Category Archives: Politics

Countryside, Everyday Life, Excavation, Government, Identities, Media politics, Politics

Gomti Nagar to Bundelkhand

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It has been over a year since Mayawati came to power in UP and I am absolutely sick of seeing news reports beginning with the comment, “In a state ruled by a Dalit chief minister, a Dalit youth was killed…” This hostility towards Mayawati is ironically couched in the language of ‘Dalit empowerment’, the phrase used so loosely its is completely devoid of meaning. Where were all these reporters and their editorialising and their concern for Dalits when Yadavs were running the state?

What has Mayaywati been doing for Dalits? That question will be answered again and again without talking to a single Dalit. But if you do go looking for something, you will find it. The redoubtable Nilanjana Bose reports: Continue reading Gomti Nagar to Bundelkhand →

Everyday Life, Metropolis, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Claims and Space – Thoughts from the Feet

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Fort,
Bombay – 400 001.

Clean footpaths,
Spic and span,
Bombay – 400 001. Continue reading Claims and Space – Thoughts from the Feet →

Capitalism, Debates, Politics, Theory

Prasanta Chakravarty – Of Demos, Innovation and Affect

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Carrying forward the debate around Partha Chatterjee’s article in EPW.

by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

In the wake of the development debates around the nation, one witnesses an interesting array of articles—polemical as well as academic—that takes on headlong issues of political intervention by developing the terms of negotiation and deliberation in a certain direction. And that is the story of growing up—that democracy is the story of pragma, of mature understanding of the contestatory space. These are reminders that politics of good intentions is benign self-deception. Worse: it is apolitical, prophetic, self-indulgent.

Continue reading Prasanta Chakravarty – Of Demos, Innovation and Affect →

Left watch, Movements, Politics

Ahilan Kadirgamar on Southasian Solidarity and Questions of State and Land

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[This guest post is by AHILAN KADIRGAMAR who is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum. He has written about the international dimension of the conflict and peace process in Sri Lanka and worked on human rights concerns related to the conflict. His current interests include the political economy of state-society relations and attempts at state reform in Sri Lanka.]

I have been travelling between cities, from Kathmandu to Delhi to Calcutta and down south to Madras. Visiting friends, but also trying to understand peoples’ perceptions of Sri Lanka in a time of war. I give talks here and there, but many more meetings over tea and dinner. There is an older tradition of solidarity, but now I am thinking again of the meaning of Southasian solidarity.

In Calcutta, on an activist’s book shelf, I find a book signed and gifted to her in the mid-eighties by Para, my friend from Berlin who passed away last year. Kumaraswamy Pararajasingham, a Marxist and human rights activist in Lanka in his early years, was a pillar of Tamil dissent over the last two decades of exile in Germany. An old Marxist in Calcutta, asks me about Hector Abhayawardhana, the theoretician of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party Continue reading Ahilan Kadirgamar on Southasian Solidarity and Questions of State and Land →

Identities, Left watch, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Understanding the Nepali mandate

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(Three years back, Nepal was in the middle of a miserable war. 7 people were killed every day, mostly by the army but also by a ruthless Maoist military. An autocratic monarch ruled from his palace in Kathmandu. The street agitation led by established parties was not going anywhere. The Maoists were waging an armed struggle with control over most of the hill hinterland, as well as the strength to block supplies to the capital. There was a political deadlock among the three power centers and a military stalemate between the Royal Nepal Army and the People’s Liberation Army. Continue reading Understanding the Nepali mandate →

Identities, Left watch, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Beyond just a ‘Home and a Name’

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[The transformation of the agenda of the mainstream left in Kerala is beginning to produce resistance, and nowhere is this more visible than at Chengara in the south eastern Pathanamthitta district. The ongoing struggle for land there brings into relief not just the denial of productive resources to the real tillers of the soil – the Dalits – in Kerala’s land reforms, but also the shift of the left from the fight against inequality to the distribution of ‘minimum entitlements’. It also draws attention to the manner in which a ‘state-centric’ civil society, mainly the large network of poor women’s self-help groups sponsored by the State’s poverty eradication “Mission’, has been authorized as ‘authentic civil society’. All claims made outside these formal institutions are thereby rendered illegitimate and indeed, ‘against the law’. At Chengara, the protestors have been resisting the combined force of the state and the major political parties, laying claims to productive resources – and rejecting ‘minimum entitlements’. Indeed, the darker side of ‘democratic decentralization’ in Kerala, the ‘new Kerala Model’, as it has been called by its admirers, is the implicit legitimacy it grants to blatant violence unleashed upon people who struggle for economic equality, who do not find ‘minimum entitlements’ the solution to rampant and growing economic inequalities in contemporary Kerala. No wonder, then, that the Chief Minister of Kerala felt no qualms in warning the leader of the Chengara land struggle, Laha Gopalan, that if the protestors did not peacefully return to their villages (where they could put in applications for 3 or 5 cents of land for housing), they would have to encounter “police with horns and thorns” – in other words, not just armed police, but a bestial force. Nandigram, in short.

