Radical Notes
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Archive for September, 2008
Posted by Radical Notes September 25, 2008 at 2:19 am in Communalism, Orissa
Satyabrata
On August 24, two policemen came and informed a Christian dominated hamlet (comprising of around 50 families out of which 32 were Christians) that 6 ‘Hindus’ along with ‘Swami’ Lakshmananda Saraswati had been killed. They asked the villagers not to go to the church. The majority of the villagers are cattle-bearers with little land. They decided to obey the order/advice but asked the police for protection which was denied on the grounds that there were not adequate forces for that.
In the evening, about 50 men, with fire torches in their hands came to the village shouting Hindu communal slogans, like ‘Hindu-Hindu-Bhai-Bhai’ (All Hindus are brothers), etc. They stopped in the midst of the village and shouted. There was a dilemma - “should we burn the houses of the Christians first or their church?” To put it more accurately, “should we destroy them or their symbol first?” They decided to destroy the symbol first; the church was to be destroyed.
That symbol played the function of the authority, this they probably understood. On hearing that the church was to be burnt and then their houses would be the target, the villagers panicked. They went to the Hindu houses of their village and asked for help. They wanted their Hindu brethren to take care of their costly possessions, which they handed them over. They ran and hid themselves behind the bushes. The Hindu stalwarts then came to the village and lit the houses aflame. The Christians were silent spectators.
There was a family of four brothers. One of them was a paralytic who couldn’t be rescued from his house. He was shouting at the Hindu fundamentalists desperately, “Throw me out of this place and do whatever you like.” They drenched him in petrol and… One of his brothers watched this from behind the bushes, shocked!
With the houses burning, enough light emanated. The villagers from behind the bushes could see the faces of over 50 ‘Hindus’. They recognized some of them. They were from a nearby village, the place where the slain Swami practiced his “philanthropy” and “education”, which his followers were demonstrating that day.
With the light also came the fear of being noticed by the killer mob. Fear forced them to leave the bushes and go to the nearby jungles. They did so. The mother of the four brothers, aged about 70, couldn’t run. She was kept behind a tree seated and was asked not to move. The rest of the villagers ran into the village. Their struggle continued. The Hindu fundamentalists had got some clue about them and entered the forest to chase them. The villagers couldn’t go to the nearby ‘main-road’, nor could they stay in the jungle. They decided to go to Bhubaneswar, Orissa’s capital. They succeeded in doing so after about a journey of 300km. They reached Bhubaneswar on the 28th evening and took shelter in the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) from the 29th morning.
I went to interact with them a day later. They refused to tell me anything. Then I noticed a priest who had come from Andhra Pradesh. I went and sat beside him to know what had happened. One of the brothers was speaking to the priest. The priest asked, “Why didn’t you confront these people. You were 32 families, which means you were at least 60 men.” The brother replied, “Most men have migrated. Majority among our families present in the village were women and children”. Another man then came and sat beside me. He introduced himself as an army man guarding the Indian borders, and was one of the four brothers, too. He came directly to YMCA when he got the news.
***
“What do you want now?
“This Government has failed us.”
“Which Government? The Central or State Government?”
“The State Government.”
“But the Central Government also knows what is happening and we have also approached it.”
“Then we want a President Rule.”
“That is in the hands of the Central Government.”
“Then it is war between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and we want ‘our people’ to be ‘on our side’.”
“What do you mean by ‘our people’?”
He took a glance at me and answered, “The Christians”.
Now, I could make out why they were not revealing anything to me. Probably, they wanted to know who I was - was I from among ‘them’ or was I from among ‘us’. The Father was of course one of ‘us’.
There were several such villages that have had such bitter experiences.
The author is a second year bachelor student in an engineering college in Bhubaneshwar.
