Red Flags of ‘Consent’/ Black Flags of Freedom and We, the Civil Society
guest post by TRINA NILEENA BANERJEE
(Written in Feb 2008)
The way towards Nandigram in November 2007 was fraught with a spectacle of flags.
I use the word ‘fraught’ deliberately – because as the journey progressed that autumn morning1, this proliferation of flags left me with a sense of mounting fear and apprehension. Continue reading Red and Black
From John Dayal and Madhu Chandra of the All India Christian Council, an update on the continuing violence against Christians in Orissa. Continue reading The Continuing Violence Against Christians in Orissa
Censorship and violence against press in Kashmir
Reporters WIthout Borders, 25th August, 2008
Reporters Without Borders calls on the Indian authorities to put an immediate stop to the censorship and violence against the media in Kashmir that has been prompted by a wave of protests against Indian rule. At least 13 journalists were beaten by police yesterday in Srinagar, local TV stations are being censored and a curfew is making it hard for newspapers to bring out their issues.
“This latest crisis in Indian Kashmir must not be used as a pretext for subjecting the press to more violence and obstruction,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Journalists must have all the guarantees they need, including permanent passes, to be able to work freely despite the curfew. We also call on the police authorities to investigate the violence by certain elements that have led to injuries in the ranks of the press. If no sanctions are adopted, the door will be left open for more abuses. Finally, we call for an end to the censorship of local TV stations, which is a clear violation of the right of Kashmiris to be informed.”
Continue reading Statement on Censorship in Kashmir by Reporters without Borders
Two bajarangdal leaders were killed while 2 others injured on 24 August when they were making bombs in Kanpur in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) as reported by Urdu daily Rashtriya Sahara in its front page. According to Sahara, the blast was so strong that the wall of the room in which the blast occurred collapsed. In other rooms, the walls were damaged. Pieces of glass were strewn everywhere.
The bomb blasted in a house in Rajeev Nagar area on Sunday afternoon. According to the report, the police recovered 3 kg lead oxide, 500 g red lead, 1 kg potassium nitrate, 11 country made grenades, several bomb pins, seven timers and batteries from the spot. According to the IG, “The recovery shows that a massive explosion was on the cards.
The deceased have been identified as Rajeev Mishra and Bhupinder Singh. While Rajeev is the son of S S Mishra, the landlord of the house, Bhupinder was a resident of Shastri Nagar. Continue reading Bomb Makers of Hindutva
(Adapted from a posting made earlier today on the Reader-List, Apologies for Cross Posting)
Even as the Indian state seems to be on the threshold of losing its grip both on hearts and minds in Kashmir and on its own wisdom, we have our own bunch of proud patriots making a heroic effort to convert the column inches of newspapers and the floor space of television studios into their own, special, battleground. Perhaps they might be consoling themselves with the hope that the turf battle of perception management in the media may yet be won, even if Kashmir is lost. Somehow, I am not so sure that this is going to be the case.
Unfortunately for them, to win in arguments, both – the state in Kashmir, and the Indian nationalist hard liners in the media and on other public fora, need some ideas, some attempt at reason, some amount of vision. I am afraid, that so far, neither the state, nor its hyper-loyal editorialists, sound-byte commandos and cyber-footsoldiers, have been able to display any. Instead, we have had bullets in Kashmir, and as I write this, news of midnight raids, arrests and the putting in place of the machinery of a major crackdown tomorrow, on those planning to assemble to protest peacefully on Lal Chowk in Srinagar, and restrictions on the freedom of expression. It is possible that a lot will happen tomorrow and in the next few days that will not filter through on television and the newspapers. It is possible that internet connections will be momentarily ‘down’ and that phone contact with the valley may be suspended. If it is not, then it is imperative that those who are in the valley, especially journalists of major international newspapers witness and report what might happen. If the worst does not come to pass, then, everyone will be relieved, and I really hope that is the case. We must remember, that in 1989-90, major massacres took place in Srinagar and in the rest of India, nobody really knew what was going on before it was too late. It is not as easy today for the Indian state to replicate the news blackout that accompanied the crackdown that took place in 1989, but certainly, the signs are that there might just be an attempt to do precisely that underway.
The PTI report quoted in a story just uploaded on the Indian Express website an hour before midnight, yesterday, 24th August, makes for chilling reading, especially if we read between the lines. It deserves being quoted in its entirety.
