The legal battle between the Tatas and the state government dragged on at the Calcutta High Court for the second day on Thursday with no interim order and the focus shifting to the “loot at the Singur factory site” cited by the Tata counsel, Samaraditya Pal.
Pal began the day by arguing that the government’s arbitrary Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act of 2011 led to looting of valuable inventories at the plant site.
The district police confirmed that villagers looted costly machinery, iron rods and other material from the abandoned factory premises of Tata Motors at Singur and that security had been beefed up. News agencies quoted Hooghly SP Tanmoy Roychowdhury as saying that a person was caught stealing bricks in the early hours after sneaking through the dilapidated boundary walls.
In the court, at the end of the hearing, Justice Soumitra Pal directed the Hooghly district magistrate to file a report on Friday on security arrangements and the situation prevailing there, but refrained from handing out an interim order.
?Assuming that the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Act of 2011 is valid, the district magistrate of Hooghly is directed to file a report on deployment of police force and the situation prevailing there. The report has to be filed by 11 am through an affidavit on the grounds of alleged looting,? Justice Pal ordered. However, justice Pal’s pronouncement doesn’t come as an interim order but as a direction to the district magistrate with whom the entire 997.17 acre in Singur is vested. Pal argued that even if it was assumed that the Singur Act was valid, the way it was enforced was not reasonable and led to looting of valuable inventories.
He reiterated that the Singur Act was arbitrary, discretionary and unreasonable and that it offended Article 14 of the Constitution.
However, state counsel Kalyan Bandopadhyay said the state was only exercising its constitutional powers of making an Act. But Pal argued that the state could not exercise its power unreasonably. He contended that the Tatas were not given enough time to take away their inventories before the district magistrate took possession of the land.
However, Bengal advocate general Anindya Mitra charged Pal with coming up with a false case, pointing out that the petition it had filed was contrary to the submissionhe made in the court. Mitra said in the petition, the Tatas filed they were unlawfully restrained from getting inside the plant premise but in their submission they argued that they were unlawfully dis-possessed of the land.