The humiliating defeat in the Lok Sabha election has numbed the Left Front government into inaction. The realisation that the result if interpreted simply put the ruling Left Front in a minority has shattered the confidence of the ministers. Important files are not being cleared by some of the ministers like Abdur Rezzak Molla in charge of land and land reforms department.
Today the first meeting of the state cabinet after the election witnessed similar trends as the chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee withdrew a proposal to acquire 120 acres of land for a proposed city centre near Kharagpur. Earlier it was included in the agenda papers before the election results were out.
The result caused such bewilderment in the government that a number of ministers expressed concern in the meeting about how to keep the normal functions of the government going in the next two years.
The PWD minister Khsiti Goswami, a member of the RSP, a constituent of Left Front stressed the point that many criticisms were levelled against the government on the question of poor governance.
He pointedly wanted to know from the chief minister if the government had an action plan ready to improve the governance or not. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee accepted that as a matter for concern and said that he had also thought of the problem.
He proposed to prepare a note and circulate it to the ministers as a guideline for that purpose. But, a number of ministers, mostly Front partners of CPI(M), raised objection to this approach. Khsiti Goswami and Nandagopal Bhattacharjee suggested that it first be discussed in the cabinet before taking it as a guideline.
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The election result softened the will of the big party CPI(M) so much that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee yielded immediately to the pressure piled on him by his cabinet colleagues from the minor partners and agreed to place it before cabinet for discussion.
Though the chief minister did withdraw the proposal to acquire farm land for the proposed city centre near Kharagpur at the beginning of the cabinet meeting, he could not escape criticisms from his colleagues. The project was conceived by the department of Urban Development.
In a veiled criticism against Ashok Bhattacharjee, the minister in charge of the department, Rezzak Molla pointed out in the meeting that the character of the land had not even been mentioned in the proposal papers. Some other ministers also commented on this saying it a ‘hastily done job’ without thinking of the political consequences.
They also pointed out that after Nandigram and Singur fiasco the government had declared its intention of acquiring land only in those areas where it would be mostly fallow or under single crop cultivation.
Incidentally, the state cabinet today took a decision to hand over the responsibility of creating ‘land bank’ to Rezzak Molla, the minister of land and land Revenue.
Earlier it was Nirupam Sen, the minister in charge of commerce and industry, was asked to shoulder that. Ever since the government got embroiled in the Singur and Nandigram controversies, it was decided to create a ‘land bank’ for setting up of new industries. It was hoped that once such land bank was in possession with the government for giving land to industry, it would be able to avoid the acquisition related controversy.
The decision to take away the responsibility to create land bank from Nirupam Sen, who was the pro-industry face of the government with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and hand it over to Rezzak Molla, a man who had been resisting the acquisition bids of the government, is not without significance.
It shows that the government has gone on back foot on the issue of industrialisation. Already Nirupam Sen has expressed concern about the future of their dream project: chemical hub at Nayachar. Nayachar is under Tamluk Lok Sabha, and Tamluk has gone over to the opposition TMC. Shubhendu Adhikari, the newly elected MP from Tamluk had already threatened to obstruct the chemical hub at all cost.