Posted by Radical Notes September 23, 2008 at 1:29 pm in Call for papers
Council for Social Development, New Delhi
Structural-Cultural Moorings of Transformative Politics in India
- Call for papers
20-21 January 2009
Evaluating the mode of production debate in India during the 1970s, Alice Thorner (1982) had noted an unwillingness to deal with the cultural aspects. Mainstream academic discourse today has swung to the other extreme of an unwillingness to deal with the political economy aspect, except for largely empiricist economic analyses. There is a felt need today to move-away from these unilateral approaches and follow a synthetic approach of marrying the concerns of political economy/ accumulation, on the one hand with studies on culture and identity, on the other. This would entail viewing social reality at the inter-junctions of accumulation and identity, structure and agency, enabling collective action for social transformation and social development. We need analyses that would be sensitive to both the specificities of the particular ‘social and spatial structures of accumulation’ on the one hand and their totality on the other. We invite papers that could deal with structural-cultural categories such as class, caste, gender, national formations, tribe, community, environment, etc. that could plausibly constitute the social and political mobilisational bases of transformative political articulations and assertions in our country. We also welcome theoretical contributions attempting to link various kinds of social oppressions and finding the principal determinant within a social totality and identifying the principal task of transformative political movements.
Tentatively, the seminar will have the following sessions:
1) Theoretical session
2) Class as the social basis of transformative politics
3) National formations as the social basis of transformative politics
4) Caste, tribe and community as the social bases of transformative politics
5) Gender as the social basis of transformative politics
6) Human-nature relationship as the axis of transformative politics
Please send abstracts of about 1000 words to: Dr. Gilbert Sebastian, Associate Fellow, Council for Social Development, 53 Lodhi Estate, New Delhi – 110 003, e-mail: gilbert_sebs@yahoo.co.in and gilbert.s@rediffmail.com latest by 15 December 2008 and full papers (around 25 pages) by 5 January 2009.
A selection of papers from the seminar would be published in an edited volume.
Posted by Radical Notes September 22, 2008 at 4:20 am in Technology, Science
Norbert Wiener
from Norbert Wiener (1948/1961) Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. pp.26-29
It has long been clear to me that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performance of motors or solenoids. With the aid of strain gauges or similar agencies to read the performance of these motor organs and to report, to “feed back,” to the central control system as an artificial kinesthetic sense, we are already in a position to construct artificial machines of almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the development of the technique of radar in the Second World War.
I have said that this new development has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the “fifth freedom,” that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.
Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present if I say that the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the “dark satanic mills,” was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery. There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.
The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling. To arrive at this society, we need a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle, which, if the best comes to the best, may be on the plane of ideas, and otherwise - who knows? I thus felt it my duty to pass on my information and understanding of the position to those who have an active interest in the conditions and the future of labor, that is, to the labor unions. I did manage to make contact with one or two persons high up in the CIO, and from them I received a very intelligent and sympathetic hearing. Further than these individuals, neither I nor any of them was able to go. It was their opinion, as it had been my previous observation and information, both in the United States and in England, that the labor unions and the labor movement are in the hands of a highly limited personnel, thoroughly well trained in the specialized problems of shop stewardship and disputes concerning wages and conditions of work, and totally unprepared to enter into the larger political, technical, sociological, and economic questions which concern the very existence of labor. The reasons for this are easy enough to see: the labor union official generally comes from the exacting life of a workman into the exacting life of an administrator without any opportunity for a broader training; and for those who have this training, a union career is not generally inviting; nor, quite naturally, are the unions receptive to such people.
Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable, We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces, technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments. They belong to the age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the hands of the most irresponsible and most venal of our engineers. The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation, As we have seen, there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.
Posted by Radical Notes September 21, 2008 at 10:25 am in Pakistan, Literature, Obituary
Arjumand Ara
Kisi aur des ki or ko, suna hai Faraz chala gaya.
sabhi dukh samet ke she’hr ke, sabhi qarz utaar ke she’hr ke.
(They say that Faraz has left for some other land,
Taking with him all the sorrow of the city, paying away all its debts.)
