Government, Identities, Left watch, Media politics, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Update on Chengara

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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.

Debates, Everyday Life, Government, Identities, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Gun Salutes for August 15, 2008

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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

Continue reading Gun Salutes for August 15, 2008 →

Capitalism, Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life, Government, Left watch, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Flashpoint Chengara: March Against Blockade Tomorrow

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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 →

Capitalism, Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Identities, Media politics

A Tangential Addition to the Great Auto Debate

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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 →

Bad ideas, Law, Right watch

Breaking News – Shiv Sena’s secretly Maoist!

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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.

Capitalism, Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life, Movements, Violence/Conflict

Quepem by the kilo: Hartman de Souza on Mining in Goa

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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 →

Debates, Government, Politics

Nuclear Deal, ‘National Interest’ and the Indian Left – PK Sundaram

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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.

Capitalism, Debates, Everyday Life

The Rest of Now

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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 →

Debates, Everyday Life, Metropolis

Death of the Author(-ized)?

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Or it is just another case of planning paranoia?

Although commonly understood to be a city of traders, Ravinder Singh Chowdhary*, is adamant that Delhi be understood as the abode of farmers.  Sitting adjacent to lush verdant fields of brinjal, rice, and spinach in the village Madapur Khadar in Delhi’s Badarpur Constituency, Chowdhary, explains how Delhi is paradoxically “a city of farmers.”  “From Kilokri and Kotla Mubarakpur in the South-East, to Karol Bagh in Delhi’s North-West, almost every new colony post-partition has been settled on farm land. Those settled by the Government were given water, electricity and drainage and became proper colonies; those settled by private individuals were denied these basic amenities and termed ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorised’.”

In its most recent and controversial policy announcement, Delhi Government and the Union Ministry of Urban Development seem to take cognisance of Chowdhary’s understanding of the city’s settlements and have begun the process of issuing provisional regularisation certificates to about 1,500 unauthorised colonies that are mostly settled on agricultural land; a move that they claim will benefit approximately 40 lakh residents.
Continue reading Death of the Author(-ized)? →

Identities, Media politics, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Ahem-dabad again

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Update: Yaha sab shanti hai, yeh public hai sab jaanti hai

Sheela Bhatt’s assertions that the Gujarati Muslim hasn’t been seeking retribution by a long shot are not surprising at all. What is illuminating is this:

One of the surprises of Saturday’s blasts was that except one blast in Sarkhej, all the blasts were executed in East Ahmedabad, which includes the highly communally sensitive walled city area. The accuracy of the planning suggests that a person with a complete grip on the social-political mindset of the city and its communal geography must be behind the blasts.

No one in this shaken city doubts that these blasts were planned by someone who has a thorough knowledge of the past 25 years history of communally sensitive areas and the Sangh Parivar’s role in it. Continue reading Ahem-dabad again →

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Genders, Identities

Reflections on the Great Unexpected Auto Debate

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Little did I think when I put up this image, that it would lead to such a rich set of comments on class, caste and gender.

The picture had been circulating on the web, in blogs and email lists for some time, and without comment, as a funny, jokey kind of thing. Autos and trucks (in Delhi anyway,) are renowned, as Aman pointed out in his comment, for pithy, witty, quirky, dolorous, amorous etc. comments on life. Briefly glimpsed, their ability to linger in our minds is a reflection of their literary quality.

When this one was sent to me, the reason I posted it on kafila was initially light-hearted too, since we consider autos to be our mascots, as representing kafila’s philosophy and relationship to the city in some way – small, cheeky, full of “attitude”, winding nimbly through the mass of traffic, a resistant challenge to the idea of a shiny, “world-city-like-paris-and-singapore” that our various governments want to turn all our cities into, by neatly removing the poor, the workers, the slums etc.

Continue reading Reflections on the Great Unexpected Auto Debate →

Identities, Violence/Conflict

In the midst of blasts and fireworks across cities …

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[While this post is also posted on my blog, I want to add a small qualification as to why I have put this up on Kafila as well. This post goes out on Kafila in the optimistic spirit of peace and wisdom in our hearts in the midst of the various blasts that have been taking place in different cities across India.]

