Sunday, May 20, 2007
20 hurt in fresh violence at Singur
May 20: At least 20 persons were injured in fresh clashes between police and villagers protesting against proposed Tata Motors car factory here on Sunday.
Around 200 farmers gathered at the factory site in Singur demanding their acquired land back.
The project has been mired in trouble with some farmers who say the government took their land against their will. The government claims that it has compensated most of the farmers.
There have been regular protests in West Bengal this year over the acquisition of agriculture land for industry.
SEZs have been a real flash point for many places such as Alibag near Mumbai, where many say that such a venture is needless. One cannot avoid seeing a high level of arrogance by the authorities over some of these cases, which in itself can brew trouble and foment violence.
On the face of it, it already looks like fascist diplomacy, a sort of Mussolini type Government/Business 'Private Finance Initiative' so both Government and Big Business can try to solve their problems at the expense of the poor, in this case presenting in return the Potemkin Village of motor cars, the '1 lakh car'. The relevance to the whole world with such cars ? Well, it may be that the end result is rather like building nuclear power stations without writing eventual essential closure costs into the sums. In short the world will certainly have to pay through the nose for these cars. But exactly who and exactly how ? Best to know real environmental costs of these projects in advance. Nowadays effect on the environment of such cars is extremely large. And the local workers do not seem happy either. So both the world and the local poor are really filling the coffers of greedy tycoons and their running dogs, the latter apparently being for the moment the Indian Government, deeply preoccupied already with other matters such as caste and religion, which in fact had been half way solved by Mahatma Gandhi, some would say completely solved in principle.
Perhaps fascist corporate/state tactics were (relatively) innocent enough in the early 20th Century, but we are living in the 21st Century now, with environment and overcrowding and all the other problems of the 21st Century. We cannot nowadays afford to be simply greedy capitalists or altruistic socialists as we choose. Those halcyon days are long gone.
IMO: I am already unwillingly beginning to find myself with a dossier of the adverse effects of such PFI methods already in the UK and how they seemingly bolster a Government's budget there in a basically unsound way. Not, I fear, a possible prelude to the likely end of socialism but to the possible end of the capitalist system and this time there may not be a Herbert Hoover around to pick up the pieces. I don't like it.
Around 200 farmers gathered at the factory site in Singur demanding their acquired land back.
The project has been mired in trouble with some farmers who say the government took their land against their will. The government claims that it has compensated most of the farmers.
There have been regular protests in West Bengal this year over the acquisition of agriculture land for industry.
SEZs have been a real flash point for many places such as Alibag near Mumbai, where many say that such a venture is needless. One cannot avoid seeing a high level of arrogance by the authorities over some of these cases, which in itself can brew trouble and foment violence.
On the face of it, it already looks like fascist diplomacy, a sort of Mussolini type Government/Business 'Private Finance Initiative' so both Government and Big Business can try to solve their problems at the expense of the poor, in this case presenting in return the Potemkin Village of motor cars, the '1 lakh car'. The relevance to the whole world with such cars ? Well, it may be that the end result is rather like building nuclear power stations without writing eventual essential closure costs into the sums. In short the world will certainly have to pay through the nose for these cars. But exactly who and exactly how ? Best to know real environmental costs of these projects in advance. Nowadays effect on the environment of such cars is extremely large. And the local workers do not seem happy either. So both the world and the local poor are really filling the coffers of greedy tycoons and their running dogs, the latter apparently being for the moment the Indian Government, deeply preoccupied already with other matters such as caste and religion, which in fact had been half way solved by Mahatma Gandhi, some would say completely solved in principle.
Perhaps fascist corporate/state tactics were (relatively) innocent enough in the early 20th Century, but we are living in the 21st Century now, with environment and overcrowding and all the other problems of the 21st Century. We cannot nowadays afford to be simply greedy capitalists or altruistic socialists as we choose. Those halcyon days are long gone.
IMO: I am already unwillingly beginning to find myself with a dossier of the adverse effects of such PFI methods already in the UK and how they seemingly bolster a Government's budget there in a basically unsound way. Not, I fear, a possible prelude to the likely end of socialism but to the possible end of the capitalist system and this time there may not be a Herbert Hoover around to pick up the pieces. I don't like it.
# posted by uv : 9:25 PM
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