"There was a young lady of Riga, Who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride With the lady inside -And a smile on the face of the tiqer" On Singur and Mamata Banerjee, the limerick seems, at first, singularly applicable. Here is this termagant, with her impossible demands, riding a tiger, which in the end shall devour her. There could be truth in this. For days after Sunday 24th August, when the dharna at Singur began, movement of vehicles on the Durgapur Expressway had come to a grinding halt, and the pile up of hundreds of long-distance trucks extended beyond the jharkhand border. Some of these lorries were carrying fruit, vegetables and fish, which started rotting. Prices in Kolkata's markets made for a parabolic movement skywards, and the hungry Bengali, deprived of his fish, was not feeling too charitable towards the perpetrator of the crime. Clearly, Mamata did not know when and where to draw a line. However, beneath the surface, it's not so obvious or simple. Somewhere, Mamata Banerjee seems to have struck a rich lode of ore - and she has a groundswell of public support. Today it is increasingly accepted that rich, alluvial, agricultural land at Singur has been acquired forcibly, illegally and by unfair means by a callous and uncaring administration, and that the farmers truly have a grievance. The acquisition was made under the 1894 Act, which requires use for "public purpose", not for industrial or commercial enterprise. Furthermore, for agricultural land, the applicable 1991 manual of the Land Reforms Act, which was brought in by the Communists themselves, would presuppose consent of owners. Since compensation cheques remain uncollected for 25 per cent of the land, such consent was clearly absent. Thus, according to this view, Mamata Banerjee is the lone voice of protest against tyranny, and the roles are completely reversed: it is Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya who has been riding the tiger. And with another flick of the kaleidoscope, in this tragedy or farce (whichever it is), it's not the politicians, but the ordinary suffering people of Bengal who are being torn apart by wild beasts! And that is when the words of Jyoti Basu, quoted above, become tinged with such tragic irony. Basu, independent India's longest serving chief minister, was tantalisingly deprived of prime-ministership by his party's (so called) "historic blunder". It seems, in the end, he has achieved precisely what was his purported dearest wish to avoid - West Bengal has become an industrial desert. It seems too long ago, given the country's increasingly youthful population almost beyond living memory, that Basu and the Communist Party (Marxist) first came to power forty years ago after the Congress election defeat in 1967. The dance of death that followed - the gheraos, industrial closures, violence and murders -is described in the history books, and has left a permanent scar on West Bengal. After the 1971-77 Congress interregnum, the Marxists decisively returned post-Emergency. Today, inside the "Red Fortress" built by them these thirty years, democracy has been completely subverted, all dissent stifled, every single institution targeted for control by means fair or foul, and then systematically destroyed, all talent driven out of the state. Kolkata, once a throbbing centre of intellectual creativity, is today a city of retirees; and West Bengal is an industrial desert. The new chief minister has tried to make amends, but his party has sowed a wind and is reaping a whirlwind. Furthermore, in his hurry for new industrial investment, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has been losing credibility. At an Assocham meeting on Tuesday 26th August, he termed gheraos as "barbaric", and claimed that he would strongly oppose any bandhs that his party may call the next time round! Within the day a controversy had started whether he had been "publicly censured" by the party Politburo, or whether his colleagues had merely "distanced" themselves. An isolated Bhattacharya, Canute-like, today seems helpless in the face of forces too big for him. At Singur it's the government's highhanded land acquisition that created all the problems, and the Tatas have been made a victim of their too easy trust. From this point of view, the entire episode is summed up not in the limerick nor Jyoti Basu's "historic" words quoted above, but in Tennyson's "Someone has blundered!" The Communist Party's electoral reverses in the last panchayat elections have given Mamata Banerjee her head of steam. Her success is actually a creation of the Communists, and her tactics a mirror image. She has been accused of unreasonableness and rigidity, and as a newspaper headline memorably put it, lives in a "Republic of No-No". But the Agni Kanya (as her party has taken to calling her) is the supreme populist, she knows she is playing to win a dangerous game. In the end, of course, some kind of settlement shall be reached. The winners may be one or the other party, but the greatest pity would be if the losers were the people of West Bengal!