The struggle, however, remains vibrant and growing. Below is a translated version of a speech made by leading Dalit activist and intellectual, Sunny M Kapicadu, at a night-vigil organized in support of the ongoing land struggle in Thiruvananthapuram on 7 March 2008, in which he defends the struggle against powerful efforts to malign and undermine it. – JD ] Continue reading Beyond just a ‘Home and a Name’ →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Debates, Politics, Theory

Democracy and Economic Transformation – Partha Chatterjee

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[Political theorist Partha Chatterjee’s work has been the reference point for many contemporary theorizations of politics in India and others parts of the postcolonial world. Chatterjee has recently published an important essay, which we reproduce below. Many friends and colleagues in Kolkata and elsewhere have requested Kafila to provide the forum for this debate, considering the common interest that many of us have in issues raised here. Some reformulations by Chatterjee, especially in the aftermath of Nandigram, call for a more sustained political theoretical reflection. The article also raises issues directly related to questions of rural-to-urban migration that has seen some debate in Kafila lately. – AN]


Economic & Political Weekly
April 19, 2008 [Download PDF]


Democracy and Economic Transformation in India

With the changes in India over the past 25 years, there is now a new dynamic logic that ties the operations of “political society” (comprising the peasantry, artisans and petty producers in the informal sector) with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in “civil society”. This logic is provided by the requirement of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation of capital with activities like anti-poverty programmes. This is a necessary political condition for the continued rapid growth of corporate capital. The state, with its mechanisms of electoral democracy, becomes the field for the political negotiation of demands for the transfer of resources, through fiscal and other means, from the accumulation economy to programmes aimed at providing the livelihood needs of the poor. Electoral democracy makes it unacceptable for the government to leave the marginalised groups without the means of labour and to fend for themselves, since this carries the risk of turning them into the “dangerous classes”.

Partha Chatterjee

The first volume of Subaltern Studies was published in 1982. I was part of the editorial group 25 years ago that launched, Continue reading Democracy and Economic Transformation – Partha Chatterjee →

Countryside, Excavation, Government, Identities, Law, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Kavita Srivastava’s report on last year’s Gujjar confrontation in Rajasthan

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[This detailed report was prepared by Kavita Srivastava, the Jaipur-based general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. Posting this here to make it publicly available as it is not on the PUCL website. Please note that this was a rough draft. ]


State Violence and Caste Confrontation in Rajasthan

I. Outline of the week long movement for ST Reservation by the Gurjars

Soon after independence the Bhil Meenas got reservations in the Districts of Dungarpur, Banswara, Chittorgarh and Udaipur. At the time of 1931 census the Bhil Meenas were over 20, 000, however today they have reduced to half they are only 10,000 in number.

This was an issue of contention for the Meenas as they felt that they also deserved to be STs so they decided to raise their voice against this injustice as they called it. Under the leadership of Lakshmi Narayan Jhirwal they organized themselves.

11th June 1952: Meenas organized a sammelan near Dudu (Jaipur) district for the inclusion of the Meena community in the Schedule list for reservation. The Gurjars supported this wholly. Continue reading Kavita Srivastava’s report on last year’s Gujjar confrontation in Rajasthan →

Debates, Identities, Politics, Right watch, Theory

“There is no such thing as the caste system anymore”

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In April last year, Avinash Dutt and I had interviewed the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot. We walked around Lodhi Gardens, tape recorder in hand, and I ended up transcribing more than five thousand words that night. Tehelka had published a shorter, edited version. Here’s the full thing.

