Do Bigha Zameen : A Modern Retelling

It is more than a matter of the 400 acres of land at Singur. The Tata plant running into labor trouble at Singur is an example of several tectonic shifts in our politics.

We have here a bizarre situation where a party committed to the welfare of the toiling masses provides police protection to a capitalist firm — after being accused of having acquired land by force using the party muscle to coerce the local “peasantry” into parting with it.

The peasants are being led by a party comprised of more or less one person, Mamta Bannerjee, whose ideology on most matters is unknown except that she loves to oppose any thing and any one with a passion. Of course, her supreme passion is to hate the Left Front. But, she opposed the Congress leadership when she was in it, opposed the NDA when she was part of it and retains an ambivalent relationship with it even now. And, of course, she opposed several in her own party who tried to give it an identity and an ideology.

The irony is probably all the more jarring because the Left Front’s once stellar record in land reforms must be staring it glaringly in the face. Although most of the country has passed laws paying lip service to the “land to the tiller” concept, it has been the earlier Left Front governments in the Jyoti Basu era that took the matter of land reform seriously and single mindedly pursued it.

“When Benoy Choudhury became Minister of Land and Land Reforms when the Left Front came to power in 1977 after two short earlier spells be began ‘Operation Barga’, Bargadar being the word used for sharecroppers who had no security of land. West Bengal’s reforms turned out to be the best land reform and distribution system in India. The so-called land reform schemes in the other states like U.P. and Bihar had just been a hoax, the landlords continued to rule their empire with an iron hand. Benoy Choudhury and the team he created saw to it that sharecroppers had tenure over their land and could not be evicted.”

From the time of Benoy Choudhury the journey was long. In the early days of Left Front rule, land reforms were of such high importance that in the West Benga “quota” of the CPI (M) politburo a seat was held by the land and land reforms minister and, of course, the portfolio itself was awarded to a senior minister. That the same “seat” is now occupied by the industry minister since the last party congress speaks a lot about the distance covered.

The situation of the Left is understandable. Industrialization may be a necessity, but it has to live up its own formidable legacy in giving land to the landless and not taking it away as it is doing now. The trouble is compounded by the fact that today there are no leaders of the stature of a Benoy Choudhury who would command the credibility that he and others like him with a mass base did. That would have allowed them to have communicated with the people in a vocabulary of their own and be believed. Today, the few mass leaders that the Left has are pygmies compared to the giants who preceded them.

And meanwhile, as the Left Front sorts out its fractured identity, we will be treated to the spectacle of the party of the “toiling masses” providing protection to merchant princes even as the Trinamool Congress, a part of the right-wing NDA committed to free enterprise, agitates for the aspirations of the poor. Keep your television sets on in the coming days. A “worker’s party” using police to keep agitating peasants at bay will be a sight to behold.

Tax for the Idiot Channel

It looks like that the UPA government is developing dementia. It can’t remember any more if it supports a free market economy or a socialist one. The so called mixed economy on which many of us grew up was some thing we all thought was well and truly over but it looks as if it is not so. Whey else otherwise, the government have the sudden brain wave of imposing an annual recurring fee from the owner of every television set – Rs. 500 for each color set and Rs.200 for each black and white set.

And this is only one of the many measures being contemplated by the UPA government to pump money into the supposedly autonomous Prasar Bharati so that they can perform their public service broadcasting role better. Interestingly enough, the money thus collected is not going to increase radio and Doordarshan coverage in the villages or increase the quality of programming. Rather, it is going to help the government pay Part of the money raised will go into providing government pay scales and other benefits for the 38,000-odd Prasar Bharati employees. Sources said the license fee plan alone could raise an estimated Rs 23,871 crore.

The average middle class person and above typically does not watch Doordarsahan or listen to All India Radio. For the others who do, may be in the rural areas where cable television has not penetrated and where terrestrial television is still the norm, the bets are that the typical viewer and radio listener has a life style far lower down the ladder compared to the Prasar Bahrain bureaucrat. How ethical is it then that he or she should subsidize the life of government bureaucrats and program staff which even today have a large dollop of programs that could have come out of the stables of the Soviet era propaganda department.

It is probably time to question several things. One is that in a socialist style Robin Hood style economy, which is obsolete any way, the poor are subsidized by the rich. Here we have a situation where the poor and that is typically the profile of the person who watches Prasar Bharati programs who will be paying for the upkeep of government TV and programming staff. It has been reported in the context of these proposed taxes that the revenue of Prasar Bharati is about Rs.1, 500 crores per year and the operating costs are about Rs3,000 crores. It has also 38,000 employees.

Another good question to ask is to why the government funded broadcaster should be running so many channels if no body watches them ? If at all, in a large and complex country like India , a need is felt to have a platform from where the government feels the need to reach out to the entire population at times of National crisis or emergencies , it could at the most manage one news channel to communicate with the nation. The rest of the entertainment channels, sports channels , and regional language channels which don’t attract any advertising could just be shut down. Even in the private sector, even among those channels which are not free to Air, no channel is surviving on subscriber fees alone. Why should things be any different here ?

Witness the recent incident involving Dayanidhi Maran where Sun TV published a poll that angered the Tamil Nadu chief minister and that subsequently led to the exit of Maran in the cabinet. In all this battle for viewer ship , there were three players – Sun TV , Raj TV, and the about to be formed Kalaignar TV. DD Tamil was not a player of any magnitude in the game for whose viewer ship , any body was keen to fight any wars and battles. In the private sector, if a particular industry bleeds for long , it either shuts down or if it has assets of its own, it gets acquired or merged with some other. The old style nationalization wherein sick companies are acquired by the government and run with the tax payer’s money does not happen even in states like West Bengal any more. May be that the government should tax the high end television purchaser, the kind of television which gets reflected in the Annual Information Return- the folks who buy high end plasma televisions or the LCD sets. Those purchasers too may complain but at least such a policy is at least consistent with the Robin Hood government’s Aam Aami policy. Making a dhaba owner with a banged up black and white TV or a cheap Chinese set pay a recurring tax is not good welfare. Or may be even good politics.