Interview with Sailaj Ravi on people’s movements in Orissa
Sailaj Ravi – poet, critic and social activist based in Cuttack (Orissa)
Radical Notes
JournalAuthor Archive
News from Narayanpatna: Sharanya
Sharanya, a political activist in Orissa on the happenings in Narayanpatna…
An Interview with Prafulla Samantara on movements and state repression in Orissa
Prafulla Samantara, a prominent social activist in Orissa
An Interview with Shivram on movements in Orissa
Shivram, a CPI(ML) leader based in Bhubaneswar (Orissa)
Seminar: “Dismantling Democracy in the University”
VENUE: Hindu College, Delhi University
Session 1 (11 am to 12: 15 pm) – Academics, Politics and the University
Chair : Sunil Dua
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Pothik Ghosh ………………………………………..11 AM to 11. 20 AM
[Editor, Radical Notes (radicalnotes.com)]
Speaker 2: Abhijeet Phartiyal…………….…………………..11. 20 AM to 11. 40 AM
[Correspondence (Group)]
Chair’s comment and Discussion…………………………….11. 40 AM to 12. 15 PM
Tea Break……………………………………………………….12.15 PM to 12. 30 PM
Session 2 (12: 30 PM to 1: 45 PM) – Deconstructing the “semester system”
Chair : P. K. Vijayan
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Harriet Raghunathan …….…………………………12:30 PM to 12: 50 PM
[Department of English, Jesus and Mary College]
Speaker 2: Shomojeet Bhattacharya.…………………………..12: 50 PM to 1. 10 PM
[Department of Economics, Kirorimal College]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………………….1. 10 PM to 1. 45 PM
Lunch Break……………………………………………………….1.45 PM to 2. 15 PM
Session 3 (2: 15 PM to 3: 30 PM) – Education in the Era of Late Capitalism
Chair : Neshat Qaiser
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Speaker 1: Malay Firoz ……………………………………..…..2: 15 PM to 2: 35 PM
[Department of Sociology, Delhi University]
Speaker 2: Ravi Kumar……………………………………..…..2: 35 PM to 2: 55 PM
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………….……….2: 55 PM to 3. 30 PM
Tea Break………………………………………………..……….3: 30 PM to 3: 45 PM
Session 4 (3: 45 PM to 5: 45 PM) – Rethinking Politics in the University
Chair : Paresh Chandra
[Correspondence (Group)]
Speaker 1: Delegate from Disha Students’ Organization
Speaker 2: Delegate from Students’ Federation of India
Speaker 3: Delegate from New Socialist Initiative
Speaker 4: Delegate from All India Students’ Association
Discussion
On People’s Movements and State Repression in Orissa: Lenin Kumar
An interview with Lenin Kumar, an artist, editor of Nishan and political activist based in Bhubaneswar.
On State Repression in Orissa: Biswapriya Kanungo
In Dec 2009-Jan 2010, a Radical Notes-Correspondence team toured Orissa and interviewed many activists and intellectuals in the state. The following interview with Orissa based lawyer and human rights activist, Biswapriya Kanungo is first in the series.
People’s Struggles in Orissa: Bhalachandra Sarangi
CPI(ML) New Democracy’s leader from Orissa, Bhalachandra Sarangi talks about the various movements in Orissa, including Narayanpatna. Presented at a Seminar organised by Campaign Against War on People, Delhi University. (14th December, 2009)
An Interview with Bernard D’Mello (Deputy Editor, EPW) III
Radical Notes’ Pothik Ghosh talks to the Deputy Editor of the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) Bernard D’Mello about the current confrontation between the Indian State and the Maoists.
An Interview with Bernard D’Mello (Deputy Editor, EPW) II
Radical Notes’ Pothik Ghosh talks to the Deputy Editor of the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) Bernard D’Mello about the current confrontation between the Indian State and the Maoists.
An Interview with Bernard D’Mello (Deputy Editor, EPW) I
Radical Notes’ Pothik Ghosh talks to the Deputy Editor of the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) Bernard D’Mello about the current confrontation between the Indian State and the Maoists.
