage of Sharecroppers

71

List of Abbreviations

ABPTA AIKS APL BDO BJP BPL CPI CPI(M) DM DVC DYFI EAA FB GC GoWB ha HYV ICDS IRDP JDP km LRA MLA MTA NGOs NREGA NREP NSSO OBC PRIs RSP

All Bengal Primary Teachers Association All India Krishak Sabha Above the Poverty Line Block Development Office Bharatiya Janata Party Below the Poverty Line Communist Party of India Communist Party of India (Marxist) District Magistrate Damodar Valley Corporation Democratic Youth Federation of India Estate Acquisition Act Forward Block General Caste Government of West Bengal Hectare High-yielding Variety Integrated Child Development Scheme Integrated Rural Development Programme Jharkhand Disam Party Kilometres Land Reform Act Member of Legislative Assembly Mother–Teacher Association Non-governmental Organizations National Rural Employment Guarantee Act National Rural Employment Programme National Sample Survey Office Other Backward Castes Panchayati Raj Institutions Revolutionary Socialist Party

viii  |  List of Abbreviations

SALC SC SCP SDP SEZs SHG SIPRD SSA ST STWs SUCI TMC TSP UC UEE VDC VEC WEMs WIDER

Save Agricultural Land Committee Scheduled Caste Special Component Programme State Domestic Product Special Economic Zones Self Help Group State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development Sarva Siksha Abhiyan Scheduled Tribe Shallow Tube Wells Socialist Unity Centre of India Trinamul Congress Tribal Sub-plan Utilization Certificate Universal Elementary Education Village Development Committee Village Education Committee Water-extracting Machines World Institute for Development of Economics and Research

Acknowledgements

A keen interest in the changing contours of the rural society of West Bengal during the last couple of decades led me to pursue this research project. To Prof. Partha Chatterjee, I owe my academic debts; I am extremely grateful to him for intellectual inspiration and for taking out time to discuss and shape my research questions. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Prof. Gautam Bhadra, Prof. Manabi Majumdar, late Dr Anjan Ghosh and Partha Sarathi Banerjee for their useful suggestions and comments at the preparatory stage of my research. The intellectual motivation of Prof. Manabi Majumdar has enabled me to continue this research with great enthusiasm. She has meticulously gone through various drafts of the manuscript and always insisted on lucidity and clarity; I am indebted to her for her critical comments. My deep gratitude and thanks to Dr Surajit C. Mukhopadhyay who encouraged me to be mindful of alternative perspectives and instilled a rigour that helped me to develop a balanced approach to issues. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and suggestions on the initial draft of my manuscript and Prof. Pradip Kumar Dutta, Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Dr Ravinder Kaur and Dr Peter B. Andersen for providing valuable feedback. The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) was kind enough to grant me the ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship and the faculty members of the CSSSC and the Department of Sociology, the University of Burdwan provided insightful comments at my seminar presentations in these two institutions. Many thanks to the Department of International Development Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark for awarding me the Guest PhD Fellowship and enabling me to exchange my ideas and research findings with the faculty and students. My heartfelt thanks to Prof. Pamela Price and Prof. Arild E. Ruud of the University of Oslo, Norway for inviting me to present my research papers in an International Workshop and in an International Conference, held in Oslo and Trondheim, respectively. The postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark helped me complete

Acknowledgements  |  x

major revisions to this manuscript. The Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI) of the University of Copenhagen was generous enough to grant me a travel fund to revisit my field site in 2010 for preparing my manuscript. The editorial team of the Cambridge University Press was prompt and professional in their support to the publication process. Many friends and colleagues supported me and provided critical advice at different stages of research. I am indebted to Partha Sarathi Banerjee for his generous help in several ways to write this book. My parents, Krishna Roy and Biman Behari Roy, were the continuous source of inspiration and encouragement that has enabled me to complete this book. Above all, I express my deep sense of gratitude to those individuals who speak through the pages of this book in their own voices. They are not just the subjects of my observation but the ones who have shaped my understanding of rural India, through their wit and wisdom, generously giving me their time on numerous occasions.

1 Introduction

T

he Indian village is changing. During its long journey through the colonial and post-colonial periods, almost nothing has remained the same in the village society of India. In 1975, the pioneer anthropologist of India, Srinivas, observed profound changes taking place in Rampura when he revisited the village after a gap of 20 years. Further, he commented that ‘It looks as though the day was not far off when Rampura would be a dormitory of Mysore’ (Srinivas, 1976: 233).1 In recent times, things have changed in such a fashion that one Indian scholar argues that the Indian village is vanishing; that it ‘is shrinking as sociological reality, though it still exists as space’ (Gupta, 2005a). The changes in the village society in West Bengal, a state of India, have probably been more spectacular in the Indian context, particularly during the last three decades. During this period, as a scholar says, ‘rural West Bengal has been subjected to extensive governmental intervention in the form of land reforms and democratic decentralization’ (Bhattacharyya, 2009: 59). A section of social science researchers, both from India and across the globe, have taken keen interest in studying different aspects of these changes in rural West Bengal. The specificities of West Bengal that have been mainly addressed in these contemporary researches are the roles and impacts of the deeply entrenched Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and organized party machineries in the countryside and the effects of various land reform measures on the agrarian structure of the state (Bhattacharya, 1998; Bhattacharya, 2002; Lieten, 2003; Rogaly et al., 1999; Webster, 1992). Mallick’s (2003) work is also notable here as it tries to reveal the specificity of the ‘communist’ government of West Bengal in terms of its redistributive development reforms. The unusual stability of the Left Front rule in the state for more than three 1. Srinivas had studied Rampura village of Mysore province (presently Karnataka) for the first time during the period 1948–52 and wrote his famous ethnographical account, ‘The Social System of a Mysore Village’ (Srinivas, 1955).

2  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

decades has also impelled the social scientists to carry out studies on various issues like local governments and politics in West Bengal. A major study2 conducted in West Bengal during 2003–06 could be a case in point (Bardhan et al., 2009; Bhattacharyya, 2009; Dasgupta, 2009; Majumdar, 2009). Moreover, the traditional social institutions like caste and religion, and particularly their relationship with the modern state and organized political parties, have been other aspects of focus in these contemporary scholarly works. But these aspects so far appear to be a relatively under-researched area which has posed, surely, an interesting problematic that researchers should address with greater emphasis. Changes in the village society have several dimensions. While economically it might appear, with growing agrarian crisis, that ‘the villager is as bloodless as the rural economy is lifeless’ (Gupta 2005a: 757), one could hardly agree with Gupta (2005a) that the village is shrinking as a sociological reality. In West Bengal, perhaps the most significant changes in the rural areas are appearing in the sociological field where traditional communities are confronting the modern state institutions and organized political forces in multifarious ways, and in the process, both are undergoing certain changes. To quote Chatterjee (1997: 84): It does appear that while a process of differentiation within the peasantry, the spread of organized political agitations on class questions and electoral mobilization have together tended to erode and perhaps break down the bases of any earlier notion of the community consisting of an entire village, this is often replaced by the idea of a truncated or fragmented community, comprising perhaps a strata of the peasantry or of a caste, but possessing many of the ideological characteristics of collective solidarity and identity of a community.

It seems that while traditional community could not resist transformation under the impact of modern state and state-led politics, it is not disintegrating altogether; rather, the communities are reconfiguring themselves vis-à-vis the all-pervasive modern state and state-led politics. The essential dynamics underlying rural changes probably lie in the strategy of the modern state and state-led politics to intervene and change the 2. I am referring to the major study conducted in West Bengal during 2003–06 by Bardhan, Mitra, Mookherjee, Sarkar, Bhattacharyya, Dasgupta and Majumdar to examine the factors underlying the unusual stability of political power in rural West Bengal. The study is conducted on the basis of large quantitative sample survey across all districts in West Bengal and an ethnographic observation of six purposively selected gram panchayat (GP).

Introduction  |  3

traditional village society and the counter-strategy of the rural people, cutting across different social categories, to cope with these forces of modernity and translate or ‘utilize’ them for their own benefit. In the ensuing interaction between these conflicting forces of history, both have to undergo changes. The state tries to understand the aspirations and sentiments of the people and the political parties try to read people’s demands and moods and make necessary alterations in their programmes of implementation depending both on their normative principles and assessment of the rural situation. The rural people, on the other hand, try to devise suitable strategies to best utilize the ‘development’ programmes of the state in their individual or communal interests, and resist the same if it goes against their interest. In the process, they interact with different organized political parties, some with access to governmental power and some in the opposition aspiring for that power, and try to extract best advantages by manoeuvring the political rivalry between the competing parties. The interrelations and interactions between these two ‘porous’ as well as mutually dependent forces seem to constitute the nature and direction of rural changes. If the state and state-led organized politics can be termed as the organized domain of politics, which is organized according to the legal–political principles laid down by the state, then there has been another domain lying outside it, namely, the unorganized domain of subaltern politics. In fact, this theoretical frame was conceived by Chatterjee (1984) to analyze the history of Bengal in the colonial period and explain the politics of peasantry vis-à-vis the colonial state. The question is whether the same might essentially be applicable in the present context to understand the dynamics of the grassroots village politics. Indeed, these two domains of politics have been entangled more and more in the post-colonial period, so much so that it became apparently difficult to identify the existence of a ‘subaltern’ domain separately from the organized domain of politics. But does that mean the evaporation of the ‘subaltern’ domain, assimilation of it in the organized domain or its regeneration in a different style and way? I would endeavour to address this question in the light of the changing pattern of village politics. My contention is that to understand the changes in the village society, our focus should be on the changing interrelationship and interactions between these two entangled domains that constitute the changing pattern of politics in the countryside. The village studies in West Bengal have focussed, so far, more on the changing pattern of agrarian structures combined with the political reforms of decentralization and the changing power structure being exercised in the countryside. An intensive village study conducted by Ruud

4  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

(2003: 2) seems to be an exception which ‘seeks to investigate the relationship of village to state and vice versa, to investigate a case of mutual adaptation’. It is evident from this scholarly research that state-led organized politics, that is, different political parties regard the rural people not as individuals but rather as different social groups and try to manipulate their communal unity in the interest of the political party. On the other hand, social groups existing in the study village respond, based on their local culture, to ‘the modern ideology’ introduced into the praxis and subsequently, in the process, village politics is transformed (Ibid.: 211). Very often, in recent times, not only the political parties but also the state in India has treated the people more according to their ethnic identity than as equal citizens, for the purpose of governance. The positive discrimination for the deprived social groups here might be a case in point. But it is not that the policies of the state and the programmes of the organized domain of politics are determined solely by the wishes of elite policymakers and legislators at the centre of power and that there is no role of the ‘subaltern’ masses, that is, people outside the circle of power in determining them. Both in the colonial and the post-colonial period, the rural people, who were away from the power centres, acted under the aegis of their own community, or sometimes a larger community, with or without the ‘guidance’ of organized political forces and influenced the course of politics as well as views of the policymakers in a definite way. The political histories of different states in India have taken different trajectories depending not only on the divergence in the nature of organized politics in the individual states but also on the role the peasant masses played in a particular state at different periods. The emergence of left politics in West Bengal would not have been possible without the role of peasant movements (along with other kinds of people’s movements) in the state, principally in the post-colonial period. While left politics have thrived in the state drawing on peasant movements, the peasants, in turn, could develop and sustain their movement and achieve certain gains with the active support and guidance of the left parties. This symbiotic relationship of the peasant movement with the left parties took a new turn since these left parties ascended to power in 1977. The ruling Left Front took several measures of rural reforms immediately after coming to power was, in a way, its acknowledgement of the role the rural subalterns played in its ascendancy to power. But even after coming to power, the ruling left could not bring the peasant movements completely under its control. Several studies (Banerjee and Roy, 2005; Ruud, 2003) have found that the

Introduction  |  5

movements of the rural peasants in West Bengal had far surpassed the left leadership’s efforts to keep them within the legal confines during the early stages of the Left Front rule. Hence, the present study on rural West Bengal aims, essentially, to be a study of changing dimensions of two mutually dependent and intertwined domains of politics: the organized state and state-centric politics on the one hand; and the unorganized political culture on the other. But it seems to be undeniable now that ‘the state has become implicated in the minute texture of everyday life’ (Gupta, 1995: 375). In other words, as Chatterjee (2004: 39) has pointed out, ‘the democratic process in India has come a long way in bringing under its influence the lives of the subaltern classes’ resulting in greater entanglement of elite and peasant politics. The extent of the entanglement of these two domains is so extensive that Chatterjee proposes a new concept of ‘political society’ to understand the changing entanglement of two domains of politics and to analyze the contemporary politics of the peasantry in relation to governmental measures by the state (Ibid.; Chatterjee, 2008a). Bhattacharyya (2009) has expanded Chatterjee’s proposition of ‘political society’ further in the specific context of West Bengal by introducing an idea of ‘party-society’ and argues that political parties in rural West Bengal largely transcended caste, religion and ethnicity-based organizations which have some relevance in other parts of the country. Gupta (1995: 392), on the other hand, argues that ‘rather than take the notion of “the state” as a point of departure, we should leave open the analytical question as to the conditions under which the state does operate as a cohesive and unitary whole’. Moreover, in the current climate of neo-liberalism and ‘developmentled’ dispossession and displacement, India is witnessing a new communitycentred rural, as well as urban, politics operating at the margin of the domain of organized politics, seeking to extend and deepen people’s democratic rights. The recent outbreak of peasant resistance in Singur and Nandigram of West Bengal in the wake of land acquisition moves on the part of the ruling government in these places reveals the nature of political imagination of the rural people. These movements partly forced the central government to declare certain reformist policies in order to safeguard the interests of the rural people while pursuing the state-specific programmes of industrialization and building of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Since one of my fieldwork sites is a village in Singur in the district of Hooghly where almost the entire agricultural land has been acquired by the West Bengal government, I have availed myself of this opportunity to observe the perception of the peasant

6  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

community vis-à-vis the impacts of so-called ‘historical transition’ from agriculture to industry so vigorously being pursued by the erstwhile ruling political regime in the state. But the question at this point is whether we should analyze the recent land movements in the same old tradition of peasant resistance in the rural areas of India? Or do we need to examine the recent peasant movements in a changing context marking a clear departure from the earlier situations? Some distinguished scholars have dealt with these issues and introduced a new conceptual framework, for instance, Chatterjee (2008a) and Sanyal (2007). This research endeavours to examine the empirical validity of this contextualization. The present research marks a distinction from the earlier studies carried out in India, and particularly in West Bengal, by conducting an ethnographic study of two villages to explain the forms and dynamics of entanglement of these two domains in terms of power relations. It offers a new effort by testing and comparing, through ethnographic techniques, the available frameworks used for explaining the present political situation of rural India. Moreover, the issues of changing dynamics in political activities and imaginations of the rural people across different social groups and creeds construct a major part of this research. The book endeavours to look closely at how the people from different castes, religions and genders represent themselves in state institutions, that is, local government, political parties and even in the social movement. In other words, how do the local people interact with the state-led politics and state institutions, especially in response to different governmental policies meant for their ‘benefit’? Is there any new pattern of politics emerging at the margin? How is this pattern of politics corresponding with the current discourse of governance? These questions obviously call for a new research which can unravel the underlying dynamics in micro-level politics. The book makes an effort to address these relatively unexplored questions by taking into account everyday politics in two villages in a certain period of time, with a particular emphasis on a peasant movement that arose in one of the two villages against land acquisition move on the part of the government for industrialization. Thus, the principal focus of this research is to get an insight into the apparently incomprehensible idea of peasant consciousness, the abstruse spheres of peasant or subaltern culture and ideology that inform unorganized or subaltern politics, that is, their activities and struggles in the political spheres. What are the changes that are occurring in their cultural and ideological proclivities over the past few decades, corresponding to the changes in the economic and political spheres brought about in the state? Do these changes

Introduction  |  7

in the different spheres at all cohere with each other? Can there be any linear relationship between these changes? What kind of cultural–ideological transformation do the peasants or subalterns undergo while negotiating with the development and decentralization strategies of the state? Or conversely, do the state-led development and decentralization programmes have considerable impact on the subalterns’ cultural–ideological consciousness? If so, how would we interpret these changes?

Theoretical Context The changes in rural societies have been so vast that Gupta (2005a: 751) tends to regret that ‘the theoretical cum analytical frameworks remain largely unchanged, while at the level of facts there is a clear recognition that things are not what they used to be’. This urge for a change in the theoretical-cumanalytical framework while studying the village is not new as Srinivas himself acknowledged the challenge posed by the rapidly changing rural societies as early as in 1966 in the following words, ‘the study of one’s own society while it is changing rapidly…poses challenge that calls for the mobilization of all the moral and intellectual resources of the sociologist’ (quoted in Joshi, 1996: 133). Hence, the important questions are: how to study the changing rural society and whether the existing theoretical and analytical frameworks provide us with sufficient analytical wherewithal to understand the changing rural society? Is there a need for developing an entirely new theoretical frame? Earlier, Srinivas had endeavoured to study the traditional institutions mainly in its harmony, for instance, in the continuity and integrity of different castes. Afterwards, Srinivas made some important shifts from his earlier standpoints. First, he acknowledged that he had concentrated more on reconstructing the social structure when he was doing his fieldwork in Rampura (1948–52) and this made him less sensitive to the factors causing change. Second, he acknowledged that ‘conflict as such is an inescapable part of social existence, and should be of serious concern to the sociologist’ (quoted in Ibid.: 134). Pointing out the limitations of the study done by Srinivas, Joshi (Ibid.: 142) comments that ‘Insights into continuity or change can be gained if changes in other vital spheres like productive forces, production relations, belief system and power structure are investigated’. A strong proponent of the Marxian view, Joshi (Ibid.) suggests:

8  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a …the understanding of relations between man and man – caste being one such relation – will always remain illusory or partial without an understanding of man’s interaction with nature…The understanding of caste in the Indian context has been largely obscured by the tendency to view it in isolation from economic activity and organization.

He criticizes Srinivas for his failure to attach proper importance to economic organization and underlines the significance of the growing approximation of caste to class from a theoretical point of view. The orthodox Marxist view is perfectly reflected in the above formulation of Joshi, where he emphasizes on the economic activity and economic organization so as to understand the changes occurring in the caste system. In the classic Marxist literature, economic changes are seen to be constructing the base of a society and politics and culture forming its superstructure. It is assumed then that every change in the base would have corresponding change in the superstructure and that there has been some linear relationship between changes in the base and the superstructure. But these classical Marxist theories have been well criticized since long by scholars from different disciplines. The subaltern studies scholars, most of whom were Marxist in the past, in the 1970s, tried to introduce some new scholarships drawing on Gramsci’s ideas for explaining the histories and societies of the countries of the South. The subaltern studies’ scholarship, in fact, set a new perspective for the countries of South Asia by emphasizing on the role of the subaltern classes in determining the course of history. Spivak (1988b) well summarizes the contribution of subaltern studies’ scholarship. She writes, ‘The most significant outcome of this revision or shift in perspective is that the agency of change is located in the insurgent or the “subaltern”’ (Ibid.: 3).

Ideas of Subaltern Consciousness It is mainly the phenomenon of subaltern consciousnesses that the subaltern studies’ scholars give primacy in studying the history of colonial India, a phenomenon that has been ignored by both the nationalist and Marxist historians. Initially, peasant consciousness was identified as the most important example of subaltern consciousness, especially in the Indian context, as most of the working people in India were peasants. Peasant movements and peasant rebellions in the colonial period are termed by the Marxists as a pre-political phenomenon. Hobsbawm (1959: 96) best describes this phenomenon when

Introduction  |  9

he finds the ‘traditional forms of peasant discontent’ to have been ‘virtually devoid of any explicit ideology, organization or programme’. In contrast, the subaltern view is most explicitly expressed by Guha (1983: 4) when he comments: To acknowledge the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion is to attribute, as we have done in this work, a consciousness to him. Hence, the word ‘insurgency’ has been used in the title and the text as the name of that consciousness which informs the activity of the rural masses known as jacquerie, revolt, uprising, etc. or to use their Indian designations – dhing, bidroha, ulgulan, hool, fituri and so on. This amounts, of course, to a rejection of the idea of such activity as purely spontaneous – an idea that is elitist as well as erroneous. It is elitist because it makes the mobilization of the peasantry altogether contingent on the intervention of charismatic leaders, advanced political organizations or upper classes.

Guha (Ibid.: 8) shows extensively how a political relationship of domination and subordination informs the colonial system of dominance where the peasants’ ‘subjection to this triumvirate – sarkari, sahukari and zamindari was primarily political in character, economic exploitation being only one, albeit the most obvious, of its several instances’. This relationship of domination and subordination at the same time contained its opposite, that is, insubordination, resistance and rebellion, that remained latent in the relationship and became explicit only at particular historical junctures. This ‘subalternist’ perspective, which ‘has increasingly come to dominate the formation of perspective and concepts’ (Ruud, 1999a: 689), still seems to be somewhat relevant for some scholars as an analytical approach to hierarchical social systems. But Ruud offered some resistance to this ‘dominance’. He asserts, It is here we find Chakrabarty and other contributors reduce the historical (cultural) experiences of India to one single paradigm, that of hierarchy. Whatever there is of dissonance, of opposition and ‘resistance’, all takes place within that paradigmatic construct. I will be among the last to suggest that there is not a strong element of hierarchy in Indian culture. (Ibid.: 689)

Ruud’s assertion seems to have offered a different vantage point though he never concludes his standpoint clearly and finishes his thought-provoking essay by saying that …there is no conclusion to this essay, only the caution not to oversimplify the lives of the ‘uneducated’, ‘unsophisticated’ ‘masses’, ‘the rural folk’ or ‘toiling classes’...because such an oversimplification can readily be detected in otherwise

10  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a sympathetic and important studies, a tendency which hampers an understanding of change, whether cultural change or an only half-backed political conversion. (Ibid.: 728–29)

But elements of subaltern consciousness, as reflected in the nineteenth century peasant insurgencies, do not remain the same in the twentieth century when ‘organized’ domain, organized according to legal–political principles laid down by the state, began to intervene and influence the ‘unorganized’ domain of the rural subalterns in an ever-increasing manner. Chatterjee (1984) proposes the division of Indian society into organized (elite) and unorganized (subaltern) domains to develop a theoretical frame to analyze the peasant movements in the early twentieth century India. Following Antonio Gramsci’s ideas, Chatterjee (1984: xli) suggests: Colonial and post-colonial Indian history can be studied in a framework of power relationships in which the elites and subaltern classes inhabit two distinct and relatively autonomous domains of everyday existence and consciousness. The task of the new historiography is, first of all, to recover this autonomous history of subaltern classes, and second, to study in its concreteness the interpenetration of the two domains as a process of domination and resistance.

But the concept of the ‘autonomous domain of subaltern consciousness’ has been lately questioned by some scholars (Chatterjee, 1999: 417)3 as, they argue, it has been shaped and directed by elements of elite consciousness. Moreover, there might be instances where elite consciousness has also very strong elements of subalternity. So, the quest for a pure and undiluted subaltern consciousness does not remain the focus of the subaltern studies in the later period. Rather, the complex relationships between the elite and subaltern domains, where both are intertwined and interdependent, each having a role in the construction of the other, where no firm division seems to be possible between the two domains, become the focus of study. That is to say, the extent, forms and mode of representation of the subaltern people in the domain of ‘organized’ politics now becomes the focus of the subaltern theories. 3. Spivak referred by Chatterjee (1999). Spivak was the first to raise the question of structuring subaltern consciousness in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ (Spivak 1988a; 1988b).

Introduction  |  11

The rural scenario takes a substantial turn in the post-colonial period with the introduction of parliamentary politics on the basis of universal franchise along with a number of community development and poverty alleviation projects, land reform measures and finally, the formation of local self-government, that is, PRIs. The economic scenario undergoes certain changes with the implementation of Green Revolution technology along with the spread of irrigation facilities to certain areas, the widespread penetration of market economy and a considerable increase in non-farm works. With the development of infrastructures like roads, migration from villages to towns and from agriculturally underdeveloped areas to agriculturally developed areas becomes commonplace. In brief, the state assumes more and more intervening role in changing the rural society in line with the aim of building a modern state. Simultaneously, the democratic rule in India has been changing, through various legislations, from the representative form of democracy to the participatory form of democracy. The Indian state has, of late, made a number of legislations to reserve seats for, and thereby ensure representation of, the so-called weaker sections of the society, like the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the women, in the power structure. At the same time, gram sansad and gram sabha meetings, that are to be held twice in a year to enhance participation of all sections of the society, have been made compulsory to enable people’s participation in the decision-making process of the local self-government. This overarching policy of reservation has been framed by the state to include the deprived social groups in the power structure. As a result of this, it seems to be further facilitating the process of fragmentation in the social categories like class, community and caste. But the factor which needs to be added here is the role of modern governmental techniques, the art of application which has precisely been termed as governmentality. The ‘major characteristic of the contemporary regime of power’ in India is seen as ‘governmentalization of the state’, whereby the ‘regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 34). It is needless to say that this ‘governmentalization of the state’ has not been a new phenomenon. It started as early as in the nineteenth century, when the British colonialists introduced enumeration of the population, preparing the Indian census, though the East India Company had started the process with a few regional censuses before that, as part of the techniques of modern government (Chakrabarty, 2002). Whether there is more governmentality and less participation or the reverse in the affairs of Indian democracy, all these welfare policies become tools in

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the hands of the state as well as the politicians who utilize them to govern, and win over the people in the power game with oppositional parties. As the political parties vie with each other in securing the credibility of providing governmental benefits to the population or to the individual members of the population, and thus create vote banks in their favour, people also try to avail this opportunity by manipulating between different parties, sometimes between different power groups within the party in power, and get the best benefits in a given situation. In other words, people not only depend on the political parties for negotiating on their behalf with the government but also get involved in manoeuvrings between different political forces to achieve their communal as also individual benefits from the governmental schemes. In fact, a lot of political storm usually gathers in the village society over the distribution of governmental favours, and there have always been allegations and counter-allegations by the contesting parties on this issue. The endeavours of the political parties to secure legitimacy in power politics through the distribution of governmental favours create typical interactions between the organized and unorganized domain, where both sides enter into a kind of strategic alliance with each other and try to extract the highest benefits out of the alliance. This ‘strategic politics’ might even lead to legitimizing of certain ‘illegal’ demands of some sections of the population (for example, demands for rehabilitation of illegal squatters on government land or hawkers illegally occupying pavements) who struggle over those demands and enter into the process of bargaining or negotiating with government officials through the mediation of the organized domain. Chatterjee (2004) seeks to theorize this typical post-colonial phenomenon by creating a category called ‘political society’ which denotes the sections of people in countries like India who remain outside the periphery of civil society and interact with the state in certain manners that are incompatible with the rules of civil society. Persons belonging to the political society enter into some relationships with the state and governmental agencies, which are certainly political in nature, but different from the one the state has with members of the civil society. Chatterjee (Ibid.: 39–40) has pointed out: Since those early experiences of the imbrications of elite and subaltern politics in the context of the anti-colonial movements, the democratic process in India has come a long way in bringing under its influence the lives of subaltern classes. It is to understand these relatively recent forms of the entanglement of elite and subaltern politics that I am proposing the notion of a political society.

Introduction  |  13

How this entanglement of these two domains of politics is operating in the rural polity demands critical enquiry, but it is an undeniable fact that the elite and the subaltern domains have entered into a relationship of closer dependence on each other in the post-colonial period. Although many of the activities that are characteristic of the political society, according to Chatterjee (2004: 47), have emerged within the spectrum of nationalist political mobilizations in the colonial period, they have taken ‘something like a distinct form’ only since the 1980s as two conditions have facilitated the process. These two conditions, one of which is the dominance of a notion of governmental performance that emphasizes the welfare and protection of populations and the other is the widening of the arena of political mobilization often only for electoral ends, have become increasingly prominent in rural India. The Left Front government of West Bengal, for the last three decades, had been most successfully utilizing these governmental technologies for mobilizing the people, specifically the rural people, prompted mainly by electoral considerations. All these factors have highly politicized the people at large in the state of West Bengal, making their response to the state policies more and more political in the contemporary period. Consequently, rural Bengal has probably turned into the most appropriate testing ground among the Indian states where the concept of ‘political society’ as a distinct form can be best examined.

Governmentality and Political Society Chatterjee develops the notion of political society drawing on his observation of the activities of some urban communities formed under specific conditions of their existence where they are threatened to be evicted by the state authorities. Such communities (like the illegal settlers beside the railway lines in Kolkata) respond to the threat with an obvious show of their unity that has been consequently strengthened by the support of a section of the ‘organized’ domain. The political parties do act in support of these communities under electoral compulsions, as even such illegal settlers are legal citizens of the county having voting rights. In the ensuing confrontation, the people of these communities enter the domain of politics with their own strategy of using political parties and their leaders to the best of their interest. The state, with its welfare programmes that must encompass all citizens, can hardly ignore such demands of the illegally settled people and has to enter into negotiations with these communities who are represented in the ensuing talks by organized

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parties. In the process, the people in question seem to assume a new role in the domain of politics that is being characterized as political society. It is true that due to the spread of governmentality, that is, the state policy of universal welfare, along with the initiation of participatory democracy in the later phase, the people at the grassroots are engaging in state politics in their everyday life in an ever-increasing manner. This phenomenon is probably more evident in the rural areas where a number of community development projects and poverty alleviation programmes are being implemented through the local self-governments. The state enumerates people, classifies them on the basis of ethnicity and stratifies them on the basis of poverty line – all to bring different groups of people under different schemes of the state. These policies of providing state patronage create aspirations among the subaltern people who, in turn, organize themselves in old/new communities to get the best of the governmental support, and enter into strategic relationship with the political parties to avail the existing opportunities or sometimes to facilitate new ones (that is, putting new demands to preserve their rights or creating new rights for their community). These have become the part and parcel of the day-to-day lives of the peasantries in the rural areas, particularly in West Bengal where both governmentality and the policy of participatory democracy are being simultaneously practised for a considerable period of time. The practices of participatory democracy, that is, PRIs and other measures of decentralization (like the participation of SC–ST people and women in PRIs, gram sansad and gram sabha meetings, in Village Education Committee [VEC] and in Village Development Committee [VDC]), implemented in rural West Bengal have definite effects on the traditional relationships between different castes, class, gender and power groups. Although these decentralization measures have several constraints in their functioning in rural Bengal (Bhattacharya, 2002; Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002), these have certainly brought some changes in the old power structure and facilitated, to some extent, entry of the subaltern classes into the lower strata of the power structure. The above mentioned factors get entwined with the proliferation of party organizations at the grassroots level in rural Bengal where people, apart from their caste, class and religious identities, are further stratified by their party identity; where distribution of governmental benefits is highly biased by party affiliations of the recipients (Williams, 1999); and where, sometimes, a particular caste among the SCs is discriminated against in the distribution of the benefits of land reforms (Ruud, 1999b). Hence, in the politically sensitive countryside of West Bengal, the entanglement of the elite and subaltern

Introduction  |  15

domains has, of late, assumed critical proportions in the lives of the subaltern people who could hardly avoid a connection with the organized domain of politics. In the process, the subaltern people gain certain realization of how to deal with different political parties and even learn to manipulate between different power factions within the village in order to get the best of governmental benefits. This increasing entanglement of the state and the peasantries in rural areas of West Bengal, and the ensuing restructuring of community lives of the subaltern people and reshaping of their aspirations, demands and consciousness in the contemporary times, demands further research from the social science researchers. It seems that as the ‘statization’ of society in India goes hand in hand with the spread of governmentality, the latter reduces the effect of the former, that is, governmentalization is overshadowing the process of statization. Simply put, community consciousness or identity politics seems to be emerging more and more as a result of governmentalization of the state. This is a dichotomous relationship which Foucault (1994: 220) has pointed out: ‘May be what is really important for our modernity – that is, for our present – is not so much the statization of society, as the “governmentalization” of the state’. Popular sovereignty or civic nationalism, whatever we may call it, is based on individual freedom and equal rights irrespective of culture, whereas governmentality is principally based on the welfare of weaker sections of the population, which is mainly comprised of certain social groups in terms of caste, class, minority groups and gender. That is to say, the latter helps to consolidate sectional demands and sectional movements of the social groups, including often the rejuvenation of ethnic politics. Hence, it seems that the community or the ethnic groups are increasingly gaining prominence in modern politics through a process of so-called transition from the idea of popular sovereignty to the idea of governmentality. Now, another important question comes to the fore which seems to be related with the issues of economic transformation. The question is that how do we explain the present peasant movements against land acquisition on the part of the government in West Bengal and other parts of India? In the neo-liberal climate and ‘development-led’ dispossession, how do we interpret the concepts of governmentality and community-based politics? In fact, the economic and political situations of developing countries like India have undergone remarkable changes, particularly in the recent phase, under the impact of globalization. Drawing upon Sanyal’s findings, Chatterjee (2008a: 55) explains that the contemporary peasant struggles could not be examined

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by the old transition theories, ‘in which peasants and peasant societies under conditions of capitalist development are always in a state of transition – whether from feudalism to capitalism or from pre-capitalist backwardness to socialist modernity’, as the subaltern domain or the peasantry at large has undergone fundamental changes during the last few decades and exists today under new conditions. Sanyal (2007: 20) says that ‘under present conditions of post-colonial development within a globalized economy, the narrative of transition is no longer valid’. The small producers (principally the peasantry) who have been continually dispossessed of their lands and/or other means of labour are simultaneously being provided with some other means of livelihood as part of ‘governmentality’. The following lines from Chatterjee (2008a: 53) might help clarify this viewpoint: With the changes in India over the past 25 years, there is now a new dynamic logic that ties the operations of ‘political society’ (comprising the peasantry, artisans and petty producers in the informal sectors) with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in ‘civil society’. This logic is provided by the requirement of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation of capital with activities like anti-poverty programmes. This is a necessary political condition for the continued rapid growth of corporate capital. The state, with its mechanism of electoral democracy, becomes the field for the political negotiation of demands for the transfer of resources, through fiscal and other means, from the accumulation economy to programmes aimed at providing the livelihood needs of the poor.

The movements of the peasants and other petty producers against land acquisition carried out or attempted by the government with a view to set up industries might be a useful case to examine the above conceptual framework advocated by social science scholars. Hence, first, the idea of a political sphere existing outside the organized domain of politics needs to be examined. What are the changes that have occurred in the subaltern consciousness under the influence of the democratic practice that has, presumably, engulfed the lives of the subaltern people in the post-colonial India? Does the concept of political society prove to be more appropriate to explain the present state of entanglement between the elite and subaltern politics in the rural areas? Or, do some other analytical frames need to be developed? Second, in recent times, the subaltern people have been increasingly participating in both the state institutions and statecentric political organizations, sometimes as a result of compulsory reservation policy and sometimes due to the mobilization strategy of the political parties.

Introduction  |  17

Whatever may be the reason, the pattern of representation of different social groups may not be the same. Hence, we need to find out how different social groups have been representing themselves in the organized domain. Does their representation in state politics entail any new phenomenon? Third, to what extent does the welfare politics of Indian state fit the normative concept of governmentality which means ‘the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health etc’ (Foucault, 1994: 217)? With very limited resources, the state can only fulfil the needs of a small group of people, and that creates ample room for manipulations by the political parties and ruling leaders to favour certain persons owing allegiance to them. In a micro-level study, one can explore the attitudes and intentions on the part of the government about the problem of the welfare of the population as a whole and try to delineate how the local state functions at the village level. Consequently, one can observe, at the same time, the impact of the so-called subaltern politics on the functioning of the local state. How far does rural decentralization, as one of the tools of governmentality, justify that ‘population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of the needs, of aspirations…’ (Ibid.: 217), where particular vested interests of different political parties, more specifically the electoral interests, are mostly dominating the political arena? Fourth, how can we explain the issues of transition and the anti-land acquisition movement occurring in recent times? Under present conditions of post-colonial development within a globalized economy, is the narrative of transition no longer valid? If the narrative of transition is no more valid, then which framework do we need to take up to explain the present peasant movement against land acquisition? Nonetheless, the state and community have entered into a complex relationship in the post-colonial countries, the reflection of which can be critically examined through an ethnography of village society.

Methodology It is obvious that the village study does not claim to put forward any general explanation as an end result of the research of what is happening in the current political context. This village study also does not claim that it will reveal any general phenomena for explaining the contemporary society. Rather, it questions or validates the analytical frameworks available for studying the social

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and political phenomena by examining the everyday politics of rural India. And it also critically examines some general explanations suggested by the social scientists in the contemporary literature on India’s politics and some of its socio-political events. In fact, the research begins by seeking to understand two major facets that seem to be very essential vis-à-vis the study. First, the study will analyze, by reviewing the available literature on the subject, albeit in a limited way, where West Bengal stands at the moment in relation to all spheres of the societal life, that is, economic, social and political. This understanding will be useful to contextualize the present study as the rural situation is changing very fast. Second, the study also endeavours to find out whether the analytical frameworks available so far are appropriate to analyze the current political situation in West Bengal. By revisiting briefly some of the major theoretical frameworks, it raises some questions on the validity of these frameworks in the present times, and subsequently takes on a flexible, somewhat open-ended position and begins its enquiry by ethnographic methods. Now, the question at this point is: why does the study employ ethnographic method to carry out this research? The objective of an ethnographic study is mainly to capture the insider’s views, attitudes and interpretations about everything s/he practices and experiences in her/his everyday life. By extension, the idea is to delineate the inner dynamics of the functioning of a society. Very often, ethnographic study is also treated as a micro-study or an in-depth study in social science parlance, though there could be a sharp difference between a micro-study and an ethnographic study in their objectives and methods as well. While the ethnographic study is primarily based on the insider’s perceptions and interpretations, a microstudy may not necessarily depend on them. Instead of focussing on the culture and consciousness, which an ethnographer usually tries to probe, the scholar who is pursuing a micro-study tries to define the micro-processes evident at the grassroots level. An ethnographer would carry out the additional task of observing, as a participant observer, the so-called trivial events and actions and interactions of the subject people and interpret them both through the subjective views of the insiders and of the ethnographer her/himself. There is a debate among social scientists regarding the justification of an ethnographic study in social science research. The debate revolves around the doubts expressed over the ability of an ethnographer in objectification of the subject. The proponents of this view usually argue that as only one or two villages are taken in an ethnographic study or micro-study as sample(s), it is

Introduction  |  19

not representative enough. While discussing the impact of decentralization in West Bengal, Mookherjee (2006: 360) remarked, ...many case studies are available, but these are usually conducted in one or two locations, and there is heavy reliance on the subjective impressions of the investigators (see for example Lieten, 1992, Pramanick and Dutta 1994 and Webster, 1992). So the representativeness of their conclusions can be questioned. For this reason, to supplement our micro-narrative we shall draw on results of recent studies based on larger and more representative samples, relying on empirical data generated by these studies, often thought to be far more reliable than subjective impressions reported by surveyed individuals or investigators.

To be sure, a case study based on one or two locations cannot be regarded as having a representative character. But it is a truism that an ethnographer does not consider the representativeness of the sample to be the primary concern, as her/his aim is quite different. The very objective, outlook and nature of an ethnographic study is to get an insight into the micro-level situation, processes and dynamics. It never claims to describe the general phenomena at the macro level. To quote P.C. Joshi’s (1996: 133) revealing words: The study of post-colonial rural India necessitated a greater interaction between the sociologist dealing with larger society and the social anthropologist dealing with small rural communities…This micro level enquiry provides insights which could be explored further at the macro level. The latter raises questions which give direction and focus to the former.

So, the macro-study and the micro-study are not contradictory, rather complementary to each other, and both are equally important to explore social phenomena in the contemporary rural society. In assessing the impact of decentralization in West Bengal, Mookherjee himself draws on the micro-level study, when he uses the insightful observations of Ruud’s case study of two villages in Barddhaman district (Mookherjee, 2006: 369). The larger concern perhaps is about the reliability of subjective impressions reported by surveyed individuals or of investigators, as Mookherjee implicitly suggests. He raises questions about the very epistemological foundation of ethnographic studies and in particular, about the basis of the subjective view of the surveyed individuals and the investigators. Indeed, a considerable section of social scientists remains sceptical about the use and relevance of ethnographic methods in understanding the changing realities of contemporary societies.

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However, it is well to point out that the anthropological perspective, along with its theoretical apparatuses, has undergone radical changes over time. Correspondingly, the methods of enquiry have also been refurbished and refined in accordance with the passage of time and with changing perspectives. Anthropologists in the post-colonial period have not only been inventing newer methods but also are developing newer approaches to the study of society. The crucial question that Mookherjee raises is how far a social scientist can rely on the subjective impressions of the ‘surveyed individuals’. But these ‘subjective impressions of the surveyed individuals’ precisely constitute the epistemological premise of an ethnographic study (Mookherjee, 2006: 360). It seems that while a macro-study is conducted for arriving at some broad empirical conclusions, the ethnographic method of study is followed to explore the subjective conditions, that is, principally the culture of the surveyed people. Simply put, ethnography can reveal the hidden treasures of remote rustic lives, remaining obscured in the so-called backward societies, which a macro-study possibly may not unravel. As the basic premises of these two methodological perspectives are quite different, the corresponding differences in study methods are quite expected. In particular, in the countries of the East where people live in various social groups, where caste and religion are major forms of community life of most of the people and where people act as a community more than as individuals in the social and political field, an ethnographic enquiry seems appropriate to examine the culture and practices of diverse communities. The debate over subjectivity versus objectivity, over the ‘view from nowhere’ versus the ‘view from somewhere’, is an old one. Sen (1993) adds an interesting twist to this discourse by introducing the notion of ‘positional objectivity’. He argues that a special emphasis must be given to synthesize position-dependent objectivities, that is, ‘positional objectivities’, in order to construct and supplement a ‘view from nowhere’. He admits that ‘There is need for what may be called “transpositional” assessment – drawing on but going beyond different positional observations. But the constructed “view from nowhere” would then be based on synthesizing different views from distinct positions’ (Ibid.: 130). To put it differently, contextual specifities as well as community-centred particularities need to be factored in order to produce an adequately nuanced generalized description of rural reality. In India, the prevalence of organized party politics in all spheres of life does not necessarily negate the role of community in the lives of subaltern people; rather, it reinforces the communitarian way of life, probably in newer forms and in fragments, with the associated culture determining

Introduction  |  21

the social and political dynamics to a great extent. Hence, an ethnographic enquiry seems all the more relevant to understand this underlying dynamics. To discern the changing pattern of politics in the rural areas of India, and particularly of West Bengal, two villages are chosen purposively for an ethnographic research. These two villages are located in two adjacent blocks, namely, Dhaniakhali and Singur, in the Hooghly district, which is one of the industrially and agriculturally prosperous districts in West Bengal, situated in the lower Gangetic basin. The villages have been selected on the basis of their specific features, that is, the particular caste–class–religion and party compositions that distinguish them from others. Both these villages are multi-caste villages with one village having a small minority Muslim population. While one village was under the grip of the traditional zamindari system in the past and had subsequently the strong presence of the erstwhile main ruling left party since 1977, the other village is known for a fair amount of political competition between the ruling and the opposition party, free from the presence of any erstwhile zamindar within the village. While one village witnessed a strong peasant movement led by the opposition in recent times, the other has been characterized by its absence in the last 30 years. The panchayat members of both these villages belong to the SC community, one from the ruling league and the other from the opposition, while one of them simultaneously holds the post of the panchayat pradhan at present. I have spent more than six months (three months at a stretch) in one village (Kalipur) staying with a middle-caste family. That is, a middle-class agricultural family with no overt political leaning, which has facilitated my fieldwork to a great extent. With the village being extremely politically charged, the political leaning of a person – resident or outsider – matter more than anything else. On the other hand, as I was staying in a middle-caste landed family, I could not perhaps capture the full depth of the culture and consciousness of the subaltern caste, class and category that has been my main focus. If I could stay in the hamlet of a marginal/landless family, preferably of the SC/ST community, it would have been possible for me to study their actions, interactions and attitudes in various fields, their informal social and political activities reflected in their day-to-day lives and their culture and consciousness as a whole more closely. For some unavoidable reasons, however, I could not do the same. My sincere efforts to fill the gap notwithstanding, this is the limitation of my study. I have been involved in informal talks and discussions with the people of different caste, class, religion and gender groups. I have, very often, closely

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observed the interactions and discussions of the people among themselves. Simultaneously, I have conducted some formal discussions with prominent persons of the village and the locality as well. I have tried to participate in various meetings and programmes arranged by state-led institutions (for instance, VEC meeting, gram sansad meeting, panchayat-level training camp of the VEC members and Mother–Teacher Association meeting) where a considerable number of marginal people are seen to be participating under some degree of compulsion due to reservation and quota-wise inclusion as a special drive of the government. Political mobilizations and meetings of various types, political campaigns during election period (I had the privilege of staying in the village during the assembly elections of 2006) and some other organized activities have been observed closely. I have also participated in the ceremonies and festivals of different castes at the village level to capture the functioning of the traditional institutions. In the rural areas, the shops, specifically tea shops, the temple courtyards (puja mandap) and the local clubs are the important places where one can engage in informal discussions with the local people. And these gatherings are generally held in the evening as the male members of the families remain busy during the day. Being a woman, I could not utilize this opportunity to the fullest extent. These gatherings are exclusively for men. The participants in these gatherings were hesitant to talk with me in that setting, though I tried to participate in some of these addas4 to gauge their mood. It is a constraint forced on me due to the inherent gender bias in Indian society. On the other hand, however, I could fully utilize my gender role to my advantage somewhere else. I could freely interact with the womenfolk and observe their family lives very closely. It has been a privilege for me to get to study not only the culture and imaginations of the women, but their role in the day-to-day lives of those families. In the other study village (Kadampur), I had to stay with a middle-caste family. The head of the family in this case was a retired primary school teacher. It was also a landed middle-class family. I spent more than one month in this village and after that I had been in touch with this area and its people intermittently for some more months. This I could manage due to its proximity to Kolkata. A resistance movement sprang up in this village against the land acquisition move of the government for a proposed car factory when I started 4. ‘The word Adda is translated by Bengali linguist Sunitikumar Chottopadhyay as a “place” for “careless talk with boon companions” or “the chats of intimate friends”. Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and un-rigorous conversations’ (Chakrabarty, 1999: 109–45).

Introduction  |  23

doing my fieldwork here. This offered me a great opportunity to observe very closely, sometimes as a participant observer, the interaction between the two political domains, the state and the community spheres entangled in the course of an intense struggle for and against land acquisition. Here, I could study, as far as possible, how the people of different caste, class, religion and gender are participating in the land movement and interacting not only with the state but also with different political parties. I interviewed the people of different strata and had several rounds of informal discussions with them in a manner similar to the one followed in the first study village. I could participate here in the informal gatherings and discussions (adda) more frequently than was the case in the first village as it was closer to Kolkata, and more so because of the charged atmosphere created by the resistance movement and people’s deep involvement in it. The political activities and aspirations of the people, specifically of the subaltern people, were more explicit and palpable to me in this village, probably due to the above-mentioned reason. Here, people discussed political matters more openly than their counterparts in the first village, though here too a small section of the villagers were extremely cautious and quiet due to their political compulsions. As a methodological supplement and to get an overview of the demographic profile of these two villages, I have used some quantitative methods which are usually called a village census. I have used the survey materials collected under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) project as well. I also tried to collect some panchayat documents such as minutes of gram sansad meetings and minutes of gram panchayat general/annual meetings, annual budget for the year 2005, annual plan sent to the panchayat samiti, audit reports for the year 2005, list of the beneficiaries for different schemes and a copy of by-laws. These documents are very useful to get an idea about the participation not only of the villagers but also of the people’s representatives in various meetings and participatory spaces, which are crucially important for participatory democracy. Also, to get a glimpse of the actual functioning of the panchayats purportedly engaged in the process of deepening development and democratic decentralization, these documents are important and useful. But I was able to collect only some of them, as I was told that the rest were not for public use. To sum up, the methodology on which I have primarily based my study essentially consists of collection and analysis of oral history from the villagers in order to understand their representation in village politics. Also, I have used participant observation to supplement my study, albeit in a limited manner, to closely look at how the local people represent themselves in organized domain

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of politics. In one recent study, some scholars (Biswas and Dhar, 2007) have engaged with the underlying concepts of this methodology afresh. They argue that the formal observational experience which has been used as the principal method, particularly in anthropology, for the construction of truth is bound to be biased or one sided. It must be one sided particularly in a society which is hierarchical, that is to say, based on some power structure. They have proposed, referring to J. Lacan,5 that the method which is followed in ethnography might be termed as psychoanalytic experience as opposed to the method of observational experience. Whereas the epistemological premise of psychoanalytic experience is based mainly on listening to the ‘objects’ or analyzing the psyche, the observational experience is principally based on observation of the events and various interrelationship among the target people as its epistemological foundation. In the former method, the subject becomes attached with the object as soon as listening is incorporated as a part of the study. Thus, the subject and the object are very closely knit in the method of psychoanalytic experiences. Some may argue that the objective truth cannot be constructed without the detachment of the subject or subjective impression from the object. In defence, it could be argued that the object itself is constructed through a dialectical interrelationship of the two components, the subject and the object. The separation between the two is impossible. If one tries to explore the objectivity, s/he must recognize the importance of the object as a subject as there can be no object without subjectivity. Not only in the hierarchical societies but in all human societies, the subject and the object are entwined because every individual is socially constructed in our society. If one expects to get a proper objective reality by objectifying the society, and in the process detaching it from the subjective impressions of the object, it would in all probability be a vain project. This project might only produce a biased objectivity. We will never get subaltern position and its consciousness in this project by following only the observation method as the subalterns would, very often, remain unheard in the former method. The ethnographic method, I think, would equip us better to explore the inner dynamics of contemporary rural society in India than the other existing methods known in social science research. Hence, I have drawn mainly an ethnographic method of enquiry to carry out my study, combined as well with the method of close participant observation. But I have always been a ‘methodological opportunist’, that is to say, whenever possible, I have used quantitative figures and data to substantiate and clarify my arguments. 5. I have taken the reference from Biswas and Dhar (2007). The original passage is from Miller (1998).

Introduction  |  25

An Overview Apart from the first chapter, ‘Introduction’, the rest of the book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal’, offers an overview of the broad patterns of changes that have occurred so far, in all spheres of rural life – economic, political and social – in the state and then contextualizes the two study villages. The overview of the state and politics of West Bengal helps us to analyze the political dynamics of the study villages. Chapter 3, ‘Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal’, is, in fact, a description of two villages, Kalipur and Kadampur, selected for this ethnographic research. The chapter discusses the changing contour of socio-economic landscape of these villages so that the political dynamics of the current socio-political events can be analyzed in its particular context. This chapter reveals that despite the implementation of land reform policy ‘effectively’, the peasants belonging to socially backward castes and other groups still remain, mainly, land-‘poor’ agricultural labourers. Chapter 4, ‘Seeing the State and Governance in the Grassroots’, discusses the relation between local government and different social groups in a village. That is to say, this chapter focusses on how different social groups, including women, are participating in, and interpreting as well, the local government, that is, panchayat and other state institutions. The major part of the chapter engages in what ways the people belonging to various social groups, particularly the socially deprived groups, are representing themselves in the panchayat, gram sansad meetings, the VECs and other decentralized forms of governance. Chapter 5, ‘Party and Politics at the Margin’, problematizes the linkages between political parties, local government and village society. This chapter seeks to examine the intricate and multifaceted processes by which a dominant party, here the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), extends its network or hegemony over the residents of a village. The nature and dynamics of relationships between the political parties and local government, that is, panchayat, also forms a considerable part of this chapter. Above all, how the people belonging to different social segments get attached in myriad relationships with these political parties, that is, the parties both in ruling power and in opposition as well as the local state, has been dealt with in detail in this chapter. Chapter 6, ‘A Narrative of Peasant Resistance: Land, Party and the State’, has dealt with the political dynamics of a village where a peasant resistance

26  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

surged against land acquisition by the government for setting up a car factory. Two key aspects have been discussed in this chapter. One is about the politics of land acquisition, that is, about the ways in which the peasant resistance has come into being and how different political actors play their roles in it. The second is about the diverse nature and extent of participation of different social groups in the said resistance. In other words, the chapter describes how different social groups find their space within the resistance movement and take part in it accordingly. Chapter 7, ‘Caste and Power in Rural Context’, explores caste and its operation in two villages where party politics in the grassroots is vibrant with functioning local self-government. This chapter discusses how caste relations and caste identities have overarching presence in day-to-day politics of these two villages. Though caste almost ceases to operate following religious strictures, the division of labour largely coincides with the caste division under economic compulsions. In the cultural–ideological field, caste hierarchy seems to continue as an influencing factor even in the operation of left politics. Chapter 8, ‘Women and Caste: In Struggle and Governance’, examines the question of how the peasant women in one of the study villages take part in the resistance movement against land acquisition when they have seldom been enjoying any right customarily to agricultural land. In the contemporary neo-liberal climate, does the participation of peasant women in the movement against land acquisition and ‘development-led dispossession’ reveal any new pattern of politics? How does caste influence the participation of women in the decentralized forms of governance and in the land movement? This chapter explores the socio-political basis of the participation of women, cutting across different caste groups, in the movement against land acquisition for setting up an industry and in normal process of governance. The last chapter, ‘Conclusion: A New Kind of Peasant Mobilization?’, summarizes the main arguments and research findings put forward in the preceding chapters and tries to ask whether there emerges any new kind of mobilization at the grassroots of the post-colonial countries like India in contemporary age of globalization. The concluding chapter reveals that the recent people’s mobilizations at the grassroots are, as it happens, distinct and new from the kind of mobilizations that occurred in earlier periods. This new kind of mobilizations of the people is seemingly ‘local’ or ‘micro level’ and ‘manifests in intensely local form’, but its impacts go beyond and affect larger political landscape.

2 Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal

T

he last three decades have really been very important in the history of West Bengal, India, for a number of reasons. These long years, marked by the uninterrupted rule of the Left Front, have been particularly remarkable for the changes they brought about in the rural society of West Bengal. Never before could the state achieve such a remarkable growth in agricultural production as it did during this period. In fact, agricultural production almost stagnated in West Bengal for nearly a century, that is, from 1880 to 1980 (Bandyopadhyay, 2007). Never before were the programmes of land reforms, including ‘Operation Barga’, initiated and implemented on such a scale and with such a firm political will. Never before were PRIs made to function uninterrupted with the purported aim to ‘decentralize’ rural administration and enhance rural development. Never before did the countryside witness so much activity of the organized political parties and the ensuing political division in the rural society. Never before perhaps, in such a short span of time, had West Bengal’s village society undergone so much change in all spheres of life – economic, political and cultural – ideological. The Economy West Bengal has been regarded as one of the fastest growing states in India with its annual growth rate of State Domestic Product (SDP) being 7 per cent in the period between 1993–94 and 2000–01. The per capita SDP was just above the national average, while the per capita consumption expenditure in 2000 was Rs 572 per month, which was lower than the national average of Rs 591 per month (Government of West Bengal [GoWB], 2004c: 8). In the rural areas of West Bengal, there has been a substantial increase in the

28  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

informal manufacturing sector and a simultaneous decrease in regular jobs.1 In the rural population of West Bengal, the proportion of main male workers (those getting economically productive work for more than 183 days a year) decreased from 50.66 per cent in 1991 to 47.01 per cent in 2001. During the same period, the proportion of male marginal workers (those getting less than 183 days economically productive works a year) increased drastically from 0.74 per cent to 6.98 per cent. Among the female population, main workers did not change much (from 7.96 per cent to 9.12 per cent) during the same period, while marginal workers increased considerably from 3.29 per cent to 9.21 per cent (Ibid.). The change in employment pattern can be seen from another register. According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) study (GoI 1999–2000), the most significant change in employment conditions for rural men in the state is the decline in regular employment and the increase in casual work. Self-employed men (in both agriculture and non-agriculture) accounted for about half of the rural male workforce, while those with casual jobs were more than two-fifths (43.3 per cent) and those with regular jobs were only 7.5 per cent in 2001 (GoWB, 2004c: 95). About 72 per cent of the people in the state live in rural areas. According to the Planning Commission, the proportion of population below the poverty line in 1999–2000 was 31.85 per cent in the whole state, which is higher than the national average of 26 per cent (Ibid.: 9).2 Poverty is more concentrated in the rural areas: 84 per cent of the absolutely poor population lived in the villages, compared to 74 per cent in India as a whole in 1999–2000 (Ibid). In terms of basic household amenities, West Bengal’s performance tends to be lower than the national average. In the late 1990s, 68 per cent of urban households and only 16 per cent of rural households had pucca (brick) houses, compared to 71 per cent and 29 per cent respectively for all-India average. In West Bengal, 82 per cent households had access to safe drinking water,3 which was much higher than the national average of 62 per cent. Electrification in West Bengal has proceeded more slowly than the rest of India: in 1991, only 1. The number of such enterprises in rural Bengal was 21,237 and number of people employed there was 4,416,100 during 2000–01 (GoWB, 2004b). 2. Department of Panchayats and Rural Development, West Bengal, published a ‘Report of BPL Survey as on 30.10.2002’ on its website (www.wbprd.nic.in/HtmlPage/bpl2002.aspx. Last accessed on 26.02.13), which shows that 36.68 per cent families lived below the poverty line in the state, barring Kolkata. 3. Recently, widespread presence of arsenic contamination has been noticed in drinking water sources in the rural areas of several districts of West Bengal, which probably has not been considered while estimating the safe drinking water facility in rural Bengal. Had it been taken into account, the percentage of households having safe drinking water facilities would have probably been much less.

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  29

33 per cent of all households had electricity connection compared to 42 per cent for all-India. Literacy indicator in the state is not up to the expectation from a ‘politically alert state’ like West Bengal. The aggregate literacy rate was 68.6 per cent in 2001, which was only marginally higher than the national average of 65 per cent (Ibid.: 9). The most important feature of the rural scenario is probably the predominance of a small peasant economy in which most of the land is in the hands of peasants having land below 5 acres. It can be seen from the Table 2.1 that the proportion of land held by marginal, small and middle peasants was considerably high, that is, around 60 per cent of the arable land in West Bengal. The distribution of land among households and by area is shown in Table 2.1. Table 2.1 Pattern of Landholding Distribution According to Size Class (1961–81) Size class In acres 0–1

1–2.5 2.5–5 5–10

Above 10

1961–62

Households

Households

Area

Households

Area

1.34

2.11

2.04

1.64

1.89

0.411

1.68

2.59

0.98 0.41

1981–82

Area

5.11 1.81

1971–72

2.88 2.76

5.65 1.26 0.73 0.24

0.68 2.56 2.77 1.93

6.41 1.29 0.5

0.14

1.08 3.14 2.41 1.45

Source: NSSO for 1961–62 (1999) and 1971–72; and Bandyopadhyay (1980) for 1981–82. Note: Number of households and land is in million.

As there were no figures on the number of landless for the year 1981–82, the per cent of landless peasants and marginal farmers were clubbed together in the first row of Table 2.1. It is evident from the table that, in West Bengal, fragmentation of land has increased over time and the trend has been persisting for the last few decades. Due to fragmentation and other reasons, marginalization among the peasant community has also been a severe problem since long. From Table 2.1, we can find that the number of peasant households below the 1 acre category had a secular increase during the decades of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, while the number of peasant households from all other categories had reduced. From Table 2.2, more up-to-date results of classification according to land size are available. Here also, we can find the trend of increasing marginalization among the peasant population in West Bengal. This trend of marginalization has continued while the number of landless has increased dramatically during the period of Left Front government in

30  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a Table 2.2 Pattern of Landholding Distribution According to Size Class (1985–96) Year 1985–86 1990–91 1995–96

Below 1 hectare

1–2 hectare

2–4 hectares

4–10 hectares

Above 10 hectares

HHs*

Land#

HHs

Land

HHs

Land

HHs

Land

HHs

Land

4.63

1.83

1.17

1.69

0.457

12.69

0.079

0.425

0.001

0.2

4.29 5.00

1.61 2.23

1.17 1.1

1.75 1.62

0.517 0.382

13.82 10.46

0.094 0.060

0.486 0.316

0.001 0.001

0.2

0.22

Source: Evaluation Programme, Evaluation Wing, Directorate of Agriculture, GoWB (quoted by Ghosh, 2003). Note: *number of households in million; # amount of land in million hectares.

West Bengal, notwithstanding all its success stories in land reforms. During the period from 1977 to 2001, the number of agricultural labourers increased from 1.4 million to 7.36 million. According to census reports, the number of owner-cultivators in the state had decreased from 6.41 million in 1991 to 5.65 million in 2001, while the number of agricultural labourers had increased from 5.48 million to 7.36 million during the same period. That is to say, among the working population in agriculture, the per cent of owner-cultivators has decreased from 53.9 per cent to 43.4 per cent, while the per cent of agricultural labourers has increased from 46.1 per cent to 56.6 per cent in just one decade (GoWB, 2004b). The NSSO data indicate that the proportion of landless rural households in West Bengal increased from 39.6 per cent in 1987–88 to 41.6 per cent in 1993–94 and to as much as 49.8 per cent in 1999–2000. Nearly half of the rural households appear to be landless in the state and the rate of landlessness is fast increasing (GoWB, 2004c).

Agrarian Scenario The advent of Left Front rule in West Bengal almost coincided with the widespread application of the Green Revolution technology in the countryside. The Green Revolution programme had been initiated by the central government in the mid-1960s when severe food crisis rocked the country. This crisis eventually broke the monopoly of Congress power for the first time since independence and brought down Congress ministries in seven states in the 1967 elections. The Green Revolution technology was then introduced to select areas of the country. Only since the mid-1970s, West Bengal witnessed its increasing application through initiatives taken

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  31

both at the private and the government levels. After coming to power, the Left Front government, in its anxiety to consolidate its rural support base, sought to facilitate the implementation of the central government schemes related to Green Revolution technology and poverty alleviation. This effort was combined with the implementation of land reforms and the revitalization of PRIs, which also played an important role in bringing about substantial changes in agrarian production and productivity. There was an unprecedented growth in the production of foodgrains, including paddy, the main staple food in the state, during the 1980s, that is, the first decade of the Left Front rule in West Bengal. Rawal and Swaminathan (1998) pointed out that while foodgrain production in the state grew at the rate of less than 1 per cent annually during the 1950s, the rate of growth increased to 3.3 per cent annually in the 1960s but fell back to less than 1 per cent in the 1970s (see Table 2.3). The overall growth rate for the period 1950–80 was 2.5 per cent a year. In the 1980s, this growth rate jumped to 5.8 per cent a year, after which it again slowed down, but the overall annual growth rate of foodgrains remained at 4.5 per cent for the period 1980–95. Table 2.3 Rate of Growth of Foodgrain Production (1950–95)

Period

1950–60 1960–70 1970–80 1980–90 1990–95 1950–80 1980–95

Production

Compound Annual Rate of Growth

0.79 3.32

Area

Productivity

1.13

2.06

0.44

0.96

-0.07

2.13

0.44

5.81 2.56 4.56

0.96 0.76 0.72

0.32 1.06 5.18 1.88 1.78 3.85

Source: Rawal and Swaminathan (1998).

Notably, after the initial boom, the foodgrain production stagnated. In the period 1990–95, it came down to a growth rate of 2.13 per cent per annum (Table 2.3). This stagnation in growth rate continued the entire decade of 1990s when the annual growth rate registered was 2.26 per cent as foodgrains production increased from 11.27 million tons in 1990–91 to 13.815 million tons in 2000–01 (GoWB, 2004b).

