Tapasi Malik was the 16-year-old daughter of a land-loser from the Singur site. In December 2006, her mutilated and burnt body was found on the land acquired by Tata Motors in Singur. There was an old breach in the factory wall next to a gate at the back from where heavy machinery was moved in and out of the plant. Malik’s body had been dumped in a shallow grave and there was little doubt that she had been sexually assaulted.
Sexual assault in rural India is not unheard of, and sadly most such cases get buried deep inside the local papers and few warrant a mention in the national press. But this murder was different. Gory pictures of the mutilated body were carried in the local media, and Mamata Banerjee was quick to blame the Communist goons.
The West Bengal Government, sitting in Writers Building 30 kilometres to the south, pooh-poohed this just like it ignored the initial land protests. But this case gripped the media, and because Singur was so close to Kolkata, it became headline news in the Bangla media. The matter became worse when local Communist leaders hinted that Malik was selling her body at the local truck stop and these sorts of things happened. The rape and murder of a poor village girl in Bengal suddenly became national news. Banerjee rode a wave of indignation against an already weak and unpopular local Government, and Singur became a lightning rod for protests.
By the time I reached Singur a few months had passed since the murder. Standing underneath the highway overpass, I waited for my local contact to meet me. Falguni Banerjee was a stringer for the Kolkata edition of The Times of India; it was his reports of the murder and land protests that had made this factory so controversial. Falguni was a local; his family had a lot of control over the Tarakeshwar Mutt, a major local temple. And he had significant knowledge and contacts in the area.
As the Tata Group shared a hostile relationship with The Times Group, the newspaper had no hesitation in playing up these stories. I had approached Falguni through my step-father, Arindam Sengupta of The Times of India, and found him to be extremely helpful, almost to a fault. When I told him of my local heritage in the area, my ancestral house on the river being barely ten kilometres from the Singur plant, he insisted that I visit the temple, saying that my forefathers must have prayed there for generations. But first, I had to visit the plant.
I had spoken to Debasis Ray at Tata Motors to get access inside the plant and expectedly was flatly refused; the Nano was still under development, and journalists — even ones more amenable to the cause — were not allowed inside. But Falguni took me to the spot where Malik’s body had been found; he hinted that she was possibly raped by some local Youth Communist leaders on the plant premises. The boundary wall the Tatas had put up was broken at many places and some local villagers even stole cement and steel from inside.
As we drove through the villages abutting the plant on relatively new roads built under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the image of a desperately poor area did not emerge. like much of southern Bengal close to Kolkata, the villages were decidedly middle class for the large part. There were slums on the edges of the villages, but poverty-stricken the place was not. Almost all the children went to school, and when I stopped at a local medical health centre, there were doctors and a decent stock of medicines.
The dichotomy became clear: The more affluent people, who formed a majority of those who had lost land to the plant, wanted construction to go ahead. A local leader of Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress even admitted to making money by providing (illegal) sand to the construction project as well as cheap labour. But when I spoke to the poor sharecroppers, who actually cultivated the land, there was the clear sense that they had been left behind. “What will we getIJ” they lamented, and even though a majority of the land was not the best agricultural land in the region, a quarter of it, the level land, certainly was. So good, in fact, that it supported three harvests a year. There were arguments that the compensation did not account for land quality; those with the better land told me that those who had fallow and poor land got the same as they did.
And here is the funny thing — for the large part, these poor sharecroppers and those with the better land did not want all that much; some of them just wanted enhanced compensation. They argued that a running factory would lead to much higher land prices for others nearby. The sharecroppers also demanded that they be compensated with jobs and some amount of financial protection. A quick back-of-the-hand calculation led me to believe that it would have cost the Tatas at best `100 crore or so more. But the car was going to be a cheap one, and any additional cost would increase the price of the car, so officials at Bombay House (the Tata Group headquarters) stood firm. In retrospect, maybe they shouldn’t have.
—To be continued