Under the Pretext of Fighting the Maoists: Kavita Krishnan
Central Committee Member of CPI-ML (Liberation), Kavita Krishnan on how the state and corporations are suppressing not only the ‘maoist’ struggle but movements of any kind that are challenging neoliberalism.
State Terrorism in Manipur: Malem Ningthouja
Malem Ningthouja from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (Manipur) talks about the brutality of state repression that the Manipuri people have been suffering.
On the Workers’ Strike at Rico (Gurgaon)
Ajit Kumar Yadav, a worker in Rico Auto, Gurgaon was murdered by goons of the management. Four other workers were shot at and sixty others sustained injuries.
The management had been evading the workers’ demand to form a union for long. A month back sixteen workers were expelled in this regard and others (all 4,800 of them) were prohibited from working for engaging in ‘illegal activities’. Meanwhile, the management hired around 1,000 goons to prevent workers from coming back to work. In addition to this, the management’s goons, with the supervision of the police, brought around 300 workers from the unorganised sector to resume work in the factory. It should be noted here that these workers are not allowed to leave the premises of the factory and there are reports of torture by the goons. The workers sat in peaceful protest outside the main gate, demanding work and their unionisation. On October 19 the goons attacked the protesting workers and murdered Ajit, shot at four others and injured sixty. In response to this, more than 1,00,000 workers from more than 150 factories in Gurgaon participated in the strike on October 20.
The Hindu reported the incident on the 19th as ‘a clash between two groups of workers’. Such an explanation begs the question: Why should there be such solidarity amongst the workers if it was a ‘clash between two groups’? Furthermore, both The Hindu and The Times of India have lamented the fact that production has been affected. Whether it is the Maoist question or the incident at Rico, the media turns to the establishment to create a narrative. To understand this aspect of the media we need to locate its position as an industry in the capitalist system. There is a unity of logic that binds the media to the capitalist state. In times of need, notwithstanding their contradictions, all organs of the capitalist state come together as a whole.
This is nothing new. Workers have time and again asserted their right to determine their conditions of work. Workers’ agitation at the Honda factory in 2005 is not a separate incident. It comes from the same strain for self-determination. In Coimbatore, Pricol workers’ demand for the recognition of their unions is met with pressure from the management to withdraw from the road of struggle and sever ties with ‘Marxist-Leninist’/’Maoist’ forces. The unfortunate death of the Vice President of the Human Resources Development of Pricol Ltd in the workers’ agitation has lead employers and sections of the corporate media to demand a ban on trade union struggles and advocate labour reforms to give employers a free hand. A single day’s tragic incident is now being deliberately sought to be used to prejudice public opinion against the Pricol workers and suppress the truth of the nearly one thousand days of their united and determined struggle. Similarly, in Gorakhpur three activists and one journalist have been arrested for participation in workers’ demands for implementing labour laws.
When we condemn the Indian state’s war against the rural poor politicised by the Maoists, or express solidarity with people’s struggles anywhere, we see things through the prism of geo-political distance that separates us from them. True solidarity however will not exist unless we realize that though there is a distance separating us, and the forms of struggles that others engage in may not be relevant to our own context, the larger questions raised are the same. The struggle for self-determination and true democracy is one of which all of us are a part. A tribal in Chattisgarh faces the state in its most brutal forms, and as we see here, so does the factory worker. And to push it further, the student confronts the same state, may be in a seemingly milder form. Even as the above mentioned events were unfolding elsewhere, a multi-party meeting was organized on October 20 in Delhi University (North Campus) to take up the issue of fee-hike in colleges. The struggle is to ensure that we have a say in the decisions that affect us and to make sure that no decision that goes against the students’ interests goes unchallenged. All these are moments of contradictions when the facade of equality and democracy that the state covers itself with is exposed as a facade and nothing more. At these moments it is our task to make sure that the state does not go unchallenged, and that we recognize that each challenge to the state is part of our own larger struggle.
————————-
Correspondence, as the current members think about it is a political group, using “political” in a very broad sense so as to include all issues, questions and answers that influence our lives. Our ideas and working principles are best described as anti-hegemonic. We run a political magazine, also called Correspondence, of which we have produced one issue, and are working on others. All your responses and correspondences are welcome. Email: submissions.correspondence@gmail.com.