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The boom in foodgrain production in the decade of 1980s could be attributed to several factors, the principal being the adoption of higher-yielding varieties of aman paddy and the cultivation of summer boro paddy in rotation with aman. Both these forms of intensification were enabled by the rapid growth of groundwater irrigation, mainly in the form of privately owned shallow tube wells (STWs) (Rogaly et al., 1999). According to a study, 40 per cent of the growth in rice production between 1980 and 1993 could be attributed to the expansion of area under the boro crop, and another 35 per cent to introduction of high-yielding variety (HYV ) seeds in the main aman season (Banerjee and Ghatak, 1995: 63). Of course, other factors like land reforms have provided the muchneeded incentive to boost agricultural production depending on the highly fragmented small peasant economy. That HYV paddy can be cultivated in small plots and by family-run firms that are able to achieve higher land productivity than larger labour-hiring ones seems to facilitate growth on the basis of redistributive agrarian reforms. But tenancy reform was supposed to be more responsible than land distribution in the growth story as only 3 per cent of agricultural land has come under redistributive land reform, while around 8 per cent of agricultural land, so far, has come under Operation Barga. The impact of all these changes seems to have had a favourable effect on the increase in agricultural wage rates in West Bengal during this initial period of the Left Front rule. Sengupta and Gazdar (1996) estimated the compound growth rate of average real wages of male agricultural labourers in different Indian states from 1979–80 to 1992–93. During this period, West Bengal showed the highest growth rate (2.8 per cent annually) in real wages for agricultural labourers. From the same data source, Kynch (1990) calculated the daily wage rate of male agricultural labourers in terms of rice and found it to have increased substantially from 2.56 kg in 1983 to 5.03 kg in 1990. Interestingly, there is also evidence to suggest that the male– female wage differential was not high in rural Bengal. Data from the World Institute for Development of Economics and Research (WIDER) village survey conducted in 1987–89 showed that with the exception of a north Bengal village, daily wage rate for women in agriculture were not below those of male labourers (Sengupta and Gazdar, 1996: 169, quoted by Rawal and Swaminathan, 1998: 2601).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  33

Effects of Tenancy Reform on Agriculture On the effect of Operation Barga, Banerjee et al. (2002) identified the direction of correlation between the extents of recorded bargadars4 on the one hand, and output, adoption of HYV seeds and extent of development of irrigation on the other. They found that Operation Barga had a positive effect on agricultural production by substantially increasing the rate of expansion of boro cultivation and investment in private irrigation. A more sophisticated econometric analysis of data for 14 districts for the years 1973 and 1993 confirmed that tenancy reform had a significant positive effect on the productivity of all crops, working mainly through yields (Banerjee, Gertler and Ghatak, 2002). It was also estimated that the contribution of tenancy reform to the overall growth of output was as high as 36 per cent of all rice production and 72 per cent for a man rice production. Bhawmik (1993) studied the effect of Operation Barga on agricultural production and productivity in Medinipur district for the year 1986–87 and found that registered or recorded tenants were better off than unrecorded tenants in terms of share of output retained by the tenants. In aman season, for example, recorded tenants received 59 per cent of the total returns as compared to 32 per cent among unrecorded tenants. He found that a higher proportion of recorded tenants (43.7 per cent) relied solely on institutional credit than unrecorded tenants (22.3 per cent) (Ibid., quoted by Rawal and Swaminathan, 1998: 2600). In a study of two villages in eastern Bankura, Rawal (2001) found that agrarian movement had a profound impact on rural markets, in particular on land and credit markets, and argued that the redistributive implication of agrarian reforms went far beyond the achievements of direct public action. The study found that a substantial amount of land was transferred from large and non-resident landowners to landless and small cultivators through transaction in the market. For example, in the villages Panahar and Muidara in Bankura, the land purchased by landless households between 1977 and 1995 was nearly three times the extent transferred through land reforms. There has been a debate on identifying the principal reason behind this extraordinary growth in foodgrain production in the state. But most of the 4. The bargadar is a sharecropper, a type of tenant, who borrows land from the landlords or other landholding classes for cultivation with the condition of giving a particular fixed share of the crops produced on the land to the landowner. The Left Front government, in its initial days, had launched the ‘Operation Barga’ programme to register the names of the bargadars so that they could not be evicted by the landowners. The stipulated share of crops is three-fourth for the bargadar and the rest to the landlord.

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scholars agree that a combination of factors helped in the spectacular growth of foodgrain production in the decade of 1980s. However, it should be noted that the boom in foodgrain production was a very short-lived one, which actually covered the period from 1983 to 1990. After that, once again, the growth rate slowed down in the decade of 1990s to 2.28 per cent. Bandyopadhyay (2007) observed that the impact of Green Revolution of the mid–late 1960s was felt in West Bengal over a decade later only after agrarian relations underwent a massive change through two phases of land reform. However, he did not attribute the upsurge in foodgrain production fully to land reforms. Thus, there seems to be a distinct relationship between the implementation of land reform programme and the success story in agricultural production in West Bengal. The Left Front government has also asserted a connection between its agrarian reforms and rapid agricultural growth (GoWB, 1995; see also Rogaly et al., 1999). Though rarely any scholar has challenged the veracity of this claim, some have posed some very relevant questions. Sengupta and Gazdar (1996) pointed out that the rapid agricultural growth actually began in West Bengal around 1983–84, that is, six years after the initiation of land reforms. It is also pointed out that security of tenure though very important for the tenants, in itself, is unlikely to have made a big change in the overall agricultural performance. Even in September 1995, the area cultivated by registered sharecroppers was only 8 per cent of the net sown area (Rogaly et al., 1999). Further, there has been a slowdown in the agricultural growth rate since 1991–92.

Causes of Stagnation The stagnation in growth of foodgrain production since 1990s may be attributed principally to exorbitant increase in the cost of irrigation water due to diesel price hike and price rise of other inputs without a corresponding increase in crop selling price. It should be noted that the rise in foodgrain production was mainly caused by a boom in the production of the summer rice, that is, boro paddy, that requires huge amount of water for a good yield. Peasants in West Bengal cultivate this summer paddy depending mainly on the diesel-run shallow pump sets. The use of pump sets for irrigation had increased astronomically during the decades of 1980s and 1990s. But only 10.1 per cent of all irrigation pump sets used in West Bengal were electricity

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  35

operated in 1998, while this figure was 51 per cent for India as a whole. This made West Bengal the state with lowest proportion of electricity-run water-extracting machines (WEM) to total WEMs, even lower than the neighbouring states of Bihar (11.9 per cent) and Orissa (27.3 per cent) and far behind states like Karnataka (89 per cent), Maharashtra (88 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (88 per cent) (National Sample Survey Office [NSSO], 1999). The state government failed to provide surface water irrigation or electric connections at a cheap rate to most of the aspiring peasants, making them principally dependent on diesel-run pump sets for irrigation. In the meantime, diesel price skyrocketed from Rs 3.54/litre in 1990 to Rs 34.50/litre in 2007, rendering irrigation by the diesel pump sets highly non-viable.5 Further, the power tariff imposed by the State Electricity Board increased a lot during the same period (the flat electricity rate for shallow and submersible pump sets utilized for irrigation increased from around Rs 1,100 in 1991 to around Rs 8,000 for shallow and Rs 10,000 for submersible pumps in 2007) (Mukherji, 2007). All these factors forced a considerable number of peasants to abandon cultivation of summer paddy and shift to some other crops or keep their land fallow in the summer season. Thus, the benefit of Green Revolution seems to have evaporated under the heat of diesel price hike along with price hike of almost all other inputs. While stagnancy in growth rate has been continuing, the net cropped area in the state has reduced from 5,463,424 hectares in 1990–91 to 5,427,672 hectares in 2003–04 (GoWB, 2004b). Further, the seventh Left Front government, after coming to power in May 2006, declared its intention to acquire around 0.1 million acres of land, mostly agricultural, for its industrialization and urbanization programmes. The continuous reduction in net crop area in the state has been a cause of concern for scholars who stress on the fact that West Bengal has not yet attained actual food security. It produces 11 per cent surplus rice and 40 per cent surplus vegetables, but it is 50 per cent deficient in wheat production and 75 per cent deficient in pulse production and has to buy 60 per cent of the oilseeds from other states (The Telegraph, Kolkata, 28 June 2006). 5. See Table in India’s Petrol, Diesel, Kerosene and LPG Prices. The Reuter. Downloaded from website http://www.in.reuters.com. http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/02/04/india-fuel-prices-idINSGE6130E720100204

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The Story of Land Reforms The history of land reform in West Bengal can be divided into three phases. During the first phase (1953–66), some basic legislations were adopted, but few of them were implemented. In the second phase (1967–76), the state made some progress in land distribution, but still little was done to protect the right of the bargadars. In the third phase (1977–present), however, considerable success was achieved in safeguarding the rights of the bargadars and distribution of ceiling-surplus land. In the first phase, two major land reform acts were passed in West Bengal. The first was the West Bengal Estate Acquisition Act (EAA) 1953 that aimed to eliminate the interests of the intermediaries, that is, zamindars and jotedars, on all lands except that they ‘self-cultivate’ (using hired labours, of course). Of this latter category of land, called khas land, the intermediaries were allowed to retain 25 acres of agricultural land and 20 acres of non-agricultural and homestead land. Till 1966, ceiling-surplus land amounting 300,000 acres was distributed, a little less than 3 per cent of the total cropped land at that time. Much of the above-ceiling land was retained by the rural gentry through evasive transfers to relatives; also, friends and fictitious persons retained much of the above-ceiling land. These types of land were popularly termed as ‘benami land’. In 1955, the state legislature enacted the second land reform law, the Land Reform Act (LRA) 1955, which intended to restrict the landholders’ ability to transfer land (to avoid ceiling) and to provide protection to bargadars. While little of the LRA provisions were implemented, this Act supposedly led to widespread eviction of cultivators from land by the landlords who wanted to evade the provisions of the Act, thereby increasing the percentage of agricultural labourers in the state (Dutta, 1988). The second phase saw the installation of two United Front governments in West Bengal and a surge in peasant movement, principally to reclaim the benami lands so far held by the landlords through their connection with the administration and the political leaders in power. The United Front government took an active role in redistributing the ceiling-surplus land and, as a result, in just four years, 1967–70, an additional 600,000 acres of land was distributed (Bandyopadhyay, 2007). The land ceiling law was amended during this period so as to change its basis from individuals to households and the ceilings were lowered considerably. Previously, the basic ceiling was 25 acres per person. The changed ceiling became 12.35 acres of irrigated land or 17.39 acres of

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  37

unirrigated land for a family of two to five persons; and for larger families, 17.29 acres of irrigated land or 24.12 acres of unirrigated land. But little could be done in this period of widespread peasant movement to grant greater security to the bargadars due to the lack of a proper legislation. After the collapse of the second United Front government in 1970, important amendments were passed to the LRA to secure the tenancy right of the bargadars, but in practice, little was done in their favour till 1977. After coming back to power in 1977, the Left Front government took a number of steps to implement the existing acts and also amend them in favour of the cultivators. It started to take over ceiling-surplus land and to seal loopholes that previously allowed exemptions to the ceiling for religious and charitable trusts, plantations and fisheries. Furthermore, in 1979, the state legislature amended the LRA to narrow the definition of ‘personal cultivation’ to better ensure that those who were actual cultivators owned the land. Simultaneously, the Left Front government launched ‘Operation Barga’, under which the government functionaries would record the names of the bargadars to ensure them greater tenure security and protection against the threat of eviction. The programme ‘Operation Barga’, that is, registering the name of the sharecroppers, started in 1978 and immediately got startling results as around 1.2 million sharecroppers – around 65–70 per cent of the total number of bargadars in the state – registered their name in the first three years. In fact, by recognizing the critical deficiency of the traditional administrative approach in the earlier land reform programmes carried out in West Bengal, the present administration adopted a new attempt to implement this policy effectively (Bandyopadhyay, 2007: 61).6 Till 2000, over 1.68 million sharecroppers were 6. The main features of the programme of land reforms in West Bengal are: 1. Drive to detect and vest more ceiling surplus lands through quasi-judicial investigative machinery with the help of rural workers organizations and PRIs. 2. Giving institutional credit cover to the sharecroppers and the assignees of vested land to irreversibly snap the ties of bondage they have with the landlords and moneylenders. 3. Assigning permanent titles for homestead purpose to all the landless agricultural labourers, including sharecroppers, artisans and fishermen up to 0.08 acres who are occupying lands of others as permissive possessors. 4. Providing tiny sources of irrigation to the assignees of vested land through bamboo tube wells where underground hydrological conditions permit such technology and bank financed dug wells with heavy subsidy from the state in other suitable areas with a view to induce such assignees to go for high value multiple cropping to improve their economic status. 5. Giving financial assistance in the form of subsidies to the assignees of vested land for development of their lands. 6. Abrogation of the old revenue system which was a hangover of the zamindari era and substituting it by a new measure under which revenue is assessed on land-holding above a certain valuation on progressive rate. Small and marginal farmers have been exempted from revenue burden. 7. Restoration of land alienated by poor and marginal farmers through distress sale provided the purchaser himself is not a poor peasant having land holding less than 1 acre. 8. Designing ‘Food for work programme’ for developing rural infrastructure which

38  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

recorded, giving them hereditary right of cultivation and a fair deal in crop sharing, with a certificate of sharecropping which could be used as a document to establish one’s identity as a sharecropper and also for securing crop loans from institutions. This number of recorded sharecroppers accounted for 20.2 per cent of total agricultural households, and the land covered amounted to 8.2 per cent of the total arable land in the state (GoWB, 2004c). At the same time, about 1.39 million acres of land was acquired by the state government (18 per cent of the total land acquired in India), of which 1.04 million acres were distributed (20 per cent of the total land distributed in India). This land was distributed among 2.745 million beneficiaries that account for nearly half (47 per cent) of the total beneficiaries of redistributive land reforms in India. It should be noted that 24 per cent of the total amount of land declared surplus remained to be distributed till 2000. Pattas (legal ownership papers) of homestead plots were given to around 0.55 million landless families. Thus, it can be estimated that more than 4 million households in rural West Bengal directly benefited from land reforms (GoWB, 2004c: 34). Though quite a large number of rural poor were benefited by the redistributive land reforms, the average land received by a pattadar is quite small, only 0.39 acre, while the ceiling of landholding of a pattadar is fixed at 1 acre. This has been one of the reasons why landholding is so fragmented in West Bengal. The pattern of land distribution has benefited the SCs and STs most. They constitute more than half of the total pattadars, well above their share in rural population.7 Table 2.4 shows the official data on percentage of SCs and STs among the beneficiaries of land reforms in the state. Table 2.4 Percentage of SCs–STs among the Pattadars and Bargadars Scheduled Castes

Scheduled Tribes

Others

37.1

19.3

43.6

Pattadars

Bargadars

30.5

11.0

58.5

Source: GoWB (2004c: 35).

While the pattern of land reform in the state has clearly aimed to redress the social inequalities of caste, it has been much less effective in reducing the would primarily benefit the assignees of vested land and marginal farmers as well as to give them sustenance during period of distress to tide over crisis and to prevent re-transfer of land to affluent farmers (Bandyopadhyay, 2007: 61–62). 7. The percentages of SCs and STs in the total population in the state are 28.6 per cent and 5.8 per cent respectively, in the rural areas (GoWB, 2004a).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  39

gender discrimination present in the landownership pattern. Rather, it seems to have reinforced the existing gender inequalities. The land pattas were principally allotted in the name of male members of the family. The incidence of joint patta and single patta in the name of women remained extremely low. While 9.7 per cent of the total pattas were distributed as joint patta (in the name of both male and female members of the family), only in 5.94 per cent cases, pattas were allotted in the name of women (Ibid.: 36). But the most disturbing trend in the recent phase seems to be the reversal of land reform as a number of pattadars were found to have lost their possession of land, with an almost similar number of bargadars being evicted from land they were cultivating so far. A recent study sponsored by the State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development (SIPRD) found that by 2001, in the whole state of West Bengal, 13.23 per cent pattadars had lost possession of the land they got through land reforms programme, while 14.37 per cent bargadars were reported to have been evicted from the land they were cultivating (Ibid.: 41).

Panchayats: Participatory Democracy? Following independence, the Constitution of Indian republic encouraged decentralization to rural governments but left the responsibility to implement it to the state governments. The central government set up the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee in 1957, which provided the basic guidelines for a three-tier system of local government. West Bengal government passed its own Panchayat Act in 1957, followed by Zilla Parishad Act enacted in 1963 proposing a four-tier panchayat system. Accordingly, in the year 1964, approximately 19,000 gram panchayats were formally constituted, but not much power and responsibility was delegated to these institutions and nor were they provided with financial support. In 1973, the West Bengal Panchayat Act was passed annulling the previous act and proposing the three-tier system of gram panchayat, panchayat samiti and zilla parishad. But no election was held to invigorate the system till 1978, when Left Front government held elections to the three-tier panchayats and made panchayat elections mandatory after every five years. The panchayati raj system was amended thrice during the Left Front rule. In 1985, an amendment was made to create the system of ‘decentralized planning’ or budgeting where panchayats would communicate their priorities

40  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

and necessities to the higher levels, which would subsequently be considered while allocating funds for various schemes. In 1993, the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution made the mandatory provisions of reservation of one-third panchayat seats for women and a share of seats to the SC–ST category people equal to their proportion in the local population. This was supplemented in 1998 by a constitutional amendment to include reservation of the position of pradhan (chair of the gram panchayat) for women and SC/ST candidates. Apart from reservations, the 1993 amendment also mandated two meetings in a year of the gram sansads (village assembly) where: accounts for the preceding period would have to be submitted; future proposals and projects would have to be discussed and finalized; and complaints and critiques by the local villagers would have to be answered. The latest amendment to West Bengal Panchayat Act was in 2003, thereby creating the provision for the mandatory formation of ‘Gram Unnayan Samiti’ or VDC that would decide development issues and look after the implementation of the same. Bandyopadhyay (2007) observed that the latest phase of land reform could successfully break the stranglehold of landed gentry over the rural society of West Bengal. For long, this landed gentry was the base of Congress party in the countryside and ruled the rural people. To spread the influence and organization of the left parties, it was necessary to break the social base of the Congress party and create an alternate support base for the left. Panchayati raj was almost simultaneously introduced by the Left Front to consolidate its rural base. The middle and upper middle peasantry, now being freed from the domination of the landed gentry and with the active support of rural poor, took the opportunity to fill the political vacuum. From these classes came most of the leaders of the left parties and a large number of representatives in the various tiers of the panchayat. But, probably, more phenomenal change took place in the social status of the ‘lowest’ category of rural people in the wake of land reforms and the introduction of the PRIs. These are the people from small and marginal peasantry and the landless households who benefited somewhat from land reform measures and were enthused to get, for the first time, some kind of representation of their own castes and community groups in the PRIs. A sample survey conducted after 1978 panchayat elections showed that 75 per cent of the people elected came from households that owned less than 2 acres of land (Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002: 47). The SCs, caste wise, and STs had the largest representation among the various castes and social groups, and the representation has increased over the years (Lieten, 1996).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  41 Table 2.5 Percentage of Gram Panchayat Seats According to Landholding Size Class Per Cent of Gram Panchayat Seats Landless

1978–83

1983–88

1988–1993

1993–98

1998–2003

9.6

11.2

10.9

20.8

19.9

18.3

16.9

21.7

12.1

15.7

Marginal

38.5

Total

66.4

Small

Per cent of total rural households

96.1

39.6

37.6

67.7

37.8

70.2

70.7

35.2 70.8 99.2

Source: Mookherjee (2006).

Another study (Mookherjee with Bardhan, 2006), conducted in 80 villages spread in different districts of the state, reveals that the proportions of landless, marginal and small landowners occupying gram panchayat seats were much less than their proportion in the population. Table 2.5 shows that though the landless, marginal (0–2.5 acres) and small (2.5–5 acres) landowners collectively accounted for two-thirds of all gram panchayat seats, their representation was far less than their share in the population, which rose from 96 per cent of the village population in 1978 to 99 per cent in 1998. This means that the households owning more than 5 acres of land were vastly over-represented in the gram panchayats. This category of people, having less than 4 per cent share among rural population, occupied one-third of the total gram panchayat seats. Table 2.6 Percentage of Women and SCs–STs among Total Gram Panchayat Seats Per Cent of Gram Panchayat Seats Women

SCs–STs

Per cent of SC–ST in rural households

1978–83 1983–88 1988–93 2.4

20.1 31.8

1.7

20.3

1.3

22.1

1993–98

1998–2003

1.1

34.1

33.9

33.4 34.4

Source: Bandyopadhyay (2007).

The landless people were found to be the largest among the underrepresented categories. While their demographic weight increased from 44 per cent in 1978 to 49 per cent in 1998, their proportion of seats increased

42  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

from 9.6 per cent to 19.9 per cent, that is, less than half of their demographic share (Table 2.5). In 1998, one of the two households was landless, but only one out of every five panchayat seats was secured by a landless candidate (Bandyopadhyay, 2007). Similarly, women were highly under-represented till 1998 and SCs–STs remained under-represented till 1983, that is, till these groups were provided with reservation facilities. Table 2.6 reveals these details. While above-mentioned social groups remained highly under-represented and only had a matching representation when reservations were made for them, the schoolteachers were highly represented in the panchayat system. According to one survey conducted in 1993 of all the panchayat members of eight districts, teachers were elected in 6.7 per cent of gram panchayat seats, 15.5 per cent of the panchayat samiti seats and 32.5 per cent of the zilla parishad seats.8 Significantly, higher the panchayat tier, higher the representation of teachers in the panchayat. That means the teachers were deeply entrenched in the leading positions within the panchayat system. The effect of reservation policy on representation was studied by Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) on all the gram panchayats (166 in number) of Birbhum district. The study focussed on the representation of women and SCs–STs in reserved and unreserved seats, along with the pattern of attendance of women in the gram sabha meetings. Table 2.7 Percentage of Gram Panchayats with Women and SCs–STs Pradhans

Per cent of gram panchayats with female pradhans Per cent of gram panchayats with SC–ST pradhans

Per cent of women attending gram sabha meetings

Gram panchayats with reserved pradhan positions

Gram panchayats without reservation

100

6.5

100

7.5

9.8

6.9

Source: Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004: 1414); Mookherjee (2006).

It is quite revealing from the data given in Table 2.7 that while the reserved seats for women and SCs–STs were all filled as stipulated, in the unreserved seats, these groups were highly under-represented. The percentage of women among the attendees of gram sabha meetings was slightly more in gram 8. See District Panchayat Profiles, published by SIPRD, quoted in GoWB (2004c).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  43

panchayats with women pradhans but on both occasions, their presence was insignificant. As it has been made mandatory for all gram panchayats to conduct gram sansad (village council) meetings twice a year according to the constitutional amendment, all eligible voters in a particular village constituency are eligible to attend the meetings. The participants in these meetings are supposed to discuss local needs and new programmes to be taken up and choose beneficiaries for the existing programmes; review the past and proposed programmes; and inspect the accounts of expenditure and budgets. The gram sansad meeting is thus an instrument of direct participation of the people in the planning process as well as it helps in monitoring elected representatives. Ghatak and Ghatak (2002) have studied 20 constituencies having an average of 940 voters each where the average number of voters who have utilized their franchise in the last panchayat election is 628 for each constituency. That means an average of 66.8 per cent voters have participated in the elections for grassroots power. But what about participation in gram sansad meetings where activities concerning people’s direct interests are supposed to be discussed and decided? Ghatak and Ghatak (2002) find that an average of 12 per cent of voters attend the meetings. It is interesting to note that while one-third of the gram sansad seats are reserved for women, only 9 per cent among those who attended the meetings were women. But a more interesting finding of the study relates to the causes of nonparticipation in the said meetings. The study shows that: Those who participated were largely members or supporters of some political parties or other and in all the 20 constituencies a majority of the voters who were present belonged to the respective parties of the elected members. Among the non-participants were relatively affluent individuals who found no immediate benefits, as they were not eligible for any financial benefit under various poverty alleviation schemes. Political minorities and those not directly associated with political parties preferred to stay away as they feel their opinion would have little effect. They feel that the dominant party would do whatever they wanted to do anyway. Members of backward groups (SC and ST) felt that they did not have much voice in their own party where the leadership consisted largely of members of higher castes. Women, too, felt that they were not encouraged to participate. (Ibid.: 50–51)

These findings are consistent with the findings of the earlier study done by Webster (1992). Ghatak and Ghatak’s (2002) study was conducted through

44  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

interviews on the very next day after the gram sansad meetings were held. Among the respondents who had not attended the meetings, only the affluent families expressed indifference regarding attending. But all others had expressed definite reasons for their non-participation that showed clearly their lack of confidence in the local ruling party (among those elected in these local constituencies, 65 per cent were Left Front members in the abovementioned study conducted in the three districts of North 24 Paraganas, South 24 Paraganas and South Dinajpur). In brief, they did not attend the meetings in the apprehension that the ruling party leaders and supporters would dominate the same and would not listen to the views of persons who were either supporters of some other party, or did not belong to any party or were supporters of the ruling party but belonged to SC and ST community. So, at the grassroots in West Bengal, these three categories of people appear to be excluded, as also women who are not at all encouraged to participate (the survey revealed that they were not properly informed) in meetings where some sorts of decisions are supposed to be made. Hence, it is not surprising to find that rural people are losing interest in the activities of the panchayat. Bhattacharya (2002: 184) has found in a study that 90 per cent of the electorates interviewed in Raghunathpur in Hooghly district and 80 per cent interviewed in Jogram of Barddhaman district ‘showed absolute lack of interest in panchayat’s activities’. She also concluded that: …the people (i.e. the non-partisan masses) have been effectively kept away from the process of decision-making and enjoyment of political power. Thus panchayats have been institutionalized as essential component of a new system of decentralized government, but the vital aspect of people’s participation in these bodies is found missing. (Ibid.: 191)

It is worth noting here that the erstwhile ruling party, the CPI(M), had three declared objectives, according to its party documents, as far as the implementation of its rural development policy is concerned: (i) ‘to involve the entire people in the process of development by democratic decentralization of the power structure’; (ii) ‘to bring about a change in the correlation of class forces in favour of poor and working people’; and (iii) ‘to raise class consciousness through struggle over development’ (Mishra, 1991: 9). The party claimed that it wanted to fulfil the stated objectives principally through the panchayati raj system of democratic local government, by mass participation in the panchayats and increased class consciousness as a result. But many scholars have been sceptical about the fulfilment of these objectives.

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  45 Table 2.8 Number and Percentage of Gram Panchayat Seats Won Uncontested Year

1978

No. of seats uncontested

Percentage of total seats

332

0.74

1983 1988 1993 1998 2003

338

4,200

0.73 8

1,716

2.81

6,800

11

600

1.36

Source: Bandyopadhyay (2007: 187).

Insignificant participation (11–12 per cent) in the gram sansad meetings is cited as one example of the non-involvement of the rural people in the functioning of the panchayats. Many held that the control of the PRIs through the networks of party organization, principally of the CPI(M), has been mainly responsible for the loss of interest of the people at large in the PRIs (Bandyopadhyay, 2007; Bhattacharya, 1998; Bhattacharya, 2002). There had been widespread contention that opposition candidates were not allowed to file their nomination papers for the panchayat elections, particularly elections in 2003. Table 2.8 shows the abrupt increase in the number of uncontested seats in two elections during the time when such allegations were the highest. The governmental technique of distributing doles and relief through panchayats does not necessarily entail decentralization of power to the people. This phenomenon is keenly observed by Williams. He stated: The control of development funds for JRY and IRDP schemes gave (panchayat) members a degree of economic influence beyond that of most Landlords, and thus supported them in fulfilling their leadership role. Also, any development work a member undertook became highly personalized: rather than fulfilment of an objective set of criteria, it was seen by potential beneficiaries as ‘help’ especially by those among the labouring classes. This is significant in that by requesting help from their members, villagers were using a ‘language of claims’ equivalent to that used by, for example, a tenant requesting a loan from his landlord. Such requests are indicative of the way in which the whole Panchayat system is viewed by many: rather than being an institution in which they actively participate, it is seen as a distributor of personalized benefits. (Williams, 1999: 236)

He also observed that:

46  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a …more subtle than such outright theft (of Panchayat funds which was already mentioned by the author), and more commonplace, was the use of Panchayat funds to secure political support: a general complaint of all villagers not belonging to the faction of the Panchayat member was that all development money was being directed exclusively to the member’s friends and supporters…it was only the politically well connected that benefited. (Ibid.)

So, in rural West Bengal, the studies show that governmentality9 is not to be directed towards the welfare of the whole population, rather it is meticulously utilized in the interests of the party to strengthen its power and support base. At the same time, it is also true that, as observed by Corbridge et al. (2003), panchayat benefits are better distributed in areas where CPI(M) party is powerful than in areas where it is weak. In Malda, where the CPI(M) is weak, and in some part of Bihar and Jharkhand districts, people were found to be less aware of the Employment Assurance Scheme and benefited less from it in comparison to their counterparts in Medinipur where CPI(M) is strong. As the party tries to spread its network through the spread of governmentality, it helps to create an awareness about the beneficiary programmes among the whole population in general, and a sense of demand or right to get the benefit among the poorer sections in particular, which results in increasing political activities in the villages. Williams rightly observed that ‘the resources routed through Panchayats and the involvement of political parties have enabled a far wider number of villagers to become active in village politics’ (Williams, 1999: 247).

Party and Power in the Countryside The most critical question that one has to encounter while dealing with the contemporary rural politics is the question of political power in relation to organized political parties and different social strata in the countryside. All these years, West Bengal countryside has been an exception in India where the old landed gentry has almost faced its political demise, where political parties intervene in every spheres of rural society that has been stratified according to political allegiance (Bhattacharyya, 2009) and where the power 9. The term ‘governmentality’ was used by Michel Foucault to define the techniques of modern governments that ‘have as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health etc…’ (Foucault, 1991).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  47

of highly centralized political parties exists side by side with decentralized rural governance. The rural areas of West Bengal witnessed a strong peasant movement in the 1950s and the 1960s that was spearheaded by the left parties in the interest of small peasant–sharecroppers and directed against the dominance of the neorich jotedars who had become powerful enough to rule the villages along with remnants of the erstwhile landlord class. This movement was accompanied by the spread of strong organizational network of the left parties, mainly of the CPI(M), in the rural areas. Though these jotedar–landlord combine got back their power during the Congress party rule in the period 1972–77, the ascendance of Left Front to power in 1977 considerably weakened their grip on the countryside and ushered in new power relations. Chatterjee (1997: 67) has observed: It is in fact the Left movement, whose ideological and organizational leadership was provided by the urban middle classes, which has succeeded in resisting, much more than any other part of India, the emergence and domination of rich capitalist farmers in the countryside and sustained to a very large extent the continued viability of small peasant cultivation.

He also suggests that the success of land reforms in West Bengal depended more on the direct intervention of organized political movement than on administrative vigilance. Webster (1992) finds the reason behind the stability of the Left Front government for 34 years in the shift of its main constituent party, the CPI(M), from initial radicalism (1977–81) to administration of development programmes in the later period of their regime. While the initial radicalism facilitated the foundation of a strong base for the party and the government among the subaltern people in the rural areas of West Bengal, ‘the CPI(M) and its workers tended to move from focussing on discontent against structural causes of poverty and oppression to the administration of programmes and works aimed more at the alleviation of poverty itself ’ (Ibid.: 126). This change apparently helped to defuse tensions in agrarian relations and instead directed party activism into institutional works. This adaptation of the CPI(M) party with institutional politics has perhaps led to the de-radicalization of its own character by pursuing ‘consensusevoking unifying politics of mediation between different sectional interests’ in the countryside, which, in brief, is termed as the ‘Politics of Middleness’ by Bhattacharyya (1999: 292). Departing from its original agendas of

48  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

‘intensifying class struggle’ and ‘digging the graveyard of the looters, the billionaires, the jotedars and the landlords’ by using government as a tool of revolutionary struggles, the CPI(M) party has come a long way to shed all the euphoric display of ‘revolutionary zeal’, cool down its radical tempers and even compromise wage demands of the agricultural labourers which has been underestimated by the Krishak Sabha of the CPI(M) as ‘lower than the basic demand to win over the rich and middle peasants’ (Ibid.: 285).10 Notwithstanding the shift in its orientation, the party has been able to maintain its rural base by organizationally penetrating into the rural society and pragmatically manoeuvring local issues in the name of preserving ‘peasant unity’ instead of conducting ‘peasant struggle’. Kohli (1997) also traced the stability of the present regime in the effective role played by the well-organized reformist party, namely, the CPI(M), in this period. He observed that the party’s disciplined organization could minimize the debilitating elite factionalism and the related elite-led mobilization and counter-mobilization so common in other Indian states. The party consolidated a coalition of middle and lower strata by implementing some modest redistributive reform programmes. At the same time, it took a non-threatening approach towards the property-owning groups. But the CPI(M)’s attempt to maintain an alliance of the middle and lower groups has generated serious problems in its professed programme of redistribution. Moreover, like other ruling communist parties elsewhere, observes Kohli, the CPI(M) is beginning to give rise to a ‘new class’ of privileged members who are being resented by those excluded from the perks of power (Ibid.). Dealing with the later period of Left Front government, Bhattacharya (1998: 2) tries to understand the designs and strategies of party operations that ‘hold the real clue to the pattern of the exercise of political power and the degree of mass participation in the polity’. His study areas were mainly some urban and rural areas of Barddhaman and Hooghly districts where the main ruling party, the CPI(M), was traditionally quite strong. His principal observation is that the West Bengal panchayats have not been able to become the true platform of grassroots democracy, notwithstanding the decentralized pattern of their formation. All the major decisions of the panchayats were taken beforehand by a panchayat sub-committee formed and operated by the party and would be presented in the formal panchayat meetings as the 10. All India Krishak Sabha, the CPI(M)’s peasant body, adopted such resolution in 1986

(quoted from Bhattacharyya, 1999).

Land, Development and Politics in West Bengal  |  49

‘pradhan’s proposals’. Debates and discussions were generally avoided and any proposal for modification of the party sub-committee decisions would have to be brought back again to the party committee and ratified there. Even the names of the members of different beneficiary committees were decided beforehand by local party committees, and the party usually packed those ‘people’s committees’ by its members, activists and supporters. Such panchayat practices discouraged the common peopple and they became apathetic. Thus, ‘panchayats have failed to become the centre of people’s power in the state. The party is self-critically aware of it, but the victim of its own political problematic’. (Bhattacharya, 1998: 180). While studying the relationship between ‘Panchayati Raj and the Changing Micro-politics of West Bengal’ in three villages of Birbhum district, Williams (1999) attempts to evaluate the degree to which the CPI(M) has been able to restructure the micro-politics of rural Bengal through the implementation of the panchayati raj programmes. He observes that at the grassroots, the CPI(M) has not been exclusively or universally identified by the poor as ‘their’ party, nor has it initiated a system of local government with a ‘party democracy’ in the Western sense. This has resulted in the confinement of peasant awareness in competing for benefits, instead of raising their ‘class consciousness’ for achieving the party’s socialist aims. But there has been a real change in ‘class relations’, observed particularly between the agricultural workers and their employers, that suggests that the former are gaining in confidence and independence so much so that they are more able to change their support between party camps in order to corner some benefits of panchayat’s development programmes. Williams notes that without the economic changes, the freedom of the labourers to switch over to different support groups would have been constrained, and the power of their votes reduced accordingly (Ibid.). Ruud’s research of two Barddhaman villages shows that ‘the reign of the party does represent a significant period of agrarian change: the practical abolition of untouchability, enhanced social, economic and political status of the former “untouchables”, improvements in the positions of the women and increased literacy’ (Ruud, 1999b: 255). But the CPI(M) party was not equal in treating different caste groups of the same SC category. Bagdi’s were found over-represented in the powerful positions of the panchayat, village cooperative societies and gram committees. It was due to the caste group’s special relationship with the party in power that it got privileged positions, while the other SC group, the Muchis, seemed to have been discriminated against (Ruud, 1999b).

50  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

These major scholarly researches of the contemporary situation in West Bengal amply reveal that rural West Bengal has witnessed a number of paradoxes as far as development and democracy is concerned. As in the sphere of economy, the political sphere of rural Bengal perhaps contains more contradictory features and is full of dichotomies. On the one hand, there has been a phenomenal growth in foodgrain production, and on the other, there seems to be not much respite from rural poverty. Though the amount of land distributed in the state was more than any other state in the Indian Union, there has been a simultaneous increase in the proportion of landless people among the rural population working in agriculture. The effective implementation of PRIs has created an opportunity for greater representation from the so far unrepresented rural masses. At the same time, the success story of PRIs goes hand in hand with the enormous increase of the power of highly centralized organized political forces in West Bengal countryside that very often control the real power, superseding even the elected bodies. The research of Bhattacharya (2002) shows that panchayat members do not hold actual power if they are not members of the ruling party. Against the backdrop of these changes that have occurred in rural West Bengal during the last three decades, this book attempts to elucidate the grassroots politics in two selected villages of West Bengal, with a special emphasis on the political imagination of peasant people, and also the extent of their participation in institutional politics in recent times. In the light of these researches, the book describes the changing pattern of politics of peasant people on one hand, and the politics of organized parties and local government on the other. The study asks the question: how the local marginal people see the state and its policies and in the process, how they get entangled with the political parties existing in the area? Moreover, the study probes how the political parties and the local state treat peasants in their day-to-day political activities. Finally, this research, departing from other researches, seeks to understand, in the main, the changes that have occurred in the cultural and ideological proclivities of the subaltern people over the past few decades.

3 Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal

K

alipur and Kadampur,1 the two villages selected for my ethnographic research, are located in two blocks of the Hooghly district, Dhaniakhali and Singur respectively. The Hooghly district, lying on the western side of the river Ganges, has been prosperous in manufacturing, trading activities and agriculture and therefore, it has attracted a number of colonial powers since the sixteenth century.2 Due to its proximity to Kolkata, the district saw considerable development of modern industry during the British colonial period. In fact, a number of industries were set up during the colonial period on both sides of the Ganges stretching south to north of Kolkata, with the Hooghly industrial belt lying in the northern part. Both the blocks, Singur and Dhaniakhali, in the Hooghly district are separate assembly constituencies; the Dhaniakhali constituency has been reserved for the SC candidates since 1952. In the Singur block, out of the total population numbering 260,827, urban population is 30,391 as per 2001 census. In the Dhaniakhali block, the total population of 293,345 lives in rural areas; there is no urban population (GoWB, 2004a: 14–17). The high percentage of agricultural labourers (48 per cent) in Dhaniakhali block provides a sharp contrast to the situation in Singur block where the category ‘other workers’ (58.1 per cent) constitutes the biggest section among the working population, probably denoting the high recurrence of non-farm works available there due to its more urbanized character and proximity to the industrial areas of Hooghly. 1. Kalipur and Kadampur are the fictitious names of two villages in West Bengal. The names of the characters that will appear in the following pages are all fictitious. 2. Even before the British established their colony here, the Portuguese, the Danish, the Dutch and the French had come to the area and occupied the riverside areas of the district to set up their own trading centres (Mitra, 1975a: 591).

52  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

The political landscape of Hooghly district in the first two decades of the post-colonial period was dominated by the Congress party, though the communists, since the spurt of Tebhaga peasant movement, grew as a formidable force to challenge the supremacy of Congress in this period. In the 1971 interim parliamentary elections, the CPI(M) won all the three seats of the district, including the newly constituted Arambag parliamentary seat, demonstrating the complete hold of the party on the electoral politics in the district (Banerjee, 1990). While there has been close contest between the Congress and the Communist Party of India (CPI) in parliamentary elections from the very beginning, the Congress party dominated the assembly elections up to 1962, winning most of the assembly seats of Hooghly district. In the 1969 elections, Congress suffered an electoral debacle in the district as it could manage just two seats and in 1977, during the countrywide upsurge against the Emergency rule of the Congress, the party drew blank in the district. Meanwhile, peasant struggles continued under the leadership of the Communist Party, initially the undivided CPI and then the CPI(M), during the 1950s and the 1960s. The main thrusts of peasant movement in this period were to identify and seize above-ceiling land kept by the jotedars under different fictitious names and end all kind of illegal extractions done by the erstwhile zamindars and jotedars. As the food crisis aggravated, the peasants were repeatedly mobilized to demand food from the government. In 1959 and 1966, food movement broke out in Hooghly as in other districts of West Bengal. In fact, the movement to seize above-ceiling and khas3 land became very popular with the land-starved poor and landless peasants and a large amount of land was seized from the landed gentry during this period (All India Krishak Sabha [AIKS], 1997). The results of assembly elections in the two constituencies, Singur and Dhaniakhali, exhibit the many ups and downs in the fate of the contesting parties, mainly the Congress party and its later breakaway party, Trinamul Congress (TMC), and the CPI, CPI(M) and Forward Block (FB). The CPI’s win in the Singur seat in the very first elections in 1952 might seem puzzling, as the Congress party had dominated the elections in the district in the four consecutive elections from 1952 to 1967 (Banerjee, 1990). This was perhaps the effect of the Tebhaga peasant movement that broke out in the Singur 3. Large amount of above-ceiling land was kept by the landed gentry in collusion with the government officials in the Congress regime, flouting the norms set by the LRA. Moreover, those lands vested with the government, known as khas lands, were mostly in de facto control of the landed people. The peasant movement targeted these lands to be recovered and distributed.

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  53

block just prior to the 1952 elections. From 1969 onwards, the left won the Singur seat consistently in all assembly elections till 1996, except in 1982. But the CPI’s win in 1971 and 1972 may not be considered as the win of the left, as the CPI contested both the elections allying with Congress and defeated the left combine led by the CPI(M). Then, in the last two elections, in 2001 and 2006 respectively, the party candidate was defeated by the TMC candidate. So, it is evident from the election results that Singur has been one of the traditional bases of the left in the district. For the Dhaniakhali constituency, on the other hand, the left’s winning record has been more consistent since 1967, while the Congress won the first three elections beginning in 1952 (Ibid.). This constituency has been reserved for SC candidates from the very beginning. But, contrary to the Singur constituency where the CPI and later the CPI(M) dominated the scene, Dhaniakhali seems to be the traditional base of the FB party. In the 1967 elections, the FB candidate won against CPI(M) candidate who got a paltry sum of 5,070 votes. But surprisingly, the CPI(M) defeated FB candidate only once in 1971 and that too reducing the FB votes to a mere 3,883. Then, since 1977, the seat has been allocated to the FB as partner of Left Front and the party has been able to retain the seat uninterrupted for the last seven terms. It seems that Dhaniakhali has also become a left base in a later period, that is, since 1967.

Kalipur The village Kalipur is situated at a distance of around 6 kilometres (km) from Dhaniakhali, the block headquarter. Dhaniakhali is an old prosperous marketplace that flourished in the pre-colonial period as a manufacturing and trading centre for cotton and silk fabrics (Mitra, 1975b). The weavers lived in the surrounding villages and used to produce quality cloths in indigenous handlooms, and the products had a good market and were transported by the traders to far off places. The woven goods produced in Dhaniakhali are still famous in Kolkata and other parts of West Bengal, though both the production and the number of producers have declined, to a large extent, due to unequal competition they have been facing from the modern manufacturers of textile goods. A number of old temples in Dhaniakhali are the silent witnesses to the once-prosperous trading centre. Shibaichandi, the nearest railway station and main connecting point to Kolkata and Barddhaman town (around 50 km in

54  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

the south is Howrah station, the gateway to Kolkata, and 45 km in the north is Barddhaman station), has emerged as a big vegetable market of late. This market seems to be a symbol of agricultural prosperity that the region has been witnessing since the last couple of decades. From early morning, small and marginal peasants and even landless people who grow vegetables taking land on lease, from far-off villages, gather in hundreds in the wholesale market with their produces and sell those in exchange of cash. The history of this village is closely intertwined with that of its neighbouring village, Madhupur. The two villages have traditionally been so interlinked with each other that the social dynamics of one village cannot be explored without considering the situation prevailing in the other village. These villages are among the oldest villages in the Dhaniakhali block, having a number of old temples and other structures carrying the relics of their prosperous past. These temples, established by the prosperous landowning families, date back to the seventeenth century. The Kayastha caste (a higher caste) families of the village, who had once built some temples, were related to a nayeb4 of the Maharaja of Barddhaman.5 The Kayasthas were the traditional landed families of the village and constituted the socially dominant caste till the 1960s. The people of middle castes, for example, Ugrakshatriya and Tili, also had built some temples. The inscriptions on the walls of the temples show that the Sitaramjew temple of the village was established in 1655, the Lakshmi–Janardan temple in 1648 and the Radha–Krishna temple in 1677. The Sitaramjew temple, built by Chandrasekhar Kar of Kayastha caste, was renovated some years back and still stands as a status symbol of the Kars. It is said that once upon a time both Kalipur and Madhupur were very prosperous villages. The village was linked with the river Damodar by a rivulet, Bajardah, through which bajras6 used to ply carrying goods and people to other places. The name Bajardah originated as numerous bajras used this route for transportation purposes. The Bajardah passes through the southern end of the village bordering Madhupur. After construction of the dam on Damodar in the colonial period, the flow of water in the rivulet dried up slowly (Mitra, 4. Nayeb was an administrator and rent collector of a rent-collecting unit of a landlord’s estate. This was one of the most important posts in which a very trusted person was usually placed by a zamindar. 5. The Bardhhaman Maharaja was one of the rulers of pre-colonial Bengal, having a fairly large area under his rule. He continued with his estate in the colonial days as well under an agreement with the British Raj. 6. Bajras were big boats used for carrying both goods and men to distant places. The zamindars and prosperous people used to have their own bajras that were decorated and furnished according to the status of their owners.

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  55

1975a). The rivulet was somewhat restored after it was linked with Kananadi, one of the main canals of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) project.7 The 6 km long road leading to the village from Dhaniakhali is made of broken bricks. This brick road has reached a decrepit condition since long, but no steps have been taken to repair the same by the panchayat. The villagers told, almost in unison, that they could not remember when the road was last repaired. All are eager to see the road renovated soon, and this one agenda is being discussed in every gram sansad meeting,8 but with no result. Usually, the wealthy people do not attend the gram sansad meetings as they have generally no personal stake in such meetings. But for pressing the issue of road repair, some of the elites of the village have taken part in a few gram sansad meetings. Not only the people of Kalipur, but the residents of adjacent six/ seven villages also have to tread this road in their day-to-day lives. The delay in road repairing, as explained by political party leaders, is due to the fact that the road passes through two separate panchayat areas and there has always been a lack of understanding or agreement between the two panchayats, say, ‘A’ panchayat and ‘B’ panchayat, both controlled by the CPI(M) party, regarding the repair works. Another moram road9 connects the village with the local panchayat office. At the end of my fieldwork, I observed that the part of the road that falls under the ‘B’ panchayat has been upgraded to a moram road. However, the portion leading to the village remained in the same condition. It is told that a committee comprising four members from ‘A’ panchayat and seven members from ‘B’ panchayat was formed to oversee the repair work of the road. ‘A’ panchayat, under which the village Kalipur falls, could not manage to get the renovation done to its own part of the road either because of strong lobbying by the ‘B’ panchayat people or due to sheer neglect of Kalipur village as it is a SC–ST dominated village. The village Kalipur comprises of 259 households, of which the number of SC families is 106, that of STs is 61, Other Backward Castes (OBCs) are six, 7. DVC, a government enterprise, came into existence in the late 1950s to manage the barrage and dam built on Damodar river and the huge irrigation potential created thereof. 8. The 1993 amendment to Indian Constitution mandated two yearly meetings of the gram sansads (village assembly) where accounts for the preceding period would have to be submitted; future proposals and projects would have to be discussed and finalized; and complaints and critiques by the local villagers answered. These are supposed to be as powerful as the state legislature assembly where any new proposals or critiques can be made, all for the development of the gram sansad (village constituency) area. 9. The moram road is made of special quality rocky soil which is available in the south-western parts of West Bengal and is extensively used in road building due to its non-muddy character.

56  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a

minorities are 50 and general caste (GC) are 36.10 As per the household survey conducted in the village in the month of July 2007, the following demographic features and landholding patterns could be found among different sections of the villagers. Table 3.1 presents the distribution of the village households in different social groups, that is, by caste and religion. It can be seen from the table that the village has a predominant presence of people belonging to SC and ST categories, who together comprise almost two-third of the village population. These together with the substantial presence of another ‘socially backward category’, Muslim, as revealed in the Sachar Committee Report, comprise 83.8 per cent of the village population.11 So, the village forms an important sample for studying the power relations reflected in the participation (or its lack) of these socially backward people, and the practice of democracy and decentralization in general. Table 3.1 Distribution of Households According to Social Groups Caste/Religion GC

OBC

Total no. of households

Per cent of households

6

2.3

36

13.9

SC

106

40.9

Muslim

50

19.3

ST

Total

61

259

23.6 100

Source: Village questionnaire survey done by the author in 2006–07. Note: For all the tables in this chapter, the information has been taken from village questionnaire survey.

Among the GCs, 13 households belong to the dominant Mahishya caste, 12 to the erstwhile dominant Kayastha caste and the rest belong to the Brahmin caste. Among the SC category, Bagdis are more numerous having 73 10. These data of the villages have been collected from a house to house survey conducted by the author on the basis of a small questionnaire, prepared mainly for the purpose of capturing the demographic features of both the villages. 11. Muslims in India, as a community, are not recognized as socially backward category by the government. But after the publication of the report of the Sachar Committee – a committee established by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to look into the social and economic condition of Muslims in India – in ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2006, the ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Muslims in West Bengal are informally recognized as socially backward community. Because, according to report, the status of Muslims, particularly in West Bengal, is even below the conditions of SCs and STs. Consequently, some sections of Muslims in West Bengal are going to be recognized as Other Backward Categories (GoI, 2006).

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  57

families, Dules have 31 families and Muchis have only two families. The village panchayat seat has been reserved for the SC–ST categories since the first panchayat election held in 1978. Since 1993, this village has been represented by the Bagdi caste. The present panchayat member, who happens to be the pradhan of the local panchayat, is also of the Bagdi caste, signifying probably the importance of the numerically dominant Bagdi caste in electoral politics.

Caste, Land and Livelihood From Tables 3.2 and 3.3, it is evident that 79.28 per cent of the landless households belong to SC–ST categories, while their representation in the village households is 64 per cent. If we include the percentage of Muslim households in the landless size class, it shows an astounding 95 per cent of the landless households belonging to the backward social groups. Almost the entire remaining households of the SC, ST and Muslims fall under the marginal landholding category. But from Table 3.2, it can be seen that these social groups are the most marginal among the marginal landholding size class, having the average landholdings of 0.23 acres, 0.2 acres and 0.52 acres, which are far below the average landholdings of GC and OBC households Table 3.2 Distribution of Households According to Different Landholding Class (caste and religion wise) Caste/ religion

Landless No.

No.

GC

5

OBC

1

SC ST

Muslim Total

73 38 23

140

Marginal peasants Total amount of land (acre)

Average land size (acre)

No.

19

15.86

0.83

11

3

2.6

0.87

4.5

0.2

33

7.69

26

13.41

22 103

44.06

0.23 0.52 0.53

Small peasants Total amount of land (acre)

Average land size (acre)

29.84

2.71

2

5.32

2.66

1

3.17

3.17

15

50.33

3.25

0 1

0 4

0 4

Note: (i) Marginal = below 1 hectare (ha); Small = 1 ha and above but less than 2 ha; Semimedium = 2 ha and above but less than 4 ha; Medium = 4 ha and above but less than 10 ha; and Large = 10 ha and above. (ii) One GC household holds 8 acres of land and falls under the semi-medium landholding class. Being the only family among all castes in the semi-medium category, it has not been included in the table.

58  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a Table 3.3 Percentage of Households Belonging to Different Social Groups in Each Landholding Size Class

Landless

No. of hhs 5

GC

Per cent 3.57

Marginal

19

18.45

Semimedium

1

100

Small

11

73.33

OBC

No. of hhs

Per cent

3

2.91

1

0.71

2

13.33

No. of hhs

SC

Per cent

73

52.14

0

0

33

32.04

No. of hhs

ST

Muslim

Per cent

No. of hhs.

Per cent

38

27.14

23

16.43

1

6.67

1

6.67

22

21.36

26

25.24

Note: hhs = households.

belonging to the same size class. While the marginal GC households have an average of 0.83 acres of land, the average landholdings of marginal OBC households is 0.87 acres. The difference, particularly between the landholdings of marginal SC–ST households and that of marginal GC–OBC households is quite remarkable. In the small landholding size class, there is not a single family from the SC category and only one family each from the ST and Muslim social groups. On the contrary, 86.6 per cent of the small landholdings belong to the GC–OBC categories. Table 3.4 Average Village Agricultural Land in the Hands of Different Social Groups Social groups

No. of households

General caste (GC)

36

SC

106

OBC ST

Muslim

6

61 (60) 50

Total land (per cent) in possession of different social groups (acre)

Average of land in possession of different social groups (acre)

53.7 (56.9 per cent)

1.49

7.92 (8.38 per cent)

1.32

7.67 (4.5) (8 per cent)

0.13 (0.07)

7.69 (8.15 per cent)

17.41 (18.44 per cent)

0.07 0.34

The total amount of land in the hands of 36 GC households is 53.7 acres, while total amount of land in the hands of 217 SC–ST and Muslim house-

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  59

holds combined comes to only 32.77 acres (Table 3.4). That is, the average landholding among the GC families is 1.49 acres, while the same for the 217 SC–ST–Muslim families is 0.15 acre. Most miserable is the condition of SC category households that have an average of only 0.07 acre of land. In the ST category, if we deduct the landholding of the only one family in the small size class possessing 3.17 acres of land, its average landholding becomes 0.07 acre only, strikingly same as for the SC category. Table 3.5 Distribution and Percentage of Households as Per Landholding Size Classes in Different Social Groups Landless

No.

Per cent

Marginal

No.

Per cent

No.

50

2

GC

5

13.88

19

52.78

11

SC

73

68.87

33

31.13

0

Muslim

23

46

26

52

OBC ST

1

38

16.67 62.3

3

22

36.07

1

1

Small

Per cent

30.56

33.33

Semi-medium No. 1

Per cent 2.78

1.64 2

Table 3.5 shows the distribution and percentage of households belonging to different landholding size classes in each social group. It is evident from the table that while 13.88 per cent of the GC households are landless, the same is quite high among the SC and ST categories: 68.87 per cent of the SC households and 62.3 per cent of the ST households are landless. Among the Muslim households, 46 per cent are landless. In contrast, the SC and ST categories have 0 and 1.64 per cent of their respective households in the small landholding size class, whereas the GC has 30.56 per cent of their households in the same size class. The Muslims have only 2 per cent of their households in the small landholding size class. Tables 3.6 and 3.7 show the occupation-wise distribution and percentages of households in each social group. While 52.78 per cent GC households are engaged in cultivation as their primary occupation, only 2.78 per cent of their households are agricultural labourers. Notably, more than 30 per cent of GC households are engaged in services. In sharp contrast, only 6.6 per cent of the SC households are engaged in cultivation as their primary occupation, while 72.64 per cent of their households are agricultural labourers. Interestingly, among the ST households, none has cultivation as its primary occupation,

60  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a Table 3.6 Distribution and Percentage of Households in Each Social Group According to their Primary Occupation Cultivation No.

Per cent

Agricultural labour No.

Per cent

No.

2

33.33

0

58

95.08

GC

19

52.78

1

SC

7

6.6

77

20

38

OBC ST

Muslim

1 0

10

16.66 0

Business

2.78

2

72.64 76

Job

Per cent

No.

0

3

Others Per cent

No.

50

0

Per cent

5.55

11

30.55

3

10

9.43

5

4.72

9

8.49

0

0

1

2

1

2

0

0

2

3.28

0

8.33 0 0

Table 3.7 Distribution of Households in Each Social Group According to their Secondary Occupation Cultivation No.

Per cent

Agricultural labourer No.

GC

6

16.67

0

SC

26

24.52

Muslim

9

OBC ST

2

22

33.33 36.06 18

Per cent

Livestock No.

Per cent

0

7

19.44

5

4.72

60

56.6

1

2

0

0

2

34

33.33 55.74

Business No. 6

Per cent

Others No.

Per cent

2

1.89

1

2

16.66

though 36.07 per cent of these households are marginal peasants. An astounding 95.08 per cent of ST households are engaged in agricultural labour as their primary occupation. This means that the meagre amount of their landholdings compels these families to depend more on agricultural labour than on cultivation in their own lands. The only minority group in the village, Muslims, also have high percentage (76 per cent) of their households engaged in agricultural labour as their primary occupation. Thanks to the reservation policy of the government, a few SC and ST families have jobs as their primary occupation. Table 3.7 shows the distribution of households in each social group according to their secondary occupation. It is interesting to note that a large number of households have taken livestock rearing as their secondary occupation. Among the SC and ST families, these figures are quite high. For the SC and ST

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  61

households, these figures are 56.6 per cent and 55.74 per cent respectively. It may be concluded from these figures that more than 50 per cent of SC and ST households supplement their livelihood with livestock rearing. Only around 25 per cent of SC and 36 per cent of ST households are engaged in cultivation in their own small plots of land or in the land of others as sharecroppers.The practice of ‘lease in’ cultivation is also widespread in this village. The data available from the household survey show that around 35–40 per cent households belonging to SC and ST social groups are engaged in ‘lease in’ cultivation. But the detailed information about leasing in cultivation, for example, about average amount of land taken for ‘lease in’ cultivation, was not available. As those people have been cultivating a very meagre amount of land for mainly producing vegetables for short term or for seasonal basis, they are not interested in speaking about it. Many of them mentioned that if they can manage to get a small amount of land for cultivation of seasonal vegetables, they can better survive in the lean season when almost no work is available to them. Notably, though around 37 cultivators have been cultivating land as sharecroppers for generations, only nine among them are registered as sharecroppers. The data about ration cards and other benefits the villagers have been getting from the panchayat were not available from the household survey. These two questions in the household questionnaire were almost always filled up with the letters ‘NA’, that is, not applicable. When these questions were asked, either they expressed a lot of grievances about the non-availability of the BPL ration cards and the other panchayat benefits meant for the poor or they became silent, sceptical and hesitant to disclose anything in this regard.

The Socio-physical Space The Mahishya caste in Kalipur village is not numerous though it is the dominant caste; in fact, it is more concentrated in the neighbouring village of Madhupur. The population of Kalipur is 1,472 as per the village census done by SSA12 workers during the year 2006. The village Madhupur has 214 households; among them, 67 families belong to SC category, 23 to ST, 31 to OBC, five to minorities and 88 to GC families. The minorities in both the villages are Muslims. It is evident from this that though Kalipur is a 12. The SSA is a central government project to facilitate universal literacy and elementary education. As part of the project, village census is done regularly and a child register is maintained by the local Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) workers.

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predominantly SC–ST inhabited village, as mentioned earlier, Madhupur has a mixed population of SC–ST and GC people. The habitations of different caste groups lie principally on the two sides of the main brick road connecting the village with the block centre. To enter the village, people have to cross the Muslim hamlet or para on the left side of the road, by the name Muslimpara, where all the Muslim families reside as a community. The Muslimpara is quite distinct as it is situated far from other hamlets of the Hindus. After proceeding on the road and leaving a paddy field on the way, one would come across the Malikpara, the habitation of Bagdis, one of the castes in SC category, and then the Adivasipara or tribal hamlet on both sides of the brick road. The Dules and Doms stay beside Malikpara. The Muchis reside at a distance from other SC habitations. These Bagdis, Dules, Muchis and Domes constitute the SC communities, while the ST people belong to the Santhal community. These SC–ST hamlets are adjacent to each other, and distinctly separated from the upper-caste hamlets, the Kolepara and the Kayetpara, by roads in between, and more by appearances. After departing the Muslimpara and just before entering the Malikpara, a road turns left to reach the Kolepara, which is inhabited predominantly by Mahishyas, the middle-caste people. And further along the main brick road, we reach the habitations of upper-caste Kayastha families, who were the traditional elite and had dominated the village society in the earlier phases. Among the Kayasthas, the Kars were the zamindars of the village during the colonial period and the Mitras and Roys were their maternal relatives. This Kayastha hamlet is commonly known as Kayetpara, which is marked by old brick structures and temples along with a large courtyard and puja mandap.13 This puja mandap is also popularly called burimatala.14 The Mitras, who have mostly migrated to Kolkata and other places, usually gather during the Durga puja festival. These old structures, temples and the courtyard are reminiscences of the past ‘glory’ of the Kayasthas and their present status symbol. Some other GC groups live at the western end of the road, which stretches from east to west inside the village. They reside not as a conglomerate of families that generally form a para; rather, their houses are located in a scattered manner. The Muslim dwellings are mostly made of mud walls with roofs made of straw, tin or tiles. Only one Muslim family is rich and has a big concrete house.

13. Puja mandap is a concrete structure built for worshipping Devi Durga, a popular goddess of West Bengal. 14. Burima is a local name of Devi Durga.

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  63

The family owns around 15 bighas15 of land after some portion of their land was vested to the government during the Left Front regime. Other Muslim families are generally marginal peasants and day labourers. Many youths from Muslimpara have migrated to Delhi, Mumbai and other cities of India to earn livelihoods from jewellery and embroidery works. Day labourers have to commute to other areas in search of work as there is an abundance of labourers in the village as compared to the availability of jobs. Many also work in small shops in Dhaniakhali and ply rickshaws and van rickshaws to transport men and materials. Many Muslim women make muri16 (puffed rice) and boil paddy in their houses (to prepare rice in husking machines) to earn a livelihood. The SC habitations are very congested as most of them have very little homestead land. They are mostly landless, and though some did benefit from land distribution, they possess only small plots of land. Some among them are sharecroppers. Their houses are made of mud with roofs made of straw, tile, tin and asbestos. Two persons among the SC people have jobs: one is a teacher and the other is in government service, and these two families have brick houses. In the Adivasipara, similarly, while most people are landless, bargadars and marginal farmers at best, four have government jobs thanks to the reservation policy of the government. The ST dwellings, except four which are concrete houses, are mostly made of mud and thatched roofs. Some among them could put tiles or tins on their housetop, while a few fortunate people got their houses renovated through the funds they had received from Indira Awaas Yojana.17 The GCs comprise of Brahmins, Kayasthas and Mahishyas. There are 17 Brahmin families in the village; some of them have concrete houses, while others live in mud houses. Most of their concrete houses have roofs made of tiles, tins or asbestos. Among the general caste groups, the houses of the Kayasthas and the Mahishyas have generally concrete houses. The houses of the Kayasthas are big but old, while the houses of the Mahishyas are mostly big and newly constructed as proof of their prosperity derived almost fully from agriculture. Also, though there are only 10 Mahishya families in Kalipur village, they constitute the most prosperous caste and derive their strength from their caste brethren in the neighbouring Madhupur where they are more numerous. Their prosperity has been based on their agricultural activities combined with 15. 3 bighas = 1 acre. 16. Muri or puffed rice is one of the most common food items taken by the Bengali people, particularly in rural areas, as breakfast; and during periods of distress, it is even taken as lunch or dinner. 17. Indira Awaas Yojana is a central government scheme that provides fund for constructing new houses or renovating dilapidated ones for the homeless and destitute families in the rural areas. The panchayat is empowered to disburse this fund among the deserving candidates.

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agriculture-related businesses, like lending out power tillers, selling water from their mini submersible pump sets and dealership of fertilizers and seeds. Kayasthas, who had dominated the village scene since the colonial period, lost their dominant role in the 1960s and the 1970s when land ceiling regulations began to be implemented vesting some of their land to the government. Many among them began to migrate to Kolkata and other cities where they could get jobs and enter into other professions due to their educational background. Then onwards, Mahishyas, the agricultural caste people, bought most of the land from the Kayasthas who did not cultivate on their own and found it increasingly difficult to get handsome returns from agricultural activities.

Village Infrastructure A number of grocery shops and other shops like tea shop, fertilizer shop and hair-cutting saloon are located besides the road at different hamlets or paras. The shops, particularly the tea shops, are informal centres of gathering for village people in their leisure time. The age-old primary school, known as Madhupur Primary School, is located at the border of the two villages. This is the only school where children of both the villages enrol for primary education. Two ICDS18 centres meant for two villages are housed in the same primary school. These two centres operate from one single room of the primary school where children of pre-primary age gather for nutrition and schooling. There is no high school in these two villages; students have to travel at least 4 km to study in the nearest high school. The nearest college is located at Dhaniakhali 6 km away. The village has been electrified in 1984–85, though many families could not afford to bring electricity to their homes because of fund constraint. Interestingly, the Kolepara, the principal habitation of the Mahishyas, where most people have the capacity to buy electricity, received electric connection only a few years back. It is alleged that they were deliberately denied the facility as they were known as the Congress party supporters. Even after the Kolepara was electrified, one family in the village was still denied electric connection as the head of this family is a strong critic of the ruling CPI(M) party and has refused to surrender to the latter. This person had an important role in shap18. The ICDS is a central government scheme for every village that aims to achieve six goals. These are providing nutrition, immunization, health checks, identification of handicapped children at the initial stage, providing pre-primary informal education and providing education on health and nutrition.

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  65

ing village politics in the early days of the Left Front rule. The majority of the village people, belonging to SC and ST categories, do not have the financial capacity to get an electricity connection for their houses and many of them avail of this facility, very often, rather illegally by hooking from the main line with the obvious support of the ruling political party. The nearest health centre or hospital is located at Dhaniakhali at a distance of 6 km from the village. This hospital is always overcrowded as it is the only hospital that can provide modern medical treatment for all the people of the 214 villages of the block. The ailing villagers of Kalipur have to commute the long distance to the hospital on a broken brick road; and this is done in a van or rickshaw. In most cases, they do not get proper treatment at the hospital due to paucity of doctors and hospital beds. Very often, they are sent to the Medical College Hospital at Barddhaman which is 50 km away. Many cannot travel such a distance for treatment and have to be admitted into nursing homes in Dhaniakhali or in Tarakeswar. Sometimes, the poor people of the village end up spending all their savings or have to get loans for treatment. Many even die due to lack of proper treatment. In such a situation, poor people have no choice but to resort to the quack doctor available in the village. Kalipur has one quack doctor, who has opened a dispensary in the Kayetpara. Patients from the two villages gather there in large numbers regularly to get some sort of medicines for their illness from the doctor. The quack is an educated youth of the Muslim community who has worked as an assistant to a medical practitioner in Dhaniakhali for a few years. He himself supplies medicines to the patients and charges a minimum amount that includes the price of the medicines, which, altogether, is generally affordable for the village poor. There are also some Homeopathy practitioners in the village who generally treat only their family members and relatives, and sometimes supply medicines to others as well, but rarely charge fees for that. The tribal people use their traditional medicines, which are mostly herbal in nature. The pregnant women of the village, particularly of poorer families, depend on the local ‘dai’ or midwife for the delivery of their babies. In case of an emergency, rich people also depend on the village midwife for delivery. The village midwife, who is around 45 years old, was trained by the government hospital in Dhaniakhali and has been attached to the nearby health sub-centre. The ICDS workers also supply some medicines to the village women and children for relief from basic ailments.

