As protesters marched towards Nabanna, they faced police barricades. Clashes broke out in Howrah on Friday between the police and the activists, who were met with teargas, lathi-charges and water canons. Several protesters suffered injuries and some were rushed to the hospital.

 

 

DYFI state secretary Sayandeep Mitra said, “We were to submit thousands of applications seeking jobs and answers on various other issues from Banerjee, as part of the TMC government’s “Didi ke Bolo (Ask Didi)” public outreach initiative,but as soon as our peaceful rally reached Mullick Ghat (in Howrah), police resorted to unprovoked lathi charge and tear gas shell firing.”

The protesters were also demanding ‘unemployment allowance schemes’ and reduction of cost of Education in Bengal.

“She has failed to bring about economic development in West Bengal. Several business summits were organised over the past few years but not investment has been made. Lakhs of youths are unemployed,” the DYFI state secretary added.

 

Watch videos of clashes here and here.

 

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When Muslim groups stated the obvious, there were claims that it was an attempt at ‘communalising’, the disappearance, Najeeb was just a ‘student’ of JNU! I didn’t feel it was right, but I didn’t know enough then to articulate why using ‘communal’ in such a reckless manner was wrong. Is it ‘communal’ to identify religion as a sociological category of existence that intensifies discrimination? In that sense, is SIO or any ‘Muslim’ organisation in India, ‘communal’ if it understands this ‘social category’, and organises Muslims based on this identity to speak for justice? ‘Up, Up Secularism; Down, Down Communalism!’ is a slogan many of us use to start any protest in JNU, often having no idea of its history and the insidious manner this binary is being used to shut minority voices of dissent rather than question power. I think it’s time we stop using this term ‘communalism’, as every time we do that it results in blowbacks, and recognise that to be a Muslim is to have your very citizenship questioned by your mere existence like Najeeb, and to organise based on this identity then isn’t ‘communal’, as even leftists misunderstand.

Ideally, in a Communist Utopia, people would have risen above their immediate, ‘community’ identities to embrace merely the materiality of a fragile existence, where identities wouldn’t crystallise into anything ‘essential’. However, liberal democracies are far from Communist Utopias, and the state, or rather those in power, use identities to profile and define as a threat, often the most marginalised groups of people and call them ‘communal’. Liberal Democracies survive on the constant creation of an enemy, appropriate pain from collective mainstream consciousness- market it, create the dangerous, irrational ‘other’ and survive through the sustained ‘othering’, to the point of dehumanisation. ‘Communal’, ‘terrorist’, ‘fanatic’ is dog whistles that hit a deep paranoiac space in  the Malayali- dominantly liberal left psyche, that once labelled, it becomes impossible to talk to the person on the opposite side as language has enabled a dehumanisation which makes it ‘okay’, to inflict pain and  violence on this perceived enemy. Now, why is that? I think it’s because we are deeply afraid of ‘Human Aggression’; it’s a fear possibly deeper than the fear of death itself. We’d rather die than be betrayed, humiliated or let anyone we love to be attacked. Now, this has a problem when there is an attempt to create a collective psyche because it always needs the fear of the enemy to survive.

Liberal politics, even if its left lenient, is very good at tapping into this deceptive phobia and a lot of insanity can be covered up under the constant rhetoric of potential attack and intermittent shocks created through media spectacle and state rhetoric. Narratives can now easily be made, random statistical facts connected and ‘exceptional’ situations created to profile and survey these ‘communal’, ‘fanatic’ and ‘terrorist’ forces when real issues like political representation and voice remain. So now the possibility of ‘Muslim Aggression’, in its perceived ‘communalism’ is used against a minority to silence it’s very material and psychosocial qualms.

The American Empire was the first to master this in recent history, through the whole discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Radical Islam’- which was started for an imperial mission outside, but  however has ended up as blowback with  increasing surveillance and profiling of its own citizens, mostly its racialised black and brown minorities. White nationalists talk about the end of a glorious white race(as if there is anything essentially white!) that is threatened by the ‘Radical Islamists’, ‘Black Gangsters’ and ‘Mexican Rapists’. Even if many regular Americans think of white nationalism as ridiculous, constant exposure to this rhetoric creates a real fear which enables ‘exceptional’ use of power, through ‘war on terror’, ‘war on drugs’ and most recently a ‘war on immigrants’ and over a period of time even allows for a ‘scientific’, ‘statistical’ and  ‘academic’ study of these ‘threats’.

The Indian state had benefitted much from the paranoia that burst out post 9/11 in America, thanks to a burgeoning global industry of academic-military and media complex that attempted to understand these “threats” through incessant debates which have only legitimised the phobia rather than question its irrationality. It shouldn’t have been a surprise for us when a course on ‘Islamic Terrorism’ was introduced on campus. The stupidity of it was funny but sadly, stupidity can be toxic. Terrorism and Islam have been used so often together that it has caused a cognitive fusion in many minds. Articles had to talk about why talking about ‘Islamic Terrorism’ was just as absurd as to talk about ‘Jewish Terrorism’, ‘Christian Terrorism’ or ‘Hindu Terrorism’.

Much like White nationalists, Hindu nationalists have benefitted the most from the corporate media that uses Islam and Terrorism alternatively, as it’s becoming quite an accepted idea in many parts of the country, the potential threat- aggression of Muslims, and it is conveniently pitted against ‘National Security’. Of course, this isn’t to place the fear of the other, within the short span of merely two decades. We have always been afraid of ‘difference’, in the case of mainstream Kerala, it was always the ‘Muslims’ not the Christians and Communists as much. However, the logic of Hindutva that operates now in its micro fascistic ways even through those it oppresses the most has exploded beyond control, that words like ‘fascists’, ‘fanatic’  ‘communal’  ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘terrorist’ are used carelessly against any political force that has considerable Muslim presence, even if not an  ‘exclusive’ Muslim presence, rather than critique the actual source of power.

The murder of a student SFI leader Abhimanyu on Maharajas Campus in Kerala was a traumatising eye opener to this reality for me. Endless scholarly articles, news debates and social media discussions associated the horrific activities of a few members of PFI, a party with considerable Muslim presence, but not exclusively, to philosophical and political trends in WANA and other Muslim majority nations of South Asia. Accusations of Salafi Jihadism, Maududism, Qutubism and Wahhabism to be the cause of the violence was put forth along with theories of Saudi Funding, SIMI terrorism and in the worst cases, even funnily ISIS. It’s difficult to think beyond all this scholarly jargon, which ultimately was often just lazy journalism, which confirmed existing stereotypes, in a dangerous sensational way, without looking at the peculiarities of Kerala politics and the precariousness of Muslims in politics. Why do genuine domestic qualms about material and political existence by Muslims in the Indian state always get treated as a global conspiracy?

