What a Strange Argument! Yet it is voiced by no ignorant child, but blared over shrill microphones by an elderly ‘responsible’ person, i.e., the industry minister of West Bengal. Last 13th (June), while inaugurating the Iron and Steel Factory of RASHMI Metalix Ltd., at Gokulpur of Kharagpur, by No.6, National Highway, the minister roared out: “ I feel proud that those who tilled the land with plough till the other day have turned laborer today. We are really proud.” The news came out in banner headlines in various newspapers.
The first question is if this is really such a cause for self-applause. Is there any reason to feel that fine?
The assumption is that Farming can be no cause for pride, -- not a respectful job at all; rather embarrassing, undignified; on the other hand, turning a labor is dignified. Must you thus insult the rustic tiller? When and where did the speaker take this lesson that farming was shameful, and only working as factory labor should make one proud ? Such absolute lack of knowledge and perception! And these are our rulers, the deities controlling our destiny, that too in the name of the ‘poor’! This pack of arrogant autocrats have no imagination, no feeling, no vision, no statesmanship. Have you completely forgotten to take up a book, to look at the blue sky, or green horizon, to stop and think sometimes!
From Tagore to Gandhi, Tolstoi to Einstein, haven’t we heard repeated anguished admonitions against the repercussions of precisely this transfer of vocation? In England , where industrial development started earliest , we have records of this human tragedy registered in work after work, by numerous writers and thinkers of the time ranging from Ruskin to Dickens, Hardy to Lawrence. Thomas Hardy wrote in his famous essay ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883): “Drudgery in the slums and alleys of a city, too long pursued, and accompanied as it often is by indifferent health, may induce a mood of despondency which is well-nigh permanent; but the same degree of drudgery in the fields results at worst in a mood of painless passivity. A pure atmosphere and a pastoral environment are a very appreciable portion of the sustenance which tends to produce the sound mind and body, and thus much sustenance is, at least, the (agricultural) labourer’s birthright.” In the same essay the author maintains, “The happiness of a class can rarely be estimated aright by philosophers who look down upon that class from the Olympian heights of society.”
As result of the forcible displacement of the villagers and the consequent depopulation of the villages, to use Hardy’s words once again—they seem so relevant in our context today—
“The occupants who formed the backbone of the village life have to seek refuge in the boroughs. This process which is designated by statisticians as ‘the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns,’ is really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced. The poignant regret of those who are thus obliged to forsake the old nest can only be realized by people who have witnessed it…”.
So much Ministerji, about this your ‘pride’; because you and your comrades have now been ‘declassed’, have been so completely de-humanised that people’s bleeding – physical and mental— and the pervasive grim human tragedy of dislocation and loss escape your notice altogether. And you, the self-appointed ‘people’s leaders’, you gloat over the corpses which come handy as foundation material for the façade of your vulgarly vaunted ‘development’. It is time you had dropped the sickle from your flag, and retain only the hammer , that too in order to come down heavily on the skull of any foolish protester who should dare to feel unhappy, or not too ‘proud’ with your deal. Perhaps they could speak the same words that the fallen subject of King Henry the Fourth use to address their king:
Our house, my sovereign liege, little deserves
The scourge of greatness to be used on it;
And that same greatness, too, which our own hands
Have holp to make so portly.
Hardy adds, “The system is much to be deplored, for every one of these banished people imbibes a sworn enmity to the existing order of things, and not a few of them, far from becoming merely honest Radicals, degenerate into Anarchists, waiters on chance…’. Aren’t our dispossessed peasant families being pushed to that brink of desperation? Just the other day in Nandigram a small boy , with his fractured arm in plaster, told the volunteer medical team—on being asked about his aim—that he wants to be either a lawyer or a goon; the boy had seen his father being beaten, his mother molested, and when he tried to hit the goons with the kitchen mortar, a policeman twisted his arms so… hence the fracture. As despair increases the lure of the second choice becomes irresistible. So , pushing a peaceful well-off (though not wealthy!) community into a nameless crowd of destitutes and criminals—must be a cause for ‘pride’ indeed!
Ministerji, do you remember a beautiful old song ( kono ak gãer badhur kathā …)of Hemanta Mukherjee, the famous music maestro of Bengal, which your IPTA comrades used to sing everywhere in our schooldays: ‘Let me sing to you about a village wife/It is not a fairy tale/ It is a song made with the garland of flowers picked from the honeyed season , moistened with the dew of life…’ Then the happiness is smashed all of a sudden by draconian forces of evil from outside . The song ends, --‘Today if you see rows of deserted shambled huts in a village,/ please remember there lies the grave of all the dreams and hopes of the village wife.’
Doesn’t it seem weirdly true of the devastated villages of West Bengal which have been multiplying under your reign with unholy pace?
The problem with you people is that power has insenitized your mind, draining imagination , sympathy; you have no time nor mentality to study and learn, to develop a perspective; so what do you have to deliver to people except foolish sermons, false promises, and cruel threats?
Secondly, this your package of sermon-promise-threats misses or deliberately evades certain facts: Will the actual tiller’s son [the daughter remains invisible in all such tall promises] get a job in the factory? And how many of them will get it? The maximum ‘liberal’ package does not ensure more than one job per family. What about the others? The whole family, including the women, was engaged in farming and related works till the other day. What will they do now? Just hang on to the one sole bread-earner? How long will it be possible/tenable either for the earner or the dependants? Is it a way of creating employment or aggravating unemployment?
Furthermore, a modern factory, using automatons, will be bound to employ far less numbers than in the earlier eras. This is a basic even a school student knows today. So why this great urge for ‘development’ at the cost of dispossessing the poorest / marginal of the little that they possess? Who is the gainer, and who are the losers? What is going to be the exact job situation? Why such lack of transparency at every stage and level? What is the great deal that has been struck between the investors(Indian +foreign) and their host government and party?
The dispossessed have no right to feel unhappy. All this is being done in the name of the ‘Cause’, either by brutal force—as in Singur and Nandigram—or through such enormous cheatings! At the very same moment when the minister on the dais is patting himself on the back with his ‘feel-proud’ message, a few tribals of the Lodha-Sabar tribe are lamenting outside the gate of the factory. They had been allured by the false assurance of the local CPIM leaders: that if they agreed to surrender their land they would get high-salaried jobs in addition to good compensation money. But these families have not even got the minimum price of their land, not to speak of jobs. As they moan: ‘They snatched away the little land that we had; we got not a paisa towards compensation.” The poor fools do not know it is all ‘For the Good of the Cause’. They are puzzled , in whose interest are they being so pauperized, and what is the point of such industrialization! While the microphone continues to blare the brazen staccato of the bragging leader: “Industrialization is our challenge… Must the farmer’s son remain a farmer till the end of his life?”
These simple people, cheated out of their last means of livelihood, had come with the fond hope of meeting the minister, who controls their destiny from his air-conditioned room at the Writers’, and appealing to him for justice. But they were pushed back from the very periphery of the factory. Inside the factory the minister continues appealing from the gorgeously decorated dais of the luxurious meeting hall, ‘Investors are lining up for the Kharagpur-Medinipur zone; they will invest more than 50,000 billions. Unless we build up sophisticated townships how can they stay here?’
Meanwhile, the other ‘they’ , people uprooted by cynical cheating and callously turned into beggars , stand there shelterless under torrential rain. Sufficient reason indeed for being ‘proud’….!
[Author: Anama Bag]
Law 