Correspondence Pamphlet No 2: Bad Paper
The Bursting of the Fiction Bubble
Edmond Caldwell
In the early days of the current economic crisis, the Treasury Department demanded from the U.S. Congress a 700 billion-dollar bailout to buy up the “bad paper,” a term for all the junk assets owned by the banks and mortgage companies. Bad paper – the phrase was an evocative one, and the next time I found myself walking past a Barnes & Noble Bookseller, looking through the broad front windows at the stacks of unsold “bestsellers” on the display tables, I couldn’t help but imagine the CEOs of the Big Six publishing corporations scurrying to Washington D.C. to demand their own big slice of bailout pie. After all, who could have more bad paper to unload than Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, the Penguin Group, and Macmillan?
For the complete text:
Correspondence Pamphlet No. 2
Correspondence Pamphlet No 1: Deconstructing ‘Terrorism’
‘All incidents in India that have occurred recently, which go by a blanket name “terrorist attacks,” have been viewed as self-explanatory. A terrorist and his acts don’t need any explanation. A terrorist is like any other professional who is supposed to do what he is trained for. Why does he do that – is not a question to be asked. It is his own “free will” which clashes with others’ free will.’ The old ‘criminal as victim’ argument took into account the fact that though free on surface, in the final analysis, a person is determined by her/his circumstances.We however have stopped using it as though overuse has sucked out wisdom and relevance from the cliché.
For the complete text:
Correspondence Pamphlet No 1
Correspondence – A Magazine for “Exchange of Perceptions of Reality”
A group of students from Delhi has published the first issue of their magazine called Correspondence. The Table of Contents and the editorial are given below. For the pdf version of the magazine CLICK. Please contact the editors for the hardcopies – submissions.correspondence@gmail.com.
Coverpage and Table of Contents
Editorial –Paresh Chandra p.1
On Permanent Revolution –Kumarila
Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution is dialectical to the very core viewing revolution as a continuum embedding the particular in general and appearance in essence, with the latter necessarily getting represented through the former. p.3
Discovering Nuclear Energy for Justifying Bad Deal –Prabir Purkayastha
Not only is nuclear power more expensive, it will also have adverse effects on the entire electricity sector. Going in for huge investments for imported nuclear power plants – three times the cost of similar coal fired units — would mean starving the Indian economy of other investments. p.6
The Art of Naming: Meditations on Queer Activism in Delhi–Akhil Katyal
Queer activism, here and now in Delhi, as I have lived through for the past three years, is composed of varied definitional excursions that are precisely that, definitional excursions, baggy monsters, simplifying technologies that take enormous and complicated raw material, lets say of the morass of human sexuality and try to produce, indeed with success, finished products, peculiarly sexualized individuals, gay or straight. p.10
Q&A with Mahesh Rangarajan: On Ramanujan’s 300 Ramayanas and the Controversy –Paresh Chandra and Bhumika Chauhan
Mahesh Rangarajan, member of faculty of the Department of History, University of Delhi, speaks about Ramanujan’s essay and the protest that followed the decision to include it in the syllabus of a BA Honors course. p.13
Failure, Consumerism and a Counter Strategy – The IP College Protests: an Insider’s Diagnosis — Paresh Chandra
Without the clause of class-consciousness that makes the connection between career and exploitation plain resistance becomes a perverse (the usual) form of consumerism, the commodity bought and consumed is “peace of mind” and the cost is a few days out in the sun. p.16
Changing Class Character of the Campus: New Challenges of the Student-Youth Movement –Abhinav Sinha
To counter the contraction of the space for students’ politics on campus we need to think about a unified student-youth movement which will have equal and free education for all and employment for all as its central demands. Only such a movement will have the strength and potency to achieve such aims. p.19
Beyond the Veil of Identity Politics – Preliminary Explorations through Categories of Caste and Class in Indian society –Ravi Kumar
Identity politics, based on the principle of homogenizations, segregation of social realities into unconnected, autonomous modules, has allowed the expansion of capital, thwarting any possibility of resistance against the system. p.22
Q&A with Lal Khan: On Can Partition Be Undone — Paramita Ghosh
The interview brings out some of the important issues dealt in the book ‘Crisis in the Indian Subcontinent – Partition… Can it be undone?’ along with Khan’s perspective on the political situation and transformation in the subcontinent. p.26
———————–
EDITORIAL: Struggle and Dialogue –Paresh Chandra
It had already been decided that I needed to rework the editorial. Now I have to mention the Delhi blasts, though the addition might seem strained. I was returning from the University when I heard. A friend sent me a message. I had boarded the metro at the University at six and came out at IP in thirty-five minutes. I spent the next half-hour calling friends who were likely to be out. It will sound clichéd but the incident did drive most other thoughts out of my head. Five blasts all over the city and many bombs diffused. Apparently an Islamic outfit took responsibility.
