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Culture, Debates, Movements, Politics

When Mikhail Bakhtin visited Jantar Mantar Protest: Rashid Ali

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Guest post by RASHID ALI

CJP protest, photo courtesy Salman Ali/ PTI

The Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar went beyond the traditional orotundity of electoral politics. Some political commentators view this through a biological optic, turning the ‘cockroach’ into a metaphor for resilience due to its ability to survive nuclear radiation. This immediately echoes Salman Rushdie’s famous line: ‘we are radioactive with history and politics.’ Others leaned toward literary history, pointing to the infamous insect in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis.’ Written over a century ago, the novel opens with Gregor Samsa waking up transformed into a giant bug – or Ungeziefer, as Kafka originally wrote in German. Ultimately, the plot tracks Samsa’s desperate struggle against alienation, sudden dehumanisation and systemic social exclusion. Continue reading When Mikhail Bakhtin visited Jantar Mantar Protest: Rashid Ali →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Debates

We should be there: The Left and the Anna moment

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My head has been in a whirl the past few days with a single question – how do we on ‘the Left’ manage so unerringly to be exactly where ‘the people’ are not, time after time?

At this moment I don’t mean the organized Left, for the Left parties  have been cautious about criticizing  the current upsurge; they strongly defended the right to democratic protest when Anna Hazare and his colleagues were arrested, and now have launched a Third Front initiative on the issue of corruption and the Lokpal Bill; the students’ front of CPI (ML), AISA, has been organizing militantly on the issue for a very long time now, and is very much part of the campaign.

I mean the few hundreds who form my own community, the people with whom I have organized protests and run campaigns and sat on dharna and drafted petitions;  struggled against communal violence and sexual harassment,  for queer freedom and workers’ rights, against the nuclear bomb and nuclear energy, in support of reservations and against the moves in our universities to hold up appointments to reserved posts. Many of these people I know personally, some are among my closest friends, and many more I know as part of the broad Left/secular non-party tendency in the country’s politics, where I feel most at home.

Continue reading We should be there: The Left and the Anna moment →