Sunday, November 15, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance in India
This was a draft for a speech to be delivered at Toronto, during the South Asian Peoples' Unity Conference, 23-26 April, 2009. I spoke only about SEZs, and I talked about Lalgarh, not covered here).
Comrades and friends,
I am glad that I can speak here, in a gathering that includes Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and Nepalis. In South Asia, internationalism is a very necessary sentiment, with most of our governments doing their best to turn our attention away from class conflicts to patriotism and hatred of the enemy outside the border, or the internal enemy (the Muslim in India, the Tamil in Sri Lanka). Yet the neoliberal attack has been a devastating one for us, our economies, especially for our workers and peasants. The Indian economy, touted as far better than the economies of the neighbouring countries, gives ample evidence of the destructions caused by neoliberalism. The overall attacks of neoliberalism have been disastrous, and I can speak about only one small corner of it. Today, we read that we had a socialist economy that had slowed down our growth. Well, what we really had was a state-aided capitalist development, necessary because Indian capitalism did not have enough resources and did not want the profits to go to foreign capital. But it is true, that certain concessions had to be given to workers and peasants, for a complex of reasons. In the name of getting rid of outmoded socialism, those few gains of the toilers are being steadily destroyed. I could provide statistics. Let me instead make just a few points. Malaria has been staging a big come back. Famines are back and the general PDS has been replaced by targeted PDS that leaves a large part of the population in total food insecurity. Fighting the dead socialist past has meant reducing the tax burden of the rich and the super rich, (one estimate of such cuts is, a loss of 1.7 trillion rupees due to tax cuts for SEZs).
The years 1989-91 saw a disoriented left, shaken by the crisis and collapse of the bureaucratized regimes of East Europe, the Tien An Men Square massacre, and the crisis of the USSR, failing to resist this turn strongly. While a number of mass organizations led by left parties did come together, to resist the onset of neoliberalism, this was brought to a halt by the end of 1992 using a line of political argument that is often called popular frontism. Resisting fascism after the Babri Masjid destruction, we were told, means prioritizing secularism over anti-neoliberalism. This ended up in disorienting the workers and peasants and could not halt the growth of Hindutva forces, who were the dominant partners in the NDA, ruling till 2004.
The 2004 elections saw not only a decline of the BJP votes, but defeats for many of the most fervent advocates of neoliberalism, whether the TDP in Andhra or the Congress in Madhya Pradesh. The left, not so much for what it did but for what it said – that it would oppose neoliberalism – received its highest ever number of seats in the parliament: 61 out of 542. After the elections, however, once more in the name of stopping fascism, the left agreed to support a Congress led government, the United Progressive Alliance, and it finally broke with the UPA not over its economic policies, but over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
One aspect of the neoliberal offensive in the present decade has been the push for Special Economic Zones or SEZs. This has three significant dimensions for India’s working people, and the environment. Ever since globalization began, there has been a clamour for changes in labour laws, so that hiring and firing can be a smooth process. This is supposed to help the workers too. Resistance by trade unions and the left parties has made it difficult to enforce as ‘”radical” a set of changes as the employers would like. SEZs are one way of tackling that.
The name and the concept were borrowed directly from the Chinese.
An SEZ is a development zone with state guarantee for the infrastructure, a series of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives, removal of bureaucratic hassles. The SEZ will be a duty free enclave, treated as foreign territory for the purposes of trade operations and duties and tariffs. The state government must commit that the area of the proposed SEZ is free from environmental restrictions, that water, electricity and other services would be provided as required, that the units would be given full exemption in electricity duty and tax on sale of electricity for self generated and purchased power; that there would a wide range of exemption of state level taxes on the supply of goods from Domestic Tariff Area to SEZ units; and that the units will be declared a Public Utility Service under Industrial Disputes Act, which makes calling a strike all but impossible. The union government will allow 100% Foreign Direct Investment, massive income tax benefit for any block of 10 years in 15 years, exemption from Service Tax/Central Sales Tax; and granting a series of further facilities. According to government propaganda, the 130 SEZs notified so far will provide an additional 17,43,530 jobs. In fact, with the exception of SEZs in the IT sector, basically there will be, and is being, a transfer of jobs from industries outside the SEZs. Relatively better paid workers lose the jobs, and the same job then migrates to the SEZ, where there is greater exploitation, no union rights, and often oppression comparable with early industrialization. The violence at Gurgaon, where a CEO was killed, was widely reported, especially in the English language press, which is the voice of India’s ruling class itself. But the background is, trade unionism is practically banned, trade union activists are beaten up, in fact on that day, in the name of negotiation the workers leaders were being beaten up, and when the news went out to the massed workers outside this inflamed them.