(I write in the spirit of my words and in submission of myself to my vulnerabilities and to the present …)

One blast here,

One there,

One everywhere.

Today here,

Tomorrow there.

One blast here

And one blast there.

So that is what we, in various parts of the world, have been hearing about in the last two days. And yet, the indifference on my skin remains. It only thickens. But I remain sensitive to more mundane issues that concern me/bother me/sit on my mind/nag me. And what is sitting on my mind as of now, is that beautiful feeling of vulnerability and the thought of what it means to be vulnerable in the city. The feeling of vulnerability is beautiful as of now because I write in the solitude of music, my words and my difficult and vulnerable self, shut off from the noise of the blasts and of the noise of the crowds that existed in my space a while ago.

Continue reading In the midst of blasts and fireworks across cities … →

Culture, Debates, Identities, Politics

Textbooks and Intolerance, Communal and Secular

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Once again, religious sentiments have been hurt. This time in the God’s own Country, Kerala . And the culprit is a small portion of a lesson from the social science textbook for class vii, part i. It has been alleged by groups claiming to represent Muslims and Christians that this particular lesson preaches atheism. It sticks because the government which is getting the textbooks published is led by Marxists and there is a perception that Marxists have a pathological hatred for religion. Kerala has been witness to a bitter controversy on the faith only recently in which the church and the CPM were at loggerheads. So, there is a background to the new battle over a small lesson in a class seven textbook. But first let us try to look at the facts.

Continue reading Textbooks and Intolerance, Communal and Secular →

Debates, Identities, Politics

Textbooks Yet Again

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The current agitation in Kerala demanding withdrawal of the class vii social science textbook has turned murderous. James Augustine, 45, a headmaster of a primary school was killed in an attack by the Indian Union Muslim League youth activists on a training program. And this was done even after the announcement by the Kerala government that it had decided to remove the controversial portion of the textbook. Will this utterly meaningless death of the teacher at their hands stop the agitators in their track? Will we allow warriors of different shades of identity politics a free run? Or, will the sacrifice of a life turn into an occasion for all of us to once again ponder over issues related not only to the politics of textbooks but also the principles on which textbooks in a diverse country like India should be prepared?

It is very easy to see that the allegation on this particular book that it promotes atheism cannot be substantiated as the text in question closes with the response of the parents of Jeevan, who belong to different religious identities that he would be free to choose his religion when he grows up. It only shows that they are very relaxed about his identity and are ready to give him freedom to decide on his identity. Surely the agitating groups are neither sure nor relaxed about their relationship with the members of their denominations. Do they fear that texts like the one dealing with the religious identity of Jeevan can give ideas to children about their right to take decisions in the matters of marriage and identity? Even if we leave this aside, the charge leveled by the opposition that the book is substandard deserves a reasoned discussion. It needs to take into account the role textbooks are expected to play in a country like India, the process of textbook writing, the implication of the federal character of India for school education in general and textbook writing in particular.

Continue reading Textbooks Yet Again →

Debates, Government, Left watch, Politics

Commissar Karat in October 1917

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In his opening passage of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx attributed to Hegel (somewhat mistakenly) the idea “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice” and added sardonically that Hegel forgot to add: “First time as tragedy, second time as farce.” He went on to illustrate his comment thus: “Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.”

Marx’s point was simple but profound. The tradition of the dead generations, he claimed, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living: “Just as they [revolutionaries, ‘men’] seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.”

Continue reading Commissar Karat in October 1917 →

Everyday Life, Government, Metropolis

P.S. Mandawli: Manufacturing Crime and Criminals

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Mandawli is a police station area in East Delhi and covers the area I live in. As such it is the field of my ‘ethnography’. The reader may however put the name of any other police station in Delhi – rather India – and the story, I can bet, will read as true as ever. Let Mandawli then be the name of all the dens of YS Dadwal’s men (YSD being the police commissioner Delhi, who famously claimed yesterday that ‘Even in New York women are not safe…’). PC Dadwal also has the distinction of claiming, against the growing feeling of insecurity among Delhi’s denizens, that crime is actually declining in the city! A Jansatta report yesterday, however, cites many ordinary people as saying that they are more scared of the police than of criminals.