Continue reading “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”
Arundhati Roy on the freedom struggle in Kashmir:
To expect matters to end there was of course absurd. Hadn’t anybody noticed that in Kashmir even minor protests about civic issues like water and electricity inevitably turned into demands for azadi? To threaten them with mass starvation amounted to committing political suicide.
Not surprisingly, the voice that the Government of India has tried so hard to silence in Kashmir has massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities, their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable display of raw courage.
Raised in a playground of army camps, checkposts and bunkers, with screams from torture chambers for a soundtrack, the young generation has suddenly discovered the power of mass protest, and above all, the dignity of being able to straighten their shoulders and speak for themselves, represent themselves. For them it is nothing short of an epiphany. They’re in full flow, not even the fear of death seems to hold them back.
And once that fear has gone, of what use is the largest or second-largest army in the world? What threat does it hold? Who should know that better than the people of India who won their independence in the way that they did? [Outlook]
Today, perhaps for the first time after early August, the Chengara land struggle attained some front-page space in the newspapers. It was front-page news in the Thiruvananthapuram edition of The Hindu, which reported the ongoing efforts for negotiated settlement. The Revenue Minister, K.P.Rajendran, and the Minister for the Welfare of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, A.K. Balan, held talks with Laha Gopalan, and other solidarity council members, and “promised them that the government would do everything within its power to meet their demand for provision of land to the landless among the Scheduled Castes and other similarly placed sections and assured them that there was no question of the government resorting to repressive measures against the agitators”. However, the Ministers revealed that” the government could promise to give them only land that is already with it or that which could be taken over without the possibility of further litigations.”
So far so good, and obviously we are in here for a long haul. The leaders of the agitation apparently made it cleared that they were not demanding the immediate assignment of the estate land but a more comprehensive package. The government has also announced that medical camps will be conducted in the struggle point and that the road bloackade will end. Relief, indeed, after so many tense days.It is clear that the real hard work begins now. Pressure will have to be kept up until the package is announced; it will have to debated, and adequate monitoring of its implementation will have to be assured through, perhaps, a national monitoring committee.
But as a historian, I’d say that that this is indeed an opportunity to attain greater clarity on the political relevance of political decentralisation and local planning. In the mid-1990s, it was projected as a panacea to all possible ills — from Kerala’s fiscal crisis, to non-sovereign forms of power. The People’s Planning Campaign shifted the focus to local-level development, promising to transform welfare recipients into small producers. In itself this was an interesting proposition in some ways: one that focused on small capitalism rather than neoliberal extractive growth, and promised to make poor citizens independent of state welfare. Continue reading Will the Left’s’Negative Hallucination’End in Kerala?
On June 7, 2007 the opinion page of The New York Times carried a piece by Jenny Strauss Clay, daughter of Leo Strauss. With a candid fervor, she sought to distance her father’s legacy from the masterminds of the neo-conservative ideologues of the American foreign policy. She tells us that Leo Strauss believed in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy; although he was not blind to its flaws. He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised unworked utopianism—in our time, Nazism and Communism—which is predicated on the denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature: love of one’s own deepest concerns. And yes, Jenny Strauss reminds us that his greatest passions were to raise rabbits (Flemish Giants) and read Plato with his students.
The nephew of Wassily Kandinsky, Alexandre Kojeve/ Kozhevnikov’s seminars on Hegel from 1933-1939 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, as is well known, fundamentally influenced much of modern French thought, including that of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, Bataille and Althusser, Breton and Queneau—all his students at some point. Kojeve’s thought also philosophically encouraged a different breed of social and political thinkers: Raymond Aron in France, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama in the US, to name a select few. Kojeve himself spent the final 25 years of his life as a trade negotiator and civil servant under de Gaulle and helped establish the European Economic Community (now EU) as a model for his universal and homogenous state.
Continue reading On Tyranny and the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondences – Prasanta Chakravarty
The right to a fair trial is a cornerstone of democratic societies. How a person is treated, when accused of a crime, provides a concrete demonstration of how far a State respects human rights. Detention is ‘arbitrary’, where there are often grave violations of the right to a fair trial. Detention and imprisonment, which may be lawful under national standards, are considered ‘unlawful’ under international standards. A fair trial is indispensable for the protection of other rights, such as the right to freedom from torture, the right to life, and the right to freedom of expression. This right should never be compromised. However, throughout the country, people are being detained and imprisoned without a fair trial. In these circumstances, many face torture and other forms of ill-treatment. The continued detention of Dr. Binayak Sen, Vice-President of India’s leading human rights organization, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), should trigger a debate, not only in Chhattisgarh, but also around the country, about whether and to what extent the right to a fair trial may be compromised in the name of security.