The long history of political turbulence in Pakistan produced a long list of writers, poets and artists who raised their voice against oppressive regimes. In exchange, they suffered regular threats, imprisonment, torture and exile. Prominent writers and artists like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Habib Jalib, Ahmed Faraz and Ustad Daman were hunted and haunted by the establishment. Finding the political milieu unbearable, these writers had to go on self-exile as mark of protest. Through their poetry and other writings, Faiz, Jalib, Faraz and others exposed the exploitative and suppressive nature of the Pakistani state, plight of the ordinary citizen, helplessness of writers and artists, imperialist interference and their agencies, and the environment of political suffocation borne out of pruned civil rights, truncated laws and gagging of public opinion.
However, as one may be proud of this legacy of protest and defiance, it is sad to note that there have been writers and poets who accepted positions and power as rewards for keeping silence or lending support to the rulers. But then, this is not a phenomenon unique to Pakistan. Hegemony will always find courtesans and court-poets for legitimacy.
Most of the Urdu poets and writers from Pakistan have always been politically responsive, unlike their counterparts in India who chose to remain apolitical/neutral, especially after independence. This was perhaps because of linguistic-communal introversion that Urdu-speakers suffered in India. On the other hand, the Pakistani writers and artists had to express themselves in a long-term civil war-type situation characterised by a continuous political instability, lack of social reform, a continuing grip of landed oligarchies and tremendous neo-colonial pressure on the Pakistani political economy. Therefore, we see a galaxy of radical writers/poets associated with the Progressive Movement, which included poets like Faiz, Jalib and Faraz. With them the Progressive Movement flourished in Pakistan, while in India we saw a decline with leading poets like Ali Sardar Jafri reciting poem in praise of Lotus (while accepting Gnanpith award) and applauding Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a great poet.
To trace the legacy of anti-hegemonic resistance we see that Faiz was jailed for a year after being implicated in the notorious Rawalpindi conspiracy case. Habib Jalib was imprisoned several times. To silence him, other tactics were also tried, e.g., his name was selected for Adamji Award, the highest literary award of Pakistan. Habib Jalib refused to accept it, saying that he wrote for people, not for Adamji. Ahmed Faraz, best known Progressive poet after Faiz and Jalib, was first jailed in June 1977 during the Zulfiqaar Bhutto government for reciting his poem Peshawar Qatilon (Professional Killers!) in Islamabad in which he challenged the military rulers, saying: Peshawar qatilon tum sipahi nahin (Soldiers you are not, you professional assassins).
As he always found himself at the left of the establishment (right from the Ayub regime, to Yahya’s, Bhutto’s and down to Musharraf’s), Faraz was always viewed by the establishment as a rebel. In 1978 he was exiled from Sindh (by the Zia regime), receiving orders for his exile in a Mushaira where he had just recited his famous poem Muhaasira (The Siege). He felt so greatly dejected and heartbroken that he left the country and did not return for six years. Asked once, when Zia was still in power, why he had left Pakistan, he replied that he was in Karachi when the order expelling him from the province of Sindh was served. ‘I said to myself, ‘What have we come to when a man is exiled from his own land! Today, it is Karachi, tomorrow it will be Peshawar, the day after, Lahore. That is when I decided to leave.’ Faraz also returned the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him for his literary achievements in 2004. He returned the award in 2006 after becoming disenchanted with the government and its policies. He said in a statement, “My conscience will not forgive me if I remained a silent spectator of the sad happenings around us. The least I can do is to let the dictatorship know where it stands in the eyes of the concerned citizens whose fundamental rights have been usurped. I am doing this by returning the Hilal-e-Imtiaz (civil) forthwith and refuse to associate myself in any way with the regime…”
No one could match the wit of Faraz. When asked why he had kept the Hilal-e Imtiaz for two years, he replied jokingly, “Do you think it laid eggs in those two years?”
He could actually outwit his opponents without losing his sense of humour. An anecdote gained much popularity. One day Faraz heard loud banging at his door. He rose hurriedly to open it, only to see four or five bearded men in white skullcaps. “Can you recite the Kalima?” one of them asked. “Why, has it changed?” Faraz inquired.