An added dimension is the employment of women at terrible wages in the SEZs. Nirmala Banerjee’s studies show that women workers are willing to put up with worse conditions, because many of them feel they will not be working all their lives. They are trying to save up money for a dowry, and are therefore willing to put up with the additional burden. Employers’ unwritten conditions for hiring women workers often include the terms that they have to be young and unmarried. Marriage or pregnancy often leads to immediate sacking.
It also means taking over land from peasants. To give you one example, in West Bengal, thousands of industrial units have shut down over the years. This land, in what has often become prime urban area, is being redesignated as land for housing, fuelling the housing boom till recently. On the other hand, the SEZ Act specifies that unless it is a single item SEZ, its size must be at least 1000 hectares. So agrarian land is being targeted. To take another example, the government is not concerned about helping peasants to shift to organic farming, nor is it interested in resisting Genetically Modified seeds etc. But it has included agriculture among its list of SEZ industries. And we have Reliance Fresh announcing that it wants to set up its SEZ for organic farming, which will then be marketed. This also ties up with the shift to monopoly in retail. The aims of the Indian and foreign large retail concerns, whether Relaince or Wal Mart, add up to a target of about 20% of the retail market within the next decade. So from production to distribution through these monopolies will mean a tremendous loss of jobs. Yet the government of India in its various websites keeps issuing assurances that SEZs will lead to the creation of millions of new jobs.
The BJP-led government started the SEZs, and immediately began giving away land across the country at throwaway prices to big industrial houses. Critics were silenced by the refrain: China had done the same in the 1980s, look at it now. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government pursued the same policy.
I want to talk about West Bengal, not because that is the only place where there has been such attempt at land take over, nor because it is worse there than elsewhere, but because it is a tragedy that a left front government has been pursuing the policy there.
It is possible to mention a whole series of efforts at taking over agrarian land. Rajarhat New Town is coming up on agrarian land taken over at a pittance. And if you look at websites, you can see wealthy locals and NRIs being invited there.
The first large scale resistance came in Singur. The Tatas wanted to set up a private sector enterprise to build the $2000 US nano. But they are not ordinary mortals like you or me. They chose prime agricultural land at Singur.
* The government must procure the land for them. This will cost it Rs 140 crores. But the Tatas will
pay only Rs 20 crores, after five years.
* They will pay no stamp duty.
* They must have a contiguous plot of 997 acres (almost 400 hectares, or 40 lakh square metres). No
Indian car factory has anything approaching this area. (Even Tata Motors's giant Pune factory has only 188acres, including housing for employees.)
* The factory proper, said the Tatas, will have a built-up area of only 1.5 lakh sq m, or under 4
percent of the land acquired.
* The land must be fenced off and protests suppressed. The Tatas mendaciously accused their
"competitors" of fomenting the protests, but couldn't name them when challenged.
That's not all.
* The Tatas demanded "compensation" for "sacrificing" the 16 percent excise duty exemption
offered by Uttarakhand for locating the car factory.
* This means "upfront infrastructural assistance" worth Rs 160 crore on a Rs 1,000-crore project.
Besides, the hyped-up "Rs 1 lakh car" will probably cost a fair bit more. It be must be "cross-
subsidised."
Therefore the government also gifted the Tatas 250 acre further land in Rajarhat New Town and Bhangar.
