Corporate Land Grab: Issues of Development and Democracy

If 2006 had begun with the massacre at Kalinganagar, 2007 has dawned with the uprising at Nandigram. At Kalinganagar, land had been acquired more than a decade ago and all

-- Arindam Sen Already notorious as special eviction (for the “development refugees”), exemption (for the investors) and exploitation (for the workers) zones, SEZs call for a closer examination from the perspective

-- Dipankar Bhattacharya Is there at all any case for a debate and agitation over Singur? The CPI(M) leadership would like us to believe there is absolutely none and that the

-- Kavita Krishnan Defenders of the SEZ policy propagate many myths about SEZs. Let us examine some of them. 'SEZs are needed for industrialisation' The most favourite argument offered by SEZ fanatics is

-- Tapas Ranjan Saha A Critique of CPI(M)’s Proposed Amendments to the SEZ Act 2005 The CPI(M) MPs in Parliament quietly voted for the shameful SEZ Act. But when farmers’ protests at

-- Arindam Sen Primitive Accumulation in the Era of Globalisation As regards economic essence, the eviction of peasants and other toilers from their natural socio-economic habitat is best understood in the Marxian

(excerpts from Comrade Dipankar’s speech at Singur, 14 September, 2006) We have come here to congratulate you for the message of hope and resistance that you have sent out from Singur.

-- Arindam Sen Both Singur and Nandigram are fertile multi-cropped regions with a settled peasantry having deep socio-economic and emotional attachment with land. Both areas boast a tebhaga lineage and sharecroppers,

-- Dipankar Bhattacharya Three Decades of Uninterrupted CPI(M) Rule... In May 2006, the CPI(M) had won one of its most spectacular electoral victories in West Bengal. The CPI(M)-led Left Front government returned

Most stories of corporate land grab have a predictable script: with identifiable themes like forced land acquisition, masked by ‘consent’ forged at gun point, handing of precious fertile land to

-- Kavita Krishnan A look at facts about the Nandigram massacre and CPI(M)-sponsored fiction. Quotations from CPI(M) leaders are from Brinda Karat’s ‘Behind the Events at Nandigram’ (The Hindu, March 30,

-- Dipankar Bhattacharya Even as the Congress and the CPI(M) and their respective governments in New Delhi and Kolkata are busy covering up the state-sponsored barbarism in Nandigram, the ‘empowered group