KOCHI: Rajya Sabha member from Kerala P.V. Wahab (IUML), who recently visited Nandigram, called for a study of the whole question of land acquisition and displacement of people in West Bengal by an independent international agency.

He said the Nandigram incident should not be reduced to merely a police action. It involved larger issues of people's displacement for setting up industries and their rehabilitation.

For the moment, he said, the Central Government should make ex gratia payments to the relatives of the victims and the missing. He noted that the Centre had waited so many years before recently announcing ex gratia for the victims of the Gujarat carnage. "Such delay should not happen in the case of the Nandigram victims," he said.

`No development'

He pointed out that Nandigram, inspired by the Singur agitation, had been on the boil since January and that the inhabitants were determined not to spare their farmland. They also had before them the experience of Raja Haat farmers whose farmland was acquired at very cheap prices by the Government for constructing an airport.

Parts of the 3,000-acre land were later sold at extremely high prices, but the farmers did not get anything.

Mr. Wahab said despite 30 years of uninterrupted Left rule in West Bengal, the region that includes Nandigram was totally untouched by development.

After Chief Minister Budhadeb Bhattacharjee took over, he took some development initiatives and decided to acquire farmland for industries. Because of Mr. Bhattacharjee's eagerness, the pace was too fast and the farmers got suspicious.

Mr. Wahab said more than two-thirds of the population in Nandigram was Muslim and the rest were mostly Dalit. The farmers were extremely poor and their land holdings small. Of the 14 killed in the March 14 police firing, seven were Muslims.

IUML stance

Mr. Wahab, an industrialist and businessman himself, said his party was not against special economic zones, but wanted that the displaced people be properly compensated for and rehabilitated.

As practised abroad, they should be made stakeholders in the new industries located on their land.

He said the West Bengal Government had notified 1.54 lakh acres for acquisition across the State. Curiously, at least a half of this land belonged to Muslims as most of the land notified was in Muslim-concentrated areas.

In Raja Haat, he claimed, 90 per cent of the displaced people were Muslims. Asked if he suspected a plot, Mr. Wahab said he would not hazard a guess. His party viewed it as a human issue, but would nevertheless find out if there really was an anti-Muslim bias. He said 26 per cent of the West Bengal population was Muslim and quoted the Sachar Committee report which stated that the State was home to the poorest Muslims in the country.

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