To be a Muslim in itself is a politically charged precarious situation to be in, in an ever-growing Hindu Nationalist country and to assert political visibility is almost suicidal. The Muslim in Kerala always needs to prove his /her (especially ‘his’) Nationalism, Secularism and hatred for Terrorism, in whatever way the state defines all of these. The so-called ‘Muslim Organisations’ which, I repeat aren’t exclusively ‘Muslim’ organisations are vulnerable unlike how media reports make them out to be. It’s this very vulnerability, the trauma of always being dismissed, erased and invisibilised that informs their political practice. It’s hilarious when organisations like CPI (M) patronisingly calls for ‘class’ politics rather than caste or community without examining its own community base; or when Congress calls forth Nationalism, in a state that has, again and again, failed its Muslim and Dalit citizens and has often opportunistically used ‘Secularism’ for electoral gains. What ‘Secularism’ as a binary of ‘Communalism’ in the current Indian state implies is the extermination of Muslim presence in liberal democracy by hypocritically saying it is communal, without any self-reflexivity. In a ‘Hindu State’, it has meant arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial or encounter killings, incarceration and in some cases even death sentence without a fair trial for its Muslim and Dalit citizens.

If Kerala wants to fancy itself as some kind of liberal utopia that is now being destroyed by ‘communal’ forces or increasing ‘religious fundamentalism’ which strangely is disproportionately Muslim, well then we need to rethink how our textbooks killed, all those who talked about justice by either calling them ‘fanatic’ or invisibility the voices of dissent.

Let’s talk about the ‘real’ history of exclusion, which hasn’t been written, where Marx says the conflict of contradictory forces happens for transformation. I doubt if he would have agreed with the expulsion of a minority, (whose citizenship itself is always under scrutiny) from the political presence in a liberal democracy to be definitional of class politics. Of course, he wouldn’t have agreed with the theory or current practice of many of these dominant ‘‘Muslim’’ parties, but he would have placed it in the specificities of a political understanding that is attempting to merely survive, to exist. Maybe he would have expanded his theory to include the psycho-social in his Political Economy. And who cares about Marx anyway today, we Malayalis have become sick of his language and Socialism, or the critique of Capital (which no doubt is brilliant) isn’t exclusive to Marx.
 

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The sense of triumph that many CPM cyber warriors displayed vulgarly was such that they even claimed to have been right about the Hadiya case too: that the CPM’s planned indifference to the plight of Hadiya detained forcefully by her father who cited the High Court’s order was morally defensible because it was the PFI which supported her; and therefore that the CPM’s implicit support for Hindutva positions on ‘love jihad’ in the Hadiya case are justified. Those of us who took her side and defended her right to choice of faith and partner were pilloried as irresponsible intellectuals who feed extremists in the name of fighting Islamophobia. Some leftist cyberwarriors even said that we were probably paid to do so, a claim that the Sangh has never stopped making.

I refrained from responding immediately to these. First, I no longer consider these elements to be leftist for the most. There are still individuals in the CPM who try to forge alliances against crony capital at the national level, but sadly enough, the larger share of the regional leadership does not display such commitment. Their commitment to democracy was never strong and now it has weakened even more. Indeed, in Kerala, the war is between Sanghis and Pracchanna Sanghis, and the latter is the smarter and the more powerful. I find it pointless to respond to either, since they share the common end, ultimately, of pleasing the majority and disciplining minorities. The CPM now fights on the cultural terrain laid out by the Sangh — and so now organizes Ramayana seminars during the month of Karkatakam, when high- and many middle-caste Hindus used to read the Ramayana. Secularizing the Ramayana can hardly address the range of critiques of it raised by non-Brahmin, Dalit, and women’s perspectives, and the CPM will inevitably be caught in the contradictions of celebrating the Ramayana month with critical discussions on the Ramayana. Besides, the cultural poverty of the CPM which cannot produce an alternate discourse of family, community, love, and loyalty that could challenge the exclusions and silences of the Ramayana is too apparent. And it appears that the CPM has no discourse at all to address the educated upper caste Hindu middle-class except a B-team version of Hindutva and Moditva’s cultivation of infinite growth-anticipation.

But watching the discussion on issues raised by this truly shocking murder from a distance, there are questions that I believe no one is asking — or no one wants to ask.  The shrieking tone of the CPM participants probably disorients others or worse, creates some sort of psychological urgency to join the shrieking chorus, blend in, so to say. That is another reason why one may want to keep a distance, of course.  I was watching a very specific conversation, between some of Kerala’s most prominent public intellectuals and activists, about the editorial of the journal Patabhedam, This is a group least likely to bow to the pressure to blend in and stop thinking, but what I saw, especially in the responses of CPM- supporters in it, looks especially worrying to me.

First, I am forced to raise a question I have been raising since the Hadiya Case overtook us in 2017: it may be true that the PFI is religiously and socially conservative — but where is the concrete evidence for all the claims that are being brandished in its face? Of association with the ISIS, of planning terrorist attacks and violently disrupting Hindu-Muslim marriages? I cannot see how many of the intellectuals in the aforementioned groups who normally call for  evidence-based policy formulation, do not demand solid evidence for this? I am yet to read theological justifications of violent dissociation with others in the PFI’s writing and public statements. During the Hadiya Case when Brinda Karat, a person I deeply respect, made the allegation that the PFI was disrupting Hindu-Muslim unions in Malabar, I publicly demanded information on such cases — say, police complaints, at least the name of the police station, details of people who have been harassed thus etc.  In these times in which the demonisation of young Muslim men has reached its crescendo, it is surely easy to file a complaint. Brinda Karat’s office apparently responded to the PFI’s own request that they were collecting information and that she would be writing about it soon. Till date, I have seen no such article. If we are all for rational thinking, surely we ought to condemn or condone organizations based on evidence? It galls me why the concern about the ISIS links of the PFI have not been thoroughly investigated by now by responsible authorities or the all-powerful CPM itself? Discussions published in their newspaper merely repeats a series of allegations and provides no proof that will stand in a court of law. And even more importantly, why does the CPM pause this hunt periodically and wait till the next round of CPM-SDPI conflict? If the latter is the greatest threat to Kerala, should it not be exposed thoroughly and pursued consistently?

