(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)
There is an enduring myth about the lemming, a rodent which inhabits the Arctic region, that they are prone to mass migration towards the steep cliffs of the Norwegian coast and, following their leader, topple over, one after the other, into the raging sea below. Much like the BJP over the Land Acquisition ordinance.
The ordinance has been re-promulgated and the BJP is now irretrievably committed to its bizarre lemming-like behaviour, hoping against hope that the nine amendments they have introduced after the debate in the Lok Sabha will exculpate them from the charge of being anti-farmer and pro-corporate.
How pathetic is their condition is unveiled in the 2015 Economic Survey, which claims that GDP has registered well over seven per cent growth in the past year of mainly the Modi government, but left agriculture lagging behind at a whisker over 1 per cent.
For all of Modi's tears and protestations that he knows poverty, the fact is that he is now much better acquainted with the fat cats of industry and infrastructure than he is with the poverty-stricken kisans and khet-mazdoor. While Gandhiji's goal for the nation was to "wipe every tear from every eye", Modi's is to shed copious crocodile tears for the poor while bringing the bright smile to the super-wealthy.
Chief among the "special category" of exempted economic actives are "industrial corridors" and "infrastructure". For what else does big business want quasi-free land? It wants cut-price land to put up manufacturing units and physical infrastructure. Neither will provide substitute employment or livelihood to those who are being forcibly deprived of their property and the employment derived from working the land. Almost all the benefit will go to those who had nothing to do with the land until it was forcibly acquired.
This fundamental exploitation is at the heart of the "special category" that Modi has created to favour his crony capitalist friends. He has covered up his real purpose by adding "affordable housing" to the list of exemptions and started strumming his guitar with the usual chauvinistic appeal to "defence" by placing it among the exempted categories. It won't wash because none other than the Defence Ministry itself had informed the Standing Committee on Rural Development, of which I was a member, that they saw no need to exempt land acquisition for defence industries and defence purposes from the full purview of the 2013 Act. One reason that may have weighed with the Ministry then might have been the fact that nearly 1.5 lakh hectares of land acquired for defence use is lying unutilized with the defence authorities, in some cases going back half-a-century or more!
The kisan is no fool. He knows that it is neither a passionate desire for national defence nor housing for the poor that drives the man. They know that his innocent expression -"special category" - is really aimed at making the rich infinitely richer and gravely depriving the poor to fill party coffers.
The key to the Gujarat model was rampant land acquisition to pass on land to the private sector at throwaway prices. A classic case was in Kutch where some 1,500 acres were acquired by Chief Minister Modi and passed on to his favourite corporate house, who used a small portion of the land for their own use, and held on to the remainder to sell at a market price that was around 200-300 times the rate at which it was allotted to them. Another example was at the Special Industrial Zone in Hazira, where one of India's major construction companies received land at a discounted price that was zero point something of the rate at which micro-industries subsequently secured land in the same special industrial zone. (The above estimates have been obtained from knowledgeable articles in the prestigious academic publication, The Economic & Political Weekly, Mumbai).
Particularly worth noting is that a huge portion of land was acquired by Modi's Gujarat government from tribal populations. According to figures supplied by the erstwhile Planning Commission in its Twelfth Plan documents, whereas tribal people constitute only 8 per cent of the state's population, 76 per cent of those dispossessed and displaced were Gujarat's unfortunate tribals. No wonder they massively voted against him. Alas, their share of the electorate was so small that such mass deprivation did not result in electoral losses for so callous a government.
Modi, therefore, decided that the centre-piece of his economic "reforms" programme would be to transpose the "Gujarat model" to all of India. Hence the tearing hurry to take the ordinance route and, failing its endorsement in the Upper House, deploy the NDA's brute majority in a joint session of both Houses. There are contra-indications from the ground.
Many of his allies and all of the Opposition are up in arms against this outrage. So are the bulk of the 60 per cent of the electorate directly adversely affected. Gujarat is not India. Compared to most of the densely -populated states of the country, there are large tracts of arid dryland and wasteland in Gujarat that can be forcibly taken over without effective political opposition. Also, Gujarat's forests are available for exploitation by any ruler as ruthless as Modi.
But India is not Gujarat. When multi-cropped agricultural land is taken over, Modi is quite wrong in thinking he can ride roughshod over protesting kisans. Moreover, a united Opposition will come to the rescue of the deprived kisan and khet-mazdoor wherever and whenever there is takeover of rich agricultural land (which was prohibited under the 2013 Act). They will have to face the electoral consequences - particularly in UP and Bihar where the national destiny is crucially determined.
The newly-minted Janata Parivar is waiting in the wings to win back the states it lost to Modi in 2014. And a newly-minted Congress, immediately after its Rahul-led rally on 19 April against the land acquisition amendments, will lend its might and weight to the cause of the kisan against the depredations of the merchants of disaster.
This is the BJP's lemming moment. The countdown to the end of Modi's achche din has begun.
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