There is still the eerie silence here about the land struggle at Chengara, but we are nearly deaf from listening to talk, talk, and more talk about the redistribution of surplus land to landless dalit people. Everyone, from Karat to Pinarayi Vijayan to VS, to even that undaunted champion of liberal ‘minimum entitlements’ welfarism, T.M. Thomas Isaac, is talking of redistributing surplus land to landless dalits (adivasis, according to some,or landless ‘poor’ according to others, ‘poor’ according to yet others…).
That seems rather odd.Talking with some minor CPM intellectual-bhikshaamdehis the other day (who are of course still patiently waiting for ‘more and accurate information’) I could see a sense of wounded innocence. “Don’t forget,” one of them told me,”it is the CPM that campaigned for redistribution of surplus land.” What they do not want to acknowledge — in the very specific present, of course — was that this promise was never fulfilled. Indeed, the so-called ‘class agenda’of the dominant left was more or less treated as over in the early 1970s;the left’s achievements after this did not touch upon redistribution of productive resources to the agricultural working classes. Indeed, we have seen the expansion of mass welfare — mass housing, fixing minimum wages, making available welfare pensions through welfare funds for unorganised sector workers, and so on.We have also seen the welfare system’s indirect acknowledgement of the rise of the consumer-citizen in Kerala — for instance, in the state-run Maveli stores.
The Chairperson
National Commission for Women
4, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg,
New Delhi
Subject: Torture and Rape of Women and Other Incidents in the Land Struggle at Chengara, Kerala
Dear Chairperson,
We urge your attention to the following incidents in Chengara, Kerala as they require your urgent intervention.
In the ongoing struggle for land in Chengara, there is escalating violence against the peaceful and democratic protest of the people. Here women are the most affected as they are the targets of brutal attacks by the workers of trade unions affiliated to leading political parties and also other hired henchmen of Harrison Malayalam Ltd. Many women have testified that the attacks happened right in the presence of the police. All these events seem to indicate a total breakdown of the state’s administrative machinery to redress the situation, which makes the intervention of external bodies like yours crucial.
Continue reading Chengara: Letter to National Commission for Women by Delhi groups
Mr. Prakash Karat, how far behind are you and your crew walking?!
asks theatre director SAMKUTTY PATTOMKARY
[As the Chengara struggle reached a new phase, the CPI-M in Kerala organized a Dalit convention in Kochi – 51 years too late says the author. J Devika has posted updates on the struggle in recent days, as also a translation of Sunny Kapicadu’s speech at the historic night-vigil on 7 March 2008, in Kafila earlier.]
In more than 80 years of communist history in Kerala, for the first time, a communist chief minister has declared today (16-8-2008) that the caste system is strongly alive in Kerala! It took 51 years, starting from EMS in 1957, for the communist rulers to understand the caste system in Kerala. Anyway, on this ‘auspicious’ occasion of such a revelation for the Kerala CPM people, let them be reminded of some more facts.
Continue reading Horses That Walk Backwards – Samkutty Pattomkary
On 14 August, leading dalit activists from Kerala protested in Pathanamthitta against the continued road blockade organised by the joint front of trade unions which claim to be fighting for the rights of plantation workers. They were prevented from proceeding to Chengara and were arrested, to be released by evening. Meanwhile, the trade unions agreed to lift the blockade by 3 at noon. They however demand that the people who have occupied the plantation should all leave in 10 days’ time, and if this does not happen, the blockade will be on again.
Press coverage has improved somewhat but not much. Even the sworn enemies of the left, like the Malayala Manorama, have kept largely silent. Not surprising, though — the Congress and others, including the interests that this newspaper represents, are patiently waiting for the LDF government to dig its own grave by provoking a Nandigram-like situation. Once the calamity begins, they will of course move in, like vultures. The Centre too of course is watching and waiting for CPM to make another big mistake.
