An Ethnographic Snapshot by Abhijit Guha
An Ethnographic
Snapshot[1]
Abhijit Guha
abhijitguhavuanthro@rediffmail.com
‘… When someone
tells you what he states happened to himself, you are more likely to believe
that he is telling the truth than when he tells you what happened to somebody else.
It has besides the merit from the story-teller’s point of view that he need
only tell you what he knows for a fact and can leave to your imagination what
he doesn’t or couldn’t know’. W. Somerset Maugham (Preface, Collected Short
Stories, vol.2, Penguin Books, 1963).
Background or
false consciousness?
Since I
began my research on development caused forced displacement with a special
emphasis to land acquisition on a particular locale, I also tried to collect
public opinion outside my field area. I talked with people of other places who
were not affected by land acquisition. For example, I talked, listened and
debated with my colleagues, friends, relatives and strangers on the streets and
public transport systems on the justification of land acquisition. The people
with whom I talked were mostly middle class educated women and men of Bengal. I
found most of them had very little idea about the adverse consequences of land
acquisition, let alone the intricacies and delay towards the payment of
compensation to the land losers. Moreover, whenever land acquisition for
industrialisation took place most of the urban and educated women and men were
found to hold the view that industrialisation, after all was the sign of
progress that would create employment for the staggering number of unemployed
youth of Bengal. For many people, Bengal’s declining economic growth was due to
the lack of industrialisation. I found very few people who also praised the
success of Bengal in agricultural production. Even when somebody showed hopes
for agriculture they talked in terms of high yielding varieties of seeds and
chemical fertilizers. The Bengali mind was preoccupied with an image of high
technology and growth oriented development whether it was industrial or
agricultural. And, probably for that reason Bengalis were found to admire the
state of Gujrat when it came to industrialisation and they praised Punjab when
it was about agricultural growth. I hardly found a Bengali educated person who
showed any interest for the success of cooperative farming in Gujrat or
small-scale industries of Punjab. So, for the typical ordinary educated Bengali
urban middle-class citizens, West Bengal needed large industries and since
industries could not be established without acquiring land, the impact of
industrialisation in terms of displacement was not viewed as major problem. So
the only trace of collective consciousness which I found among the middle class
Bengali people was a kind of false consciousness around the success of
industrialization.
From ‘Land to the tillers’ to ‘Agriculture
is our foundation, industry our future’
During the early 1990s the ruling
left front leaders argued that since land reform is a very successful endeavour
in the state of West Bengal, which raised the agricultural production and also
the purchasing capacity of the peasantry, the state is the ideal ground for the
establishment of capital intensive heavy and medium industries.
It is also interesting to note that by 2006 the then Marxist government that
was in power changed its age-old Leninist slogan ‘Land to the tillers’ to ‘Agriculture
is our foundation, industry our future’.
In fact, the then CPI (M) leadership argued in favour of huge capital
investment in the state by saying that success in land reforms had created the
ground for industrialization, although two important government reports during
the Left Front regime had recorded very slow progress in the distribution of
land to the landless and even a reversal of land reform benefits to an alarming
level. One
may name it industrialisation-through-land reform argument.
The second
line of argument came from more theoretically oriented Marxists of the ruling
parties, who claimed that industries would be able to absorb the extra labour
force engaged in agriculture in disguised form and also owing to the
introduction of mechanization in traditional means of cultivation. The proponents
of this line of argument also stated that agriculture owing to land
fragmentation caused by inheritance of property rights and hike in input costs
have already become non-viable for many small and marginal farmer families.
This argument may be termed as employment-through-industrialisation. Together, these two sets of politico-economic
arguments created a kind of collective consciousness among the ruling party
workers which acted against the interests of small and marginal farmers of West
Bengal since acquisition of land also meant dispossession of the land reform
benefitted peasants. So this kind of partisan collective consciousness finally
became self defeating for the Left Front Government which was vanquished in the
elections and had to leave the position of power they enjoyed for more than
three decades. Poor collective consciousness! (pace Emile Durkheim).
The
old man of Kantapal jokes at collective consciousness
The event occurred near
Kantapal village from where the huge chunk of land acquired for CenturyTextiles
could be seen. I, with some of my students, was engaged in a discussion with
the locals about the condition of the small dykes (ail) raised by the
farmers to demarcate the plots of land possessed by different owners within the
acquired area. Since no cultivation could be taken up for three successive
seasons in the whole area it had turned into a grazing field and the dykes had
started to break down.
Two consequences of this
situation followed. First, cultivators who still had unacquired land in the
vicinity of the acquired area were facing difficulties in protecting their
agricultural plots from the grazing cattle. Earlier there were other peasants
who also shared the responsibility of driving out the cattle from the fields
during agricultural season. Driving out the intruding cattle in paddy fields is
always a collective affair in rural areas. After acquisition, the number of cultivators
decreased in this area. Moreover, cows and buffaloes of the milkmen of the
urban areas of Kharagpur town also ventured to exploit this huge chunk of land. Second, after the breakdown of dykes the poorer people of
the area, who used to collect a good quantity of
small fishes of various types from those agricultural plots as a common
property resource, were not getting any fish
in those plots. In the discussion, three or four persons, including one middle
aged woman and an old man, were present. All of them were denouncing the
government for the takeover of the fertile agricultural land for CTIL which had
not yet been constructed. When the question arose, if people of this area had
started to dislike the ruling party and the government, then why did they cast
their votes at the panchayat and assembly elections to the same party
every year? The reply came from the old man, which is reproduced here verbatim
and translated freely from Bengali:
Look babu,[2] we poor
people always has to ride on some animal almost blindfolded. After the ride for
some time we start to realize whether it is a tiger or a bullock. But very
often we have to twist its tail in order to keep it in proper direction.
All of us,
including the old man, burst into laughter but soon I realized that the joke
symbolized the rupture in the false collective consciousness between the
elected and the electors in a democratic polity.
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