According to the government, Singur has poor land, identified as capable of producing only one crop a year. In fact, development of irrigation, road networks, and land reforms have combined to produce a multi-crop area here. The government used a 19th century colonial era act that allows the government to take away agricultural land for a compensation in cash, and for public need. In Singur, the “public need” was to give land at throwaway price to the Tatas. The total drain on the state exchequer was estimated to be several hundred crore rupees. The motor car factory is not a labour intensive factory. It was to come up by displacing not only peasants who, willingly or unwillingly, were going to be given cash compensation, but also share-croppers, agricultural labourers, transporters who moved agricultural products, and a range of people who were not going to be compensated at all. The peasants were not anti-development. Rather, they wanted development to suit them. In 2006 a small plot of land of as little as 5 cottas could encourage a sharecropper to send his kids to school nourishing an aspiration for a better future. This was what was brutally destroyed on 2 December 2006 through massive violence, even though despite all government and CPI(M) efforts, peasants in half the area had refused to even take the compensation cheques. Resistance continued. So did state and party violence. On 8 December, Tapasi Malik, a young woman (18) leader of the resistance struggle, was strangled, and then burnt to death. The CPI(M) in India, and some intellectuals in the US, claimed that Tapasi’s father and brother had killed her (PD 7 May, counterpunch). After a protracted fight, including a campaign to have not the state criminal investigation department but a central body, the Central Bureau of Investigation, look into the murder case, a CPI(M) leader and a CPI(M) activist were arrested. A lower court has found them guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment, but the case is going on in a higher court.
Peasant resistance also created a major upset. In the rural self government bodies’ elections, the district was won by the rightwing opposition Trinamul Congress, as its leader Mamata Banerjee had supported the peasants. Banerjee had been a partner in the BJP led coalition that had initiated the SEZ projects in India, so her role is purely opportunistic. But that she changed positions shows the degree of popular anger at the land acquisition policy. And in the end, the Tatas pulled out. But an adamant government refuses to hand the land back to the peasants.
Singur was followed by bigger plans. A huge SEZ was to be set up in Nandigram, in East Medinipur district. A traditionally strong left base, Nandigram also has a record of militant fighting. On December 29, 2006, Lakshman Seth, the CPI(M) strong man of Haldia, a nearby town, held a public meeting where he announced that land would be taken for a chemical hub, to be set up by the Salim group of Indonesia. They are not any ordinary group, but cronies of Suharto, and accomplices in the mass murder of communists in Indonesia in 1965. For this SEZ and associated work, the total area to be acquired was to be just under 18547 acres. Over 15,000 families would have to be evicted. 137 schools (mostly primary, but also some secondary), and 3 health care units were to be shut down. 16,652 water bodies would be filled up.
To resist this, Nandigram peasants dug up roads, cut down wooden bridges, and prevented government personnel from coming into the areas between January and March. There were clashes, and some local CPI(M) leaders, attempting to fire on peasants, were counter attacked. One of them was killed and his house was burnt. A large number of CPI(M) supporters left the area, claiming they were unsafe. The CPI(M) retaliated by organizing an economic blockade of Nandigram. CPI(M) camps on the road to Nandigram searched vehicles. Peasants set up a committee, the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee(land eviction resistance committee). Between 11 and 14 march they were sending telegrams and appeals saying they feared an attack. On the 14th, police and CPI(M) goons attacked, killing at least 14. Hundreds were injured. Some of us went there in a relief team. We saw attempts at resistance, but no trace of “outsider” Maoist guerillas, who, according to the government, were fomenting trouble.
Finally, in April the government stated that an SEZ would not be built in Nandigram, but they refused to pay any compensation for those killed, injured and raped on March 14. No attempts were made to arrest and punish the guilty. So called peace talks were held, but the BUPC was never called for peace talks at the state level. The CPI(M) claimed that the BUPC had ejected 3500 of its supporters from Nandigram area. But civil liberties groups trying to meet those people were not allowed to do so. The APDR estimated that the real number of people ejected were around 300. From late October the CPI(M) again stepped up armed threats, culminating in a mass attack in early November. On 6 November, several villages were torched. Two days prior to this, CPI(M) all India leader Brinda Karat had called for public violence on the people of Nandigram. By 7 November 25000 people had been rendered homeless. Medha Patkar, travelling in a car that also had one of my colleagues, Prof. Amit Bhattacharya, was not allowed to proceed to Nandigram.
Nandigram was taken back by the CPI(M), but at a high price. In East Medinipur too, the party lost in the rural elections. More important, the left political culture in the state received a severe jolt. On 14 November, between 60,000 and 100,000 people took part in a citizens’ demonstration condemning the party-state violence in Nandigram. For the first time, this was a demonstration not called by any political party.
