The Nano didn’t roll out of Singur. But the controversy over the stillborn project seems to be rolling far and wide. Just last month, Mulligan used the same model in another workshop for journalists he conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria. The contrasts between the responses of his students in Beijing and Sofia could surprise both Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Mamata Banerjee.
In communist Beijing, the journalist-students had more sympathy for Mamata. The consensus in Mulligan’s class was that higher compensation to landlosers in Singur at an earlier stage could have saved the project. In other words, the communist scribes didn’t think the Marxist government in Bengal had done enough to carry the farmers on its side.
In Sofia, the response was “more sophisticated”, Mulligan tells me over cups of green tea at the lounge of a Beijing hotel. The Bulgarians were more sympathetic to the Bengal chief minister and blamed Mamata’s “cynical politics” to exploit Singur in order to regain lost political ground.
But why did he choose the Nano story for his workshops? Mulligan says he had two broad reasons. One: the international focus on Nano, slated to be history’s cheapest car. “Here is a car that’s on offer for just the price of the stereo system of a Mercedes. That’s simply fantastic.”
The other reason is the widely varying kinds of reporting of the story in the international media. In his class in Beijing — he’s at Xinhua on a Thomson Foundation assignment — Mulligan gave the examples of three British papers — The Guardian (“sympathetic” to Singur farmers), Evening Standard (“absolutely Right-wing, pro-business”) andFinancial Times (“more balanced”). more