I was reminded of this interview after encountering the argument here that there should be, and is, a Dalit-Brahmin alliance against the already much-demonised OBCs. I thought that this way of seeing the BSP’s victory in the Uttar Pradesh elections was not only incorrect, but also seemed to be in need of the argument that Jaffrelot makes in this interview: that seeing caste as a ‘system’ is outmoded, at least as far as electoral politics is concerned.

1- Shivam: Which is more important for the average Indian, religion or caste?

It is sometimes not only those two but much more. Continue reading “There is no such thing as the caste system anymore” →

Capitalism, Debates, Identities, Politics

Flight to Freedom: Travel Through Dalit Villages

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“Do you eat piglets?” he asked as our car moved through the long road from Lucknow, via Barabanki, Faizabad, Akbarpur towards Azamgarh. “We can have roast piglets and whiskey when we end our day’s work” This was our ‘tour sponsor’, Chandra Bhan Prasad, well known now as the maverick intellectual who celebrates capitalism, consumption and globalization and who was the first to advocate a Dalit-Brahmin alliance against the Sudra (OBC) castes. Thus it was to be. We were to spend our first night in the poorvanchal on 4 June 2008, eating and drinking.

When we arrived at his village at about 8 pm, it was dark. All of Uttar Pradesh only has electricity for about seven or eight hours every day. And this was a village. That too, the dakkhin tola (the generic name for the Dalit settlement, given that, by and large, it is supposed to be situated at the southern end of the village). But true to the line that Prasad has been trying to convince us of for sometime now – and which actually occasioned this trip – within minutes, the generator started purring and the place lit up. We were in front of a fairly large pucca building that happens to be Prasad’s family house. The preparations were soon made for the feast that was awaiting us – the cooler was put on and other arrangements were made. Prasad has been at pains to underline to us, over and over again, that over the last twenty years, hunger and humiliation have disappeared from the lives of the Dalits in this area. Not that they are not poor and oppressed any more. But their lives have changed decisively.

Continue reading Flight to Freedom: Travel Through Dalit Villages →

Government, Law, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Individuals at Risk

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At the heart of all peoples’ rights work is the individual – as the person at risk of human rights abuses, as the survivor, as the partner in the defense of rights, and as the activist speaking out, and working with and for other individuals. Individuals, as part of the political, social and cultural collective and spread over the length and breadth of the country, lie behind much of the activism of Indian social-political groups, working at local, grassroots and community levels in India today. They try to change lives by acting on their own or with other people and political groups making the same demand – an end to injustice in all its forms.

These individuals are increasingly at risk in India today. We have witnessed the killings at regular intervals of activists like Safdar Hashmi, Shankar Guha Niyogi, Satyendra Dubey, Sarita and Mahesh, S. Manjunath, Mahendra Singh and Chandra Shekhar in the past two decades. We have had a series of cases of arrest and detention of people like Dr. Binayak Sen and T. G. Ajay. At a time when the patterns of human rights abuses against rights activists are becoming widespread and showing signs of further deterioration, with the governments showing their apathy, we need to draw attention to the situation, point to the concrete failures of the governments to live up to their obligations, and plan on some concrete actions, so that the human rights activists can carry out their important work free from attacks, fear or reprisals. Continue reading Individuals at Risk →

Capitalism, Ecology/Environment, Movements, Politics

Goa: How the battle was won

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By Rifat Mumtaz and Madhumanti Sardar

(Rifat Mumtaz and Madhumanti Sardar work with NCAS and are involved in campaigns against SEZs).

Recently, Goa became the only state in India to openly declare that no more Special Economic Zones (SEZs) would be set up on its territory. This was a result of relentless pressure from almost the entire state — villagers, educated middle class, professionals, activists, the church and media. Continue reading Goa: How the battle was won →

Debates, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Condemnation of Maoist and State violence in Orissa

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[We publish below a statement signed by some concerned citizens and intellectuals, on the Maoist violence in Nayagarh town in Orissa. This statement could also be considered as an invitation to a debate on the larger question on the place of violence in political and social movements. Continue reading Condemnation of Maoist and State violence in Orissa →

