Radical Notes
Journal
Archive for West Bengal
Posted by Radical Notes July 3, 2007 at 9:37 pm in West Bengal, Agrarian Question, India
Ish Mishra
Machiavelli’s living role model for his Prince, Cardinal Caesar Borgias who subsequently manipulated his ascendance to the papacy of the Roman Church as Alexander VI, “did nothing but deceive the people and found enough opportunities to do so and did it magnificently”. If Machiavelli had to choose a model for his Prince in the contemporary Indian politics, where conquests are not decided by the war of sword but of numbers, he would face a great difficulty, due to abundance of modern Indian Borgias, nevertheless Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee would be a serious contender. The West Bengal Government declared that in the process of “developing the state, the interest of agriculture shall not be compromised and that no land acquisition shall be implemented without the consent of the peasants and the local communities” and next day the chief minister, Mr. Bhattacharjee unleashes the rein of terror on the peasants by ordering Police firing in collusion with the CPI(M) patronized goons, as has been purported by the preliminary CBI inquiry. The philosopher of the European Renaissance had advised the successful Prince to kill quickly and reward gradually. If the political economy of Left Front Government, particularly after the take over by the “Marxist” Nadir - Budhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indicator, the CPI(M) seems to have heeded Machiavellian advices more earnestly than the Renaissance absolutist monarchies did.
The heinous act of killing, wounding and maiming innocent farmers, artisans and agricultural laborers - a crime against humanity - reminds the stories of the gory acts of medieval sadist despots. The Nandigram, that has become a common noun from proper noun due to the brutal repression of the heroic resistance by the farmers of the area against the expropriation of their agricultural land for creating “foreign territories” - the SEZs. It once again witnessed death of 14, protesters and injury to hundreds in police firing aided and abetted by CPI(M)’s lumpen brigade on the14th March 2007 on the orders of the Marxist Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, committed to the “development of West Bengal at any cost”. However, the peasants’ resolve not to be displaced at any cost forced the postmodern Nadirs to step back from their declaration of creating the SEZ for Salim group at any cost. The CPI (M) supremo Prakash Karat has gone all the way out to defend Singur “take over” for the Tata’s “pro-people” car factory and Nandigram atrocities and killings in the name of establishing governance as they don’t want to allow West Bengal into becoming a “Chhattisgarh”! A party refusing to part away with the prefix-Communist from their name despite acting as agents of corporate houses is using the “law-and-order” argument more dubiously than any social democratic party. This is being met by pervasive protest and condemnation, even by its allies and sympathetic intellectuals including the veteran Economist Ashok Mitra. Now Prakash Karat had declared that there would be no land acquisition for SEZ in Nandigram area. This wisdom needed so much of bloodshed and terror. Apart from the loss of lives and causing irreversible harm to the interest of the working people politically and economically, its ideological bankruptcy has made the other imperialist parties and rightwing lumpen elements into heroes. Prakash Karat to counter Advani, reminded of the state engineered Gujarat pogrom by Narendra Modi government in order to defend the repression at Singur and Nandigram. Well Modi and Bhattacharjee, despite opposite ideological declarations and pretensions bear many similarities. Prakash Karat defends the West Bengal Chief Minister as “elected by the people” in the same language as the Hindutva lumpen brigade defends Modi. Both of them take pride in “developing” their respective states with the same formulae as the Corporate led imperialist globalizations seeks to develop the “under-developed” and “developing” countries of the world.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced that there would be no forced acquisition in Nandigram and sent the police to kill the people resisting the land grab. One stark similarity between Kalinganagar and Nandigram is that at both the places people are firmly refusing to be displaced and the agitators were shot dead in a targeted manner. The one difference, which has gone unnoticed, is that Naveen Patnaik shed crocodile tears by announcing a judicial enquiry where as the West Bengal’s self claimed leftist chief minister and the CPI(M)’s leaders went out of way to defend the Police action in the name of law and order. The CPI(M) led left front government, despite opposition by some of the constituent parties of the front, had expressed its determination to go ahead with the plan of creating the SEZs at any cost, and has been forced to make a hasty retreat.
