It depends on how one looks at it: Rahul Gandhi's day-long dharna under the May sun on the outskirts of Delhi in Uttar Pradesh, in support of the farmers' agitation against land acquisition by the Mayawati government for the Gautam Budh Expressway, can be seen as a wicked irony or short-sighted opportunism by the Congress.

A nation, increasingly cynical of the gap between intentions and practice would perhaps believe it is a bit of both. As for the irony, the young Prince, who seems destined to play the angel of hope for a ruling party sinking fast into sleaze and confusion, could hardly have failed to realise what the farmers of Greater Noida villages were really protesting against.

UPA POLICIES TO BLAME

Beneath the authoritarian ‘law and order' tactics of the Mayawati regime to break the farmers' resistance stretches one of the biggest failures of the party he may one day lead — a collapse of its industrialisation policy that has been evident for more than five years.

Yet, if the White Knight of the Congress chose to support farmers protesting a policy his own government had pioneered with such blinding ignorance, surely his willingness to bake under a North Indian summer sun must be counted as pure opportunism.

When Mayawati taunted Rahul Gandhi to get his own government to pass farmer-friendly land acquisition legislation, she did more than engage in that joust so common in parliamentary democracy.

For the first time in his career as the vibrant face of an exhausted Congress, Rahul Gandhi had the carpet pulled from under his feet, even if he did not realise it.

NATIONWIDE DISCONTENT

Unless he has lived all this while under a rock he would know that the farmers of villages affected by the proposed expressway are only the latest entrants into the growing club of farmers resisting the acquisition of land across the country.

In West Bengal, the violence attending the protests against the lands being acquired for Tata's Nano car plant and other industrial projects provided the Centre (and the Congress General Secretary) an opportunity to reflect, not on the CPM's wickedness, but on the yawning hole at the centre of its plan for industrial expansion.

Not even when protests against Posco and Vedanta Resources in Orissa and against SEZs in Goa and western Maharashtra set farmers on a collision course did policymakers open their eyes to the rage fanning across rural India.

For five years, the Centre has had ample evidence thrown its way of the need to reinvent administration of lands for the next phase of industrial growth. At the very least an urgent and publicly debated refurbishing of the antiquated Land Acquisition Act should have been on the top of UPA-I's agenda.

RURAL GOVERNANCE

More than fixing the actual compensation, the process of land transfers requires governance to correct the inherent “asymmetry of information” between the buyer and seller to ensure farmers get a fair deal in any bargain.

To assume that impecunious landowners would readily acquiesce to a new deal from industrial parks, Special Economic Zones or as labourers on an expressway was monumental folly; the prolonged agitation against the Sardar Sarovar and other public utilities should have warned policymakers in UPA-1 that it needed to provide a more amicable environment for land transfers, and the sooner the better.

For UPA-II, Ms Mamata Banerjee's objections to the draft legislation provided the excuse for decisive inaction. Now with the lady packing her bags for Writers' Building, UPA officials figure they can act but it's not going to be easy; in rural India, governance hardly exists and peaceful and amicable land transfers require dollops of just that.

Mr Gandhi might do his party lasting service if he carried back to Dr Singh's Cabinet wisdom gleaned from a night in a Noida village agitated over the loss of land and an uncertain future. And the next time he returns he should spend the night explaining to those farmers how New Delhi hopes to get them and the rest of rural India a better deal.

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