The Tatas have finally left Singur. The chief minister of West Bengal has talked of battle and war, but the warring factions, conveniently forgot the most important part of any war, especially, where the industry is involved.

There have been blames being apportioned, while, whosoever holds post mortems, wants to have his say. However, no one has spoken on whether the issue could have been resolved and whether the chaos could have been avoided. One recollects a famous Hollywood movie – ‘Dirty Harry’, where a person who wanted to take revenge on a police officer, intentionally, went on injuring himself. He wanted to precipitate a situation so he could earn the sympathy of the masses by pointing fingers at the police and saying that his condition was a result of the beatings that the police have showered on him – a innocent. That is what Mamata wanted and what the West Bengal government did not want – the result was a standoff in Singur, losing the chance of having a small car factory of the Tatas.


The chief minister of West Bengal has talked of battle and war – but the warring factions, conveniently forgot the most important part of any war, especially, where industry is involved. That is industrial espionage, which is used extensively, where large stakes are involved. Here the three main parties were the Trinamool Congress, the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M) and the Tatas. If such a situation had occurred in any Western country, the trouble shooters would have descended on the scene and would have taken over the charges. We know that there exists an Achilles heel in every human, they just need to identify it and extract the pound of flesh. It need not necessarily be connected with any of the leaders directly, but could have been a family member or a friend – he could find himself involved in some embarrassing police case like…(we can leave it to one’s imagination).

That would have made all the people happy – the Tatas would have their factory, the residents of Singur would have had a happy Durga Puja and Mamata would have been searching for other problematic areas to attack. I wonder whether, such options had been considered by any of the factions.