03-18-2007, 10:27 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Bengal scores a self-goal </b>
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Swapan Dasgupta
The beneficial spin-off from Nandigram is that the ugly face of the CPI(M) has been exposed nationally. The next time the fellow-travellers from Sahmat get all worked up over a film which can't find a distributor in Gujarat, the next time Brinda Karat gets herself photographed outside Parliament in the company of happy tribals (as she was last Thursday), and the next time Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee spouts a verse from Mayakovsky or Neruda, you can offer one word of retort - Nandigram.
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<b>And yet, gloating over Nandigram is painful. True, the CPI(M) has been put on the backfoot and the duplicity of the Congress leadership exposed. The Left intellectuals are in disarray and many have discovered their lost conscience. The debate over Special Economic Zones has merged into the national concern for the deepening crisis of agriculture throughout the country and triggered a populist backlash which will have a debilitating impact on the UPA Government. The Opposition NDA has rightly sensed an opening and drawn considerable strength from the Government's discomfiture - even if that involves parroting the likes of Medha Patkar. Amid this headiness, one minor point appears to have been forgotten - the likely impact of the Nandigram kerfuffle on West Bengal.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the flight of capital from West Bengal. The first CPI(M)-dominated United Front Government began the assault which the Naxalite movement and Congress hooliganism complemented. The decline of Bengal was, however, not purely economic. The upheavals bred a strange political culture based on self-pity, cussedness and envy - what a perceptive British commentator, in another context, described as the "grievance community." This negativism is not confined to the Left; it has infected the anti-Left forces as well. The protests - the product of a strange combination of the Trinamool Congress, the ultra-Left and Islamists - in Nandigram epitomise this self-destructiveness.
Investment in West Bengal is certain to be the biggest casualty of the Nandigram violence and the controversy over Singur. The turbulence of politics has offset all the promise and hope that its Chief Minister held out during last year's Assembly election. Ratan Tata, if not the Salem group, must be ruing the day he decided to repose faith in West Bengal</b>.
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link
Swapan Dasgupta
The beneficial spin-off from Nandigram is that the ugly face of the CPI(M) has been exposed nationally. The next time the fellow-travellers from Sahmat get all worked up over a film which can't find a distributor in Gujarat, the next time Brinda Karat gets herself photographed outside Parliament in the company of happy tribals (as she was last Thursday), and the next time Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee spouts a verse from Mayakovsky or Neruda, you can offer one word of retort - Nandigram.
.............
<b>And yet, gloating over Nandigram is painful. True, the CPI(M) has been put on the backfoot and the duplicity of the Congress leadership exposed. The Left intellectuals are in disarray and many have discovered their lost conscience. The debate over Special Economic Zones has merged into the national concern for the deepening crisis of agriculture throughout the country and triggered a populist backlash which will have a debilitating impact on the UPA Government. The Opposition NDA has rightly sensed an opening and drawn considerable strength from the Government's discomfiture - even if that involves parroting the likes of Medha Patkar. Amid this headiness, one minor point appears to have been forgotten - the likely impact of the Nandigram kerfuffle on West Bengal.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the flight of capital from West Bengal. The first CPI(M)-dominated United Front Government began the assault which the Naxalite movement and Congress hooliganism complemented. The decline of Bengal was, however, not purely economic. The upheavals bred a strange political culture based on self-pity, cussedness and envy - what a perceptive British commentator, in another context, described as the "grievance community." This negativism is not confined to the Left; it has infected the anti-Left forces as well. The protests - the product of a strange combination of the Trinamool Congress, the ultra-Left and Islamists - in Nandigram epitomise this self-destructiveness.
Investment in West Bengal is certain to be the biggest casualty of the Nandigram violence and the controversy over Singur. The turbulence of politics has offset all the promise and hope that its Chief Minister held out during last year's Assembly election. Ratan Tata, if not the Salem group, must be ruing the day he decided to repose faith in West Bengal</b>.
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