CPI(M) ideologues aided and abetted by its propaganda brigade are justifying the governmental decision in the name of the law and order, using Marxist and Leninist jargons, creating the confusion of the contexts by juxtaposing of 19th century England and early 20th century Russia over 21st century India. Probably for such Marxists of his time Marx had pejoratively said that “thank God! I am not a Marxist”. History never repeats itself. As a philosopher of the Greek antiquity had rightly said that every thing in the world is in continuous state of change and flux and that the only constant is the change itself. History does not repeat itself, it only echoes. The creation of “foreign territories” within the country under the SEZ Act 2005 echoes the creation of fortified enclaves in the costal regions by various - French, Dutch and English East India Companies - in the costal regions of the country. It appears that history has taken a full circle. But much water has flown down the Bay of Bengal. Capitalism and innately linked imperialism has made multiple advances since then. Imperialism in its latest avatar of globalization has become so ubiquitous that now there is no need of any Lord Clive, all the Sujauddaulas have turned into Mir Zafars.
European Renaissance was not the “rebirth” of classical antiquity. “Rebirth” is a myth. It was not the rebirth but the reconstruction of the society with the nostalgic memory of the classical antiquity, according to the needs of the new social forces that had matured in the womb of decaying feudalism. It announced the emergence of a new era which witnessed the emergence of a new species of hero - the hero of finance struggling to get money making included in the circle of virtues, even if on the periphery. This new hero proved to be very smart. In less than 150 years time it became the hero and moved from periphery to centre. The17th century ideologue of this new hero, John Locke declared in unambiguous and categorical terms, “governance is a serious matter; it can be entrusted with only those who have already proved their worth by amassing sufficient wealth.” Their demand for freedom and equality was interpreted as universal equality and liberty and which eventually led to universal franchise and territorial-national universal citizenship and establishment of representative democracies, dictatorship of proletariat and their reversal into capitalism. There have been many insightful presentations and discussions and shall be more on the changing nature of citizenship and its theorization based on the changing nature of the economic base structure and its political superstructure. SEZ is the cheapest and sure-shot technique of the latest stage of the imperialist capitalism leading to the erosions of citizenship rights of people working in and outside these “foreign territories”, which in essence are “Special Exploitation Zone” and its long term possible implications. Also the details of fiscal and revenue implications are beyond the scope of this presentation and constitute the subject matter of separate discussions. The country-wide intensification and radicalization of the resistance against the land grab campaign by the state and corporate nexus for industrialization/SEZ/real estate provides a ray of hope for the anti-imperialist struggles all over the world over and Nandigram has created a precedent by forcing the government to rollback.
Indian parliamentary parties have gone many steps ahead of their colonial predecessors in using the draconian colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894, in the sense that even they did not acquire the agricultural land for private capitalists in the name of “public utility”. But preceded by Kamalnath and Chidambaram, Man Mohan Singh also reiterated his government’s firm determination to go ahead with the SEZ plans at any cost. Seeing his sense of history with gratitude to colonialism for “civilizing” India into a “nation” as revealed by him while being awarded with an honorary doctorate at Oxford University’s University and his World Bank affinity, it is not unexpected. This has provided an opportunity to CPI (M) leaders to shift the blames and devise new methods of the expropriation of agricultural land for national/transnational corporate houses. The Nandigram has taken an initiative and shown the way. There have been reports of peasants’ resistance against SEZ from all the corners. Only future will tell how long and to what extent the peasants struggling for the right to land and livelihood can hold against the formidable nexus of Indian state and the imperialist capital.
Heroic struggle of the peasants of Nandigram and Kalinganagar have challenged and foiled the neo-imperialist strategies of land expropriation by the state-corporate-judiciary nexus and forced a debate upon non-devastating models of development by laying their lives. “Their martyrdom shall not go in vain and let us salute the martyrs of Nandigram and Kalinganagar and resolve to condemn the brutalities of Budhadeb Bhattacharjee and Navin Patnaik governments in no uncertain terms”, said an activist of the Kalinganagar movement. “These local battles would strengthen the international forces seeking human emancipation and an end to exploitation of human by man”.
