A Gram Baithak in Shantipara, Late November 2007

Some 45 villagers, mostly men, have gathered around 10 p.m. on the porch of Asutosh Manna's house. Nearly a year has passed since the land in Singur was acquired, and construction work has been making rapid progress ever since. It is a cold night, and everybody is wrapped in blankets as they sit or squat on the cool concrete floor. As SKJRC president Rabindranath Bhattacharya raises his voice, the gossip soon subsides. Bhattacharya welcomes the villagers and thanks them for attending at this late hour:

Bhattacharya then immediately proceeds to inform them about a verdict delivered by the Calcutta High Court only days earlier in a case concerning the violence that occurred over the proposed land acquisition in Nandigram (see the introduction). The High Court had ruled that the police shooting that had injured and killed several villagers had been ‘unconstitutional and avoidable’. And it had ordered the government to pay a significant compensation to the next of kin of those killed. In addition, the bench had ordered that compensation be paid to those who had been raped and molested. Bhattacharya explains that this verdict is good news for the unwilling farmers because Singur and Nandigram are comparable cases since both concern instances of forced land acquisition. And so, if the High Court has ruled in favour of Nandigram's farmers, it should naturally do the same for Singur's farmers, whose petitions challenging the legal standing of the land acquisition in Singur have been heard by the High Court over the past several months. Moreover, the lawyer Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, who had represented the victims from Nandigram in the High Court, has also represented the unwilling farmers of Singur in their case – and one would expect Bandyopadhyay's success in the Nandigram case to rub off on his performance in the Singur case as well.