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Kadampur The Kadampur village lies in the agriculturally prosperous Singur block of Hooghly district. Singur block is close to Kolkata city (within 40 km) and the industrial belt of Hooghly district. Singur was known in the history as Singhapur (the name Singur is said to have been derived from Singhapur) and was once the capital of King Singabahu. It is said that the king expelled his son, Vijay, from his kingdom and Vijay, along with 700 followers, took a voyage to Lanka island, defeated the reigning king there and became the king of the island, presently known as Sri Lanka. ‘The landing of Vijay with his seven hundred followers is generally regarded as the starting point of the history of Ceylon’, pointed out G.C. Mendis in his book, Early History of Ceylon. This history dates back to 700 BC (Mitra, 1981: 1059). Though the Singhas of Singur had migrated from Singur even before the advent of the British rule, the place was famous for its zamindars and dacoits during the pre-colonial and colonial days. It is said that the Singur estate was only next to estate of Barddhaman Maharaja in the Bengal province when the British came (Ibid.: 1062). Singur town has many old buildings and temples that were constructed by the zamindars and still carry the old heritage of the area. Since the colonial days, Singur has been connected by two railway lines: one linking Kolkata with Barddhaman town; and the other linking Kolkata with Tarakeswar town. So, trading activities have naturally developed here. With the increasing production of potato during the post-colonial period, Singur became famous as a potato-trading centre. Today, it has five cold storages and a big wholesale potato market comprising of more than 160 wholesale houses. A large amount of potatoes from this wholesale market is supplied all over West Bengal and to other states as well. The Durgapur Expressway built with the aim to connect Kolkata with the industrial town of Durgapur, and to develop industry on both sides of the highway, runs through this area. Several small industries began production on land adjacent to the expressway when the state government intervened to acquire around 1,000 acres of agricultural land as well that utilized for small industries, for promoting the setting up of a car factory under the aegis of big monopoly house of the Tatas. The Kadampur village is located near the Durgapur Expressway, and almost the entire agricultural land of the village has been acquired by the government during the period of my fieldwork in the village. The village can be approached from two sides. A mud road connects the village to the neighbouring village of Joypur. On the other side of the village, another mud road connects it with

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  67

Banipur bazaar. This bazaar, lying at a distance of 2 km, is the centre of all commercial activity of the village. The village comprises of 160 households and has a population of nearly 1,000. Among these households, around 67 belong to the SC community, 73 belong to the Mahishya caste and the remaining 20 belong to the Gowala caste, which comes under the OBC category. The SC families are mainly landless labourers and only some of them have small plots of land. Many of them have been sharecroppers for generations together, but have not been registered as bargadars in the government records, thereby highlighting the limitations of the Operation Barga programme of the Left Front government. Another important feature, though not peculiar to this area only, is that the system of cultivation on ‘lease in’ land is rampant here and many of the landless people grow crops taking land on lease. So, the people here have a great stake in the land that is being acquired by the government and have been in the forefront of the Singur movement from the beginning. The village is divided into three hamlets: Daspara, Ghoshpara and Bagdipara. These paras are situated very close to each other with almost no physical separation between them. However, these hamlets are known by their caste names and are inhabited by the villagers belonging to the same caste groups. That is to say, the different caste groups reside in their respective enclaves called paras, but these paras are contiguous in location in this particular village. Daspara is the habitation of the Mahishyas, the dominating caste in the village. The name of the hamlet Daspara has been derived from the surname Das that the Mahishyas of this village generally have. As mentioned earlier, Mahishya is one of the agricultural castes in Bengal and is ranked as the middle caste in the caste hierarchy. In Kadampur, there is no other higher caste; hence, the Mahishya’s domination seems to have been an obvious reality. Similarly, Ghoshpara consists of Gowala caste people, having Ghosh as their caste name. These people are traditionally milkmen and are very hard working and hence, they are prosperous. While the Mahishyas are the traditionally prosperous caste, the prosperity of the Gowala caste has been remarkable in the last few decades due to the opening up of the village economy to market forces. In the early colonial period, a Ghosh family of the neighbouring Banipur village, known as zamindars in the village, owned substantial quantum of land in the village. At the time of vesting of surplus land, most of their land was taken over by the government and distributed among the peasants. It was this Ghosh family against whom some land movements were launched in the 1960s and the 1970s. Until recently, this family had some land in the village which was cultivated by bargadars of Kadampur village.

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This was subsequently acquired by the government. Bagdipara consists of Bagdi caste people who belong to SC category. These people are mainly landless sharecropper and agricultural labourer. The Mahishya houses in Daspara are generally made of bricks with concrete roofs over them, many of which are two-storied. But some Mahishya families still remain economically poor with small plots of lands in their possession and no other source of income. The condition of the families of Ghoshpara is quite similar to that of Daspara, that is, they have some well-built houses along with some poor households. The habitations of Bagdipara, on the other hand, are mostly mud houses with straw, tiles or tins on their roofs. The village has one primary school, while the secondary school is situated in Banipur. The primary school has a newly built concrete structure thanks to the availability of building funds on account of the SSA initiated by the central government. The concrete clubhouse of the local youth is situated just besides the primary school. The club is always full of youths who enjoy watching programmes on the colour television placed in one corner. The big club room is presently used for all types of activities related to the movement against land acquisition. The village has no health centre and the nearest centre is 3 km away. One resident is a qualified doctor and presently employed in a public-sector enterprise far off from the village. Table 3.8 Distribution of Households According to Different Castes Caste

Total no. of households

OBC

20

GC SC

Total

73 67

160

Per cent of households 45.62 12.5

41.87 100

Table 3.8 shows caste-wise distribution of households in Kadampur. The total number of households is almost equally divided into two castes, GC and SC. In Kadampur, GC consists of only the Mahishya caste which is actually recognized as middle caste in the caste hierarchy of West Bengal. Tables 3.9 and 3.10 show the distribution and percentage of households cross-classified by caste categories and landholding sizes. Among 47 landless households, 39 households belong to SC category which means 82.97 per cent of the landless households belong to SC category. On the other hand, I have mentioned in the Table 3.8 that the share of the SC households in the total

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  69 Table 3.9 Distribution of Households According to Different Landholding Classes (caste wise) Caste

Landless No.

No.

GC

8

61

SC

39

OBC Total

0

Marginal Total amount of land

Average land size

No.

38.99 17.6

0.63

4

13.83

1.26 0.49

14 28

47

103

70.42

6 0

0.79

10

Small

Total amount of land

Average land size

17.5

2.91

12.3 0

3.07 0

29.8

2.99

Note: Marginal = below 1 ha, that is, 0–2.47 acres; Small = 1 ha but less than 2 ha, that is, 2.47 acres–4.95 acres. Table 3.10 Percentage of Households in Different Landholding Classes (caste wise)

Landless

Marginal Small

No. 8

61 4

GC

Per cent

No.

83.56

14

10.95 5.47

0 6

OBC

Per cent

No.

70

28

0

30

39 0

SC

Per cent 58.2

41.79 0

village households is 41.87 per cent. The remaining households of the SC fall under the marginal landholding category. But from Table 3.9, it can be seen that this social group is the most marginal among the marginal landholding classes, having the average landholdings of 0.49 acres which is far below the average landholdings of GC and OBC households belonging to the same size class. While the marginal GC households have an average of 0.63 acres of land, the average landholdings of marginal OBC households is 1.26 acres. The difference, particularly between the landholdings of marginal SC households and that of marginal GC–OBC households, is remarkable. In the small landholding size class, there is not a single family from the SC category. In other words, 100 per cent of the small landholdings belong to the GC–OBC categories. Table 3.11 shows caste-wise distribution of the landholding in the village. The total amount of land in the hands of 73 GC households is 38.99 acres, while total amount of land in the hands of 67 SC households is only 13.83 acres. That is to say, the average landholding among the GC families is 0.53

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acres, while the same for the 67 SC families is 0.2 acres. The striking fact is that the average landholding of the OBC households is the highest at 0.8 acres. Table 3.11 Average Village Agricultural Landholding in the Hands of Different Social Groups Social groups

No. of households

GC

73

OBC

20

SC

67

Total

160

Total land (per cent) in possession of different social groups (acre)

Average landholding

16.1 (23.4 per cent)

0.8

38.99 (56.6 per cent)

0.53

13.83 (20 per cent)

0.2

68.92 (100 per cent)

0.51

Table 3.12 shows the distribution and percentage of households belonging to different landholding size classes in each social group. It is evident from the table that while 17.02 per cent of the GC households are landless, the same is quite high among the SC category where 82.98 per cent of the households are landless. In contrast, the SC category has no share in the small landholding size class, whereas the GC and OBC have 50 per cent each of their households in the same size class. Table 3.12 Caste-wise Distribution and Percentage of Households (land size wise)

GC

OBC SC

No. 8 0

39

Landless

Marginal

Per cent

No.

0

14

17.02 82.98

61 28

Per cent

No.

10.1

6

61.61 28.28

4 0

Small

Per cent 50 50 0

It is evident from Table 3.13 that around one-third of the total households in Kadampur are engaged in sharecropping. Among them, 54.9 per cent of the total households belong to SC category though their representation in the total households is 41.87 per cent. The percentage of sharecroppers in GC and OBC categories is not insignificant either, with a percentage of 45.09 per cent. The number of unrecorded sharecroppers among the total is considerably high suggesting the limitation of the Operation Barga Act.

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  71 Table 3.13 Caste-wise Distribution and Percentage of Sharecroppers Recorded

Unrecorded

Total Sharecroppers

No.

Per cent

No.

Per cent

SC

16

72.72

12

41.37

28

Total

22

100

29

100

51

GC & OBC

6

27.27

17

58.62

No.

23

Per cent 54.9

45.09 100

56.86 per cent of the sharecroppers have not been registered, though they have been cultivating the land for generations. Among the unrecorded sharecroppers, notably, the proportion is high among GC and OBC categories with 58.62 per cent, whereas this percentage for the SC category is 41.37 per cent. In other words, the rate of recording is higher among the SC category. The percentage of recorded sharecroppers among total SC sharecroppers is 57.14 per cent, whereas the percentage of the same among GC and OBC sharecroppers is less than half. The village questionnaire survey reveals that the amount of total land cultivated by the sharecroppers is 21.81 acres, of which 11.83 acres of land is cultivated by the sharecroppers of SC category. It is interesting to note that only four households have BPL ration cards; the rest are all recognized as having an above the poverty line (APL) status. But in the year 2005, at least 70 households had BPL cards. After acquisition of almost all of the cultivable land of the village, the number of BPL cardholders has been reduced strikingly and it has been fixed at four. The village leaders and the panchayat officials are also unable to explain this discrepancy. Among 67 SC households, 22 households have been getting benefit from the panchayat, out of which 13 households have benefited from the Indira Awaas Yojona. The numbers of Mahishya and Gowala households who benefited from the various panchayat schemes are only six and one respectively. It is quite natural that SC households will enjoy more benefits from the panchayat as majority of the panchayat schemes are meant for the deprived sections of the society, that is, for the SC, ST and women. Among the 160 families in the village, 135 are mainly or fully dependent on agricultural activities for earning their livelihood. Among the 230 acres of agricultural land, 200 acres is under cultivation. All the arable land has the facility of irrigation. There is a canal and a few gutters that collect rain water

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which is then lifted for irrigation. There are also some mini submersible pump sets used to water the crops. The principal crops of the village are paddy, potato and jute, the last two crops being the main cash crops, while paddy is produced particularly by the marginal peasants, bargadars and lessee cultivators for their subsistence. Some landless families, particularly those without male members, survive on rearing cows and goats. Hence, their livelihoods also depend on the agricultural land which is used for grazing their domestic animals, and also for collecting some edible herbs and vegetables. Many of the upper-caste people, who own substantial amounts of land, have migrated to towns or settled in Banipur bazaar and are engaged in different business or trading activities. There is hardly any non-farm work available inside the village and people have to move outside in search of jobs other than agriculture. Being located at a distance of only 40 km from Kolkata, villagers in Kadampur are closely linked with the city life, and a few substantial landowners are engaged in jobs and businesses while their lands are tilled either by the bargadars or by those landless and marginal peasants who take the lands on lease. A few villagers also travel to adjoining town areas to do odd jobs in factories, shops and small businesses. Some of the young men, approximately 30, have migrated to cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, working there principally as goldsmith or construction workers. There are several cases of reverse migration as well when people come back to their village after closing down of the factory or enterprises that they have been working in, or finding it more profitable to work on land than to work in petty industries or businesses for a paltry sum in lieu of hard labour. So, the villagers here are quite aware of the contemporary situation in industries and other urban enterprises where factories are occasionally shedding ‘surplus’ workers in the name of rationalization and modernization. Hence, the labouring people of the village seem to be more disenchanted about the industries than about agriculture which gives them at least food security. Finally, it might be concluded that the majority of the households in both the villages are still dependent on agriculture. Moreover, most of the main workers residing in these two villages earn their livelihood by working as agricultural labourers, and that is very similar to the practice in the colonial and early post-colonial West Bengal. Despite the ‘effective’ implementation of the land reforms policy, the people belonging to socially backward castes and other groups work mainly as agricultural labourers, as they are either landless or have a meagre amount of agricultural land. A substantial number

Changing Landscape of Two Villages in West Bengal  |  73

of sharecroppers still remain as unregistered bargadars though there has been a significant presence of the left political parties in the two study villages since long. Next, we will analyze the political dynamics behind all these phenomena with the help of an ethnographic enquiry. As I have discussed in the ‘Introduction’ (Chapter 1), ethnographic explorations, and more generally any qualitative methods that draw upon the perception-based information provided by respondents, have some inherent limitations in that they invariably face the proverbial test of ‘objectivity’. It is also argued sometimes that respondents gauge the attitude and opinion of the researcher and frame their responses accordingly. This may, it is alleged, obfuscate rather than clarify our understanding of the ground reality. This is, of course, true of almost all kinds of qualitative investigative tools. In the subsequent ethnographic narratives, I have tried to be mindful of these concerns in a number of ways. More precisely, first, I have tried to record the voices of people from diverse social and economic backgrounds, often triangulating their perceptions and opinions. Second, I have tried to talk to people having different declared political affiliations and report their views as accurately as possible such that a balanced synthesis of their views can be presented in my description and analysis. Third, and most importantly, as a result, I have obtained a variety of perspectives and political viewpoints that are often contradictory and therefore representative of the larger reality. This very plurality and oppositional nature of their voices makes me confident to state that the following analysis faithfully represents a wellrounded account of the people’s perception in these two study villages.

4 Seeing the State and Governance in the Grassroots

T

his chapter aims to examine how the rural people see the state in the contemporary regime of governmentality. In other words, the chapter tries to look at what kind of cultural–ideological transformation the peasants undergo while negotiating with the development and decentralization strategies of the state, and also how the people from different castes, religions and genders represent themselves in state institutions, that is, local government. Do caste, religion and gender matter in shaping the politics of the local state? The chapter also seeks to understand the present context by testifying and comparing, through ethnographic techniques, the available theoretical frameworks put forward for explaining the present political dynamics of rural India. It intends, in fact, to look at the changing dimensions of two intertwined domains of politics, the organized state and state-centric politics on the one hand, and the ‘unorganized’ political culture on the other. But it is also true that the state and its institutions have enormously penetrated into the everyday lives of the peasantry. Also, the elite and subaltern domain has got entangled to a great extent as a result of the state and democratic processes in India. The extent and intensity of this entanglement of these two domains is so extensive that Chatterjee proposes a new idea of ‘political society’ to understand the changing entanglement of the two domains of politics. He suggests that the concept of ‘political society’ should be an appropriate analytical category to analyze the contemporary politics of the peasantry in relation to the governmental policies undertaken by the state (2004; 2008a). On the other hand, Gupta proposes that one should frame the analytical question as to ‘under which conditions the state operates as a cohesive and unitary whole’, instead of only taking the idea of the state as ‘a point of departure’ (Gupta, 1995: 392).The chapter deals with these frameworks and reveals that issues on caste, religion and gender matter significantly both in shaping the politics of the state and the peasants’

Seeing the State and Governance in the Grassroots  |  75

‘everyday encounters’ with the state institutions, despite the fact that the peasants at large are today deeply linked with the state and its discourse.

Local Government, Party and Ethnicity To understand how the rural people see the state and also how the local government operates in the grassroots, it is imperative to consider the local ‘conditions under which the state does operate’ (Ibid.). In the rural reality of West Bengal, two factors, political party and ethnic components, matter considerably to shape the nature of operation of the local government. It became obvious from the very day I entered the village. When I decided to select Kalipur village as one of my field sites, I did not have much acquaintance with the region. So my first venture, in the month of February 2006, was to look for a dwelling where I could stay during my fieldwork. I reached Dhaniakhali to meet one schoolteacher, Md Rejauddin, whom I had met on a previous research assignment on primary education. Rejauddin had assured me that he would arrange an accommodation for me in the area. But when the time came for actual selection of the same, he immediately took me to a Brahmin neighbourhood nearby and approached some persons there saying, ‘this lady belongs to your community. Please arrange for an accommodation for her so that she can conduct her research in this area.’ I was struck by the deep feeling of communal estrangement evinced by a person who was not only a headmaster of a primary school, that is, a member of the rural intelligentsia, but also an active member of the CPI(M)-led teachers’ union, All Bengal Primary Teachers Association (ABPTA). At the very moment of my entry into the village, questions of social divides sprang up in my mind. And my enquiry started with the question: how have these ethnic codes and relationships still been functioning as the ground realities of rural lives of West Bengal where ‘every other social institution…have been eliminated, marginalized or subordinated to the “party”’ (Bhattacharyya, 2009; Chatterjee, 2009)? Eventually, I found accommodation in a Hindu house of a Mahishya family in Kalipur with the help of Ram Kole, who was a CPI(M) supporter and a state government employee in the irrigation department of GoWB. Before going to the village, Ram Kole introduced me to Sunil Samanta, the local CPI(M) party leader, to whom I had to explain, once again, the purpose of my staying in the village. Samanta seemingly emerged as my natural ‘guardian’ and instructed Ram Kole to extend all help to me. Samanta instructed

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Kole like a ‘principal arbitrator’ in the village who had the every authority to mediate ‘...when individual villagers need help in matters of health, education, finances, employment or travel’ (Chatterjee, 2009: 43). Ram Kole candidly told me later, I support the CPI(M) party as they have arranged a job for me. My brother is a supporter of the Congress party. He has not managed to get a job till now. But I am not so linked with them. I don’t visit the local party office regularly. I do visit the office occasionally and that also not on my own but as an obligation.

Throughout the conversation, Kole identified the party people as ‘them’. Since a long time, he has been associated with the CPI(M) party, but still he felt the party as something alien to him, and not his own. More interestingly, betraying the scholars’ observation, it is proven true through Kole’s own experiences of getting a job that ‘the two most important white collar occupations in rural areas are teaching and government employment. Both are firmly under the political control of “the party”’ (Ibid.: 45). Villagers, too, were curious about my purpose. Many ideas did their rounds as I proceeded with my fieldwork moving around and across the village and interviewing different people belonging to different strata. My explanations did not clear all their doubts and concerns and people continued their guesswork, often taking interesting directions. For example, while I was talking to Pakhi Murmu, the tribal political leader of the village who was associated with the CPI(M) party since long and presently disenchanted with the party, he asked me whether I had come on behalf of any political party that had some interest in setting up its organization in the village. Later, I found that Pakhi had been seeking a new political formation in the village that would preserve and fight for the tribal interests, and this aspiration was reflected in his peculiar assumption about my purpose. While I tried to explain the purpose of my visit in many different ways, I could readily convince them only when I talked in terms of development. When I said, ‘I have come here to do a research on what developments have taken place in the village society in the last 30 years’, people quickly understood my purpose and came forward to give their opinion on the extent of development the village had experienced. Development, to most of them across different social groups, meant nothing but receiving more amenities and benefits from the government. For example, one commented, ‘Our village has not been developed. You see the condition of the roads.’ In fact, the word ‘development’ has become the buzzword of village politics and village life in the contempo-

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rary period. The PRIs have also become very popular since they are considered as the tools of development in the rural areas. Presumably, everyone in the village is acquainted with the PRIs and village politics and has also been closely interlinked with the activities of the same. Since quite a number of government projects, both state and central, are implemented through the panchayat, that is, local self-government, people’s aspirations for a share of ‘governmental care’ also ensue from and rotate around the PRIs to a great extent. But how do social cultural elements like caste relations, for which the rural society has been known so far, surface on the political landscape in the village? On my way to visit the local panchayat pradhan (chief ), Khagen Malik, who also happened to be the panchayat representative from the Kalipur village and a political leader of the SC community, I came across one prosperous Mahishya farmer, Jiban Pal. ‘What does Khagen know about the village?,’ he asked in a derogatory tone, ‘These people are faltu (worthless). They are only for show. Better go to Naru Chatterjee and Monoj Dutta who can give you the true picture. I am a member of the party. I also have thorough knowledge about the village.’ Naru Chatterjee and Monoj Dutta, who hailed from the upper castes, were the leaders of the CPI(M) party and, as it appeared from his words, were influential people in the village. Though Khagen Malik was the panchayat pradhan and the leader of the numerically dominant SC community of the village, he was considered a worthless person by none other than one of his close associates in the party. His sentiments became clearer as our conversation went on. Pal expressed his strong resentment against the agricultural labourers of the village, principally belonging to the SC–ST communities, and especially against their wage increase. He was also opposed to the party leaders who proposed wage increases for the agricultural labourers. He was a close kin of the most affluent farmer of the adjacent Madhupur village, Khetra Pal, who owned 20 acres of land and was the biggest landowner in the twin villages. Jiban and his brother together owned 10 acres of land. They were among the economically most powerful families in the area and might be termed as the kulaks.1 Did they enjoy political power as well? Jiban had been an AG member2 of the CPI(M) 1. Kulaks are the prosperous capitalist farmers who are opposed to the interests of the rural proletariat. This class was first identified by V.I. Lenin during the days of Russian Revolution as the rising force of rural bourgeoisie. 2. AG means auxiliary group in the CPI(M) party parlance. The AG can be called the lowest unit of the party consisting of activists at the village/hamlet level. These activists are not yet members of the party and in the process of getting membership, they are organized in AGs by the leadership to train them in activism and indoctrinate them in party ideology.

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party that showed his close association with the powers that be. It was evident that the richest family in the village also had its representative in the ruling party, the CPI(M), which was supposed to look after the interests of the labouring masses of the village, the ‘rural proletariat’ in communist parlance. The question that now comes up is: how do the political leaders mediate the conflicts between the rival classes, the landed gentries and the agricultural labourers, inside the party?

Decentralization, Panchayat and the SC Pradhan The question that arises is that how are the government policies like decentralization being implemented at the rural grassroots when the SC village representative like Khagen Malik, the panchayat pradhan, is considered as a worthless person by the upper-caste people and none other than one of his close associates in the party. The narrative of Khagen Malik (interviewed in March 2006) reveals some interesting clues regarding this question. Notably, potato is an important cash crop in the area during the rabi season. It was a potato harvesting season and everyone seemed to be busy in the field. Even the womenfolk of the prosperous farmers were taking part in agricultural works in this season. The paddy harvesting season was just over.3 All the cultivators, even many landless ones, were engaged in cultivation of this crop, the latter by leasing in small plots of land from others. Other varieties of vegetables and herbs are also cultivated in this season. This is the season when peasants get irrigation water through the Kananadi canal, though the facility is not available regularly and to all the fields due to inefficient maintenance of field channels and the lack of proper regulation of canal lock gates. Most of the peasants need to use pump sets to lift groundwater or tank water for irrigating their crops. On that day, the peasants got canal water for the first time in the season. So, it was an auspicious day for them and for their farming activities. The pradhan, Khagen Malik, was growing potatoes in 1.4 bighas of land after harvesting the aman paddy that he had cultivated in 2.5 bighas of land. In the words of Malik, a political leader belonging to SC community, ‘I cultivate 3 bighas of land as a sharecropper. The landowners stay in Kolkata and occasionally come to get their share of crops.’ 3. There are three seasons of cultivation in West Bengal: kharif, rabi and summer. The kharif season starts with the monsoon and lingers from June to November; rabi season is from November to February; and the summer season is from March to June.

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After being informed of my purpose of coming, Malik began to talk. The tribal leader of the village, Pakhi Murmu, was also present at the time of our conversation. Malik used to cultivate 4 bighas of land, of which most of the land he sharecropped and only a small portion he owned. Earlier, he used to work as an agricultural labourer as well. That practice he had discontinued upon assuming the office of the panchayat pradhan. In his words, People won’t respect me if I go to work as a khet majoor (agricultural labourer). I have to manage a lot of work both in the field and at home and only then can I attend the works of the panchayat or the party. People might regard the CPI(M) as a party of the poor, and the Left Front government a government of the poor, but in actuality that is not the case. Both the party and the government belong to the rich.

I was struck by his plain talk and began to probe further. He said candidly, …we don’t get enough time to spend for the party. Only economically solvent people can devote sufficient time for the party and become its leaders. Politics is based on economy. So people like me remain as petty activists of the party and can never emerge as its leaders. Moreover, one needs some capability to become a leader. We don’t have that skills coming from the family of an agricultural labourer and a backward caste. But we all vote for the CPI(M) party, with the understanding that this party would look after our interest.

He got party membership in the year 1991, although his political career had started before. He said, Party was facing problem with the previous panchayat member, Sanatan Tudu, and asked me to take charge of the party. It was the year 1992. During the 1998 panchayat elections, the party nominated me for this seat. Initially, I refused to contest saying that I would not be able to fulfil the responsibilities of a panchayat member being so overburdened with my livelihood work. But the party convinced me saying that it would share the burden of most of my responsibilities. They also said that I should agree to the party proposal, as there was no better choice before the party for the seat. Thus, I became the panchayat member and in the next turn in 2003, I became the panchayat pradhan.

He added smilingly, This time also I refused to take the responsibility of the pradhan. Once again, the party convinced me to do so as the seat of the pradhan has been reserved for the

80  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a SC categories and it had no other alternative at its disposal. Then onwards I have been trying to fulfil my responsibilities as a pradhan. Initially, I could not quite follow the official rules and procedures in the panchayat office. Slowly, I picked up and now I understand at least some of the tasks entrusted on me.

Malik also held the post of the secretary of the village unit of Krishak Sabha4 and was a branch committee5 member of the party. It was evident that the political ascendancy of the numerically predominant SC–ST communities was quite important to the party leadership. The party had to be careful in selecting a leader from among the SC–ST communities who would also be the panchayat representative from the village as the seat had been reserved for the SC–ST candidate since 1978. It was remarkable that in the first three terms from 1978 to 1992, the elected representatives hailed from the ST groups though the SC people were more numerous in the village. The first panchayat member elected in 1978 was Pakhi Murmu, the tribal political leader. Pakhi was the popular leader of the tribal community during the early periods of the CPI(M) party formation in this village and also seemed to have acceptance among the SC communities. Pakhi Murmu left the party in 1981–82 due to some disagreement cropping up within the party. His candidature was replaced by that of Sanatan Tudu in the next panchayat elections held in 1983. Sanatan remained the panchayat member of the village and also the party leader from the SC–ST communities for two consecutive terms. Khagen Malik continued to narrate his story of an agricultural labourerturned-leader: I myself work as a cultivator. Occasionally, I employ agricultural labourers on my field as well. Sometimes I feel embarrassed to work on the field guessing that people would not respect me as pradhan as I have to toil on the agricultural field. But I have no other option since I have to maintain my family. So, occasionally, I think that persons like me are not competent enough to lead the party or manage a panchayat. These are, in fact, tasks meant to be shouldered by the rich, by the rajas (kings). That is why this enterprise is called rajniti.6 I need to continue 4. Krishak Sabha is the peasant wing of the CPI(M) party. The party doesn’t have a separate mass organization for the agricultural labourers and organizes the labourers in the same organization. 5. Branch committee is officially the lowest unit of the party consisting of party members. Party members, from three to five villages usually, are by the party local committee to form a branch committee. The party hierarchy starts from branch committee at the lowest tier, and then proceeds upwards through local committee, zonal committee, district committee, state committee and finally, central committee and the Politburo. 6. Rajniti means politics in Bengali language. If we divide the word into raj and niti, the two parts become separate words having separate connotations. The word raj means a state or government

Seeing the State and Governance in the Grassroots  |  81 my livelihood work as a cultivator. Otherwise, what would I do once released from the post of pradhan? In fact, I seek to relinquish the post of pradhan as I am not fit for it. I don’t have education and hence, am unable to follow most of the panchayat works. Quite often, I fail to understand what should be done and why. I cannot follow clearly the government policies and its directives either. With the party’s help, I could manage somehow. The guide committee7 of the party helps me to run the panchayat. They prepare the action plans and look after the accounts. They obviously consider my views and suggestions. The staff of the panchayat office also help me a lot. With all these supports, my understanding about panchayat activities has improved somewhat. Bidhanda himself looks after the panchayat works.

Bidhan Mandal had been the main political leader of the area being placed in both the zonal committee and the district committee of the CPI(M) party. He had been at the helm of running the party in the block. His wife was the current upa-pradhan (deputy-chief ) of the local panchayat. Both Khagen Malik and Pakhi Murmu expressed strong confidence in him. Khagen said, Some people say that since Bidhanbabu holds such a big post in the party, it is quite likely that he has embezzled some money. This is not true. Anyone occupying top positions could be blamed like that. But he is not a person to be blamed.

The organizational presence of the party and its linkage with the panchayat are palpable. Khagen Malik claimed: Here you won’t find any corruption in panchayat activities. We came to know from newspaper reports that in many places, panchayats are steeped in corruption. Such irregularities never happened here. We don’t appoint contractors for panchayat works. We usually do all the developmental works on our own. Party persons and beneficiary committees look after the projects. We don’t construct houses under Indira Awaas Yojana and instead give the fund to the beneficiary committee,8 provided it produces Utilization Certificates (UCs) on time. Only in big projects, we employ contractors to do the job. as well as a king, according to the Bengali to English Dictionary published by Sahitya Sansad. So, people often equate the word rajniti with something related to the kings or the rich in the present times. 7. Guide committee is a party committee to look after the works of the panchayat. The CPI(M) party generally maintains such committees as party agents inside government institutions and mass organizations to get its directives translated into work. 8. Beneficiary committees are formed by the panchayat to supervise the specific projects being carried out for the benefit of the people. These beneficiary committees in party strongholds will generally be constituted with party activists and supporters.

82  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a Though many people are getting benefits from the panchayat, some discontent may still be found here and there. Once we confiscated, through struggle, ceilingsurplus land amounting to around 10–13 acres from the Kar family who had earlier obtained injunction on the land from the High Court. The party leaders then distributed the land seized on the basis of principle of priority. But some people have persistent grievances over the reasons of distribution. Benefit distribution itself generates discontent among a section of the people. How can we provide benefits to all the persons? We still try to satisfy as many people as possible. In administering every scheme, for example, Indira Awaas Yojana, Jawahar Rozgar Yojana and IRDP [Integrated Rural Development Programme], we face similar problems. Also, people fail to utilize the benefits properly or produce UC, thus become ineligible for claiming further benefits from the available schemes. The ST community has the opportunity to avail the benefits from most of the schemes, but they fail to utilize them adequately.

Being the local panchayat member, Khagen was the ex-officio President of the VEC. I, Rambabu and Harubabu run the VEC here along with the ICDS worker, SHG [Self Help Group] representative, etc. All of them are our party people, as there is no existence of any other party in the village. We discuss several things in VEC meetings including issues of how to spend funds, if available; who would take the responsibility of construction works, for improving the quality of teaching and serving of mid-day meals, etc. After the commencement of mid-day meals,9 children are coming to school in large numbers. About the gram sansad (village council) meeting, however, Khagen Malik sounded somewhat less enthusiastic: We cannot hold gram sansad meetings on time as peasants generally remain busy in cultivation works during this period. Moreover, labouring people cannot come to meeting except in the evening. Our village committee (party) members conduct door-to-door campaign to encourage people to attend the meeting. We also arrange to do some announcement of the meeting through the microphone. Nowadays, women are participating in gram sansad meetings in considerable numbers.

Khagen Malik continued, ‘In our village also, very few people used to attend gram sansad meetings earlier. Now more people are attending. This 9. Mid-day meals were introduced in all rural primary schools in India in the early years of the 2000s. This has been a central government project aimed at attracting out-of-school children to the schools and providing students with minimum nutrition.

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is a success.’ The economic position of Khagen Malik was clearly better than others in his community who are principally dependent on agricultural labour. Only two persons from the SC community had obtained government jobs thanks to reservation. His house, situated on the fringe of Malikpara, was among a few households in the entire SC hamlet that had got electricity connection. Electric poles were not drawn through this hamlet, as the SC households would not be able to bear the cost of drawing electric lines to their hamlet. For getting electric line to a hamlet, the residents of the hamlet had to bear the whole cost of erecting posts and drawing lines, and that usually required a huge sum of money. In this situation, Khagen Malik and some of his caste fellows had drawn electric lines by hooking from a distance, though all in the same hamlet were not enjoying this quasi-legal facility. The pradhan commented, On every Sunday, I spend time in the village to ‘take care’ of my organizational duties. That day, I usually go door-to-door to nurture and strengthen my rapport with the local people. The party has also directed me to do so. If I don’t interact with the villagers sincerely, don’t listen to their views and demands and show empathy for them, can our organization survive? Nowadays, our organization is becoming weak in the village, as I am unable to devote adequate time. In 1998, our organization was quite strong. The litany of people’s complaints, demands and distress seems to be increasing day by day. Most of the problems arise out of land and growing land fragmentation. We have to spend a lot of time and energy to resolve conflicts among warring brothers within the same family. As land price is increasing, the conflict among the villagers is increasing more. We try to resolve such disputes. People are dependent on us in this regard.

There is a hint here of utilizing people’s dependence on the panchayat or the party for dispute settlement as a subtle electoral strategy. As the conflict resolution process is yet to be over, the concerned people would be at the party’s beck and call. They could be mobilized during electoral rallies and their votes could probably be ensured in favour of the party. While the pradhan was getting ready to go for the VEC meeting, I asked Geeta, his wife and a VEC member, whether she knew about the gram sansad meeting to be held in the evening. She replied, ‘I have heard that some meeting is going to be held today. But whether this is a gram sansad meeting or something else I don’t know.’ Surprisingly, the pradhan’s wife also didn’t know

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anything about that day’s VEC meeting though she belonged to the VEC.10 I asked the pradhan whether his wife ever took part in the party meetings and rallies. Khagen Malik replied in the negative, ‘If my wife goes out, my family would go astray. So it is not advisable for her to go out.’ Khagen Malik, being a member of the subaltern class, was perhaps more explicit and candid than other leaders of the higher caste/class background in expressing views about women’s participation in village politics or panchayat activities. This statement of the pradhan well indicates the reason why half of the citizenry is absent in gram sansad meetings.

Local Self-government and Empowerment Khagen Malik, the pradhan, generally found time to attend the panchayat activities in the afternoon. One late afternoon, after the visitors from nearby villages had left the office, the panchayat office looked like an abandoned place. Only the local party leaders and activists continued chatting here and there. The panchayat staff had also left as the office hours were over. Most of the party activists and the sympathizers present there seemed to belong to affluent landed families. They were discussing about potato prices as it was the season for potato harvesting. All the landowners cultivated potato, the principal cash crop in this region, either in their land or by leasing in other’s land. Potato cultivators used to earn a lump sum by selling potato in this season. But Khagen Malik was still busy with his work and roaming from one room to another. It seemed as though others had hijacked his chair and perhaps his whole office and he had no place to sit. He looked quite out of place in this assembly of party activists; his presence seemed superfluous, because those who were sitting there were the people with real power. It was palpable by this time that people from prosperous families held real power in the village society, and now it appeared that the same was true in the panchayat office as well. They held real power in the village in terms of caste and social categories. They also held power in the institutional setting of panchayat by virtue of their being the real leaders of the party in power. Khagen Malik, the pradhan elected in the post by virtue of belonging to the SC community, was looking for a chair in that room to sit on. It seemed, both literally and symbolically, as if he 10. See also Ghatak and Ghatak (2002). Their study also showed that women were not invited in the gram sansad meetings. But the present observation is more interesting as it shows that even the wife of the pradhan is not invited in the gram sansad meetings and the VEC meetings.

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was striving to get a place in the existing power echelon where he was placed formally but displaced essentially by his own party ‘comrades’. The concept of decentralization appeared somewhat redundant in the situation in which persons like Khagen Malik stood apart from the actual power structure, with a highly centralized party having upper-caste, upper-class people at the helm of its affairs (see Bhattacharya, 1998; Bhattacharya, 2002; and also, Roy, 2008). The party leaders and activists were discussing about levy collection and election funds. They were expecting more funds to be collected this year as the selling price of potato was much above the normal rate this year. The landowning community was quite happy. Hence, they would possibly contribute more than expected to the election fund. All who were present there seemed to be in charge of one village each. One among them was leading the discussion and fixing the amount to be collected from each village. He was Mrinal Sarkar, the second-most prominent leader of the party after Bidhan Mandal. Finally, each village leader was given the responsibility to collect, on an average, Rs 5,000 for the forthcoming elections. But Khagen was not given any responsibility to collect money from his village, Kalipur. Perhaps this job would be entrusted to a party leader of his village who was a prosperous peasant.

Gram Sansad, Democracy and Marginal Groups To get a glimpse of the relationship of the marginal people of the village with the panchayat, I attended the gram sansad in Kalipur in November 2006. On the day of the meeting, I visited several SC and ST families in the village. First, I visited the house of Khagen Malik and came to know that his wife was completely unaware of the gram sansad meeting. Next, I visited Khagen Malik’s brother’s – Kanu Malik – family. Both Kanu Malik and his wife, Pritilata, were busy carrying paddy from the field. They had also cultivated potato on 0.75 bigha of land (as a sharecropper). Kanu rushed to the field to get canal water channelled to his plot of land. His wife was not going to the gram sansad meeting. She said, I have no knowledge about the gram sansad meeting being held. My husband might know it. Nobody informed me anything about it. And it doesn’t carry much sense in going there. Whatever is in store would happen whether I go there or not. I have heard that the VEC meeting would be held today. But I cannot attend the same because of work pressure.

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She was an activist of the village, a women representative in the VEC and a leader of a SHG.11 She also used to attend the meetings of Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti (Democratic Women’s Association), the women wing of the CPI(M) party. Still, she was unaware of the gram sansad meeting. It was surprising that such a woman, who was so active on the political front, was not informed about the gram sansad meeting. I came across several other women of the SC communities and tried to find out whether they were going to attend the gram sansad meeting on that day. None of them had got any information about such a meeting. I reached the house of Sanatan Tudu, the former panchayat member of the village and leader of the CPI(M) party. His wife and daughter were present in the house at that time. They, too, were found to be clueless about the gram sansad meeting. Sanatan’s wife remarked, ‘What meeting? I am not interested in any meeting. I have no time for it.’ Then I reached the house of the elderly tribal leader, Pakhi Murmu. His wife, Purnima, was preparing dung cakes from cow dung, which is used as fuel in rural households. Purnima had been an activist of the left movement that once rocked the village. Till now, she used to attend the CPI(M) party meetings whenever called for. But she was not aware of the gram sansad meeting. She said, ‘I don’t know that the gram sansad meeting will be held today. Pakhi might know of it. He has gone to one of our relative’s house and would definitely come back before the meeting.’ I suggested to her that she could talk about their problems in the gram sansad meeting and also could get some benefits from the panchayat for herself or for other villagers. She replied, ‘Our presence won’t matter there, as things are predetermined in such a meeting. Moreover, I have nothing more to get.’ While roaming through the Adivasipara, I found almost the same level of ignorance and apathy among the tribal women about the gram sansad meeting. These people, mainly women from the lower caste and tribal communities, were not only unaware of the gram sansad meeting, they also seemed quite reluctant to attend it. It appeared that they were neither informed nor motivated to attend the meeting. This finding that women are not even invited to attend gram sansad meetings in West Bengal corresponds to the observation made by other researchers as well (for example, Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002; see also Bhattacharya, 2002). 11. The SHG is organized, principally, with BPL women who have to save some money in the bank and then, they get back a few times of their savings as loan that might be utilized for small business or for enhancing farming activities. This scheme has been instrumental in reducing the dependency of rural poor on moneylenders.

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But not all the women were uninformed about the gram sansad meeting scheduled for that day. The women of higher-caste families, particularly the Kayastha women, were aware of the gram sansad meeting but not interested to attend the same. One of them said, ‘We are not going to attend the meeting. In fact, we never attend such meetings. How can we go and attend the meeting where the chhotoloks12 will gather? Our male members may go there.’ The Mahishya women of the Kolepara were found to be not only ignorant of the gram sansad meeting but also totally disinterested to attend any such meeting. Finally, I reached the venue of the gram sansad meeting, namely, Harisabha,13 situated on the roadside near Malikpara. The meeting was scheduled to be held at 4 p.m., but nobody had come by that time. In the youth club adjacent to this place, a group of youth were busy playing cards. In front of Harisabha, across the road, there was a grocery shop. The shop owner informed me that people won’t turn up for the meeting before evening. Around 4.20 p.m., the secretary of the gram panchayat arrived on his motorbike. One of the karmadhyakhsas14 of the panchayat samiti, Timir Kole, who was also an emerging leader of the CPI(M) party in Kalipur– Madhupur villages, arrived soon after. The pradhan, Khagen, also arrived. Sometime after 4.30 p.m., somebody put up a microphone and loudspeaker at the venue and immediately, popular songs began to play through the loudspeaker to give the area a semblance of festival. Intermittent announcements through the loudspeaker were also going on urging the people to attend the meeting. Some other people, who came from outside on behalf of the party, were seen taking part in organizing the meeting. It seemed that the CPI(M) party had taken the responsibility on its own shoulder to make the meeting a success. In the meantime, one party activist of the village opened a register and began to collect signatures from people all around. Even those who were passing by on the road were called to sign on the register and this signature collection went on throughout the meeting, and even for sometime after the meeting was over. 12. Chhotolok and bhadralok are commonly used in Bengali parlance to mean people of lower castes and higher castes respectively. These terms are, of course, used by the educated higher-caste persons who think themselves as bhadralok or gentlemen and others as chhotoloks in the derogatory sense. The term chhotolok is also used among the higher castes to abuse somebody of their own caste. 13. Harisabha is a concrete structure built for religious gatherings and found in many villages in Bengal. In other times, people use it for informal meetings, playing cards, etc. Here, the same venue is being used for holding the gram sansad meeting. In this village, this is the place for other public meetings which are generally termed as sholo ana. 14. Karmadhashas are positions selected from the elected members in the second tier of the panchayat, panchayat samiti, and in charge of different departments like health, roads and electricity.

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Around six to seven women, all from the SC–ST communities, arrived at the venue in a group and took their seats in a corner. Most of them were widows. Some chairs were placed on one side, which were meant for the party leaders and the panchayat staff. The branch committee members of the CPI(M) party and one local committee member, who resided in a nearby village, came and occupied the chairs. Some other persons also gathered and took their seats on the floor along with the women. The meeting seemed to be clearly divided between two groups, one on the chairs and the other on the floor: the powerful people were on the chairs and the apparently powerless people, the subalterns, were on the floor. The meeting started at around 5.30 p.m. The meeting began with a speech by Khagen Malik who was presiding over it by virtue of his position as the panchayat member of the local constituency. Malik was delivering his speech very confidently like a true political leader and urged everybody to participate in the meeting. The first point in the agenda was the submission of income and expenditure accounts of the gram sansad area for the last six months. The secretary of the panchayat submitted the accounts of total Rs 22,000. But it seemed that nobody was listening. The pradhan requested the participants to put forward objections, if they had any, or pass the accounts by raising hands. Immediately, people raised their hands and the statement of accounts was passed. Then Sanatan Tudu was requested to give a speech. He spelt out a list of achievements of the panchayat. At the end, he mentioned that the road running through the village needed to be repaired at the earliest. Malik announced, one by one, the names of the leaders sitting on the chairs who gave speeches related to the development work that was accomplished so far and the future ones to be taken up. Nirmal Das, a prosperous peasant of the village belonging to the Mahishya caste and a leader of the party, raised some more problems besides the general acclamations of panchayat activities. He said: Road is no doubt an urgent necessity. But some other things should also be given attention to. We, the peasants, are not getting sufficient irrigation facilities in spite of release of water through the canal. For ensuring better irrigation, concrete field channels need to be constructed. The sluice gate nearby has become defunct. That should be repaired immediately. The availability of canal water is also irregular. All these are hampering our cultivation work. We need to ask the government to install a mini-deep tube well on the field. Moreover, we need one concrete building for housing the ICDS.

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The next speaker called for was Naren Kole who was introduced by the pradhan as a ‘well-wisher of the panchayat’. He was a retired primary schoolteacher and a prosperous farmer of the Mahishya caste and the Chairman of the Dhaniakhali Thana Cooperative Agricultural Marketing Society Limited. He was known as a traditional Congress supporter, but had come closer to the CPI(M) party in recent times. He was probably attending the gram sansad meeting for the first time and was visibly not at ease to be there. He tried to admire the CPI(M) party and the panchayat and give a laudatory speech: It is not true that nothing has been done in the Left Front period. Many good works, developmental activities were taken up and accomplished in this period. But several things still remain to be done. Roads and canal water are all necessary things. But we need to pay attention to another important matter. There is rampant black marketing of potato seeds to hike its prices. Panchayat should take initiative to stop this unscrupulous way of trading.

Saifuddin, the younger brother of Ahammad, the CPI(M) activist from the Muslimpara, was a graduate and one of the very few educated among the Muslims in the area. He was honoured with a chair to sit on and called on to speak in the meeting, probably with an aim to bring such educated young men and their communities closer to the party. Noticeably, Ahammad and Saifuddin were the only two persons of the Muslim community present in the meeting. The Muslims generally did not participate in such meetings. Probably, they were not interested to participate in gram sansad meetings as they did not have an individual stake in such meetings. Almost all the schemes aimed to provide individual benefits were meant for the SC–ST people. Utpal Mitra, a member from the Kayastha caste and a known Congress supporter, was roaming around the venue till then and did not take (nor was invited to take) a chair despite being from the higher caste. The financial position of his family was modest, with only 4 bighas of land. He approached the pradhan in order to say something and the pradhan allowed him to speak. He first expressed his approval of the proposals raised so far and added, ‘There is a small ditch in the middle of the field that may be utilized for irrigation if canal water is diverted to the ditch through the construction of a field channel. This should be done for the development of agriculture in the area.’ It seemed that the ditch was situated near his land and if it were filled with water, it would irrigate his land. That was the reason why he took pains to speak in the gathering. Swarup Patra, belonging to the SC community, approached to speak on his own, that is, not being invited to speak like most of the previous speakers.

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He said, In our village, only 10 per cent people are rich or middle peasants. But all these discussions are so far held keeping the interest of this tiny section of the population in mind. Nobody raises the problems related to landless agricultural labourers like us. The agricultural labourers, at their old age, are relegated to the position of near starvation. Their sons don’t take care of them, and often they don’t have even rooms to stay. So, something should be done for them. At least, they should be provided with some funds for constructing their own shelters.

Kanak Malik, another SC person, said, After a number of gram sansad meetings held, the village got electric connection. But still, we the poor could not avail of this facility. The poor should be provided electricity in lieu of a minimum cost. Those pulling vans for carrying vegetables from the village to the market have been facing trouble because of the bad condition of the road. They should be provided loans so that they can instead buy auto-vans.15

Benu Ruidas, a cobbler from the SC community, spoke next: We have only one tube well in our locality and many families depend on it. Hence, a concrete platform needs to be constructed on the surroundings of the tube well so that people can use it in a better way. Some among us don’t have ration cards; that should be provided soon. A road should be constructed to link our hamlet with the rest of the village. My father has been too old to work. A grant should be sanctioned for him.

The cobblers’ hamlet, called Muchipara, was located in the field somewhat isolated from the main part of village. They were among the lowest in the caste stratification and among the untouchables in the Hindu society. A narrow muddy road linked their hamlet. Now, the women who had been sitting silently in a corner so far began to speak. Bimala Mandi, a tribal widow, stood up to talk without the microphone and in a hesitating manner stated, ‘I have not received any money, relief or house. My husband had died long back, but I didn’t receive anything. I need help.’ It seemed she was begging from the powerful of the village as was the practice in the days of the zamindars. Next was another tribal widow, Chuni 15. Auto-vans are indigenously made motor-fitted vans that are replacing the manually pulled van rickshaws to some extent in the West Bengal countryside.

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Hembram, and she said, ‘The children of my family don’t have ration cards. These should be arranged as quickly as possible.’ Then Sandhya Murmu, another tribal woman, stated, ‘I have come to the village two years back under some compulsions. I have none but two children. Please arrange a home for me.’ Then Rina Malik, an SC widow, said, ‘I am not getting widow allowance despite being old. What would I get to eat at this old age?’ Another tribal woman, Dukhi Tudu, said, Everybody is getting widow allowance. My husband died 15 years back, but I am not getting anything. I am made to participate in the party meetings time and again with the assurance that I shall be given the allowance. But till now I have not received anything.

Then, Lakhi Malik from the SC community said, ‘We don’t have enough food to survive, please take care of us.’ Rina Hembram, a tribal woman, said, ‘I want widow allowance and nothing else.’ All these women seemed to be in a destitute condition and were desperate to get some help for their mere survival. The most remarkable was the attitude of these women who came to the meeting only with their personal appeals. While most of the women in the village were ignorant about the meeting, these women participated in the meeting with a particular urge to get some relief from the acutely distressing conditions they were in. Probably, these women had earlier approached the political leaders for help and were told to attend the gram sansad meeting and plead their cases there. More striking was the attitude of the leaders present there during the entreaties of these women. They were just making fun of these women, ridiculing them, saying jokingly, ‘state your case more loudly otherwise you won’t get anything’, or ‘tell us what more you need’, etc. All the time when these women were talking, these leaders, including Khagen Malik, were laughing at them as if they were having some fun. Here, another Khagen Malik emerged who behaved like the higher-caste party leaders in his dealings with the village people asking favour from the panchayat. Like the other leaders, in the true sense, his desire here seemed ‘to become a person others looked up and listened to, a man to whom people turned for advice and help’ (Alm, 2010: 14). Here, he was among the ‘givers’ of benefits and hence, identified himself with the elite domain wielding power, though in some other contexts, for example, while sitting in the office of the panchayat, a feeling of distance and marginalization from the elite circles might have prevailed upon him.

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In the gram sansad meeting, ultimately, a division became evident among the participants: some on the chairs being the ‘givers’ of benefits or patrons; and the distressed subalterns, the ‘takers’ of benefits or the clients. Some researchers (Corbridge et al., 2005: 7) have compared the local state’s functioning in rural Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal and argued that in rural Bengal, the political society is not dominated by patron–client relationship, unlike in the other two states, and hence the local state could work more effectively on behalf of the rural poor. I, however, find a strong trace of the same relationship existing in rural Bengal as well. Finally, Khagen announced, ‘Now we would again come back to our main agenda. The well-wishers of our panchayat, Tarak Das and Naru Chatterjee, will deliver their valuable speeches now.’ It sounded as if the interventions made by poor people so far were all useless and a waste of time. After a brief speech by Naru Chatterjee, Tarak Das, the CPI(M) local committee member, who had been sitting on a chair meant for the special guests from the very beginning and had been giving instructions and whispering suggestions very often to Khagen Malik, concluded the gram sansad meeting by delivering a speech. In his speech, Tarak first congratulated all the villagers for making the gram sansad meeting a success.16 It appeared from his speech as if making the meeting a success had been the responsibility of the party persons who had been organizing the meeting. The term ‘well-wisher of the panchayat’, used very often to dignify some of the participants, mainly the party leaders, was very ambiguous. It was as if only persons close to the party were well-wishers of the panchayat, and others were not. The leaders might be dividing the participants into two categories: one, the common people asking for benefits; and two, the leaders (of both the party and the panchayat; in this case, both were the same) delivering the goods. Perhaps, the term ‘well-wisher’ was invented by the party to justify the presence of some political leaders outside the village in the meeting who were otherwise not eligible to be there. It was evident that most of them present in the meeting could identify Tarak Das as a party leader and not as one who belonged to the panchayat. After completion of the meeting, one labourer belonging to the SC community responded to my query, ‘Uni partir lok (he is a party functionary), baro neta (an important leader)’. Even after the meeting was over, signature collection on the register was still going on and finally, the attendance went up to 123. Many of those 16. See Bhattacharya (1998: 20). He stated, ‘panchayats have failed to become the centre of people’s power; it is just another centre for party power in the state’.

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whose signatures were collected were just passersby and actually not present in the meeting. After the meeting was over, the place was still vibrant with mostly SC–ST people who crowded there like every other day. This evening crowd was quite indifferent to the happenings of the meeting as if it was not their affair. Many observed the meeting from a distance and never came forward to participate, though their signatures were definitely collected. Some people of the upper caste seemed to have come there just to please the party leaders who had assumed the role of the self-styled ‘organizers’ of the gram sansad. At the end of the meeting, the division between the people on the chairs and those on the ground, the persons in power and those without, seemed more than apparent.

Education, Decentralization and the VEC The VEC being a recent policy initiative, meant to implement decentralization of governance in the sphere of education, envisages that the local communities would govern the affairs of primary education themselves. However, …it is naïve to presume a strictly benign role of the community in school governance, without paying heed to the nature of the community groups, the degree of cohesion among them, and, more generally, the oppressive class system of the Indian society. (Majumdar, 2003: 496)

Thus, realizing the highly stratified nature of the local communities, representations from the traditionally backward groups were sought to be ensured by compulsory reservation not only in the local self-governments but also in the VECs to enable their participation in promoting elementary education. But how far have the VEC structures been instrumental in extending their participation in the governance of the ‘temples of learning’? As per the rules, one workshop was held for the members of the VEC in the area. The venue of the workshop for the VEC members was a potato godown in front of the ‘A’ panchayat office where VEC members from two panchayat areas, ‘A’ and ‘B’, gathered.17 The workshop continued for two consecutive days. Altogether 15 were present at that time. A total of 20 primary schools were situated in the two panchayat areas and the representation in 17. The names of the panchayats are not disclosed so that the identity of the pradhans is not exposed. Instead, A and B are used to distinguish them from each other.

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the workshop was supposed to be four from each school. Hence, less than 20 per cent of the candidates were present at the beginning of the workshop. Even the two panchayat pradhans of the respective panchayats had not arrived when the meeting started. The pradhans, a woman and Khagen Malik, came long after the meeting had started, almost by the time of lunch break. The announcer of the meeting was Mrinal Sarkar, the local party leader as well as the resource person of the VEC.18 Among those present there, almost 50 per cent were women.19 Finally, the attendance rose up to 50–55, but not all of them were VEC members. In a rough estimate, around 40 were actually VEC members, while others were organizers of the workshop, obviously the party activists. Mainly, the head teachers and panchayat members were attending the meeting. Some ICDS workers were also present (one ICDS representative has to be compulsorily included in the VEC); it appeared that they were probably participating in the workshop as political activists rather than as VEC members. The main resource person, Mrinal Sarkar, explained: I am a resource person here to impart training to the VEC members. One training programme had earlier been conducted at the behest of the zilla parishad, where I, along with 10 persons from each block, was trained as resource person. This work is unremunerative and it is difficult to manage this responsibility after attending my livelihood activities. My livelihood is based on cultivation. In fact, I don’t engage myself much in agricultural works as I have a lot of party work to do. I belong to a local committee of the CPI(M) party and hence, have to manage a number of responsibilities. Around 80–85 per cent of the VEC members in the block are, in fact, the sympathizers of our party.

Mrinal Sarkar was quite correct in saying that most of the VEC members of the block belonged to his party. In Kalipur, the VEC seemed to be packed with the sympathizers of the CPI(M) party. Remarkably, among the 13 members of the VEC, at least five were known as party leaders in the village; probably all of them were members of the village unit of the party. More 18. Selection of resource persons and providing them with proper training has been part of the SSA programme to revamp primary education. These resource persons are supposed to give training to the teachers and VEC members. 19. Apparently, women are positively discriminated in the constitution of VEC. The VEC is composed of 12 members. Among the six parent members to be selected in a VEC, four must be mothers. If we include the ICDS member and siksha sahayika(s) with these four mother members, the total percentage of the women members in the VEC more or less conforms the norm of 33 per cent reservation for the women which is generally practised in the contemporary reservation regime in India.

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remarkable might be the fact that two of these party leaders were included in the VEC as people interested in education. Among the four women members representing the parents, one was the wife of the panchayat pradhan, who incidentally belonged to Kalipur, and another was his brother’s wife Pritilata, an active member of the Mahila Samiti (West Bengal Democratic women’s Association) of the party. Another woman member representing the parents belonged to a Congress-turned-CPI(M) supporter family of the upper caste. Emphasizing and justifying the overarching role of the party over institutions like the panchayats and VECs, Sarkar said, ‘I carry out more significant work, the work of the party. Administration is controlled by the party and not the other way around. In fact, we run the panchayats and other institutions, guide the pradhans.’ He gestured towards the two pradhans sitting on the chairs, both elected as pradhans by dint of reservation to the top gram panchayat position. Neither of them uttered a single word throughout the workshop, though they were the heads of the local self-government in the area. Mrinal’s comments made one wonder about the role of the so-called decentralization of power through the system of reservation. Throughout the entire proceeding, Sarkar literally managed, or one might say, dominated the workshop. At the end, another local committee member of the CPI(M) party, Sunil Samanta, turned the workshop completely into a party meeting by giving a list of the successes of the government. The leaders, as if, had begun the campaign for the coming assembly elections (2006) by addressing the schoolteachers—the intelligentsia in the rural area. The VECs were meant to include different sections of the people for the advancement of elementary education and the development of the school. The state’s education policy intended to include representatives particularly from the deprived social groups in school administration to identify and eradicate the barriers on the way to achieve universal education. But in reality, it appeared that the process had become somewhat exclusionary, with the near-total control of the party over the functioning of the VECs. Moreover, the relation of power seemed to have taken a complex shape with multiple actors operating in the VEC: the head teachers, the panchayat members/pradhans and the party leaders. Probably the head teachers would be ranked at the lowest strata in the political hierarchy that was prevailing. Evidently, political leaders coming from well-to-do, ‘educated’ and highercaste backgrounds were dominating the sphere of rural education even after all the measures of decentralization.

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Khagen Malik said after the meeting is over: I didn’t say anything in the VEC workshop as the teachers were very learned people. They are much educated. I am quite insignificant and ignorant in comparison with them. So I feel very hesitant to speak before them. Sometimes, I have to speak before them by virtue of my position. At that time, I remain scared as to whether I am making any mistake. Sometimes, the teachers remain silent, even if I say something wrong. They are afraid of finding any fault with me as they have to come to me for their own work. This will continue as long as I am in the position of pradhan.

As a part of local power echelon, Khagen Malik had his own tactics to maintain the power base or to control the people. In other words, Khagen Malik’s case validates ‘the use of fear to obtain positions of leadership’. ‘If they feared him, they would hesitate to oppose him’, Khagen Malik replied in same fashion like another leader in a village of Tamil Nadu about whom Alm discussed in his work (Alm, 2010: 16). Remarkably, a person of Malik’s stature, who was not only the chief of a gram panchayat but also a leader of the numerically dominant SC community of the village, did not feel free to speak his mind in front of the people with ‘superior’ social, economic and educational background. If that be the case with Malik, one can easily imagine the position of other members of the socially deprived communities in bodies like the VEC. It follows that the VECs, aimed at ensuring the participation of the local community, including the socially disadvantaged groups, in the management of the universal elementary education, have been reduced to a great extent to mere formal bodies in West Bengal. The VECs, which might have been instrumental in accommodating the views of the unprivileged sections of the people in finding out ways to inculcate in them a real spirit of learning, seemed to have turned into another tool in the hands of the local power to extend its sphere of domination.

Party, Power and Panchayat The important question is: how does the ruling party utilize various welfare schemes to strengthen its network at the grassroots? To get some clues, I got an opportunity to talk with Samir Chakrabarty, who was an insider both in the party and the panchayat. Samir Chakrabarty, a local committee member of the CPI(M) party, was working as a job assistant in an adjacent panchayat.

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He was also the block secretary of West Bengal Panchayat Joint Committee, a mass organization affiliated to CPI(M) party. He explained how the CPI(M) party could strengthen its base by implementing creatively the different welfare policies initiated mainly by the central government. He narrated: The scheme for enhancing rural development in 1970s was Food for Work, which was utilized in the Dhaniakhali block to revitalize the irrigation system in the area. Several tanks were re-excavated and small field channels were constructed to link the Kananadi canal with the agricultural fields. With the development of irrigation potentials in the area, agricultural activities got a boost that also increased the availability of work for the agricultural labourers. The next scheme implemented through the panchayat was the Rural Works Programme, which emphasized the supply of drinking water in the rural areas. Tube wells were dug in every hamlet. Earlier half of the cost of tube well boring had to be borne by the users; so, only the general caste people could get tube wells in their areas. Now the tube wells were sunk in the areas inhabited by SC, ST and minorities.

In 1978, after the devastating flood throughout West Bengal, Rural Restoration Scheme was implemented through the panchayat. Reconstruction of the rural infrastructure and households ruined by flood was emphasized in this scheme. Later, in 1980, National Rural Employment Programme (NREP) was introduced. With this scheme, the previous programmes were substituted and all the programmes of rural employment generation were brought under it. At the same time, panchayat began to help the peasants, particularly the bargadars, by providing them loans with subsidies and other facilities like the supply of mini-kits (this was a package containing HYV seeds, fertilizers and pesticides) free of cost. Subsequently, the NREP scheme was renamed as Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, and the Indira Awaas Yojana was introduced to help the rural poor to construct their houses in 1984 when the Congress (I) again came to power at the centre. Under the IRDP, the unemployed youths were offered loans with one-third subsidy to help them in self-employment. Under the Special Component Programme (SCP), the SC people were provided loans with 40 per cent subsidy and under Tribal Sub-plan (TSP), loans were offered to the tribal people with 50 per cent subsidy. Samir said, ‘The party utilized all these schemes to strengthen its rural base.’ Samir further added, And to manage all such schemes, it was felt at this stage to provide more staff in the panchayat. The party activists, in the main, were recruited in these new posts. The party leaders asked me to work in the panchayat as a staff saying that everything was now being done through it. So we must manage its operations. I

98  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a was then the secretary of one branch committee of the party. I took up the panchayat ‘job’ at the request of the party. But after some time, differences began to crop up between the party leadership and me over the functioning of party and panchayat. So they removed several assigned responsibilities given by the party from me. I was not given any work in the panchayat. Altogether three panchayat employees, including me, were rendered idle by the leadership although we were being paid from government exchequer.

Then, literacy centres were opened under the central government scheme to campaign for universal literacy mission in the year 1988. There was a distinct political aim of the CPI(M) party in implementing the literacy mission. As the opposition parties began to spread in the countryside at that time, particularly in this region, the literacy mission was utilized fully as a platform to bring the people closer to the party. The evening camps of Adult Education were turned into party schools where not only ‘ABCD’ was taught, but party’s politics and ideology was also preached. Through this government project, the CPI(M) party could successfully spread its politics. But I won’t say that none had been literate in this effort; but more could have been done.

This narrative indicates clearly how different welfare schemes, most of which were introduced by the central government, were utilized by the CPI(M) party for strengthening its networks in the grassroots. Since 1978 itself, the party had been making use of the panchayat and its welfare schemes for its own purpose, that is, to sustain its power base. It could be said as well that this was perhaps the reason why the CPI(M) party, or the Left Front, was so successful and creative in implementing the panchayat schemes as compared with other political parties (Corbridge et al., 2003).

