Which way will Singur sway?

It might be hard to predict who will win but the nation awaits the verdict from Singur nonetheless as a commentary on current West Bengal politics

Twenty-year old Manoj Ruidas of Singur has plenty of time to while away. He lazes around, soaks up the election atmospherics, and every now and then lends a helping hand to his sharecropper father. Who would think that he has just completed a two-year vocational training in the automobile sector.  

"I am unemployed. I had thought that the factory would come up. But it hasn't and I don't have money to do a diploma. It would cost at least Rs 1.3 lakh to enroll in a private institution. We can't afford it. So I have nothing to do at all. If the factory had come up, I might have got a job," he says wistfully.

Manoj is emblematic of a dream gone wrong. When Tata Motors announced the small car project in May 2006, it promised to employ 2,000 people directly, initially; the project was expected to create employment in excess of 10,000 jobs among vendors and service providers in the vicinity of the plant.

But an indefinite agitation by 'unwilling' land losers, backed by Mamata Banerjee, then in the Opposition, ultimately led to the pullout of the project in 2008.

Manoj was in school then but always dreamt of working in an automobile factory. In the last seven years, that dream has got hazy, but he lives in hope. With elections in Singur tomorrow, no prizes for guessing who he is going to vote for.

"Rabin Deb (of the Communist Party of India Marxist) has taken it up as a challenge to bring the Nano factory back. I have had conversations with him and I believe in him," he says.

Manoj is the son of a sharecropper. In the battle of the 'willing' versus 'unwilling' Manoj's family sided with the former. Yet many from his lot had voted against the Left Front in the 2011 elections that routed it and ushered in a new regime under Mamata Banerjee.

"It is obvious that many of the 'willing' had not voted for the Left Front last time," says Udayan Das, convenor of Left-leaning Singur Shilpa Bachao Committee. The 'willing' in Singur account for 80 per cent of the total 13,000 land losers.

A feeling of let-down had crept in among them. The 'willing' had given up their land hoping for development. The hopes crashed when the project was relocated to Sanand in Gujarat.

"In the last one and a half months Rabin Deb has worked relentlessly in Singur. His organisational skills are superb. He has been able to mobilise the party workers. There were areas which were out of bounds for the Left at one point but not anymore," explains Das.

The Left Front, which had stayed away from Singur since the fiasco, has finally taken the bull by the horns. Deb made a grand entry into the electoral battleground of Singur in a Nano which was symbolic in a way.

But Singur is not just about the 'willing' and 'unwilling'. There are 2,20,000 voters in Singur of which land losers are 13,000 while another 5,000 people are in the periphery of the factory site.

The land in Singur where the Tata plant was supposed to come up (pic: Subrata Majumder)

"Issues like Sarada and Narada are likely to play out here," says Das. But Deb has a strong opponent in three-time MLA from the Trinamool Congress, Rabindranath Bhattacharya who had won in 2011 by a margin of 100,000 votes.

Plus, even though she has failed to return the land -- with the case languishing in courts for the last five years -- to the 'unwilling', Banerjee has kept them seemingly content with 16 kg of rice at Rs 2 per family member and cash of Rs 2,000 a month.  

So how will Singur vote this election? There is no easy answer right now. But as CPI(M) general secretary recently said at a rally in Singur, the entire nation is looking towards it to see what message it sends out.