Left at war in wake of communist raid on Indian village

Attempts by India's communist party to rebrand itself has sparked a war of words between leftwing intellectuals in India and those abroad after a violent attempt by the party to seize paddy fields in West Bengal to be turned over to big business.

When armed communist cadres raided the village of Nandigram last month, killing six people and raping several women, thinkers and writers from across India decried the violence as a "bloody capitulation to globalisation and imperialism". Houses were burnt and thousands fled to refugee camps.

But the party has received support from fellow travellers in the west, notably academic Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn and writer Tariq Ali, who put their names to a letter in the Hindu newspaper highlighting the dangers of splitting the left at a time "when a world power has demolished one state (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran)".

This foreign intervention, which was reproduced in the mouthpiece of the Communist party of India (Marxist), has not been welcomed by critics in India.

Indian historians, artists and writers including Arundhati Roy wrote a letter warning that "history has shown us that internal dissent is invariably silenced by dominant forces claiming that a bigger enemy is at the gate. Iraq and Iran are not the only targets of that bigger enemy. The struggle against corporate globalisation is an intrinsic part of the struggle against US imperialism."

Sumit Sarkar, a leftwing historian, said the western authors had an "ignorance of what is happening in India. They have no idea of the on-the-ground facts."

West Bengal is the seat of the world's longest serving democratically elected communist government. But in recent years the CPI(M) has been busy rebranding itself.

It began its Chinese-style reforms five years ago, with the most controversial policy being the establishment of special economic zones that would cut red tape, slash taxes and relax labour laws for foreign companies who wanted to invest. It also snuffed out dissent with a ruthless campaign to silence critics of the new policies.

It had ordered the Nandigram paddy fields to be turned over to a special economic zone for an Indonesian-owned petrochemical complex.

For detractors the communists have begun to betray the very people - the poor - they were supposedly dedicated to helping. Led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, a silver-haired playwright with a penchant for Harold Pinter and the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, the communists say their actions were justified.

But Prof Sarkar said that many were now disillusioned with the policies of the government in Bengal.

"When they were first elected in the 1970s there was great enthusiasm for them. We saw land reform and a number of other good policies. But now we see farmland forcibly grabbed for capitalists and multinationals. It is a kind of fetish that Stalin used to have."

Independent observers say that the fight for the soul of the party has left the rest of the country bemused.

"Words like neoliberalism sound like pointless abuse to me," said Ramachandra Guha, a historian and writer. "I am not an economist but many intellectuals do not really understand economics. Yet in India they are happy to argue endlessly over it. The real issue is that the thinking left nurses a deep sense of betrayal over events in Nandigram."