Panchayat, Gender and Caste The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution (1993) made the mandatory provisions of reservation of one-third panchayat seats for women, and a share of seats to the SC–ST category people equal to their proportion in the local population. This was supplemented in 1998 by a constitutional amendment to include reservation of the position of pradhan for women and SC–ST candidates. The effect of reservation policy on representation is studied by Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) on all the gram panchayats (166 in number) of

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Birbhum district. This study reveals that while the reserved seats for women and SC–STs were all filled as stipulated, in the unreserved seats, these groups were highly under-represented. In the said panchayat, the post of upa-pradhan was reserved for the women. So, I visited the panchayat to get some idea of how the present woman upa-pradhan was working. The panchayat office was quite busy and crowded in the afternoon on the day of the visit. A number of villagers were seen to have come to the panchayat office. They came to receive their own entitlements for constructing lavatories which the government was providing to the people belonging to the SC–ST categories. Actually, one person had announced in the morning with a loudspeaker on behalf of panchayat that every household must construct a lavatory and the government would bear a part of the expenses for those persons who were unable to do it on their own. The announcer had, in fact, threatened that steps would be taken against the villagers who would not comply with the panchayat scheme. This gram panchayat had already been recognized as the ‘nirmal (clean) gram panchayat’ by the central government agency, which meant that all the households in the gram panchayat area had sanitation facilities. Probably, this had been a premature declaration on behalf of the panchayat and now the leaders were busy trying to fill in the gaps between sanitation arrangements done so far and that which still remained. Puspa Mandal, the upa-pradhan (deputy-chief ) of this gram panchayat, was present in the panchayat office. She was busy with her work. The pradhan was also there in the office. All the staff in the office were busy working. The villagers who were coming to the office with their problems or needs were attended to quickly by the staff. But everyone, including the pradhan and upapradhan, had a distinct approach of talking with the villagers. Khagen Malik was very kind to those villagers who were hesitant to voice their problems before the staff. He helped these people to speak out their problems to the staff. On the other hand, Puspa Mandal’s approach was quite different from that of the pradhan. She seemed to be talking like a patron or a boss well-entrenched in the position of authority, treating the people coming to her as clients – as if she was the only authority in the panchayat to distribute the benefits to the villagers. For instance, she was asking the people, ‘What’s your need?’, ‘What do you want after all?’, ‘Didn’t I give you the “same” some days before?’ and ‘No, I can’t give you the “same” now’. It was not surprising that Puspa Mandal, being the wife of the CPI(M) leader Bidhan Mandal and commonly called baudi (sister-in-law), assumed all powers in this panchayat in the absence of Bidhan Mandal. The staff used

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to consult her whenever they faced any problem or had to take an important decision. The staff even sought her advice on things related to Kalipur, the village of the pradhan, bypassing Khagen Malik. In other words, the role of Puspa Mandal was much more prominent than the pradhan in the panchayat office. The ‘famous’ baudi even dealt with the visitors or villagers outside this panchayat area and suggested how things should proceed in any case. The upa-pradhan asked an old man waiting for something, ‘What do you want?’ The old man said, ‘I need some materials for constructing a toilet. Please provide me these things. Now everyone is getting these materials.’ The upa-pradhan asked, ‘Didn’t you get the same before?’ He replied, ‘Yes, but those got consumed by white ants.’ The upa-pradhan ridiculed him, ‘Why don’t the white ants consume you?’ Then, she said with all authority, ‘No, you will not be given anything more.’ But the old man, probably from the SC community, was desperate to get the materials. He stood there for a long time. After some time, the upa-pradhan seemed to have second thoughts on his appeal and somewhat disgustedly ordered the staff, ‘Oh! What should I do? Give him some materials.’ The staff seemed to be waiting to hear the last words from the upapradhan. They immediately allotted the materials to the old man. It was observed that Puspa Mandal was addressing even the elderly people in the panchayat office as tumi, which is a derogatory term in vernacular language if used by a younger person to address an elderly person not so close to him/her. Remarkably, all were addressing her as apni to express their respect to her, while she was using the word tumi as if to express her supremacy in the panchayat office. Generally, the bhadraloks from the upper castes would address the chhotoloks of the lower caste as tumi or tui to express their caste superiority. In some offices, the bosses also use such terms to address their subordinates, irrespective of their ages, as an expression of superiority. In the meantime, one woman panchayat member came to the panchayat office and sat beside Timir Kole, a member of the panchayat samiti. She was whispering something to Timir Kole. Timir Kole suggested to her to talk to somebody else, ‘Go ahead and talk to them. Why are you so scared? Mind that you are a panchayat member. I don’t know why they had nominated you in the panchayat elections? You don’t do anything.’ The point is that while the woman panchayat members in general seemed to suffer from many problems in discharging their responsibilities, Puspa Mandal was really steady in the panchayat office as if she was handling the things in her own house. Puspa Mandal narrated her experience of working as a panchayat member. She had been the panchayat pradhan during 1998–2003. Prior to that, she

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was once a panchayat member from her own village. She had occasionally participated in the big mass meetings organized by the CPI(M) party before being elected in the panchayat. She initially felt so shy to participate in those meetings that she tried to hide herself from the gaze of the people lest they could think something negative about her participation in party meetings in spite of being a housewife. She had even declined to be a panchayat member initially when the seat of her village was reserved for women. But the party leaders convinced her to be a panchayat member and assured her help in carrying out her responsibilities. After being a panchayat member, she realized that a panchayat member had to do a lot of work. She became interested in the panchayat work gradually. She had now been enjoying the post and working with confidence, though she had to face a lot of problems in managing the household chores simultaneously. Subsequently, she had also become a party member. She tried to attend all the party meetings, but failed to do so. The branch committee to which she belonged comprised of 12 members.20 She was the only woman in that committee. About the participation of women in the gram sansad meeting, she said: Of late, more than 50 per cent of the voters do attend the gram sansad meetings. Women in more numbers are participating than earlier. Their participation in the proceedings of the gram sansad meetings has also increased. But everybody, both men and women attending the meetings, seeks to get something from the panchayat. Their requirements are endless. During the last three decades, the attitudes of the villagers have completely changed. All of them have now become desperate to get something. And it is we who are responsible in transforming the attitudes of the people.

This narration reveals that Puspa Mandal was working in the panchayat with enough authority. She regarded her fellow villagers as ‘they’ or ‘them’ and herself as ‘we’ and ‘us’. To her, the other villagers seemed to be the governed people and she herself was the authority. But did the other women members in this panchayat think like her? The answer would be a categorical no. The rest of the woman panchayat members could not even speak freely in the panchayat office. Here lies the underlying power relation of caste, landholding class and party affiliation. Being a member of a dominant caste group and solvent landowning class, as well as wife of the most influential party leader of the region, Puspa Mandal became a real authority of the panchayat to some extent. 20. But more than half of the members in the branch committee belonged to the SC–ST communities and among the 12 panchayat members in this gram panchayat, six were women.

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But Puspa had a gender understanding about the women participating in politics: Women should not be involved much in politics. If they are deeply involved in politics, their family will be ruined. Women have to face a lot of problems in the tussle between political and household tasks. I have to engage myself in household chores immediately after I reach home. I have to cook for my family.

This reveals that though Puspa emerged as an authority in the panchayat, she still regarded the party and panchayat as the domain of men; and household chores, on the other hand, as the domain of women. It seemed she was entrenched in the dominant patriarchal tradition existing in the rural area.

ICDS: Equity Question at the Grassroots Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) or anganwadi, a central government scheme, had been a popular programme in the rural areas of West Bengal. Kalipur had one such centre that was located in the primary school building. Another ICDS centre of the neighbouring village, Madhupur, was also operated from this school. In one single room, both the centres were run simultaneously. Food for the children of the two ICDS centres was cooked on the school verandah or courtyard. Each ICDS had one worker and one assistant. The worker, usually called the didimani (mistress), looked after the children, while the assistant prepared the food. The ICDS workers are supposed to look after supplementary nutrition of the children, their pre-school education, immunization, health and nutrition education, growth monitoring and referral services. When I reached the joint ICDS centres, chaotic conditions were prevailing there with most of the children shouting at the top of their voices. The room was overcrowded with children of the two centres sitting side by side and very often getting mingled. The ICDS worker said, ‘people who are solvent generally do not send their children. Some of them are of late sending their offspring to the centre so that their children get pre-school education.’ Generally, children from poor and lower-caste families were more numerous in the centre. Probably, this was one important reason why the upper-caste people usually felt reluctant to send their wards to these centres. The division of chhotolok and bhadralok seemed to begin right from these early days of childhood

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(children below the age of 6 years are admitted in ICDS centres). But did all children from poor families attend the centre? A member of the staff replied, ‘We are trying to bring all of them. But all are not coming.’ The children were found to be reading books as well, though in ICDS centres it is not recommended to use books. Even English books were seen being used for teaching. Some were reading books of Class I standard. It seemed that the children of well-to-do families had a prior exposure to teaching and were getting more attention than others. One ICDS worker hailing from the Mahishya caste was taking more care of the children of upper-caste background. In the meantime, a number of women along with a few men gathered on the school premises. Every one of them had a small container in their hand. It became evident that they were parents of the children who had not come to the centre on that day. These parents had come to collect the cooked food meant for their children. Paradoxically, many of these people were from well-to-do and upper and middle-caste background and usually did not send their children to the centre. Some children perhaps never appeared at the centre, but their parents would not miss collecting food from the school, at least for one day in a week. That day being Wednesday, the ‘egg day’, when eggs were distributed with food to the children, more parents flocked to get the share of their children. Firstly, parents were served the food and when they dispersed, the food was distributed to the children. After sometime, it became apparent that eggs had fallen short and all the children present there could not be served the same. A member of the staff clarified: Today, more people have come from outside than usual. Hence, we could not predict the number of eggs required. In fact, the office directs us to serve food first to the children. But we cannot refuse the guardians coming to collect food for their own children. So today, we will serve the children half an egg each.

This reveals how a governmental policy is being implemented on the ground. The success of any scheme is actually dependent on the existing power relations in the grassroots. Here, the prevalent caste relation was very important. The people flocking to collect food for their children were generally coming from upper-caste and solvent family background, and hence they could not be refused or asked to wait, while the children from mostly lower-caste and poor-class background coming regularly to the centre could be deprived of their legitimate share of food for the sake of the higher ups in the society.

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Thus, the ICDS centre looked like a microcosm of the discrimination prevailing in the village society. Though castes had apparently ceased to be an instrument of oppression in the rural polity of West Bengal, their expressions could be seen in many veiled forms, the ICDS being one of them.

Women, Local State and Governance On 8 March, the International Women’s Day ceremony21 was observed in the village primary school. A circular to celebrate Women’s Day was sent by the panchayat on the previous day, which contained directions on how this day should be observed. First, a procession with teachers and students would be organized and then, a meeting with the ‘mothers’ and children would be held in the school premises. At 10.30 a.m., two young male teachers arrived in the school. They had joined the school just a few days back and were given the responsibility to manage the events on the day. Two senior teachers were absent since they had gone to the zilla parishad office to bring the funds allotted to the school under the SSA. The young teachers tried their best to make the programme a success. They immediately began to prepare some placards with slogans like ‘Observe 8th March as the Women’s Day’ and ‘Stop Torture against Women’ were written on them. At 11.30 a.m., the students accompanied with the two male teachers marched on the roads in a procession with placards in their hands, making a lot of noise. Although one lady teacher was present there, but she seemed to be very indifferent with respect to the occasion. She walked some distance with the procession and then came back. The ICDS workers, all of them women, were supposed to attend the occasion, but they too were not much interested in taking out time for the occasion. Two of them went back home and the other two did not participate. After the procession, a meeting was scheduled to be held with the mothers and the children. But most of the mothers did not turn up; only five to six women who resided nearby in the Bamunpara22 and Kayasthapara came. Among them, only one belonged to the Mother–Teacher Committee. 21. Each year, on 8 March, around the world, International Women’s Day is celebrated. The theme of the Women’s Day declared by the United Nations in the year 2006 was ‘Women in Decision Making’. The West Bengal government had also planned to celebrate the day through its own agenda that is, in all the government-aided primary schools of the state the mothers of the students were invited in the school programme so that they would be involved in the initiative of the UEE. 22. Bamunpara means Brahminpara, that is, Brahmin hamlet.

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The young male teachers who were anchoring the programme proposed the name of a senior lady teacher to preside over the meeting and asked her to say something on the occasion. But she was unable to say anything. Then, the name of one ICDS worker was announced as chief guest of the programme. The lady instantly refused the offer, probably to avoid the embarrassment of giving a speech on an occasion they were so ignorant about. One of the male teachers then managed the programme, principally, with his own performance–a few recitations and a dance performed by the students. After conclusion of the programme, when asked about the same, both the ‘mothers’ and the lady teachers remained mum. One of them said, ‘As they asked us to come, I came to attend this meeting. I don’t know what the meaning of Women’s Day is.’ Women’s Day seemed to carry no significance for these women. Interestingly, the motive of the state government for making the celebrations mandatory in all primary schools was to encourage the mothers to be active in sending their children to schools so that the universal literacy campaign could be successful. Further, this occasion was meant to revitalize the MTA. But why was the state directive failing so miserably? Perhaps the problem lies somewhere else. In fact, this event was designed by the state government on the basis of its own legal–rational principles which do not seem to be in tune with the cultural consciousness of the women belonging to rural peasantry. Though these women were participating in the programme arranged by the village primary school, they remained largely indifferent to the proceedings of the meetings.

Summing Up The foregoing discussion reveals some of the complex and multifarious relationships between the local state, particularly the panchayat, political parties and other institutions on one hand, and the village people belonging to different social groups on the other. These two have been increasingly getting entangled with one another in the contemporary period, and at the same time, maintain their own relatively autonomous existence both in the sphere of politics and, more so, in the sphere of ideology. But what is the impact of recent decentralization reforms on the participation of different sections of the peasantry? This chapter reveals that, as the scholars argue, it will be unwise ‘to assume that the agenda of “the new public administration” does not open up significant spaces of empowerment for the men and women it seeks to position as participant

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or possible beneficiaries’ (Corbridge et al., 2005: 7). It is also true ‘that the ways in which technologies of rule are made flesh will depend on the manner in which they are interpreted and put into play by lower-level government workers, elected representatives and others’ (Ibid.). The question is whether the decentralization reforms can achieve the goal of empowerment without removing the barriers of hierarchical social structure on the basis of which the ‘lower-level government workers, elected representatives and other’ very often interpret their roles and agenda and ‘put into play’. The rural subordinate classes merely seem to be able to enjoy equal power in a political setting where the dominant castes, or landed gentry, in the main have been in control of the local institutions. Though the rural poor had to gather in the panchayat offices to get their share of doles, this was more a case of patron–client relationship than one of equal rights of citizenship. So, only the people likely to receive benefits assembled in gram sansad meetings. Most of the people seemed to have lost interest in the functioning of the panchayat. Bhattacharya’s (2002) study in two villages of Barddhaman district has made similar observations. On the other hand, the dominant political party may utilize this local governmental power in the interest of its own electoral successes. Williams (2001: 611) observed in his study of two panchayats in the district of Birbhum that the CPI(M) party could well utilize the institutional power to strengthen its support base. He stated: …the CPI(M) was also able to reinforce its electoral support through the massive institutional power of the panchayats. Through its overall control of the panchayat boards, the CPI(M) had a solid grip on local government spending in Birbhum, which was backed up with a degree of influence over the police and development bureaucracy.

He also commented, ‘Of course any attempt to use this institutional power in a partisan manner would leave the party open to accusations of corruption and nepotism…’ (Ibid.: 611). Coming back to Kalipur, we will see that a number of villagers, particularly women, belonging to subordinate social groups complained about the corrupt practices of the party. In fact, to many of them, the party being a powerful entity could decide everything in the village, including the panchayat. Hence, ‘democratic decentralization is no panacea for reducing corruption even when local communities are formally included in implementing and monitoring policies, programs and schemes’ (Veron et al., 2006: 1936). The next chapter discusses, in more detail, these linkages between party and panchayat.

5 Party and Politics at the Margin

The political processes in post-colonial India have come a long way, bringing about many changes in the relationship between the rural people and the state-led politics. The state-led politics, that is, organized ‘elite’ domain, and the politics of the rural masses have got entangled in ever-increasing ways in the post-colonial period in India, particularly in post-1977 West Bengal that has witnessed a long uninterrupted rule till 2011 by the Left Front government. The influence of the state and political parties on the everyday lives of common people, particularly of the rural masses, has enormously increased in more recent times due to the ‘successful’ implementation of the PRIs, including the reservation of panchayat seats for the SC, ST and women, the six-monthly gram sansad meetings and increasing allotment of funds and welfare schemes through the panchayat. The contemporary political processes in rural West Bengal can be studied by paying attention to both the panchayat and the party as two institutions of political power. But over and above, political parties seem to be dominating the social and political lives of the rural people in West Bengal more than the panchayats. This largely corroborates with the observation of Bhattacharya (1998) that the panchayats in West Bengal have become another centre for party power, of which the party is well aware, but could not do without it. Emphasizing the overarching role of the party over other institutions like panchayats, Mrinal Sarkar of Kalipur, the local committee leader of the CPI(M) party asserts that the panchayat administration is controlled by the party and not the other way around. He said, ‘I have never contested elections and did not aspire to become a panchayat member or even pradhan.’ So, it was evident that the party was all powerful in West Bengal and at the same time, it was more institutionalized. Kohli (1990) argues that due to this institutionalization of political parties, West Bengal has managed to reverse the ‘crisis of governability’ that is plaguing other parts of India. As a

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result, the political landscape of West Bengal has been remarkably stable (see also Williams, 2001: 603). Let us then have an ethnographic enquiry into the political processes of Kalipur in order to examine these insightful observations made by the scholars in this field.

Tribal Community and its Leaders Pakhi Murmu, the tribal leader, had been active in the party since the 1960s when the CPI(M) party began to organize peasant struggles to get an entry into the village. In fact, he was the main organizer of the ST–SC people on behalf of the party during those turbulent days, and subsequently became a panchayat member in 1978 on behalf of the CPI(M) party. He left the party for some time, tried to organize the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), another Left Front partner, in the village and was beaten up in the process. Finally, he came back to the fold of the CPI(M). He was instrumental in actively organizing the ST people of the village during the period of my fieldwork. This trajectory of his political life made him one of the most important characters in the village that needed a closer study. Pakhi Murmu resided just on the bank of a tank. Some other families also stayed nearby and the area was known as Santhalpara. This area was located at a distance from the main Adivasipara. As habitation space in the Adivasipara became inadequate for housing the burgeoning population, a section of tribal people began to shift to the other side of the road and constructed their own settlements over time. Most of the houses were muddy thatched houses, with only a few having asbestos or tin on their rooftops. Pakhi’s house had asbestos on the roof thanks to the welfare scheme, Indira Awaas Yojana. It was a tworoom incomplete house with one room for the cows and the other for Pakhi and his wife separated by a half-built wall. We were talking sitting in his room which was quite dark even at 10 a.m. We could not clearly see each other. I sat on Pakhi’s bed that had still the unruffled mosquito net on it. Some food was kept on the floor which his wife had cooked in the morning and gone to work as a day labourer. He began to talk in a low voice, ‘I have lost everything for the party. My life has been spoiled joining in politics.’ But why was he feeling like this at a time when their party was in power both at the state level and in the local panchayat? The party organization was also quite strong in the village. Pakhi replied,

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  109 The party is no more ours. It has been usurped by the bhadraloks [upper-caste gentlemen] and the baroloks (the rich). The people against whom we had to struggle once have become the party leaders. In this situation, how can our condition improve? It has remained as it is.

Pakhi continued: We have built up the party, established it bit by bit. At that time hardly anyone worked for the party, which was new in the area. Since the regime of the United Front (1966–69), we the adivasis (tribal) have organized struggles here. I was known as the only CPI(M) person in the area. We have conducted continuous struggles against the zamindars (landlords) for confiscation of ceiling-surplus land, for wage hikes and against all kinds of oppressions. We had been beaten up, had to go underground for long time and even spent nights on the branches of trees. Police had issued arrest warrant against me. People in thousands used to gather at my exhortations. At those times, the Bagdis and Dules [that is, the SC people] did not stand steadfastly behind us. Today, these very people have become leaders by virtue of being elected in the panchayat. After so much of pleading, I got only six asbestos sheets for the roof of my house. Earlier, Khagen was an agricultural labourer. Now he has managed to improve his position.

How did he get attracted to the party? Pakhi began reminiscing about the old days: Those were the days of the zamindars and the reign of the Congress. Suman Mukherjee, Bidhan Mandal and Pranab Banerjee came to the village. We held discussions with them and began organizing the people. I was then very daring and also well built. I could convince people to join the party. So very quickly the organization got roots in the area. Village people used to say it was the organization of Pakhi. So I became hostile to the zamindars. So many times they attempted to kill me. Every time I could manage to escape. Zamindars, their agents and the police were all against us. We had confiscated substantial amount of ceiling-surplus land. Many landless got land. I got 0.4 bigha of land. Party decided the amount of land to be distributed to each.

Pakhi continued, But I have never been a leader in the party. I am totally illiterate. As I could organize men and women in the village, leaders used to call me to resolve any dispute or organize any programme. Tribal people and other toiling masses used to follow me. When I became panchayat member for the first time, Khetra Pal, the rich peasant of the village, and his associates attacked us. The women were resisting them.

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It appeared from Pakhi’s narration that he was the leader of ‘rebellion’ that was indeed a ‘collective enterprise’.1 Guha (1983: 115) argues that ‘it (rebellion) uses communal processes and forms of mass mobilization, expresses mass violence in the idiom of communal labour and encourages communal appropriation of the fruits of pillage in many cases.’ The assertion of the tribal people and also the SC people in Kalipur during the 1960s and the 1970s was, in fact, a rebellion of collective enterprise and mass violence. Pakhi Murmu was the key figure in that rebellion, and he did not forget those days. To him, time was remembered by those memorable incidents that had occurred in his life. Not unexpectedly, numerous conflicts took place during the early days of the Left Front government. Till then, the landowning community was so hostile that they could beat up a panchayat member of the ruling party. The tribal community spearheaded the movement against this landowning community, probably on the lines of the legacy of the old tribal and peasant movement as described by Guha. Guha (Ibid.: 336) claimed: So long as landlord authority continues to function as a significant element in the ruling culture – and continue it will for long even after the genuine (as against spurious) end of landlordism in the economy and property relations – all mass struggles will tend inevitably to model themselves on the unfinished projects of Titu, Kanhu, Birsa and Meghar Singh.

But did the landowning community become submissive over time? Pakhi described, Khetra Pal and his associates are the new zamindars, the big farmers. Previously, the Kayasthas, the Kars and the Mitras were the zamindars. They had their own lathials [people who fought with sticks]. One side of the village was then covered by forest. We were residing near the forest. Due to our united struggle, the main Kayastha zamindars fled the village. They got decent jobs in Kolkata. Later, when the government began to seize above-ceiling land, the Kayastha landed people sold off most of their land at throwaway prices. The solvent Mahishyas mainly purchased those lands. Some Swarnakars and Benes also purchased some of their land. Some among the Mahishyas became prosperous as they used to cultivate on their own. They are now the big landowning people in the village. Their sons are entering the party. The CPI(M) party now looks like the old Congress party.

1. Guha (1983) borrowed the term ‘collective enterprise’ from Lefebvre who used it to describe the peasant revolts in France in 1789.

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How can the rich people find a place in a communist party? This seemed to be a puzzling question to which Pakhi had no answer. He had fought against the zamindars drawing on the unity of his community. Pakhi Murmu said, In spite of being a panchayat member, I continued the struggle against them on different issues. Not only in this village, I used to visit other villages as well to mobilize people in struggles. The leaders used to do paperwork sitting in the panchayat office.

His account was so vivid that events of the past got enlivened through it. Even now, he seemed enchanted with the talk of struggle and was keen to judge the party and its leaders on the basis of it. He was the hero of those struggles that had been instrumental in entrenching the party in this area. He could not forget that those struggles had provided them some rights, recognition and social prestige in the village. Now, when the party had withdrawn from these types of movements, people like Pakhi seemed to have lost their importance to the party. Here lay the crux of his ambivalent relationship with the party. Pakhi had been the panchayat member for only one term. He mentioned, Sanatan became the next panchayat member. But I remained at a distance to organize people and unite the poor. At that time, the wage of day labourers was very low, only Rs 5 plus 750 grams rice. That was in 1986–87. I initiated the wage increase movement after consulting the party. The movement continued for 20 days. They tried to bring labourers from outside. We resisted the attempt. All the agricultural labourers’ families were united in the struggle. But the babus (the landed gentry) were not ready to concede to our demand. Then Sanatan Tudu, on behalf of the CPI(M) party, tried to deceive the struggling agricultural labourers. He proposed and endorsed the terms of the landowners. Ironically, the party backed him. He could mislead a section of the struggling people. We, the adivasis, remained steadfast till the last, but the SC people were persuaded to withdraw their struggle.

The statement again validates Guha’s formulation on peasant insurgency. Guha (1983: 331) stated that ‘even when solidarity between ethnic groups triumphed over separateness for a time, it weakened soon under pressure from their common enemy’; here, the common enemy was the landowning community and, perhaps, even the CPI(M) party to some extent at the later stage of the wage increase movement. But it was also true that the tribal leader,

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Sanatan Tudu, ‘deceived’ the movement and forsook the interests of his own ethnic group. Thus, the ethnic groups in the post-colonial period appeared not to exist as an organic community as compared to their counterparts in the colonial times, and were rather more or less fragmented due to some factors like the deep penetration of the political parties into the ethnic communities. But were the movements of the ethnic groups in the colonial period really devoid of fragmentation or differentiation? The scholarly study of Bandyopadhyay (1994) on the Namasudra movement in Bengal, 1872–1947, showed ample evidences of differentiation or fragmentation in the movement. Pakhi’s brother-in-law, present during this part of our discussion, commented, ‘These SC people, particularly the Maliks, are always agents of the babus. They always remain subordinated to the gentry. They are the doubledealers.’2 Pakhi said, Party then asked me to withdraw the movement; but I refused to budge. This led to differences of opinion in the party. I proposed that we could stop the movement only against those landowners who were ready to concede to our demands. One evening, a few local party people came to discuss the matter with me. But the discussion didn’t yield any result as they were insisting on calling off the strike. At the end, they attacked me unexpectedly and beat me up severely and then went away. That day, on the occasion of a tribal festival, all my people were outside the village.

A case was filed against five CPI(M) persons, including Bidhan Mandal by him. The RSP arranged his court expenses, and also the cost of his medical treatment. Then, he joined the RSP. In the year 1993, he contested the panchayat election on behalf of the RSP and was defeated by only a few votes. That means a considerable section of the village people had voted for him after he left the CPI(M) and joined the RSP. But the RSP organization could not flourish in an isolated pocket. In Pakhi’s opinion, an organization in one village could not survive for long, particularly when all the power of the panchayat was concentrated in the hands of the CPI(M). There was also tremendous pressure from the CPI(M) that a small organization like the RSP could not withstand. So the tribal people, under the leadership of Pakhi, again came back to the fold of the CPI(M). How could they, the adivasi people, survive without the help of the panchayat which was totally under the control of the 2. See also Ruud (1999b). Ruud describes how and why a particular jati, here Bagdi, is being preferred by the local CPI(M) party and consequently, political allegiance is shaped. In Kalipur, the trajectory of Bagdi participation in the CPI(M) party may corroborate Ruud’s story.

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CPI(M)? All the schemes and projects of the panchayat were meant for them, the adivasis, the SC and the poor. How could they stay aloof from the panchayat and the party leading the same? This seemed to be the crux of Pakhi’s realization after so many years of struggle. People like him and his community could not survive without the help of the political parties. Even if the party was not their ‘own’, of their own choice, they had to cling to it until any alternative emerged to replace it. Pakhi Murmu remarked, ‘We have no other way but to join the party. We cannot live without the support of a party. And we cannot join the Congress or TMC–BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], as these are the party of the landowners.’ So, he again approached the CPI(M) party leaders and told them, ‘We have nowhere to go. Hence, I have decided to work for the party again.’ On the other hand, no party could ignore a person like him who had long been an efficient organizer and a natural leader of his own community. Hence, the leaders of the CPI(M) party once again accepted him in the party, but he could not cope up with the present atmosphere in the party as it was. Pakhi Murmu, a 65 years old and yet a strongly built man, said, ‘Bidhanbabu allotted a chair in the party office for me and for sometime I used to sit on it. But I can’t follow what they discuss these days. So I don’t feel anymore interested to go there.’ Pakhi said, People like me who had established the party through struggles remain deprived in the village. They never ask me what benefits are to be distributed, who should get those or who are to be included in the beneficiary committee. But most of the money spent in different schemes is meant for people like us, the adivasis. Funds that are meant for our development are misappropriated by the Maliks [that is, the SC people to which the pradhan belongs]. But whenever the party has to mobilize the people, I am asked to take the responsibility. They cannot organize people for rallies and other party programmes.

His brother-in-law again commented, ‘Pakhi did not get anything for the sake of dharma’.3 Noticeably, in his long narration, Pakhi repeatedly spoke in terms of ‘us’ and ‘they’. While the word ‘us’ was used to mean the adivasis in particular, and poor and toiling people in general, ‘they’ meant sometimes the landed gentry, 3. Dharma may be translated as religion in English. But in India, the word carries some deeper connotations. For example, dharma is, in broader sense, a duty or morality in life that should be followed irrespective of one’s race and religion. Dharma also implies fighting against injustice and struggling for achieving justice. In the two great Indian epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, the fight between what was just and unjust is described as dharma.

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sometimes the party leaders and sometimes the SC people who were getting the bulk of panchayat facilities at the cost of others. He seemed to consider them, the adivasis, as the ‘other’ of the mainstream. This mainstream was once represented by the landlords and the Congress, then by the CPI(M) leaders and the landed gentry and finally, the ‘opportunist’ among the SC community. His feelings were not isolated ones but echoed by others in his community, as was evident from the words of his brother-in-law. But people like Pakhi could not probably remain steadfast in their dharma in these days of governmentality. They had to compromise with the organized domain to get necessary relief and other facilities provided by the state. After Pakhi Murmu quit the panchayat in 1983, Sanatan Tudu was selected as the next panchayat member from the tribal community by the party. In that year, he got AG membership in the party and was also elected as panchayat member for two consecutive terms. He used to cultivate 2 acres of land as a sharecropper, out of which he had grown potato in 0.66 acre of land in the year 2005. He resided with his wife in a house that had two rooms made of mud walls with the roof covered by tin. About Pakhi Murmu, he said, He was the first panchayat member of the village. But he could not complete the full term as he was in trouble due to pilferage of funds. He was caught red-handed. Then, Bidhanda asked me to contest the local panchayat seat on party’s behalf.

Both Suman Mukherjee and Pakhi Murmu, the erstwhile leaders of the CPI(M) party, were accused by the party of corruption in the panchayat activities. But Sanatan said, …previously, panchayat functioning was better as all were honest then. Now Khagen is a nice person, but not everything is running well. I represent the Village Development Committee. Panchayat schemes are generally discussed there. But often, we remained ignorant about some of the schemes. Earlier, the number of schemes was not many and all the party activists were aware of them. Discussions among us took place about who would be the beneficiaries of these schemes. Now such things are discussed but not everything is transparent. I got Rs 500 as old-age allowance for two months. Then nothing is coming and nobody knows why.

A contemporary of Pakhi, Sanatan could not remember exactly when he came close to the party:

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  115 I was in the party since the days of the United Front government. Pakhi and I worked together for the party. We led many struggles at those times and suffered a lot. Leaders used to come from outside. Now I have become too old to carry out the party responsibilities. I asked Bidhan Mandal to release me from the duties. He said that without me they couldn’t run the organization in the village. Hence, I have to continue with my responsibilities.

Further, he added, I have to attend the party meetings and rallies. Now, I cannot attend all. But I work hard to gather people to make party meetings and rallies successful. Apart from these, I have to collect donations for the party, for the Krishak Sabha, for DYFI [Democratic Youth Federation of India] and even for Mahila Samiti.

But why did he collect money even for the Mahila Samiti? His candid reply was, ‘Can they collect money on their own? They only attend meetings and rallies occasionally. So we have to look after their works as well.’ Women in the Santhal community were traditionally regarded as independent not only in economic spheres but also in all spheres of society and politics with their prominent roles in decision making (see Guha, 1983: 130).4 But the tribal women in contemporary period seemed to have been losing their previous roles in social organization. Sanatan Tudu’s forefathers hailed from Birbhum district. Long back, they had migrated to the tea gardens in north Bengal in search of work and then migrated to this place. At that time, the village was surrounded by jungle and the adivasi people were asked by the zamindars to clear the jungle and settle there. Sanatan used to cultivate the land of the erstwhile zamindar family of the village as a sharecropper. He was a registered bargadar. Once, the adivasis had led many struggles against this Kayastha family of Satya Kar. Sanatan said, ‘But we have not conducted any struggle in recent past. During the Left Front period, generally a day’s token strike was organized every year for wage hike and Rs 1–2 was increased per year.’ It transpires that Sanatan Tudu, being associated with the CPI(M) party, was not much enthusiastic about getting involved with the party affairs, and thought that the party leaders were not like earlier times; they had now become self-seeking people and reluctant to organize labour movements against the landed gentry with an aim of wage hike. On the other hand, the local party 4. Guha states that the tribal women play a prominent as well as an equal role both in hool and shikar. Hool means rebellion and shikar means hunting.

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committee required people like Sanatan Tudu, after Pakhi Murmu left the party, to represent tribal community both in the panchayat and the party. Chand Murmu, a VEC member and a panchayat member of Madhupur,5 might help us to discern to what extent the tribal people, in general, got representation in the political sphere of the village. Chand Murmu, a day labourer, said: I am not at ease in the panchayat office and other government offices as I am illiterate. I am in the VEC but don’t attend the meetings regularly. In fact, my presence is not at all necessary. They don’t need me. Only when they require my signature, they come to me.

Chand was only aware that some elderly persons in Adivasipara were entitled for old-age allowance. But he did not know, rather was reluctant to know, the amount of the allowance in a year they were entitled for. When questioned further, he got enraged and said, ‘We badly need electric connection in our hamlet. Despite our repeated request, the leaders did not pay heed to the issue. They don’t care what we say. They act according to their own wish.’ Haren Hembram was the tribal morhol (chief ) of Kalipur and his post was now largely ceremonial. He was an agricultural labourer and in dearth of work throughout the year. He had been associated with the party since its beginning in the village. But he said, After CPM came to power, Pakhi left the party weakening the party’s base in our community. We also became inactive to a great extent. Since then, those who were active in the Congress sneaked into the party. They have now become the leaders of the party. How could the party work for the masses? The old CPM has changed. It no more remains the same party as it was.

Haren then began recollecting the older days: After quitting CPM, Pakhi and Mukherjee [the erstwhile CPI(M) party leader of the village] set up contacts with the RSP party and brought the same to our village. We all joined the new party. The CPM doesn’t allow other parties to exist. So, it began to put down the new party. This led to severe conflicts and clashes in the village. Even tribal people of one para got divided and fought with 5. During my fieldwork, Madhupur was a separate gram sansad and had its own VEC, though Kalipur primary school was meant for both villages. But the meetings of two VECs were jointly convened. During the panchayat elections of 2008, the two villages of Kalipur and Madhupur were merged and formed into one gram sansad.

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  117 their brethren in another para. At the end, we found it useless to fight among ourselves. Moreover, we realized that we won’t be able to continue with the RSP party; so we left it. But we needed a party that could provide us some sort of support (Kintu party to ekta korte habe. Ekta abalamban tow darkar). Hence, we again came back to CPM. This party has done anyway a lot for us, for the poor.

Though he received some benefit from the panchayat as loan to purchase goats and cattle, he mentioned, ‘I don’t like any of the present leaders. I just attend some meetings of the party and nothing else. Moreover, neither do we have much time nor do we have enough education to be involved in party activities.’ The tribal people of the village had selected Haren as the chief or morhol. In earlier days, the morhol used to adjudicate in all squabbles and in social and religious matters of the tribal people. Particularly, in the matters of marriage, sraddha (last rite) and other festivals, morhols used to play a vital role. Still, the tribal people had their own morhols for each of their hamlets. What was their role in the present day? Haren replied, At present the morhol has no role as such in adjudicating the problems arising in the tribal society as the party has become all in all (sarbesarba). Even problems arising in the conjugal life are sometimes settled by the party. This leads to more problems very often as they don’t know or bother to follow the norms of the tribal community. But, in any case, we have to follow their decisions.

When the party’s adjudications were not in line with their community norms, what did they do? He replied, ‘We have no other way but to follow the rule of the present regime.’ It transpired that the tribal people of Kalipur had been trying hard to cope with the changing situations. The tribal community had been the main base of CPI(M) in its early days. The RSP, another constituent of the Left Front, also tried to establish itself in the area, drawing on the support of the same tribal group. But the attempt failed and instead, the people had to come back to the fold of CPI(M) once again. Since then, the people had been maintaining a dual relationship with the party with no other alternative available in the present scenario. While they were apparently associated with the party, they seemed to be also maintaining a distance from the present activities of the party. They adhered more to the past orientation of the party than to its present variant. They seemed to be aggrieved with the new leadership of the party. Culturally, they seemed to have been hinduized to a great extent by forgoing their traditional rituals and festivals and instead, adapting to Hindu rituals like the pujas.

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Muslim and its Leaders: The Margin on the Margin? Ahammad, a Muslim leader of the CPI(M) party in Kalipur, stated: ‘Since long I have been attached with the party, but my family condition remains almost the same.’ He did not continue his studies after Class VII due to his family’s economic distress. They were very poor earlier and even had to starve very often. Hence, he had to be engaged in agricultural works since his childhood. But Ahammad’s elder sister had passed Madhyamik by sheer hard work and efforts to cope with the unfavourable situation. In fact, Ahammad was a very sentimental guy. In his time, students had to pay monthly tuition fees in the school. The teachers very often expelled students from the classroom for their inability to pay the fees. Once, Ahammad’s father was unable to pay his tuition fees for a few months. Due to this, he stopped going to the school as he was apprehensive that the teachers might insult him. His family managed to buy 1 acre of land in the recent past. Earlier, his father was landless and used to look after the livestock of the zamindar family whose house was situated just beside theirs. They were altogether three sisters and five brothers. The brothers had been separated, but they did not divide the land among themselves6 as it would amount to small fragments. After jointly cultivating the land, they would divide the produce among themselves. All the brothers engaged in agricultural works in the field whenever necessary. They were involved in livestock rearing as well to supplement their livelihood. Ahammad said, We did not get any vest land. I had the responsibility on behalf of the party to distribute the vest land among the villagers. If I had taken my share at the first instance, people could have maligned me. Hence, I thought that I would take it later. But there was no scope of getting a piece of land at the end as no more land was left for distribution.

How does he feel to be a member of the CPI(M) party? He replied, There is a lot of work pressure on me. I have to attend to the tasks of a number of organizations functioning in the village, for example, DYFI, women’s organization, SHGs, party’s gram committee, branch committee. But what did I get after spending so much time for the party? Since long I have been attached with the party, but my family condition remains almost the same. Even our hamlet has not been electrified yet. 6. Daughter or sisters are customarily not entitled to get agricultural land in the region.

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Ahammad lamented, ‘We had applied for electrification around two years back and also submitted Rs 9,000 as quotation money. But we are in dark. The people of our hamlet want to get back their money, which they have submitted as quotation money.’ He added, ‘I informed both the panchayat and the party many times. Nobody could give any satisfactory answer. I cannot understand who is doing what.’ It seemed that his position in the party was as marginal as his community in the state.7 Though he had been placed in the lowest power echelon of the party as a party member, he did not seem to enjoy actual power. Also, it transpired from his narrative that, these days, rural people like him engage in politics in order to get something for their own or community’s interest. Interestingly, Muslimpara was situated at a distance from other hamlets in the village. At a glance, it appeared as a separate entity detached from the main part of the village. Ahammad’s brother, Mahammad, 38 years old, was a graduate from Dhaniakhali College. He used to give tuitions apart from looking after their joint family cultivation. As per his narration, this hamlet consisted of 38–40 households and almost half of these households were landless. Only one family had land above 20 acres, of which 2.8 acres had been vested. About four to five persons owned lands around 1 acre each. The vested land was distributed to the landless, each getting 0.083 acre. Mahammad said, ‘This para is inhabited by very poor people. But their condition has improved to some extent and they can manage now two square meals a day.’ Rajia Begam said: We are somehow managing our families. If we don’t toil, we won’t get food. We don’t have land. My husband sells muri. We could earn Rs 25 a day by boiling one bag, that is, 60 kg of paddy and drying the same. But such works are not available throughout the year. We also earn by frying muri. My daughters are studying in the madrasa, one in Class V and the other in VI. The son goes to Somaspur High School.

Why were the girls studying in the madrasa and the son in a general government-aided school? She replied, The girls would learn Arabic in the madrasa. They have to read Koran in future and Arabic is required to read Koran. Besides, they would get acquainted with Islamic manners in the madrasa. And the son has been admitted to the school so that he may try for a job in future. 7. See the report of the Sachar Committee in GoI (2006) and also Dasgupta (2009).

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Most of the children from the Muslimpara went to a primary school situated in the neighbouring village, which was very close to the hamlet. These Muslim families did not have much contact with other people of the twin villages of Kalipur–Madhupur. They used to visit Madhupur only for getting essentials from the ration shop located there. The economic condition of the landless who lived off agricultural labour seemed to be quite wretched. Some of them used to lease in small plots of land for cultivation of vegetables seasonally. The womenfolk did kam selai8 after completing their household chores. They could earn just Rs 35 per saree which generally required a week’s time for completion. Agricultural work was available for three months in a year. At other times, they sought to do different types of works. Livestock selling remained their supplementary source of income, particularly during the distress periods. Many of them used to migrate daily to different agriculturally prosperous areas, including Singur, for the job of agricultural labourer. They informed me that 14–15 youths from this hamlet had migrated outside in search of livelihood. They had mainly migrated to Mumbai, Gujarat and Punjab to work in jewellery shops and for embroidery works. Three boys had immigrated to Arab countries by utilizing their social networks. Rabiul was one of the youths who had migrated to Mumbai and had come back. Now he had settled, once again, in agricultural work. He was an apprentice for oneand-half years and did not receive any wage during this period. After learning the skill, he could earn a salary of Rs 2,000 per month. They had to work very hard throughout the day and that is why Rabiul had come back to the village. He said, ‘It is better to work as an agricultural labourer than to work there. We have at least peace of mind here.’ Rabiul regularly travelled to adjacent agriculturally prosperous areas to work as an agricultural labourer. He had to start at 3.30 a.m. and could come back only by 2.30 p.m. He said that those who had migrated to Arab countries were facing a more critical situation. They usually went there by paying a hefty sum to the agents who, very often, just embezzled the money. They usually paid Rs 35,000 per person to the agent for transporting them to the Arab countries. Such hefty amount of money was gathered either by selling land or by taking loan. But even after reaching there, they were not sure of getting jobs and often, they were forced to live in precarious conditions due to the lack of both money and job. 8. Kam selai is a local term that means stitching and embroidery works on sarees and other dress materials. A lot of women in this region, particularly the Muslim women, are involved in this job and thus supplement the earnings of their family. According to local people, this is an extremely poorly paid job.

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The Muslims in the village believed that people’s mindset had changed a lot. Nowadays, they would neither accept anything unquestioningly nor did they fear to explore new ways of living. The most important change had taken place in the social attitude of the people. Now everyone wanted to live holding their heads high. This had, of course, been achieved due to political developments facilitated by the Left Front regime in the state. In the past, politics had been confined to a very few. Now, people at large were taking interest in, and understanding, politics to a great extent. Did they receive any benefits from the panchayat? They said, ‘No. All the benefits are meant only for the people of the SC–ST communities. Government thinks that we are wealthy and hence need no benefits.’ Didn’t they think of demanding benefits from the government? ‘We are minorities. Who would listen to our demands? Most importantly, we don’t have enough time to mobilize people and organize movements. If we go for that, our families would starve.’ Almost all the inhabitants of Muslimpara concurred that the extent of hunger, poverty and distress which they had suffered earlier had lessened to a considerable extent. But that did not mean that their crisis was over and they were very happy with the turn of events. They informed me that though six people had got a bachelor degree in their para only one among them could manage a government job. Mahammad, a graduate, said, ‘Earlier I worked in a hardware shop in Dhaniakhali where I had to toil the whole day for a remuneration of Rs 800 per month. So I left the job and began tuitions in the area and helping my brothers in cultivation as well.’ He was very candid about his political participation: My elder brother has been active in politics since long. But he could not manage to get anything. I therefore thought that this was not the right way. Rajniti karar mato korte hobe, thik lineta dharte hobe. Ta na hole bagano jabena (We have to be involved in politics in a way so as to make proper connections. Otherwise nothing will materialize.). So, I have joined politics to cultivate some connections. I had known Ajit Patra, the MLA [Member of Legislative Assembly], since my college days. I have renewed that acquaintance with him and assured to work for him. He too has promised to help me once the election is over.

This was another instance of how the new generation was thinking about politics, or rather how politics was apparent to them. Ajit Patra was going to be the new incumbent in local power after being elected in the assembly elections. He would need new friends and allies in local politics. Mahammad seemed to have seized the opportunity to befriend the new MLA and get the

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best out of this network, which he termed as ‘opening up a line’. In organized politics, particularly in the political parties that were in power, this ‘line’ or connection proved to be a preferred medium to get the best of benefits. To the young generation, politics seemed to carry a new meaning, that is, a strategy for grabbing the best benefits in terms of personal gains through appropriate connections with the powerful. This was also a reflection of a give-and-take policy between the leaders who were at the power centres and the youths who sought to enter politics with the aim of gaining personal benefits. They found that without proper connection, it was hard to get jobs despite having educational qualifications. As a result, they became active in politics, sometimes even against their own conscience and in spite of their strong aversions to the present brand of politics. It was evident that Muslims in Kalipur en masse had been casting their votes for the left or the CPI(M) since long. They also thought that the economic distress they had suffered earlier had reduced now to some extent. But did this mean that they found themselves more empowered as compared to the past? The answer seemed to be in negative. They were much aggrieved as all the benefits were allegedly meant for people of the SC–ST communities. They aspired for governmental benefits and wanted to be recognized as a disadvantaged community. But who would pay heed to their demands? ‘We are minorities. Who would listen to our demands?’ This seems to be corresponding to the observation of Dasgupta (2009). Dasgupta (Ibid.: 96) noted: After six decades of independence, Muslims in West Bengal are beginning to find themselves on the margins. Although the question of affirmative action had come up on several occasions, nothing tangible has happened to address this and Muslims, by and large, remained outside the purview of reservation benefits.

Party and its Control The village primary school’s teacher-in-charge, Kalpana Das, was wife of the local CPI(M) leader, Nirmal Das, and belonged to one of the solvent Mahishya families in the village. She had once been elected to the seat of panchayat samiti on behalf of the CPI(M) party. Though she disliked party politics, she was practically forced to be a candidate in the panchayat elections. She said, ‘Apprehending trouble, I agreed.’ Kalpana described,

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  123 We were too poor previously, even had to starve day after day. We had only a portion of land that we used to cultivate. My husband then earned Rs 100 per month by maintaining accounts in a potato trader’s house. I did not get the job (in school) till then. I used to work hard throughout the day in our own agricultural land. My husband was just a supporter of the CPI(M) at that time. After I got the job, we could rebuild our house with concrete structure. But the neighbouring Kole family began to create trouble over land measurement. They are the traditional supporters of the Congress party. So my husband sought the support of the CPI(M) who helped us finish the construction of the house. Then onwards, my husband had to play an active part in the CPI(M) party, even though he is not so willing to do so. After I became the panchayat samiti member, he had to become more active as I was not fit to do official works of the panchayat. Since then, my husband has turned into a CPI(M) activist. The party utilizes him.

Villagers complained that Nirmal Das, Kalpana’s husband, had managed a job of an ICDS worker for his daughter by utilizing the party networks. Likewise, his son had got a job in a higher secondary school. Hence, they had recovered from the wretched conditions which they had suffered earlier. It seems to be a valid instance of how the local party could extend its network or power base through the settlement of family-level land disputes and arranging jobs for their supporters. Naru Chatterjee, the local party leader, had been running a ration shop as long as he had been associated with the CPI(M) party since 1982. A Brahmin by caste and owner of 6 acres of land, he was the secretary of the VDC, and also a member of the party branch committee. He was quite reluctant to talk about the party’s ideology, strategy and policies. There was a lot of confusion among villagers about who was a more powerful leader in the twin villages, Naru Chatterjee or Monoj Dutta? Very few considered Khagen Malik as a leader of the same stature. It became clear later that Naru Chatterjee was more powerful among the two. Monoj Dutta was a newcomer as compared to the other party leaders of the village. He always talked about development or developmental schemes. Monoj Dutta, owner of 1.25 acres of land, said: I am the block secretary of the DYFI.9 Though I am above 40, I am still kept as a member of it. There has been substantial progress made in villages as compared to the situation in the past. Many SHGs are functioning in the village. Their members are getting good benefits from these groups, for example, receiving loans in their distress, opening small businesses, etc. I do look after these SHGs. 9. The DYFI is the youth wing of the CPI(M) party. Like other wings of the party, it has also its branches spread at the grassroots throughout the province.

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It appeared that the present party leaders of the CPI(M) were seldom concerned about the ideology of the party. They were rather more interested about influence, control and surely about ‘development’. Hence, there was seemingly a big gap in understanding between these two generations of local leadership. While the old pattern of leadership was concerned much about the party’s ideology and strategy, the new leadership didn’t bother about it. The new local leadership seemed to be only interested in benefit distribution and day-to-day politics of dispute settlement. Did Bidhan Mandal, the main leader of the CPI(M) party in Dhaniakhali block, bother about the ideology of the party? Bidhan Mandal had been associated with the party since the 1960s. He was a role model, a source of inspiration to many party activists. In the party circle, there were many stories circulating about him and party activists used these stories for setting examples to others. Everyone in the party seemed to be busy to prove his/her closeness to the leader. Bidhan Mandal had been working as a teacher in a primary school. He owned a few acres of land, but the exact amount of land could not be ascertained. He had served as pradhan in this panchayat for two consecutive terms since 1978. After that, he had also been a karmadhaksha in the panchayat samiti. I talked with him in the panchayat office. When I reached the panchayat office in the afternoon, it was still crowded as the preparation for voter photo identity cards was going on. In the main office of the panchayat, Bidhan Mandal was seated on a chair as the central figure directing others to get the job done. Most of the party activists from the surrounding villages present there were seriously engaged in their work. The scenario in the panchayat office seemed to have turned on its head. The panchayat pradhan, Khagen Malik, was sitting aimlessly on a chair, as he apparently had no function to perform in this affair. Everything was guided by Bidhan Mandal as if the panchayat office had turned into the local party office. On the previous day, the same people were seen to be in similar roles in the CPI(M) party office. Bidhan Mandal seemed to be very proud of the development works done so far in the local panchayat area under his ostensible guidance. He presented a list of the development works undertaken so far. He claimed that this local panchayat had been adjudged the best performer among all the panchayats in the block in terms of rural development. He said: Before 1978, there was not even a moram road in villages under this panchayat. There was no link road among the villages and no road connecting the village

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  125 with even the panchayat office and the ganja.10 Villages existed like islands. After coming to power in the panchayat, we first planned to construct roads under the Food for Work scheme. We solved two problems in one stroke. On the one hand, the poor people got employment, and on the other, all the villages were connected with roads. The cultivators now got an easy access to the ganja and other markets for selling their products. At the same time, a large number of field channels were constructed linking the fields with Kananadi main canal to facilitate irrigation in the surrounding lands. Though Kananadi main canal was built up in the early 1960s, it could only irrigate a very small amount of land. A vast area of the region was kept outside the command area of the Kananadi main canal, as the connecting field channels were not built. The tanks, which were significant for irrigation in the surrounding villages, got renovated under the Food for Work scheme. All these activities resulted in a substantial growth in agricultural production. The cultivation of vegetables also increased rapidly in the region. The local panchayat started to give assistance to the peasants by supplying fertilizers free of cost. Peasants learned many things through this process and began to be acquainted with new technologies.

Bidhan Mandal added, We have been trying through the VEC to ensure enrolment of all the children of the village. We will be able to solve the problem of drop out very soon, if the parents could be made more conscious. We are the pioneers in Dhaniakhali block to introduce mid-day meals in primary schools, immediately after government order was received by us.

Notably, he always referred to the activities of the panchayat as ‘ours’. Undoubtedly, the terms ‘our’ or ‘we’ used by him were intended to mean the activities of the party. Though he held no position presently in the threetier panchayat system, his role in running the system seemed more than obvious. Hence, as the panchayat had been functioning under the guidance and control of the party, its achievements were unhesitatingly claimed as the party’s achievements, as if these were the party’s service to the people. During our discussion, he was never oblivious of his duty as a party leader. He stated that there had almost been no existence of any opposition party in this region. They usually surface and become active during the election times and try to assert their presence. Just after the elections are over, they become quiet. I have very 10. The marketplace in the rural area is commonly called ganja. Recently, it is also being called a bazaar. In general, one ganja covers 11–12 villages.

126  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a good relations with them. I listen sympathetically to their problems and opinions with the aim to win them over.

Mandal’s narrative clearly revealed how a kind of intricate power network has been constructed surrounding the lives of rural people. It was also evident that the party in power could successfully manage to keep this area almost free from any opposition by following some meticulously thought-out methods. One of the methods pursued here to keep the opposition in check was cajoling of an opposition member in her/his distress (the distress was caused by the ruling party supporters and ostensibly, with the consent of the party leader) and winning her/him over through continuous persuasions. Bidhan Mandal was very formal in making his statements. He never mentioned any person’s name in the whole discussion. Probably, he was habituated in making such types of statements that closely toe the strategy of the party. In any communist party, it seems that always the party is to be regarded as supreme to the relative neglect of individuals. Since the 1960s, he had been with the CPI(M) party, when the exhortation of the party was class struggle. Mandal was then a young cadre. Now, he never mentioned anything about struggle or class struggle. He wanted to show always that his present concerns were solely about the implementation of various developmental schemes of the panchayat. He tried to illustrate the extent of development that his panchayat had done so far. It seemed from his deliberations that his party had no programme other than the implementation of these governmental schemes. Surprisingly, Mandal didn’t ever mention the term ‘class struggle’ in his long presentation of political history of the local area. Rather, his presentation was a story of development. At least the case of Bidhan Mandal differed with the observation of Williams. Williams (2001: 609) observed in his study, ‘West Bengal’s political history as presented by the CPI(M), both in official documents and in the recollections of party activists, is a story of class struggle’. Mandal had been an ardent witness of the long journey of the party when its rhetoric changed from class struggle to development works. When enquired about this shift, he argued that his party had never left the agenda of class struggle, but being a pragmatic party, it had to be realistic as well.

Party and its Factions But Santanu Santra, the estranged leader of the CPI(M) party, identified the cause behind the shift of the party’s ideological thrust. He said,

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In fact, the process of degeneration had started since 1990s when neo-liberal economic reforms have started. It seems the degeneration is also quite natural for a party continuing its rule in the government for a long time. One can participate in the Parliament as a strategy, but once a party gets entrenched in power, it can hardly live without it. Power is such a thing.

He continued, By utilizing the administration, the party could strengthen its organization. The three-tier panchayat system is a useful technology for the party. In fact, they tried to retain their power by the unscrupulous exercise of the same. My differences with the party cropped up from my opposition to such activities. Ultimately, I had to quit the party.

Santanu Santra, a 50 year old teacher of a nearby high school, had been an active organizer of the CPI(M) party in the area since the early years of the Left Front rule. He observed, When I was a karmadakhsa (of education) in the panchayat samiti, I tried to find out the actual barriers to development. I could realize that if the people for whom the development was meant didn’t feel interested, nobody could do anything for them. The party’s ideology is important in this regard. But the motive of the party has completely changed. The party has, of late, turned into a give-and-take organization.

He added, Even in 1990s we got lot of successes in the literacy campaign. The campaign activists were not even paid any allowance or remuneration. They had an ideology that had inspired them in selfless works. But the activists at present working in the Prabahaman Sikhsa Kendra11 are getting remuneration. In spite of that, the programme could achieve little.

He opined that without an alternative party, an established power could not be challenged. The ruling party always kept a vigil on Santanu Santra. They would not allow him to organize an alternative party. Some activists and leaders of the village who had left the party earlier and tried to organize 11. Prabahaman Sikhsa Kendra is a central government scheme under which the illiterate adults of every village are supposed to be included for literacy programme. The workers or the teachers of this centre get a small amount of remuneration.

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people into other parties had to face the ire of the party in power. They were threatened and even beaten up for joining or propagating for another party. It seemed an irony that being at the helm of the party affairs in the village in those times, Santanu himself might have been involved in the thrashing of those people. Finally, he himself had become a victim of the same strategy that had been practised by him for long. This seems to be an inherent paradox of power. Interestingly, Santanu, along with some other old-fashioned party leaders, were now unable to cope with the new style of leadership practised these days in the rural areas. Suman Mukherjee, another erstwhile leader of the party, had become antiCPI(M) and had suffered a lot for his opposition to the party. He was a retired primary schoolteacher. He used to cultivate 1 acre of land by employing labourers. He said, Still we didn’t get electric line. They didn’t even maintain properly the portion of the road which has passed beside our house. In fact, they want to punish us in all possible ways. My son even lost his occupation as a shopkeeper due to his association with the opposition party.

Suman Mukherjee was associated with the CPI(M) since its formation in 1964. He was one of the senior-most activists of the CPI(M) in this region. He recalled the past, I had built the party organization in this region. I was a member of the panchayat even before the advent of the Left Front rule. At that time, such welfare schemes were not implemented through the panchayat. So the panchayat didn’t have enough funds to get even its members interested. Since 1978, as the government started to implement many schemes for the welfare of the poor through the panchayats, a lot of tension and tussle began to appear over utilization of funds. After a long struggle over such practices, finally I left the party in 1990.

Suman added, In fact, the disagreement with them over various issues began to crop up since the very ascendancy of the party to power. My point was that after coming to power how could we indulge in the same corrupt practices that we had fought against earlier?

He had been instrumental in organizing first the RSP and then the TMC party in the village after his disassociation with the CPI(M) party. Pakhi

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Murmu was with Mukherjee in organizing the RSP and rallied the tribal people behind the party. But when Mukherjee shifted his allegiance to the newly formed TMC party after 1998, Pakhi, despite all his reluctance, went back to the CPI(M) party for his own and community’s interest. He seemed to be quite reluctant to join any party of Congress background as the Congress party, to Pakhi, had always been identified with the landed gentry during the pre-1977 period.

Women and the Party Pritilata Malik was seen participating in some of the programmes of the CPI(M) party and its women’s wing. Pritilata, a kin of the present pradhan, Khagen Malik, was also active in organizing the SHGs. Her husband was a vegetable vendor and also worked as a casual labourer in the local cold storage for four–five months a year in its season. They had two sons; one was studying in Class IV and the smaller one went to anganwadi centre. The roof of their small muddy house had been newly covered by tiles. Pritilata informed that they managed to renovate their small house by mortgaging all the belongings they had. She said, We have no land. This year we had grown potato by leasing in 0.1 acre of land. We have some hens and geese which are a constant source of eggs. Very recently, I have bought a cow with the loan I got from the bank as an SHG member. I have got Rs 2,000 as loan like other SHG members.

Most of the women of Malikpara have joined the SHGs. Even a few women of Kolepara had become the members of the SHGs. Pritilata complained, ‘Khagen Malik’s wife is not involved in SHGs. In fact, they don’t have the necessity to be involved in it. Their situation is completely different than ours.’ I could guess from her words that the status of Khagen’s wife had changed. She seemed to have been alienated from the other womenfolk of Malikpara. It also seemed that Khagen Malik’s family had been undergoing a process of somewhat upward mobility, albeit limited. Pritilata held: To be a group member, everybody has to tolerate a lot of unpleasant things. SHG members have to participate in a lot of (party) meetings. Many of our members feel annoyed and most of them avoid attending such meetings. On many occa-

130  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a sions, I am the only SHG member who participates in the meeting. But I could not participate in the Chinsura meeting held yesterday as my shoes were torn. I failed to attend even the VEC meeting held three days back at the local committee office of the party12 due to the same reason.

How was it that the VEC meeting is being held at the party office? She clarified, ‘All the important meetings are usually held at the party office. The leaders attend those meetings (netara thake to).’ The question was whether Pritilata felt interested to participate in the VEC meeting. She explained with quite indifference, Because I have studied up to Class VII, I was chosen as a member of the VEC. In fact, I feel no interest to attend the VEC meetings. I am also a member of the party’s Mahila Samiti. Whenever they call me for a meeting, I have to go. Very often they told me to mobilize women for the meetings. Despite my best efforts, I could pursue only one or two women to accompany me.

But what did she generally do in the meetings of the Mahila Samiti? She replied quickly, ‘I do whatever they order us to do (ja bole tai kori). I do some petty works.’ She was referring to the leaders of the party as ‘they’ whom she had to oblige even while attending the meetings of the women organization of the party. She continued, They first asked me to form a group for SHG. Initially I tried a lot but nobody was interested to form a group. Afterwards we, seven women, succeeded to form a group. I had attended two training courses meant for the SHG members held at one town in Hooghly district. I enjoyed a lot while participating in these training programmes held in towns. I feel interested to visit outside world. I had spent my childhood in a small town. My father and other relatives were either rickshaw pullers or van pullers.

Pritilata, a Class VII educated woman, appeared as an organizer who tried to inspire the women belonging to the SC and ST community to get together in SHGs, and also to participate in various programmes of the party and be benefited through them. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes not. The party utilized her ability to mobilize the women of these so-called backward social groups in order to fulfil its own agenda. With the help of her, 12. The local committee office of the party is situated at a distance of 7 km from the village where the panchayat office is located.

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the party wanted to reach broad sections of womenfolk of the SC and ST communities who constituted as its major vote bank. But the womenfolk seemed seldom interested to be mobilized in the party programmes, though a section of them had organized themselves into SHGs. Even Pritilata, whom the party selected as women’s ‘representative’ in different types of committees functioning in the village, did not feel much interested to participate in them. Both the VEC and/or the Mahila Samiti to which Pritilata had been attached cannot probably provide her a space of her own. She did not seem to think of them as parts of her own organization. The leaders of the party were still mentioned by her as ‘they’ or ‘theirs’. In fact, these spaces in which Pritilata used to participate as SC woman were actually dominated by the party, or per se, by the traditional dominant social groups. Hence, she seemed to remain an ‘outsider’ vis-à-vis these institutions, though she felt somewhat interested in remaining attached with them for her own personal and community interests. But Krishna, the village anganwadi (ICDS) worker and the daughter of Kalpana Das, the teacher-in-charge of the local primary school, was very gender conscious. She believed that women themselves had to solve their own problems. She had passed higher secondary and discontinued the BA course midway. She had to attend to the ICDS centre in the morning, visit the households in the village and maintain a number of registers. While the ICDS workers had to perform a number of tasks, they only got a salary of Rs 1,400 per month.13 Apart from these, they had to attend the VEC meetings and send reports to the block office. Krishna said, Besides all these official responsibilities, we have to join the Mahila Samiti of the party and work in support of the party. We have to take part in the meetings and rallies of the party and work as volunteers of the party during the elections. Whether we want or not, we can’t avoid doing these works. Though we are not compelled, but we can’t oppose or refuse them.

Krishna remained busy with the centre’s work almost throughout the day. She said, Mostly the children from SC–ST families attend our centre. Some mothers are still not conscious enough to send their children regularly to the centre. For treatment of petty illness also people come to me and I try to serve them by giving 13. Recently, in 2009, the government announced that the salary of the ICDS workers will be increased by around Rs 500.

132  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a medicines that are available. Mainly, the mothers visit our centre during their pregnancy or to get advice about birth control.

She, aged around 30, continued, Since my childhood I have been observing that the rural women have to work like slaves and to serve the husbands and all other members of the family. The family members try to impose all kinds of restrictions, rules and regulations on the female spouse. In the course of my job, I come close to the village women and have to listen to their problems and sufferings regularly. They receive no regard from others and only experience agony. Some among them who protest against these injustices are identified as bad housewives. Most of them silently endure this situation.

‘Some of us do not want to marry and remain independent. But to live alone, we have to earn more.’ Did she discuss these problems in the Mahila Samiti? She replied with a smile, ‘We can’t imagine discussing these things there. They only discuss how to bring women within the fold of the organization. Why should we support the organization and the like? Women have to realize their own problems and move independently with confidence.’ From the conversation with Krishna, it transpired that a kind of feminist consciousness has risen among these young women working as ICDS workers. Education and employment, though with a very low salary, seemed to have made the difference between them and the other village women. Remaining far from the urban life and feminist literature, these rural women were exploring ways of women’s emancipation on their own. Interestingly, the Mahila Samiti and the party they were nudged to be associated with did not provide them any way out from the problems the rural women were facing. The Mahila Samiti even did not provide a platform to discuss about these women’s problems that Krishna was referring to.