Debates, Left watch, Politics

Aman Sethi on Gajar Matar

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This is something that i have been thinking of ever since Chomsky et
all brought out their series of letters on Nandigram, left unity etc, and now Tariq Ali on Why he will
not participate in Turin Book Fair. At such points, i imagine the
writer of the letter in an almost kung-fu posture – balanced on one
foot, maybe raised on one toe to make the stance more complete, the
other leg bent at the knee, hands in classic double punch pose. The
moment of “taking a stand”, defining his/her stance.
Continue reading Aman Sethi on Gajar Matar →

Capitalism, Debates, Government, Politics

Conscience of the Company

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A nocturnal gas leak in 1984 took the lives of more than 7,000 people in Bhopal over a three-day span, and a further 15,000 in the years that followed. The leak came from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), now owned by Dow Chemical (DOW). The company is still denying its responsibility, and refuses to reveal the toxicological information of the gas, thwarting medical efforts to deliver appropriate treatment to more than 100,000 surviving victims. Should not there be a conscience of the company, which ensures that the Bhopal factory site and its surroundings are promptly and effectively decontaminated, that the groundwater is cleaned up, that the stockpiles of toxic and hazardous substances left at the site are removed, and that full reparation, restitution, compensation and rehabilitation are promptly provided for the continuing damage done to people’s health and environment by the ongoing contamination of the site? Should they not be ashamed of the lack of effective regulation and accountability systems, which have meant that court cases are dragging on, and corporations and their leaders continuing to evade accountability for thousands of deaths, widespread ill-health and ongoing damage to livelihoods?

Of course, our government has the primary obligation to secure universal enjoyment of human rights, and this includes an obligation to protect all individuals from the harmful actions of others, including companies. However, while the government has been frequently failing in regulating the human rights impact of business or ensuring access to justice for victims of human rights abuses involving business, the companies too have been complicit in their human rights abuses. In a democracy, a government will be taken to task for its failure. At the same time, there has also to be a call for the companies to be conscientious and accountable for their activities related to human rights. A few of them claim to engage with human rights responsibilities through voluntary consultations, relief and rehabilitation initiatives. While these have a role to play, such voluntarism can never be a substitute for concrete standards on businesses’ mandatory compliance with human rights. In India, as a minimum requirement, all companies should respect the right to information; free, prior, informed consent; and no displacement without rehabilitation, regardless of the sector, state or context in which they operate.

Continue reading Conscience of the Company →

Government, Law, Politics, Violence/Conflict

State Repression In Chhattisgarh And Continued Detention Of Dr Binayak Sen

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STATEMENT OF CONCERNED CITIZENS AND PEOPLE’S ORGANIZATONS

A group of former bureaucrats, academicians, lawyers and social activists visited Chhattisgarh from 18 – 22 January 2008 in connection with the prolonged incarceration of Dr Binayak Sen. The team met the Governor and Director General of Police and also met Dr Binayak Sen in the central prison at Raipur. Some members of the group also visited areas in the districts of Bastar, Dantewada and Bijapur.

In the light of the information gathered, the team is of the opinion that the charges filed against Dr Sen under the IPC, CrPC and the Chhattisgarh Public Safety Act (CPSA) are unwarranted and unconstitutional. The CPSA enables the government to interpret the rendering of simple humanitarian acts as unlawful The Act defines “unlawful activity” so broadly that every act of vigilant citizenship can be construed as unlawful and anti-national. Thus it is clear that Dr Sen is being targeted in his capacity as General Secretary of People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Chhattisgarh. The reports produced by the PUCL have highlighted the anti-constitutional violence legitimized by the state through the Salwa Judum campaign.

Continue reading State Repression In Chhattisgarh And Continued Detention Of Dr Binayak Sen →

Politics, Right watch

“Any Policeman Can Do This”

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“Any policeman can do this”: for us ungrad students in Trivandrum, Kerala, in the 1980s, this was the cool way to refer to any really low-down, low-skill task. Partly it came from the defiant mood of that decade, when political action from marginalized social groups was taking shape and acquiring strength outside mainstream politics and the state. Partly it was rooted in our common feeling that the police force was essentially nothing but an arm of mainstream political forces.