Secondly, why do so many of us who otherwise are firmly on the side of rigorous scientific methodology in coming to conclusions about most matters of vital significance to society, ditch that attitude when it comes to dealing with so-called ‘ Islamic extremists’? If you take the data of violent conflicts between student organizations on college and university campuses (such conflict may be relatively rare on campuses where one organization dominates, and such domination is usually held through brutal means — that indicates not ‘peace’ as some claim, but a permanent, normalized, state of conflict), it is quite likely that the fights are much more over bids to control space and influence on campus, and less over theological and religious  differences. There is further evidence for this if one considers the fact that the SFI and Campus Front have entered into opportunistic alliances during elections in colleges and it is common for students to move between the SFI and the Campus Front and ABVP as well. In the Abhimanyu murder case, the conflict was sparked by a dispute about mounting posters on the college walls. The high frequency of violent incidents between student organizations over space and resources on campuses should lead us to think that the incident at Maharaja’s was also most probably one such — and not about theological differences. In that case, it would fall into the history of the irresponsible and shoddy conduct of democracy on our campuses, and not be singled out as the eruption of religious fanaticism on a college campus.  Yet many CPM commentators, themselves intellectuals with social science credentials do not place this incident within the data on student conflicts but connect it with the infamous hand-chopping case, in which religious fanatics attacked a professor in a Kerala college for blasphemy. I am sure that we do not connect the violence that the SFI inflicts on its political rivals in college campuses, however chilling it may be, with. say, the truly gruesome Jayakrishnan Master murder case in which a BJP leader was hacked to death mercilessly by CPM supporters in front of a class full of sixth standard students. Also, however similar the CPM’s violence may be, we rarely connect it to, say, the terrible forms of torture practiced under the Soviet regime or in China. Nor do we connect the moral policing that many SFI units routinely practice on their campuses (especially on women, their clothes) with control exercised by the Stalinist regime over women’s bodies in the Soviet Union.

Thirdly, I cannot fathom why so many of us who swear by class analysis as the ultimate tool for making sense of social change and political possibility, refuse to deploy it when it comes to the Muslims and the PFI.  Secular Muslim intellectuals on the left, particularly, are often blind to their own histories and more commonly, to their middle and upper-class status. They seem to imagine the Muslim community as untouched by class differentiation, not to mention social hierarchies. Surely, one of the most apparent social processes in Kerala during the past three decades has been the intense social differentiation within the Muslim community which has left a large number of people outside the gains garnered through the Gulf migration.  The young male activists of the PFI and Campus Front, like Abhimanyu himself, mostly hail from the disadvantaged social and economic circumstances. It is these young people who do not see any future for themselves in Hindutva India who are most likely to turn to desperate measures. Projecting them as merely lumpen is a way of rendering invisible their working-class status.  To say that secular Muslims are in danger because of the so-called radicalized Muslims, then, in class terms, means the educated Muslim middle class is endangered because the working-class, socially disempowered Muslim poor are trying to obtain a voice in whichever way they can. Why is it that the CPM is unable to gain the trust of the Muslim poor? And instead of acknowledging this failure and acting on it, why are CPM intellectuals pushing them further towards the brink where they may actually get radicalized?

Fifthly, why are we not asking the question why the Campus Front is acting the way it should? If radicalization and the spread of conservative social ideologies are all that the PFI and Campus Front aim at, all they need to do is lie totally low, stay away from campus politics, aim for small prayer groups, and so on. Right now, if this is indeed their goal, they are playing the wrong strategy. There are many other religious student organizations on campus that actually choose to lie really low because their goals are truly long-term, since what they aim for is conservative social transformation outside the sphere of public politics.  If radicalization of Muslim students is indeed the aim of the Campus Front, why are they exposing themselves to the public and the arms of the state so frequently?

Finally — and for me, this is the most troubling question of all — how is it that we, as a society, have become incapable of recognizing the insights that can emerge only from tragedy and mourning? Death — irrespective of whether it is physical death (in Abhimanyu’s case) or social death (in Hadiya’s case) — and mourning are occasions in which we turn back into our own selves, reflect on our lives, with a certain distance, detachment, and we see the ugliness we have allowed to grow till then. In the distance that allows us to set aside our vested interests, we are often able to discern what the world and life are truly all about. That did not happen  in the Hadiya case, nor is it happening in the present tragedy. In each, the effort rather has been to project the CPM-SDPI difference as the core of the conflict with the CPM’s position upheld as the right, moral, secular response. In the Hadiya case, some of us did not let that succeed. Despite heavy attacks on our characters, professional competences, commitment to democracy, integrity, and threats of many sorts, we insisted that the core issue was not this but that of the destruction of a young woman’s citizenship, her social death.  And despite the best combined efforts of the CPM’s cyber warriors, official CPM feminists, and the CPM-‘manned’  State Women’s Commission, as well as the Hindutva chorus, we prevailed when the Supreme Court agreed with us. Indeed, the Hadiya case has continued to reverberate, contributing to the progressive expansion of social democracy in the daunting darkness of our present: since then, several cases to do with young people’s rights to live with chosen partners, and the present hearing on Section 377 have cited it. The credit for that does not go to the CPM’s cyber brigade which claims the monopoly of progressive thinking in Kerala but to those who insisted that the core issue is not what the CPM made it out to be.

In the present incident too, if we were truly capable of mourning and perceiving loss, we would have seen that the core issue is not the CPM-SDPI conflict and the CPM’s moral superiority; rather it is about the ways in which young men are being used by various political and social organizations in Kerala at present.  A participant in this debate reminded me that Abhimanyu was a very progressive young tribal man with an interest in protecting the environment and committed to the inclusion of the transgender community. Yes, I agree, but cannot help noticing that while such young men build ground support for the CPM on campuses, the senior leaders in power systematically break down environmental safeguards, disempower local governments, and continue to hang on to gender and sexual conservatisms of the worst sort – in other words, they use these young men while keeping them largely powerless. As for the PFI, it is clear that giving back to the SFI in the same coin is actually intensifying their younger activists’ experience of adversity, something that may well be expected in a situation in which both Hindutva and non-Hindutva political forces are essentially committed to the religious majority and the middle classes. That the leadership seems unable to  plan a strategy that would empower this youth without exposing them to terrible risks even as more and more young activists pay a terrible price (and data on past conflicts confirms this), seems unforgivable to me.  If what happened at Maharaja’s was an accident or self-defense,  then those who were involved should have come out, whatever the consequences, and admitted guilt. Only that way would they have affirmed their moral superiority. By playing the dominant game of violent student politics on the terms of the dominant, these young people only stand to lose and it is unconscionable that the leadership should assert the difference between cadre and supporter and claim that the Campus Front was not under the SDPI, and so on. If we are to address the core issue that surfaces in this murder, then we must refuse to treat it as mainly a CPM-SDPI confrontation and insist on ending the unpardonable instrumentalization of young men by these forces in student politics.