These are strange times.There is a raging debate now on within the CPM and the LDF about the pending approval to proposed SEZs, and one of the key points of the conflict has to do with trade union presence within them.While a powerful section within the CPM wants to curtail workers’ rights within the SEZs,outside, on the road to Chengara, trade unions attack their ‘enemies’ — landless and marginalised people.
The Chengara Struggle Committee has called for protest meetings all over the State on 23 August; it has also appealed for a protective human chain around Chengara on 25 August.
Anniversaries are good opportunities for reflection. I write this in the early hours of 15th August, 2008, the 61st anniversary of Indian independence.
The events of the past few months, and the past few days, in the Indian administered state of Jammu and Kashmir have demonstrated how well and how equally (or not) the police, paramilitaries and armed forces of the Indian Republic treat different kinds of protesting crowds. The facts that I am about to discuss are good measures with which to think about the relationship between acts of power, different kinds of people, sovereignty, life and death in the Indian nation state as it has evolved over the past 61 years.
The region of Jammu in the province of Jammu and Kashmir has been caught in the grip of a fierce agitation against the revocation of the land transfer to the Amarnath Shrine Board. We have all seen footage of angry SASS (Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti) activists brandishing trishuls, setting up roadblocks and burning tyres, the agitation has spread to different parts of India
AN APPEAL from the PANCHAMI DALIT FEMINIST COLLECTIVE, Kottayam, to join the march on August 14th, against sexual harassment and human rights violations at the site of the struggle for land at Chengara, Pathanamthitta, Kerala.
[Below is an urgent appeal from Chengara, Kerala, where a land struggle has been on for the past one year. There seems to be a general elite consensus about refusing citizenship to the 7500 landless families that have occupied government land there; more ominously, there seems to be also the determination to punish them. Since early August a road blockade has been going on led by the united front of trade unions defending the right of (eighty) workers in the occupied Chengara plantation. Apparently, there are also ‘criminal elements’- the trade unions and the police, poor things, know nothing of them – who have been violently stopping activists from reaching the settlement.The CPM intellectuals in Kerala are patiently waiting for ‘more and accurate’ information, as they were when some of us approached them proposing a protest around Nandigram last year. Reports of starvation, sickness,and sexual assault are reaching us from Chengara but there is no way we can get there.Now, what is this? A new form of illegal custody? A new form of sexual harassment in custody? On 14 August, dalit activists and organisations are planning a march to Chengara, and hopefully food and medical supplies can be taken there. Please circulate this appeal widely – we have to stop another Nandigram– JD]
A historic land struggle has been unfolding at Chengara in Pathanamthitta district, Kerala, involving about 7500 families, Continue reading Flashpoint Chengara: March Against Blockade Tomorrow
I want to go off on a bit of a tangent here. Just to open a different discussion in the spirit of thinking, and muddling along together. It seems to me that one of the axis on which the debate has turned is on the question of desire and its representation. Who is the desiring subject, towards whom is this desire directed, who represents this desire in what way, what are the slippages therein, who has the right to speak about whom.
I was wondering if we can approach this from a slightly different angle by taking this question of desire beyond the individual subject (variously defined). And in fact nameless did gesture to this in one of her responses where she raised the question of the appropriation of what she termed subaltern practices by elite intellectuals where certain practices and forms, in this case autos, are made to stand in for certain values – in this case progressive, ‘left” etc – which says more about the locations of the intellectuals and their insensitivity to their own class-caste positions, in a move which is patronizing at best and exploitative at worst. I think inherent in this critique is the shadow of a kind of objectification of a certain experience, so that a symbol becomes alienated from the actual life practices in which it is located to circulate as some empty signifier, to be appropriately filled as per requirement.
Continue reading A Tangential Addition to the Great Auto Debate
Narcoanalysis, it has been scientifically proved by Indian law enforcement agencies, is the final frontier of truth. What comes out of narcoanalysis is solid stuff, the real thing. Confessions and self-implications account for almost all the crimes the cops “crack” – when was the last time you heard of a revelation of who dunnit coming out of careful deductive reasoning based on evidence? Terrorists send emails that can be tracked to physical addresses (“the IP address led the police to B ek batta chaar, gali number 2, Balli Maran”), or they are caught bearing in their pockets, maps of sensitive border areas, scribbled over with little reminders like “death to hindus” in Urdu; or murderers confess under narcoanalysis, like Krishna the compounder in the Arushi murder case, that he and four other “servants” were responsible, thus freeing, thangod, all middle-class people so far involved, from the taint of suspicion. Without confessions no crimes would ever be solved, and narcoanalysis is the scientific, sophisticated, twenty-first century alternative to the “Abey bol, kaise nahin bolega, tera baap bhi bolega” school of confession extraction which has been the mainstay of coppery so far.