The environmental dimensions of SEZs are less discussed, because the position of all mainstream political parties is a contemptuous one towards environment. Broadly, there are three kinds of impacts that SEZ can have on access to water for the people in the SEZ area. First would be due to the diversion of water for use within the SEZ. Second impact would be the impact of release of effluents from the SEZ. Here the situation at locations like Ankleshwar in Gujarat and Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, among scores of other places is illustrative. At these places, the release of untreated effluents from the industrial estates has created a hell for the residents of the area. Thirdly, the conversion of land to SEZ would mean destruction of groundwater recharge systems. SEZs even in relatively small areas can pump out huge quantity of water, drying up the wells of the surrounding area.
In the 13 000 ha Mundra SEZ in Kutch in Gujarat, 3000 ha area is covered by Mangroves, which are already being destroyed for the SEZ. Mangroves are also facing destruction at a number of other locations in Gujarat due to industrial expansion along the coast in Kutch, Saurashtra and South Gujarat. Potentially the largest SEZ in the country, the Mundra SEZ will destroy fisheries and livelihood of large number of fisherfolk and they are protesting against the SEZ.
By now, across India, over a hundred have died resisting the SEZs. The tragedy is that the major traditional left parties have swung to wholesale acceptance of SEZs where they are in power. This gives rise to a major problem. Unless a left wing response can be developed, it seems likely that the right wing may benefit, as Mamata Banerjee is showing in West Bengal.
New (and not-so-new) realities of our time
(Presentation at the Left Forum, New York, 18 April, 2009)
I am glad to be able to speak here, at the Left Forum, about the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. What is not so new, of course, is the attempt by socialists to be internationalists. That is indeed one of our oldest and proudest traditions. In 1871, the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association received a letter from Calcutta, which wanted to open a branch of the International there. The identity of the author of the letter is not known. But the response proposed by Marx included a suggestion that Indians be included, indicating that the correspondent from Calcutta was probably a European. As late as the 1920s and 1930s, militant socialists from India or other colonial and semi-colonial countries could only keep sporadic contact with their fellow fighters in the developed countries, or with the Soviet Union. An international effort meant chiefly the work of people and organizations in Europe and North America, with perhaps Japan added. Asia and Latin America, to say nothing of most of Africa, were very marginally represented. Capitalism itself has changed that. And at the same time it has made closest international collaboration ever more imperative.
The newest reality we face right now is of course, that there is a massive crisis of capitalism. This was supposed to be finished. With 1991, history had come to an end. I remember all too well (as who does not, who was old enough to be a leftist in 1991 and still remains one) the queues of repentant leftists who were busy acknowledging that it had all been an illusion. Those who refused to give up their Marxist politics were derisively labeled “dinosaur”. Capitalism had supposedly triumphed, something proved by the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes calling themselves socialist. For a number of years, only small groups, barring in a few countries, were willing to stand up and call themselves revolutionary socialists or Marxists. Small numbers were willing to argue that capitalism would again face crises. That is of course what a part of the new reality is about. The initial attempts at saying that the system faced no trouble, only the rotten elements were being weeded out, had to be given up by September 2008. Not only that, but for the first time in two decades, bourgeois political leaders across the world were talking about policies that meant ending the neoliberal consensus. When the Republicans call Obama socialist for talking about some degree of state control, and the accusation does not cut much ice with US public opinion, we need to realize that there have indeed been great changes. If the US President can talk about state control, we are much better placed today, to talk about control over the economy by working people, and get a hearing, than we were for a very long time.