But I am no longer sure that I am addressing even the Malayali public anymore.  Since morning I have been sitting at my desk petrified by a piece of information given to me by an honest and concerned education activist: in the past one year, sixty teenagers, students of Classes Eleven and Twelve in Kerala’s schools, have committed suicide  mostly unable to suffer the moral policing and torture by teachers at school. Even more devastating was the fact that not a single case was registered in any of these deaths. I cannot see these deaths as suicides, they are murders, and that too, prompted by teachers and other authorities, even parents in some cases, who should have been their protectors and refuge,. They are every bit as searing as that of the murder of Abhimanyu. In a society in which young people are pushed over the brink by fanatic adherents of Victorian prudery and these murders are considered normal and swept under the carpet, the murder of a youngster by other youngsters alone evokes horror and shrill screaming. especially when it looks like a great chance to entrench the vested interests of the dominant left!! I do not know whether to cry or laugh.

Courtesy: kafila.online
 

The post Who feeds who? Reflections on the Left responses to the Abhimanyu murder case appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Interview with Hannan Mollah
Interviewed by Pranjal Produced by Newsclick Production,

The farmers’ agitation has been intensified all across the country. The Maharashtra Kisan Long March has emerged victorious. The organisers of the march plan to wage similar struggle all across the country

The post We will take the Kisan Struggle to Every Part of the Country: Hannan Mollah appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The recent incidents of vandalism targeting the statues of Vladimir Lenin – a towering communist leader of the Bolshevik revolution in India by the supporters of the ruling Hindu right wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have outraged Indian Marxists who took the streets.

This followed the defeat of the Marxists in the recently held Assembly elections of Tripura state – where the communists were in power for the past 25 years. Though the outgoing chief minister Manik Sarkar was known for his integrity and secularism, he was unseated in the election that resulted in the victory of the BJP- led coalition which won 43 out 59 seats in the Legislature ending the communist rule.

Not only did mobs of BJP supporters pull down two statues of Lenin in the state, some BJP leaders took to social media to applaud these acts of vandalism.

In Belonia town, one of the two statues was brought down with the help of an excavator. While this was being done, the miscreants chanted patriotic slogan, “Long Live Mother India.” As the statue fell, its head was dismembered from the body. A Marxist activist alleged that the BJP supporters were seen playing football with it.

One of the local BJP leaders claimed that this was the result of an anger of the people with the left government. Describing Lenin as a “foreigner”, who according to him, had nothing to do with the native population; he questioned why the statue was built with taxpayers’ money?

So much so, some senior BJP leaders went to the extent of welcoming these incidents unashamedly. Not to be left behind, the Tripura governor Tathagata Roy tweeted: “What one democratically elected government can do, another democratically elected government can undo. And vice versa.” This is despite the fact that he holds a constitutional post. Yet, he is known for his political affiliations with the BJP.

Another BJP leader H Raja posted on Facebook: “Who is Lenin and what is the connection between Lenin and India? What connection India has with communists?”

The entire episode obviously reflects very badly on the BJP which has shown its true colours of being intolerant. This also shows the hollowness of its so-called nationalism and disconnect with the freedom movement.

India that remained under British occupation for almost two hundred years was liberated by the efforts of both pacifist and revolutionary freedom fighters. The founding fathers of the ideology of Hindu India which is greatly cherished by the BJP remained away from both camps. With an aim to establish Hindu theocracy, they either openly or discreetly served the interests of the British rulers.

Rather, the Hindu extremists who are often glorified by many BJP leaders were involved in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi – the world renowned leader of the passive resistance movement. He was murdered for standing up against Hindu zealots who terrorised Muslims and treated “low caste” people as untouchables.

Contrary to these enemies within, Lenin became a guiding light for the Indian revolutionaries who were invited to Bolshevik Russia to learn how to liberate their motherland by organizing mass movement. He stood for the Indians who were fighting for the right to self-determination.

The BJP that is trying to impose its own brand of patriotism is doing nothing but scape-goating minorities, both cultural (read Muslims, Christians and other minority communities) and ideological (read left and secular parties) to polarize Hindu majority for political survival. Lenin is just one soft target they have picked to create divisions and re-frame the narrative of domestic nationalism. Every Indian should be indebted to Lenin for standing up for those who actually fought for our freedom rather than falling into the trap of the defenders of Hindu India something that was strongly despised by Gandhi and the revolutionaries who fought for a secular republic which had no place for bigotry.

What we need to recognize in these difficult times is the beauty of Lenin’s internationalism which can truly save humanity from falling apart and bringing all of us together while at the same time embracing all nationalities without any malice or discrimination.                  

That said, this whole episode also shows the true colours of Indian Marxists who have turned into idol worshippers. The top leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxists) came out on the streets to protest against the vandalizing of the statues. The protests are not just confined to India. The CPI (M) supporters in Canada have also organized a demonstration in Surrey. The kind of outrage being displayed over the vandalizing of statues has remained missing for all these months while living men and women from minority communities were being lynched by the BJP supporters. The CPI (M) has even failed to acknowledge that these incidents and the defeat of Sarkar are both symptoms of majoritarianism that has become synonymous with democracy in India not just with the emergence of BJP but also because of political opportunism of so called secularist Congress Party that has also been involved in sectarian violence to garner Hindu majority vote in the past.

Unfortunately, the mainstream Indian left has been conveniently aligning itself with the Congress to keep BJP out of power and never dealing with the threat of majoritarianism as the real cause of the problem. If the Marxists really believe in what they preach in terms of scientific analysis of social and political situation then they need to stop whining over the vandalizing of statues and try to regain lost political territory by honestly standing up for religious minorities under attack and denouncing monolithic nationalism that is being imposed on a diverse and pluralist Indian society by the BJP.

The post Are Indian Marxists becoming idol worshippers? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: PTI
 
The RSS-dominated BJP rulers of India have finally woken up against violence! You are grossly mistaken if you believe that they are seeking forgiveness for large scale killing/raping/maiming/robbing people of the minorities specially Muslims and Christians in 1992-3 (nation-wide carnage of Muslims before and after demolition of a mosque at Ayodhya), 1998 (wide-spread violence against Christians in Gujarat), 2002 (carnage of Muslims in Gujarat) and Kandhmal, Orissa violence of 2007-8 (cleansing of Christians in the area). The RSS/BJP rulers have not expressed any intention of discarding or checking the present spate of violence against minorities in the name of cow, love-jihad, ghar wapsi (forcible conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism) and allegiance to Hindutva.
 
There has been no respite in violence against Dalits too. In fact, in last three years incident of violence against Dalits has escalated by around 300%. Casteist, criminal and patriarchal elements are having free run in inflicting violence against women.  The same is the fate of peasantry, working class, students and intellectuals. Never in the history of India’s independence,these classes were subjected to such brutal denigration and repression in the name of Bharat Mata.
 
