submitted on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 14:41 in Travel Asia with Raimondo Bultrini Niche by zorg 
By Raimondo Bultrini
Nandigram (western Bengal) It had been five months since the ferryboat last shuttled between the city of Haldia and the fertile basin by the waters of the Maldi and Hooghly rivers, the latter a majestic tributary of the sacred Ganges.
The return of the ferry service after the long blockade is a small gesture of peace from the communist party government of Bengal to the peasants of the Free Territory of Nandigram, in the red heart of the Indian state just a few hours from Calcutta, where a popular uprising has spiraled out of control. But seldom do any passengers now board the ferry. Not a single farmer leaves the small rebellious enclave of seventeen villages surrounded by trenches dug beside bridges and roads.
No policeman has set foot there in six months. Twenty- five thousand families in Nandigram have openly defied the governments of Bengal and India since the end of last year, in a struggle which has cost some of their own lives and those of their families. Over twenty have died, some of them children.
Dozens have been wounded in an infernal cycle of ambushes and reprisals which began with the announcement that 19,000 hectares of cultivated land would be expropriated and turned over to a giant foreign petrochemical concern. Since then no vegetables, fruit or milk have reached Haldia marketplace, schools have emptied, and special measures are needed to safely take the seriously wounded to the properly equipped district hospitals.
After sunset the gunfire intensifies with hardly a day of respite. We accompanied a group of volunteer doctors into the enclosed villages of the Free Territory, which are constantly in danger from the Party snipers, who claim they are defending the rights of those who intend to cede their land in the name of progress.
In tears, women tell us of massacres and unspeakable violence, of infants butchered and small girls raped and they urge us to spend a night in the village listening to the noise of gunshots and bombs launched from the CPiM (Indian communist party, marxist) stronghold in Kejuri, on the other side of the bridge. Officially, four people were killed in January and another fourteen on March 14 during a protest march. Others have died in skirmishes in the last few weeks, amounting to an estimated 30 dead or more, according to farmer sources. H
owever the events in Nandigram are more significant than the social disturbances created by peasant revolts in the years of early industrialization in Europe. The killing of fourteen victims in front of Nandigram Police Station occurred a few weeks after the deaths of six farmers who refused to hand over their property for a joint Tata- Fiat Italy venture, a massive automobile plant in Singur.
There, near Calcutta, a pocket of peasant resistance has formed, involving over 60,000 people. In Singur troops bloodily crushed the protests of the rebels whom they accused of being Maoists and Naxalites. A three meter wall was erected around the thousand hectares intended for the automobile plant. Within the wall we saw bulldozers at work, while the police outside were kept on the alert by fellow officers in watch-towers for any signs of movement from the village.
One of the leaders of the uprising explained to us that as soon as the surveillance is relaxed, they will try to breach the wall and repossess their land. But for now they can only contemplate the image of their defeat on the other side: the foundations of a factory destined to produce innumerable small economy models, to be sold at one Lack, a hundred thousand rupees, a little over two thousand euros. Deprived of their land, with their indemnity compensation handouts diminishing fast, the farmers told us the hatred they nurse is mixed with a sense of impotence, an ideal ideological terrain for the Naxalites and Maoists active both in Singur and Nandigram.
These two areas have become something of a symbol of resistance to India’s new economic course. Hundreds of SEZs (special economic zones) have been created or are about to be conceded to large Indian and multinational companies using forests and agricultural land which had provided a living for tribal people and farmers, who compose 70% of the population. The Free Territory of Nandigram begins at a small canal called Talpati Khal and a series of trenches dug across the road delineates the “liberated” area from the rest of the State of Bengal and from India. This already happened once before in 1942, when Nandigram was a republic for several months before yielding to the firepower of British soldiers. Today however, the people are accusing the powerful Communist Party allied with Congress of having given free rein to all kinds of criminal elements so as to ease the capitalists’ path and force the small farmers to move away.
The volunteer doctors at Sramajibi, a small hospital for the poor on the outskirts of Calcutta, confirm they have treated numerous cases of mutilation and rape. They recount acts of horrendous brutality, such as the razing of the mansion of two brothers, members of the party elite, by an enraged group of peasants who murdered one of them on the spot, and that later bloodied clothes and underwear were found in the charred ruins. Bengal’s Communist Prime Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattaracharya, claims that nothing can stop the progress which the Special Economic Zones represent and that the party is acting for the future benefit of the people.
Yet there are signs of different viewpoints emerging among the governing classes, perhaps partly in response to a revolt which cost dozens of lives a year ago in the state of Orissa, where tribespeople armed with bows and arrows attacked an industrial steel complex belonging to Tata. The governor of Bengal, Ghopal Krishna Gandhi, a descendant of the Mahatma, has openly endorsed the rights of the rebels. Even the government in Delhi no longer seems very proud of the neo-liberal unscrupulousness of its Communist Party allies.