What is not so new is the continuing reality of imperialism. In the happy utopias of free trade theorists, there is no war, only people peaceably trading. There, the hidden hand of the market ensures that the aggregate of millions of different, self-interested decisions appears, magically, as in everyone’s best interests. States are hardly visible either: they just protect property and enforce contracts. What an irony then that the most enthusiastic free marketeers are also the most warlike. The free market, pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was about as peaceful, as Joseph Stiglitz, no socialist, said, as the Opium Wars, which too imposed the “free market” on China. The so-called Washington Consensus meant that debtor countries trying to borrow from the Bank were forced to comply with the structural adjustment policies set by the IMF. The resulting cuts in government spending, the dismantling of tariff restrictions on imports and a shift in agricultural policy away from food production towards exportable cash crops, the earnings from which could be used to service the debts, have resulted in a global tide of starvation, misery and environmental damage. Countries already desperately poor are forced to service debt they will never be able to repay and hand their economies over the international banks. It has been estimated that the South had paid to the North, by 1997, via debt servicing, 6 Marshall plans. By 2006 this had gone up to 20 Marshall Plans. The ultimate irony is that aid and cancellation of debt is ever more tied to ‘good governance’ preconditions when the main cause of bad government was and is the same structural adjustment policies associated with debt.
There have been arguments to the effect that imperialism in its classical sense is of little or no use in understanding the current realities of the world. While it is true that modern imperialism is not presently in a stage of warlike rivalry between national states, this does not mean that inter-imperialist competition could not in the future lead to such rivalry. Though in recent periods competition between capitalist powers has been institutionalized within bodies such as the G8, the crisis of 2008 saw big business run to national governments for protection. Globalization has meant the growing importance of trade between local branches of the one hundred transnational corporations that dominate global trade. This means that protectionist pressures (and therefore imperial rivalries) are lessened because raising trade barriers would also damage branches of transnational companies located within the protectionist state’s own borders. Conflicts of interest between transnationals are also negotiated within bodies such as the G8/G20, the IMF or the World Trade Organisation (WTO). There are 63,000 transnational corporations worldwide, with 690,000 foreign affiliates. Three quarters of them are based in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Ninety-nine of the 100 largest transnational corporations are from the industrialized countries. 51 out of the world’s 100 largest economies are transnationals. This shows clearly the domination of the same small group of countries, with the TNCs closely linked to the governments of those countries. In the last analysis the power of transnationals in organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank comes not from market dominance but from the ability of their states to protect their interests, if necessary, by military force. We have seen, in connection with the Iraq War, how powerful imperialist states have an agenda that meets the requirements of many of those transnationals. Indeed, ultimately market dominance and state power are closely linked, thereby providing a major contradiction of capitalist globalization.
So we now have a global crisis of capitalism, with even the political representatives of the ruling classes are compelled to call for state action. And we are doing so, when a new generation has grown up, that is not burdened by memories of past defeats and that cannot be halted or defused by pointing the finger at a now non-existent Soviet Union as the only alternative. We are in a period when the degeneration or collapse of many of the old left parties are no longer the sole reality. In Nepal, a Maoist party combined armed struggles, mass struggles and elections with great flexibility. Certainly, they have problems, the biggest being that Nepal is a small country, very poor, and no party can hope to transform it rapidly, while precisely such an expectation will be building up among the masses. In country after country in South and Central America, a left swing is visible. Not all these are equally radical, but this swing reflects a profound stirring at the base.
But a part of the new reality is also the tragedy that in many countries, the younger generation comes to these militant struggles without adequate revolutionary continuity. It is only the sectarian, for whom if his or her organization does not lead the revolution then the revolution should be postponed, that the collapse and degeneration of left wing parties can be a cause of glee, an opportunity to say I told you so. In his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Victor Serge tells us what a disaster the break with our historic continuity can be. The Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, a Trotskyist who has accidentally survived the three purge trials, is reflecting on the Bolshevik Party. “each hieroglyphic was human: a name, a human face with changing expressions, a voice, a portion of living history…. If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thousands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory, now perhaps reflected only in his own mind as in a thousand-faceted mirror”. The revolutionary party, not as a bureaucratic machine, as Cold Warriors, above all in the USA, have constantly warned us, but rather, as the collective brain of the vanguard of the working class.
