NANDIGRAM, India, 16 March 2007 — Baton-wielding police fired tear gas and beat dozens of villagers yesterday who were protesting the killing of at least 14 people in a dispute over plans to set up an industrial hub on farm land.
The killings were the worst violence yet over Communist-run West Bengal’s plans to acquire land for a low-tax Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Nandigram, a dispute that has also undermined the national government’s economic reform plans.
The shootings prompted widespread outrage in India’s capital, New Delhi, and in West Bengal. “The thought uppermost on my mind, and that of all sensitive people is, ‘Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable’?” said West Bengal state Gov. Gopal Krishna Gandhi. The governor’s role is largely ceremonial.
In New Delhi, lawmakers from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena, two right-wing Hindu nationalist groups, shouted, “Communists are murderers” — a reference to the communist politicians who have ruled West Bengal for more than three decades. The outbursts forced the house to be adjourned for the day, before any business could be conducted.
Meanwhile, the High Court in Calcutta, West Bengal’s capital, ordered India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the shootings.
Farmers angry over plans to build an industrial park on their land torched a government office yesterday in a second day of unrest, authorities and witnesses said.
At least 2,000 protesters, most of them farmers and opposition activists, set fire to a government building in Nandigram, witnesses and police said. Apparently in retaliation, police fired tear gas near a hospital emergency ward, sending hundreds of villagers, who had assembled at the hospital to look for missing relatives from the previous day, scurrying for cover.
Villagers jumped into ponds and ran into paddy fields as some shouted: “They will kill us again. Run for your life, brothers.”
Elsewhere, women and children wailed as they sat along narrow mud roads, their homes ransacked, reportedly by Communist supporters.
The clashes erupted a day after police fired on farmers who had attacked officers as they tried to enter an area earmarked for a chemical industry hub with investment from an Indonesian conglomerate, the Salim Group.
Police said they have taken control of at least five of the 12 troubled farming areas in Nandigram, 150 km southwest of Kolkata. But protests have spread.
In Kolkata, students boycotted classes, trains were stopped by demonstrators outside the city and roads were blocked.
India’s houses of Parliament were adjourned for an hour because of protests by legislators over the killings, and opposition lawmakers said the ruling communists in West Bengal were responsible for the deaths.
The violence has been an embarrassment for the Communists in West Bengal, who have annoyed grass-roots supporters by pressing for SEZs as part of their reform program.
The unrest has also proved a serious challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is under pressure to tone down reforms after signs of voter discontent with the ruling Congress party.
