Nandigram sitting on a powder keg

An uneasy calm prevailed around Nandigram four days after an unspecified number of people "� the body-count ranges from 15 to 50 "� were killed in police firing over the issue of land acquisition for Indonesia-based Salim group's special economic zone (SEZ).

Police battalions are still present in the area and villages in a radius of 40 km from the site of Wednesday's clashes are deserted. Several of the appalling roads still bear the signs of brick heaps or chopped timber put up by villagers to prevent the police from entering the area.

The heavy political presence of the CPI (M) and Trinamool Congress, the two political rivals here, is starkly evident in dense festoons of party flags planted around the area. Of Illias Mohhamad, the local MLA, or Lakshman Seth, the MP and strongman of nearby Haldia, who is said to have orchestrated Wednesday's carnage, there was no sign.

The aggressive messages of political dominance, however, appear lost on the villagers of Sonarchur, the village under the Nandigram police station that lay at the heart of the action.

Extraordinarily media savvy, despite the absence of electricity and therefore access to TV, they were more intent on showing journalists places where police atrocities were apparently committed. Across the tiny bridge over which the encounter took place, the police watch with cynical resignation.

Many villagers have simply left the area, waiting for things to blow over. Some of them were under "escort" of the local CPI (M) branch and declined to talk. Others took refuge where they could.

The cause of the mayhem in this lush area of East Midnapore district, three and a half hours from Kolkata, differs according to who voices it. The villagers say it was an unprovoked attack while they had gathered to perform a "puja".

The police say they were sent in to restore law and order in an area that had seen unprecedented violence since early January, including the killing of a police officer and a rape and murder. That such restoration took more than two months in coming they attribute to "poor administration". They did not, however, rule out the possibility of CPI (M) cadres entering in police uniform.

The villagers themselves want to be left alone. They admit that no one has received an acquisition notice for the 14,000-acre SEZ that would have displaced the inhabitants of 36 villages.

Essentially an agrarian economy, the area has poor and middle class farmers, 80 per cent of them Muslim, who earn a maximum of Rs 20,000 a year from their land on which they grow paddy, kesar dal, vegetables and, sometimes, betel leaves.

Selling their land, they say, would tear them from a centuries-old livelihood and leave them with no alternatives.

They do not believe that the SEZ could have provided them enough jobs. "They will want engineers and computer specialists," said Sudarshan Pain, owner of 6 bighas of land and a fertiliser and pesticide unit, hiding with family and neighbours in a brick kiln.

"How can we provide such people?" Literacy in the area is 29 per cent, against a Bengal average of 69 per cent.

The CPI (M) appears to have patently lost control of an area it dominated for years. In fact, the party appears to have become a victim of the successful land reform programme that kept it in power for so many decades. It gave the people land, but little else. There is no power, no water, save what the ground yields, few schools and even fewer hospitals.

The lack of a sensitively-crafted public relations programme to sell the project to villagers here might have worked. As it is, they have repaid years of party neglect with strong retaliation that sends out poor signals to investors rushing to the state on Chief Minister's Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's promises of easy land availability.