In its humble way, the encyclopedia that is the starting point of our gathering here today, will be seeking to contribute to overcoming that disaster. For decades, we have had aggressive right wing attacks on the ideas of revolution, even of enlightenment and progress. We have had Schapiro, Pipes, Figes, (for example) tell us that the Russian Revolution was nothing but a coup, a plan for a dictatorship. We have had Furet, Simon Schama and others tell us that terror and mindless violence was built into the very origins of the French Revolution. We have had historians like Ramachandra Guha or Rudrangshu Mukherjee in my country debunking the communists in the cause of neoliberalism. The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest is, or can be, a very important tool for radical activists. It restores, in a form accessible for those who cannot go through piles of books, the memory of revolutions and struggles. For example, David Mandel and Paul le Blanc respond to the campaigns against the Russian Revolution. Soma Marik explores the historiography of the French Revolution and the popular aspirations behind the Terror. And the encyclopedia has an ecumenical position. The perspectives from which the essays are written are many, not one. Not monolithism, but an engagement between anarchism, environmentalism, feminism, radical nationalism, and of course a very plural Marxism is what marks these volumes. And it is, above all, truly international. All too often we find that a Eurocentric bias is built heavily into histories written in the North. This is not the case here. Struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America are extensively covered.
I am particularly happy to be speaking at the Left Forum about this, for the forum, too, is an attempt to bring together the diverse voices of the left. To strengthen political consciousness, notably class consciousness, these are important initiatives. Certainly, mass radical movements are the essential ingredients. But movements do not automatically generate class consciousness to the full extent, nor do workers get the full picture of the totality of world capitalist oppression and exploitation simply through workplace experience. Certainly, a book, any book, including the encyclopedia, cannot take the place of the living collective brain. But this too is the product of a living collective, reflecting on our new realities while writing about the past, and it can have good value for working class militants and social movement activists.
From the late 1930s to the 1970s, for about forty years, there was a rich left wing political culture in much of India, certainly in West Bengal, where I live and work. Bengal/West Bengal had seen general strikes of hundreds of thousands of jute workers. Bengal had a massive radical student upsurge, not once but four times within this period – demanding the release of political prisoners in the late 1930s, sparking off the post-war upsurge of 1945-47, fighting, in East Bengal/East Pakistan for the Bengali language, and fighting for food and for democratic education in West Bengal, between the 1950s and the late 1960s. India’s most massive women’s movement was developed there, in the 1940s, where the Mahila Atma Raksha Samity mobilized over 40,000 members by 1944, combating a government and capitalist made famine that left half a million dead in Bengal in 1943. In 1946, at the crest of the post-war upsurge, P.C. Joshi, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, told a group of prominent intellectuals of Calcutta that for the next generation, the best intellectuals of Bengal would be Communist, as indeed they were. The splits in the communist movement, the smashing of the original Naxalbari movement, the class battles of the 1970s and 1980s that saw major defeats by the working class, the orthodoxy that silenced women’s autonomy within the communist movement, and the rise of aggressive communalism, all combined to weaken and partially to break the continuity. But new struggles are breaking out there too. Struggles against Special Economic Zones have taken place, in West Bengal, in Gujarat, in Uttar Pradesh. Struggles have developed against communalism, going beyond merely contesting it in the parliamentary terrain. Young people are contesting the destruction of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. As the participants in such struggles try to make sense of the world, rather than just their corner of it, they will be looking at history. This Encyclopedia will be making its own contribution to all such attempts at recomposition of ideologies and political and organizational outlooks.
I am glad to be able to speak here, at the Left Forum, about the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. What is not so new, of course, is the attempt by socialists to be internationalists. That is indeed one of our oldest and proudest traditions. In 1871, the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association received a letter from Calcutta, which wanted to open a branch of the International there. The identity of the author of the letter is not known. But the response proposed by Marx included a suggestion that Indians be included, indicating that the correspondent from Calcutta was probably a European. As late as the 1920s and 1930s, militant socialists from India or other colonial and semi-colonial countries could only keep sporadic contact with their fellow fighters in the developed countries, or with the Soviet Union. An international effort meant chiefly the work of people and organizations in Europe and North America, with perhaps Japan added. Asia and Latin America, to say nothing of most of Africa, were very marginally represented. Capitalism itself has changed that. And at the same time it has made closest international collaboration ever more imperative.