The paranoia that an incident like this creates is huge. Blame is thrown on the police, on the Home Ministry, on Shivraj Patil’s softness on ‘terrorism’. Solution plans fly from all over the place. I distinctly remember how I annoyed I was with the manner in which a RJ kept repeating how such incidents can be averted if we like responsible citizens inform ‘concerned authorities the moment we see unattended objects’. The most interesting solution was proposed by possibly the biggest terrorist in the country—re-invoke POTA. For a moment I bracket out the interests of Hindutva in the re-invocation of the act and concentrate on other aspects. Everybody is bent on treating it as a ‘law and order’ problem. A few decades ago my criticism could have been different (discussions of socio-economic causes of acts of violence have becomes so common that they are not considered serious anymore) but I now feel that mere common sense and experience should be enough to teach us that the problem lies somewhere else. I do not suggest that law and order are not in question, nor am I taking the ‘terrorists-are-also-humans’ stand. I merely wish to point out the fact that stricter laws and greater protection have never ever helped in curbing acts of violence. However I do not wish to go into diatribes against this blindness nor is my agenda to offer an alternative solution (I have none to offer)—I seek to make a different point, or rather I wish to target a different bunch of people.
The situation of the Left in the country is very interesting. If I try to put my finger on the stand of the Left at large on issues like terrorism and communalism I am struck by a sorry realization—there is no stand to pinpoint. The Left is so stuck in the creation of counter-discourses or participation in discourses that are already ideologically compromised that its own discourses cease to exist. Try to locate a few genuine attempts in the country to understand fundamentalism and fundamentalist militancy (to name one issue) from a Left perspective and you will understand what I’m talking about. The ‘mainstream’ left is the busy guardian of bourgeois secularism and the not so mainstream left is busy attacking the mainstream left. When an incident like this one takes place the only thing the Left leaders can do is offer condolence. And because they themselves do not have anything to offer all they can do is try and counter what the Right offers—in this case it will probably be POTA.
* * *
Struggle provides us with what is perhaps our only real chance of continued freedom from reification. It entails the forging of alliances that can help transcend the experiences of fragmented modern existence. The process of changing society is also the most effective manner of transforming our own existence and the only way of bringing about fundamental change is struggle. This magazine is a medium to take forward the idea of struggle. The revivification of struggle (in all its possibilities) needs us to first understand what threatens this idea and then strategise to counter these threats. This magazine is an attempt at doing just that—it will try to bring together counter-hegemonic perspectives on important questions and help provide the sense of community essential for the participants in counter-hegemony. Without this community an idea will hold no bearing on reality—it will become a force only when shared by persons. In this editorial I will lay out some of my thoughts on the situation making some observations regarding problems that I think important.
I was in conversation with a person whom I know to be more than a mere sympathizer of the Left and I am using some of his words when I say that these are depressing times for those people in India who want to believe in the validity of a Left politics, with the organised Left in danger of succumbing completely to the social democratic “Third Way” and the fringe Left more often than not caught in the mires of sectarianisms and adventurisms. It is easy in such circumstances to give in to the lure of consumerism and it becomes compulsive to “enjoy one’s condition”; the easiest thing indeed is to give up the idea of struggle and go out to shop. This consumerism too is not limited to the mall but seeps into and becomes the defining signifier of all actions and social phenomena, even resistance. Trapped in the tri-partite struggle between i) the inertia of a long history of anti-establishment struggle ii) the apparent uselessness of this struggle and iii) the desire to join the system (that one cannot fight) by choosing a career, some call a truce and resistance is chosen as a career option—a symptom of this is the manner in which instead of the Party being a means for struggle, struggle becomes solely a way of “building” the Party (it is important to emphasize the word ‘solely’ because it alone signifies where the problem lies).
