Police brutally fired upon and killed five persons and injured dozens of others during a rally to protest against the acquisition of land of farmers in Greater NOIDA in UP. People's Voice strongly condemns this act of cold-blooded murder. That such violent repression could be let loose on a mass protest so close to the capital city just shows the extent to which governments in India today will go to push through the speedy transfer of land from farmers to big corporations like Reliance and others.

The struggle in NOIDA must be seen against the efforts being made by big capitalists like Reliance, Unitech, DLF, Ansals, etc. to grab land around big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. This land is being provided to them at throwaway prices by various governments, which use old laws dating back to the period of colonial rule to forcibly acquire the land from residents.

According to these laws, the state can acquire land at a rate it can fix unilaterally, in the name of ‘public purpose’. The protesting farmers in NOIDA claim that their land was acquired some years back in the name of building infrastructure. It was only after their lands were taken away that they understood that it was being handed over to Reliance instead.

The compensation offered to them by the state government when the land was acquired amounts to only a fraction of the value of the land today. Companies like Reliance have been able to raise huge funds on the basis of their acquisition of these extremely valuable assets on the outskirts of Delhi, but the farmers have been paid just a pittance. Naturally, they are furious at what they see as the trickery of the government acting in league with the super rich capitalists to defraud them of what is their due.

In July, angry farmers of Gurgaon on Delhi’s outskirts also held a panchayat to condemn a similar fraud perpetrated on them by the Haryana state government. There too, land has been acquired by the government and given to Reliance. The value of the land is currently around Rs 4-5 crore per acre, but the farmers whose land were acquired was paid only a small percentage of that. To intimidate the villagers there, police has been camping in the area, erecting barricades and preventing the free movement of the people, and has lodged dozens of cases against protesters. 

SEZs are being justified by the Central and state governments in the name of economic development and particularly industrial development. But the case of the mega-SEZs being set up adjacent to the big metropolitan cities shows that this is nothing but a gigantic land scam. It is a way for real estate sharks to grab land and then make a killing parcelling the land out for building expensive residential areas, office buildings and commercial spaces, as well as leisure and entertainment ventures like hotels and golf courses. This kind of development is only in the interests of a super rich minority. 

The drive of the big capitalists, both Indian and foreign, to use the state machinery and its laws and institutions to take over the lands belonging to farmers and other working people is being challenged all over the country.  Mass protests like the ones in NOIDA and Gurgaon are a real spoke in the plans of the big bourgeoisie, which is why all the force of the state is being used against them, including cold-blooded shooting and killing of protesters. The struggle against SEZs and the forcible takeover of land is however only growing.