The newest reality we face right now is of course, that there is a massive crisis of capitalism. This was supposed to be finished. With 1991, history had come to an end. I remember all too well (as who does not, who was old enough to be a leftist in 1991 and still remains one) the queues of repentant leftists who were busy acknowledging that it had all been an illusion. Those who refused to give up their Marxist politics were derisively labeled “dinosaur”. Capitalism had supposedly triumphed, something proved by the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes calling themselves socialist. For a number of years, only small groups, barring in a few countries, were willing to stand up and call themselves revolutionary socialists or Marxists. Small numbers were willing to argue that capitalism would again face crises. That is of course what a part of the new reality is about. The initial attempts at saying that the system faced no trouble, only the rotten elements were being weeded out, had to be given up by September 2008. Not only that, but for the first time in two decades, bourgeois political leaders across the world were talking about policies that meant ending the neoliberal consensus. When the Republicans call Obama socialist for talking about some degree of state control, and the accusation does not cut much ice with US public opinion, we need to realize that there have indeed been great changes. If the US President can talk about state control, we are much better placed today, to talk about control over the economy by working people, and get a hearing, than we were for a very long time.
What is not so new is the continuing reality of imperialism. In the happy utopias of free trade theorists, there is no war, only people peaceably trading. There, the hidden hand of the market ensures that the aggregate of millions of different, self-interested decisions appears, magically, as in everyone’s best interests. States are hardly visible either: they just protect property and enforce contracts. What an irony then that the most enthusiastic free marketeers are also the most warlike. The free market, pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was about as peaceful, as Joseph Stiglitz, no socialist, said, as the Opium Wars, which too imposed the “free market” on China. The so-called Washington Consensus meant that debtor countries trying to borrow from the Bank were forced to comply with the structural adjustment policies set by the IMF. The resulting cuts in government spending, the dismantling of tariff restrictions on imports and a shift in agricultural policy away from food production towards exportable cash crops, the earnings from which could be used to service the debts, have resulted in a global tide of starvation, misery and environmental damage. Countries already desperately poor are forced to service debt they will never be able to repay and hand their economies over the international banks. It has been estimated that the South had paid to the North, by 1997, via debt servicing, 6 Marshall plans. By 2006 this had gone up to 20 Marshall Plans. The ultimate irony is that aid and cancellation of debt is ever more tied to ‘good governance’ preconditions when the main cause of bad government was and is the same structural adjustment policies associated with debt.
There have been arguments to the effect that imperialism in its classical sense is of little or no use in understanding the current realities of the world. While it is true that modern imperialism is not presently in a stage of warlike rivalry between national states, this does not mean that inter-imperialist competition could not in the future lead to such rivalry. Though in recent periods competition between capitalist powers has been institutionalized within bodies such as the G8, the crisis of 2008 saw big business run to national governments for protection. Globalization has meant the growing importance of trade between local branches of the one hundred transnational corporations that dominate global trade. This means that protectionist pressures (and therefore imperial rivalries) are lessened because raising trade barriers would also damage branches of transnational companies located within the protectionist state’s own borders. Conflicts of interest between transnationals are also negotiated within bodies such as the G8/G20, the IMF or the World Trade Organisation (WTO). There are 63,000 transnational corporations worldwide, with 690,000 foreign affiliates. Three quarters of them are based in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Ninety-nine of the 100 largest transnational corporations are from the industrialized countries. 51 out of the world’s 100 largest economies are transnationals. This shows clearly the domination of the same small group of countries, with the TNCs closely linked to the governments of those countries. In the last analysis the power of transnationals in organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank comes not from market dominance but from the ability of their states to protect their interests, if necessary, by military force. We have seen, in connection with the Iraq War, how powerful imperialist states have an agenda that meets the requirements of many of those transnationals. Indeed, ultimately market dominance and state power are closely linked, thereby providing a major contradiction of capitalist globalization.
So we now have a global crisis of capitalism, with even the political representatives of the ruling classes are compelled to call for state action. And we are doing so, when a new generation has grown up, that is not burdened by memories of past defeats and that cannot be halted or defused by pointing the finger at a now non-existent Soviet Union as the only alternative. We are in a period when the degeneration or collapse of many of the old left parties are no longer the sole reality. In Nepal, a Maoist party combined armed struggles, mass struggles and elections with great flexibility. Certainly, they have problems, the biggest being that Nepal is a small country, very poor, and no party can hope to transform it rapidly, while precisely such an expectation will be building up among the masses. In country after country in South and Central America, a left swing is visible. Not all these are equally radical, but this swing reflects a profound stirring at the base.