But it is only Kerala only where violence is running amok perpetrated by the CPM government of the State against RSS/BJP cadres which has been labelled as ‘red terror’.
 
The rulers marching under the banner of Hindutva have declared war against Kerala government by launching a strident Jan Raksha Yatra. It is not that only the left, CPM-run government of the state that is under attack. The whole of the Kerala society, its ethos and culture is under attack. The national leadership of RSS/BJP has descended on Kerala to fight the Left, to be specific, the CPM for ‘perpetrating violence’. The UP chief minister Mahant Yogi Adityanathwho has many criminal cases pending against him in UP courts is at the forefront, the commander of this Hindutva juggernaut. According to Adityanath the Left has turned the state into a factory of “jihadi terrorism” which should be matter of serious concern for India as a whole. To quote him, “In the guise of secularism, CPM has turned Kerala into hub of jihadi terror. It must be rejected for which we have come here to create public consciousness”.
 
No proofs are of course offered in support of these serious allegations against Kerala and its people. Even the home ministry of India which is under the charge of Adityanath’s Hindutva co-traveller, Rajnath Singh and other national intelligence agencies like NIA, CBI and IB under him have not prepared any such dossier. If this was so CPM government would have been dismissed long ago by the Modi government. But this denigration of the state and government of Kerala publicly continues. In any other country the person/s making such wild allegations would have been hauled up by courts and deposited within the safe custody of jails.
 
Despite this smoke-screen created by the rhetoric, the Hindutva leadership has been unable to hide its real design. None less than Adityanath, the newly surcharged Hindutva icon has spilled the beans. He declared that in Kerala “the red will turn saffron soon”. This would be done by converting Kerala into a “Sanatan Hindu Rashtra”. The Left would be cleansed as Adi Shankaracharya did in the 8^th century by cleansing opponents. According to Adityanath “When the country’s religion and culture was threatened by foreign invaders, Shankaracharya launched the movement for the protection of the Hindu religion. Today, time has come to replicate the Shankaracharya movement and Hindu culture must be protected and preserved in Kerala”.
 
By foreign invaders Adityanath must have meant Buddhism and Jainism (as that period there were no Muslim or Christian ‘invader’) and what Shankaracharya army did to these religions has been chronicled by the two prominent saints of Hinduism. 
 
According to Dayanand Sarswati, founder of Arya Samaj “For ten years he (Adi Shankaracharya) toured all over the country, refuted Jainism and advocated the Vedic religion. All the broken images that are now-a- days dug out of the earth were broken in the time of Shankar, whilst those that are found whole here and there under the ground had been buried by the Jainis for fear of their being broken (by those who had renounced Jainism).”[i]
 
Swami Vivekananda while describing cleansing of Buddhism from India wrote: “The temple of Jaganath is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet.”.[ii]

It is surprising that Hindutva bandwagon does not organise anti-beef yatra in Kerala where beef is part and parcel of a secular diet. It does not launch any movement for banning cow-slaughter in the State. It only exposes its own hypocrisy. The issue of Islamic jehad and Left having a foreign ideology are being used as the RSS feels that after Gujarat it is Kerala which could be the laboratory of Hindutva because has substantial presence of minorities.
 
It should not surprise anybody that RSS basically represents hegemonic Brahamanism of  North India that historically looked down upon, if not hated the Keralite Hindu and treated them as if belonging to inferior race.
 
MS Golwalkar, the RSS Supremo was invited to address the students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on December 17, 1960. In this address, while underlying his firm belief in the Race Theory, he touched upon the issue of cross-breeding of human beings in the Indian Hindu society in history. He said:
 
“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientist of today. If some human cross-breeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding the Namboodri Brahamanas of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kashtriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first off-spring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodri Brahman and then she could beget children by her husband. Today this experiment will be called adultery but it was not so, as it was limited to the first child.”[iii]
 
This statement of Golwalkar is worrying at several levels. Firstly, it proves that Golwalkar believed that India had a superior Race or breed and also an inferior Race which needed to be improved through cross-breeding. An equally worrying aspect was his belief that Brahmans of the North (India) and specially Namboodri Brahamans, belonged to a superior Race. Due to this quality, Namboodri Brahamanas were sent from the North to Kerala to improve the breed of inferior Hindus there. Interestingly, this was being argued by a person who claimed to uphold the unity of Hindus world over. Thirdly, Golwalkar as a male chauvinist believed that a Namboodri Brahman male belonging to a superior Race from the North only could improve the inferior human Race from South. For him the wombs of Kerala’s Hindu women enjoyed no sanctity and were simply breeding organs, destined for ‘improving the breed through intercourse with Namboodri Brahamanas who in no way were related to them.’ Golwalkar was thus conferring legitimation on a regressive and medieval practice, prevalent amongst the male dominated high Caste Hindu society in the past, that forced gendered violence on newly-wedded women of other Castes by compelling them to spend the first night of their marriage with ‘superior’ caste males.
 
It is surprising that despite holding and propagating such ideas that denigrate Hindu women of Kerala and hold them in contempt, the RSS has been able to create pockets of influence within Kerala society. And present itself as saviour of the Hindus of Kerala.
 
There is no doubt that some parts of Kerala are in the grip of bitter and condemnable political violence. This is sad for a State which is known for its high literacy, deep sense of culture, finest gender ratio and all-inclusiveness. Hindutva leaders present the violence as one-sided; saying only their cadres are being targeted. This is not true. According to police records accessed by journalist Sneha Mary Koshy of NDTV, “172 political murders have occurred since 2000. Of these, the RSS and the BJP have together lost 65 party workers, while 85 of the CPI (M)’s workers have been killed. 11 activists each of the Congress and the IUML have also been killed in this period.”[iv] The data on killings clearly shows that insince the year 2000 that BJP/RSS sole victimhood is not supported by facts. But one unfortunate aspect of these killings is that almost all victims hailed from poor families.
 
In fact, it was not long ago that Golwalkar, the most prominent ideologue of the RSS who has been described as ‘guru of hate’ in an essay titled ‘Internal Threats’ identified three sections of the Indians as ‘Internal Threats’ who needed to be neutralized. Muslims, Christians and Communists were declared to be ‘Internal Threats’ number one, two and three respectively.[v] Muslims and Christians have been perennial targets of Hindutva storm troopers for being ‘outsiders’ and it is the turn of the Communists now. This guru wrote: “Socialism is not a product of this soil. It is not in our blood and tradition. It has absolutely nothing to do with the traditions and ideal of thousands of years of our national life.”[vi]
 
This semi-literate (a status worst then being illiterate) guru thus denigrated hundreds of great martyrs of India namely Bhagat Singh, Chandershekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who sacrificed their lives raising the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and dream of building a Socialist India. Golwalkar while describing Socialism as alien ideology insults even swami Vivekananda who declared “I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread” and described Socialism “as the vanguard of the social revolution that is to follow”.’
 
