India
Does Not Need SEZs –
The SEZ Act Will Have To Go!
By Dipankar Bhattacharya
21 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Even
as the Congress and the CPI(M) and their respective governments in New
Delhi and Kolkata are busy covering up the state-sponsored barbarism
in Nandigram, the 'empowered group of union ministers' has cleared the
deck for the government's SEZ campaign with only a few minor modifications
in the SEZ policy. There will now be a cap on the size of SEZs –
individual SEZs will henceforth not exceed 5,000 hectares. Half of the
area in an SEZ will now be earmarked for the main processing activity
with the other half still left free for real estate business. And governments
will apparently no longer be involved in the act of forcible land acquisition
– that part of the job will from now on be left to the free market!
With these minor modifications,
the government has now paved the way for immediate notification of formal
approval for as many as 54 SEZs. Another 29 SEZs just await clearance
from the Law Ministry, while 88 applications are now passing through
the stage of verification. Then there are 162 SEZs that have already
secured in-principle approval and only formalities remain to be completed.
And then there are 350 new applications waiting for approval. Add up
all these categories and the total is already close to seven hundred!
If the average size of an SEZs is assumed to be 2000 hectares or 5000
acres, seven hundred SEZs would occupy around 1.4 million hectares or
14,000 square kilometres! And this is all prime land – agricultural
or otherwise – in the vicinity of India's major urban centres.
There is absolutely not a
word regarding the enormous tax concessions that the Government's own
finance ministry had been questioning. Tax concessions apart, SEZs will
continue to promise a massive immunity from the laws of the land. Municipal
regulations or labour laws will all remain eminently dispensable. And
it is not difficult to envisage how easily big corporations can subvert
each of the minor modifications mooted by the group of ministers. To
take just one example we already hear reports that the giant Reliance
SEZ in Haryana, originally proposed to sprawl over 25,000 acres, will
now be broken up into five separate zones: one large multi-product SEZ
and four smaller ones, to conform to the new norms.
What will be the state's role in the new scheme of things? We are told
that the state will no longer directly lend its hand to the act of land
acquisition. In other words, the peasants will now be directly subjected
to corporate thuggery and the armed forces of the state will wield their
batons and bullets to enforce corporate 'rights' on peasant land. If
the people who are robbed of their land insist on the implementation
of promises made to them – cash compensation, rehabilitation,
employment in SEZ projects – they have Kalinganagars in store
for them. Let us not forget that the gas victims of Bhopal have not
been rehabilitated till date and Honda workers in Gurgaon were brutally
beaten up just because they had dared to exercise their most elementary
right to get unionised. The so-called 'retreat' of the state from the
direct business of land acquisition does by no means signal any neutrality
on the part of the state in enforcing corporate interests.
When the SEZ Act was passed in parliament, it saw little debate and
no party, including the CPI(M) and its allies, voted against it. With
mass resistance intensifying, the CPI(M) began making some noise about
amending the SEZ Act. The amendments are mostly of a procedural nature
and not substantive; in fact, it has now all boiled down to haggling
over the size of SEZs. While the government is arrogantly bypassing
all public debate and steamrolling its way to enforce its SEZ policy,
the CPI(M) and its allies are fulfilling their duty by merely criticising
the government for its 'obsession' with SEZs. And the government is
perfectly aware that as the architect of "Operation Nandigram",
the CPI(M) has little moral courage and credibility left to risk a showdown
with the Congress over the issue of SEZs. Indeed, for ruling parties
of different hues, the debate over SEZs is just one more opportunity
for another bout of shadow-boxing. The people of this country have become
sick of this shadow-boxing, their opposition to SEZs is most urgent
and real. They are staking their lives to resist this corporate land-grab.
It is now as clear as daylight why like POTA and AFSPA, we must fight
for a complete repeal of the SEZ Act. Whichever way the government may
implement this Act, and whatever be the average or maximum size of the
SEZs, the people of this country cannot accept this corporate land-grab
which will drain away their resources into corporate coffers and mortgage
their rights to brutal corporate power. Let us intensify the resistance
to SEZs and let this resistance redefine the lines of political demarcation.
Parties and governments that stand on the corporate side of the SEZ
fence can have no claim to the legacy of the Left.
[Dipankar Bhattacharya is
the General Secretary of the CPI(ML)]
Click
here to comment
on this article