Context: geo-political history of struggles for liberation

Nandigram is a rural area in Purba Medinipore district of the state of West Bengal, located about 150 km south-west of Kolkata, on the south bank of the Haldi River, opposite the industrial city of Haldia. The area falls under the Haldia Development Authority (HDA). The region has been at the centre-stage of an autonomous peasant resistance against the state government ever since the announcement in December 2006 of acquiring land for setting up a Special Economic Zone in the area.

The modern history of Nandigram is the history of struggle for liberation since the days of British Rule in India. During the Civil Disobedience Movement, 1930, Medinipore had played a major role. The SDO, Medinipore wrote,”….the villages had been converted to good forts. Cutting up village roads, filling them with loose earth, thorn and rough sharp shells......, barricades with large bamboo trees and trenches dug into the middle of the fields.”

In the 1942 Quit India Movement, a parallel government was formed in Tamluk (present day district headquarter), which was disbanded only in September 1944 at the request of Mahatma Gandhi. In the Tebhaga Movement, 1946-47, Nandigram was again in the forefront in the establishment of Krishak Sabhas revolting against the share-crop system. Women of Medinipore, namely from Tamluk, Nandigram, Sutahata, etc., came forward and joined the movement as members of volunteer bahini of the Krishak Sabha. In Nandigram, Bimala Majhi organized women to resist the police and administrative attack on the villagers, with sickle, brooms, boti (a sharp curved instrument to cut vegetables), and dust, chilly powder and salt tied in their clothes that they hurled at the police.

Nandigram, therefore, has a history of autonomous peasant movements and liberation struggles against the hegemonic state power, and history repeated itself once again when the West Bengal government decided to set up a chemical hub under the Special Economic Zone policy at Nandigram.

The chemical hub required the acquisition of over 25,000 acres of land under the Government of India’s PCPIR (Petro-Chemical Petroleum Investment Region) Scheme, to be jointly developed by the state-owned Industrial Development Corporation and the Indonesia-based Salim group of companies, founded by Sudono Salim closely associated with Indonesian ex-president Suharto. The state government stated that it was won by competing with nine other Indian states, and hailed it as a progressive ambitious project being in the vicinity of Haldia Petrochemicals & IOC refinery, which the party in power CPI-M claimed, had earlier led to 100,000 jobs created through downstream projects. The party argued that this was the best place to build a hub from the point of view of supply-chain integration.

The SEZ would have been spread over 29 mouzas (villages) of which 27 were in Nandigram. Most of the land to be acquired is multi crop and would affect over 40,000 people. Expectedly, the prospect of losing land and thereby livelihood raised concerns among the predominantly agricultural populace. The villagers, which included supporters of CPI-M, joined hands and organized a resistance movement under the banner of the newly formed Bhoomi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee or BUPC (literally, Committee for the Resistance to Eviction from Land)

For more than ten months now the clashes between the BUPC and the CPI-M cadres have continued resulting in large-scale massacre and human rights violations over the Nandigram SEZ controversy. The casualty, West Bengal’s worst in 30 years of Left Front rule, has left the state stunned. Media and human rights organizations have reported large scale violence initiated by armed CPI-M supporters and alleged inaction by the state’s law enforcing agencies who apparently failed to take steps to uphold law and order and to protect local inhabitants.

The team of concerned civil society actors led by AI India and HRW visited Nandigram after the spate of violence between the two sides in November 2007 that required the deployment of Central Reserved Police Force (CRPF), to inquire into the events that led to such a situation, as well as to assess the reports from media and non-governmental sources about the actual situation there.

This diary is an attempt to log the findings of the team on the November violence within the context of the Nandigram SEZ controversy. Efforts have been made to assess the impact of the violence on the common villagers through their testimonies, as well as to ascertain what part the state and district authorities have played in the entire controversy by interviewing the proper authorities.