(A modified version of the article was published in Red Star April 2007)
Posted by Radical Notes June 27, 2007 at 10:20 am in West Bengal, Economy, India
Pothik Ghosh
There was a time when the spectre of communism haunted private property, but times have changed. The spectre of private property haunts communism now. Even as the ‘communist’ government of West Bengal resorted to state terrorism in Nandigram to acquire land from unwilling villagers to jump-start industrialisation for ‘development’, Communist China passed a law that would make right to private property legally enforceable for the first time since the 1949 revolution. The legislation, which is meant to give people a stake in their assets and protect them from a capricious party bureaucracy that has used the proxy of state ownership to dispossess many of them, seems to be a markedly different response to development than that of their CPI(M) comrades in Bengal.
There are, of course, obvious limits to how far the common citizens of China can go with the law. Given the infamous unaccountability of the Chinese state, it’s most likely to be used by its avaricious political elite to legalise its ownership over assets acquired, in the name of the state and public good, by expropriating individual citizens.
Therefore, in terms of the final solution, the responses of the communists of China and West Bengal to the question of ownership have turned out to be not so different after all. The two cases are, however, not strictly comparable. For one, while post-revolutionary China has always been a one-party state, the Left Front has come to power in West Bengal and held on to it by participating in the Indian system of multi-party electoral democracy.
For another, LF-ruled West Bengal has always recognised the legally established form of mixed ownership of property in India. Yet, the vengeance with which the Indian state has often used the principle of eminent domain to dispossess traditional socio-economic communities in order to acquire land for ‘development’ and ‘public good’ emphasises its institutional affinity for the ideology and rhetoric of state socialism. It would, therefore, make perfect sense to historically examine the ’socialist’ discourse on ownership of property.
State ownership cannot truly socialise property because of the way the state structurally is: an alien authority dispensing governance to a passive population. Public ownership of property is thus the ownership of bureaucracies, and ensembles of vested interests. Such institutionalised diminution of public participation by the modern state holds true even in a representative electoral system like India’s.
On the other hand, legally enforceable right to private property, even if it were to exist as a fundamental right, would not lead to a participatory democracy. The dangers that the new Chinese law poses, bears that out. Even as the disintegration of stratified pre-capitalist communities has always led to legalised private property and capitalism, such breakdown has not always yielded by itself even functional democracy.
The link between private property and democracy is much more tenuous than commonly accepted. While the 19th century Prussian model of Junker capitalism - where landlords and companies expropriated the peasantry from above and legalised property so acquired as their own - will certainly not yield democracy; the 19th century US way, where private property was established through the emergence of small-to-medium independent farmers from below, is a case of capitalistic ownership coinciding with the formal democratic project.
It was not without reason that Russian social democrats Plekhanov and Lenin championed the latter, rejected the former (enforced by liberals like Stolypin in Russia), and yet managed to distinguish themselves from the Populists and Narodniks, who opposed Stolypin’s reforms because it destroyed the traditional peasant community. Clearly then, asset redistribution programme was not merely an end in itself for the social democrats. It was of even greater consequence to them precisely because it engendered the possibility of an alternative conception of political power than that embodied by the modern state.
Lenin and his fellow-travellers’ quest, at least till the October Revolution of 1917, was as much socialisation of economic assets as an alternative political structure that was more democratic than any. The reason they envisaged the two together was because they understood the individual’s freedom from the community both as his freedom from the oppressive bonds of the community and from its protection. Their vision was to reconcile the question of individual liberty (rights) with that of communitarian protection (social entitlements). The social democrats knew that only universal empowerment would arm people with the capacity to both facilitate and participate in modern development.
The unfortunate part of the story is that as the movement progressed, the search for an alternative political structure became subordinate to the nature of ownership of property. This was largely because the Bolshevik Revolution, just like other similar Left-led movements that occurred later elsewhere, was forced by the exigencies of modern politics to concentrate on dealing with the might of the pre-revolutionary state and emphasised the seizure of state power as its cardinal goal. As a result, it was rendered incapable of imagining configurations of power outside the framework of the modern state.