17 July 2008: The Times of India (19 July) and other newspapers reported the death of 18-year old Umesh Kumar ‘who was picked up by the police for questioning’ two days ago and who died soon after returning home at night. The incident was of Swaroop Nagar in outer district, Delhi. Umesh did not live to tell his story but his friend, Atul, ‘who too was picked up by the police said: “The police took us to Ibrahimpur police post and started beating Umesh after which he lost consciousness.” Umesh, from all accounts was not a hardened criminal – just one of those whom the police decides to make into a criminal in the long run. Unfortunately for them, he died.

Continue reading P.S. Mandawli: Manufacturing Crime and Criminals →

Media politics, Politics

The Web Will Not Kill Traditional Organising by Michael Connery

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Is technology undermining the much-vaunted community values of Millennials and creating a generation of semi-activists clicking for change on their computers, but ultimately disconnected and disempowered from each other and from the levers of real social change? This is the thesis posited by Sally Kohn, the director of the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change in an op-ed published in the Christian Science Monitor last week: Continue reading The Web Will Not Kill Traditional Organising by Michael Connery →

Centre watch, Empire/ Imperialism, Excavation, Frontiers, Law, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

“Madam, we know you’re leaving. Think wisely before coming back”

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Continue reading “Madam, we know you’re leaving. Think wisely before coming back” →

Debates, Left watch, Right watch

Farewell to our Humid Weimar

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Dear All,

I find it sad that all those who live in India are being sent headlong into a period of turbulence following the unilateral  decision by the so-called Left parties in response to the Indo-US  Nuclear Deal to withdraw support from the UPA government. This decision is not a response to basic issues like the rising cost of living, but in support of the chimera of ‘sovereignty’ in military affairs. It is shameful that parties that continue to call themselves communist should feel no embarassment at all in exhibiting the worst and most pathetic form of militarist nationalism, premised on the maintainance of an obscene Nuclear military policy. In all likelihood, if the government of the day fails  to pass the test of numbers on the floor of parliament, India will head straight for early elections.It will do so entirely because of the ‘Patriots’ on the so called ‘Left’. Continue reading Farewell to our Humid Weimar →

Culture, Debates, Everyday Life, Genders, Identities, Media politics, Sex

When you’re OUT, you’re IN

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Since Gay is in, currently, for the Indian media, Sonali Gulati, film-maker, out lesbian and gay rights activist, knows what it is to be hotly pursued for sound-bites. She has posted on youtube a recorded conversation with a reporter from IBN 7 pressing her for her take on a “lesbian” issue. Her quiet , insistent questioning reduces him to confused gibberish, but more importantly, makes the point that “lesbians” are no more and no less newsworthy than straight people – At one point she asks him, “Agar yeh ek heterosexual couple ke saath ho jaata, tab aap kis se comment lete?”

(If this had happened with a heterosexual couple, then to whom would you have gone for comments?)

Meaning of course, that any and every heterosexual would not be considered “expert” enough to comment on any and every heterosexual issue. The bemused reporter starts all over again with his insane drivel – he simply does not get it. Can she really be giving up an opportunity to appear on television? Naaah.

But go on – listen to Sonali.

Frontiers, Identities, Politics, Right watch

Foreboding

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Five years ago, in an article called “Srinagar, Four Years Later,” Suvir Kaul wrote:

A Ram Mandir is being built at the site of the ancient sun temple at Martand (Mattan). This is not simply an addition to what is already there – it is a deliberate refashioning of Kashmiri Hindu worship to obey the dictates of Hindutva practice. But worst of all are the excessive displays put on ostensibly for the benefit of the Amarnath yatris, but which actually function as a warning to local Kashmiris: all along the route past Pahalgam, and to some extent on the Baltal route, banners and wall-slogans sponsored by the CRPF and the BSF (and occasionally, the Jammu and Kashmir police) welcome the yatris. These units also make available tea and snacks, and announce them as prasad. There is no constitutional separation of temple and state to be found here – the yatris, and those who guard them, are equally, and aggressively, Hindu. [Link]

DISSENT, DEBATE, CREATE