Educated Youths, Youth Association and its Leaders The youth of the hamlets of Mahishyas and Kayasthas, in general, extended their strategic support to the ruling party in the hope of fulfilling their family interests. They all belonged to traditionally rich families, known to others as Congress party supporters. Most of them had two-storied brick houses. They had studied in different grades from the secondary to the university level. All

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of them were complaining about the wretched condition of the main village road, which they had to use daily. Despite their repeated complaints in the gram sansad meetings, no positive result had ensued till now. Surprisingly, Kolepara was electrified some four to five years ago, whereas other parts of the village got electric lines 15 years back. Why did they receive electricity so late? Was there any political reason? They clarified, ‘Yes, there is a lot of politics behind it. As we are not supporters of the CPI(M) party, we were deliberately denied electricity.’ But, how could they manage to get it finally? Did they, of late, turn into CPI(M) supporters? They laughed, ‘Maybe, we have become CPI(M) supporters.’ It was evident from this fact that even the non-CPI(M) people among the upper castes were involved in strategic politics. It seemed they had been, of late, participating in the CPI(M)-led activities to such an extent that they could also be deemed ‘eligible’ to get not only a part of the fruits of development works but also to get the essential amenities which they are entitled for. Saikat, the son of Swapan Mitra, a Kayastha and Congress party supporter, was a graduate from Dhaniakhali College. He used to work as a cultivator mainly in the peak season and was a popular private tutor. Saikat was not involved with any political party though he used to speak like a leader. In fact, he had been the secretary of the village youth club, which consisted of 55–60 members, principally from SC–ST communities. Saikat narrated the objective and activities of their youth club which had probably been the only forum outside the party influence in the village: We are trying to do some social work in the village through the club with a new mission. Our main objective is to do something for the well-being of the society. If anybody in distress approaches us, we try to solve her/his problem immediately by collecting donations from the villagers. I have been the secretary of the club for more than two years. We, the club members, were engaged in re-excavation of tanks to earn money through collective labour and then spent that money to build a concrete structure for the club. To get the membership in our club one has to fulfil two conditions. The first condition is that s/he must not be a member of any political party. That means no activists of any party would be allowed to be a member of the club. The second condition is that one can’t be involved in political activities or debates inside the club premises. With these rules, the club is running well now. The CPI(M) party had tried to interfere and penetrate into this club. Fortunately, the club members resisted them.

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It was quite remarkable that these young organizers of the club had officially made certain rules to debar party politics from the club premises at a time when party interference seemed to be all-pervasive in the social life of the village in West Bengal. Asked whether the political parties had any relevance for the benefit of the village society, one member replied, ‘political parties are necessary for the society. Many things can be done with the help of these political parties.’ Subsequently, a debate ensued among the club members in support of and against the utility of party politics in village life. Most of them stated that party politics had vitiated social life, divided the village society and done more harm to the people than good. One member said: Previously people used to join politics as a means to protest against injustices. But now the wrongdoers are flocking together in the parties. For instance, the people are quite aggrieved with the local ration dealer, but none can do anything against him as he has been associated with the CPI(M) party. He doesn’t supply food materials according to quota or display the prices of rationed materials as per rule. He supplies whatever amount he likes to give and charges whatever prices he wishes. The rice and wheat meant for public distribution is often diverted to the black market. If anyone protests against these irregularities, the dealer-cumCPI(M) leader threatens her on the contrary.

Importantly, long before the mass protest had taken place against the ration dealers in some districts of the state in 2008, the peasants of Kalipur expressed their grievances against the corrupt ration dealer who was also one of the main party leaders in the village. When Bhattacharyya and Rana (2008: 68) claimed that people in all villages they visited got into action (the rural people’s protest against corruption in the public distribution system) in response to some verbal and non-verifiable news, the SC and ST people of Kalipur, in 2006, sought to organize themselves in protest against the corrupt ration dealer who sought protection from the CPI(M) party. Did they enjoy individual freedom like expression of opinions or joining a party of one’s own choice? Almost all the youths voiced the same opinion: We don’t have any freedom to speak our mind or tell the truth. Always we live in a state of terror. Leave alone joining a party of our own choice, we don’t enjoy any individual freedom at all. More jeno benche achhi, e ek sanghatik abastha (We are passing through a terrible time when life has lost all its meaning).

They said, ‘A change in this situation can only be brought about if everyone in the village rises up in protest.’ Could this ‘social’ forum stand up to ques-

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tion these types of corruption? After my fieldwork was over, it was heard that this club became a decisive factor in settling a dispute over the selection of candidates in the last panchayat election in 2008 that had resulted in factional politics inside the CPI(M) party.

A New Style of Leadership? Villagers usually came to Monoj Dutta, the village party leader, for solving their own problems. Very often, they came with land or property-related disputes. Monoj Dutta seemed to be a leader of a new kind. Because, as the scholar argues, ‘instead of using access to land as a means for patronage, as the earlier type of leader did, the new type of leader strove to harness various state-distributed resources for patronage’ (Alm, 2010: 5). He used to mediate in disputes and propose terms of agreement between the contending sides by using the political party as reference for local leadership. Other party activists were often present during these conflict-resolution exercises. He lived in a newly built brick house with two rooms. When I visited Monoj, he seemed busy discussing the accounts pertaining to the mini-pump sets of Manabendra Pal. Manabendra Pal was the elder son of Khetra Pal, the biggest landowner (30 acres) and the most prosperous farmer in these twin villages. They had grown potato in 8.8 acres of land. They had installed three mini-deep tube wells for irrigating a large tract of land (their own and others’ land where they sold water) and owned a potato storage centre in the nearest market. In fact, Monoj was bargaining with Manabendra over the charges for water taken by the former from the mini-pump set owned by the latter. Simultaneously, negotiations on the donation to the party fund to be paid by Manabendra were also on the agenda. Monoj said, ‘I am asking only a total sum of Rs 1,500 as donation to the party fund for the three mini-pumps sets, that is, Rs 500 per mini. But you are refusing to pay this minimum amount.’ It seemed that Monoj consciously conflated the two negotiations: one over the fixation of water rate to be paid by him; and the other of party donation to be paid by Manabendra so that his payable irrigation charges could be minimized. It was an example of how a local leader of the CPI(M) party enjoyed privileges by using his organizational power. Monoj Dutta’s ‘desire to make a personal profit was evident’ (Ibid.: 14). He could extract favour from the most substantial landowner of the village utilizing his position in the local party. On the other hand, the big landowner, the kulak of the village, seemed to be quite

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interested in establishing a rapport with the local party leaders, obviously for his own interest, and was ready to give the party leaders various types of favours and facilities. It transpired from their discussions that Manabendra had a close link with Bidhan Mandal as well, and he used that link conveniently in his dealings with the local leaders. In other words, it could be argued that though there were tall claims of class struggle and revolution in the theoretical parlance of the CPI(M) party, in practice, there was predominance of class compromise, maintenance of status quo and ‘politics of middleness’ as coined by Bhattacharyya (1999).14 Just after Manabendra’s departure, two people from the Agro Fertilizer Company came to meet Monoj Dutta. The company had been manufacturing organic manures since 1989 in Chandannagar, Hooghly, and marketing the products throughout Hooghly district through local cooperative societies. Being a member of the cooperative, Monoj had been selling the organic manure in the village. It seemed that the representatives of the company had been trying to expand their market by using the party network, and the party personnel was also trying to utilize these types of connection in the interest of the village as well as his own. In this place, the leader of the party was availing the opportunity of using his social networks and political power for opening his own businesses. It was evident that different interest groups were operating to create and utilize their links with different party functionaries for their own advantages, and the party functionaries, on the other hand, sought to maximize these networks in their own interest. This style of give-and-take business was obviously generating tussle among the party activists over their respective shares.

Caste, Class and the Party The CPI(M) party had three party members in Madhupur, namely, Monoj Datta, Naru Chatterjee and Bishu Majhi, while in Kalipur village, it had four party members, namely, Khagen Malik, Sanatan Tudu, Ahammad and 14. The following is stated in the Programme of the CPI(M) party (updated in 2000): The nature of our revolution in the present stage of its development is essentially anti-feudal, antiimperialist, anti-monopoly and democratic. The stage of our revolution also determines the role of the different classes in the struggle to achieve it. In the present era, the proletariat will have to lead the democratic revolution as a necessary step in its forward march to the achievement of socialism. It is not the old type of bourgeois democratic revolution, but a new type of people’s democratic revolution organised and led by the working class.

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Nirmal Das. Among the party members of these two villages, one belonged to ST community, two to SC, one to minority and three to GCs. Interestingly, the two leaders of GC background hailing from Madhupur controlled the politics of both the villages. But why were these higher-caste party members regarded as the actual leaders of the party when they did not have much power to mobilize people? In fact, leaders like Khagen Malik and Pakhi Murmu had more mobilizing capacity than the higher-caste party leaders and were also regarded by the respective communities as their own leaders. Khagen was the party member while Pakhi was obviously not because of his critical attitude towards the party. Among the ST people, Sanatan Tudu was probably given party membership to formally represent the ST people inside the party. It was evident that though the SC–ST communities formed the main support base for the CPI(M) party in these villages, their community leaders were not recognized by the party as the leaders of the village. In Madhupur village also, the SC party member, Bishu Majhi, was quite ineffective, but was kept as party member probably to satisfy the SC communities. The Muslim party member, Ahammad, might be regarded as a community leader, but not the village party leader. Apparently, the party leadership in the village had representations from different social groups, but the real leadership seemed to have been concentrated in people according to the traditional social order based on caste and religion where the upper-caste people played the leadership role over the lower castes, tribal groups and minorities. When almost none from the SC and ST community had been elevated to the leadership position of the party, Ganesh Majhi, had become the secretary of the branch committee of the CPI(M) party in 2003. Being a member of the Majhi community (SC), he had also been a leader of the teachers’ union affiliated to the party, namely, ABPTA since 1970s. Ganesh Majhi was a retired head teacher of a primary school. He used to cultivate 2.8 acres of land. Economically, he was quite solvent in comparison with other members of his community. He said candidly, ‘Though I am the secretary of the branch committee, I don’t know anything. They have persuaded me to be in this position. They manage all the activities. I remain in the party as a dummy. I want to relinquish the membership to the party.’ Why was Ganesh selected as the secretary of the branch committee of the party? Among several reasons, one reason, cited by Bhattacharyya (2001), might be applicable here. He argued,

138  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a By virtue of being located at the interstices of the village community, they (the school teachers) could communicate with all segments and act as repositories of trust and confidence. The CPI(M) saw good political sense in utilizing their special position for its own penetration particularly in the unorganized stretches of West Bengal’s political society. (Ibid.: 677)

The question was: how successfully could the present schoolteacher-turnedparty leader communicate with all segments of the society? Ganesh continued, There are 13 members in my branch committee, who hail from the surrounding four villages (Kalipur is one of them). Most of them belong to SC communities. But none of them seems to be competent enough. In fact, the educated new generation people are not at all interested to join the party.

When he was a teacher in a primary school in Bardhhaman, he was attracted by the activities of ABPTA. At that time, the teachers’ financial condition was very bad. The teachers’ monthly pay was as low as Rs 167 with no other benefits. ‘Hence,’ according to Ganesh, I took part in the activities of ABPTA since 1970s. Finally, our salary was increased by a few rupees. Afterwards, the Left Front came to power; our conditions improved a lot due to government intervention. I had been the president of the teachers’ union in the Dhaniakhali circle for a long time. I had served the local panchayat as pradhan for 10 years since 1988.

How could he manage all these responsibilities – in school, in association and in panchayat? He replied, After my school hours, I used to attend the panchayat office. Upon managing the panchayat works within a short time, I used to visit the party office. There I held discussions with the party leaders about all the problems I came across. They took the decisions and implemented the same. My job was to formally endorse their decisions and nothing else. So I did not have many problems in managing all the works.

Surprisingly, Ganesh Majhi had been made the branch committee secretary of the party though he was not involved in any organizational work of the party at the village level. A branch committee usually looks after the party and its frontal organizations in a number of villages. Though he didn’t oversee the party activities in the four villages under the ambit of this branch com-

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mittee, he was ostensibly ‘selected’ for the job to keep a balance between various interest groups working inside the party. This ‘selection’ might reflect the party’s strategy to accommodate educated SC persons in the party hierarchy, ostensibly to win the confidence of the lower-caste people who matter most in the electoral calculus. Timir Kole, belonging to SC community, had also reluctantly become a representative in the panchayat as a CPI(M) party candidate for the reserved seat for SC in 2003 panchayat elections. But now, he was emerging as a leader of the party. Timir was now the panchayat samiti member and the karmadhyakhsa in charge of small industry and electricity. He neither had any land for cultivation nor did he sharecrop in any. His father had worked as a Group D staff in the local gram panchayat office and now received pension after retirement. Timir, 32 years old, said that leaders like Naru Chatterjee knew everything. He, on the other hand, knew a little about the party. Timir was educated up to higher secondary level. After completing education, he used to visit the panchayat office very often as his father was an employee there. Subsequently, he became close to Bidhan and her wife, the then panchayat pradhan. At that time, the panchayat built up a concrete market complex in Kananadi. He was entrusted with the job of collecting weekly donations from the shopkeepers doing businesses there on behalf of the panchayat. He narrated: I was given a remuneration of Rs 500 per month for the job. One day, Bidhan asked me to come to the party office and suggested that I contest for the reserved seat of panchayat samiti on behalf of the party. I refused at first, saying I was not sure of managing such a big responsibility and suggested that the party should select some other candidate who would be more competent. But Bidhan persuaded me saying that I was the choice of the party. So I must contest the election. He also assured that he would help me in carrying out the official responsibilities. Finally, I agreed and won the seat. After the election was over, they made me one of the karmadhyakshas. Again, I declined to work with the big shots. Bidhan once again assured me that he would manage everything and I would have nothing to worry. I have now been somehow managing the show for the last three years. I have to visit the block office thrice a week and of course, attend to all the meetings held.

Timir’s narrative revealed the process of how an SC man was becoming a leader, both in the local government and the party. Importantly, he was reluctantly incorporated into this political system by some party leaders who urgently required such a person like him before the panchayat elections. After the introduction of the reservation policy in the three-tier PRIs, the political

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parties were always in search of such representatives of the SC and ST community who would contest the panchayat elections on behalf of their party. Timir subsequently attained some leadership skills though, initially, he joined these institutions only due to his personal allegiance to Bidhan Mandal, the local influential leader.

Landed Elite: Structure of Rural Power The rooms in the concrete one-storied house were spread forming a circle around a wide cemented courtyard. On one side, there was a big wooden gate while on the other there was wide paddy field. In the middle of the courtyard, a round shaped granary was being rebuilt. Manabendra, the elder son of Khetra Pal, was overseeing the work with the help of two labourers. Khetra Pal was the most prosperous farmer of the area. Some said he owned 30.8 acres of land; others said he owned 80 acres of land. He apparently ran moneylending business as well. During the last two years, he had installed three mini-deep tube wells for irrigating his own land as well as selling water to others. How could he achieve such a spectacular success in agriculture? Khetra Pal began to tell his success story: People say that I am a rich man having enormous property. Still, I work in the field at this age of 76. I have prospered through sheer hard labour and intelligence. My father had only 4.9 acres of land and we were two brothers. I could read up to VI class and then onwards had been involved in cultivation. I am able to do all types of works, including ploughing, with my strength and vitality. Now I have 30.8 acres of land. I have purchased even the barga lands. I asked them to sell such disputed lands to me and I would manage all problems. And I have managed of course.15 But the profit we had gathered from cultivation earlier declined substantially. During the period of Bidhan Roy, the second Chief Minister of West Bengal (1948–62), we got very remunerative prices of our crops, while in the Left Front regime, we are losing the most. The government is not doing anything for the farmers. We, the farmers here, are also not united. The Left Front won’t allow the farmers to be united. But in other states the farmers have become united, built up their own organization and compelled the government to take care of their demands. 15. Hence, purchasing barga land does not seem to be a secret deal to Khetra Pal. He openly purchases the barga land from the distressed bargadars. Presumably, the local party is extending their favour to him for practising this illegal act.

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He perhaps rightly assessed the agrarian scenario of West Bengal during the last three decades. Arun Kole, a member of Mahishya caste, believed that agriculture should be developed with utmost care. He said, ‘The government has to pay attention to the problems of the peasants and take steps accordingly. If the farmers resort to cultivation, then only the labourers will find work.’ It was well known that despite some initial growth that occurred in agriculture between 1983–84 and 1991–92, West Bengal witnessed a substantial slump in agricultural growth in the decade of the 1990s.16 But, to Khetra Pal, the question was not about the falling growth rate in agriculture. Rather, he was saying that the farmers were not getting profit from agriculture as was the case earlier. Was there any linkage between the reduction of profit and the market strategy of the government? Harriss-White (2008) offered a new explanation. She states, ‘but the key to making sense of the pattern is agricultural markets…. markets were crucial determinants of growth’ (Ibid.: 4). That is to say, the falling growth in agriculture as well as ‘the multidimensional agrarian poverty’ could be explained through the market strategy of the Left Front government. In fact, the state government had been reinforcing the old pattern of ‘commercial capitalism’ in agricultural market in West Bengal. While attacking the elite agricultural producers and redistributing resources to the agricultural poor, it was at the same time protecting the privileges of the agrocommercial elite, and actively penalizing the agro-commercial poor. Its interest in protecting the agro-commercial elite lay in keeping down the costs of state procurement and trading. (Ibid.: 2)

Harriss-White’s observation seemingly justified Khetra Pal’s allegation that the state government was not doing anything for the farmers. The farmers who were themselves hoarding the crops and trying to do petty business were seriously affected in recent times as they were not getting reasonable profit. But why didn’t they mobilize themselves politically against the dominant commercial capitalists? The answer to this question was presumably very complicated in nature. On the one hand, the petty enterprises did not have many options as the dominant capital was protected by the politicized arrangements of the state government. On the other hand, it was also true that the petty producers and the petty traders were themselves more or less entangled with 16. Between 1983–84 and 1991–92, the annual rate of growth increased to somewhere between 4.3 per cent and 6.9 per cent, but the annual growth rate was 2.4 per cent in the 1990s. See HarrissWhite (2008).

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some sort of political arrangements, principally with the ruling party, to solve their own livelihood problems.17 Khetra Pal continued: For long I have been trading fertilizers and pesticides from the block market to the villages. At the same time, I used to hoard paddy, rice, jute and potato and sell them seasonally. I have introduced power tiller, shallow tube wells and now minitube wells, all for the first time in the village. In 1971, I purchased the first power tiller at a cost of Rs 12,500. My elder son used to operate it. Subsequently, I sold out the same and purchased a new one costing Rs 30,000. This was replaced by a more expensive one at a cost of Rs 75,000. In 1975–76, I purchased the first pump set in the village. Recently, I have installed three mini-pumps spending Rs 0.45 million. I borrowed money to install the mini-pumps that had brought immense progress in agriculture of the village. Each mini-pump has a command area of 20–25 acres. Due to increased irrigation facilities, the labourers are getting more works in the fields nowadays. So, I have facilitated their opportunity of getting more works. The cost of cultivation has increased so much that farmers are not getting profits nowadays. The wages have increased a few times.

He recollected the problems of labourers he had been facing since the inception of Left Front rule. He said, I had faced a lot of problems on the issue of agricultural labourers. The party tried to harm me repeatedly. The labourers very often used to cease work and left the field demanding wage hikes. Being harassed repeatedly, I tried to continue cultivation works by hiring labourers from outside. But the party opposed the entry of labourers from outside and a lot of tussle took place between the party and me. I employ in each season around 8–10 labourers from outside. The outside labourers usually work hard and their wage is also lower than the wage of the labourers of my village. Actually, I am the only person in the village whom they allow to bring the labourers from outside.

He did not suppress his sense of achievement in managing the party against the interest of the local labourers. It was remarkable that Khetra Pal could manage to employ outside labourers when the agricultural labourers of the village suffered from acute shortage of work throughout the year. Presumably, he had been able to manage the 17. Potato trading in rural Bengal is a glaring instance in which major part of the trading is controlled politically, or rather illegally. Not only do the dominant non-farm capitalists get favours of this political arrangement of trading, the petty traders as well utilize the system as per their capabilities. The same is true in case of rice mills. See Chatterjee (2009) and Harriss-White (2008).

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party in this regard by his tricky manoeuvrings. On the other hand, it was also quite possible that the local labourers would feel disenchanted with the party. Hence, the question was how the local leadership of the party had been able to manage this conflict of interest between the agricultural labourers and the most prosperous farmer of the village? How could we explain then the changes that had occurred in the rural structure of political power? Earlier, around two decades ago, the rich farmers were believed to be one of the dominant classes in the structure of state power. Some scholars even tried to emphasize ‘the growing political clout of the rich farmers and agrarian capitalists within the dominant coalition’ (Chatterjee, 2008a: 56) of capitalists, rich farmers and bureaucracy (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987; Varshney, 1995).18 Kaviraj (1989), and also Chatterjee (1986; 1998), used the idea of ‘passive revolution’ and contended that ‘power had to be shared between the dominant classes because no one class had the ability to exercise hegemony on its own’ (Chatterjee, 2008a: 56). But how did Khetra Pal, being a rich farmer or agrarian capitalist, exercise his power in the village polity? Could he be recognized as a part of dominant classes who had been sharing power with other classes? It seemed to be hard to explain in a micro-level village study. But it was evident that he could well utilize the ruling party in his own business interests and was able to successfully mitigate the class contradictions between himself and the agricultural labourers in recent periods. Though he had no formal power as such in the structure of village polity, he could probably exercise some sort of influence on the subaltern classes through the party. But he was apparently helpless with regard to the unfriendly market principles operating in the rural areas. Farmers like him were unable to influence anybody in this sphere of agricultural market where the ‘agro-commercial elite’ were dominating the scene, as argued by Harriss-White (2008). Herein lies, it seems, another underlying power relations between farmers, particularly the rich farmers, and the non-farmer commercial capitalists.

The Bargadar, Party and the Landowner The bargadars had, once upon a time, become successful in registering their names as legitimate bargadars by organizing themselves under the leadership of the CPI(M) party. In recent times, there seemed to be a reversal of this 18. Chatterjee (2008a) discusses the transformed structures of political power in detail.

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trend as a result of which the landowners were getting back their land with the help of the same party. Santanu spoke about the status of bargadar in the village. He explained how the landowners or the landed people nowadays were getting back the land the bargadars had been sharecropping with the tacit support of the party. He narrated: The principal problem is that the bargadars fail to earn profit from cultivation. Two methods are generally functional here in the practice of sharecropping. One, the cost of cultivation will be shared 50:50 between the landowner and the bargadar and the produce will also be shared 50:50 between them. After harvesting the crop, the bargadar often finds that he cannot get any profit. Two, the entire cost of cultivation will be borne by the bargadar and he would give one-fourth of the produce as share to the landowner. In both ways, the bargadar is losing. In fact, the share he is paying to the landowner could have been his profit. So, the bargadar is very often keeping the land fallow. Subsequently, the landowner asks him to return the land in lieu of certain amount of money. The bargadar often agrees to this proposal, as the cash, whatever the amount is, seems attractive to him. In this way, the landowner is purchasing the bargadar’s share at a throwaway price.19 In most cases, the landowner doesn’t cultivate the land and instead sells it out to some other person. But such sale of barga land is illegal. Some people who are purchasing it at comparatively low price are flocking behind the party and gratifying the party leaders such that they can keep the land in their possession.

He then described one such instance of land transfer. In one case, one party member of the CPI(M), who was also a panchayat member, had ‘sold’ out his share to the landowner Kar family. As the Kars didn’t cultivate land on their own, they then sold the same to Khetra Pal at a very cheap rate. To keep such land in his possession, Pal obliged the party. In this way, land was again being concentrated in the hands of a few people and they were becoming the patrons of the party. They were purchasing land and investing the surplus accrued from agriculture in different agriculture-related businesses. They were selling irrigation water by installing mini-deep tube wells, renting out tractors and power tillers, taking the dealership of fertilizers, hoarding and trading potato, etc. But other rural industries were not coming up due to the lack of market. Who would take the risk of investing in industries? There was a scheme in the panchayat to provide loans up to Rs 1.3 million to unemployed youths to set up 19. Usually, the bargadar’s right over the land is ‘purchased’ by the landowner by paying a lump-sum to the bargadar, taking advantage of his distress though such transactions are not tenable in law. The amount offered in such transaction has no market rate. Sometimes, 50 per cent of the market value of land is offered by the landowner. But in most of the cases, the transactions are made at throwaway prices.

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new industry, and also train them in this regard; but no one was coming forward to avail the same. Nobody wanted to take the risk.

The Party, Elections and Social Groups As the assembly election was approaching, the party activities were gaining momentum. In fact, in West Bengal, ‘the entire election campaign and its conduct is dominated by the activities of the Comrades and the party cadres’ (Banerjee, 2010: 22). She mentions, regarding political work of the ‘Comrades’ of the CPI(M) party, ‘the most visible evidence of the efficiency of this (party) machinery is available during elections, when voters are mobilized to turn up...’ (Banerjee, 2010: 22). Pakhi said, Yesterday, a women’s rally was held in Kananadi as a part of election campaign. Everyone in the party is quite apprehensive this time as the Election Commission is going to deploy a lot of police and military during the elections. To create confidence among the women, the rally has been organized.

Pakhi Murmu was still enthusiastic. It seemed he couldn’t think of a life without a party. He said, But I don’t know where to go. Those who had toiled to build up the party were left behind. On the contrary, those people who were against the party and against whom we led many movements had come in the forefront. Can this situation be accepted?

He commented, ‘These leaders can’t ever be reformed. I had realized their character in the beginning and so left the party to join the RSP. But the RSP party didn’t have leaders who could defend us.’ He was touring different hamlets of the village. He passed through the upper-caste hamlets first where some people spoke to him. Pakhi behaved like a political leader in interacting with the people, as if he had the responsibility to solve different problems of the people. The next day, an election rally of the CPI(M) party was scheduled to be held in Dhaniakhali which would be addressed by the tribal minister, Rupchand Murmu. Pakhi was responsible for sending people from the area. He went to a house of one old woman of Adivasipara and said, This elderly woman had once helped much to build up the CPI(M) organization in the village. The CPI(M) had quite a strong base in this area in those times. The

146  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a people here in general stood by the party in all the struggles. Particularly, these women were always ready to come forward for the party. In one call, 40–50 of them used to gather anytime.

What was the experience of the old woman, Sukhi Hembram? She said, We are with the CPI(M) as it has helped us in many ways. Previously, we were in a very bad situation when we had to starve for days together. As working hours were not fixed, we had to work all day long. In the evening only we could be free to prepare our meals and have food. Now, on the contrary, the party has fixed the working hours. We can now express our grievances to the babus. Previously, we didn’t have a hand pump in our hamlet. We had to collect water either from Kolepara or near the house of Naru Chatterjee. Now, we have a hand pump in our own area.

Pakhi then asked her to attend the rally at Dhaniakhali. Why should she attend? She replied, ‘When Pakhi has said, we have to go. Yesterday, I attended the procession at Kananadi.’ The elder son of Sukhi, Suresh Hembram, was a landless peasant, but used to lease in some land for cultivation. Suresh said, We have no other party but the CPM to side with as this party has helped us to speak our minds. Because of it, we could understand what was right and what was wrong and could gain a prestige in the society. But presently, we are confused: against whom should we lead our movement? All have joined the CPM. Even Khetra Pal’s son has joined the CPM.

Padma Murmu had also been one of the political activists during the 1960s and the 1970s. Her family owned no land and almost all depended on agricultural labour for their survival. Only occasionally, they used to cultivate 0.01 acre of land in share. She complained at the first instance, We are not getting any benefit. After a long time, I got Rs 4,000 as an old-age allowance. In the entire Adivasipara, only one tube well exists. In spite of our repeated demand, they have not installed another tube well. Till now, I don’t have a ration card, leave alone the facilities of BPL.20 20. BPL or below the poverty line is an official notional line to measure the number of the people living in sheer poverty in order to target them for treatment with different poverty alleviation programmes, like providing them with cheaper food stuff through the public distribution system. Thus, the whole Indian population has, of late, been divided into the two economic categories: above the poverty line (APL) and BPL. In the process of enlisting BPL families, there have been complaints of several irregularities on account of which the really poor families are very often

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She is still with the CPI(M)! Padma said, ‘What else can we do? The CPI(M) is the only party that looks after our interest.’ She continued, Here there is no opposition. In 1998, they surfaced. The young boys of the Bag (Mahishya) families joined the opposition party and intimidated us before the elections. They threatened, saying that once they came to power, they would compel us to work at low wages. After we won the elections, we beat them up.

The tribal people in Kalipur were quite aggrieved over their deprivation from the governmental benefits that were principally distributed through the panchayat. It seemed that the benefit distribution pursued by the present regime was so meticulously done that it generated, among the tribal people, both the aspiration to get those benefits and a simultaneous sense of deprivation for not getting the same. But they did not have any alternative to the party in power as the opposition parties were apparently allied with the landed gentry. They feared that once the opposition came to power, they would presumably be subjected to far worse conditions. Malina, belonging to Brahmin caste, was trying to utilize the forthcoming elections for getting a job in the primary school through the party. She said, One day the local party leaders came to ask me to sit in the election booth on behalf of the party. But I won’t go on their request. I shall talk first with the leaders at the upper level. The people in this village are mostly engaged in the party activities for self-interest. I would also follow suit. I have to manage a job at any cost.

It seemed that a symbiotic relationship emerged between the local party and Malina. The symbiotic relationship was formed not on the basis of any political principles, but very much on the basis of personal (or organizational) interest. On the eve of elections, at the local market area, some villagers gathered and were talking with each other in a low voice as if all had become overcautious about the presence of armed forces in the village. The village primary school had been converted into the election booth. The area had been lighted up with high-power electric bulbs. The party leaders were seen moving around. Seeing Santra, Monoj Dutta came forward and said, ‘We have excluded from the welfare net and those with better economic condition are included.

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managed all the jawans except two. We can hopefully manage the rest. All the officers belong to Hooghly district. So everything will be alright.’ Monoj seemed quite confident in his dealing with the police forces. The Election Commission had declared this booth as one of the ‘sensitive booths’ in the state because of very low polling in favour of the opposition candidate in the last elections. Inside the booth, the presiding officer was busy sorting out papers along with four others. But no security staff were around. After introducing himself as a teacher, Santra told the officer not to hesitate to ask for any kind of help that they might require. Khagen Malik, though present there, seemed to be very happy with Santra talking with the officer, something he himself was not confident of doing. Dilip De, an elderly villager, commented, Everyone was content about the strict vigil of the Commission this time. But everything seems to be as it had been in earlier elections. It was announced that none would be allowed to enter within 200 yards of the booth. But what is it about that restriction? It seems nothing will change in this assembly election.

After the assembly elections were over, the villagers seemed to be in a relaxed mood as if a big village festival had just been completed. All were discussing about their experiences in the elections just held. Everybody seemingly tried to guess on the basis of their own perception who would win. Finally, the Left Front won the assembly elections in West Bengal for the seventh time consecutively. The election results show that the ruling Left Front has received more support in rural Bengal again than in urban areas. One of the main reasons seems that the distribution of benefits through panchayat is done so skilfully that it can mitigate the discontent generated among people to some extent, and at the same time, make the downtrodden dependent on the party to get those benefits. Another reason might be that the Left Front pursues a politics of exclusion by which it prevents the rise of any opposition to its supremacy at the grassroots level of the rural areas (Roy and Banerjee, 2006; Banerjee, 2008).

The Party, Leadership and its Future The local party office was positioned as a citadel of power in a prominent location of the ganja. The red flag was flying on its top. It was a huge, two-storied brick house and was very close to the panchayat office. The party office was

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bustling with activities in the evening as some people gathered there. I talked with Sunil Samanta, the local committee member of the CPI(M) party, who was in charge of Kalipur village. Sunil Samanta, around 60 years old, owned 0.75 acre of land and worked almost like a whole-timer for the party. He had to look after three branch committees of the party. Each branch committee generally had three to five party members from two to three adjacent villages. So, he had been in charge of the party in at least seven to eight villages. He was also elected as a panchayat member from one of them. He was in a frustrated mood nowadays and remarked, ‘at present, the party organization seems to have become fused with the panchayat administration and the comrades have developed bureaucratic attitudes as the party remains in power for long.’ Sunil also commented, Substantial improvements have taken place in the lives of the poor people. They used to starve before. After we came to power, the condition of the villages could be changed a lot by the implementation of various schemes through the panchayat. But the aim to elevate the SC–ST people to the leadership positions has remained far from actualization. Due to the reservation policy of the government, a few among these backward communities might have held some government jobs, but they could not become leaders in the society. There are two reasons behind this: one, their lack of formal education and two, their economic insolvency. As these poor landless people have to spend all their energies for earning a livelihood, how can they come up to share social responsibilities? As a result, those who are economically solvent are capturing the leadership positions in the party. These backward people and their social position remain more or less unchanged.

He was really frustrated and said, When we ascended to the power, our own government was formed. We thought we would utilize the government and its administration in the interests of the poor and the exploited, would enact laws in favour of the poor and at the same time, explain to the people the limitations of the parliament. These had been our understanding in 1977–78 and we propagated these things to the people as well. But now our main task has turned into safeguarding the government and keeping the administration in our control as if we want to stay in power at any cost.

Sunil candidly said that everybody categorized the Left Front government as the government of the poor and the downtrodden, but it was not. He mentioned one instance:

150  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a The government has recently made it compulsory to have a mutation certificate from the district office for someone who would like to convert agricultural land to some other use. The poor very often could not follow the rules and instead constructed house illegally on agricultural land with the help of the party.

This was a clear evidence of mutual dependence between the main ruling party, CPI(M), and a section of people in rural society. On the one hand, the CPI(M)-led Left Front government was trying to enforce certain regulations like compulsory mutation in order to bolster the flagging government coffers, and on the other hand, the same party or parties at the ground level were encouraging the poor villagers for non-payment of the same as ‘the law was too restrictive or too expensive’. Chatterjee (2009: 45) stated, ‘...we find that the law is either too restrictive or too cumbersome or too expensive to be acceptable and, therefore, it is the local political leadership, belonging to one or the other “party”, which steps in to regulate the transactions’. How can this ‘political management of illegalities’ be explained if not by the electoral gains the party might aim to reap from such steps? ‘What about the new generation? Are they interested in politics?’ Sunil Samanta replied, ‘The new generation remains almost completely aloof from party politics. They try to avoid politics and stay away from any principles. Those among them joining politics are busy with development, administrative works, etc.’ He also added, The women are very rarely coming up in the leadership position. The women of SC–ST families are to some extent participating in party programmes, but they are unable to join the ranks of the party. The women from middle-class families are not at all interested in party activities as they have nothing to gain by joining the party. The women from the toiling families have a give-and-take relationship with the party.

So, it seemed that the party had turned into a party based on the give-andtake policy. Sunil replied, …as such we haven’t led any movement in the recent past. The question is who will lead movements and against whom? There is no opposition party here to lead a movement. At the beginning of every season, we call one token labour strike with a demand for wage hike. Then we negotiate with the farmers and ask them to increase the wage rate by a rupee or two. The matter ends there. Now we discuss all these issues in the gram sansad meetings. Different problems are raised

Party and Politics at the Margin  |  151 there. We solve them on the basis of priority. Whatever vest land is still left to be distributed, there are court injunctions prohibiting distribution of the same. So no scope for further redistribution of land exists. The movement for wage hike can be directed towards the attainment of the minimum wage rate fixed by the central government.21 But that would be counterproductive as the farmers will stop cultivation in that case.22 There is preponderance of agricultural labourers here and many of them have to go outside in search of work. So their wage can’t be hiked beyond a limit. Now the wage rate is around Rs 50 per day [as in 2007]. In this situation, it is better to negotiate the wage with the farmers.

Sunil Samanta admitted that the party in its present incarnation lacked the ideology of struggle, and he was pained to see that the panchayat was sometimes functioning against the interest of the poor peasants. The shift of party’s ideology from struggle to reform had created some sort of frustration in him. Due to his affinity to the old ideology of the party, he was lamenting over the lack of participation of the SC–ST people from the poor and landless background in the party leadership. This concern was absent, particularly, among the party leaders of the next generation like Monoj Dutta. Rather this lack of ideology, which Sunil indicated, seemed to have benefited the new generation leaders in promoting their relationship with the landed gentry, the erstwhile opponent of the party, and enhancing their own interests at the cost of the so-called subaltern people.

Benefit Distribution, White-collar Jobs and Party Politics Though FB had no organization in the village, Subinoy, owner of 1.5 acre of land, continued to be known as the FB leader, notwithstanding his near total inactivity in local politics. The FB had been representing the local assembly seat since 1977 as a constituent of the Left Front. He said, Initially I was not involved in politics. My sister’s private tutor was associated with the FB. One day, he introduced me to the local MLA, Kripasindhu Saha, and I was very impressed by the personality of Saha. Subsequently, he found a job for me. I became an activist of the FB. 21. The minimum wage rate prescribed by the central government in West Bengal for the workers of agriculture category was Rs 74.53 in 2007. Available at www.labour.nic.in. 22. It is obviously illegal that the minimum wage rate fixed by the government is not being implemented in the village. But surprisingly, this illegality is smoothly managed by the party through consensual solutions between the agricultural labourers and the landowning people.

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Subinoy recollected his experiences, In the initial period, Nirmal, Khagen Malik, Monoj Dutta, Samar Chatterjee, all were with the FB. Now all of them have turned CPI(M). Samar Chatterjee did a mistake by quitting the party; otherwise he could also have managed a job in the assembly. As FB is a small party, the possibility to get a job through this party is much higher. Suppose three jobs are allotted for the FB and there are five eligible persons in the party. So, three would get the job and the rest two can be assured to be provided in the next turn. On the contrary, in CPI(M) party suppose there are 50 persons and the opportunity to provide jobs is only for 15. So what would happen? It will automatically lead to internal fighting and ultimately factionalism inside the party. I have arranged jobs for many persons in the village in the ICDS and in the primary schools. Previously, we had control over the recruitment in the primary schools. Be it in primary school or in ICDS, the ruling Front partners used to allot the jobs among themselves. Every party has its own quotas.

He continued, Nobody joins a party now without the assurance of getting a return. So people will naturally flock around the party which is able to provide more jobs, more benefits. Hence, a party’s power in rural areas depends on the number of panchayats it has under its control. And here lies the strength of the CPI(M) party. At the same time, this generates a lot of factionalism inside the party. Even the FB is not free of factionalism.

Subinoy concluded, All the CPI(M) leaders in the village are active in the party for their own interests. Naru Chatterjee is active in the party just to keep his ration dealership intact. He wants to cover up all his unscrupulous activities with the help of the party.

But were the leaders, belonging to other parties, free from similar allegations? According to his account, it became obvious that all the political parties operating in the region used to utilize their ‘quota’ or influence in various governmental institutions for distributing jobs or employments to lure the educated youths to their party. The rural youths also joined the political parties on the basis of their ‘calculation’ of whose association would benefit them the most. Hence, the ‘political management of illegal’ distribution of jobs constituted one key feature of present-day rural politics.

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Samar Chatterjee repented, ‘I was not able to find a job as I could not utilize the party connections properly.’ Being an upper-caste Brahmin, Samar Chatterjee, owner of 1.25 acres of agricultural land, was not involved in farming work directly, though his economic condition was not solvent. His wife was an ICDS worker. But he could not manage a job till date. Initially, he thought that utilizing some proper ‘source’ or connections would help him get a job. People advised him to try through party connections. He joined the FB party which was then active in this area. After 1977, he became a member of the party’s Dhaniakhali Thana Committee. Afterwards, he was disillusioned and became aloof from party politics for some time. Samar, recollecting his past, said: Being a resident of the village one can’t avoid the association of a party. So again, I became close to the CPI(M) party. My wife has got a job in the ICDS centre for which she has to keep contact with the party and the panchayat. In the year 1998, the party selected my wife for the panchayat seat of Madhupur and she won the elections. Since then my involvement in the party increased substantially.

He expressed, Sometimes I think that had I been involved in the CPI(M) party from the very beginning, I could have managed a job. Again, I think that possibly I could have managed the same, had I not at all been involved in any party. But, truly, without a party connection one can’t get a job. The party is all-powerful.

Though Naren Kole, a retired primary schoolteacher and owner of 12 acres of land, had been known to all as a Congress party supporter, he was asked by the CPI(M) party to be the Chairman of the Marketing Society. He reluctantly accepted the party’s offer. At the time of the fieldwork, Naren was the Chairman of Dhaniakhali Thana Cooperative Agricultural Marketing Society Limited (Marketing Society). He narrated: They asked me to become the Chairman of the Marketing Society. I was not ready to accept their proposal. But they insisted. I realized that I had no other option but to accept their proposal. Generally, the committee of the society is supposed to be formed through elections. But as the party selects the persons to be in the committee, elections are not required. Now I have been acting according to their instructions. Not only do I have to visit the party office regularly, I have to be involved in politics against my will.

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The Marketing Society was quite large: 33 samitis (smaller cooperative societies) were functioning under it, each of them encompassing three to four villages. Any cultivator, be he a landowner, or bargadar or vest landowner, could be a member of these samitis. Altogether, the Marketing Society had around 1,400 members. Naren Kole said, The Society was formed with the aim to free the peasants from the exploitative clutches of the moneylenders and to enable them to buy fertilizers, etc., in time. That aim has no doubt been fulfilled to a great extent. The peasants have benefited from this Cooperative. But the moneylenders have not vanished altogether from the rural scene. Still many landless families get indebted to the moneylenders and often get enmeshed in the debt trap.

Not only the landless families got indebted to the moneylenders, a section of farmer households borrowed more from the moneylenders or non-institutional agencies than the institutional agencies existing in the rural areas (see also Patil, 2008).23 Patil stated: According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers (2003), only 48.6 percent of farmer households were indebted, of which only 57.7 percent were indebted to institutional agencies. In other words, only 28.04 percent of farmer households were indebted to institutional agencies. (Ibid.: 47)

Naren Kole, an ardent supporter of the Congress party, had been awarded the post of Chairman in the Marketing Society to, perhaps, neutralize the Congress lobby as well as to utilize his efficiency and sincerity in running it. The Congress party had a substantial support base among the business community in the block town which had also considerable presence and business stake in the Marketing Society. It was evident that the Marketing Society was actually run by the CPI(M) party and Naren had to visit their party office regularly to get instructions. The Marketing Society being a powerful and important financial as well as business organization needed an acceptable and sincere person at the helm of its affairs. The party probably did not have such a person in its own rank, and hence had to employ the service of a known Congress person for the job. Though this was an instance of accommodating the 23. Patil (2008) argues that despite tremendous expansion of the branch network, particularly in rural areas, after nationalization of private sector banks and the growth of institutional credit for agriculture, the severity of agricultural indebtedness has persisted due to some social and economic reasons.

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opposition in the power structure, the party maintained its strict control over the Marketing Society through the instructions given from its party office. The story of Kalipur elucidated, to some extent, how power was being exercised in a village in the daily lives of the people belonging to different social groups. The CPI(M), the only party in the village which is operating overtly, tried persistently to extend its influence over the people in order to ensure its ‘hegemony’ with the principal aim of electoral success. The electoral success of the Left Front, particularly the CPI(M), in Kalipur presumably depended on several factors.24 One of the main reasons of its success in Kalipur, as argued by Williams (2001: 618) in regard to his own study, was its past record of propoor action. The poor SC–ST people in Kalipur still seemed to be a support base of the ruling CPI(M) party. Also, another important reason was that the CPI(M) party could effectively utilize the distribution of governmental benefit schemes meant for various disadvantaged groups for its own electoral goal, as well as strategically use the aspirations of many interest groups in the village who had found that with help of the party, they could maximize their own interests. Besides these, the ruling party had not only been controlling the local government to retain its own power base but also had been using microviolence as an integral means ‘in creating political support’ (Ibid.). While the party utilized the representatives of different communities to fulfil its own interest, the people, cutting across social groups, endeavoured to make use of their relationship with the party to satisfy their own personal interests. In the process, the people in the village undoubtedly got more and more entangled with these political parties. But at the same time, very often, they became disenchanted with the organized parties not only because they failed to achieve their demands but also due to the interventionist roles of the political parties in their daily social lives.

24. Though the Left Front had been winning both the assembly elections in Dhaniakhali and the panchayat elections in Kalipur (Kalipur was an uncontested seat in panchayat elections in 2008) since 1977, it has faced a massive electoral debacle in the panchayat elections in 2008, in the parliamentary elections in 2009 and in the assembly elections in 2011.

6 A Narrative of Peasant Resistance: Land, Party and the State

Introduction Kadampur, the village situated in Singur block of Hooghly district, has been in the eye of a political storm since May 2006 when the state government announced its intention to acquire almost the entire agricultural land in the village for setting up a car factory by one of the biggest industrial houses of India, Tata Motors.1 In fact, after the licensing policy had undergone major changes due to the implementation of liberalization policy in the 1990s, and the visible decline in the role of the central government and Planning Commission in both conceiving and financing state-level developmental projects, various state governments of the Indian Union acquired quite a bit of autonomy in economic decision making and, as a result, seized the opportunity to attract investors to their respective locations (Rudolph and Rudolph, 2001). West Bengal was no exception in this respect. The Left Front government made efforts to woo the investors for rejuvenation of the state’s industrial sector. In this regard, the investment of Tata Motors for a car plant in the state was seen 1. In the months following May 2006, the Singur peasant movement became a focal point in the political landscape of West Bengal. Subsequently, the ‘civil society’ – that included social activists and prominent personalities in the field of art and literature – took an active interest in the movement. Overcoming initial reluctance, the electronic and print media also got embroiled in the controversy making it a popular issue in the state. Not only did the major political forces get involved, either in support of or in opposition to the movement, the civil society, the public opinion at large and even the media got highly polarized over the issue of acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of setting up industries. The increasing importance of the issue can be gauged if one goes through the daily newspapers of this period and the scores of writings and a number of documentary films covering this issue.

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as a major breakthrough to ease the path of industrialization. But the peasants of five villages, including Kadampur, were going to be affected as around 1,000 acres (the exact figure is 997 acres) of agricultural land had been earmarked for acquisition. The government was bent on acquiring the land by virtue of a colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894. According to this Act, if land is to be acquired for the purpose of ‘public interest’, then in that case, no sanction of the landowners was required for acquiring the land. Understandably, the Left Front government projected this land acquisition move for the Tata Motors as serving the purpose of ‘public interest’. It was also claimed that industrialization is the path of progress that the entire mankind must traverse, and West Bengal was suffering precisely for the lack of it.2 Immediately after the word spread that the government was planning to acquire land for a car factory, the villagers of the five affected villages registered their protest against the plan. The government’s intentions became clear to the villagers of Singur by the surprise visit of a team of Tata Motors along with the officials of West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation on 25 May 2006. Anticipating loss of their agricultural land, the local peasants immediately gathered there to block the team’s passage and thus registered their protest. That was the beginning of a long peasant resistance that subsequently spread to other areas of West Bengal where the government planned land acquisition for the sake of industrialization and urbanization.3 This was, probably, the beginning of a rupture in the apparent social tranquillity that marked the rural areas of West Bengal during the 30 years of the Left Front rule.4 If Kalipur represented the face of apparent social peace in rural Bengal, Kadampur represented its opposite – the turbulent face of rural Bengal. I had the privilege 2. In a booklet titled, Industrialization for the Toiling Masses, penned by Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the erstwhile Chief Minister of West Bengal, explaining the government’s drive for industrialization, it was stated, ‘Marxists hold that the development is from agriculture to industry…the transition from agriculture to industry is an inevitable phenomenon both in capitalism and socialism’ (p. 10 of the booklet, published by West Bengal State Committee, CPI(M), Kolkata, 2006). 3. The peasant movement in Nandigram was the most important event among all others. In Nandigram, situated in East Medinipur district, West Bengal, the erstwhile state government proposed to set up an SEZ on around 10,000 acres of land that was likely to include both agricultural and residential lands of 27 villages, affecting a population of nearly 65,000. This move caused deep anguish and anger among the local population who stood together to ‘defend the motherland’ and continued their struggle until the government had withdrawn its project. A number of agitating peasants were allegedly killed and tortured by the police forces and by the ruling party cadres. 4. The political impact of these movements against land acquisition can be gauged by the startling success of TMC, the main opposition party in West Bengal in that period, not only in the panchayat polls held in 2008 but also in the parliamentary elections (2009) and assembly elections (2011).

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to witness this turbulent phase as the period of my fieldwork coincided with the drive for land acquisition and the subsequent resistance in the area. The question that motivated my ethnographic research in one of these turbulent villages, Kadampur, was how social turbulence developed in some pockets of rural West Bengal. The focus of my research was what had been the impact of the state’s project of industrialization on different sections of the rural people in a particular village, and in what ways the peasants of the area got entangled in a dynamic and complex relationship with the state and institutional politics. In fact, the affected people of the area had to deal with myriad groups of political activists, state leaders of different parties, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, social activists, artists and intellectuals thronging the area in the wake of the peasant movement. As I was approaching Kadampur village, trudging the muddy road passing through the surrounding villages, I found signs of distress on the faces of the local people who were pained at the unpredictable turn of events in the recent period. One very old man, at the age of probably above 80 years and unable to move from his small roadside room in the neighbouring village, asked anxiously, ‘Where are you coming from? Can you tell me whether we would be able to save our land or not?’ The residents of all these villages had united to put up resistance to the government move, but were not sure whether their efforts to save their land would finally be successful. The common people’s concern was reflected in the words of the old man. In a vacant field used as a playground, some men and women had mobilized for a meeting to discuss their future strategy to defend their land. On behalf of the gathering, Jagannath Das, a prosperous Mahishya farmer and one of the village leaders of the Save Agricultural Land Committee (SALC), explained their position on the issue. He said: It is we, the farmers, who have done a lot to improve the productivity of this land by installing 27 mini-deep tube wells in the 1,000 acre stretch of land.5 The peasants also use a number of small pump sets to lift water from the canals and irrigate the land. We have turned this land into multi-crop and fertile land and hence, we won’t allow the government or any other agency to take over the land. We have been united and will fight till the end.

5. The command area of a submersible tube well varies between 20–25 acres. So, 27 submersible pump sets have the capacity to irrigate something between 540–675 acres of land. This shows that most of the 1,000 acre land being acquired by the government was irrigated by privately owned pump sets.

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The women were also present in the gathering. They reacted very strongly against this land acquisition issue. Kamala, an elderly woman having no land, said, We live off sharecropping and gathering food from this land. We collect different types of edible herbs from different corners of the land. We also rear a goat or two and cattle that graze on this land. So this land is of prime importance to our lives. We can’t live without this land.

Padma, belonging to a sharecropper family, said, Earlier we could manage food only for half the day and had to starve for the rest. Both my husband and I worked on others’ land, sharecropped in some land and reared goats depending on this land. We sell three–four goats in a year. After hard labour we bought 0.025 acre of land and thus, at last, we reached a stage where we could expect a decent earning (eibhabe aay-unnatir pathe esechhi). In this situation, we won’t allow anyone to distract us from this path of development. Hence, if necessary, we would rather lay down our lives to defend this land.

Swapan, a young agricultural labourer, said, I have no land, but am fully dependent on this land for earning a livelihood. So we won’t allow this land to be acquired. Even if the landowners agree to sell their land, we wouldn’t leave this land. I was working in a rolling mill in the Howrah industrial area and used to earn Rs 1,000 per week. But due to ill health, I could not continue the work. Now I am working as an agricultural labourer in this field. Many have been working in industries and businesses in urban areas, but very often they have to come back due to closure of the industry or some other trouble. Outside work is unstable and not reliable, while our income from land is more secure and provides us food throughout the year.

As I went along a narrow moram road, with a playground on the left and a paddy field on the right, the habitations of Kadampur appeared. At the entry point of the village, a few newly constructed concrete-structure shops were seen, probably as an evidence of the prosperity the villagers were witnessing since the last few decades. Though agriculture has been going through some crisis in the recent period, these villages of Singur became prosperous principally through agricultural activities.

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The Forms of Resistance As the news of the visit of Tata Motors team spread in the neighbouring villages on 25 May 2006, people from all corners rushed to the site to register their protest.6 The most important feature was the presence of a large number of landless bargadars and marginal farmers among the crowd that blocked the passage of the team’s visit. Many of the bargadars in the surrounding villages were not registered, and hence had no legal right over the land they had been tilling for generations. This area of Singur was not far off from Bara Kamalapur where peasants mobilized in big numbers during the days of Tebhaga movement in the late 1940s in support of the bargadars’ right over land.7 It may be recalled that since then, the rights of bargadars got recognized by several governments that ruled the state of West Bengal. The Congress government in 1971 had amended the Land Reforms Act so that the bargadars would get three-fourth shares of crops cultivated by them, enhancing the twothird share originally demanded during the Tebhaga movement.8 In 1978, the Left Front began ‘Operation Barga’ to register the names of the bargadars so that they could no longer be evicted and their hereditary right over cultivation of the land they were sharecropping would get legal protection. But in this area of Hooghly district, which had been dominated by the ruling left parties since the advent of the Left Front rule, the programme of Operation Barga seemed to not have been implemented in its true spirit. At least, the presence of a large number of unregistered bargadars showed the limits of the much-trumpeted programme in one of the left strongholds.9 What went wrong with the programme? The CPI(M) leader of Singur and a district Krishak Sabha leader acknowledged the presence of a large 6. The account of the movement has been gathered through interviews and informal talks with the villagers, mostly opposed to the land acquisition, cutting across caste, class and gender. I could closely observe the people’s participation and mood in some of the protest rallies, mass meetings and sit-in demonstrations during my fieldwork. 7. Several accounts of the movement have been penned by activists and intellectuals associated with the movement. See, for example, Mitra (1998: 621) and Patri (1998). 8. ‘The rights of the bargadars in West Bengal are contained in the West Bengal Land Reforms Act 1955. The Act was amended in 1970 and 1971 further safeguarding the interest of the bargadars. The Act as amended provides for: Regulation of crop share payable to the landowner. It has been provided that the produce of the land cultivated by the bargadars shall be divided as between the bargadars and the owners: 1) In the proportion of 50:50 in case where plough, cattle, manure and seeds necessary for cultivation are supplied by the person owning the land; and 2) In the proportion of 75:25 in all other cases’ (Bandyopadhyay, 2007: 20). 9. Out of 51 bargadars in Kadampur, 22 were found to be registered and remaining 29 unregistered in a household survey conducted by me during my fieldwork.

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number of unregistered bargadars in the area. But he then said that it was the bargadars’ fault that they had failed to register their names despite the best efforts of the party and the government in this regard. He commented that the unregistered bargadars actually wanted to keep good relations with the landowners and hence did not take interest in registering their names. Significantly, several erstwhile CPI(M) supporters had also not registered their names. Why the party could not ensure the registering of their own supporters’ names was not clear. One elderly villager explained that soon after the Left Front had come to power, most of the landed people, who were earlier with the Congress party, turned into supporters of the CPI(M) and hence, their lands were spared from being registered under Operation Barga. Only on the lands of a few hard-core Congress supporters, like the Ghosh family of neighbouring village, the cultivating sharecroppers were registered at the behest of the party. It became very clear from day one of the unrest in Singur that the peasants, who depended on land for their livelihood, had been opposing the land acquisition programme of the government. It was said by the leadership of the movement that the small and marginal farmers, the bargadars and landless labourers were in the forefront of the movement. What was striking was the participation of a large number of women in the movement. Not only did the women of the landless and marginal farmers’ families, who used to toil in the land, come out to join the movement, women from the small and middle peasants’ families, who never participated in any sort of public programmes and so far remained secluded, to an extent, from the public gaze, also participated in the movement in large numbers. Probably, this typical combination of the economically marginal and the socially marginal had been responsible for the movement taking on such a militant form from the beginning. Among the economically marginal, there were also a large number of SC people, who were, supposedly, for long socially ostracized by the powers that be. After the 25th May demonstration of peasant solidarity against agricultural land acquisition, another peasants’ rally took place on 1 June 2006, in which 2,000–3,000 peasants got mobilized in a procession that ended in a demonstration in front of the Block Development Office (BDO), the local administrative centre. In this rally, the marginal and landless peasants and the peasant women were present in large numbers. The women protested holding broomsticks in their hands, symbolizing the women’s resolve to sweep away the efforts of land acquisition. Most of the women who participated in the rally from Kadampur were attending a public rally for the first time.

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Immediately after the initial breaking out of the movement, opposition parties entered the scene with their professed claim to advance the cause of the peasants. It was obvious that the political parties would try to cash in on the people’s movement in order to extend the base of their influence, strengthen their organization and enhance their vote bank. But why didn’t these opposition parties raise their voice against the land acquisition for the industries by the government a decade back in some other areas like Kharagpur? Guha (2007: 3706) comments, in relation to land acquisition in Kharagpur for the pig iron companies of the Tatas and Birlas, that the opposition parties and human rights group as well as ‘the pressure groups lacked the political foresight to take it up as their major agenda for agitation’. Presumably, this time, the opposition did not want to ‘miss the boat’. But, as Nielsen (2010: 165) argues: …at the level of principles one finds few disagreements between the two major parties to the conflict, the CPM and the TMC: the two have disagreed over the issue of forced acquisition versus voluntary sales...But neither party voiced any particular objection to the policy of industrialization by way of private sector investments, nor have they dismissed the idea that the state should play an active role as a facilitator of private capital.

So, in the first week of June 2006 when the Krishi Jami Raksha Committee (Save Agricultural Land Committee) was formed by the participation of a large number of would-be affected villagers, two political leaders were selected as the joint conveners of the committee, one from the TMC and the other from Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) party.10 In fact, these two parties had presence in the area apart from the CPI(M) and were agitating against the land acquisition move from the beginning. The villagers were also in search of political support to their movement and hence, readily accepted the political leaders at the helm of the committee. Astonishingly, though many of the agitating peasants had been associated to some extent with the opposition parties for long, both the conveners of the committee were chosen from the nonfarming sections joining the movement. One of the conveners had been a jute mill worker and a TMC leader of Singur block. The other convener, a staunch SUCI activist, was a potter by profession, making idols of Hindu deities. Both of them were non-farm workers and did not have any direct stake in the land concerned and had joined the movement for their political commitment. 10. SUCI is one of the left parties outside the Left Front in West Bengal.

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On 18 June 2006, one mass meeting was convened by the SALC. The meeting, addressed by the main opposition leader of the state, Mamata Banerjee, indicated the growing influence of various organized parties on the agitating people. People in large numbers joined the mass meeting in a festive mood. Placards were made with writings opposing land acquisition; festoons and banners were prepared with slogans inscribed on them along with the name of the committee. The women wore colourful saris and began to gather in different corners in the affected villages. The children also wore their best dresses and came out with their parents. From the hamlets located at a distance from the venue of meeting, people, including women and children, were brought by trucks. The people nearby reached the spot in processions shouting slogans. The women were seen responding to the slogans in full throats. The venue, a big school ground, resembled the venue of a rural mela (fair) taking place at an unusual time. The people gathered in the meeting place and waited for hours to hear the speeches of different political leaders braving the scorching sun of a midsummer day. The stage of the meeting was decorated with the tricolour TMC party flag. The mass meeting was conducted by one prominent state leader of the TMC party who was seen announcing the names of speakers and controlling the crowd. Mamata was the star attraction of the meeting and spoke at length in support of peasants’ demand to keep off from acquiring agricultural land for industry. She said that she was not opposed to industry; but that should not dispossess the peasants of their means of livelihood. She insisted that 40,000 acres of land, lying fallow in various closed industries in West Bengal, should be utilized by the government for setting up new industries. Her speech was greeted with a standing ovation from the audience on several occasions. Though several other opposition parties also joined the meeting and some of their leaders gave speeches, the meeting was clearly dominated by the TMC party. The next mobilization took place in July 2006 in Chunchura, the district town of Hooghly, where a few thousand peasants and their families joined a rally and demonstration before the district magistrate’s (DM) office to register their objection to the land acquisition move. As the ruling party had by then begun to garner peasant’s consent to land acquisition in writing, around 1,000 peasants in a countermove on that day submitted their signed objection letters to the DM. In the last week of July, the administration issued the first notification for land acquisition in Singur. In protest, the peasants blocked the Durgapur Expressway, National Highway 2, on 28 July. That was the beginning of the militant phase of the movement.

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In the subsequent period, the government officials tried several times to enter the villages and distribute the notifications to the peasants whose lands were going to be acquired. But every time the officials tried to enter the villages, their path was blocked by the women of the affected villages. Though the officials were given sufficient police escorts, they did not try to force their way into the villages, and on several occasions turned back. The women’s mobilization was spontaneous and unique. They made an arrangement among themselves so that whenever and wherever the officials would be seen proceeding towards the villages, the women who noticed them first would immediately blow conchs from their houses and others would respond by blowing the same so that the information could spread from one hamlet to the other, eventually covering the whole of the affected area. And immediately, they would rush to the spot where the officials were approaching, with broomsticks in their hands. The women’s vigilance would continue throughout the day and such instances of resistance took place several times during the months of August and September. In the third week of September 2006, the government started distribution of compensation money to the landowners willing to hand over their land for the Tata project. In the process, several irregularities were reported. Even legitimate owners were reported to have been deprived. In the normal selling and buying of land, very few people in the countryside opted for mutation of the land they purchased, as the process was expensive and time consuming. It was reported that some erstwhile landowners had received compensation for the land they had already sold out, depriving the actual landowners who were not willing to accept compensation. As reports of many such irregularities and anomalies began to pour in across the already charged villages, the villagers decided to protest the distribution of compensation which was taking place in the block office in Singur town. On 25 September, the peasants gathered in large numbers in front of the BDO and began a sit-in dharna on behalf of the SALC virtually blocking the office. This type of militant demonstration was a popular method of protest by the leftists in the late-1960s when they were struggling for power. Since then, such blockade of offices and officials for hours together, until the demand was met, has been known as gherao. The gherao continued till midnight. In the afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the opposition leader, joined the gherao. She thus wanted to take up the mantle of leading the movement on her own and generate enthusiasm among the people with her presence. Thus, the leadership of the movement seemed to get transferred to the TMC party leader completely. At her behest, the agitators

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demanded that the distribution of compensation be stopped and a negotiated settlement reached before proceeding further. At midnight, when the demonstrators were exhausted by the day-long commotion, a large contingent of police force surrounded the BDO from different sides and began to repress the gathering, which comprised of a large numbers of women and children. The TMC leadership did not seem prepared to face the police brutality and lost much of its spirit in the aftermath of the incident. The villagers also needed some time to recover from the trauma and in the meantime, the administration immediately seized this opportunity to set up several police camps in and around the villages. Upon setting up the camps, the police force began to patrol the roads inside and around the villages and began to ask people of their identities day and night. All these were done supposedly to tighten the grip of the administration on the situation and maintain its upper hand over the agitators. Soon the villagers, once again, mobilized themselves in demonstrations to demand the removal of the police camps from the villages and the field. But the police camps remained rooted and police patrolling got intensified. The government seemed to be acting in a determined way to acquire the land for the proposed small car project. In the meantime, the Singur issue gained importance at the state and national level. Apart from different opposition parties who were trying to get a foothold in the locality by extending support to the movement, several people from the ‘civil society’, NGOs and other spheres began to regularly visit the villages in Singur to express their solidarity with the struggle of the local people. The government also intensified its campaign to project that the landowners were ready to part with their land and most of them had already done the same. By that time, a section of the peasants gave in to the government pressure, principally under the impact of the 25 September incident, or for some other reasons, but many others remained steadfast in their resolve to continue the fight till the end. People from different walks of life from the state and outside took up the campaign in favour of the agitating peasants, particularly in Kolkata and other metropolitan cities of India. Everywhere, ‘people struggle over the very purpose, value and future of capital insertion’ (Da Costa, 2007: 316). The media also began to focus on these developments with greater frequency. The support of different political parties, NGOs and other sections of people, and the role of the media, played a crucial role in the developments that followed in the subsequent period. On 1 December 2006, the government began the fencing of the land earmarked for the Tata Company. On that day, the

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unwilling villagers mobilized in large number and protested against the step. The large police force present in the area did not try to disperse the gathering and rather started token fencing on one portion of the land. On the next day, the final showdown took place between the police forces and the villagers. On that day, a few thousand police forces swooped down on the land, burst teargas shells and chased away the villagers gathered on the field to protect their land. The villagers tried to resist the police but were outnumbered by the huge police force. Police arrested several agitators, including a number of women, from the field. Chasing after the agitators, the police entered the villages and severely beat up whoever came in their way. They even entered houses, beat up people in their own houses and dragged them out. Hundreds of villagers were implicated in several criminal cases just for their efforts to protect their own land (audio-visual documents by Roy and Banerjee, 2006; 2007). Many villagers, particularly the males, fled from the village as they were apprehensive of further police tortures. Many people dependent on the land suddenly lost their main or only source of living, resulting in most of the working people becoming unemployed. This was such a blow to most of the local peasants that some of them started suffering from severe depression, subsequently leading to cases of suicides in Kadampur. The medical team from Kolkata visiting Kadampur reported several such cases of mental depression in the village, including the case of a little girl who became almost speechless after the incident.11 One of the peasants who committed suicide was a marginal peasant who was losing his entire land of 1.33 acres on account of the ensuing Tata project, while the other was an unregistered bargadar, having no land of his own. This was probably an unmistakable sign of the fact that, contrary to the official belief, the marginal peasants and landless bargadars had the biggest stake in the land that was being acquired. Immediately after 2 December, the administration began fencing off the area in full swing under the surveillance of a few thousand policemen permanently posted in the temporary police camps set up around the field and in a ceramic factory that was also acquired from its owner under pressure. The agricultural field virtually turned into a battlefield from 2 December 2006 as 1,000 acres of land was cordoned off from all sides to prevent any movement of the villagers inside the field. Watchtowers12 were erected all around the 11. I got the information by interviewing the psychologist, Mohit Ranadip, who had visited the village as part of a medical team several times in the aftermath of land acquisition. 12. There were a number of watchtowers built surrounding the wall of the industry premises. The police forces used to guard the acquired land day in and day out standing on those watchtowers. The watchtowers were built as high as 40–50 feet so that the watchmen could oversee the

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land and police forces were posted there to guard the fence from possible attacks by the agitating peasants. The villagers, bewildered by the police action, could not chalk out fresh programmes of protest immediately after 2nd December. In January 2007, the villagers, on behalf of SALC, started hunger strike in protest against the forced acquisition of the land, but almost simultaneously, the TMC leader Mamata Banerjee began her indefinite fasting programme in Kolkata stealing the limelight away from the villagers and virtually hijacking the issue from the villages and the villagers to Kolkata. As the fasting programmes ended with no positive response coming forth from the administration, the villagers witnessed, to their dismay, the bit-bybit transformation of their agricultural land into an industrial plant as cement, stone chips, sand and other materials were poured onto the land on a war footing. There was an urgency to hand over the land to the Tata Company as early as possible so that the company could complete the construction of the small motor car plant within the stipulated time. Even after the land was fenced off and permanent police camps, including watchtowers, were set up across the boundaries of the land for day and night surveillance, the aggrieved peasants attempted to smash the fence and enter into the land several times. But every time, they were overpowered by the strong police force that was guarding the fence all the time. Thereafter, the movement lost steam and the only hope, for the people who lost their land, rested in the court case, pending in the High Court, challenging the legality of land acquisition in Singur. The Land Acquisition Act, 1894 allows the government to acquire land ‘in public interest’. The petitioners challenged the land acquisition in Singur on the principal ground that it was done for the sake of enhancing private interests of a big industrial house. It would be interesting to note the earlier view of the local MLA, one of the main leaders of this peasant movement, on why they were not challenging the government’s acquisition move in the court of law. He replied that such a step might divert the agitating people’s attention to legal proceedings and thus would dilute the spirit of the movement. So, the leadership of the anti-land acquisition movement was not thinking at that moment to approach the court, though not ruling it out as a last resort. Now, it seemed the movement had reached the absolute limit when the agitators had to depend on the legal route as their last straw to recover their land.

surrounding villages and the activities of the villagers.