These are just a few examples of how he could give a humorous turn to a grave situation or outwit his opponents. Kishwar Naheed, writing a letter to ailing Faraz (in The Hindu, New Delhi on 24 August 2008, just a day earlier when Faraz died), narrates several such incidents. Once at a mushaira held on the occasion of International Women’s Day to honour protesting women. Faraz was the chief guest. When he started reciting his poetry, a fiery Tahira Abdullah objected, saying, ‘we want poetry on women.’ Faraz abruptly replied, “But all my poetry is about women.”
With the passing away of Faraz (August 25, 2008) in Islamabad, a true inheritor of Faiz’s mantle has died. As noted Pakistani journalist Khalid Hasan puts: ‘Like Faiz, he suffered prison and lived in exile during the dark days of military rule in the 1980s. Like Faiz, he is very popular, especially among the youth, and nobody wrote with more intensity about love than Faraz. He gained fame as a young man…. Few poets have had more of their work set to music and performed by the great singers of the age than Faraz.’
Faraz is considered one of the best poets of Pakistan. He was born in Nowshera on January 14, 1931. His real name was Syed Ahmad Shah. The Pashto-speaking Faraz learned and studied Persian and Urdu at the Peshawar University, where he also taught later. He headed the Islamabad-based National Book Foundation for several years. In 1976, he became the founding Director General (Later Chairman) of Pakistan Academy of Letters. He wrote 13 books and all put together came as Shehr-e Sukhan aarasta hai (A City of Poetry is Adorned), his latest publication so far.
Arjumand Ara is a lecturer in the Department of Urdu, Delhi University.
Posted by Radical Notes September 21, 2008 at 12:07 am in Counter-Terrorism, State Terrorism, India
Shabnam Hashmi, Satya Sivaraman, Manisha Sethi, Tanweer Fazal, Arshad Alam & Pallavi Deka
A team comprising activists, academicians and journalists visited the site of the police operation against alleged terrorists staying in an apartment in Jamia Nagar in the afternoon of 20.09.2008 (Saturday). Two alleged terrorists Atif and Sajid, along with Mohan Chand Sharma, an inspector of the Delhi Police’s Special Cell died in the operation while a third alleged terrorist was arrested.
On the basis of our interactions with the local residents, eye witnesses and the reports which have appeared in the media, we would like to pose the following questions:
1) It has been widely reported (and not refuted by the Police) that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar. All the five youth living in the apartment submitted to the Delhi police their personal details, including permanent address, driving license details, address of the house they previously stayed in, all of which were found to be accurate.
Is it conceivable that the alleged kingpin behind the terrorist Indian Mujahideen outfit would have wanted to undergo a police verification- for whatever purpose- just a week after the Ahmedabad blasts and a month before the bombings in Delhi?
2) The four-storeyed house L-18 in Jamia Nagar, where the alleged terrorists were staying, has only one access point, through the stair case, which is covered by an iron grill. It is impossible to leave the house except from the staircase. By all reports, the staircase was taken over by the Special Cell and/ or other agencies during the counter-terror operation. The house, indeed the entire block, was cordoned off at the time of the operation.
How then was it then possible, as claimed by the police, for two alleged terrorists to escape the premises during the police operation?
3) The media has quoted ‘police sources’ as having informed them that the Special Cell was fully aware about the presence of dreaded terrorists, involved in the bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, staying in the apartment that was raided.
Why was the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, a veteran of dozens of encounter operations, the only officer in the operation not wearing a bullet proof vest? Was this due to over-confidence or is there something else to his mysterious death during the operation? Will the forensic report of the bullets that killed Inspector Sharma be made public?
4) There are reports that towards the end of the counter-terror operation, some policemen climbed on the roof of L-18 and fired several rounds in the air. Other policemen were seen breaking windows and even throwing flower pots to the ground from flats adjacent or opposite to L-18
Why was the police firing in the air and why did it indulge in destruction of property around L-18 after the encounter?
5) The police officials claim that an AK-47 and pistols were recovered from L-18.