So narcoanalysis reveals the truth. And the truth is apparently, that the Shiv Sena and Bal Thackeray have funded Maoist activities. “Suspected naxalite” Arun Ferreira confirmed our deepest suspicions in his narcoanalysis test – while other political parties, bless their souls, will never fund maoist activities, he blurted out, Shiv Sena and the ABVP have always helped out the comrades with money.
Shiv Sena has issued a strong denial. It has in fact, “rubbished” these allegations, making the bizarre claim that “Naxalism is born out of a communist agenda” (oh come on!), and since the Shiv Sena is well known to be anti-communist, why would they pour money into naxal coffers? I don’t know, it all sounds very plausible to me, and anyway, it’s not up to us to decide whether the claim is false or not. This fact came out of narcoanalysis, let me remind you, and we HAVE TO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY.
To add to their cavalier disregard for truth, the Sena spokesperson further added, “a drugged person might talk any rubbish“.
I propose the Shiv Sena be immediately banned for its anti-national contempt for narcoanalysis, the unimpeachable symbol of the nation’s commitment to truth.
I am posting below a requiem to Quepem by my old friend Hartman. It reads eerily like a companion piece to the curatorial essay to Manifesta 7 by Raqs, posted earlier on Kafila. Raqs wrote:
Mountains are flattened to mine bauxite, the main aluminium ore. Mountains of aluminium waste may eventually take their place…The “rest of now” is the residue that lies at the heart of contemporaneity. It is what persists from moments of transformation, and what falls through the cracks of time. It is history’s obstinate remainder, haunting each addition and subtraction with arithmetic persistence, endlessly carrying over what cannot be accounted for. The rest of now is the excess, which pushes us towards respite, memory and slowing things down.
And here’s Hartman:
As you read this, mourn the brutal rape and murder of half a dozen steep, thickly forested hills barely 12 kilometres from Quepem town in south Goa. These form an integral link of the magnificent Western Ghats that surround Goa, and as any schoolchild studying the environment will tell you, they play a crucial role in providing Goa its ecological wellbeing.
And yet, in blatant contravention of wisdom we purport to impart to children, hundreds of forests are being cut down around Quepem even as I write this. The denuded land turned inside out so fast, a hill can disappear in three months, leaving behind suppurating wounds that go down so deep the giant tipper trucks at the bottom look like the harmless toys little boys plays with.
Continue reading Quepem by the kilo: Hartman de Souza on Mining in Goa
It is the Indian left’s concurrence, rather than its disagreement, with the idea of a nuclear future (including nuclear weapons) that has made its case weak and inaudible to the larger masses.
Contextualizing the deal
In a charged atmosphere produced by the backers and opponents of the deal both pitching their positions in terms of ‘national interests’, it would be necessary not to lose sight of its broader meanings and implications.
In its essence, the deal is about opening up of the restrictions over nuclear commerce put on India after its 1974 ‘peaceful nuclear tests’. Though initiated and facilitated by the United States, this move will provide India access to international markets in nuclear fuel, material and technology, in accordance to the safeguards and guidelines of the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). While it would imply huge imports from the US, the deal also removes international fetters on nuclear trade with other countries including Russia, China, France and Australia whose corporations would get major business orders from India once the deal comes into effect.
Read the full article here.
My colleagues (Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula) and I (as Raqs Media Collective) have been working over the last year on curating an exhibition titled ‘The Rest of Now’ which opened recently as part ofManifesta 7in the town of Bolzano/Bozen in northern Italy. Manifesta is an itinerant biennial of European contemporary art. I am posting below our curatorial essay, which may be of interest to some amongst you, and look forward to your responses.
–
The Rest of Now
by Raqs Media Collective
1.
A hundred years ago, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, artist, poet and high priest of a muscular industrial aesthetic, was seriously injured in an automobile accident on the outskirts of Milan. Continue reading The Rest of Now
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 