The political violence in parts of Kerala is not an aberration but part of Hindutva strategy of hegemony over those parts of India where the ‘other’ kind of Hindu resides. The Left, instead of falling into the Hindutva game-plan of tit for tat must concentrate on organising all sections of Kerala population against the anti-national plan of the “Sanatan Hindu rashtra” where Casteism, racism, inequality and Manu Code will thrive.

The post What is Actually Behind the BJP-RSS Combine’s Holy War Declared on Kerala appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Fidel, Fidel, the people are grateful
for words in action and deeds that sing,
that is why I bring from far
a cup of my country’s wine:
it is the blood of a subterranean people
that from the shadows reaches your throat,
they are miners who have lived for centuries
extracting fire from the frozen land.
They go beneath the sea for coal
but on returning they are like ghosts:
they grew accustomed to eternal night,
the working-day light was robbed from them,
nevertheless here is the cup
of so much suffering and distances:
the happiness of imprisoned men
possessed by darkness and illusions
who from the inside of mines perceive
the arrival of spring and its fragrances
because they know that Man is struggling
to reach the amplest clarity.
And Cuba is seen by the Southern miners,
the lonely sons of la pampa,
the shepherds of cold in Patagonia,
the fathers of tin and silver,
the ones who marry cordilleras
extract the copper from Chuquicamata,
men hidden in buses
in populations of pure nostalgia,
women of the fields and workshops,
children who cried away their childhoods:
this is the cup, take it, Fidel.
It is full of so much hope
that upon drinking you will know your victory
is like the aged wine of my country
made not by one man but by many men
and not by one grape but by many plants:
it is not one drop but many rivers:
not one captain but many battles.
And they support you because you represent
the collective honor of our long struggle,
and if Cuba were to fall we would all fall,
and we would come to lift her,
and if she blooms with flowers
she will flourish with our won nectar.
And if they dare touch Cuba’s
forehead, by your hands liberated,
they will find people’s fists,
we will take out our buried weapons:
blood and pride will come to rescue,
to defend our beloved Cuba.

The post Viva Cuba! Viva Comrade Castro!! appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In The Indian Express (September 6, 2016) Prakash Karat, former general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has an opinion piece defending the BJP against its characterisation by sections of the Left in India as the external face of a fascist movement driven by the RSS and its vision of a non-secular, Hindu state. The threat that is sweeping through India today is one of authoritarianism, not fascism, he argues. Nor are the conditions present for a fascist regime to be established, even though a ‘determined effort is being made to reorder society and polity on Hindutva lines’. The crux of Karat’s argument is a conception of fascism lifted straight from the famous formula adopted by the Comintern’s executive committee in December 1933. “Fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.
 
Why is it that every time mention is made of Prakash Karat powerful images of rigor mortis rush through my brain? Is it because the young student leader from JNU days always impressed me as the pure type of the apparatchik, the social type that flooded the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, swamped it as the emerging base of Stalin’s rapid consolidation of power within the party and then in the country as a whole?

The apparatchik destroyed Lenin’s party but he couldn’t discard Marxism completely. He adapted to Marxism by converting it into a draw full of rubber stamps. Incapable of thought, much less of any more creative process like actual intellectual engagement, the building of theory, unfettered debate, etc., he (for we are dealing overwhelmingly with males) opened the draw to look for the right stamp every time some phrase or expression triggered a signal.

Stalin with Dimitrov

‘Fascism’, ah yes, what does the stamp say? It had Georgi Dimitrov’s name on it.  A definition of fascism first adopted by the executive committee of the Communist International at the end of 1933 became famously associated with Stalin’s favourite Dimitrov when it was taken over and circulated more widely in his report to the Seventh World Congress in 1935. This is the one I’ve cited in the preamble above, ‘Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship (etc.)’. It rapidly became orthodoxy on the Stalinist Left, the ‘official’ line on fascism.  

Karat reiterates it with a profound sense of loyalty and timelessness, citing it in the Indian Express piece. The implication here, of course, is that nothing that has been said or written about fascism since 1933–1935 has any relevance for him. We have gained not a whit (in understanding, knowledge, analysis and so on) since those (pre-Holocaust!) years. Do we have a better understanding of fascism today? Obviously not as far as Karat is concerned. That definition is ‘classic’, as he says. ‘Classic’ here means cut in stone, impermeable to argument, eternally true like some truth of logic. As Karat says, there is ‘no room for ambiguity’ here.

The Comintern had deliberately narrowed the definition to ‘finance capital’ to allow other sections of the capitalist class to join the fight against fascism once Stalin decided he desperately needed alliances (‘Popular Fronts’) with all manner of parties regardless of who they represented. For Karat the reference to ‘finance capital’ suffices. It sums up the essence of fascism, and fascism for him is simply a state form, a type of regime that breaks decisively with democracy (‘bourgeois’ democracy).

The response to this is simple: how did such a state emerge in the first place? Fascism must have existed in some form other than a state for it to become a state? Since Karat stopped reading Marxism decades ago, it may be worth rehearsing some of this for him. Before fascism succeeds as a state it exists as a movement. And fascism only succeeds in seizing power because it first succeeds as a mass movement.

The question the revolutionary Left simply failed to address in the twenties and thirties (with a handful of exceptions such the German Marxist Arthur Rosenberg and the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich) was why fascists are able to build mass movements. How do they create a mass base for the parties they form? As soon as we frame the issue in these terms (breaking with Karat’s myopic fascination with end results), the problem itself becomes a practical one. We have to look at the specific techniques used to generate mass support. We have to ask also how this ‘mass’ that fascism creates and dominates differs from, say, the social forces that Marx saw driving revolutionary movements forward.   

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

Anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Islamism, Hindutva, patriarchy, male violence, caste oppression, militarism, and (not least!) nationalism then become basically irrelevant; window-dressing on a beast (capitalism) that works in some purely economic way, as if the ‘formation of the authoritarian structure’ (Reich) which has everything to do with how reactionary ideologies come about in the wider reaches of civil society is not a process every bit as material as the economy.

What does Karat think he is debating? Is there anyone on the Left who claims that we are currently in the throes of a full-blown Hindu Rashtra in India, that the machinery of the law lies in ruins, that the media, servile as they are, have been taken over and remoulded by a self-defining Hindu state, that trade unions have been abolished, opposition parties banned, active opponents rounded up and murdered?  That would be India’s counterpart of a fascist state.