What was the weapon that killed Inspector Sharma? Was the AK-47 used at all and by whom? Going by some reports that have appeared (see ‘Times of India’, 20.09.08), the AK-47s have been used by the police only. Is it not strange that alleged terrorists did not use a more deadly and sophisticated weapon like the AK-47, which they purportedly possessed, preferring to use pistols?
We feel that there are far too many loose ends in the current story of the police encounter at L-18 in Jamia Nagar. We demand that a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident be initiated at the earliest to answer the above questions as also any other ones that arise from the contradictions of the case.
Posted by Radical Notes September 21, 2008 at 12:06 am in Media, Counter-Terrorism, State Terrorism, India
Yousuf Saeed
I have titled this message the ‘media circus’, although I am actually referring to this morning’s (September 20) so-called encounter killing of two young people referred to as ‘terrorists’ in L-8 Batla House, Jamia Nagar, by the Delhi police. I call it media circus because that’s what I think it really is, like many more such incidents.
The incident happened in my neighbourhood, about 150 meters from my house. So I have the opportunity to see how things are turning up. I had gone out of the area for some work while the incident was taking place around 11 am, but found it impossible to reach back home 2 hours later, because the road for about 1 and a half kilometre (on both sides) was completely blocked, not by the police vehicles, but by the parked OB vans of the countless TV channels, some of which I never heard of before. Each of these vehicles had its generators on, and thick video cables jetting out of them for several meters to the other end where the cameraperson and the excited anchor were shouting how two terrorists have been killed in the fierce encounter. Most local people are surprised at the speed with which the TV crews arrived here and in such large number. Apparently, the Delhi Police had already told a section of the press they are going for a raid in Batla House, based on the suspect Abu Bashir’s tip-off (I heard this from a anchor on Times NOW channel, although Police chief Dadwal is now denying there is any link with Abu Bashir), but they didn’t obviously say it was going to be an encounter. Its strange that the local residents got to know about the incident only after the two people had been killed – many in fact learnt it from the Aaj-tak channel. They claim they heard only the police firing and no gunshots from inside the flat, which the police claim have injured two of their constables.
Most of you watching news TV in your homes may have already heard the cacophony of the TV anchors, each trying to be shriller than the other to prove that the local members of the Indian Mujahideen have been killed. They now seem to have memorized their lines on this issue well, since they have to repeat the same thing again and again. The graphics, animated logos, crawling tickers, and dramatic music/soundtrack to go with such coverage are always ready in the cans to be used at short notice. A cameraman running towards Batla House is nibbling at a burger while he holds on to a camera in his other hand. I saw two members of a TV crew outside the Holy Family Hospital (where the injured policemen have been taken) fiercely fight about which camera angle would look best for a sound byte. Everything looks as if planned and part of the usual business. The cops are happily allowing the media to climb any wall to get the best shot while they beat the local rickshaw pullers to leave the roads clean. The message has got across loud and clear: we told you – Batla House is a haven of terrorists.
But many things sound fishy. I’ve been hearing a lot of angry conversations in the neighbourhood: people are asking that if the police had only planned a simple raid (which they did 2 days ago in Zakir Nagar and Abul Fazl Enclave too), why did they have to bring battalions of police and encounter specialists with AK-56 and other deadly looking guns (that I myself saw) in advance. And why is the media called in even before the residents are told. Of course the fact the this happens in the month of Ramzan, on a Friday, and near a large mosque where people were going to gather in large numbers later for prayers, sounds just too predictable and clichéd for anyone’s imagination. The local people claim that it was a stage-managed encounter. However, their claim is less likely to be taken seriously after the death of Inspector Sharma.
I didn’t find a single local resident who is not fed up with this oft-repeated image of Jamia Nagar as harbouring terrorists. But none of the channels I saw aired the public angst against their portrayal.