Things, however, have changed in Kerala now. Civil society has changed. Economic inequality has skyrocketed since the 1980s. Kerala now has a substantial anti-political civil society obsessed with acquiring the golden key to consumer citizenship: skills to enter the global job market. The police force, too, has changed. It appears that the police, while still at the beck and call of ruling powers, are forging a new tie with this civil society. Nowhere is this more visible than in the recently reported incidents of civil social vigilantism under the eyes of compliant policemen. A few months back, in mid-2007, a gypsy woman was manhandled by a mob in a busy market in Edappal, in the northern district of Malappuram, and the police remained passive. Comparisons with “Bihar” (which the oh-so-socially-developed-Malayalee-middle class can scarcely endure) feel fast and thick and the government had to suspend the policemen guilty of negligence. Just the other day, a twenty year old man was accused of stealing a mobile phone and attacked by a mob in Trivandrum, and the police watched as he was forced to strip in public to prove his innocence. The phone was found later on someone else. Not that these mobs are anywhere close to consumer citizenship. But the objects which appeared stolen, the loss of which incited the mob to violence in these instances, are symbols of the new wealth of the Malayalee consumer citizen: a baby’s golden anklet, and a mobile phone. Thus the police have finally found their true allies: a thoroughly anti-political civil society paranoid about losing precious objects they have accumulated, who project the blame of such loss onto the outsider. Continue reading “Any Policeman Can Do This” →

Government, Identities, Language, Law, Politics

Quote of the day

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“It hasn’t got any definite meaning,” CJI  K G Balakrishnan said today in response to a PIL that wanted ‘socialist’ deleted from the Constitution’s Preamble.

In a world where “comrades”  want to embrace capitalism, does meaning have meaning?

Empire/ Imperialism, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Rights-Free Zones

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‘O Father, this is a prison of injustice.
Its iniquity makes the mountains weep.
I have committed no crime and am guilty of no offence.
Curved claws have I,
But I have been sold like a fattened sheep.’
— Abdulla Thani Faris al Anazi, a Guantanamo detainee since 2002, arrested in Afghanistan, and turned over to the US forces by bounty hunters.
— Abdulla Thani Faris al Anazi, a Guantanamo detainee since 2002, arrested in Afghanistan, and turned over to the US forces by bounty hunters

11 January 2008 marks 6 years since the first detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay. The United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay is a rights-free zone, for the detention, treatment and trial of certain people in the ‘war on terror’. Here the Pentagon is authorised to hold non-US citizens in indefinite custody without charge; here detainees are barred from seeking any remedy in any proceedings in any US, foreign or international court; here if any detainee were to be tried, the trial would be by military commission — an executive body, and not an independent or impartial court. A memorandum from the Justice Department to the Pentagon advises that because Guantanamo Bay is not a sovereign US territory, the federal courts should not be able to consider habeas corpus petitions from ‘enemy aliens’ detained at the base.

Continue reading Rights-Free Zones →

Politics

Gujarat, numbers

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The vagaries of the first-past-the-poll system in India make sure that we often over- or under-estimate the meaning of election results going strictly by who’s won how many seats. But if you go by factors such as vote share and seat-by-seat break-up, you will see the complexity of any election result. Once the results are out, the psephologist disappears. But that’s when he should be there.

Given below is a break-up of 33 of Gujarat’s constituencies, as circulated by an activist. Makes for interesting observations. Continue reading Gujarat, numbers →

Government, Law, Politics

Each day Binayak Sen spends in jail is one day less for democracy in India

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ON DECEMBER 10 this year, the day internationally observed as Human Rights Day, the Supreme Court of India denied bail to the veteran rights activist, Dr Binayak Sen, incarcerated since May in Raipur jail under the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. For those present, the 45-minute-long hearing was a horrible experience. We heard the prosecution claim that Dr Sen was part of the dreaded Maoist formation, and that giving him his freedom would mean setting him loose to spread subversion against the State. We saw, to our shock, how no verification was made of the prosecution’s claims, even as the government lawyer presented his summary of the contents of Dr Sen’s computer in the vilest terms, telling the court it contained letters describing how Dr Sen had helped organise an arms training camp at Nagpur. Defence counsel Rajeev Dhawan pointed out that the prosecution was distorting the letter’s contents, that Dr Sen had been in Nagpur in the course of a fact-finding mission into last year’s lynching of a Dalit family at Kherlanji and that he had nothing to do with any underground training. But the court felt that Dhawan’s arguments were matters to be looked into by the trial court, and it was satisfied that there was enough reason to deny Dr Sen bail.

Continue reading Each day Binayak Sen spends in jail is one day less for democracy in India →