The horrors of collectivisation of agriculture in the erstwhile USSR of 1920s must be ascribed to this derailment of political imagination. The alternative cannot, however, be a utopian community of subsistence farmers. Land and capital will have to be consolidated to make both agriculture and the larger socio-economic order more productive and viable. Chinese historian Qin Hui’s is opposed to both the ‘Leftists’, who favour state ownership; and ‘liberalisers’, who are all for privatisation.
In an interview to the New Left Review, the communist dissident has accurately likened the former to Russian Populists and the latter to Stolypin-style liberals. The opposition between the two, as is evident in China and, to a lesser extent, India, is false. They actually complement and fulfil each other. The real issue then is that of finding an alternative political culture and institutional structure, which will drive development through democratic management of the commons.
A modified version of the article was published in The Economic Times
Posted by Radical Notes June 16, 2007 at 11:09 am in West Bengal, Displacement, India
Soumitra Bose
What happened on June 12, 2007 was the most seminal event in the long drawn struggle of the producing forces against religious politics in India.
Shahi Imam of Delhi - the supreme Sunni cleric adjudged in the north of India and in almost all of India among the Sunni Muslims visited Nandigram. This man had maverick and chequered history of jumping boats and turning coats in politics, yet for some reason he is the most revered “institution” among the Muslims. When all faces of the ruling Left front was lost, the “champions of secularism and the poor people and the minorities” - CPM accosted the Imam to make an official visit in Nandigram. The Imam “carried” the “good will and wishes” of the Chief Minister - the infamous Buddha Bhattacharya. He came, were greeted by the local CPM, was chaperoned by the police and ventured into Nandigram to say that the protestors need to back off and the Left front is sincere and harbours all good wishes. He asked for the audience in the local mosque. The mosque was pre-occupied by the notorious Muslim sub-group of the local CPM leadership. The general people were few who frequent the said mosque almost everyday for Namaz/Salat. The moment Imam opened his mouth the local population protested his remarks. The CPM goons openly threatened the people in front of the police and the Imam looked away and kept on ranting his praises to the government. That was un-bearable. The Namazis boycotted the speech- they yelled, ‘if the Imam has to get into politics, why is he not coming as a political leader and why is he coming as an Imam?’ The local believers- the Momens shouted at him that the people of Nandigram has struck a wonderful relation with people of all religions and accused the Imam of trying to play communalism. They questioned the authority of the Imam to use religion for this purpose. Protests gathered storm and the police declined to take up the responsibility of security. The people swelled up and Lo and behold! The body language of the local Muslims and the leadership- the main trio Abu Sufian, Abu Taher, Abdus Samad of the Bhumi Ucched protirodh committee who till yesterday always donned the Islami cap even on battlefronts removed the cap from the head and challenged the Imam. The first sign of dis-illusion. The entire Muslim strong population rose with one voice against any usage of religion in politics.
For the first time the entire Muslim population collectively turned down the Imam’s authority. For the first time the Momens shooed and booed their Imam out! For the very first time the Muslim population shouted that the Imam is meddling communalism! For the very first time the Hindu right reactionary party said that “Imam is trying to divide the Hindu-Muslim unity”! For the very first time Jamiat e ulema e Hind - the Tablighi Jamat , run by the Ulemas rejected any intrusion by their Imam. For the very first time the most fundamentalist Jamat-e-Islam accused Imam of un-authorized activity. For the very first time the “smaller” Imams of entire West Bengal came out openly against the Shahi Imam! Nandigram teaches us people’s unity, people’s struggle. Nandigram teaches us that class struggle is far more strong than any religious underplay. Nandigram teaches us the way people will behave tomorrow. This is not a lesson for West Bengal, but for the whole of Indian sub-continent. Religious equations are always a part of the game plan of imperialists, but united and collective struggle effaces all these ploys. Nandigram teaches us how to be a Bengali, an Indian, an Asian, a citizen of the world.
