Kanika Datta: Communists fail in communication

SWOT

"What do you want? Which paper are you from?" The belligerent queries taper off when the toughs hanging out in the deserted villages around Nandigram find out that we don't represent a leading Bengali daily and come from a Delhi-headquartered business newspaper.

Luckily for us, "Dilli door ast" has a benign connotation in this green fortress 150-odd km south of Kolkata. Touchingly, people here charge us with messages for leaders in the capital. Of the Salim group, the Indonesian company for whom the Left Front government was trying to acquire 14,000 acres in this region, there is scarcely a mention.

No such questions on the provenance of the media prevail in Singur, the fertile potato-producing belt 40 km from the city, where Tata Motors's controversial small car project is coming up at breakneck speed under heavy police bandobast.

Hostility to the Press here is both generic and stronger, not least because the population here is more literate and less poor. "All newspapers and TV channels have been paid by that b*****d chief minister and his capitalist cronies," snarls Prosenjit Das, secretary of the Krishi Jami Bachao (or Save the Farmers' Land) movement.

In Bengal at least, there is a sharp dichotomy between the medium and the message. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee seems to have won over the Press""but not the people.

The collective hostility to the local Press""including TV channels""is a result of its unabashed support of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's industrialisation programme. In Maoist parlance, it would be said that the leading lights of the mainstream Bengali Press had become "running dogs" of Bhattacharjee's fell capitalism.

After many years of armed neutrality between the mainstream Bengali Press, particularly the powerful Ananda Bazar Patrika group, and the Left Front, this is a novel development.

Till recently, it was the Trinamool Congress's noisy leader Mamata Banerjee who was a local favourite. This volte face is, no doubt, extremely welcome for an embattled chief minister trying to hard-sell his version of capitalism to his party and Left Front constituents.

But among the many lessons he will have to imbibe from last week's tragedy at Nandigram, a key one is that influencing the media for the message brings strictly limited success.

Leveraging the local Press meant preaching to the converted""the tiny intelligentsia in Kolkata which understands the significance of Bhattacharjee's efforts. But it did not convince the more traditional elements in his own party or coalition partners who derived their power base from rural Bengal. As importantly, for those who actually stood to lose the land the Left Front had given 30 years ago, a different, sensitively-crafted communication package was conspicuously absent.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the more remote parts of rural West Bengal where literacy is low and access to information all but non-existent. Here, untouched by the benefits of electricity or the glitz of Kolkata's new money, there is no substitute for direct engagement with the people.

Yet, after 30 years in power on the back of solid rural support, the irony is that the CPI (M) seems to have forgotten the art of communicating with its constituents. At Nandigram, where the Salim group SEZ would have displaced upwards of 40,000 people, there was not even a hint of a rehabilitation package.

As last week's incident at Nandigram demonstrated, the result of this communication gap has been a welter of disinformation, misinformation and political arrogance.

Consider the case. After local protests in January, the chief minister had stated that there would be no special economic zone (SEZ) in Nandigram. No notifications for land acquisition were dispatched.

Yet, in the absence of any direct reassurances from party representatives"" the local MLA Illias Mohammad is from the CPI (M)""it became easy for the local opposition to exploit the lack of communication to create a law and order problem.

This, in turn, snowballed into a bigger problem that transcended the SEZ issue. The Left had now lost all control of Nandigram, which was blocked off by locals ostensibly protesting the SEZ. After a gap of more than two months, the police were sent in by the administration to restore law and order. Police sources make it clear that they were flanked by the more lumpen elements in the CPI (M) seeking to re-establish power.

After news of the killings hit the headlines, Bhattacharjee merely reiterated what he'd said before""that there would be no SEZ at Nandigram. Yet, the area is still chronically unstable, villages deserted, CPI (M) and Trinamool flags aggressively plastered all over. The SEZ is a thing of the past here but long after media attention recedes, the inhabitants of this enclave will continue to suffer the brutal consequences of party rivalries.

Nandigram, thus, has become a tragic and mega-sized public relations disaster that has set back Bhattarcharjee's industrialisation programme by several years. His immediate test now will be how well he can sell his message to those who need to understand it and reassure those who want to invest in West Bengal's future.