We discuss at length the importance of looking at things dialectically. In theory dialectics is something we have a copyright over, but it is hard to maintain it in practise. I do not deny that in concrete political engagements it is not that easy to constantly double check with what’s on paper but to completely lose sight of it is not altogether advisable. I feel that one needs to be vary of this ontological blindness that advertises itself on the name ‘practicality’ and allows not only actions that one would otherwise completely condemn but also disables faculties that the original idea had provided us with. But then we also need to question if the problem is that we understand and do not practise our ideas or whether there is a problem in our understanding of ideas that we call ours. I don’t think the former is possible.
A great sign of decay is the manner in which people are scared of ideas. Doubt is losing its self-reflexivity and is changing into callous lack of trust; conviction is being transformed into prejudice. Both acceptance and rejection lose their Hegelian essence and begin to precede understanding. The process is a vicious circle—because conviction comes before understanding it is shaky, because conviction is set on weak grounds one is afraid of the other’s convictions lest they be stronger and since one cuts communication from the other, one’s own convictions seem unquestioned, and since our own convictions go unquestioned there seems no need to engage with the other’s convictions. A fundamental lesson of dialectical materialism that no idea is completely false and all ideas are only partially true—seems lost.
There is need for a struggle to make struggle more dialogic—dialogue here refers to the capacity to be able to incorporate the other’s voice into one’s own without dominating it; it refers to the removal from language of the violence that destroys the heteroglossic nature of correspondence. Reviving dialogue is one of the most important tasks that face us. We must remember that though internal strife may affect the establishment, fear of revolt and the need to maintain a net profit keeps it together, united against us. On the other hand by keeping a large percentage of the working population unemployed capital makes sure that at all times every worker steps in the market against every other worker. Resistance to the establishment starts off with a huge disadvantage. If we have to counter this disadvantage we cannot allow dialogue to disappear from our interactions with each other, just as we cannot afford a non-dialectical approach unless a skewed and limited picture of reality is what we wish to achieve. Without dialogue neither solidarity nor true criticism can exist. Fear of ideas is a characteristic of hegemonic authority—hegemony has this funny property of being in a constant state of decay. Hegemony is also by definition based on violence and is opposed to dialogue. Resistance on the other hand is a process that survives and disseminates through collective action, solidarity and dialogue.
The preservation of dialogue and a dialectical understanding of things require us to stay in touch with our reality. It is vital that we grasp all that is typical and get rid of all that is superfluous. The commodification of resistance and the concomitant monologising of the space of protest is a sign of the failure of forms of resistance to comprehend the nature of capital. This will indeed be the eventual fate of all forms of resistance that lose what is actually the fundamental link that will allow them to truly engage with capitalist reality, the link with class struggle and the struggle for the interests of the working class. Capital is a result of exploitation—it exists on the production of surplus value and production of surplus value requires labour power. Any struggle as a result, to be a struggle against the system of capital needs to create and preserve its link with the “actual” producers (workers). Capital makes use of various methods to hide this essential logic of its running, to hide this essential fact, the key that has to be grasped to get rid of the chains that bind us. Perceiving the true nature of determination in capitalism would allow us to look through the various illusions that we have to confront each day and this in turn allow the re-establishment of productive ties between fellow beings.
To facilitate the re-establishment of such ties and to allow exchange of perceptions of reality, dialogue is needed. The role of this magazine is to participate in the building of this dialogue—to encourage discussion by actively participating in various discourses and by allowing discussion within its folds is the idea that will underlie its working. It will try to start a dialogue of ideas between individuals, between different organisational streams and also between the reified parts of the same whole that take the form of various disciplines in formal education today. The basic idea is to achieve the true likeness of the elephant and overcome our subjective blindness.