To be honest, one shouldn’t deny that the Batla House area has some criminal and anti-social elements, just as Darya Ganj or Shahadra or Govindpuri would have. But most local residents believe that for Jamia to become a haven of such criminal elements, the local police and land-mafia are equally responsible. Jamia area is one of the rare localities of Delhi where the rule of law doesn’t apply in most spheres. The land mafia openly indulges in illegal construction; no rules of traffic apply here, the condition of civic amenities is abysmal. Illegal shops, factories (many with child labour) and businesses operate here actively with police connivance. The local politicians (MLA, councillors) are actually part of the problem rather than the solution. There is a full-scale illegal ISBT (bus stand) running in Batla House’s backyard to bring hundreds of migrants everyday from small towns of UP (you can see the police openly accepting bribe from its operators any day).
There is no question of sealing whatever the heck business you may run here, and most places stink with heaps of garbage everywhere. There are no RWAs or citizen’s initiatives to discuss the problems. It is truly a manufactured ghetto of Delhi – why don’t all these problems happen in Lajpat Nagar or Kalkaji? I am positive that the authorities are aware that criminals (or what they call terrorists) exist here. But they deliberately allow them to thrive here – never to be touched in the normal/peaceful times – keep them for the right time. It is as if Batla House is a laboratory or breeding ground where things are allowed to grow by providing all the required ingredients and safety. The fruits are plucked only when they are ripe (or required). So today, they simply came to gather the fruit they had sown, and made a big exhibition of it by calling the media. The local people, frightened that the next encounter may happen in their house, simply squirm and hide in their personal ghettos.
In all this, a big responsibility lies with the media, and I am yet to come across bold and honest reporters who are ready to go beyond the obvious and investigate the truth – not simply repeat what is told to them by the authorities or their channel bosses.
Posted by Radical Notes September 14, 2008 at 11:02 pm in Book Announcement
Pranab Kanti Basu, Globalisation - An Anti-Text, A Local View, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2008. ISBN(HB): 978-81-89833-53-4, Rs: 450; ISBN(PB): 978-81-89833-54-1, Rs: 225. Contact: aakarbooks@gmail.com
The focus of the book is on the international economic organisations: the World Bank, IMF and the WTO. In some sense one can also use this as common person’s guide to the logic of international economic organisations in the age of globalisation.
The age of globalisation is examined from a critical Marxist perspective. It weaves a fascinating and novel view of our age with a serious revaluation of the theory and practice of Marxism today. In spite of the density of the ideas, prior exposure of the reader to the theoretical approaches on which these ideas are based is not necessary. Knowledge of economics which is the stuff of globalisation is also not demanded. Wherever necessary, theoretical issues and concepts have been explained with adequate illustrations.
The book builds on the critique of globalisation to argue for a particular vision of the alternative course of development: nirman aur sangharsh (construction and struggle). This position advocates that a meaningful struggle against the suffocating order of global capital can take shape only if it is supplemented with a positive programme of construction (both material and moral) through community effort. This conception of struggle is rooted in the ideas of nationalists like Tagore and Gandhi as much as it is in the ideas of the Marxist revolutionary, Shankar Guhar Neogi.
Pranab Kanti Basu is presently on the faculty of the Department of Economics and Politics, Visva-Bharati, where he teaches Marxian Economics. Previously published books are both in Bengali. The first was a primer in Economic theory published by the West Bengal State Book Board. The second was on “A postmodern look at Feudalism”. His recent publications are “Political Economy of Land Grab”, Economic and Political Weekly (42:14), Mumbai, 2007; “Globalisation and Primitive Capital Accumulation”, Radical Notes, May, 2007; “Problematising Space”, Socialist Perspective (35:1-2) Kolkata, 2008. These articles expand on themes that are presented in this book. Abiding interest is in what has been termed New Economics Criticism the intersection of economics, literary criticism and philosophy. This book belongs to that genre.