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The Party and the Politics of Land Acquisition Rabindranath Bhattacharya, the TMC MLA of Singur constituency and a retired teacher of high school, said: When the people reacted sharply against the government move of land acquisition, no political party probably could remain inert about this development. Being a people’s representative, I also became involved in the movement. Neither did any prior discussion on the matter take place with me or any other people’s representatives of the area, nor were we informed of the government move. After the initial resistance by the peasants, the District Magistrate of Hooghly called a meeting inviting the sabhadhipati (president) of zilla parishad, sabhapati (president) of the panchayat samiti, three pradhans of the concerned gram panchayats, including me, to discuss the land acquisition issue. As the decision had already been taken, there was actually no importance of such a meeting.

Asked what is the role of his party was in this anti-land acquisition movement, he replied: The question of a party leading the movement does not arise as the peasants here have come together irrespective of their political affiliations. Here one would find people from all parties; even erstwhile CPI(M) supporters have come forward to resist the land acquisition move. In this case, the unity has been forged on the basis of their peasant identity. All other identities have become irrelevant at this moment. They feel that once the land is taken away, they can’t survive long on the money they will receive in lieu of it. They apprehend that this will ultimately lead them to bankruptcy, leaving no other way but to live off begging in the future. This apprehension has led them to forge a broad-based peasant unity to resist land acquisition at any cost.

He added, ‘For industry, highly fertile and multi-crop land should not be taken over. Instead, there are low lying lands and mono-crop land in Singur and other places that can be utilized for building up industrial zones.’ It transpired from the MLA’s statement that the anti-land acquisition movement was, initially, a spontaneous peasant movement with an active participation of different stakeholders in the said land. Being a local people’s representative, Bhattacharya had to participate in this movement. The MLA also did not claim that the movement was being led by his party. But the vice-president of the district Krishak Sabha and a CPI(M) leader, said,

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People are being misled by the opposition parties. But they could mislead mainly some people who don’t have land but depend on other odd jobs related to the land. The agricultural labourers are told that they will lose their jobs in the field once factory comes up there. Some people who now live off rearing cattle are being made to believe that they may lose their livelihood once their plot of land is acquired.

He also clarified the stand of his party: Singur was selected as the site of the small car plant of the Tata Motors as people in this area welcomed the project in expectation of all round development. Many ancillary industries would come up alongside the car factory. So people spontaneously stood in favour of the proposal. The lands being acquired are all flood-prone and low lands earlier used for fish cultivation. After the site was selected, we on behalf of the Krishak Sabha surveyed the area and found that it is quite suitable for the car plant. As nearly 1,000 acres of land is to be acquired, the peasants will definitely suffer some losses.

The leader was quite content with the rate of compensation the government was offering. He said, The big landowners, many of them absentee landlords, are ready to hand over their land, as they feel that farming is no longer profitable for them. They have assured us in written paper that they will sell their land for the small car project. So the peasants want to give up their land. Big landowners are very keen to sell off their land as their bank interest will be far more than what they can get from agriculture.

However, he also added, We estimated that the number of peasants dependent on the land would be around 1,500–2,000. But most of them are marginal farmers having very small parcels of land. The offer of sale so far received came mainly from big landowners. And we hope that since the big landowners have come forward to offer their land, the small and middle peasants won’t be far behind.

It is revealed from the discussion with the CPI(M) leader that the big landowners, mainly the absentee landlords, were ready to hand over their land to the government from the first day the project was announced. On the other hand, the marginal peasants and some other people who had mostly no land,

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but were dependent to some extent on the land for their livelihoods, had been vehemently against land acquisition since the beginning. Though the leader branded the movement as an offshoot of the provocation of the opposition parties, he could not deny that the marginal peasants were reluctant to part with their land. His assessment was somewhat similar to that of the agitating peasants who were of the view that some landowners, who had no attachment with the land and who were even unable to identify their land, had handed over the same to the government. Subimal Das, the main CPI(M) leader of Kadampur, was also an active proponent of industrialization and was one of the key persons in promoting the land acquisition drive of the government. Subimal Das, a retired schoolteacher and owner of 0.75 acre of land, had served the panchayat in various positions since 1978. I met him when he was chatting with the CPI(M) supporters who had assembled together on the concrete veranda adjacent to his house. Without the existence of a formal party office in the village, this place next to the leader’s house might well have been used as an informal office of the CPI(M) party or a de facto durbar of the village party leader. About the landholding pattern in the village and the position of the bargadars in the land acquisition drive, he said: The number of bargadars in the village would be 40–45; among them, 20 are registered bargadars and the rest unregistered. For many reasons some bargadars had not been registered. Some were not interested to register their names as they had good relations with the landowners. None of the bargadars has received any compensation so far. The government has offered 25 per cent of the land price to be paid to the bargadars as compensation. Already some unregistered bargadars from other villages in the local panchayat have applied for consideration of their cases for payment of compensation. The issue of unregistered bargadars is being seriously considered so that they are not deprived. But they have to approach us for compensation. Then we will definitely consider their cases and see that the actual bargadars are not deprived.

Here, ‘we’ obviously meant the ruling party and probably the panchayat, which was under the control of the CPI(M) party. Though the land acquisition programme was a state government programme, the government officials had not quite ventured into the villages to persuade the peasants to part with their land. In August and September 2006, the officials tried to enter the villages to serve the government notifications to the landowners, but were prevented by agitating villagers, most of them women. Since then, the party leaders had

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been the most visible and active proponents of the government move, overseeing land sale at the grassroots level. In the process, the party and its leaders had become the donors of favours that a peasant could expect to get from land acquisition. That is why the village leader was expecting that the unregistered bargadars would approach them. They would then consider their cases and possibly include their names in the list of potential compensation receivers. The donor–recipient (or patron–client?) relationship seemed to dominate the village polity as Subimal Das mentioned that during his tenure as pradhan of the local panchayat, he had been instrumental in providing loans to many villagers and some of them have not yet repaid the loans. He was indicating that those who had benefited from him or his party had now turned around and became involved in the movement against land acquisition. Samir Jana, one of the conveners of the SALC, was a leader of the SUCI party. About the livelihood patterns, he said: …people in these villages are also engaged in different types of non-farm works, most of them related with agriculture. The van rickshaw pulling, vegetable vending, trading of potato or working in potato store and producing rice from paddy are some of the works related to agriculture on which a large number of people depend as primary or secondary means of livelihood. Not only are the local people dependent on this land, even people from the Left Front strongholds like Dhaniakhali and Polba come here during seasons to work as agricultural labourers. As they come by train, the local people call them as garir kishan.

Jana also added that people here frequently travelled outside of their village to work in small or big industries. This was a reason for their disillusionment over the present form of industrialization. He said, ‘People working in industries are very much aware of the crisis facing the same. Many have come back after working there for a certain period. Peasants don’t believe that their sons would get employment in this industry.’ Asked if the unity of so many political parties will be sustained in view of the track record in West Bengal of political bickering in all spheres of life, he replied: In this land movement, the peasants have come together more on the basis of their community than on the basis of parties. Though I belong to the SUCI party, we are organizing different people in different committees, for example, women in women’s committee, peasants in peasant committee and youths in youth committee, in all the villages affected by land acquisition. Thus, the unity of the peasants would continue in spite of the existence of diverse political parties inside the movement.

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Jana’s account revealed that the anti-land acquisition movement had not been led by any political party and it would likely continue as a people’s struggle relying on different committees existing in the villages.

Land, Livelihood and Land Movement Kamal Kole, a teacher-turned-leader of SALC, was also a cultivator having 3 acres of land. He was one of the affected peasants because a substantial part of his agricultural land was supposed to be acquired by the government for the Tata factory. Kamal Kole, a prosperous peasant of the Mahishya community, informed that all sections of the peasantry, in general, were protesting against the land acquisition, though the marginal peasants were conspicuous in their presence. He said, ‘Almost all the peasants here are marginal peasants with no existence of any big farmer. So it can be said that the movement is basically a marginal peasant’s movement.’ He added, The landless peasants are supporting our movement as they know that their survival depends on the safeguarding of the land. If a car industry comes up, they won’t get job there. The 1,000 van rickshaw pullers would be jobless in that case. They transport the potato from the field to the local cold stores. So, they are also opposing the land acquisition move.

Lakshan Shee who lived off his 2.33 acres of land was very doubtful about the assurance of employment in the car factory given by the government. He argued, Being farmers we know only the plough and the sickle and nothing about the car factory. So how could we get employment there? So we are completely against acquisition of this land. As we are not ready to part with the land, there is no question of suggesting price for the land. Whatever price is offered we are not going to hand over the land to the government.

When most of the peasants were protesting against the land acquisition move of the government, Babu Shee, a marginal peasant, had taken a different stand. He said that he had given consent to hand over part of his land to the government. Babu stated,

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I have given consent to the party to part with that portion of my land, which is located in low areas and is mono-crop. The portion I have offered is around 0.33 acre while the rest 1.2 acre of land I have declined to offer as the same is multicrop land and quite important to my livelihood.

Hence, he was very rational in dealing with the party or the government on the question of land exchanges. Though he had given his consent for the low land, he was firm enough not to hand over the multi-crop land which actually was his principal source of livelihood. Another marginal peasant contested the logic of the government vis-à-vis its land acquisition move. He said, People who are offering land to the government never bother to till it. They have other sources of income and are not actually dependent on land. These lands are sonar chand jami13 (most precious land). One can get three–four crops by labouring on the land.

This apart, he also questioned the utility of a car industry to be established in the predominantly peasant area. He said, Why is a motor car industry being set up in this area? What benefit would the farmers get from such an industry? Why isn’t an industry to produce farming equipments or fertilizer and pesticides being set up such that the farmers get cheap agricultural inputs?

It was clear that the peasants were sceptical about the government’s assurance that the people loosing land would get employment in the forthcoming industry. Rather, they anticipated that being a peasant, they would never manage to get any employment in the proposed factory. Jagannath Das had been a prosperous peasant having around 4 acres of land for his family consisting of three brothers. Moreover, his family had installed two submersible tube wells in the year 2000 for irrigation in their land as well as to sell water to others. These two submersible pumps could supply water for up to 56 acres of land. They possessed one power tiller, which was driven by hand and hence, also called hand tractor. He explained the reason behind their prosperity, ‘We have purchased two submersible tube wells and the power tiller 13. People, generally, lovingly call a child sonar chand, which literally means golden moon.

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out of our savings generated from agriculture. We could also purchase one acre of land from our income from agriculture. Whatever prosperity you can see in our village principally came from agriculture.’ About the class composition of the movement, Jagannath said: The poor people from the SC background, who belong to marginal peasant or landless families, are taking the most active and militant role in the movement. This might seem perplexing as to why landless people are so strongly agitating against land acquisition. The fact is that they have the greatest stake in the land. People like me can survive at least for some time without land and can seek other means of livelihood. But to these people, land has been the only or principal means of livelihood. In many ways, they are dependent on land for their survival. Many just live off rearing livestock, like a few cows or goats. Where from would they now collect the feed for those animals, once the land is taken over? On the contrary, bigger the landowner, lesser is his dependence on land for livelihood and hence, more is he interested to sell off the land in lieu of a good amount of money.

Along with their cultivation work, Jagannath and his brothers had begun to invest in other business activities when the land acquisition drive put a stop to all such efforts. They had started manufacturing porcelain insulators used as non-conductors in high-voltage electricity transmission. They used to supply the porcelain insulators to one ceramics factory in Kolkata. They had employed about 10 women workers for the household industry and were planning to enhance the production. For this, they had purchased a 0.5 acre plot and were about to construct a shed there. But all this was upset with the land acquisition programme that threatened both their agricultural as well as industrial activities. A large entrepreneur seemed to survive by pushing out innumerable small and local enterprises. How did the peasant women interpret land acquisition issue and take part in the anti-land acquisition movement? They were, in general, very much indifferent to the story of transition and seemed unconcerned about the debates on viability and prospects of agriculture and industrialization, etc. Instead, the whole concern of the peasant women of Kadampur was around the issue of land, both personal and communal. They asserted that land had been indispensable for their subsistence. A sharecropper woman of the Mahishya community commented passionately: I have four children. The only son had studied up to VI class. We have very small amount of land and earn through sharecropping mainly. Drawing on our earning from this land, we could get three of our daughters married off. They are claiming

A Narrative of Peasant Resistance  |  175 that we would get jobs. What jobs would we have without any education whatsoever? Would we work as domestic help? What else can we do? Let them answer. We cultivate as sharecroppers but without any record. Now they are about to dispossess us of these lands we used to sharecrop. Now the Tata Company has come to grab this land to set up industry. If that happens, how my son could survive without this land? So, I shall fight till the end and if necessary, sacrifice my life for the sake of defending this land so that my son at least can live off it.

Noticeably, the womenfolk of the village were so strongly attached to the land that they sometimes broke into tears while reacting to the impending danger of land grab. They feared that they would be driven out of all the means of livelihood available to them from the present subsistence level of agriculture. A youth who earned by working in a factory outside Singur said, Presently my family possesses no land. But still I strongly oppose the land acquisition move as it will cause great harm to the local people. If I lose my present job, I can earn by working as a day labourer in the field. But once the Tata factory is set up, persons like me would not have a chance to get employment here. Though they are talking of providing employment, I doubt whether anyone from our villages will get a job here.

In fact, a section of the poor peasants in Singur, particularly in Kadampur, used to travel to adjoining town areas to do odd jobs in factories, shops and also, run small businesses. There were several cases of reverse migration when people came back to their villages after the closure of the industries they were working in. Sometimes, this also happened when they found it more profitable to work on land than to work in petty industries or businesses for a paltry sum in lieu of hard labour. So, the peasants here were quite aware of the situation in the non-farm sector nowadays, in which factories were very often shedding ‘surplus’ workers in the name of rationalization and modernization (see also Nigam, 2007).14 Hence, the labouring people of Kadampur seemed to be sceptical about working in industries rather than in agriculture, which at least gave them food security. Thus, these villagers coined the slogan in opposition to acquisition of agricultural land, ‘Open the Closed Factories and Build Up New Industries but Not at the Cost of Agriculture’. Bhabanath Shee, an elderly villager, made another point. He said, 14. Nigam (2007: 1047) states while discussing the issue in an article, ‘I will also insist here upon the recognition of a trivial historical fact that every child knows but no adult dare acknowledge: as far as unemployment goes, industrialization is the problem rather than the solution’.

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I am a marginal farmer. None of my sons has been able to find employment. The government is talking of employment. Even if some people are provided jobs in the Tata factory, at most one member of a family may get a job; but if he/she leaves the family, what will happen to the rest, especially the older members like us? Nowadays, none cares to look after other members of the family. On the contrary, if we can retain the land, it will give us security in old age. As land belongs to all members of a family, including the old ones, it can ensure that the elderly people won’t be neglected.

The most perceptive was the way Shee analyzed the politics of land acquisition by the government. He said, The parties in the ruling Left Front used to brand the earlier regime of 1952–77 as that of the Tatas and the Birlas and call themselves as leaders of the proletariat. Now what are they doing? Aren’t they themselves serving the Tatas now? Aren’t their own words boomeranging on themselves?

One student countered the government’s argument that the land losers could live off bank interest. He argued, The government is suggesting that the peasants can deposit the money they would get as compensations in the banks and live off bank interests. But the interest rates are decreasing day by day. One day might come when people will have to pay the bank charges for keeping their money in it. So what benefits would the peasant get from keeping money in the banks?

It appeared that the students, the new generation citizens of the village society for whom the industries were meant, at least according to government’s version, did not buy the dream that the proposed industrialization would create jobs for them. Instead, they were anticipating that their families would be totally ruined if agricultural land was acquired by the government. A family residing next to the land in question had been engaged in the business of making rice out of paddy. The family also owned 0.6 acre of agricultural land that they cultivated with their family labour. They informed that a number of families in the villages surrounding the land were engaged in similar small businesses. The peasant said, Such business would be jeopardized once the land is taken over by the government as the business depends on the crop produced on this land. So, all such

A Narrative of Peasant Resistance  |  177 business families also vehemently oppose the land acquisition move. We would definitely try to defend this land even in the face police repression.

What transpired from the remarks and arguments of the peasants was that the entire rural economy, in all its facets, will be hit hard and the peasants, of all types, were against the land acquisition move of the government. To quote Cernea (1999: 17), as cited in Guha (2007: 3707), it seemed, ‘Expropriation of land removes the main foundation upon which people’s productive systems, commercial activities and livelihoods are constructed.’

The Village Club and the Leader I met Dhiren Dhara, the village panchayat member in the club, Kadampur Pally Unnayan Sangha. He was elected from the village constituency representing TMC. The CPI(M) candidates had represented the village in the panchayat from 1978 till 1998; for the last two terms, the Congress and the TMC candidates had won respectively from the village constituency. The young panchayat member said that the clubhouse seemed to have turned into an office of the ‘SALC’, formed by the peasants since the announcement of the land acquisition programme. Dhiren explained, You would find that strange polarizations have taken place in the village since the beginning of the movement. Some of the TMC leaders have given up their land to the government. On the contrary, Kanti Patra, the CPI(M) candidate in the last panchayat elections who had contested against me and was defeated, has been firmly siding with the movement. The principal factor in taking sides in the movement is not party affiliations, but rather connection with and dependence on land of the people concerned. The TMC leaders who have given up their land are not principally dependent on land and are rather engaged in other occupations for their livelihood. So they found it profitable to sell out their land and earn a lump sum of money.

Dhiren clarified the background of the present polarization of political forces in the village: Once upon a time, the whole village was with the CPI(M). But the party has lost the confidence of the villagers. I was not much associated with party politics till

178  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a the last panchayat elections when I was requested by the local people to contest the election on the ticket of TMC. I agreed to their proposal and got elected, but I have been more of a social activist, involved more in welfare activities on behalf of the club than a hardcore party activist. The land acquisition movement, however, has changed the entire political climate and turned everyone in the village political. Without becoming political, one cannot struggle against the injustice meted out by the state.

He then explained the history of the present anti-land acquisition movement in the area: When we came to know that our homestead lands were also to be acquired, a meeting was convened to discuss the steps to be taken by the peasants. In the presence of around 300 peasants, a committee in the name ‘Save Agricultural Land Committee’ was formed to steer the peasant struggle against land acquisition. Among the 115 members of the committee, there are representations from several parties, like the TMC, SUCI and a few Marxist and Leninist groups. But the peasants’ representatives are more numerous than the parties. In our village, we have a sub-committee of 25 members that includes several women.

Dhiren, coming from a SC family of the Bagdi caste, was accepted as a leader of the village, particularly in the context of the present turmoil over land acquisition. He was one of the very few among the SC people to have completed graduation degree. The SC families in the village were mostly landless and poor. Many were bargadars, but most of them unregistered. One such unrecorded bargadar was Kanti Patra of the SC community who contested the last panchayat election as a CPI(M) candidate and lost the battle to Dhiren. But Kanti Patra told candidly: I was with the CPI(M) party all along. But the party has deserted me in the wake of land acquisition. Since the time of my grandfather, we have been cultivating two acres of land as bargadars. The land belongs to one Satya Das, who stays in neighbouring village and has a government job. As we have a cordial relationship with the landowner since long, we have never thought of registering as a bargadar in his land. Now if the land is taken away, we the bargadars will be the greatest losers. The owner of the land will get full compensation, while the ministers are planning to give only 25 per cent of the land price to the bargadars. You see, the landowner who is not at all dependent on land is getting full compensation, while we being fully dependent on land for livelihood are being offered only one-fourth of the land price. This is complete betrayal vis-à-vis the cause of the real tillers that the government had so far vowed to defend. So I have joined the

A Narrative of Peasant Resistance  |  179 Save Agricultural Land Committee, which has been founded by the real peasants who are actually cultivating the land. The CPI(M) party, on the contrary, is defending the interest of the Tatas and the non-cultivating landowners in this land acquisition move.

The cross-party mobilization of the peasants in the anti-land acquisition movement to save their lives and livelihoods was interesting. Party loyalty, apparently, did not come to the surface and peasants were taking sides on the basis of their stake or interest in agricultural land. Being a ruling party, the CPI(M) party was opposed to the common interest of the peasantry, most of whom constituted its ‘crowd’ in the political mobilization so far.

The Women’s Committee Women of Kadampur, like the women of other affected villages, were in the forefront of the anti-land acquisition movement from the very beginning. They were offering strong arguments for why this agricultural land should not be acquired for setting up an industry. From the very initial stage of the movement, the women participated in large numbers in all the programmes of the SALC. In many programmes, particularly in resisting the government officials’ entry into the villages, the women took on the main role as the men were not present in the villages at these hours. In fact, the women initiated many such combative struggles and developed creative methods of communication among themselves, like blowing conch shells to alert others, and newer ‘weapons’ of the ‘weak’, such as broomsticks. They had suffered no less than the men due to physical torture by the police as also the use of teargas shell. They were also arrested and sent to jail several times during the course of the movement. Intriguingly, however, the women of Kadampur were completely excluded from the SALC. Only at a later stage, the SUCI activists took the initiative to form women’s committees in the affected villages. An elderly woman from a solvent Mahishya family was selected as the secretary of the women’s committee of Kadampur. Both of her sons were employed outside the village and her family was not quite dependent on the land it owned. But still, she was very much interested not only to participate but also mobilize other women in the land movement.

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She argued, I avoided appearing before the public since my marriage as my husband did not like it. Now my husband has asked me to join the movement. I could have stayed away from the movement, as my family has little stake in cultivation. But I am still participating in the interest of my village community. What will happen to the village if the agricultural land is taken away? It will be a catastrophe that must be prevented. I am enjoying my association and interaction with other women of the village in the women’s committee and participation in the land movement.

About the role of the women’s committee in shaping the course of the movement, she said, ‘We are not in a position to take part in decision making. The committee takes the main decision about the activities to be undertaken and we, the women, try to implement the same in its true spirit.’ Kanika Das had taken an active role in coordinating the activities of the women’s committees of different villages. She was a young girl pursuing her studies in college and seemed to be active in the movement under the influence of the SUCI party. She expressed her discontent over the functioning of the SALC: Though the women are playing a vital role in organizing the movement, we are never consulted on the strategies to be pursued. Even the decisions of the committee were not properly and timely communicated to us. It seems that the leadership is seriously underestimating the role of the women. Sometimes, we have offered our suggestions to the leadership but those were not given proper attention and rather ignored.

The Panchayat and the People The question at this point was: how was the local government or the panchayat seeing this incident of land acquisition and how was it accordingly reacting? In other words, did it perform any particular role in this process of land acquisition? On the other hand, how did the affected villagers see the panchayat in their daily struggles against land acquisition? Mohon Mandal, the President of Singur panchayat samiti and the CPI(M) leader, was one of the key persons in the panchayat administration to implement the land acquisition programme taken up there. Had he been consulted while selecting the land for the project in Singur? Mandal replied,

A Narrative of Peasant Resistance  |  181 Though we, the panchayat samiti officials, were not consulted during the initial process of selecting the location, subsequently we got involved in the process in a meeting called by the district magistrate, in which representatives of the local gram panchayats, panchayat samiti, krishak sabha and ruling and opposition parties were invited. Since then we have become part of the process.

He added, On the day the Left Front ministry took oath, we were officially informed about the project. Before that, some visits might have taken place. We were not consulted at the initial stage and asked about the requirements of the project. We came to know about the project only after some visits to this area took place. The project was finalized in the Writer’s Buildings (in Kolkata) without our knowledge. So, when people began to ask me about the project, I had to tell them very often that I had no knowledge about the project. It was not good that the local panchayat and the panchayat samiti were kept in the dark initially.

Mandal cited his logic, that is, the logic of his party about why this particular land had to be given to the Tatas for their small car project: Actually the government is not in a position to decide the locations where certain developments would take place. The industrialists are coming in the state to set up industries and they will select the locations according to their convenience. We have to acquire land according to their choice. There is no other way to industrialization at the present stage.

During the period of anti-land acquisition movement, local people were not at all interested to talk about the panchayat and its various welfare schemes. Rather, they were very much suspicious about the role of the panchayat in the land acquisition move of the government. Asked whether he had received any benefits from the panchayat during the last one year, a middle-aged peasant, Ratan, replied, How could we get any benefit from the panchayat? The entire fund received by the panchayat for our welfare is actually being spent for the purpose of guarding the Tata project. The guards employed in Tata factory are paid by the fund meant for us.

His comments seemed to represent the perception of common people of the village associated with the land movement. Another villager complained that the fund for Indira Awaas Yojona, which was meant for the BPL families, had

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also been expended for building the high wall of the Tata project. Even the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) fund meant to ensure employment of minimum 100 days for the rural people was allegedly utilized for the project. Intriguingly, no family of this village was enlisted as BPL in the recently done BPL survey. The villagers were quite surprised after seeing the BPL list. In the earlier BPL survey, around 30 families of the village were marked as BPL. They exclaimed: How could we become APL after losing our land and livelihood? In fact, we have been debarred from being counted as BPL because we are conducting the land movement against the government. We have not been provided with any benefits by the panchayat since we have begun to express our defiance against state policy.

These were some of the representative voices of the villagers on the functioning of the panchayat in the period of land acquisition. These expressions indicated that the agitating people of the village were so much alienated from the panchayat during this period that they were developing certain set notions about irregularities in fund allotment, which did not always seem to be based on concrete facts.

Woman Worker, Small Industry and Big Capital Kamala Santra, a widow, had been working in Santi Ceramics before the takeover of the factory during the land acquisition. Santi Ceramics was a small factory employing about 200 people and was located in the area earmarked for the small car project. The owner of the factory, along with some other entrepreneurs who had set up their industries on the land proposed for acquisition, opposed the government move and even appealed to the High Court to exempt their industries on the grounds that they were providing employment to the local people. But finally, they had to succumb to the pressure from the government, and they reached settlements outside the court to sell their areas in lieu of cash. This was a glaring instance of how the operational small industries had to wind up in the interest of big or corporate capital with the tacit support of the government.15 15. The question arises then how we could interpret this closing down of small factory for the sake of big industry. It was heard that another small industry was also closed down due to this land

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Like Kamala, many men and women of the surrounding villages became unemployed due to the acquisition of the factories they were working in, but were not offered any sort of alternative work or compensation for their displacement from jobs. After losing her job, Kamala, belonging to SC community, lived off different types of small household businesses. In her words, Now I boil paddy in my house and get 3 kg of rice by boiling a bag of paddy (60 kg). I am engaged in this business throughout the year. I have only my old mother to feed. The rice I receive by boiling paddy is sufficient for our consumption throughout the year. But scope of this work is diminishing quickly as the production of paddy in the local field has ceased since acquisition of the land. We are now facing great crisis, as we have to purchase all the food from the market while being deprived of jobs that are so far available in the area. I don’t know what to do. Maybe we have to die without food.

Asked about her involvement in the movement against land acquisition, she said, I attended all the meetings and processions of the SALC. On 1st December when the police began the fencing of the land, I was among the protesters present on the field. But on the next day, 2nd December, I had to attend my duties, but when I got the news of clashes taking place in the field, I came out of the factory and joined the protesters. I was quite disheartened witnessing the huge force delegated to acquire the land on 2nd December. Though I didn’t own any piece of land, it seemed that I had lost everything with this land.

Kamala was one of the landless in Kadampur who felt so much at one with the peasants losing their land due to land acquisition. Economic interests were often contradictory and conflicting within the people of a single locality. So, when measured in terms of economic interests, a village society might get divided into separate interest groups cross-cutting their caste, religion and party affiliations. Singur provided us with one such example where conflicting interests associated with land acquisition had polarized the villagers, the castes and even the party loyalties. Some leaders of the opposition TMC party had turned strong supporters of land acquisition and identified themselves with the ruling CPI(M) party. On the other hand, some CPI(M) supporters joined the movement against land acquisition, mainly to save their lives and livelihoods. acquisition. Perhaps, in the government’s understanding, industrialization means the big industries or the investment of corporate capital.

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Land Acquisition and the Land Givers But what was the explanation of the villagers who subsequently handed over their land to the government? Did they think it was reasonable enough to part with their land by selling it to the government? Or were they motivated by the policy of the ruling party and gave up their land? Kamal Bag, a member of Bagdi community (SC), owned 3.25 acres of land till the issuance of notification of land acquisition in the area that included most of his land. He had been a primary school teacher and had retired two years back. Out of 3.25 acres of land, he had himself purchased two acres and the rest he inherited from his father. At present, he was at the centre of discussion in the village as he already received the cheque for the part of his land which was acquired by the government. In fact, he had participated in the movement against land acquisition at the initial stage but quit after a while. He justified his stand by saying: Initially I thought that we would lose everything once our land is acquired. Later I realized that we will be benefited instead if we part with our land. The land proposed for small car project is mostly the low and marshy land, though some portion of it is of course producing two crops. Knowing very well that the land is a low land, I had purchased it in 1992. My intention was to sell it off whenever the price will go up reasonably well. I had purchased the land at the rate of Rs 87,000 per acre. Now I have got a lump sum of Rs 18 lakh after handing over two acres of land to the government. I have benefited immensely from the government’s move for land acquisition. Once I had leased out 0.75 acre of land to a peasant for sharecropping, he immediately registered himself as a bargadar of this land.

About his political leanings, Kamal Bag said, ‘I have been a supporter of the TMC party since its inception.’ He repeatedly stated that he had offered his land for acquisition as neither he nor his sons were ever interested in cultivation and being a schoolteacher, he had purchased the land as an investment that would give him dividends from future sales. So, his case could not be equated to other landowners who solely or principally lived off the piece of land that was being acquired. Finally, he said that he was waiting to sell off the remaining land outside the project area once the project came up there and land price soared further. Santash Mandal was known as ‘jami dewyar dale’ (a member of land-givers’ group) since he received compensation money from the government. The

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whole village had since been divided into two dals or groups overshadowing all other divisions and differences: those who had received compensation for their lands (that is, jami dewyar dale); and those against receiving compensation and selling land to the government (that is, jami na-dewyar dale). I asked one girl to help me locate the house of Santash Mandal and she promptly said, ‘Oh, you want to meet the person who belongs to jami dewyar dale. That is his house.’ Santash Mandal belonged to the Gowala caste that fell in the OBC category. He owned an old concrete house at one end of the village. He worked in the civil defence department of West Bengal government and was posted in Kolkata. He used to commute daily to Kolkata from his village. Santash clarified under what circumstance he had to accept compensation: Initially I was with the villagers in their movement against land acquisition. I used to participate in the meetings and rallies organized by the SALC. I was never in favour of parting with our land for the Tata project. But due to some family compulsions, and this land was our family property, I have received the compensation money. I still support the movement against land acquisition, but could not join them any more as I have been isolated from the agitating people.

He continued, Since then I have been spending my days in a depressed condition. I have lost social life inside the village. I don’t move outside my house except in exigencies. Practically I have been socially boycotted. I am passing my days in a helpless condition. I wouldn’t get anybody’s help in case of any problem.

After the Land Acquisition After the forceful land acquisition, the village had also changed substantially in its political character. Nothing remained the same after most of the villagers were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods. Participation of the village people in political activities as well as the forms of leadership took a new turn after acquisition of the land by the government. Women of the marginal peasant families, particularly the families of the sharecroppers, conveyed their frustration while talking about the movement after the forceful land acquisition. Two women of the sharecropper families said,

186  |  Ru r a l Po l i t i c s i n I n d i a We are now completely jobless. We have no food to subsist on. We would not get any compensation either. Though the government declared to give compensation to the registered bargadars at the rate of 25 percent of the actual value of the acquired land, we are not entitled to get anything as we are not registered bargadars. We did everything that the leaders of the land movement instructed us to do. We were even tortured by the police and thrown into jail. But we did not get anything. Now what to do? Some of the leaders of the movement who are landowners would get huge compensation at the end of the day in lieu of their land.

A landless woman who subsisted on livestock rearing said, We could not defend our land. The land was fenced off. Our leaders assured us that the government would not be able to acquire the land. We have done everything that the leaders wanted us to do. But we failed to protect it. Now what is the meaning of the movement? Jagannath came that day to request me to participate in a rally. I said ‘no’ initially. But finally I joined the rally. I can’t refuse them as I have to stay with them.

If one made a round in the entire village, one could guess the mood of the participant villagers. Though they were still participating in the programmes run by the SALC, they were disheartened and uncertain about the fate of the movement. And sometimes, they opted for their own form of action and tried to break off the industry wall. It seemed that the collective actions of the peasants had been somewhat diffused due to several reasons. A prosperous farmer, Jagannath, was known as one of the main leaders of SALC. After the fencing of the acquired land was over, a sense of frustration seemed to be prevailing in him. He said, The real power lies with the people, who can do great things if they like to. Everybody understands the situation, but the movement has become weaker as most of the people are going out of the village in search of work. How could they join the movement if they are so deeply engaged in bread-earning?16

But it is important to note here that the poor who could spare very little time to participate in the movements since they were busy earning their subsistence income, had actually participated and got mobilized with a lot of 16. See also Elster (1989). Elster talks about needs and opportunities, and says that those who need the most to organize in defence of their rights (including the right to livelihood) lack the opportunity to do so.

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enthusiasm in large numbers in the initial stage of the anti-land acquisition movement. Was there then any another reason why the common peasantry became reluctant to participate in the said movement? However, in the course of the anti-land acquisition movement, Jagannath emerged not only as a leader of the land movement but also drew closer to the TMC party. This association with the main opposition party of the state seemed to have changed his attitude towards the people and the movement as a whole. Now he dissociated himself from the common people who were agitating for a common cause, and thought himself above the people and blamed them for their apparent reluctance to participate in the movement with greater vigour. It seems to be the voice of the organized domain of politics that often belittles the role of the people and thinks itself above the common people who have to be ‘made conscious’, organized into movements and led to achieve certain goals. When I met Jagannath at the initial stage of the movement, he appeared as one of the common villagers fearful of losing land due to acquisition and agitating against it. At that time, he used to explain that it was not the movement of the party but a movement of the common people. Now his tone had changed, presumably due to his rise to the position of a leader of the movement and the party as well. Jagannath’s elder brother, Biswanath, had also been involved in the antiland acquisition movement but he was not associated with any party. Among the three brothers, he spent much time in cultivation and had turned idle after the government forcibly acquired the land. A different type of frustration had probably set in him at being deprived of his usual daily agricultural activities. Why was he so reluctant to join politics despite being active in the anti-land acquisition movement? He said, ‘I don’t have any interest in politics.’ Could we explain this disillusionment with party politics as another form of politics which lay beyond the organized domain of politics? Probably, the answer was in the negative as Biswanath tried to argue mainly in relation to the state politics. But when the common people got disenchanted with the organized parties, they could think of charting out their own independent path of reacting to the unfolding events. This very often gave birth to independent activities of the subaltern people, though such activities might not remain independent for long as other brands of organized domain would seep into their movement with all types of support and ‘guidance’, and ultimately try to usurp the independent actions of the people. But the younger brother of Jagannath had a different story to tell. Sumanta, in his late twenties, represented some of the younger people in the village who

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seemed to be disillusioned with the organized political parties as a whole and opted for a militant resolution of the ongoing land movement. He used to participate in all the protest programmes along with his friends. Earlier, he had gone to Delhi to work in a jeweller’s shop but could not adjust to the tough working condition there and finally, came back due to ill health. By that time, his brothers had purchased two submersible tube wells and he was given the charge to look after the same. After the sudden halt in agricultural activities due to land acquisition, he had to seek another job, this time as a carpenter’s assistant in Kolkata. As the anti-land acquisition movement had lost its steam to some extent at the later stage, he became vocal criticizing the way the movement was led, mainly, by opposition parties. Though one of his elder brothers had turned into a leader of the movement with close association with the TMC party, he seemed to be charting out his own course of action along with other youths of the village. Sumanta expressed his disillusionment with the movement in no uncertain terms. The leaders are always preaching that we should pursue the democratic path in our movement against land acquisition. But the government is taking all the undemocratic means by using police forces to suppress our movement. In face of the police repression we could not do anything and the people have indeed become demoralized. How can we resist state repression by sticking to the path of democratic movement? From the very beginning, we should have pursued the path of more militant movements as the people of Nandigram17 have done. While we failed, the Nandigram people have successfully resisted the SEZ project by militant ways of struggle. Our leaders are not realizing this.

His assessment of the opposition parties that had joined the movement and taken the mantle of leadership on their own was also revealing. Sumanta said, Different opposition parties have joined the movement in their own interests. They are more interested in expanding their sphere of influence with an eye to the coming elections. They have little concern about the interest of the peasants, about whether the peasants can defend their rights over the lands they have been cultivating for generations. How can they lead the anti-land acquisition movement? 17. In Nandigram, the peasantry was united from the beginning and stopped all governmental works by obstructing their way to the villages. They dug the roads so that the government personnel and police forces could not enter into their villages.

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Then, what alternative was he suggesting for the movement? He said, We have to go for offensive movements. We have formed one team comprising of a few youths of the village. We have tried several times to break open the fencing and enter the field. But after the incident of 2nd December, the villagers have become panicky about police repression and hence, not many people are rallying behind such militant movements. Even villagers are participating in the construction works going on inside the project area due to their economic hardship. We have threatened a few of such villagers to prevent them from participating in the Tata project.

Sumanta and youths like him were frustrated with the way the land movement got caught within the legal proceedings of the court and were desperately seeking a way out of the situation. A rebel seemed to have grown within him throughout the long course of anti-land acquisition movement. The rebel was not satisfied with the path the movement had traversed so far and raised some critiques about the efficacy of that path. But he had presumably no clear idea of an alternative path either. Dhiren Dhara had been a reluctant political activist in the beginning of the anti-land acquisition movement. But in the course of the movement, he arrived at some new realizations about politics and political parties. In this period of one year, he emerged as one of the leaders of anti-land acquisition movement in Singur.18 From his earlier confinement to village-level social activities, he came out in the broader arena of politics at the state, and even at the national level, with growing importance of the Singur movement and its projection by different political parties, NGOs and social activists. He represented the SALC in Delhi twice: first, in a programme organized by an NGO; and later, in a multi-state campaign programme initiated and led by the TMC leader, Mamata Banerjee. He prepared his speech in English and read out the same at the Delhi programmes. Throughout the state, several programmes were organized during this period by different people in support of the Singur movement; he was sent to represent the SALC in a number of such meetings. In some parts of the state, anti-land acquisition movements flared up during this period and, obviously, SALC leaders were invited to those places to narrate and share their experiences in organizing 18. Notably, he has also been elected as panchayat pradhan in Beraberi gram panchayat in the panchayat elections held in 2008.

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the movement. Dhiren also attended many such programmes and enjoyed sharing his experiences as an active participant in the movement. Though the movement in Singur was on the wane, he was not frustrated like some other leaders of the movement. Instead, he seemed quite excited about his new activities. He said, I feel quite proud when people from different corners invite us and want to hear the experiences we have gathered during the movement. In my view, the Singur movement has not failed. Indeed, it has shattered the long impasse in the political field of West Bengal and has been a precursor to many other land movements in the state and outside. People from other places come here to learn from our movement. This is no less achievement for our movement in spite of the fact that the land has been acquired forcibly and we could not resist the same.

The growing maturity of Dhiren could be seen from the way he was assessing the impact of Nandigram movement and comparing it with their own. He said, There are a number of differences in the situations of Nandigram and Singur. While in Nandigram the government intended to acquire a big area including a number of habitations, here it has acquired only a portion of agricultural land leaving the habitations untouched. Further, a large amount of land here belonged to landowners who are either non-cultivators or absentee landlords, and did not have much stake in the land being acquired. In Kadampur, for instance, out of 160 families, around 30 families are non-cultivators and absentee landlords who have principally offered their land for the Tata project. Finally, we have had to face too much interference by political parties and social activists that created hindrance to the spontaneous development of the movement. So unlike in Nandigram, the Singur people could not chalk out their own path of struggles.

He complained that the villagers of Kadampur had been deprived of benefits and facilities to be delivered through the panchayat system due to their involvement in the land movement. Though he was the panchayat member, the CPI(M)-led board never bothered to consult him on the development issue. Even the BPL list had been revamped to exclude all the erstwhile BPL families. This was done purposely to punish the poor villagers of Kadampur for their defiance vis-à-vis the government. Niren Dhara was the elder brother of Dhiren Dhara. Though the two brothers lived separately, the family land of around 1.5 acres was cultivated by Niren. Apart from this, he sharecropped in more than 1 acre of land, but had

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not registered his name as bargadar. The government had acquired the total land. Why didn’t he register himself as a bargadar? He replied, ‘Parer babake aami baba balina (I don’t recognize other’s property as mine).’ This was a strange logic for not registering one’s name as bargadar. As the bargadar did not get ownership right over the piece of land he used to sharecrop in, what was the use of registering one’s name? This argument might look strange at the face of it, but if we go through the history of land reforms in the country, we would find that the proposal to register the bargadars’ name was first recommended by Sir Francis Floud as a primary step to identify the real tillers and then go for land redistribution on the basis of the list. The fact is that the Floud Commission Report19 on land reform has never been implemented by the successive governments in the colonial and post-colonial period, though, belatedly, the Left Front government began registering the names of the bargadars in West Bengal. Niren seemed to have raised the same issue in a different way. He didn’t want to register someone else’s land in his own name, that is, he defied the half-hearted reform and in that way, aspired for a full-fledged land reform that would give the bargadars ownership right over the lands they were sharecropping for generations. After the fencing of the land, Niren’s family became idle. Even the women of this family used to labour on their land. Now, they were facing the biggest problem of getting food for so many mouths in the family three times a day. Niren was quite frustrated over the situation that showed no ray of hope. But he did not agree to hand over his land in lieu of money. He reacted to the proposal of receiving compensation saying, ‘I would rather donate the land to the Tatas than accept the compensation. Tata kore khak (Let Tata earn from it).’ Here also, the same voice of defiance could be heard from a subaltern who had lost all means of livelihood due to land acquisition but still remained obstinate not to sell his land to the government. He also said, ‘I never entered the project area after fencing. Though I have severe hardship, I did not try for a job in the project.’ In Kadampur, most of the people were not seeking jobs in the construction work in the Tata project. It was, to them, a kind of surrender to the government and negation 19. Bandyopadhyay (2007: 228–29) observed, ‘…there was no demand (of the Communist Party) for having tenancy rights for the bargadars as recommended by Floud Commission. The reason is not far to seek. It is the middle class fetishism of the Communist Party led by the urban middle class elite. With all their pretensions of being “declassed” they remain to their salt and to their class interests. The bulk of the members of the Communist Party and other left parties in West Bengal are from the petti-bourgeoisie or middle class.’

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of the movement for recovering land. So, those going inside the fencing to work as day labourers were feeling somewhat isolated from the village community. After around 15 days, on my next visit to the village, I met Niren’s wife and came to know that Niren had joined the construction works in the Tata project as a day labourer. She said that under compulsion of financial hardship, her husband had joined their work against his will. Otherwise, the family had to starve. Hence, finally, when ‘neither the law nor the courts have been of much use to the victims of forced expropriation of land’, the defiant peasant seemed to have to come to a compromise with the order of the day (Nielsen, 2011: 38). But this compelling compromise did not necessarily douse the flames of defiance in him which was evident from his refusal to accept compensation money even in the face of starvation. Kadampur had been witnessing a peasants’ resistance which was perhaps unprecedented in the period of Left Front rule. This stirring was the effect of the government’s decision to acquire land and dispossess thousands of peasants of their livelihood which was dependent solely or mainly on agriculture. The peasants were resisting the proposed conversion of the area into an industry, possibly by virtue of the ‘subsistence ethic’ which was a given of peasant economics, as argued by Scott (1976). But the peasants in the contemporary political regime were more likely reconstructing this ‘subsistence logic’ as a result of their increasing interaction with state-led politics. And so, the resistance of the peasantry now seems to be distinct from that of the past. Peasants, today, do not have to struggle against the exploitation of the landlords in their local setting. They are now struggling against the government with the demand of the means of labour for their families. The government also seems not to avoid the livelihood questions of the population as ‘the major characteristic of the contemporary regime of power’ in India is ‘governmentalization of the state’ whereby the ‘regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 34).

7 Caste and Power in Rural Context

Of late, a number of scholars have attempted to argue that caste as a system is dying very fast and individual castes are flourishing (for example, Gupta, 2005b; Mayer, 1996; Searle–Chatterjee and Sharma, 1994; Srinivas, 2003). Their argument that ‘vertical social system’ defined by hierarchical relationships is decaying and castes are becoming like ‘horizontally disconnected ethnic groups’ draws on mainly two ongoing processes in contemporary India. One of these seems to be the breakdown of the closed village economy and decaying of caste-based division of labour. And the other process, according to them, is the significant spread of democratic politics in post-colonial India. The present ethnographic research on Kalipur and Kadampur reveals clearly that ‘the localized traditional system of production of food grains and other necessities based on caste-wise division of labour’ (Srinivas, 2003: 455) has changed a lot in recent times. The hierarchy based on ritual purity and pollution that was an essential characteristic of the caste system has also undergone profound changes under the impact of modernization and other socio-economic factors. But does it mean that caste as a system has collapsed? How far do the people from subordinate caste groups in rural areas emerge as leaders in the positions of power? These questions seem to be important when the scholars argue that in India, ‘social and economic conditions have connived to limit the capacity of subordinate groups to effectively exercise their rights’ and ‘with ritualised exclusions and deeply embedded hierarchical relations, the caste system had reinforced political marginalization and socio-economic inequalities...’ ( Jha and Pushpendra, 2012: 25). This chapter seeks to explore, through a comparative study of these two villages, how different caste groups are functioning with all their subtleties in the particular social setting and to what extent traditional caste system has been transformed under the impact of socio-economic and political reforms undertaken, particularly during the three decades of uninterrupted Left Front rule.

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Caste and Labour In the two villages, Kalipur and Kadampur, the Bagdis, the Dules and the Muchis, that is, the SC communities (and the ST community as well), in general, possessed either no land or only meagre amounts of land. They had to labour mainly as agricultural labourer in the lands owned by the middle and higher castes of the villages. While in Kalipur, the proportion of SC people in the total population of the village was 41 per cent, they possessed only 8.15 per cent of the village agricultural land. Furthermore, 69 per cent of the SC families, that is, more than two-third of the SC population, were landless. The average amount of land that one landed SC family owned was only 0.07 acre, while the average amount was 1.5 acres for an upper or GC family. These figures amply showed that the SC people of Kalipur represented mainly the propertyless and economically backward sections of the rural people. The SC communities were so much identified with manual labour that the uppercaste people called their hamlets ‘labour para’, which meant hamlets with inhabitants comprising labourers in the main. In Kadampur, while the proportion of the Bagdi (the only SC community in the village) people was 42 per cent of the total population, they held only 20 per cent of the village agricultural land. Here, the amount of landless among the SC people was as high as 58 per cent and the average landholding of the landed SC families was 0.2 acre only.1 The landholding status of different social groups could be discerned from the fact that 52 per cent of the total landless families in Kalipur were from SC communities (of the rest, 27.14 per cent were from ST community and 16.43 per cent from Muslim community), while 80 per cent of the total landless in Kadampur belonged to the SC category. It could also be seen from the household survey that in Kalipur, 73 per cent of the SC households (and 95 per cent of the ST households) depended primarily on agricultural labour for their livelihood. The rest of the SC households depended either on cultivation or on non-farm works. The SC cultivators were mainly sharecroppers or lessee, though some of them depended on their own meagre amount of land. The non-farm works on which the SC families of Kalipur depended were also mostly based on agriculture, for instance, labouring in cold storages, trading and transporting vegetables and other agricultural products. It may be noted that, unlike in 1. I have considered here the landholding status of the villagers just before their land was acquired by the GoWB for the proposed motor car industry. The landholding status of the villagers has undergone a big change due to land acquisition, in which another 30 families were rendered landless.

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Kalipur, in Kadampur, a few SC families owned sizable amount of land, on an average 2 acres or more, and managed to get a few government or private jobs, rendering their conditions and the overall status of the SC community in the village better in comparison with the SC people of Kalipur. It is obvious from the given figures that primary dependence of SC people on agricultural labour stemmed from the condition of sheer landlessness from which the SC people at large had been suffering since long. Apart from the condition of landlessness, these people did not seem to have much access to non-farm means of livelihood. Rather, they were forced to eke out their earnings depending mainly on agriculture, labouring on the lands of the higher and middle-caste people. Even those who used to cultivate land as sharecroppers, registered or unregistered, had to suffer from losses due to payment of one-third2 of the produce as share to the landowners. At a time when profit from agriculture was nosediving due to increasing costs of all inputs, leave alone the risks involved in getting proper yields, this forced parting of onethird of the produce would have had a definite impact on the earnings of the sharecroppers. In fact, one hardly gets more than the cost of his own labour by sharecropping a certain piece of land. Sometimes, they could not even recover the cost of cultivation of certain crops, but still had to pay the stipulated share to the landowners resulting in indebtedness. It can probably be said that with the spread of market economy, implementation of land reform measures to a certain extent and above all, the increasing assertion of the so-called low-caste people in the countryside, the rural labourers have been largely successful in coming out of several forms of bondages sustained by the traditional caste system which they had suffered for hundreds of years. Today, the labourers of rural West Bengal are apparently freely negotiating the sale of their labour in the labour market. But this freedom is severely constrained by different factors. First, the socially backward rural people have very little access to non-farm works, which are scarce in the rural areas and not easily available to them in the urban areas. Second, these rural people who seek non-farm jobs in the urban areas are very often engaged in the most insecure and risky jobs in the unorganized sector, and paid the 2. The West Bengal Land Reforms Act stipulates that a bargadar should give one-fourth of the crop share to the landowner when the cost of production is entirely borne by the sharecroppers and half of the crop in case the landowners share half the cost of production. But in these villages, like many other villages in West Bengal, the amount of share that the bargadars offered was one-third of the crop when the landowner did not share any cost of cultivation. This practice seemed to be continuing depending on the ignorance of the sharecroppers about the right sanctioned by the law and the reluctance of the government and political parties to help implement the law.

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lowest amount of wages. In Kadampur, being located not far off from the urban industrial areas, a number of people had opted for non-farm works in the urban areas. But their experiences had not been pleasant and many of them had to come back to the agricultural work, which seemed to them a more reliable means of livelihood. Such people were seen in Kadampur to be actively participating in the anti-land acquisition movement. Third, labourers in rural West Bengal are generally quite abundant and hence, they have to remain idle for long periods in a year.3 This hampers the bargaining power of the labouring people and increases their dependence on the landowning community belonging to the upper castes in a particular village/locality. In both Kalipur and Kadampur, the three factors that restrain free labour were found to be operating, though to different degrees. It was evident that principally due to the above-mentioned constraints, the caste-wise division of labour had been enduring in both the villages. The members of subordinate groups faced restrictions ‘that prevent their entry into the occupations of majority group members’, which, ultimately, led to occupational discrimination (Thorat and Newman, 2007: 4122). This seems to be apparently contrary to the observation of Srinivas (2003) that the system of production based on caste-wise division of labour was ‘fast breaking down’ in rural India. Rather, the earlier observation of Srinivas that ‘The lower castes are tenants, servants, landless labourers, debtors and clients of the higher castes’ (Srinivas, 1966: 19) remained more relevant to the ground situation existing in rural West Bengal. Though the strictures, based on Hindu Dharmashastra, on caste-wise division of labour have, in the main, disappeared from the rural scene,4 the traditional 3. Most of the agricultural labourers in Kalipur expressed their grievances over the lack of employment available in the village. They reported that in a year, they used to get hardly three to four months of work in agriculture. Very recently, in June–July 2007, they were given job cards under NREGA and were assigned work altogether for only seven days’ in the last year. In Kadampur, the landless labourers had better access to non-farm works due to its proximity to the urban industrial areas. 4. Only on some occasions involving ritual practices and social rites, the people of certain castes were seen in Kalipur (and in its adjacent village, Madhupur) to render their services mainly to the upper castes at large. The Napits, the Kamar, the Kumors and the Muchis had to serve the upper castes during ritual practices and rites or ceremonies performed by different castes for religious purposes. The above-mentioned client castes of the village, by serving these duties to the upper castes, used to follow their traditional past, though sometimes as a compulsion. One Napit woman said, ‘My sons are very much reluctant to serve the village people on their rituals and ceremonies. They feel ashamed to perform such practices within the village. They don’t like to take the payment in kind which is usually given to the service castes. But they have to serve in various ceremonies and rites of the upper castes, as they are our traditional jajman. Even, in any case, if my sons are not able to serve them, we have to manage the job by arranging other Napits outside the village since it is our caste duty.’ Interestingly, one of the two sons of this Napit woman has opted for hair cutting as his profession and is now running a saloon in nearby Dhaniakhali town.

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pattern of division of labour based on caste hierarchy has been sustained under economic compulsions. Further, the dependence of the rural labourers on the upper-caste landed community for their mere survival seems to seriously hinder the attainment of autonomy in economic relations. Landownership has always remained a pillar of caste division in the society. Anthropological Survey of India had similar observations to make in its study of 4,635 communities/castes under its ‘People of India’ project, where it noted ‘better control over land and other resources’, as cited in Shah (2003), as one of the characteristic features of higher castes in India (Singh, 1993: 79). The Anthropological Survey of India had also observed that ‘a higher position in the socio-ritual hierarchy’ was another important characteristic of the ‘highly placed castes’ in India (Singh, 1993: 79). Now, we will examine how far this socio-ritual hierarchy exists in Kalipur and Kadampur in the contemporary period. Has this hierarchy also been breaking down or sustaining in some or other forms? It can be seen that division of the society into the so-called chhotoloks and bhadraloks, based on caste positions of different social groups, is still prevalent in rural West Bengal. Even in the rural power structure, based on the practices of grassroots democracy and caste-wise reservations in the local self-governments, the old hierarchical order seems to be largely continuing. But these social and political aspects of caste assume different shapes in different villages depending on the peculiar conditions of the particular villages. In Kalipur and Kadampur, the socio-political developments did not follow similar patterns and hence, resulted in different relationships among the different caste groups of the two villages. I will now focus on the social aspects of caste that made the differences prominent between Kalipur and Kadampur.

Caste and Social Hierarchy

Kalipur In Kalipur, the difference between the SC communities and the dominant Mahishya, and other upper castes, was quite evident from their separate habitations. Though these were not located far away from one another, the habitations were distinct in the shapes and conditions of the houses of the respective caste-based hamlets. The upper-caste houses were comparatively spacious and mostly built with bricks, some of them two-storied with brick boundary

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walls. The SC habitations consisting of mud houses were very congested, with no fencing separating one house from another, no space for separate kitchen, toilet or cattle-keeping, humans and animals huddled in the same rooms, no separate space for bathing for the women, no household water supply and no sanitation facilities. As the panchayat had been campaigning urging every rural household to avail the subsidized toilet supplied by it, in most cases, the SC families constructed the subsidized toilet but were using the space not for defecation but for storing fuel, firewood, etc. In fact, these people had little space left for constructing such toilets and hence feared that these would further pollute the homestead rather than improve their sanitation, particularly when they did not have water supply in their houses. Generally, one SC hamlet had only one hand pump, which was commonly used for all domestic purposes by all the households and therefore, always remained busy. Though electric connection had been provided in the village as long back as in 1984, and the electric posts were located very close to the SC hamlets, almost none of the SC households had electric connection. Most of the SC people were illiterate. While the present generation children were attending schools, because of the government literacy campaign and huge pumping of funds for primary education, their progress in education seemed abysmally low. I have witnessed that some children of Class IV were unable to write their own names legibly in the vernacular language. In particular seasons, the children of SC families had to be engaged in cultivation activities apart from their day-to-day involvement in various domestic labours like cattle grazing. A visit to the village primary school and the ICDS immediately revealed the stark disparity between the children of the upper castes and those from the SC background, distinct not only by their attires and appearances, but by the pattern of their sitting in the classrooms (the upper-caste children generally occupying the front seats) and their responses to class lessons (the upper-caste children responding the most). Most of the children from SC families failed to continue their studies beyond the primary level. In Kalipur, among the 37 people who had passed the secondary examination, only two belonged to the SC communities. Interestingly, the number of government employees was same from both the SCs and the higher-caste population of the village. While two SC persons got employment in government services (by dint of reservation though), the same number of people from the GC categories could manage the same. But such government services held by a few SC people did not in any way change the social status of these communities. Rather, the two service-holder families got detached from

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the rest of the communities, through constructing concrete houses away from their caste habitats and through their efforts to upgrade their status for the possible inclusion into the bhadralok category. This phenomenon might be an instance of upward mobility of some individuals belonging to the lower caste. But whether this upward mobility of a few individuals of the backward communities initiates a process of upward mobility of the communities as a whole probably depends upon certain additional factors that we will examine while discussing the case of Kadampur. The three lower castes of Kalipur, namely the Bagdis, the Dules and the Muchis, belong to the asprishya sudra caste in the caste hierarchy of West Bengal as defined by Risley.5 They are presumed to be members of the non-Brahmanical social groups that do not follow the Brahmanical rituals and cultural patterns. That means they are not considered as the nabasakha castes (like the Sodgopes, Mahishyas, Gowalas and Napits) that follow the Brahmanical ceremonial activities, rituals, customs, commensalities, behavioural patterns and values. Separate priests, who are considered lower among the Brahmins, perform the ritual ceremonies and worshipping of these lower castes. But both the upper and lower castes of Kalipur were seen to be participating, almost with equal jubilation, in the main festival of the village on the occasion of Kali puja (worshipping Goddess Kali). This had been the sholo ana6 festival of the neighbouring villages, Kalipur and Madhupur, which a few Mahishyas had initiated around 15 years back, who used to play the key role in organizing the same. However, as the festival began to attract larger crowd, amounting to a few thousands from the neighbouring villages, the Youth Club of Kalipur–being the only organized body besides the party in the village–took over the role of organizing the puja. As the club was dominated by SC–ST youth, the upper-caste people slowly distanced themselves from the organizing role in the festival. Interestingly, the club did not even collect donations from 5. ‘In Bengal the castes are divided into two main groups: 1) the Brahmins and 2) the sudras. The second class is further divided into four subclasses indicating their status as regards food and water: a) the sat sudra group includes such castes as the kayastha and nabasakhas, b) then come the jalacharaniya-sudras, being those castes not technically belonging to nabasakha group, from whom Brahmins and members of the higher castes can take water, c) then follow the jalbyabahariya-sudras, castes from whose hands a brahmin can not take water, d) last stands the asprishya sudra caste whose touch is so impure as to pollute even the Ganges water and their contact must be avoided. They are thus the untouchables’ (Risley, 1891: 270), as quoted by Ghurye (1991: 39–40). 6. Sholo ana meant something belonging to the whole village community. Hence, in the sholo ana festival, all the communities had equal right to participate. But this did not happen in the previous period, when upper-caste domination was more explicit in the village. But in the contemporary period, with the assertion of the lower castes in different fields, they could no more be segregated from the sholo ana festivals.

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the Madhupur Mahishyas who were in the leading role at the initial stage. Madhupur village is numerically dominated by the Mahishyas, who were thus excluded from the festival that eventually turned into a sholo ana festival of Kalipur, the village numerically dominated by the lower castes and tribal people. Thus, this festival indicated the lower-caste mobility in the socio-religious hierarchy where a caste belonging to the non-Brahmanical social group came forward to assume a key role in organizing a puja which had, so far, been an exclusive domain of the upper castes. Recently, a few SC families were performing Saraswati puja (worship of a Hindu goddess, the goddess of knowledge) in their own houses by employing the services of those Brahmin priests who usually performed pujas in upper-caste households and are not supposed to attend rituals in the lower-caste households. This might be another indication of the lower caste’s effort ‘to move up in the ritual hierarchy’ (Srinivas, 1987: 310). But the disparity between the so-called upper castes and SC communities had not been obliterated in spite of the important role that the lower castes played in a social function. Rather, it seemed to be an aberration in the stratified rural society where the bhadralok–chhotolok division had been persisting with considerable vigour. This bhadralok–chhotolok division represents the same social hierarchy based on traditional caste division in rural West Bengal where, invariably, bhadraloks mean the upper-caste people and chhotoloks mean the lower-caste people (and also the tribal people). I have found it common among the GC people to look down upon the SC people as chhotoloks in the most derogatory sense of the term. The SC people also used to address the higher-caste people as babus or bhadraloks. These socially significant terminologies somehow reflect the existence of the traditional elite–subaltern relationship on the basis of domination–subordination to some extent in the contemporary period. The upper-caste people were very much reluctant to visit the SC–ST hamlets and generally did not take food in lower-caste houses. The higher-caste women would never visit the SC–ST paras and tried to avoid close contact with the lower castes and tribal people. The labouring SC–ST people had to wash their plates after taking food and drinks in the upper-caste households, while the economically and socially established lower-caste persons (like schoolteacher) were not required to do so. But Anupama, an elderly woman of a prosperous Mahishya family, had gone to Chennai, a city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for the treatment of her eyes with an SC tutor of children of the family. The teacher had escorted her to Chennai. He belonged to the Bagdi community.

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His elder brother was employed as a manager of a jeweller’s unit in Chennai. Anupama had taken shelter in his residence in Chennai. Outside the village and in a far-flung city, how the relationship between two families – one from the Mahishya and the other from the Bagdi caste of the SC community – was taking shape seemed quite interesting. In the village, one could not perhaps imagine that a woman of a prosperous Mahishya family would stay with a Bagdi family, even in times of distress. This indicates that the traditional caste relation might be more explicit in the village than outside. Also, the children of the upper-caste families were seen to be reluctant to take food together with SC children in the village ICDS centre, though surprisingly, their parents came very often to the centre for collecting the nutritious food meant for children. The children of the upper-caste families mostly used to have mid-day meals in the village primary school, though often sitting separately from the SC children. The upper-caste people, even the younger ones among them, rarely had any friends in the SC and ST communities. The friend circles in the village were formed largely on the basis of caste groups. The people of higher castes (Brahmins and Kayasthas) did not seem to have any prejudice in mingling with the Mahishyas, the dominant middle-caste people, in the village and vice versa, though generally in the addas, people of the same caste were seen to flock together. But there existed a strong current of caste feeling among these castes as well, where the erstwhile dominating caste, Kayasthas, looked down upon the Mahishyas labelling them as chashas (the cultivators) in a derogatory sense; and the Mahishyas tried to undermine the Kayasthas by calling them lazy and worthless. These people were quite reluctant to have inter-caste marital relationship between them. When a Kayastha unemployed youth married a girl from a neo-rich Mahishya family, the parents of the girl vehemently opposed the marriage. The instances from Kalipur are quite revealing to understand the degree of caste feeling prevailing in rural West Bengal even among the supporters and activists of the principal ruling party of the state, the CPI(M). When I met Jiban Pal of a rich, landed Mahishya family while passing through village road to visit the panchayat pradhan and village SC leader, Khagen Malik, he advised me to meet other party leaders of the upper caste and termed Khagen as faltu (worthless) who did not know anything about the village. This showed the utter contempt of the dominant caste people towards the SC representative in the panchayat. Noteworthy was the political affiliation of Jiban Pal who was a member of the CPI(M) party, the largest party of the left in India.

