The Trinamool Congress and the BJP had been indulging in “competitive communalism” to make up for their political and ideological bankruptcy, the Left Front leadership on Thursday said after staging an impressive return from a long political hibernation during which they shed their vast ground to a rising BJP and failed even to find candidates for this year’s panchayat elections.
“Both the BJP and the Trinamool Congress are cheating the people of the State by indulging in competitive communalism and sending the real issues concerning the people on the backburner,” CPI(M) State secretary and politburo member Surya Kanto Mishra told a massive rally in Kolkata at the end of a two-day long march organized by the All-India Kisan Sabha.
In an apparent bid to recover its lost ground in Bengal, once a hardcore Red bastion the Left Front had on Wednesday returned to Singur from where its downslide began more than a decade ago thanks to then Opposition leader Mamata Banerjee’s relentless movement against forcible occupation of agricultural lands to set up the Tata Nano factory in this fertile block of Hooghly district.
Aware that “Singur has got nothing but failed promises for siding with Mamata Banerjee in a suicidal movement that sent the State’s industrial prospects to grave,” the Left leadership resorted to a long march comprising several thousand farmers that traversed over two days a good 50 km in support for a host of demands.
Singur was the original site for Tata Motors’ Nano small car factory that was planned in 2006 when the CPI (M)-led Government was in power in the State.
But after massive protests led by TMC (that eventually catapulted Banerjee to power), the company shifted the plant to Sanand in Gujarat in 2008. Subsequently the Supreme Court decided in favour of restoration of the land to its original state. The demands included: setting up either an industry in the erstwhile Nano lands at Singur or helping the farmers to make the abandoned fully cultivable, correct procurement price for agricultural produce, pension for farmers who had crossed the age of 60 etc and steady industrialisation of Bengal etc.
