Left not right

On the day I was leaving for Calcutta, I got a mail in the morning from a social group protesting the eviction of thousands of people in Singur district to make way for West Bengal’s perhaps most coveted deal in a long time_ a mammoth small car manufacturing plant to be set up by Tata Motors.
The same day, when I landed at Calcutta, I saw Azim Premji stepping into the airport. Later, I read in the newspapers that he was in Calcutta to discuss expansion plans in the state with the chief minister.
Here, I must admit that I have been largely ignorant or rather indifferent to West Bengal’s industrial plans and also the `growth’ it has apparently already witnessed over the last few years. I never paid much attention to industrial or political activity in this part of the country as both, I assumed, remained much the same. The Singur mail and Premji at the airport were, for me, the first indications of business houses evincing interest in the state.
Since it’s been the red `left’ flag ruling the state for as long as one can remember, my view of the state government there has been one which is so pro-poor in its approach that it had forgotten the industrialization needs that a region requires for growth, not to mention the job opportunities that would come with the same. At the same time, what it (the state government) really did for the poor, I fail to understand. Those who do, kindly enlighten me on this.
It was while sifting through various news reports on the Singur displacement issue that I learnt how complacent the state government was being as it made one statement after another on how it would go ahead with its acquisition of farmlands and how displacement at Singur was not really as big an issue as was being made out by the opposition. (Well, I wasn’t touched by Mamata Bannerjee’s tear stained tired face resting against Gandhi’s statue and I am sure nor were the people who were being displaced and were losing their fertile land to the government).
Political parties and their contradictory statements ceased to surprise me long back but since it was the Left in power taking the rather anti-poor stand, that came as a surprise. Is it not the same Left that opposes just about every industrial plan in the country and is incidentally doing so in Andhra Pradesh? Appallingly, in its own state it contradicts itself.
I have, on several occasions, found the left’s reactions rabid such as to those on disinvestments in PSUs and always felt their views on liberalization needed a fresh thinking. And when the party finally looks at industrial growth in its state, it compromises the very interests it had allegedly been fighting for. It even goes about it like other political parties would __ displacing the poor to place and please the rich. So much for the party’s ideology!