On the other hand, is there anyone (on the Left especially) who is naive enough to think that there is no danger of any of this? That the rampant cultures of communalism, attacks on minorities and repeated violence against them (this includes unlawful detention) are not being used (consciously used) as tools of fascist mobilisation of a spurious ‘Hindu majority’? That the Indian state has not been extensively infiltrated by the RSS at all levels, even down to the vice-chancellorship of JNU?

That the Gujarat cases had to be transferred out of the state of Gujarat by the Supreme Court, no less, speaks volumes for the court’s view of the shamelessly compromised state of the justice system in Gujarat under Modi’s government there. That the mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat became pivotal to the consolidation of Modi’s support-base in the state and then rapidly in other parts of India, leading to his emergence as prime minister; that Modi financed his campaign for power with the explicit backing of big business groups who were looking for a ‘decisive’ leader; that nationalism is now being used to whip up hysteria among the middle classes to try and justify the repeated use of charges like ‘sedition’ and justify attacks on freedom of speech, thought and politics; that the Right-wing in India has repositioned itself in the more totalising and utterly sinister discourse of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ to create the absurd sense of an Indian Volksgemeinschaft and construct definitions of the other as ‘anti-national’, a sort of fifth column of the nation’s enemies… if none of this reminds us of the way fascism emerges and builds itself up historically, then we have no memory, and certainly not a historical one.       

“India today confronts the advance of an authoritarianism…”, Karat argues, wanting to distinguish this from fascism. The issue surely is what form of authoritarianism we are up against in India today. While all authoritarianisms are not fascist, all fascisms are a form of authoritarianism. What is distinctive about fascist authoritarianism is its appeal to forms of mass mobilisation and attempt to create sources of legitimacy among ‘the masses’ – through cultural (e.g. pseudo-religious) and ideological domination.

'The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes'. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years.

This is why Hindutva becomes a marker of something more sinister than just authoritarian politics. In Karat’s mental map, as I said, culture and ideology play no major role; they are simply tools to divide people to allow those in power to implement what he sees as the truly dangerous agenda of ‘neo-liberalism’. They are a sort of sideshow, pure excrescences on a largely economic programme where capital remains the chief instrumentality.

Karat agrees that the RSS has a “semi-fascist ideology (and) the potential to impose an authoritarian state on the people when it believes that circumstances warrant it”. Why ‘semi-fascist’? What is its other half? When Golwalkar praised the extermination of the Jews as a possible model for the way a future Hindu state might want to deal with its minorities, was he being ‘semi-fascist’? Is the growing culture of intolerance and forcible suppression of political views the BJP finds abrasive ‘semi-fascist’?
 
And the qualification ‘when it believes the circumstances warrant it’? How do people at large tell the RSS has finally come around to that belief?  That it has so decided? The answer, alas, as with so much of the immobile Left, is – when it’s too late!
 
The German film director Alexander Kluge calls this approach to history and politics ‘Learning Processes With a Deadly Outcome’. If that mum with her three kids in the basement of this house in Halberstadt on 8 April 1945 had fought the Nazis in 1928 and millions of others like her had done the same, she wouldn’t be there now, on this dreadful day in April, sheltering from a fleet of 200 American bombers that will, in seconds, wipe out her entire town.
 
If Stalin and the Comintern hadn’t worked overtime to sabotage the possibility of a United Front between the German Communists and the Social Democrats and the two parties had fought fascism with combined strength; if the Left in Germany had campaigned more consistently and vigorously against anti-Semitism than it ever did and started those campaigns much earlier; if feminism had been a stronger force in German society and the patriarchal/authoritarian order less firmly entrenched in German families… and so on and so forth.
 
Learning processes that shape history, that affect its outcome, are those that strive consciously to learn the lessons that generate a politics that preserves and affirms life against the ‘deadly outcome’. Do we wake up one morning and say, India’s fascism was ‘majoritarian communalism’ after all!!    
 
“The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes”. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years. So why was the CPI(M) in alliance with that ‘other major party of the ruling class’ in the first place?
 
The alliance broke over a nuclear deal with the US but doubtless no similar deal with Putin would have occasioned a major crisis of that sort. Since the United Front has come up and Karat prefers the safety of a 'Third Period' position (short of calling the Congress, a former ally, ‘social fascist’; 'Third Period' refers to the politics of the Comintern in the period of widespread economic collapse that was said to have started in 1928), perhaps we can leave him with Nehru’s more Marxist grasp of this issue than he himself seems to have:
 

 
There is a constant sense in Karat’s opinion piece that neo-liberalism is as dangerous if not more dangerous than communalism. But this is a senseless position. To the extent that communalism leads to a fascist transformation of the state, it deprives working people of any basis for resisting capitalist onslaughts. Neo-liberalism disarms the working class economically, destroying its cohesion in an industrial, economic sense. Racism, communalism and nationalism (all nationalism, not just what Karat calls ‘chauvinist’ nationalism) do the same in more insidious ways, destroying the possibility of the working class ever acquiring a sense of its own solidarity and of what it really is.

(The writer is a well-known historian and Marxist intellectual).

The post Stalin’s Ghost Won’t Save Us from the Spectre of Fascism: A Response to Prakash Karat appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Supreme Court verdict on Singur land acquisition that eventually signaled the beginning of the end of CPI(M)-led Left Front’s 34 year long rule in West Bengal, has come as a breath of fresh air. It is especially so, because the advent of the Modi government at the Centre had succeeded in reinstating the logic of corporate development, brushing aside all concerns regarding environmental clearances to land acquisition, despite its attempts to undo the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act 2013 (LARR 2013), being effectively rebuffed. The implications of the Singur judgement go far beyond West Bengal, for the argument made by Justices V. Gopala Gowda and Arun Mishra underlines one thing starkly: the “brunt of development” should not be borne by the “weakest sections of the society, more so, poor agricultural workers who have no means of raising a voice against the action of the mighty State government.” While the 204 page still waits to be read more closely, it is clear that the break that the Singur-Nandigram moment had already initiated in the neoliberal consensus among the political and state elite in 2006-7, continues to acquire legitimacy. Even the 2013 Act was a consequence of that break. The SC verdict recognizes that ‘growth’ and industrialization’ do not come without costs and who pays for those costs remains a key question at the end of the day.

