Prime minister Manmohan Singh and planning commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia have often spoken of the neoliberal dream of taking farmers and their land away from agriculture. Nobody has worked towards that objective as zealously as Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, granting land at throwaway prices to Adanis and Nirma and DLF of the Robert Vadra fame.

This efficiency of the Gujarat government in getting land for industry has been hailed by the corporate leaders and sections of the media and commentators. They compare Singur and Sanand – how Tata Motors left West Bengal over land acquisition problems and how Modi ensured land for them (not to mention unprecedented tax breaks). They also believe that the Gujarat farmer is very pragmatic, not sentimental, about the farm land, and given the right price does not mind moving out of agriculture.

Which is of course humbug. If Gujarat has been industrialising at a hectic pace, there have been several Singurs along the way – except that the administration clamps down on the protests more efficiently than UPA ever could on those Anna Hazare-Swami Ramdev movements.

Take the Mahuva agitation for example.

READ MORE: Gujarat villages stand as rock against Nirma cement factory

Audacity of their hope

The Nirma group of Karsan Patel wanted to set up a cement factory under a Vibrant Gujarat proposal, and the state government gave it a piece of ‘fallow land’, on which stands water body. Farmers said they didn’t want jobs in the cement factory, they wanted water for farms. The state government refused to listen and maintained there was no water body, it was a fallow land. Indeed, a three-minister team went to the spot and could not find the water body! The agitation started in 2008, and in 2011 the supreme court ordered Nirma to stop the work – exposing the state government’s lies to favour Patel.

Between 2008 and 2011, when farmers and civil society leaders took out a march from Mahuva town in Saurashtra to the state capital Gandhinagar, thousands – including nonagenarian Gandhian Chunibhai Vaidya – were detained in Ahmedabad for the whole day. How can a nonagenarian Gandhian be a threat to law and order?

Gujarat’s civil society, whose morale was boosted by the success of Mahuva, is now campaigning against land gifts to industry. The latest episode is from Mandal-Becharaji (MB) belt, in Mehsana district, where Maruti Suzuki’s manufacturing facility is to come up.

The proposed plant could get caught in a crossfire between farmers and the state government, as 36 of the 44 gram sabhas in the region on Thursday passed a resolution to oppose the status of special investment region (SIR) being given to the MB belt, reports the Business Standard.

Like their counterparts in Mahuva, farmers from this region are not opposed to the plant, but to diverting their fertile land for industry. The leader of the Mahuva movement, a then BJP MLA named Kanubhai Kalsariya, is now active in Mehsana. The Business Standard quoted him as saying that "Farmers of these villages waited endlessly for the Narmada water to flow. Even as their wait was about to end, the government came out with the notification of acquiring the land.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, farmers from Vadodara district finally succeeded in getting the supreme court to stop Gujarat Energy Transmission Corporation (GETCO) from acquiring parts of the grazing land. When the Vadodara district collector decided last year to acquire about 5,000 sq m land from the grazing patch, the Luna gram panchayat filed a PIL in the high court. When the high court rejected the petition, they went to the apex court.

Then, of course, farmers in Bhavnagar district have been protesting against taking their land away from them for the proposed nuclear power plant at Mithi Virdi. Then, there is a proposal to acquire land near the Sardar Sarovar dam to develop tourism (never a part of the original Narmada project, which itself is going nowhere, and yet plans are afoot to render some more people homeless). Then, there is the redoubtable Adani’s Mundra port and SEZ project which has got 6,000 acres of land, putting environmental norms aside (it got a show-cause notice). Chunibhai Vaidya has been leading an agitation of local people against this land grab too.