Posted by Radical Notes September 14, 2008 at 10:48 pm in Book Announcement
Randhir Singh, Marxism, Socialism, Indian Politics: A View From the Left, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2008. ISBN(HB): 978-81-89833-55-8, Price: Rs: 650 Contact: aakarbooks@gmail.com
The collapse of Soviet Union and its ‘actually existing socialism’ has had the consequence of further disorienting the already much disoriented communist movement in the country. There is a continuing aversion to a Marxist understanding of this collapse, and the socialist project itself stands abandoned. Ritualistic noises apart, there is a refusal to think in Marxist terms, which is a prerequisite of principled revolutionary politics and fruitful tactical resilience. The lack of a revolutionary strategic orientation has meant reformist, pragmatic or opportunistic practices on the terrain of bourgeois politics. These are among the issues of major concern in Prof. Randhir Singh’s writings put together in this volume. He writes of the need ‘to think as Marx would have thought in your place’ (Engels), to recover the ‘Marxism of Karl Marx’ and its concept of socialism. It is his argument that its failure in the Soviet Union notwithstanding, the socialist project remains necessary and possible, and viewed as an epochal transition, what is on the agenda in the present day ‘underdeveloped’, ‘over-developed’ or ‘developing’ societies is better visualized as ‘socialism-oriented development’.
Randhir Singh, a distinguished teacher and former Professor of Political Theory, University of Delhi is the author of Crisis of Socialism – Notes in Defense of a Commitment; Reason, Revolution and Political Theory, Five Lectures in Marxist Mode and Of Marxism and Indian Politics. He has been associated with the communist movement since 1939. Of this writings, Harry Magdoff, editor, Monthly Review, has said: ‘I admire the solidity of your analysis as well as the firmness of your commitment’
Posted by Pratyush Chandra September 1, 2008 at 12:05 am in Marxism, India, Politics
Prominent sociologist Dipankar Gupta’s cynical article in The Times of India (Aug 30, 2008) is itself an expression of middle-class disenchantments, which he talks about. And Buddhadeb with his frank anti-worker statements is undoubtedly in his brigade. In his anti-communist verbosity displayed in the article Gupta does exactly what he criticises. For him “the poor has never revolted”; it is the leadership, which everywhere rises in her name. Ironically, even to deny that the poor has ever revolted, it is a middle class intellectual like Gupta who has the privilege to proclaim this! Obviously in his discourse “they” will remain as “they” - “Why They Don’t Revolt”. So why should we accept his privileged denial about the poor(wo)man’s revolt, if he censures us for accepting the socialists’ claim that s/he does revolt, on the ground that they are elites?
According to Gupta, since the leaders came from the middle class or elite families the revolutions couldn’t be popular. This shows his ignorance about political processes, including class processes. Obviously he cannot be faulted for this, the disciplinarian divide that characterises the bourgeois academia does not require him to see things holistically (that’s the job of a generaliser, not an expert) - he is after all a sociologist! How can he understand that revolts/revolutions are conjunctural - their character is not simply determined by the membership of their leadership rather by the societal stage in which they occur? How can he understand that the process of class-ification, not the fixed descriptive sociological classificatory pigeonholes, allows revolutionary intellectual organicity to individuals from diverse backgrounds? How can he understand that revolution is not only a moment but also a process which comprises many “guerrilla fights” against “the encroachments of capital” before and after the “revolutionary moment” passes away? This was Marx’s understanding of the “revolution in permanence” or Mao’s notion of a “continuous revolution” or Lenin’s “uninterrupted revolution”.
Obviously within the commonsensical notion of revolution, for which the OMs (Official Marxists, as Kosambi characterised them) are most responsible, the 1949 event in China paints into insignificance the Hunan peasants’ self-organisation and struggle (as marvellously described by Mao in his Hunan Report) or the processes that constituted “Fanshen”, “Shenfan” and the Cultural Revolution. Within this framework a revolution loses its processual character, and is reduced to a moment and even a few elite figures. But why should we expect Dipankar Gupta to go beyond common sense? After all he is a “middle class” solipsist who sees the world made in his image - his class dominating everywhere, doing everything.
In fact, we can find a deep resonance between Gupta’s analysis and India’s chief security advisor MK Narayanan’s recent McCarthyist indictment of intellectuals. Both experts (in their respective fields) attempt to reduce movements to agencies, however the former does it as an expression of his academic cynicism, while MK Narayanan to find scapegoats to curb grassroots militancy. But both converge at a dangerous moment.
Yes, Prof Gupta, you are right - that really hurts!
