India fights Bharat for territory | Box Populi - Yahoo! News
India fights Bharat for territory | Box Populi - Yahoo! News A big war is on for territory, and it looks like India is fighting Bharat on many fronts. In Bengal, Orissa, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, governments are acquiring huge tracts of land for projects that, as the Supreme Court said yesterday , enrich a few at the expense of many. Governments hand over cheaply and forcibly acquired land to private companies to develop expressways, housing colonies, mines, and factories. (In pre-liberalisation times, the government would have set up public sector units, but it now only talks of private-public partnerships, coming across to the deprived as a dalal acting on behalf of the moneybags). The land-owners, mostly small farmers, aren't giving up so easily. They look at it this way: "The city-slickers have money, bulldozers, and a convenient land acquisition law to back them. But we still have one weapon: our vote." Land wars exact a heavy toll. The CPM, for example, didn'...