At a very basic level, this is a recognition of the the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘trickle down’ effect – at least in the short run. Indeed, as every common person has always known, ‘trickle down’ only means access to crumbs thrown towards them by the partying elites. ‘Trickle down’ theory very simply evades the justice question by reifying the ‘economy’ and its ‘laws’ to the status of a theology that trumps everything else – including ethical questions. While it is understandable that commentators like the Indian Express editorial writer, find that “(T)he Left Front’s diagnosis that West Bengal needed an industrial revolution to overcome social and economic stagnation was apt”, or that economists would still continue to harp on the virtues of ‘industrialization’, what is truly appalling are the reactions from the CPI(M).

The CPI(M) reaction ranged from its West Bengal state secretary, Suryakanta Misra adamantly reiterating there is no question of apologizing (implying that there is nothing to rethink – after all just the other day his party’s Singur candidate Rabin Deb, had thought it fit to campaign in Singur, riding on his Nano) – to the party’s politburo blaming it all on the 1894 Land Acquisition Act! The utter dishonesty of the assertion that the land had to be acquired “under the 1894 Act as that was the only instrument available at that time” is only matched by the continuing arrogance of a party that has got used to believing that it can make people believe whatever non-sense it dishes out. That nobody is any longer buying their stories has not sunk in despite continuous erosion of the party’s support and credibility. Very simply, no law can prevent you from giving the farmers a better deal – it is your decision that you want to go by the worst features of the law. In any case, the judgement makes it clear that the state government had not even adhered to “the proper procedure as laid down in the Land Acquisition Act”, so it is nothing less than comic to suggest that the party’s and government’s hands were tied by an archaic law. Indeed, as we have often argued on Kafila and elsewhere, and as the this article by TK Arun shows, there have been, since, more creative ways of dealing with the question of land acquisition in places like NOIDA and Haryana. Since the CPI(M) leaders have made it a virtue to not think or read, they may have missed the news that even the IMF now seems to be having second thoughts about the neoliberal dogma.

Here is a report from The Guardian by Aditya Chakrabortty that they might do well to read. An extract from the article:

The results, the IMF researchers concede, have been terrible. Neoliberalism hasn’t delivered economic growth – it has only made a few people a lot better off. It causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up, a finding with which most residents of food bank Britain would agree. And while George Osborne might justify austerity as “fixing the roof while the sun is shining”, the fund team defines it as “curbing the size of the state … another aspect of the neoliberal agenda”. And, they say, its costs “could be large – much larger than the benefit”.

And this is by no means the only report to have emerged from within the citadels of the orthodoxy, which have begun the question the creed. But like a broken record, the CPMWB is stuck on its theme of selling industrialization as the panacea for all the ills in the state. This is not the place to get into the larger argument about industrialization – I have written about and against it on many occasions ealier – but it may be worthwhile recalling the Left’s own history in the state a bit in order to underline one of the key questions that cries out for rethinking today.

For those aware of the period of the late 1960s, the tumultuous period of the 1967 and 1969 United Front governments was one of intense struggle – for seizure of benami land on the one hand and militant labour struggles in the urban areas on the other. The word gherao was coined during those heady days and it does seem that much of the militancy of the party was related to the challenge from the Left that it had been facing in the form of the Naxalite revolt. Whatever be the case, it was largely a consequence of the militant workers’ struggles of those days that large-scale flight of capital from the state took place. Industry rapidly moved to greener pastures in North India, where there was general ‘industrial peace’ – what current CPM leaders would call a ‘healthy investment climate’. (That this statement is is not an exaggeration is adequately proven by the fact that one of its leaders, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya in fact spoke like a FICCI or CII spokesperson, when he said of the SC verdict, that “this will create panic among investors, no one would come to Bengal”!)

As industry moved out, leading to what has been referred to as the deindustrialization of West Bengal, the state reeled under a long spell of gloom and depression. Unemployment or bekari became the theme song of some of the most important literary and cinematic creations of the time. But while these literary or cinematic reflections maintained their critique of ‘the system’, the CPMWB, quietly learnt another lesson. It learnt that it was workers’ militancy that was responsible for the flight of capital and therefore, of unemployment. As a matter of fact, CPMWB never recovered from that sense of defeat. Thus when the Left Front came to power with the CPMWB alone holding absolute majority, it had no desire to repeat the militancy of the 1960s; rather its entire effort was geared towards the industrialization of the state – and, as a corollary, ensuring the right ‘investment climate’ for capital. S0me of the initial industrial projects like the Bakreshwar Thermal Power project or Haldia Petrochemicals became points of emotive mass mobilization by the Left organizations among the students and youth. Very soon, by 1985, Jyoti Basu in fact, virtually forced the party to fall in line with his plan to develop industry in the ‘joint sector’ – what would be called public-private partnership in today’s language. The story that began thus, was destined to end in Singur and Nandigram. ‘Industrialization’, the communists had already forgotten, was in fact a part of the problem, not the solution as far as unemployment was concerned. Once you start believing that corporate bourgeois property is the only legitimate form of property and ownership and all other forms must cede way to it, then there is no other way. That is the classic scenario outlined by Marx, where there are owners of capital on one side, and owners of nothing but their labour power on the other. What other way of dealing with unemployment can this yield but surrender to capital and its whims?

In a manner of speaking, this is not a specific problem of CPI(M) or even Indian communists in general but a more global one. In the 1990s, German trade unions had to virtually surrender to ‘their capital’, accept humiliating conditions for making it stay in the country and not relocate elsewhere. And yet, such is the power of ‘ideology’ that this is one tenet of Marxism that communists do not want to touch (most Indian communists of course do not want to touch any but let’s leave that for another day). Is it really not possible to think of different forms of ownership (from the commons to cooperatives) as possible alternative models, alongside other forms that base themselves on use rather than ownership? Is is necessary to first destroy all other forms of life and livelihoods (where property in its bourgeois form may not even be a separately identifiable entity) and let the problem of unemployment overtake you? Must the question of forms of property and ownership be deferred to an always-deferred, perhaps never-to-arrive future? These questions have now acquired a new urgency in the context of climate change when it is no longer possible to innocently talk of industrialization and pretend not to see that we are on the edge of a precipice, rapidly moving towards self-destruction.

Courtesy: Kafila; Photo Courtesy: Tribune
 

The post The Singur Judgement, End of Neoliberalism and Questions for the Indian Left appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Bengali middle class society is seen as casteless because caste violence lacks visibility. One woman’s story of working as a teacher shows how caste intersects with gender to reproduce discriminatory practices.

Bengal was the first region of British India to be colonised and modernised. The opportunities colonial rule opened up were taken advantage of by the bhadralok (gentlefolk) who were mostly upper caste. One of the leaders of the Indian Independence movement Gokhale said “what Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow” which captured this avant garde position of Bengal. In such a vision a ‘backward’ institution like caste was claimed to have no significant presence.

The post How caste is alive and kicking in Bengal appeared first on SabrangIndia.