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Jiban’s comment about Khagen presumably reflected both his class antagonism and caste hatred towards the lower castes in general. The power position in the village seemed to also have a bearing on his attitude towards the SC pradhan who was crucially dependent on the higher-caste party leaders both in managing the village affairs and in running the panchayat. This part of the story I shall deal with in more detail later. The second instance was the attitude expressed by Madhabi, wife of the village party leader, Monoj Dutta, who was sarcastic about the SC–ST advancement attained during the Left Front rule. As I met her just before the state assembly elections, she commented on the impending elections: My husband was saying that in the coming elections the government could fall. Indeed, a change is needed. It might seem an unusual comment from me, but I must say that the chhotoloks would be cut to size once the government is changed. These people have become so adamant that they don’t care for anyone. They can’t be taken to task even if they don’t work in the field properly. In any case, all the intellectual works have still to be done by us. Can they do such works? Do they have the brains? The persons from SC–ST communities are now becoming panchayat members and even pradhan, but who are performing the real works of panchayat other than people like us?

Though she was active in the Mahila Samiti, the women’s front of the CPI(M), she even hailed the possibility of a defeat of the party in the pending elections in the expectation that a change in government in the state would cut the SC–ST people to size. She seemed to reflect the caste view of the GC people by saying that the SC–ST people did not have brains to do challenging work like running the panchayat, which had to be run practically by upper-caste people. Here, by the position of a person in the society, she meant the caste position stipulated by the varna system of the Hindu religion. This showed the existence of caste hierarchy entrenched in the consciousness of a lady so closely associated with the CPI(M) party. Even one landless agricultural labourer, Kesta of the Mahishya caste, differentiated himself from SC and ST labourers with whom he used to toil in the fields. According to him, the lower-caste people did not have any manners and hence, he could not find any friends among them. In this instance, the caste feeling in him was probably strong enough to deter him from being one with his class brethren. Among the SC communities of Kalipur, the Bagdis were more dependent on sharecropping the lands of the babus, that is, upper-caste Kayasthas.

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They were also accused, by the tribal people and other SC groups, for being close to the babus and for not joining the struggles against the landed gentry wholeheartedly in the 1960s and the 1970s. Noticeably, many of the Bagdi sharecroppers did not register their names as bargadars despite being very close to the CPI(M) during the Left Front regime. The Bagdis were also allegedly favoured by the local CPI(M) leadership in maximizing the panchayat benefits. Ruud (1999b) observed, in his study, the same close link which was created between the local CPI(M) and one particular jati. Ironically, in his study too, the Bagdis were the favoured caste to the local CPI(M) party leadership. He stated: Undoubtedly in other localities the relationship is with other groups, not necessarily jatis, but the process and linkages are likely to be the same. Favoured groups stem from and constitute the party’s local vigilantes. In return, these activists receive particular attention from the party’s local leadership. (Ibid.: 274)

It seems to be a continuance of the old patron–client relationship between two hierarchical castes, here the Kayasthas or the Mahishyas and the Bagdis.

Kadampur In Kadampur as well, the condition of the houses varied widely according to caste habitations. The SC hamlets, though situated in close vicinity of the GC habitations, were distinct by the wretched condition of their houses. The occasional floods caused the SC houses to be more dilapidated. In comparison, the Mahishyas and Gowalas of Kadampur generally had well-built concrete houses, some of them two-storied. The Gowalas were traditionally dependent on milk trading and had flourished in other businesses in the later period. They were less dependent on land, though their average landholding (0.8 acre) was even higher than the Mahishyas (0.53 acre). It should be noted that in this village, while a few SC families were solvent possessing concrete houses, a considerable section of the Mahishya caste families lived in poor conditions. Similar to Kalipur, here also the SC families, in general, suffered from lack of sanitation, education, access to safe water, etc. But, contrary to Kalipur, some of the SC families in Kadampur enjoyed some amount of social prestige due to their better economic conditions by virtue of having land, or government jobs or better educational background. As I entered Kadampur at the height of a recent anti-land acquisition movement, the caste scenario seemed to have become fuzzy under the impact

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of the movement. The villagers had initially responded to the land acquisition move of the government by dint of their united defiance as a ‘village community’. They became organized in a body to save the village agricultural land on which people of all castes depended crucially for their livelihoods. The landless SC people also had huge stake in the land as they lived off the land as agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, traditional bargadars (registered or not) and cultivators on lease rent. So, the lower-caste Bagdis of the village united with the dominant Mahishyas in the SALC. Not only had the SC people joined the movement en masse, the village panchayat member belonging to the Bagdi caste became one of the main leaders of the land movement. Subsequently, a rift appeared among the village people as some of the landed persons agreed to offer their land for the Tata project and some from the SC communities joined construction work in the project as day labourers. In this situation, caste consciousness seemed to have been superseded by economic considerations. Contrary to the case of Kalipur, here I found Mahishya caste people praising the SC panchayat member, Dhiren, and putting all their confidence in him. In fact, the two main leaders of the land movement in Kadampur were Jagannath from the dominant Mahishya caste and Dhiren from the Bagdi caste. Obviously, Jagannath played a greater role in mobilizing the Mahishya people in the movement, while Dhiren was active in mobilizing the Bagdis. But as the mobilization in the land movement cut across the caste line, and was rather based on the solidarity of the people of the whole village, the emphasis in the social life of the village was on inter-caste unity and certainly against creating any difference on the basis of caste identity. It seemed that in Kadampur, due to several factors, caste antagonism was not as sharp as we found in Kalipur. In the only existing village club of Kadampur, Mahishyas closely mingled with the SC youths, and people from both the castes took equal part in the day-to-day activities of the club. Even before becoming a panchayat member, Dhiren, a graduate and a private tutor by profession, was all along active in the club and played a leading role in its activities. He used to write jatra7 plays and the club members used to act in those jatras. These jatra plays were acclaimed in different places and the club received a number of prizes for its good performance in drama competitions. Another SC person, Pradip Bag, the only doctor from the village who was engaged in a government job as a Block Medical Officer in East Medinipur district, patronized all the activities of the club. Both Dhiren and Pradip 7. Jatra is a kind a traditional drama acted on open stage. This kind of play has been very popular in the villages of West Bengal.

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had occupied important executive positions in the club since long. Had there been substantial caste animosity in the village, they would probably not have been accepted in such roles in the club. It should be noted that the club was the main place for social gathering in the village and even the elderly persons joined the adda in the club very often. Besides the road near the club, elderly people of the village used to gather, both in the morning and in the evening, to exchange pleasantries and also to discuss politics and other things. Here also, people of both Mahishya and Bagdi castes gathered regularly. As we have seen, in Kalipur, different caste people had their own addas and they rarely befriended people from other caste groups. Particularly, mingling of upper-caste people with SC people seemed quite unusual there. The only exception was a Kayastha youth in Kalipur, who played a leading role in organizing the Youth Club, which comprised members mainly from the SC–ST communities. The absence of explicit caste antagonism in Kadampur might have several reasons, both economic and social. As mentioned earlier, all the SC people in the village were not landless and some SC families had both land and jobs. But unlike in Kalipur, such families had not detached themselves from their own community and the social life of the village. Rather, these families very much identified with the ups and downs of the village life. The case of Dr Bag is a revealing example in this regard. Though he worked outside and earned a good salary, he could not stay aloof from the developments in the village in the wake of land acquisition. He not only supported the movement but also came on particular occasions to join it. Subsequently, he was beaten up by the police and implicated in criminal charges. Such a role of an educated and well-established person seemed to help cement the inter-caste bonding in the strife-torn village. It seemed that such social involvements of SC persons who had higher educational background and economic solvency had played a definite role in giving the Bagdi caste some sort of social dignity. On the other hand, the Mahishyas in Kadampur were neither traditional big landowners nor could gather substantial land in the post-land reform period, as was the case of Mahishyas in Kalipur. Srinivas, in a study as early as 1952, observed that the upward mobility of middle castes, and sometimes lower castes as well, is due to their economic upliftment and imitation of the upper-caste rituals and customs.8 A section of the Mahishyas in Kalipur had 8. Srinivas observed in his study, ‘Though the upper castes try to maintain their higher status, the middle and lower castes have successfully improved status. With improvement of their economic condition, a dominant section of some of the low castes – including groups that were at one time

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clearly improved their status by acquiring land and following the culture of the upper castes, but that had not been the case in Kadampur. Rather, here, it was evident that a tiny section of both Mahishyas and the Bagdis could uplift their status by improving their economic conditions in the recent past, while most of the families from both the castes remained miserably dependent on small amount of land, or on sharecropping or labouring on other’s land. The Ghosh families of Beraberi had owned most of the village land of Kadampur since the colonial days and both the Mahishyas and the Bagdis had sharecropped in their lands for long, some for generations. It is noteworthy that among the 51 sharecroppers in the village, 28 belonged to the SC communities, 20 to the Mahishya and three to the OBC category. Most of the Mahishya families in the village were marginal farmers with an average landholding of 0.5 acres. Only four Mahishya families owned land more than 1 hectare, and that too they had acquired by the purchase of land in the last 15–20 years. In brief, the economic upliftment of the Mahishyas of Kadampur had been a more recent phenomenon and they were yet to emerge as a dominant caste in the village. All these factors combined together to give some semblance of common interest among the Mahishyas and Bagdis even before the land acquisition drive began in the area. So, it did not seem unnatural for these two communities to readily join hands in their struggle to save the village agricultural land.

Caste and Power An 80 year old person from the Kayastha caste of Kalipur remarked while narrating the social changes that had taken place in the village: Previously when the Kayasthas were at the helm of the village affairs, there was amity between the upper and the lower castes in the village. An understanding existed between the haves and the have-nots resulting in peaceful coexistence. Ever since caste got entwined with politics, those days were gone. Now the upper and the lower castes are always at loggerheads with each other. More the village society is imbibed with politics, more the conflicts between the haves and the have-nots are increasing. treated as untouchables – imitated the customs and norms of the upper castes residing in their vicinity’ (Shah, 2003: 8).

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The old man seemed to taken up with the reminiscences of the past when the dominant Kayasthas used to enjoy social and political power and the lower castes used to submit to their domination without question. He correctly assessed that politics had led to all the changes in the caste and power relationship in the village. He obviously meant the left politics, as opposed to the erstwhile domination of the Congress politics in the village, which made the differences possible. In the predominantly SC–ST inhabited village of Kalipur, the Kayasthas held most of the village agricultural land and enjoyed social authority till the 1960s. They were the proponents of the Congress politics in the village, while the SC–ST people at large were indifferent to the state-led party politics. The assertion of the SC–ST communities of Kalipur had almost been organically linked with the rise of the left politics in the state. In the late 1960s, as the state witnessed the first non-Congress governments in the form of two brief United Front regimes, in which the left parties were the main constituents, Kalipur saw the phenomenal rise of peasant movement that initiated a process of deep-rooted changes in the caste–power relationship like never before. As the CPI(M) party entered the village political scene with its programme of mobilization of landless and marginal peasants for unearthing and grabbing of the above-ceiling benami lands from the landed gentry, along with hiking of labour wages, the ST people of the village were the first to be mobilized in the struggle. The ensuing period saw a sharp division in the village polity between the landless belonging to the SC–ST communities and the landed gentry of the higher castes. In this period, the village middle caste, Mahishyas, notwithstanding their traditional support to the Congress politics did not enter into open conflict with the rising left politics. Rather, they were also subjected to the Kayastha domination to some extent and were yet to gather substantial land in their hands. Those struggles built the foundation of left politics in the village, though astonishingly, the present CPI(M) leadership in the area seldom remembered those days. The second phase of the SC–ST assertion in Kalipur started with the advent of Left Front rule in the year 1977. At that time as well, the ST people were in the forefront of peasant struggles that also involved the SC people. In the meantime, the Mahishyas of Kalipur and Madhupur emerged as the most prosperous caste in the twin villages as some of them purchased substantial land from the erstwhile Kayastha landlords and utilized the Green Revolution technology, along with commercial farming and agro-based business activities, to advance their economic fortunes. As a result, they could enhance

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their status from middle to rich peasants and occupied the social position of a dominant caste, particularly after the erstwhile dominant Kayastha families mostly migrated to the cities or towns. So, in the post-1977 period, the prosperous Mahishya families became the natural target of peasant movement. But unlike the Kayasthas, they built up a rapport with the CPI(M) party in the subsequent period and strategically utilized the relationship with institutional politics to further their interests. In the meantime, the rejuvenation of the panchayati raj system in 1978 enhanced the importance of the SC–ST communities to a certain extent in village politics, particularly as the Kalipur panchayat seat was reserved for the SC–ST people. Undoubtedly, the predominantly SC–ST population initially turned into a strong support base for the CPI(M) party, principally due to the support the party provided to these communities in their struggles against the landed gentry, first, during the decade of the 1960s and then, during the period immediately after the advent of Left Front rule in 1977. This symbiotic relationship between the party and the subaltern people of the village began to change with the entrenchment of the party in the local state power and its subsequent change in policy from struggle to reform. Caste– power relationship also began to change under the impact of the changing policies of the main ruling party of the state. Thus, the trajectory of changing relationship between caste and power traversed a zigzag path in the subsequent period. In the post-1977 period, the tribal community no more remained the main support base of the CPI(M) party as it had been earlier; rather, the Bagdis occupied the position of politically more-favoured caste by virtue of their closer relationship with the ruling party. Subsequently, the tribal community fell out with the party as the latter withdrew its support for a continuous labour strike for wage hike in 1986, and indeed beat up the recalcitrant tribal leader in its bid to break the strike. This happened to be a shift in the party strategy from struggle to the policy of appeasement of the upper-caste landed people. The local leaders of the party who hailed from the upper-caste landed families were reluctant to advance the wage struggle which went against their own class interests as well. As a consequence, the labouring people, consisting of the SC–ST communities, began to lose the political assertion that they had gained through earlier struggles. There has been no instance of lower-caste assertion in the subsequent period since then. They even did not dare to protest against the corrupt local ration dealer, a landed Brahmin, though they all had a lot of grievances against him. The

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ration dealer, being the main party leader of the twin villages, could escape the wrath of the people.9 The assertion of the SC–ST communities in the earlier period had been possible with the support of the CPI(M). Now that the party had shifted its focus on reform rather than on struggle, the earlier relationship between the party and the SC–ST communities of the village underwent important changes. While the tribal community tried, for some time, to seek some other ally in the organized politics in the wake of their disenchantment with the ruling party, the SC communities, particularly the Bagdis, seemed to have embraced the new policies of the party, which were based on benefit distribution through the panchayat. As most of the benefits were meant for the SC–ST people, the Bagdis tried to get the best of the panchayat benefits by dint of their more numerous presence in the village population. Because of their numerical strength in the village population, this caste received more attention in electoral politics, became closer to the ruling party and finally, assumed the coveted position of panchayat pradhan. It was alleged by other SC groups and ST people that almost all the Bagdi families had received loans from the panchayat after Khagen Malik from their caste became the pradhan of the panchayat. It seemed that the welfare politics of the state for the uplift of the so-called backward sections resulted in competition among the lower castes and tribal people to garner more benefits for their own communities. Both the tribal people and the Dules from the SC community complained of irregularities in the distribution of panchayat benefits in favour of the Bagdis. The tribal people expressed grievances over the comparatively passive role of the Bagdis during the period of struggle and their subsequent cornering of benefits that seemed disproportionately more than they deserved. Pakhi Murmu, the elderly tribal leader, regretted that the old solidarity among the SC communities and the tribal people in the village on the basis of which, once, the labouring people of these communities could assert themselves was spoiled due to this politics of benefit distribution. Institutional politics seemed not to have strengthened the solidarity that prevailed earlier among the lower-caste groups vis-à-vis upper-caste domination.

9. The resentment of the villagers against corrupt ration dealers broke out in the form of violent agitations in the rural areas, mostly in the CPI(M)-dominated south Bengal districts, in the year 2007, and was widely reported in the mass media. In many such cases of agitations, the ruling party leaders and panchayat officials became the target of people’s wrath.

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The Empowerment The question of empowerment of the lower castes through reservation of the panchayat seats and posts and mandatory inclusion of the representatives of backward sections in various village-level committees, like VEC10 and VDC,11 may be examined against the background of this politics. The lower-caste representative of Kalipur had assumed the coveted seat of the panchayat pradhan only to find himself like a ‘fish out of water’ in the essentially elitist power structure. The party in power seemed to treat him more as a dummy in the position of power than as a real authority with full charge of the panchayat office. Indeed, it had arranged to run the panchayat by some upper-caste persons who were earlier in power in the same panchayat. It was quite explicit that the actual power of the panchayat, including the decision-making authority, rested mainly with Bidhan Mandal, the zonal committee secretary of CPI(M), and his wife, both having acted as panchayat heads earlier, with the latter being the upa-pradhan in the present panchayat. The panchayat members and officials generally approached the leader, Bidhan Mandal, who was a teacher in primary school but regularly attended the panchayat office after school hours to look after its functioning. The villagers were seen to approach the upa-pradhan ignoring the presence of the pradhan in the panchayat office to redress their problems or with pleas of help. The pradhan attended the office only to sign on the dotted line as and when required. It seemed that the party was doing a favour by managing the work of the pradhan that Khagen Malik might find difficult to manage. The lower-caste pradhan had varied reactions to this state of affairs. On the one hand, he accepted the situation due to his mentality of subordination to the upper castes and remained grateful to the upper-caste leadership for the help rendered by them in running the panchayat. On the other hand, he was disgusted to act merely as an appendage of the leadership and expressed his grievances saying,

10. To ensure universal literacy, the government formed VECs under the direction of SSA. The tasks of the VEC are to monitor the enrolment of students and oversee the quality of learning of all children (of school-going age) of the village.

11. The VDC is a statutory body to be elected through the gram sansad (village council)

meeting and is empowered to look after all the development works being undertaken in a gram sansad area under the auspices of the panchayat.

Caste and Power in Rural Context  |  211 People might regard the CPI(M) as a party of the poor, and the Left Front government a government of the poor, but in actuality that is not the case. Both the party and the government belong to the rich. It is a party of the rich, the rajas.

He could realize from his experience that only those who had wealth and education were able to run the panchayat, and persons like him having neither of the two were incapable to act in the position of power. His sense of incapability seemed to be arising from the intervention of the higher-caste party leaders who accepted an SC person in the position of panchayat pradhan formally under the compulsion of the reservation regime, but in actuality, undermined his authority by allowing him to play only the second fiddle in the panchayat office. In fact, Khagen was rendered ‘faltu’ (worthless) by none other than the upper-caste leadership of the party he belonged to. It seemed that for all practical purposes, it was Bidhan Mandal who acted as the main power centre in the so-called local self-government and became the de facto panchayat pradhan. Thus, it was clear that the caste–power relationship had not essentially changed despite reservation of the post of pradhan for the SC community as the upper-caste leaders of the ruling party were supposedly not ready to relinquish the power they had enjoyed for long (Bidhan had been pradhan of the panchayat for three terms and his wife for one term) and the lower-caste pradhan was not in a position to assert his authority as head of the panchayat. Though reservation had at least been instrumental in instilling an aspiration for political power among the lower-caste people, the real transfer of power to the backward sections would not possibly be achieved without further assertion of the SC people in the political field. In village politics also, Khagen did not seem to hold real power, though he was the panchayat representative and a member of the ruling party. The two upper-caste leaders from the neighbouring village, Monoj Dutta and Naru Chatterjee, exercised actual power in the village affairs, although they held the same position in the ruling party like Khagen, but were not elected as members of the panchayat. How could they exercise superior power than Khagen Malik, a leader of the largest caste group of the village? It seemed that the upper-caste background of Monoj and Naru had facilitated their rise to the superior power position in the village. For example, Monoj Dutta did not have a much higher level of formal education in comparison to Khagen and was junior to him in the party. As we found in the conversation of one Mahishya party activist, the upper-caste party functionaries did not regard their lowercaste fellow Khagen as equal to them, as a knowledgeable and capable person.

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This attitude of denigrating the lower-caste person, even when he was in formal power, seemed to reflect the existence of a sense of caste antagonism even within a party that claimed to represent the most downtrodden in the society. Thus, it appeared that both in the panchayat and in the party, the two principal power centres in rural Bengal, the upper-caste leadership were not ready to relinquish power to the lower castes. It seems to correspond with the following observation of Chatterjee (1997: 83) on caste politics in West Bengal: Economic relations have, of course, undergone many changes, particularly over the last hundred years or so, but in ideological terms the categories of caste have continued to provide many of the basic signifying terms through which collective identities and social relations are still perceived.

This ideological overtone of caste seems to be reflected in the prevailing caste hierarchy in the rural polity based on the division of chhotoloks and bhadraloks. As mentioned earlier, the chhotolok–bhadralok division in the village, based on traditional caste hierarchy, seemed to be so strong that neither the upper castes were ready to accept a lower-caste person as their leader, nor were the lower castes in a position to claim their authority over village affairs in spite of their numerical superiority in the village. While the upper-caste people thought themselves to be far superior than the chhotoloks in all spheres of life, the lower-caste people also seemed to have accepted their subordinate position in the caste hierarchy or were not in a position to challenge the same in the field of politics. Earlier, during the 1960s and post-1977 period, the lower castes and ST communities seemed to have attained a position of dignity in the village society by dint of their struggles against the Kayasthya landed gentry in the first phase and the Mahishya rich peasants in the second. But in the subsequent period of reform, they lost much of the position to the upper caste, notwithstanding the fact that the village panchayat seat was all along reserved for the SC/ST communities. In contrast to Kalipur, the lower-caste Bagdis in Kadampur had come up in the echelon of village power only as a recent phenomenon, in the wake of the land movement. The village had not witnessed much caste antagonism in the contemporary period and the Mahishyas did not turn into a dominant caste as it was in Kalipur. The caste–power relationship had also traversed a different course in Kadampur. Though the CPI(M) had a strong support base among the Bagdis, it had not mobilized the lower-caste people on economic and

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other issues entailing social conflict between the upper and lower castes. This may be one of the reasons why caste contradiction had not been sharp in Kadampur. As a result, there was always a mixed response of different caste groups to different parties. While the rise of the CPI(M) party in the village had the support of both Mahishyas and Bagdis of Kadampur, some of the Mahishya as well as Bagdi families had always been associated with the Congress politics. Notably, some prosperous Mahishyas of Kadampur had associated themselves with the CPI(M) from the very beginning, though landless SC people formed its main support base. But no Bagdi person had emerged as a leader of the SC community in Kadampur in the pre- and post-1977 period as had been the case in Kalipur. After the main CPI(M) leader from the Mahishya caste was accused in a corruption case during his tenure as the panchayat pradhan in the latter half of the 1980s, the support to the party eroded considerably among the village people of both the castes and in 1993, a Congress candidate was elected from the village panchayat seat. In the 1998 panchayat elections, CPI(M) regained the village seat only to lose the same to the TMC candidate, Dhiren, in 2003 elections. Finally, during the anti-land acquisition movement, the Bagdis of the CPI(M) mostly switched over to the SALC, and subsequently became supporters of the TMC party. Dhiren was the first SC person who emerged as a leader of Kadampur village, not merely as the panchayat member but more as a social activist and subsequently, as an organizer of the anti-land acquisition movement. Though Dhiren got elected as a panchayat member by virtue of reservation of the seat for the SC community, he plausibly did not remain merely a leader of Bagdis. Rather, he turned into a representative of the whole village, particularly in the wake of the land movement. His acceptance as a leader even to the Mahishyas seemed to have been possible not only due to his education, social activities and the prevailing non-antagonistic relation between the two castes in Kadampur, but also due to his crucial role in the land movement. Though the bhadralok–chhotolok division between the Mahishyas and the Bagdis might implicitly be present in the village, it did not deter the emergence of a Bagdi youth as an effective leader of the village in its time of distress.

Conclusion It can be summed up that the assertion of so-called lower-caste people in the recent phase was more in Kadampur than in Kalipur due to several reasons.

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There was no single phenomenon that can explain the difference. In both the villages, it can be said that the election of SC candidates through reservation in the panchayat bodies might just be a starting point of decentralization of power, or empowerment of the backward caste, and not an end in itself. This has been coupled in Kadampur with a number of other things, such as minimum economic capabilities, educational background, social activities and political assertion, which enabled a lower-caste person to emerge as a real leader of the village. In Kalipur, this had not happened, as the formal SC representation had not been supported by other factors. But things have not been static in Kalipur either. The initial assertion of the SC–ST communities attained through struggles could not be sustained as it were, but was not lost altogether. While the dependence of the lower-caste people on the upper castes was mainly continuing in the economic field, the party was dominating the legal–political field with its upper-caste leadership pretending to defend the interests of the lower castes. In the cultural–ideological field, the sense of caste hierarchy was prevailing both in the party and the society. But there was simmering discontent of deprivation, particularly among the younger generation of the SC–ST communities, who organized themselves into the Youth Club of Kalipur out of their aversion to the present state of politics, emerging as a social force independent of the organized political domain. Hence, it seemed that the ‘vertical social system’ based on caste hierarchy in rural West Bengal was diminishing if not decaying. But the change in the ageold system had been ushered in by the struggles of the lower-caste labouring people for their rights even before the idea of empowerment was enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It appears from the present study that the policy of decentralization reforms as such cannot abolish caste-based hierarchy from the social and cultural body of the society if not accompanied by the general uplift of the backward communities and a social–political movement to fulfil the objective. Whilst the Mahishyas in Kalipur had consolidated their social status ‘after improving their economic position and maintaining their separation from equivalent castes whose economic status was lower’, the SC–tribal communities had tried to follow ‘a movement of assertion’ in ‘association with other equivalent caste groups’ (Bose, 1991: 370). In Kadampur, on the other hand, the movement against ‘economic grievances and deprivation’, though not a typical mobility movement, had united two non-equivalent social groups, the Mahishyas and the Bagdis (Bose, 1991: 370; Roy, 2012: 974). However, in the rural polity of West Bengal, institutional politics seems to have a vital role to play in the mobility movement, though in some situations,

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it might help the lower-caste assertion and oppose the same in another situation. The effective functioning of PRIs has a dual effect on the social mobility of the lower castes in rural Bengal. On the one hand, it has augmented political aspiration among the lower castes to a certain extent through the reservation of panchayat seats and posts. On the other hand, it has created certain discrepancies and competition among equivalent caste groups by inculcating the politics of benefit distribution in them. In other words, as Bandyopadhyay (1994: 92) argued, ‘due to increasing differentiation resulting from a differential impact of development on a caste’ or on some equivalent caste groups, the unity within a caste or among different equivalent caste groups may end with a ‘divergence or fracturing of the community’.

8 Women and Caste: In Struggle and in Governance

Introduction Be it in the colonial or early post-colonial periods, or in the latest period of ‘globalization’, women have at all times been participating in the peasant movements in West Bengal. The role of women in the Tebhaga peasant movement1 during the late 1940s has become legendary in the annals of women movements of India, in which a number of women lost their lives in confrontations with the police and the forces of the landlords. The later peasant movements2 in the late 1960s and early 1970s were also marked by substantial participation of women in them. In the latest movements against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, located in two districts of West Bengal, women have played significant roles not only in spearheading the movements at the initial stages, but also in the stages of resistance when people tried to thwart the attempts of the government to forcibly take over the possession of the lands. In fact, a major proportion of those arrested in the Singur land conflict was women. All these unambiguously show the extent of women’s participation not only in the making of the movements but also in determining its course and final outcome. 1. The Tebhaga movement broke out in the undivided Bengal province in the late colonial period with the demand of two-third share of crops for the sharecroppers and continued for some years even in the post-colonial period. See also Custers (1987). 2. A widespread peasant movement for the seizure of above-ceiling land kept by the jotedars under fictitious names (benami) took place in the late 1960s. Though the Naxalbari movement has been widely known as a struggle aiming at seizure of state power, it had started with the demand of land to the tiller. Remarkably, seven peasant women among 11 were killed in the Naxalbari area in an incident in May 1967 that brought the movement into the limelight. See also Banerjee (1984).

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On the other hand, women have seldom been participating in the villagelevel gram sansad meetings or in varied forms of the panchayat activities. Chapter 4 reveals that most of the women are not interested to attend the gram sansad meeting for many reasons. Other scholarly researches also suggest that they are not even invited to the gram sansad meetings (Bhattacharya, 2002; Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002). Though one-third of all panchayat seats are reserved for women, women members in different tiers of the panchayati system are generally considered ‘proxy’ representatives ( John, 2007) as their male colleagues and party leaders usually discharge most of their duties and act as de facto power centres in the rural areas. The question at this point is: in what way can we analyze the dynamics behind the participation of women who, in reality, seldom possess any land customarily and/or other means of livelihood or would hardly receive any compensation offered by the government to the dispossessed farmers and peasants? Are there any implicit dynamics due to which women came forward so actively to resist land acquisition or loss of their means of labour? The chapter seeks to understand the socio-political basis behind the participation of peasant women in the movement against dispossession from land and/or other means of labour, and also endeavours to explain the reasons behind the ‘non-participation’ of rural women in the panchayat system and the local party politics.

Women and the Singur Movement The peasant movement in Singur against land acquisition marks a significant moment in the contemporary post-colonial history of West Bengal as also in the larger canvas of post-colonial India. This movement seems to have assumed significance due to the distinct pattern of politics that has emerged in the course of this long and intense peasant struggle. The story of the Singur movement surprised everybody as it began just a few days after the Left Front government renewed its rule for an uninterrupted seventh term with a thumping victory in the assembly elections of 2006.3 The five villages in Singur, including Kadampur, have been in the eye of political storm since the very day when the state government announced its intention to acquire around 3. The ruling Left Front won the elections by securing 235 of the 294 seats in the state assembly, that is, a three-fourth majority in the state legislature.

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1,000 acres of prime agricultural land tilled by peasants of those five villages for setting up a car factory by one of the biggest industrial houses of India, Tata Motors. The Singur movement was followed by the much talked-about Nandigram incident, which has so far been marked as the metaphor of violent peasant resistance against the attempted land acquisition for industrialization. Moreover, the political impact of these movements against land acquisition can be gauged by the startling success of TMC, the main opposition party in West Bengal, in the panchayat polls held in 2008.4 The Singur movement can be characterized by the substantial participation of marginal groups of these villages in terms of class, caste and gender. Along with the small landholding groups of peasants, like the small and marginal farmers, the bargadars and landless peasants in the surrounding villages of the earmarked area constituted an essential part of this movement. Since the initial days of this agitation, these marginal groups, who mainly belonged to SCs or OBCs, raised their voices and blocked the passages of the government officials to the earmarked area. But the conspicuous presence of the peasant women from the very beginning of the movement, and in the subsequent periods as well, turned the movement into a more dynamic incident. The peasant women belonging to different landholding classes participated in large number in the movement. While the women from the landless and sharecropper peasants’ families were very active in the movement, women from the small and middle peasant families, who so far remained secluded from the public gaze, also participated in it. When the dominant discourse got engaged in debates on issues like viability of agriculture or industrialization as the only path of ‘development’, these peasant women forcefully questioned the very discourse of ‘development’ and organized themselves in protest movements against ‘development’-led dispossession. The peasant women were asserting that land had been indispensable for their subsistence. I found one middle-aged woman emerging out of the thick jute stems covering one side of the field. She had a sickle in one hand and some edible herbs in another. She was evidently collecting the edible herbs for her family consumption from the community land. She said, ‘This land is like mother to us, feeding us throughout the year. Hence, we can’t part with it at any cost. We would rather fight with all our might to defend 4. The TMC not only won most of the panchayats in the affected areas like Singur and Nandigram, but it could also register impressive victories in other areas as well. Important is the fact that the opposition parties, for the first time in the last 30 years, won most of the gram panchayats in eight out of 18 districts in West Bengal.

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the land.’ Another woman said, ‘losing this land will turn us into beggars. Our husbands are not educated enough and only know how to cultivate. You cannot force us to give up our land.’ Purnima, the marginal peasant woman commented, ‘my husband is a van rickshaw puller and I used to make bidis. We rear goats, hens and ducks as well and possess a small plot of land that provides us food throughout the year.’ ‘If we lose the land, we will lose all means of livelihood. Even we can’t rear cattle without the field. Then what option will be left for us except begging.’ They seemed to fear that they would be driven out from all the means of livelihood that they had been enjoying so far from the present subsistence level of agriculture.

Land, Land Rights and Gender Evidently, peasant women of Kadampur, as in other places of Bengal, enjoyed hardly any right to agricultural land, but they still perceived that land was everything to them and without it they would not probably survive. In fact, women from different segments of population do not enjoy the legal property right as the laws governing property inheritance are very rarely implemented and the devolution of landed property, specifically agricultural land, in rural India follows chiefly the prevailing local customs and religious codes. Though ‘several significant gender inequalities are embedded in the Hindu Succession Act and their extent varying by region and community’ (Agarwal, 1999: 46), the Indian Hindu women5 are legally entitled to enjoy some inheritance rights to land and property. The Hindu Succession Act, 1956, by which the property rights of the Hindus are governed and which is covering about 82 per cent of the Indian population, has been formulated in a long process of complex and contentious interaction between the state (colonial and post-colonial) on the one hand, and different segments of the population on the other. And so, this Act obviously is not devoid of gender discriminations (Ibid.).6 The peasant 5. I am referring here to only the Hindu women and Hindu Succession Act as the people of Kadampur and Kalipur mostly belong to Hindu religion. The women belonging to other religions in India are also, more or less, legally entitled to enjoy some inheritance rights to land. 6. Bina Agarwal (1999) finds gender inequalities persisting in the laws governing the inheritance and holding of agricultural land – ‘the most valuable form of property in rural India’ (p. 2). She mentions three kinds of inequalities in relation to succession. ‘First, among several religious groups, women are entitled to smaller shares than men. Under Hindu law, the vestiges of the Mitakshara system (the traditional religious code practiced in some parts of India) in many states give sons rights in certain categories of property, while excluding women or daughters. Second, there are specific gender biases pertaining to the devolution of agricultural land. For example, for Hindus

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women belonging to different landholding classes rarely enjoy the benefits of these succession legislations promulgated in the interest of the women. The agricultural land of the Hindu families in the rural areas of West Bengal is usually fragmented and inherited through the lines of the male descendants. The sons are supposed to be customarily entitled to get ownership of agricultural land, and hence the same is divided among the sons only. The daughters are expected to be satisfied with the dowry.7 The women of the landholding families did not generally claim to inherit the land of their parental property. When asked about her land right, an activist woman replied: I don’t possess any land in my own name. In our rural areas, in fact, no woman inherits land. Our fathers somehow managed to get us married. They had to spend a lot of money for paying dowry in our marriages. What more can they give us? We are not inclined to claim a part of land from our brothers. They have also to live off depending on this ancestral land. Furthermore, if we demand a part of our ancestral land, the kinship ties would be estranged. We would not be able to visit our parental houses anymore.

This seems to be a common perception not only among the peasant women in Kadampur, but of the women in other areas of West Bengal as well. These women are hardly aware of the Hindu Succession Act which is recognized as in much of northwest India, the rules of devolution specified in various tenurial enactments give priority to male agnatic heirs, and supersede the rules of devolution spelt out in the Hindu Succession Act. Third, tribal communities of the north-eastern states continue to be governed by uncodified customary law under which, among patrilineal tribes, women’s rights in land are severely circumscribed and typically limited to usufruct.’ (p. 46–49) She also indicated some other gender discriminations persisting in the land reform enactments. The fixation of ceilings is an instance. The women are gravely discriminated in relation to fixation of ceilings. They are hardly recognized as proprietor, cultivator or successor. 7. The system of dowry is still very much prevalent in India, including West Bengal, despite the Dowry Prohibition Act passed as long back as 1961. Dowry can be defined as the amount of assets, marriage gifts and cash payments given by the bride’s family to the bridegroom’s family. Ursula Sharma (1980) observed that in a village in Punjab she studied, there has, in recent years, been a total shift from bride price to dowry amongst all but the lower castes, and not only among those where women have withdrawn from outdoor labour. Also, the amounts paid in dowry, even among agricultural labourers, are noted to have increased several folds in Gujarat (Randeria and Visaria, 1984). The state of West Bengal has seemingly been witnessing the same trend of dowry practice these days. Kadampur and Kalipur, and West Bengal in general, have seemingly been witnessing the same trend of dowry practice these days. A number of instances in two villages show that not only the amounts paid in dowry have increased considerably, but there has been a shift from bride price to dowry amongst some other social groups like Santhal tribes in Kalipur. The system of dowry was not practised earlier among the tribal groups like Santhal. There are also some instances in Kalipur where couples are not aspiring for daughters. Rather they want to do abortion if they get prior information about the sex of the embryo.

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the chief legislation governing the inherence of property in India. Presumably, these women have rarely been informed about the legal rights they have in relation to property inheritance endowed by the Succession Act, and hence they have not been claiming, in general, any succession rights in their ancestral property. But are they entitled to any right to the landed property of their in-laws’ families? A woman of a small landholding family having 1 acre of agricultural land explained candidly, ‘This piece of land belonged to my father-in-law. Now this piece of land is the property of our family. We, including all our family members, cultivate and live off the land. Nobody can force us to part with the land.’ The woman, in fact, feels a deep attachment with this piece of land. Unaware of her legal entitlement prescribed by the Hindu Succession Act vis-à-vis the widows of the male successors,8 she believes that she has a natural right to this piece of land belonging to her husband or her in-law’s family and she could die to save the same from the expropriators. The peasant women belonging to the families of the sharecroppers and the landless have another story to tell which seems to make the situation of land rights of women in Kadampur multifaceted. Generally, peasant women are not registered as bargadars or sharecroppers in West Bengal. Notwithstanding their high level of involvement in agricultural production, they are rarely recognized as bargadars or sharecroppers. However, the policy directive of the West Bengal government, 1992, pledges that during the redistribution of land, ‘to the extent possible’, government-allocated land should be granted either to a woman individually or jointly to husband and wife. But the pattern of land redistribution suggests that the allocation of pattas9 tends to reinforce existing gender inequalities in property right. A study (GoWB, 2004c: 36) shows that among the pattas distributed so far by GoWB, only in 9.7 per cent cases joint pattas were issued in the name of both husband and wife, while only in 5.94 per cent cases, pattas were issued in the name of a woman (Brown and Das Chaudhury, 2002). It seems that the policy was not pursued at the ground 8. Under the Act, in the case of a Hindu male dying intestate, all his separate or self-acquired property, in the first instance, devolves equally upon his sons, daughters, widow and mother. For joint family property, if the deceased male was earlier governed by the Dayabhaga rules of inheritance, the same rules of succession as related to other types of property apply to this as well. Unlike under Mitakshara, women inherited an interest in all property, irrespective of whether it was ancestral or separate. In West Bengal, the traditional rule of inheritance follows the Dayabhaga code. But these religious codes are seldom followed in reality. The widows and daughters are utterly discriminated in case of their property rights. Widows are left destitute and dependent on their sons only. 9. Patta is a piece of paper recognizing the ownership right of the beneficiary to a plot of land distributed by the government under the Land Reforms Act.

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level, perhaps in keeping with the patriarchal tradition of the society. Even when the joint pattas are issued or pattas are issued in the name of a woman, the woman seldom enjoys the independence to make her own choices regarding the use of the piece of land (Gupta, 2000). Not only in the case of women’s entitlement, the implementation of the land reform policy as a whole revealed the same situation in Kadampur and the surrounding villages. Many of the bargadars in the surrounding villages are not registered and hence, have no legal right over the land they had been tilling for generations. The women belonging to these unregistered bargadar families felt more vulnerable and therefore, vigorously participated in the anti-land acquisition movement. They perhaps anticipated that once the acquisition was over, they would become a nonentity in relation to the land in which they had been cultivating for generations. Their families would not be entitled to any compensation or rehabilitation programme offered by the government since they have no legal rights over the land. So, when the government stepped forward to acquire the land by virtue of a colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894,10 the peasant women, cutting across different landholding families as well as sharecropper and landless families, objected to the government move possibly on the basis of the ‘subsistence ethic’. Though ‘the subsistence ethic’ is, in general, a given of peasant economics, as argued by Scott (1976), peasant women are more swayed by this ethic. Let us now see how the peasant women participated in the land movement and also interacted with the organized domain of politics by pursuing their ‘right to subsistence’.

Women, Land Movement and Organized Domain From the very beginning, when the peasants of the affected villages first raised their voice against the government move of land acquisition, the presence of women was highly conspicuous. The peasant women, including those belonging to the families of sharecroppers and landless peasants, would rush from their homes to block the passage of the government officials and representatives of the Tata Motors whenever they tried to enter the village. That was the beginning of their long resistance against any perceptible move in the area by 10. According to this law, land can be acquired only for the purpose of ‘public interest’ and in that case, no sanction of the landowners is required for acquiring the land. Interestingly, the Left Front government has been projecting the land acquisition for the Tata Motors’ car plant for the purpose of ‘public interest’ as they believe this is the gateway to industrialization which would serve the state.

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the government to acquire the land. This was the moment of the first spontaneous protest in the entire movement against land acquisition when there was no interference from the organized political parties and the civil society organizations. Afterwards, the organized domains of politics penetrated increasingly, and tried to influence and lead the movement according to their own ideologies and interests. In the initial period, just after the first protest demonstration, the local peasants were organized in a committee called ‘Save Agricultural Land Committee’ (SALC) under the leadership of two main political parties, TMC and SUCI. The TMC had won a number of gram panchayat seats in the panchayat elections held in 2003 and had a considerable support base in the affected villages. The SALC was formed by the affected peasantry with the aim to formulate strategies and organize the movement against land acquisition. Being a decision-making body at the local level for conducting agitations against land acquisition and negotiations with the government in the interest of the peasantry, SALC was later extended to include many political parties, civil society organizations, intellectuals and individuals along with the peasant representatives from the affected villages. Though nearly 25 peasants were selected to represent Kadampur in the SALC, women were conspicuous by their absence in the same. But, the women of Kadampur used to participate enthusiastically in each and every mobilization, rallies, sit-in demonstration, road blockade, hunger strike, etc., called by the SALC during this period. The women, very often, registered their protest by showing the broomsticks held in their hands. Showing broomsticks appears as a cultural symbol of the women’s resolve to sweep away the dirt in their way. Here, it seemed to be a symbol of protest against the efforts of land acquisition.11 Scores of the women who used to participate in the rallies and other demonstration programmes from Kadampur were attending these types of public protests or meetings for the first time. Moreover, they also witnessed, for the first time, incidents like police torture and prison life. Noticeably, the women were not only active in all the demonstrations organized by the SALC but they also had always been obstructing forcefully the construction of the factory both before and after the land acquisition. When the dominant section of the SALC had been pursuing the lawful ways of protests like mass meeting, token road obstruction 11. See also Ramachandra Guha (1985) and Ranajit Guha (1983). Both of them described in detail the modes of various social protests by the peasant community, specifically the tribal community, in colonial India. These social protests were very often organized on the basis of religious or cultural idioms.

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or campaigns as parts of the protest movement against land acquisition, the women opted mostly for resisting physically the ongoing land acquisition. The government officials tried several times to enter the village and distribute the notifications of land acquisition to the peasants whose lands were going to be acquired. But every time the officials tried to enter the village, their path was blocked by the agitating women. Though the officials were given sufficient police escorts, they did not dare to force their way into the village and turned back. The women’s mobilization was spontaneous and unique. Even if they were busy with farm activities or household chores at that time, they used to stop the same and reach the spot with utmost urgency. The women’s vigilance continued throughout the daytime for long, and such instances of resistance occurred several times during the period of the movement before the land acquisition. The women also tried to resist the forceful acquisition of land by the government. They engaged, along with their male counterparts, in the unequal battle against the mighty police force because of the simple logic that they would be impoverished with no option remaining for them to earn a decent livelihood if they relinquished their land. Hence, they faced severe police repression during the days of acquisition of land when most of the menfolk of the village were either arrested by the police or had absconded fearing police torture. The women of Kadampur did not relinquish the path of resistance even after the area was surrounded by concrete boundary walls and construction for the proposed industry was in full swing. The SALC then became almost defunct with no functional agenda in hand and the dominant political party, TMC, seemed to emerge as the only agency among all the parties to decide the course of action. The civil society organizations then engaged in their own programme of relief delivery and providing other services to the affected villagers. In the meantime, the construction of the industry was moving ahead leaving the villagers, particularly the women, in a state of subterranean frustration. One woman from a sharecropper family said, We used to cultivate 1.5 acres of land as sharecropper. We did not get the registration done as we had faith in our landlord. Now we have no other means of livelihood. We are not even entitled for any compensation as we are not registered sharecropper.12 Now we have no food at home. What would we do? 12. Government had declared to pay 25 per cent of the land price to those registered sharecroppers who were affected by the land acquisition. But, interestingly, the West Bengal Land Reforms Act contains the provision that the produce of the land cultivated by the sharecroppers shall be divided in the proportion of 75:25, where the owners will be entitled to only 25 per cent. The argument was reversed while paying compensation.

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Hence, this woman along with a few villagers began to work in the upcoming Tata project as a day labourer. But the majority of the women chose another strategy which, they thought, was a means of harassing the Tata Company. They began to pilfer the building materials and other things from the industry premises. One sharecropper woman said, ‘With no other means left to us to stop the industry, we are trying to harass them by stealing their goods. Anyway, we too can survive at least for some days by selling these goods in the market.’ This attempt of the peasants, particularly of the women, seems to be ‘weapons of the weak’, which Scott (1985) conceptualized as the ‘prosaic’ and constant struggle against the domination of existing power. This might also be recognized as ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance by which peasantry makes its political presence felt’ (Ibid: xvii.). Another important thing worth noting at this point is that while the property rights of the women were seldom recognized by the patriarchal society, in this case of land acquisition, several women were offered compensation. This could happen as substantial land plots remained in the name of the father or forefathers of the present cultivators. According to the inheritance law, daughters and sisters, who were generally married off and stayed far away from the affected villages, were automatically included as legal inheritors and hence, cheques were issued in their names. In fact, the ruling party and the government wanted to lure these women, who had supposedly little stake in the earmarked land, by insisting that cheques had been issued in their names and they should avail this opportunity to get their share of property. But interestingly, most of the women refused this offer and supported the struggle. The agitating women, along with some other youths of the village, repeatedly attempted to demolish the fencing and later, the concrete wall that stood between them and their cherished land. Consequently, they were again attacked by the police forces that were deployed to guard the walls and the acquired land, standing on the watchtowers. The watchtowers stood as symbols of an apparatus of dispossession and coercion to them. It was the resistance activities of these women that impelled one of the left organizations of the SALC, the SUCI party, to organize the peasant women into different village committees. The male organizers of the party thought it to be fruitful to form a women’s wing of the movement which would strengthen the fight against the state forces. Apart from that, these women activists were also organized with the presumable aim of nurturing a larger political interest, like strengthening the mass base of the party.

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One can contextualize the present situation with Custers’s statement about the nari bahini or women’s ‘semi-militia’ that emerged in the course of the Tebhaga movement in the late colonial period. He states: The particular and distinguishing feature of the Tebhaga uprising was that the doubly oppressed women on a wide scale created their own semi-militia, the Nari Bahini. Through those semi-militia forces they provided local leadership in the phase of confrontation with the colonial state. (Custers, 1987: 133–35)

But how far had these women’s committees of Singur in the post-colonial period been able to provide leadership in the land movement? Kanika Das, a college student and an organizer of the women’s committees of different villages, explained the functions of their committees. She stated that the women’s committees had no role in leading the course of the movement. Around four decades back, Krishna Bandyopadhyay, a woman participant in the Naxalite movement and a feminist writer as well seemed to lament the same realization that ‘the line of action that the party (the Communist Party of India – Marxist–Leninist or CPI-ML) had chosen, ultimately left no room for women’s decision-making’ (Bandyopadhyay, 2008: 53). Hence, this land movement seems to be following the same legacy of Naxalbari movement, at least with regard to women’s participation in the social movement. In fact, these women’s committees were formal and had no decision-making power. Kanika expressed her discontent over the functioning of the SALC. The decisions of the SALC were not properly communicated to them. The members of the women’s committee were never consulted on the programme or method of movement to be pursued. Even when the women offered their suggestions to SALC members, they were not given proper attention and were rather ignored. This deliberation showed the extent of frustration of the women participants in the land movement of Kadampur. In fact, they constituted the bulk of the participants in most of the mass meetings and processions organized by the SALC. They even participated in large numbers in the mass meeting held by the TMC, the then opposition party, in the locality in support of the movement, as they were aware that they needed to associate with the organized political parties to utilize them to enhance their cause. But at the same time, they seemed to have certain misgivings about the functioning of the SALC and the opposition parties and were not inclined to be a part of the organized domain of politics. The SALC and the different political parties active in

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the movement appeared to them as part of the male-dominated world where peasant women did not have much space. The story of the women of Kalipur is in many ways similar. Pritilata was a woman activist of the CPI(M) party in Kalipur and organizer of the SHGs in the village. With the help of Pritilata, who hailed from an SC landless family, the party wanted to reach broad sections of womenfolk of the SC and ST communities who were the majority in the village population and hence constituted its main vote bank. She was a member of the party’s Mahila Samiti (women’s wing of the CPI(M) party). She expressed, ‘Whenever they call me for attending a meeting I have to comply with. I do whatever they order me to do.’ Interestingly, throughout the conversation, Pritilata mentioned the leaders of the party as ‘they’ and she seemed to be conscious of the fact that she was being utilized as ‘their’ representative in her community. She enjoyed certain space in the village polity as an SC woman activist close to the ruling party, but the space seemed to be dominated by the party, or may I say, by the traditional patriarchal upper-caste landholding persons.13 She felt interested to be attached with them for her own personal and community interests. At the same time, she did not feel at one with them, the party and the state institutions, that were dominated by the ‘others’. But the instance of Puspa Mandal, the upa-pradhan of the gram panchayat to which Kalipur belonged, revealed a different aspect of how caste and family background could influence women’s participation in the state-led institutions. Being the wife of the powerful party leader and belonging to dominant Mahishya caste group, Puspa had been enjoying the post and working with considerable authority. Krishna, a young ICDS worker, had a different story to tell. She very often participated in the party meetings and also the meetings of the women’s wing of the party, as she couldn’t refuse the party leaders’ call to attend the meetings. In rural West Bengal, where the party holds the real power far surpassing the power of the state institutions, nobody dares to avoid it. When asked about the agenda of the women’s committee meeting, she replied with a smile, In the meeting they only discuss how to bring the women to party organization. But why should we support the organization and the like? This organization does not belong to us, that is, the women. Women themselves have to realize their own problems and move independently with confidence. 13. See also Bandyopadhyay (2008: 54), where she says, ‘...but the party leadership was male and can it be denied that their policies would automatically tend to be patriarchal?’

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Coming back to Kadampur narrative, we found women participants in the movement deciding their own style and course of struggle against the land acquisition move of the government. The compensation package offered by the government seemed to have very little meaning as far as the village women were concerned. The compensation money or the assurance of jobs, whatever it was, was mainly meant to serve their male counterparts. The women in general, belonging to different landholding groups and caste groups, remained perhaps beyond this dominant discourse. Hence, they remained stubborn in opposing the land acquisition move till the end. They had all through resisted the acquisition move being associated with the organized domain, but at the same time going beyond it.

Women’s Resistance: Agency and Agenda Though the women of Kadampur, in general, stood against land acquisition, the extent of their resistance against the government and the ruling party varied according to their caste, landholding positions and political allegiance of their families. The extent of their interaction with the organized political parties also differed depending on the social and economic categories they belonged to. Although it transpires that the agitating women were somewhat reluctant to be part in the organized domain of politics, they very often, creatively and effectively, tried to utilize the space offered to them by the organized political parties, civil society organizations and the print and electronic media. They opted for a range of strategies as the situation was changing over time at the different stages of the movement. In the initial stage, women en masse participated in various types of rallies organized both by SALC and other opposition parties, mainly the TMC, involved in the anti-land acquisition movement in the district town and other places. By participating in these rallies, women could well utilize the media, particularly the electronic media, as a public spectacle for justifying their opposition to land acquisition. They used to creatively apply newer forms of protest demonstration, sometimes using traditional weapons and the brooms in their hands and sometimes wearing garlands of vegetables. These types of demonstrations obviously carry some sort of traditional meaning and concepts. Traditional kitchen knife in hand was more likely to symbolize the attempt to resist the enemy on the way. And the broomsticks in hand symbolized the

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sweeping or cleaning of the nasty things from the way, like the threat posed by land acquisition to their way of living. A few peasant women belonging to the Mahishya caste (the middle caste possessing land and principally cultivating on their own) creatively utilized the public dais and delivered speeches utilizing the space to project their views on land acquisition. They used to depict forcefully why they were reluctant to part their land and sometimes, broke into tears while describing the disastrous effect of land acquisition on their lives. The impact of media coverage of these demonstrations and public speeches of the women who had hardly any formal education and experience of participating in any sort of public meeting, leave alone delivering speeches, was enormous on the public at large, and this played a great role in influencing the public opinion in favour of the anti-land acquisition movement. On the other hand, women also experienced some transformation within themselves while interacting with the public space along with the media. They tried to learn about how to utilize the media in a more effective way in the interest of the affected peasants and the anti-land acquisition movement. Hence, apart from resisting the land acquisition move of the government physically, they learnt to utilize the media more efficiently in the later phase of the movement. This endeavour was consciously directed to construct a consolidated public opinion in favour of the movement and seemed, to a great extent, to be successful in this regard. When women were tortured and beaten up and sent to jail by the police forces during the sit-in demonstration and blockade in the BDO as a part of the ongoing movement, they again utilized the media to show the extent to which they had been offended and violated by the state police forces. They raised the question of legitimacy of the government to repress this kind of movement meant to defend the cause of livelihood. They succeeded in attracting the attention of the civil society and civil rights organizations as well as prominent intellectuals and personalities in favour of them and their movement. Leave alone the local setting, the movement of Singur was so widely projected that it became a case to be debated in the international forum even beyond the national boundary. The land acquisition issue and the livelihood question of the dispossessed peasantry in Singur seemed to be now a part of global discourse on development. The peasant women of Kadampur, in this process, stood at the interface between the global and the local. A number of international and national agencies became concerned whether there were any human rights violations in the course of land acquisition in Singur. The women again were summoned in a number of national-level tribunals and seminars to narrate their experiences and views on the issue.

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At the behest of opposition parties and NGOs, around 25–30 women of Kadampur visited Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad and other cities and towns which were far away from their native village. Interestingly, they were hardly reluctant to participate in these meetings and tribunals held in different parts of the country which were quite new and diverse from their own familiar world. They participated in these meetings not as ‘passive victims’ who are ‘waiting to be saved’, as they are very often described by many; rather, they negotiated forcefully on behalf of their cause ( Jeffery and Jeffery, 1994: 130–31). In fact, those meetings became vibrant through their active participation. They put forward their arguments as to why this particular patch of land should not be taken over by the government. They tried to describe forcefully about the possible fate of thousands of peasant families of the affected villages, including Kadampur, once the land is acquired. One participant woman of the village said: I went to Delhi to participate in a conference and also a mass gathering organized by an All India Committee against Land Acquisition and Dispossession. Affected and dispossessed people from different states had taken part in this conference. I was surprised when I discovered that everybody was well aware of the Singur incident. They raised the Singur issue every now and then. Hence when I was called to deliver a speech, I did not hesitate. Rather I was proud to speak about Singur and our problems. Though most of the audience could not understand my language, as they belonged to different language groups, I described my experiences in my own language as far as possible before them. After I finished my speech, one of the organizers interpreted my version in English. What I realized by participating in the Delhi conference was that dispossessed people from different states in India had been struggling against their respective governments in order to solve their livelihood question. We got immense confidence by attending such meetings as we found out that a lot of other people all over India are also fighting against the land acquisition moves in the name of industrialization. I believe that the West Bengal government will have to bow down before us one day.

Coming back to her village, this woman seemed to have conveyed her realization and enthusiasm to other womenfolk who remained uncompromising till the later phase of the movement. Though this woman, being educated up to higher secondary level and belonging to a prosperous Mahishya family, got the opportunity to participate in such type of meetings at least twice, the majority of the women never attended such state-level or national-level meetings. The women hailing from the sharecropper and

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landless peasant families had little or no education and hence, were not generally selected for representing the village women in such meetings. Noticeably, the secretary of the village women’s committee was selected from a solvent Mahishya family which had little stake in cultivation. Both her sons were employed outside and her family was hardly dependent on the land it owned. Here lay the power relation based on the caste and class composition in the village. Though the women of the village collectively mobilized and fought for the common cause, the women of the marginal class and lowercaste groups were generally excluded from representing their case in the public sphere. They were excluded mainly by the intervention of the organized domain of politics which was essentially controlled by dominant landholding groups, caste and gender. It transpires that the women can utilize effectively the organized domain of politics and other institutions at large in order to achieve their goal. But it seems they prefer to remain active outside any institutional space. Though they had a women’s committee, they were rarely active in it. They did not have much interest in it, not only because this committee was imposed from above and by a political party, which has its own stake in forming the committee, but also because, and which is probably more important, the women’s committee lacked its own agenda on the women’s question. The women were participating vigorously in the movement throughout this entire period, but they never raised any distinct demands for themselves. Though they stated emphatically that they laboured in the field along with their male counterparts and earned livelihood for the family, they never categorically said that they themselves were going to lose their means of livelihood. When the dominant discourse was principally focussed on the livelihood question, that is, jobs, alternate land or compensation, for either the menfolk or, in some cases, the families as a whole, these women seldom demanded their entitlement. They did not ask why they were not recognized as primary stakeholders of the land and why they were being discriminated as far as ownership of the means of livelihood was concerned. But they seemed to have anticipated that they would be the worst sufferers once the land would be acquired. Because they, perhaps, were well aware of the fact that women became the first victim if the families faced any disaster. And that was probably one of the reasons behind their vigorous participation in the resistance against land acquisition from the very beginning. In fact, the peasant women of Kadampur themselves seemed to have been much swayed by the patriarchal ideology of Hindu society in which women

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were treated conventionally as dependents of either their husbands, or fathers or sons. Conventionally, the Hindu women are supposed to be looked after by their fathers in the younger ages, by their husbands after marriage and by their sons in the old ages. Family is posed as the saviour of the women. Family identity can exert such a strong influence on perceptions of the Indian rural women, Sen (1990) argues, that they find the question of personal welfare unintelligible. They would interpret personal welfare in terms of their reading of the welfare of the family (Ibid.: 6–7). The prosperity of the family seems to be recognized as the ultimate goal of the Hindu women in the dominant conventional discourse. Of course, the manifestations of this convention vary according to caste, class and region, and also according to some other factors like access to modern education. The larger society, including the women of Kadampur, rarely bothered about the legal entitlement of women in landed property and other means of livelihood. Rather, they seemed to be satisfied with the property owned or occupied by their families and that of their male counterparts. Hence, the resistance of the women in the village was very much conditioned by the existing power structure, by the dominant patriarchal ideology. Had it addressed the gender question persisting on the issues of land right and other means of livelihood, women’s role could have been more prominent in the movement, affecting its outcome in a more positive way. Having no gender-specific agenda and the significant agency of its own, this resistance was, as Jeffery and Jeffery (1994: 130–31) stated in a different context, ‘also limited by the extent to which the ruling ideology controls people’s consciousness’.

Conclusion It transpires that women’s participation in the movement against land acquisition in the contemporary period carries some distinctions from, as well as similarities with, the women’s participation in the earlier land movements held in both the colonial and post-colonial periods in West Bengal. Women’s participation in the contemporary land movement is distinct from that of the past because peasant women today do not have to struggle so much against the exploitation of the landlords in their local setting. Unlike the women in the earlier peasant struggles, peasant women in the contemporary period can interact with the organized domain of politics and can utilize them to make the movement successful. However, in the

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movement under consideration, though they interacted and utilized various institutions of the organized domain to speak on behalf of their families, they seldom showed much interest to be a part of them. They could hardly aspire to become a part of the SALC, the local decision-making body of the peasants determining the course of the movement. They preferred to keep their role rather confined to agitating on the road and resisting the land acquisition move without being a part of any institutional politics. Though they very often argued with the logic of state-led politics and participated fervently in electoral politics as a strategy to turn the situation in favour of them, they finally remained as subalterns in relation to the organized domain which they accepted as a domain of perpetual patriarchal power. They were dissatisfied with the functioning of the SALC as it was reluctant even to inform women about its decisions, but they did not protest against this undemocratic style of functioning of the SALC. In fact, the agitating women never thought to situate to the fore the gender issues that had emerged in the course of the land movement. Hence, the woman participants in the recent peasant movement are much like the women in Tebhaga and other past movements as far as the gender dimension is concerned. In both the cases, now and earlier, peasant women did not strive to raise gender issues explicitly in the course of the movements. The organized domain, the left communists in the past and the dominant right and a few smaller left groups in the recent anti-land acquisition movement, also seem not to have distinguished the gender dimensions of the land question and rather recognized the land movement as a homogenous space. One woman activist belonging to a left group involved in the recent land movement stated, ‘Women’s emancipation is essentially a part of the larger class struggle. We have to organize the peasant women into class struggle.’ Hence, the gender question has remained as far from the dominant discourse as it was in the earlier periods as perhaps the affected women themselves did not take it up as an issue. In fact, the attitude of the peasant women in Kadampur might be described as ‘complex mixture of deep-rooted commitment and reluctant compliance, of accepting things as they are and of undermining them through their questions and evasions’ ( Jeffery and Jeffery, 1994: 130–31). The participant women, on the one hand, had some questions on the style of functioning of the SALC and its dominating attitude towards women; on the other hand, they evaded taking part in this committee and complied with the same style of functioning without protesting much in the course of the movement. They tried to resist

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the land acquisition move vehemently as they felt that they would be the worst sufferers if the land was acquired, but at the same time, they never raised their voices against the gender discrimination persisting with regard to land rights, be it in legislation or in convention, and in the compensation being offered to the affected peasants. Women appeared to be engrossed in the deeply entrenched patriarchal ideology, despite the fact that they sometimes challenge the primordial network existing in the society. The large-scale mobilizations of the women extensively unsettled the traditional barriers imposed on women by way of caste and kinship relationships prevalent in the village community. This aspect reminds us of an observation made by Singha Roy (1992: 116) on an earlier land movement, ‘The whole gamut of the social network which had been operating apparently within the context of primordial loyalties of neighbourhood, caste, kinship and family experienced a tremendous transformation in this period.’

9 Conclusion: A New Kind of Peasant Mobilization?

The ethnographic findings described in the foregoing chapters reveal that the changes in rural societies of India have been enormous and ‘things are not what they used to be’. Today, the vast masses of the rural people in India are no longer the same as ‘the state has become implicated in the minute texture of everyday life’. During the last couple of decades, the rural people, particularly in West Bengal, have undergone a lot of transformations in all spheres – economic, cultural and political – of life. In the economic sphere, the majority of the households in both the villages are still dependent on agriculture either as cultivator or agricultural labourer, though they do show some evidence of growth of income with non-farm works. As agriculture is believed to have stagnated and become unprofitable due to the increase in cost of all inputs, trade liberalization and dwindling public investments in rural development as part of neo-liberal reforms (Patnaik, 2003), peasant masses are turning towards non-farm sectors. Here, too, they do not find enough opportunities to procure work since the work has either become scarce or is insecure and risky in the rural localities. This finding seems to be in part different from a recent research which reveals that rural India has been undergoing ‘ a slow and arduous transformation from an agriculture-based economy to one that is based on industries and services, and with agriculture serving an important but secondary role’ (Lindberg, 2012: 73). The peasant consciousness, which was earlier thought to have remained somewhat outside the purview of the state and state-led politics,1 now seems entwined with, and shaped by, the elite or organized domain of politics. This 1. At the initial phase of subaltern studies series, the guiding framework was to look for a distinctive structure of peasant consciousness. That is, it was argued that there was a structure of peasant consciousness. But in the later phase, the group gave up this search for an essential structure of peasant consciousness. See Chatterjee (1999: 415–16).

