Let them eat cakes
When I first came to Bangalore more than a decade ago, one of the first things that I noticed was the red soil. It was lumpy, clay-ey soil that needed a lot of coaxing to produce anything green. A "lot of coaxing" because in the part of the country that I come from (Allahabad), anything thrown even casually on the ground sprouts leaves. Bangalore, to my eye, wasn't exactly "green".
And then, over the next few years, I had a chance to visit Bengal several times (the company that I worked for has a factory there). It was when our train was pulling out of Howrah, and chugging into Medinipur that I gasped. The land! It was SO green (and it wasn't even the season of rains) that all the greens that I'd seen till then paled into insignificance. Everything was so effortlessly green. A very happy joyous shade of green that I'd never seen before (and have not since).
It is this green that is at the epicentre of the Nandigram saga.
I can understand if a government takes an unproductive piece of land, say someplace like Bankura (which is a lot more dry-red and a lot less happy-green than Medinipur), and turns it into a hub of productivity by setting up industries. What I cannot understand is why the government needs to stop rice production to start petrochem production.
Maybe I do not understand economics.
But I do understand what Bankim Chandra Chatterji was saying in Anandmath - (a snippet)
The background: Bengal famine, a zamindar family lost in a jungle, the father's gone in search of food while his ornamented wife, and their chubby child, wait.
A group of starving peasants chance upon the wife and child.
The dialogues: "Hey, look at the ornaments. Let's kill the woman and take the gold."
"Will gold fill our tummies? Ask her if she has food. If she doesn't, we'll kill the child and eat it."
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