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assimilation is so marked that the peasant or ‘subaltern’ consciousness appears to have lost much of its cohesion to qualify as a separate domain. The everyday lives of the entire peasantry, cutting across diverse landholding classes and social groups, are now closely knit, in multifarious ways, with various forms of institutional power in the rural areas. The market and the world outside the village in general have penetrated the lives of the peasantry through different means like mass media and the mobility and migration of the villagers mainly in search of livelihoods, resulting in their increasing integration with the globalized regime not only in the economic sphere but also in socio-cultural sphere. Hence, reverting back to the prominent theoretical perspectives discussed in the introductory chapters, one may argue that it is hard to discern a separate or ‘closed’ domain of peasant consciousness. Rather, one can perhaps witness, if one enquires into the abstruse sphere of culture and mundane life of the rural people, some fragmentary elements of peasant or subaltern consciousness, manifesting them in the arena of village politics. The peasant masses are found to be increasingly participating in the state institutions, such as that operating at the grassroots, and the government and the political parties are offering them various welfare packages. In both the study villages, the political parties and the panchayat have turned into essential institutions in the social life of the villagers, though the degree of participation of different social groups in them varies considerably. While the members of one social group have more stake and hence greater participation in the panchayat, people of other groups choose to participate in political parties or in other village-level institutions, like the VECs, cooperatives and VDCs. This apart, a majority of the village people who do not participate directly in these institutions cannot entirely avoid the same, particularly the political parties, due to their overarching role in the village polity. As a result, in the present regime, the manner in which the masses of peasantry are representing themselves in the state institutions has become an important subject of study. Again, the way the peasant consciousness is being shaped by elements of stateled principles and vice versa seems to be coming up as one of the principal questions before the scholars engaged in the research of peasant politics these days. In both Kalipur and Kadampur, it is evident that all sections of the peasantry are increasingly involved with, and participating in, state politics, though in varied forms and to different extents. The extent of participation varies not only according to caste, religion and gender positions of the villagers, but also in terms of the economic status (determined essentially by the landholding

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positions) of the people and the level of policy initiatives on the part of the local government and activities of the political parties. Despite the variation in their participation, it is perhaps an undeniable fact that these state or elite institutions have become part and parcel of the everyday struggle of the village people. Moreover, due to their interactions with these state institutions, the lives and ideologies of the peasantry in turn seem to be shaping, at least in parts, the functioning of local state and activities of the political parties. This becomes evident not only when the peasants in large numbers participate in the elections, in various programmes organized by the state institutions and in party rallies or meetings, but also when they discuss about it candidly in oneto-one conversations. The villagers, irrespective of their caste, class, religion and gender divisions, have developed a keen interest in different state institutions not only at the village or local level, but beyond. Also, the desires and demands of the villagers are being shaped by their growing relationship with other localities outside the villages, as also their deprivations arising out of failure to achieve these goals in their lives. Hence, the issues of ‘trans-locality’2 pose a new challenge to local governance and social order in the changing rural spaces. Under globalized conditions, when the tension between the needs and norms of local life and local governance and the needs and norms imposed by the trans-local life is increasing, the question arises how the local rural spaces are being managed, maintained and also, subsequently (re)produced. Besides, the political parties seem to have become an indispensable part of village life. This is evident from the realization of the tribal morhol (chief ) of Kalipur who says that ‘in any case, we needed a party that could provide us some sort of support’.3 Similarly, one landless woman of Kadampur, who lives on livestock rearing, emphasized the role of the political parties and its leaders in their life, notwithstanding their failure to protect her land. The nuanced narratives, collected through this ethnography of two villages, suggest that the peasantry as a whole strive to utilize these institutions as best as possible to improve their lives and livelihood. But the interesting question to explore is: how exactly are they participating in the said institutions? Do they experience some sort of ‘subordinate’ feeling in their relationship with the state domain 2. Appadurai (1990: 1) comments, ‘Sociologists and historians, especially those concerned with translocal processes (Hodgson 1980) and the world systems associated with capitalism (Abu-Lughod 1989; Braudel 1981-84; Curtin 1984; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982) have long been aware that the world has been congeries of large scale interactions for many centuries. Yet today’s world involves interactions of a new order and intensity.’ 3. He commented in Bengali (not in his own tribal language): Kintu party to ekta korte habe. Ekta abalamban tow darker.

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of politics? The ethnographic account amply elucidates that the peasantry, while participating in state politics, are guided by elements of their peasant or ‘subaltern’ consciousness. The peasant consciousness, though fragmented, is reflected in their everyday participation in the state domain of politics. Is it apt to describe the participation of peasantry in state institutions at present as transformation of power?

Transformation of Power? It transpires from the present research that there are always some forms of reflection of peasant consciousness in the arena of institutional politics, operating simultaneously at the rural margin. Though the peasantry, in general, have experienced a lot of transformations in social, economic, legal–political and cultural–ideological spheres, during the long years of their relationship with the state institutions and politics, and particularly during the last three decades of Left Front rule in West Bengal, the peasant consciousness continues to provide some sort of primordial cultural contents in their social and collective life. It has become palpable from the present study that the people of these two villages manage to sustain some sort of primordial social relationships in their daily life, mainly through their culture and consciousness. Villagers at large recognize themselves as members of distinct social groups. For example, the Muslim minority group in Kalipur lives distinctly as a separate entity, generally not being considered as co-habitants by the rest of the villagers. The Muslims are conspicuous by their absence in any collective gatherings or social occasions, including the gram sansad meetings in the village. But in the gram sansad meeting of one village, two leaders from the said community were present, while the rest abstained, presumably because their community is not entitled to any specific benefits from the panchayat. The tribal group, that constitutes 23.6 per cent of total village population, is recognized as either Santhals or chhotoloks by others. They are described by the people of other social groups, including even the panchayat pradhan hailing from the SC community, as ignorant or culturally degenerate community. Apart from the Muslim and tribal communities, the remaining denizens are divided along caste lines. These caste groups maintain their distinct caste identity mainly in their cultural–ideological lives. The caste distinctions in some instances also continue to prevail in the economic arena, as class and caste divisions often overlap in the village society. The caste division is particu-

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larly prominent between the GC groups and the SC groups, expressed often in terms of bhadralok–chhotolok relationship. The landed higher-caste people, who consider themselves as bhadraloks or gentlemen vis-à-vis the lower-caste chhotoloks, mainly use these terms and generally nurture caste-based divisiveness in their consciousness. The people of the so-called lower-caste groups (hailing from the SC communities) internalize these hierarchical categories and often describe themselves as chhotoloks and the upper castes as bhadraloks or babus. But it is important to note here that caste and religion, as a manifestation of primordial culture, have become closely entangled with institutional politics. The political arena of the villages seems to be witnessing a new kind of power relationship, ensuing from the presence of these cultural contents. The upper-caste people lament over the ‘loss of harmony’ that prevailed earlier in the social life of the village, under the influence of party politics, resulting in further conflict between the upper and lower-caste people.4 The lower castes, Muslims and the tribal people, on the other hand, feel that the spread of party politics in village life during the last decades has enabled them to gain social prestige to some extent. Not only the caste groups, but all social or economic categories are now more and more linked with and shaped by the state domain of politics. Women as well have begun to appreciate the salience of their position, albeit to a limited degree, within the framework of institutional politics. They are, at present, aspiring to get a space in institutional power and utilize the same for their benefit. But the gender question here is quite complex as it is intimately connected with those of caste, religion, economic status and access to modern education. Moreover, as the present research reveals, in both the villages, women identify the domain of institutional power as an arena dominated by men and hence, they often vent their grievances outside the legal–institutional structures. However, all these linkages vary depending on the extent to which institutional politics gets entrenched in the grassroots of the rural areas. Undoubtedly, these linkages got strengthened during the last three decades of the Left Front rule because of the deep penetration of the political parties in the rural areas and due to several governmental policies introduced, particularly since the 1990s, for the welfare of rural people. Be it the Muslim, or the tribal community or some other caste group, or women, everyone nowadays would likely interpret one’s position in the society in relation to one’s location in the arena of institutional politics. 4. This sentiment was expressed by a member of a Kayastha landlord family of Kalipur.

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Either as a community, or a social group or as a member of a community, what benefits one could gain from the government, or how much one is being favoured or not by the political parties, seems to have become the essence of contemporary rural politics. And so, in some sense, it is true that under the impact of governmentality, ‘population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of the needs, of aspirations…’ (Foucault, 1994: 217). In both Kalipur and Kadampur, the population are apparently absorbed in this politics of benefit distribution. These rural communities are found to be competing with each other to take the advantage of institutional politics for their own sake. But does it mean that a sort of domination–subordination relationship ceases to exist among them? Or do the above changes lead to ‘transformation of power’ or to a situation in which the ‘framework of power relationship between the elite and subaltern classes’ is no longer relevant? In fact, a division between the ‘we’ and ‘they’ always seems to be prevailing among the people at large in the entire narrative of the two villages, with all its subtleties. Here, the term ‘we’ refers mainly to the masses of the SC–ST category and the term ‘they’ includes the people of the upper-caste groups; it is the other way around if the narrator is from the higher echelon of the graded social structure. The division was palpable in the gram sansad meeting of Kalipur where a clear patron–client relationship emerged among the participants: the party and panchayat leaders appeared as the ‘givers’ of benefits or patrons, while the people of the disadvantaged groups participated in the meeting as the ‘takers’ of benefits or the clients. And herein probably lies the basis of power structure in the village society whereby benefits are distributed not as rights but as favours. Here, some people appear to live at the mercy of others, at best on the benevolence of the rulers. The rulers may be democratically elected by universal suffrage, but the system of governance seems to be depending on a patron–client relationship. The people are treated more as subjects than as citizens in a system in which they have to solicit the ruler’s favours for the sake of their survival or minimum improvement in their living conditions. Whether this relationship weakens the effective functioning of the local state is not the only issue here; the point is that it reflects the domination–subordination relationship that characterizes village politics. Hence, the question arises: how far ‘the new framework of democratic citizenship’, introduced by Chatterjee (2012: 46), is appropriate to explain the contemporary politics of peasant masses in India?

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In general, the panchayat, various committees at the village level and other governmental institutions like ICDS centres are supposed to function as public institutions and to operate on the basis of the legal–political principles laid down by the state. Given the diversity of the village polity, representations from the traditionally backward groups are sought to be ensured by compulsory reservation not only in the local self-governments but also in the village-level committees, in order to ensure representation of these groups in rural governance. But the question is that how far have these institutional reforms been instrumental in bringing the people of the disadvantaged social groups into positions of governance of the entire society, which remained the exclusive domain of the higher castes and big landholding classes for centuries? The present ethnography reveals that the landed gentry belonging to the upper castes still remain the real power holders in the villages blocking proper realization of the said policy reforms at the grassroots. But the important difference with the past is that at present, there have been ‘historical shifts in configurations or methods of power’ (Abu-Lughod, 1990: 48). The landed gentries are now dominating village politics through the political parties, owing to which individual patronage of earlier period has been replaced by institutional party patronage. Both in Kalipur and Kadampur, the political parties and the movements led by them are controlled, mainly, by the upper-caste party leaders belonging to the landowning community. A glimpse of the attitude of the upper-caste party functionaries, at least some of them, was reflected in the comments made by the wife of a CPI(M) leader of Kalipur, herself an active member of the Women’s Committee (Mahila Samiti) of the party, who vented her anguish over the placement of an SC person as the head of the gram panchayat, while the real show was routinely run by the upper-caste leaders. It is not an atypical view held by the upper-caste landed people, sometimes also shared by the upper-caste party leaders who are at the helm of the state domain of politics. Not only do the leaders of the party in power act in such a way, the opposition party leadership, also principally composed of people coming from the upper-caste landowning community, follows suit. The political dynamics of Kadampur present a kind of an illustration of this phenomenon, if one particularly looks at the situation that had prevailed before the peasant movement against land acquisition flared up in the village. The Mahishya people, in and outside the village, have been dominating both the ruling and opposition parties for long. The political scenario has, however, changed to some extent during the course

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of the movement that witnessed the emergence of the SC panchayat member as one of the real leaders of the village. Both the SC pradhan and the ST leader from Kalipur were found to be deeply involved in the organized state domain so much so that they couldn’t probably imagine a life without it. But did it mean that they had been enjoying the real power? Their so-called elite consciousness seems to contain some elements of subaltern mentality. But the subaltern mentality is constituted by two elements as observed by the subaltern historian Bhadra (1997). He has observed that two elements that ‘together constitute the subaltern mentality are submissiveness to the authority in one context and defiance in another’ (Ibid.: 63). For example, the SC leader had a subaltern feeling of alienation due to his inability to run the panchayat independently, as he just formally adorned the post of panchayat pradhan while the higher-caste party leaders were actually calling the shots. Realizing that a person of his background could never be competent enough to gain authority in the state institutions, he suffered from a sense of frustration and sometimes even thought of opting out of the same. But in the end, he still continues in the role of the pradhan, as this has not only been beneficial for him but also for his community in terms of grabbing a large part of the panchayat benefits. The case of the ST leader, on the other hand, seems to indicate a different dimension of subordination. Apparently, he belonged to the ruling political party and had been an ardent activist. But he carried the rebel in him all through, castigating the pro-rich activities of the ruling party and dissociating from all the anti-labour actions of the party. Instead of being seated in a position of power, he preferred his role as an organizer of the ST people in favour of a party about which he was sceptical and critical, especially in terms of its credibility to represent his own community. As most of the panchayat schemes are meant for the development of his community, he believed that it would not be wise for his community to stay away from the party running the panchayat, and instead he should try to garner as much benefits as possible for the community. But he continued his search for a new political party which would serve best not only his community but also the entire subordinate classes. The difference in subaltern mentality between these two leaders operating in the state domain seems to have originated in the histories of evolution of the two communities as also in the divergent processes of their interaction with the organized state domain. The ST leader remained a rebel against the political party all through his association with the party since its ascendancy to power. He judged a political party and its leaders in terms of their respective

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roles in struggles as he remained committed to the path of social movements. As a Santhal, he seemed to have ‘a proud sense of their militant tribal history’, as argued by Duyker (1987: 115). In his study, Duyker explained how the Santhals in West Bengal participated and also represented themselves in the Naxalite movement (1967–72), following the historical root of their participation in the rebellion. He stated that, ‘not only did the Santals rationalize Naxalite violence within the context of their own unique culture and history, but when they themselves joined the movement, they infused into it unique tactical and organizational influences…’ (Ibid.: 132). In Kalipur, the participation of the Santhal community in the movements led in the past by the CPI(M) party indicates a similar phenomenon. The Santhal community was in the forefront of peasant struggles in the late 1960s that had challenged the authority of the old landlords. The CPI(M) party had initially utilized this militant struggle of the Santhal people to establish its power in the village, but subsequently, switched over to draw support from the numerically dominant Bagdi and Dule communities in the 1980s. The subsequent development saw the rural people getting more and more absorbed in the politics of benefit distribution with different communities vying with each other to garner more governmental benefits for themselves or for their community. In fact, when the ‘regime secures legitimacy…by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 34), the governed people, particularly the people of the disadvantaged groups, cannot but utilize this opportunity to improve their well-being. The tribal community has not been an exception in this respect, as members of this community were seen to compete with those from the dominant SC community, the Bagdis, over the share of governmental benefits. Despite the feeling of subalternity, the people of all the deprived communities got involved in this politics of benefit distribution, at least to some extent, and tried to be accommodated in the existing power structure. There are other advantages as well for which the link or relationship with the ruling party is seen to be crucial in rural life. These ‘advantages’ include political management of jobs, which are scarce and hence regarded very attractive (for example, jobs in panchayats, ICDS centres, schools, colleges and the like are strictly controlled so that only persons with party connections can think of bagging the same); various kinds of unskilled and manual works (that is, in cold storages, in the implementation of various schemes, etc.); controlling distribution of licences, spaces for marketing and other facilities for various kind of businesses; favouring certain people in the misuse of governmental

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rules (that is, in the conversion of the nature of land use, mutation fees are conveniently evaded or barga lands are sold with the help of the party); and in land disputes or in the resolution of almost every conflict (see also Chatterjee, 2009)������������������������������������������������������������������������������ . As a result, as the narrative of the two villages reveals, people of different social groups try to build up party connections and learn ways of manoeuvring to fulfil their aspirations. Failure to cultivate proper connection or to get particular favour, on the contrary, generates grievances against the party and the panchayat. Not only do the people of one community complain against the people of another, allegedly for garnering more benefits by the dint of their closer association with the party, the people of the same community often fight against each other on similar issues. The people of various communities are steeped in this kind of politics based on benefit seeking and benefit distribution for the sake of their own well-being or of their respective communities. The communities, or community-centred politics, seem to have become a crucial dynamic that influences the present-day politics in rural West Bengal.

‘Community’ in Rural Spaces In fact, in both the villages, the entire societal landscape, cutting across all heterogeneous social groups, seems to be entwined with some sort of communitycentred politics. Beneath the political party-based politics on the surface, a variety of community-centred politics surround the everyday life of the rural people. The communities here are constructed mainly on the basis of caste and religion, that is, the conventional cultural content. In some cases, gender politics acquire salience in the rural setting, varying though in exact forms. In the typical situation of rural West Bengal, the old sort of ‘oppressive’ zamindars or landlords do not exist anymore, but caste identities and the landholding status often overlap with each other. For instance, the big landholding classes usually belong to upper-caste groups, whereas the landless classes usually hail from so-called backward caste groups, accounting for the continuation of the old pattern of community formation. But, this apart, some new types of communities are being formed nowadays on the basis of some economic criteria or livelihood demands, particularly when a section of the people is being affected due to some governmental policies. The political developments in Kadampur offer an instance of this kind. In some recent scholarly studies, it has been argued that in West Bengal, all social institutions, both traditional and modern, are either marginalized

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or subordinated to the party. In other words, ‘political parties in rural West Bengal largely transcended caste, religion and ethnicity based organizations which have some relevance in other parts of the country’ (Bhattacharyya, 2009: 60). The village people too, in general, would say at the first instance that the party is all in all and that the party is dominating everything. Apparently, the party is decisive in all kind of village affairs, including in forums such as gram sansad meetings, the VEC meetings and workshops, and in the office of the panchayat as well as in the functioning of schools and the ICDS centres. But one significant question surfaces at this point. Who are calling the shots in the political party that dominates the local political landscape? A deeper look into the social–political processes reveals that the interrelations among different social groups are largely determining the course of village politics. In Kalipur, it was evident that the locally dominant party was actually run by landowning persons of dominant caste groups, though for political mobilizations in the area, the dominant party principally depended on the people of SC–ST and Muslim communities. Remarkably, in the course of time, some of the landless and unlettered members of the SC and ST groups got inducted into the lower echelon of the party (as also in the panchayat positions) presumably in the interest of electoral politics.5 But the role of these SC–ST representatives in running the affairs of the party and the panchayat remained subservient to that of the upper-caste leaders. Very often, the uppercaste leaders came from outside the village and took decisions pertaining to the village affairs on behalf of the local committee of the party. Although in the course of the land movement in Kadampur an SC person emerged as one of the leaders of the dominant party, the leaders belonging to the dominant Mahishya caste were still in overall control of the party affairs. This leads us to raise the next question: how could the dominant party led by the upper-caste rich people continue its hegemony for so long over the numerically dominant people of the disadvantaged groups? Also, why is a section of upper-caste gentry then so opposed to the ruling party if the leadership of the party, in essence, represents them? The present research shows that the solidity of hegemony of the ruling party depends mainly on how effectively the party can tackle the aspirations and demands of the people of different social groups. To this end, the party not only utilizes the governmental welfare 5. The branch committee of the CPI(M) party in which the party members of Kalipur were included was composed of 13 members, out of which majority (eight members) belonged to the SC–ST community. Even the secretary of this branch committee belonged to the SC community.

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programmes but also tries to politically oversee and control various problems related to their lives and livelihoods. In both Kalipur and Kadampur, the story seems to be the same. In Kalipur, the party in power, the CPI(M), has drawn principally on the support of the SC people, particularly people of the Bagdi and Dule castes, though initially it ascended to power on the basis of the struggles of the tribal people. The party never fails to utilize the memories of those struggles against the landed gentry and the ensuing agrarian reforms to make a case in its favour and win the hearts of the disadvantaged landless people. The party strives to strengthen and retain its social base among the people of different communities through strategic distribution of benefits meant mainly for the disadvantaged groups and through the political management of different problems and conflicts concerning their lives. The party leaders who, very often, not only come from upper-caste groups but also from outside the village accomplish these tasks on behalf of the party with the help of the community leaders owing allegiance to the party. But, obviously, these leaders of the party have the final say in all important issues surrounding the village life. The party also tries to retain its support base among the tribal people through the same strategy of benefit distribution, both governmental and political; however, in my study village, it has failed to choose a correct representative from among the community to replace the dissident leader of the community. The issue of choice of community leaders seems to be important here as they act as a bridge between the party and the community. It is important to note how the ruling party is striving to mitigate the contradictions between the two major social groups in Kalipur, that is, between the Mahishyas and the SC–ST communities. Apparently, the party aims to maintain a balance in its dealing with these two larger social groups. Though the deprived social groups constitute the major proportion of the village population, the party very often comes out, in our examples, with compromise solutions in favour of the landowning upper-caste groups. While the upper-caste rich people influence the decisions of the party from within and outside the political party, the party plays a mediating role in some cases like negotiating the increase of wage of agricultural labourers to appease the SC–ST people. Though these efforts of the party to arrive at compromise between the interests of the rival social classes might be termed as ‘politics of middleness’ (Bhattacharyya, 1999), in actual fact, the party seems to be privileging the landowning upper castes in maintaining the extant social order as such. The politics of manoeuvring, aimed at maintaining a stable support base among different social groups or, more precisely, between the two larger

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caste groups, has not always been successful in mitigating social tensions or maintaining the party’s social base intact. Rather, conflicts among the divergent social groups seem to have increased over the past decades. In case of Kadampur, the dominant party lost both panchayat and assembly elections even before the emergence of the land movement. In the process, both the larger social groups grew increasingly disillusioned with the political parties and began to vent their discontent in different ways. In Kalipur too, the people of upper-caste groups, particularly the Mahishya and Kayastha, started to complain that the party was giving protection to the chhotoloks and not paying heed to the problems of the landowning peasantry. On the other hand, the people of disadvantaged groups expressed their grievances saying that they were not getting proper governmental assistance, nowadays, as the party had been ‘usurped by the upper-caste rich people’. Though the Muslim community had two party leaders from their community, the people of this community, including the leaders, felt that they were being discriminated against owing to their status as a minority community. To contain these grievances and the subsequent protests from various communities, the party adopted various unscrupulous methods, including the use of violence, though mostly in subtle forms, against the dissenting villagers. In Kalipur, during the strike of agricultural labourers in 1986 for wage increase, the village tribal leader belonging to the party was beaten up by the activists of the same party as he and his community dared to defy the decisions of the party leaders. The party leaders had asked him to call off the strike and to settle for a lower rate with the landed gentry, which he did not comply with.6 Besides, a section of the supporters of the opposition party (TMC) who had become active in the 1998 panchayat elections and campaigned for the same, were also beaten up by the supporters of the ruling CPI(M) party. Interestingly, the party leaders cash in on such types of violent activities undertaken by their supporters within the SC–ST communities. This apart, the party leaders manipulate such crucial things like the distribution of ration cards and implementation of welfare projects, or bringing of electricity in a certain locality, in such a manner as to ensure that the beneficiaries vote for the party. The party also, allegedly, controlled the distribution of voter identity cards so that the supporters of the opponent parties could not cast their votes according to their choice. 6. The existing wage rate in Kalipur was around Rs 55–60, all including, during my fieldwork in 2006–08. But the minimum wage rate prescribed by the central government for West Bengal for the workers of agriculture category was Rs 74.53 and Rs 71.13 with two meals at that time (as notified by the Ministry of Labour, Government of India, on 24 June 2008). Available at www. labour.nic.in.

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Furthermore, the party very often interferes in different social and familial conflicts with the ‘benevolent’ aim to mediate and solve the problems amicably. The ‘organizational’ aim of the party presumably remains to oversee distress management in such a way as to make more and more people obliged to the party. It has become the unofficial norm that the beneficiaries from such conflict management would be obliged to serve the party in lieu of the favour the party extended to them. But the way the party leaders intervene in familial conflicts, and even in disputes in conjugal lives, did not satisfy all the sections. The tribal morhol (chief ) of Kalipur clearly expressed his unhappiness over the intervention of the party in their social and familial affairs without conforming to the norms of their community. It goes against the argument that due to the popular acceptance of the political parties among the rural people, ‘all types of disputes (familial, social or cultural) took little time to assume partisan forms’ (Bhattacharyya, 2009: 60). But the tribal people in the post-Lalgarh scenario7 seem no more inclined to follow the decisions of the ‘party’ in power in all spheres of life. The tribal people of Kalipur en masse, who since long have been in search of an alternative party to represent their interests in the organized state domain, have reportedly joined the Jharkhand Disam Party ( JDP). The JDP, which is meant to represent the tribal community, became a strong force in Dhaniakhali block8 just before the parliamentary elections in 2009. This development seems to be significant as it shows how the integrity of a community can transcend local boundaries and consolidate across a large part of the state against the government and the dominant ruling party, having the capacity to substantially influence the dynamics of the state domain of politics. At this juncture, the community bonding proves to be more effective than the party affiliations in determining the political behaviour of a social group spread over a large area. More generally, people from divergent social groups having some common interests can also form a ‘community’, or ‘civic community’ in Putnam’s phrase, and can subsequently influence the affairs of the state politics to some extent (Putnam, 1993; 1999). The club in Kalipur, for instance, is a platform of that 7. In the Lalgarh movement of 2008, the tribal community of the state was mobilized, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, against the police repression on the tribal community, particularly on their womenfolk. Since then, throughout the state, the tribal community, especially the Santhals, has begun to join different political formations, such as the Jharkhand Disam Party ( JDP) in Dhaniakhali, which suddenly rose from the ashes to challenge the authority of the so far all-powerful ruling party in the area. 8. In Dhaniakhali, the tribal people constitute 13.9 per cent of the total block population. The report of tribal mobilization in JDP in the Dhaniakhali block was published in The Times of India, 28 June 2006, Kolkata edition.

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kind in which the youths, principally from the SC–ST social groups, have united to do something for the village beyond the confines of party politics. In fact, they became so frustrated with the overriding role of the party ‘as moral guardians not only in the public life of the society but also in the private lives of the families’ that they prohibited the entry of any kind of party politics inside their club. But, subsequently, the club could not remain completely detached from the developments of party politics in the village. These youths played a key role in nominating the SC leader of the village as a candidate on behalf of the same CPI(M) party in the last panchayat elections (2008) when the seat in question became unreserved after the merger of two villages, Kalipur and Madhupur, into one gram sansad. The upper-caste party leaders of the village were very keen to nominate a person belonging to the upper-caste groups and accordingly, tried to impose their candidate on the numerically dominant SC and ST people of Kalipur. This incident can also be recognized as a strategic win of the disadvantaged people over the domination of the upper-caste people in village politics. In conjectural terms, it can be stated that vibrant civic community is ‘the precondition for democracy and decentralization’, particularly ‘in soils traditionally inhospitable to self-government’ (Putnam, 1999: 8). The peasant resistance in Kadampur, under the leadership of SALC, presents itself as another instance of the process of the formation of a community among the disadvantaged people on the basis of a common interest to protect their livelihoods against the government’s attempt to destabilize the same. In response to the land acquisition move by the government, the peasant masses of the village formed the SALC and tried to strategically utilize various political parties, the ‘civil society’ organizations and also some influential intellectuals in the service of their cause. The political parties, on the other hand, joined the initiative of the peasantry due to their own electoral compulsions. But the committee, here the SALC, was supposedly not a platform of a homogeneous kind as it represented a heterogeneous peasantry. Despite being a formal representative body of the peasantry cutting across all social groups, there seemed to be always some underlying contents of stratification operating in the grassroots that shaped the dynamics and course of the antiland acquisition movement. The issues of caste, gender and diverse economic interests of the participants were important here, all along impacting on the ‘moral solidarity’ of the peasantry. Hence, it can be stated that caste, ethnicity, religion and gender still matter a lot in determining the politics of the peasantry these days despite the fact that the peasants at large are today connected deeply with the state domain

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of politics. So, the extent and nature of participation of different social groups of the peasantry vary considerably both in the decentralized forms of governance and in social movements against the government waged in favour of their livelihood claims. Whether the ‘party-society’ is the specific form of ‘political society’ in West Bengal (Bhattacharyya, 2009: 60) seems not to be of primary importance here, rather the question that needs more attention from social science researchers is how the politics of the peasantry in general is being constructed and shaped at the margin, through the interaction of various social groups, both among themselves as well as with party politics. The question is, therefore, how the identity of caste, ethnicity, gender and religion, along with the economic divisions, is influencing the pattern of everyday politics in rural India, particularly when the scholar asserts that ‘castes were never outside politics...Whereas in the past ambitious castes had to “wade through slaughter to a throne”, caste tensions today are a daily grind’ (Gupta, 2005b: 414). But another question seems to be coming to the fore in contemporary context of globalization with trans-locality or migration being a common feature everywhere causing greater ‘fluidity’ of previously stationary units like people, money, information, machine and ideology (Appadurai, 1990). The question is how do the rural people construct their ethnic boundary in the changing rural space where migration becomes the most prominent phenomenon from rural to urban, to faraway cities both within the country and the abroad? How does new ethnic constellation adjust with the local institutions and cultural belief and vice versa, and subsequently the ‘ethnoscape’ being (re)constructed in consequences of human motion in the rural context. By ‘ethnoscapes’,9 Appadurai (Ibid.: 7) means: …the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world…and it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move.

The pertinent question that arises is whether the issues of trans-locality and ethnoscapes facilitate the process of governance or pose a challenge to it by making a difference? 9. Appadurai (1990) uses the suffix ‘scapes’ to mean the fluidity of the aforesaid stationary units like ethnoscapes, financescape, mediascapes, technoscapes and ideoscapes. He states that the terms indicate that ‘these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision but rather that they are deeply perspectival construct’ (Ibid.: 7).

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A New Kind of Peasant Mobilization? In order to analyze different forms of resistance and the relationship of resistance to power, Abu-Lughod (1990: 41) says in relation to the nature of contemporary resistance studies: …unlike the grand studies of peasant insurgency and revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, what one finds now is a concern with unlikely forms of resistance, subversions rather than large-scale collective insurrections, small or local resistances not tied to the overthrow of systems or even to ideologies of emancipation.

So, the question arises whether there exists at all in the contemporary period of globalization, such kind of peasant insurgency or revolution that emerged in the decades of 1960s and 1970s? Chatterjee (2008a) also asserts that the economic and political situations of developing countries like India have undergone remarkable changes in the past few decades, particularly in the recent phase under the impact of globalization. Departing from his earlier standpoint, he explains that the contemporary peasant struggles could not be examined by the old transition theories, ‘in which peasants and peasant societies under conditions of capitalist development are always in a state of transition – whether from feudalism to capitalism or from pre-capitalist backwardness to socialist modernity’, as the peasantry at large has undergone fundamental changes during the last few decades and exists today under new conditions (Ibid.: 55). His main argument is similar to that of Sanyal who said that ‘under present conditions of post-colonial development within a globalized economy, the narrative of transition is no longer valid’ (Sanyal, 2007: 20). These arguments undoubtedly call for further research, particularly when in some areas, people are thought (by some scholars) to be mobilized in the anti-state movements under the leadership of radical left. But it transpires from the present ethnographic research that peasant mobilizations, in general, are now ‘local’ in nature and also, they are based on everyday needs of life and livelihood. The peasant mobilization in Kadampur seems not to be an exception. Hence, the mobilization of the peasants against land acquisition in the contemporary period carries some distinctions from the kind of earlier land movements that occurred in both the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Unlike the peasants in the earlier periods, peasants today do not have to struggle against the exploitation of the big landlords in their local setting. Rather, the peasants have to now struggle against the govern-

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ment to fulfil the demand of protection of their means of labour, as evident in case of the Singur land movement. In the global situation, the government also seems not to avoid the livelihood questions of the population. As Chatterjee argues, ‘the major characteristic of the contemporary regime of power’ in countries like India, is ‘governmentalization of the state’, whereby the ‘regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 34). In other words, in the contemporary period, when ‘the policy regulates social life and makes subjects and citizens, not by repression and overt control, but through a productive power which engenders subjectivities and aspirations’, as mentioned by Mosse (2005: 6), the government always seems to try to introduce new policies to govern the respective population in a better way. Unlike the peasants of earlier mobilizations, peasants in the contemporary period, hence, have to interact with the state-led institutions along with the civil society organizations and the media to a great extent, and subsequently endeavour to utilize them to make their mobilization successful. The question arises: when there have always been deficiencies in the issues of governance, as evident in the Singur land movement, is there any possibility of a large-scale anti-capitalist movement with an aim of a transition to another regime devoid of exploitation of corporate capital, as imagined particularly by the Marxists? In fact, the dynamics of any mobilization against capital must, first, be determined by the extent of hegemony of capitalist logic, which Chatterjee (2008a) described as the hegemonic logic of corporate capital, on the peasantry as a whole. Today, in some countries, the corporate capital could effectively and productively resettle the peasants by sharing of their financial benefit with the dispossessed population (Cernea, 2007).10 Therefore, the emergence of an anti-capitalist movement would depend on how the poor people interpret the compensations and anti-poverty programmes offered by the present regime. Do they believe that the anti-poverty schemes offered by the present regime can, as Chatterjee (2008a) conceptualizes, reverse the affects of the accumulation of capital? Second, the dynamics of any mobilization against capital must also be determined by the extent of legitimacy of electoral democracy among the peasants concerned. Do they believe that they 10. M.M. Cernea argues in a recent article that population resettlement could be possible by creative benefit-sharing mechanisms. By citing some experiences in different countries, he shows that the contemporary development regime could solve the issues of displacement by financing for development. See Cernea (2007).

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can achieve better benefits or, in other words, alter the lack of governance by using the instrument of electoral democracy? But, with very limited resources, the state can only fulfil the needs of a small group of the people, and that creates ample room for manipulations by the political parties and ruling leaders to favour certain persons owing allegiance to them. A number of ethnographic and micro-level studies conducted on contemporary rural politics have well explored the attitudes and intentions of the government on the issues of welfare of the population as a whole (Bhattacharya, 1998; Bhattacharya, 2002; Corbridge et al., 2005; Roy 2007, 2008). It has been revealed from those studies that though ‘population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of the needs, of aspirations…’ (Foucault, 1994: 217), the aspirations and needs of the population have rarely been fulfilled where particular vested interests of different classes and political parties are very often dominating the political arena. The question at this point is whether ‘in this new reality’, the ‘political change is necessarily molecular, local and perhaps impermanent and reversible’, as Chatterjee (2008b: 93) claims in relation to the question of existence of any transition narrative in recent times. In other words, the point is whether, as Appadurai (2000: 6) argues forcefully, ‘... globalization – in this perspective a cover term for a world of disjunctive flows – produces problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local’ (see also Appadurai, 1990). The narrative of Singur land movement reveals that though it originates locally and manifests in intensely local form, its impacts go far beyond and affect larger political landscape. The Singur land movement has not only been translated in different places of the country wherever the respective governments have tried to acquire agricultural land for the interest of corporate capital, it has also become an important debatable issue in the parliamentary or national politics. The land movement of Singur has initiated policy reforms in not only West Bengal but also at the national level. These political changes are anything but ‘reversible’ or ‘impermanent’ in their nature of impacts. In fact, the extent of impact, or the permanency and irreversibility, of any micro-level movement like the Singur land movement depends largely on how far the ‘non-state actors’ or the part of ‘civil society’ ‘in the areas of human rights and environmental activism’ could ‘compete with the organized global strategies of states and corporate interests’ (Appadurai, 2000: 17).11 11. By engaging Keck and Sikkink (1998) and Matthews (1997), Appadurai (2000: 17) states, ‘While

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Due to the deficiencies of governance or lack of ‘development’ in local spaces, the concerned citizens always make some protests or criticisms against the government in order to fulfil the lack on the part of the government. These criticisms or protests might become a force which can make a change in policies and actions of the government, and subsequently leads to the creation of newer policies and actions. The recent policy reforms of the West Bengal government, and the central government as well, after Singur land movement is a case in point. The most important act meant for land acquisition, that is, the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, has been revised to some extent by the central government recently, largely in the interest of peasants. The GoWB has also stalled the implementation of the Special Economic Zones Act, 2003, in the state. Due to the various discussions on the rehabilitation and resettlement of the peasants who are being dispossessed due to land acquisition for industrialization and urbanization, a bill has been introduced recently in the Parliament (in 2011) called the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill.

the number of nonstate actors has grown monumentally in the last three decades, especially in the areas of human rights and environmental activism, there is much more confusion about their relative successes in competing with the organized global strategies of states and corporate interests’.

Glossary

Adda: is translated by Bengali linguist Sunitikumar Chottopadhyay as a ‘place’ for ‘careless talk with boon companions’ or ‘the chats of intimate friends’. Adivasi: tribal people.

Aman: kind of paddy cultivated during the monsoon season.

Babu: in Bengali, the term means the landed gentry or those who are at the helm of rural power. Bagdi: a caste under the SC category.

Bajras: big boats used for carrying both goods and men to distant places.

Bargadar: sharecroppers legally entitled to receive three-fourth of the produce they cultivate. Benami land: above-ceiling land illegally held by landlords, recording those in fictitious names. Bidroha: rebellion; uprising. Hence, bidrohi is a rebel.

Boro: kind of paddy cultivated during the summer season.

Dharmashastra: a Hindu Brahmanical collection of rules of life, often in the form of a metrical law book. Dharna: a sit-in demonstration highlighting peoples’ demands. Dhing: rebellion; uprising.

Dule: a caste under the SC category.

Durga puja: worship of a deity, Goddess Durga. Fituri: rebellion; uprising.

Garir kishan: labourers coming by train/bus from outside to work on other’s field.

Gherao: keeping someone of the authority confined till the demands are met. Gowala: a caste that comes under the OBC category.

256  |  Glossary

Gram panchayat: the lowest tier of the PRI, constituted with members elected from each election booth.

Gram sabha: there shall be a gram sabha for each panchayat circle consisting of the persons registered in the electoral rolls related to the village or the group of villages comprised within the area of the panchayat. Gram sansad: village council constituted with the voters of each rural election booth.

Gram Unnayan Samiti: Village Development Committee constituted at the gram sansad level and comprised of members from different sections of the population. Hool: rebellion; uprising.

Jotedar: substantial farmers, principally employing labour to cultivate his/her lands. Karmadhyakhsa: the chiefs of different departments in the panchayat samiti. Kayastha: an upper caste in the caste hierarchy in West Bengal.

Khas land: government land, acquired or vested with the government. Kishan Sabha: peasant wing of the CPI(M) party.

Lakshmi–Janardan: two Hindu deities at the same place.

Left Front: a conglomeration of parliamentary left parties in India. Madrasa: religious schools for Muslim community.

Mahishya: an agricultural, middle-ranking caste in West Bengal. Morhol: the village or community head. Muchi: a caste under the SC category.

Moram road: is made of special quality rocky soil which is available in the south-western parts of West Bengal and is extensively used in road building due to its non-muddy character. Muri: a kind of food prepared by frying rice.

Operation Barga: administrative measures for registering the names of sharecroppers, giving certain right over the land they are cultivating as bargadars. Panchayat pradhan: chief of the gram panchayat.

Glossary  |  257

Panchayati Raj Institutions: conceived in the Indian Constitution as the tools of rural ‘local self-government’. Panchayat samiti: the second tier of PRI, functioning at the block level. Panchayat upa-pradhan: deputy-chief of the gram panchayat. Para: a hamlet or locality in a village or town.

Patta: legal entitlement of land, distributed by the government to the landless people. Pattadar: a person having a patta of land.

Puja mandap: the place of worship of the Hindus.

Radha–Krishna: two Hindu deities at the same place. Sabhadhipati: the chief of Zilla Parishad.

Sabhapati: the chief of Panchayat Samiti.

Sahukari: whatever appertains to sahukars, that is, moneylenders. Santhal: a tribe under the ST category.

Saree: a long piece of cloth worn by women principally in the Indian subcontinent. Sarkari: whatever appertains to the sarkar, that is, the government.

Sarva Siksha Abhiyan: Government of India’s flagship programme for achievement of Universal Elementary Education in a time-bound manner, as mandated by 86th Amendment to the Constitution of India, making free and compulsory education to the children of 6–14 years age group a fundamental right. Sitaramjew: a Hindu deity.

Tili: a caste under the OBC category.

Ugrakshatriya: an agricultural caste in West Bengal. Ulgulan: rebellion; uprising.

Zamindari: a kind of landlord system, prevalent during the colonial rule in India. Zilla parishad: upper tier of PRI, functioning at the district level.

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Index

above-ceiling land, 36, 52, 110, 216 above the poverty line (APL), 146 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 237, 241, 251 addas, 22–23, 201, 205 Adivasipara, 62, 86, 145 habitation space in, 108 landless people in, 63 tube well existence in, 146 adivasis (tribal), 109, 111, 113–116 Agarwal, Bina, 219 agricultural labourers grievances in Kalipur village, 196 wages, growth of, 32, 151, 247 agriculture, in West Bengal annual growth rate between 1983–84 and 1991–92, 141 Arun Kole’s views on development of, 141 scenario of, 30–32 tenancy reform effect on, 33–34 Ahammad, 89, 118–119, 121, 136–137 All Bengal Primary Teachers Association (ABPTA), 75, 137–138 All India Krishak Sabha (AIKS), 48, 52. See also Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M) Alm, Bjorn, 91, 96, 135 anganwadi. See Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) Anthropological Survey of India, 197 Anthropologists, in post-colonial period, 20 anti-land acquisition movement, 17 leadership of, 167 against Tata car project, 160–167 Appadurai, Arjun, 237, 250, 253

asprishya sudra caste, 199 autonomous domain of subaltern consciousness, concept of, 10 auto-vans, 90 auxiliary group (AG), in CPI(M) party parlance, 77 Bagdi caste, 57 participation in CPI(M) party, 112 Bagdipara hamlet, in Kadampur village, 67 habitations of, 68 primary school newly built structure, 68 bajras, 54 Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957), 39 Bamunpara, 104 Bandyopadhyay, D., 29 Bandyopadhyay, Krishna, 226–227 Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, 27, 34, 36–38, 40– 42, 45, 112, 160, 191 Banerjee, Mamata, 164, 167, 189 Banerjee, Mukulika, 145 Banerjee, Pranab, 109 Bardhan, Pranab, 2, 41 bargadars/sharecroppers, in West Bengal, 33, 36–37, 186, 191 among SCs and STs, 38 conditions under West Bengal Land Reforms Act 1955, 195 and CPI(M) party, 143–145 eviction of land by, 39 of Kadampur village, 67 position in land acquisition, 170 rights of, 160 barga lands, 140, 144, 244 baroloks (the rich), 109

270  |  Index baro neta (an important leader), 92 baudi (sister-in-law), 99 bazar, 125. See also ganja below the poverty line (BPL), 86, 146 Indira Awaas Yojana for, 181–182 ration cards, 61, 71 benami lands, 36, 207, 216 Beneficiary committees, of CPI(M), 81 bhadraloks, 87, 100, 197, 239 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 113 Bhattacharya, Buddhadeb, 157 Bhattacharya, Harihar, 1, 45, 48–49, 85, 92, 107, 253 Bhattacharya, Moitree, 1, 14, 44–45, 50, 85–86, 106, 217, 253 Bhattacharya, Rabindranath, 168 Bhattacharyya, Dwaipayan, 1–2, 5, 46–48, 75, 134, 136–137, 245–246, 248, 250 Bhawmik, S.K., 33 bidroha, 9 Birla company, 162, 176 Biswas, Ranjita, 24 Block Development Office (BDO), 161, 164 boro crop, 32–34 Bose, Pradip Kumar, 214 Branch committee, of CPI(M), 80, 88, 245 Brown, Jennifer, 221 burimatala, 62 caste(s) and CPI(M) party, 136–140 and labour, 194–197 and power, 206–209 and social hierarchy in Kadampur village, 203–206 in Kalipur village, 197–203 Cernea, M.M., 177, 252 Chakrabarty, Samir, 96–, 97, 153 chashas (the cultivators), 201 Chatterjee, Naru, 74–75, 77, 92, 123, 136, 139, 146, 152 Chatterjee, Partha, 2–3, 5–6, 10–13, 15–16,

47, 74–76, 142–143, 150, 192, 235, 240, 243, 251–253 Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra, 42, 98 chhotoloks, 87, 100, 197, 238–239 civil society, 12, 156 class and CPI(M) party, 136–140 collective enterprise, 110 colonial history, study of, 10 communist government, of West Bengal, 1 Communist Party of India (CPI), 52–53 Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M), 25, 49, 64, 75, 89, 112, 203 and bargadars, 143–145 benefits distribution and, 151–155 elections and social groups, 145–148 and ethnicity, 75–77 interim parliamentary elections in 1971, 52 and its control, 122–126 and its faction, 126–129 Krishak Sabha of, 48 literacy mission implementation, political aim behind, 98 objectives of, 44 Pakhi Murmu’s decision to again join, 113 and panchayat, 96–98 panchayat benefits distribution, 46 party members of, 136–137 and politics of land acquisition, 168–172 responsible for loss of interest in PRIs, 45 support to peasant movement, 47 Tata Motors car project, in West Bengal (see Tata Motors small car project, in West Bengal) Communist Party of India–Marxist–Leninist (CPI-ML), 226 community, in rural spaces, 244–250 Congress party, 40 dominance in 1962 assembly elections, 52 Hooghly district of post-colonial period, 52

Index  |  271 food crisis in 1960s due to monopoly of, 30 jotedar–landlord combination support from, 47 Mahishyas caste support to, 207 Pakhi Murmu’s decision not to join, 113 contemporary regime of power in India, characteristics of, 11 Corbridge, Stuart, 46, 92, 98, 106, 253 crisis of governability, 107 cultivation seasons, in West Bengal, 78 Custers, Peter, 216, 226 Da Costa, Dia, 165 Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) project, 55 Das Choudhury, Sujata, 221 Dasgupta, Abhijit, 2, 119, 122 Dasgupta, Rajarshi, 122 Das, Jagannath, 158 Das, Kalpana, 122, 131 Das, Kanika, 180 Das, Nirmal, 88, 122–123, 136–137 Daspara hamlet, in Kadampur village Mahishya houses in, 68 origin of name, 67 Das, Subimal, 170–171 Das, Tarak, 92 decentralization, 78–84 democratic, 1, 3, 7 impact on West Bengal, 19 rural, 17 and VEC, 93–96 democratic process, in India, 5, 11 Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), 115, 118, 123 developmentled dispossession, 5 Dhaniakhali Thana Committee, 153 Dhaniakhali Thana Cooperative Agricultural Marketing Society Limited, 89, 153 Dhaniakhali village, in West Bengal ethnographic research in, 21 Food for Work scheme utilization by, 97 tribal people population in, 248

Dhara, Dhiren, 177–178, 189–190 Dhara, Niren, 190, 192 Dhar, Anup, 24 dharma, 113 Dharmashastra, 196 dhing, 9 didimani (mistress), 102 displacement, 5 Domes caste, 62 Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, 220 Duflo, Esther, 42, 98 Dules caste, 57 Durga puja festival, 62 Durgapur Expressway, 66 Dutta, Manoj, 77, 123, 135, 147, 151, 202, 211 Duyker, Edward, 243 Early History of Ceylon (G.C. Mendis), 66 East India Company, 11 economic changes, 8 economy, of West Bengal agricultural labourers, increase in rate of, 30 basic household amenities, 28 electrification facility, slow growth of, 28–29 growth rate of SDP between 1993–94 and 2000–01, 27 landholding distribution pattern, 29–30 NSSO survey on employment conditions, 28 proportion of main male workers, decreasing rate of, 28 proportion of population below the poverty line in 1999–2000, 28 educated youths and its leaders, 132–135 elite and subaltern domains, complex relationship between, 10 Elster, Jon, 186 Emergency rule of Congress, 52 Employment Assurance Scheme, 46 empowerment, of lower castes, 210–213

272  |  Index Estate Acquisition Act (EAA) 1953, 36 ethnicity and CPI(M), 75–77 ethnographic methods of enquiry, 18–20, 24 ethnoscapes, meaning of, 250 fituri, 9 Floud Commission Report, 191 food crisis in mid-1960s, 30 peasants mobilization for food from government, 52 Food for Work scheme, 97 foodgrain production growth of, 31–32 stagnation, causes of, 34–35 Forward Block (FB), 52–53, 151 Foucault, Michel, 15, 17, 46, 240, 253 Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti (Democratic Women’s Association), 86 ganja, 125, 148 garir kishan, 171 Gazdar, Haris, 32, 34 gender inequalities, 39, 219, 221 Ghatak, Maitreesh, 14, 32–33, 40, 43, 84, 86, 217 gherao, 164 Ghoshpara hamlet, in Kadampur village, 67 families condition in, 68 types of castes in, 67 Ghurye, G. S., 199 government-aided school education, for Muslim boys, 119 governmentality, concept of, 13–17, 46. see also Foucault, Michel ‘governmentalization of the state,’ 11 Government of West Bengal (GoWB), 27, 75, 194, 221, 254 Gowala caste, 67, 71, 185, 199, 203 Gowalas, 199, 203 gram panchayats constitution in 1964, 39

mandatory to conduct gram sansad (village council) meetings, 43 number and percentage of won uncontested, 45 seats as per landholding size class, 41 share of women and SCs–STs in total seats, 41 with women and SCs–STs pradhans, 42 gram sabha, 11, 14, 42 gram sansad (village council), 43–44, 82, 85–93, 210 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 10 Gram Unnayan Samiti, 40. See also Village Development Committee (VDC) Green Revolution technology, 11, 30–31, 34 Guha, Abhijit, 162, 177 Guha, Ramachandra, 223 Guha, Ranajit, 9, 110–111, 115, 223 Guide committee, of CPI(M), 81 Gupta, Dipankar, 1–2, 7, 193, 250 Harisabha, 87 Harriss-White, Barbara, 141–143 Hembram, Haren, 116 Hembram, Rina, 91 high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, 32–33 Hindu Succession Act, 1956, 219–221 historical transition, 6 Hobsbawm, E.J., 8 Hooghly district assembly constituencies of, 51 geographical location of, 51 industrial belt of, 51 political landscape of, 52 hool, 9, 115 Indira Awaas Yojana, 63, 81–82, 97, 108, 181 Industrialization for the Toiling Masses (Buddhadeb Bhattacharya), 157 institutionalization of political parties, 107 insurgency, peasant, 9, 111, 251

Index  |  273 Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), 61, 64–65, 88, 94, 102–104, 131, 241 Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), 45, 82, 97 International Women’s Day ceremony (8 March), 104 jajman, 196 jami dewyar dale (a member of land-givers’ group), 184–185. See also Mandal, Santash Jana, Samir, 171 jatras, 204 Jawahar Rozgar Yojana ( JRY), 45, 82, 97 Jeffery, Patricia, 230, 232–233 Jeffery, Roger, 230, 232–233 Jha, Manish K., 193 Jharkhand Disam Party ( JDP), 248 John, Mary E., 217 joint pattas, 39 Joshi, P.C., 7–8, 19 jotedars, 47–48, 52, 216 Kadampur Pally Unnayan Sangha, 177 Kadampur village anti-land acquisition movement in, 178 caste-wise distribution and percentage of households, 70 and percentage of sharecroppers, 71 distribution and percentage of households as per different castes, 68 as per different landholding classes, 69–70 division into hamlets, 67 geographical location of, 66 history of, 66 localized traditional system of production of foodgrains, 193 mud road connects village with other neighbouring village, 66–67 new kind of peasant mobilization in, 251–254

peasants involvement in state politics, 236 polarization of political forces in, 177– 178 social hierarchy in, 203–206 study of, 22, 51 village agricultural landholding in hands of different social groups, 70 women’s committee in, 179–180 Kalipur village, 51 average village agricultural land with different social groups, 58 CPI(M) electoral success in, 155 Dhaniakhali market in woven goods production, 53 distribution and percentage of households in each social group as per their primary and secondary occupation, 60 as per different landholding size class, 57–58 as per landholding size classes in different social groups, 59 as per social groups, 56 existing wage rate in, 247 geographical location of, 53 households in, 55–56 infrastructure of, 64–65 intertwined with Madhupur village, 54 Kayastha caste families, construction of temples by, 54 link with river Damodar river, 54 localized traditional system of production of foodgrains, 193 Muslim dwellings made of mud walls, 62 Muslim minorities in, 61 Muslims vote for CPI(M) in, 122 peasants involvement in state politics, 236 population as per SSA of, 61 social hierarchy in, 197–203 tribal people aggrieved towards depriva-

274  |  Index tion from governmental benefits, 147 VEC packed with sympathizers of CPI(M) party, 94 Kamar caste, 196 kam selai, 120 karmadhaksha, 124, 139 karmadhashas, 87 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 143 Kayastha castes women awareness about gram sansad meeting, 87 youth support to ruling party, 132 Kayasthapara, 104 Keck, Margaret E., 253 khas lands, 36, 52 khet majoor (agricultural labourer), 79 Kohli, Atul, 48, 107 Kole, Arun, 141 Kole, Kamal, 172 Kole, Naren, 89, 153–154 Kole, Timir, 87, 139 Koran, 119 Krishak Sabha, of CPI(M), 48, 80, 115, 160, 168 kulaks, 77 Kumors caste, 196 labourers problems, during Left Front rule, 142 Lacan, J., 24 Lalgarh movement (2008), 248 Land Acquisition Act, 1894, 157, 160, 167, 222, 254 land acquisition, for Tata project aftermath impact of, 185–192 and land givers, 184–185 movement/resistance against, 172–177 politics of, 168–172 landholding distribution, pattern of from 1961–81, 29 from 1985–96, 30 landowner and CPI(M) party, 143–145 land pattas, 39

Land Reform Act (LRA) 1955, 36–37, 52 land reforms, 40 features of, 37 history of phases of, 36–38 land rights and gender, 219–222 lathials (people who fought with sticks), 110 Left Front rule, in West Bengal, 5, 27, 48. see also Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M) emergence of, 4 market strategy of, 141 Panchayati raj introduction by, 40 seventh government intention for industrialization and urbanization programmes, 35 transformation of power, 238–244 unusual stability of, 1–2 utilization of governmental technologies for mobilizing people, 13 Lieten, G.K., 1, 19, 40 Lindberg, Staffan, 235 livelihood and land movement, 172–177 local self-government and empowerment, 84–85 nature of operation of, 75 and women, 104–105 lower castes, 86–87, 100, 139, 196, 199, 202, 209 efforts to move up in ritual hierarchy, 200 empowerment of (see empowerment, of lower castes) mobility in socio-religious hierarchy, 200 role in social function, 200 Madhupur village, 54 infrastructure of, 64–65 Muslim minorities in, 61 population of, 61 Madrasa education, for Muslim girls, 119

Index  |  275 Mahabharata, 113 Mahila Samiti (Women’s Committee), 95, 115, 130, 202, 241 Mahishya castes in Kadampur village, 67 in Kalipur village, 56, 61 land movement and, 172–177 support to Congress party, 207 youth support to ruling party, 132 Majhi, Bishu, 136 Majhi, Ganesh, 138 Majumdar, Manabi, 2 Malik, Kanak, 90 Malik, Khagen, 78, 80–84, 88, 92, 96, 124, 129, 136, 152 Malik, Lakhi, 91 Malik, Pritilata, 129–131 Malik, Rina, 91 Mandal, Bidhan, 81, 85, 99, 109, 112, 124– 126 Mandal, Mohon, 180–181 Mandal, Puspa, 100–102 Mandal, Santash, 184–185 Mandi, Bimala, 90 marginal groups, 85–93 Marketing Society, of CPI(M), 153–155 Marxists criticism against theories of, 8 views on development, 157 Matthews, Jessica T., 253 Mayer, Adrian, 193 Mendis, G.C., 66 mid-day meals scheme, in primary schools, 82 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 24 minimum wage rate, for agricultural labourers in West Bengal, 151 Mishra, Surjya Kanta, 45 Mitakshara system, 219 Mitra, Ira, 160 Mitra, Sandip, 2 Mitra, Sudhir Kumar, 51, 53–54, 66 Mitra, Swapan, 133

Mitra, Utpal, 89 Mookherjee, Dilip, 2, 19–20, 41–42 moram road, 55, 159 morhol (chief ), 116–117, 237, 248 Mother–Teacher Association (MTA), 105 Muchipara, 90 Muchis, 49, 57, 62, 90, 194, 196, 199 Muchis caste, 57 Mukherjee, Suman, 109, 114, 128–129 Mukherji, Aditi, 35 multidimensional agrarian poverty, 141 muri (puffed rice), 63, 119 Murmu, Chand, 116 Murmu, Pakhi, 79–81, 86, 108–113, 128– 129, 137, 145, 209 Muslim leaders and CPI(M), 118–122 Muslimpara village, 62–63, 89, 119–121 nabasakha castes, 199 Namasudra movement in Bengal (1872– 1947), 112 Nandigram village in West Bengal, people’s movement/resistance in, 5, 157, 188, 190 Napits, 196, 199 nari bahini or women’s ‘semi-militia’ nari bahini (women’s ‘semi-militia’), 226 National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011, 254 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), 182, 196 National Rural Employment Programme (NREP), 97 National Sample Survey office (NSSO), 28, 30 Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers (2003), 154 nayeb, 54 neo-liberal economic reforms, since 1990s, 127 neo-liberalism, 5 neo-rich jotedars dominance, 47 Newman, Katherine S., 196 new style of leadership, 135

276  |  Index Nielsen, Kenneth Bo, 162, 192 Nigam, Aditya, 175 ‘opening up a line,’ 121–122 Operation Barga, 27, 32–33, 37, 67, 160. See also Left Front rule, in West Bengal organized party politics, in India, 20 Other Backward Castes (OBCs), in Kalipur village, 55–60 Pal, Jiban, 201 Pal, Khetra, 140–144 Pal, Manabendra, 135–136, 140 Panchayat Act in 1957, 39 Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), 1, 11, 14, 27, 31, 40, 50, 77, 215 panchayati raj system amended thrice during Left Front rule, 39–40 and caste, 98–102 and CPI(M), 96–98 elections in 1978, 40 and gender, 98–102 and people, 180–182 reservation policy in, 139–140 routing of resources with involvement of political parties, 46 panchayat pradhan, 21 Patnaik, Utsa, 235 Patra, Ajit, 121 Patra, Kanti, 177–178 Patra, Swarup, 89 pattadars, 38–39 pattas (legal ownership papers), 38–39, 221–222 peasant insurgency, 111, 251 peasant masses, participation in state institutions, 236 peasant movement, in rural areas, 47 peasant movements/rebellions, 4, 6 in colonial period, 8 new kind of, 251–254 ‘People of India’ project, of Anthropological

Survey of India, 197 Planning Commission, 28, 156 political campaigns, 22 political mobilizations, 13, 22, 179, 245 political parties, 107 characteristics of, 13 people’s interaction with, 3 reading of people’s demand by, 3 securing credibility of providing government benefits to population, 12 treatment to people as per ethnic identity, 4 political power, 46–50 political relationship, of domination and subordination, 9 political society, concept of, 5, 12 contemporary politics of peasant analyses through, 74 governmentality and, 13–17 politics changing pattern in rural areas, 21 of land acquisition, 168–172 operating at margin of domain of organized politics, 5 politics of middleness, 47, 136 post-colonial period rural scenario after, 11 study of history, 10 post-colonial phenomenon, 12 post-1977 West Bengal uninterrupted rule of Left Front government till 2011, 107 potato trading, in rural West Bengal, 142 Prabahaman Sikhsa Kendra, 127 pradhan (chair of the gram panchayat), 40, 42–43, 57, 77 Scheduled Castes, 78–84 pre-political phenomenon, 8–9 private sector banks, in rural areas, 154 puja mandap, 22, 62 Pushpendra, 193 Putnam, Robert D., 248–249

Index  |  277 rajniti, meaning of, 80–81 Ramayana, 113 Rampura village, changes in, 1 Randeria, Shalini, 220 Rawal, Vikash, 31–33 reservation of seats, legislations for, 11 Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), 108, 112, 116–117, 128 Risley, H.H., 199 Roy, Bidhan, 140 Roy, Dayabati, 4, 62, 85, 148, 166, 214, 253 Roy, Singha, 234 Rudolph, Lloyd I., 143, 156 Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, 143, 156 Ruidas, Benu, 90 rural power, structure of, 140–143 Rural Restoration Scheme (1978), 97 rural society(ies) changes in, 7 study of, 7 rural West Bengal devising of development programmes of state by people, 3 dynamics of changes, 2–3 governmental intervention in policies of, 1 institutional politics role in, 214–215 people’s resistance in Singur and Nandigram, 5 potato trading in, 142 sociological changes in, 2 state and political parties influence in life of people, 107 Ruud, Arild E., 3–4, 9, 14, 19, 49, 112, 203 sabhadhipati (president), of zilla parishad, 168 sabhapati (president) of panchayat samiti, 168 Saha, Kripasindhu, 151 sahukari, 9 Saikat, 133 Samanta, Sunil, 95, 149–151

Santhal community, 62, 108, 115, 220, 238, 243 Santra, Kamala, 182 Santra, Santanu, 126–128, 144, 147 Sanyal, Kalyan, 6, 15–16, 251 Sarkar, Abhirup, 2 sarkari, 9 Sarkar, Mrinal, 85, 94–95, 107 Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) project, 23, 61, 68, 210 Save Agricultural Land Committee (SALC), 158, 162–164, 171–172, 177–180, 186, 223, 226–227, 249 scapes, meaning of, 250 Scheduled Castes (SCs), 11, 14 CPI(M) treatment to, 49 in Kalipur village, 55 pattadar and bargadars among, 38 pradhan involvement in organized state domain, 242 pradhans, in gram panchayats, 42 share in gram panchayat seats, 41 Scheduled Tribes (STs), 11, 14 benefits of government welfare programmes, 82 in Kalipur village, 55 leaders involvement in organized state domain, 242 pattadar and bargadars among, 38 pradhans, in gram panchayats, 42 share in gram panchayat seats, 41 Scott, James C., 192, 222, 225 Searle–Chatterjee, Mary, 193 Self Help Group (SHG), 82, 86, 123 Malikpara women joining of, 129 womenfolk organized in, 131 Sen, Amartya K., 232 Sengupta, Sunil, 32, 34 Shah, Ghanashyam, 197, 206 shallow tube wells (STWs), 32 Sharma, Ursula, 193, 220 sholo ana, 199–200 Sikkink, Kathryn, 253

278  |  Index siksha sahayika, 94 Singha Roy, Debal Kumar, 234 single pattas, 39 Singur village, in West Bengal connected with two railway lines since colonial days, 66 CPI’s victory in first elections of 1952, 52 ethnographic research in, 21 peasant movement, 156 peoples resistance in, 5 resistance against Tata Motors car project, 160–167, 190 Singhas migration from, 66 Tebhaga peasant movement in, 52–53 women and, 217–219 social groups and CPI(M) party, 145–148 Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) party, 162, 171, 178–180, 223 sonar chand (golden moon), 173 sonar chand jami (most precious land), 173 Special Component Programme (SCP), 97 Special Economic Zones Act, 2003, 254 Special Economic Zones (SEZs), 5, 157 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 8, 10 sraddha (last rite), 117 Srinivas, M.N., 1, 7–8, 193, 196, 200, 205 State Domestic Product (SDP), 27 State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development (SIPRD), 39 state-led politics, 107 state, notion of, 5 statization of society, in India, 15 subaltern consciousness, ideas of, 8–13, 235–236 Sumanta, 187–189 Swaminathan, Madhura, 31–33 Tata Motors small car project, in West Bengal, 156–157 forms of resistance against, 160–167 women’s resistance against, 217–219 Tebhaga peasant movement, 52–53, 216

tenancy reform on agriculture, effects of, 33–34 Thorat, Sukhadeo, 196 three-tier system of local government, 39 Tili caste, 54 transformation of power, 238–244 transpositional assessment, 20 tribal community and its leaders, 108–117 Tribal Sub-plan (TSP), 97 Trinamul Congress (TMC), 52–53, 113, 128, 157, 162–164, 184, 188, 218, 223. See also Banerjee, Mamata Tudu, Sanatan, 79–80, 86, 88, 111–112, 112, 114–116, 136–137 Ugrakshatriya caste, 54 ulgulan, 9 Uni partir lok (he is a party functionary), 92 United Front government, 37, 115 Universal Elementary Education (UEE), 104 universal literacy mission (1988), 98 upa-pradhan (deputy-chief ), 81, 99–100, 210, 227 Utilization Certificate (UC), 82 Varshney, Ashutosh, 143 village club and leader, 177–179 Village Development Committee (VDC), 14, 40, 114. See also Gram Unnayan Samiti Village Education Committee (VEC), 14, 22, 82–83, 125, 131, 210. See also Malik, Pritilata aim of, 93 decentralization and, 93–96 education and, 93–96 villages, Indian changes taken place in, 1 methodology for study of, 17–24 social groups existence in, 4 Visaria, Leela, 220 water-extracting machines (WEM), 35

Index  |  279 Webster, Neil, 1, 19, 43, 47 ‘well-wisher of the panchayat,’ 92 West Bengal division of castes in, 198 study conducted in 2003-06, 2–3 West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation, 157 West Bengal Land Reforms Act 1955, 160, 195, 224 West Bengal Panchayat Act, 1973, 39 West Bengal Panchayat Act amendment, 2003, 40 West Bengal Panchayat Joint Committee, 97 white-collar jobs, 151–155 Williams, Glyn, 14, 45–46, 49, 106, 108, 126, 155 women’s committee in Kadampur village, 179– 180 discrimination in VEC, 94 land movement and organized domain, 222–228 local state and governance, 104–105

and party, 129–132 pradhans, in gram panchayats, 42–43 reservation in panchayat for, 98 resistance against land acquisition, 228– 232 right to agricultural land in Kadampur village, 219 in Santhal community, 115 share in gram panchayat seats, 41 and Singur movement, 217–219 worker, small industry and big capital, 182–183 World Institute for Development of Economics and Research (WIDER), 32 youths association and its leaders, 132–135 joining of political parties for benefits, 152 zamindari, 9 zilla parishad, 39, 42, 94, 104, 168 Zilla Parishad Act, 1963, 39