But a part of the new reality is also the tragedy that in many countries, the younger generation comes to these militant struggles without adequate revolutionary continuity. It is only the sectarian, for whom if his or her organization does not lead the revolution then the revolution should be postponed, that the collapse and degeneration of left wing parties can be a cause of glee, an opportunity to say I told you so. In his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Victor Serge tells us what a disaster the break with our historic continuity can be. The Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, a Trotskyist who has accidentally survived the three purge trials, is reflecting on the Bolshevik Party. “each hieroglyphic was human: a name, a human face with changing expressions, a voice, a portion of living history…. If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thousands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory, now perhaps reflected only in his own mind as in a thousand-faceted mirror”. The revolutionary party, not as a bureaucratic machine, as Cold Warriors, above all in the USA, have constantly warned us, but rather, as the collective brain of the vanguard of the working class.
In its humble way, the encyclopedia that is the starting point of our gathering here today, will be seeking to contribute to overcoming that disaster. For decades, we have had aggressive right wing attacks on the ideas of revolution, even of enlightenment and progress. We have had Schapiro, Pipes, Figes, (for example) tell us that the Russian Revolution was nothing but a coup, a plan for a dictatorship. We have had Furet, Simon Schama and others tell us that terror and mindless violence was built into the very origins of the French Revolution. We have had historians like Ramachandra Guha or Rudrangshu Mukherjee in my country debunking the communists in the cause of neoliberalism. The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest is, or can be, a very important tool for radical activists. It restores, in a form accessible for those who cannot go through piles of books, the memory of revolutions and struggles. For example, David Mandel and Paul le Blanc respond to the campaigns against the Russian Revolution. Soma Marik explores the historiography of the French Revolution and the popular aspirations behind the Terror. And the encyclopedia has an ecumenical position. The perspectives from which the essays are written are many, not one. Not monolithism, but an engagement between anarchism, environmentalism, feminism, radical nationalism, and of course a very plural Marxism is what marks these volumes. And it is, above all, truly international. All too often we find that a Eurocentric bias is built heavily into histories written in the North. This is not the case here. Struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America are extensively covered.
I am particularly happy to be speaking at the Left Forum about this, for the forum, too, is an attempt to bring together the diverse voices of the left. To strengthen political consciousness, notably class consciousness, these are important initiatives. Certainly, mass radical movements are the essential ingredients. But movements do not automatically generate class consciousness to the full extent, nor do workers get the full picture of the totality of world capitalist oppression and exploitation simply through workplace experience. Certainly, a book, any book, including the encyclopedia, cannot take the place of the living collective brain. But this too is the product of a living collective, reflecting on our new realities while writing about the past, and it can have good value for working class militants and social movement activists.
From the late 1930s to the 1970s, for about forty years, there was a rich left wing political culture in much of India, certainly in West Bengal, where I live and work. Bengal/West Bengal had seen general strikes of hundreds of thousands of jute workers. Bengal had a massive radical student upsurge, not once but four times within this period – demanding the release of political prisoners in the late 1930s, sparking off the post-war upsurge of 1945-47, fighting, in East Bengal/East Pakistan for the Bengali language, and fighting for food and for democratic education in West Bengal, between the 1950s and the late 1960s. India’s most massive women’s movement was developed there, in the 1940s, where the Mahila Atma Raksha Samity mobilized over 40,000 members by 1944, combating a government and capitalist made famine that left half a million dead in Bengal in 1943. In 1946, at the crest of the post-war upsurge, P.C. Joshi, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, told a group of prominent intellectuals of Calcutta that for the next generation, the best intellectuals of Bengal would be Communist, as indeed they were. The splits in the communist movement, the smashing of the original Naxalbari movement, the class battles of the 1970s and 1980s that saw major defeats by the working class, the orthodoxy that silenced women’s autonomy within the communist movement, and the rise of aggressive communalism, all combined to weaken and partially to break the continuity. But new struggles are breaking out there too. Struggles against Special Economic Zones have taken place, in West Bengal, in Gujarat, in Uttar Pradesh. Struggles have developed against communalism, going beyond merely contesting it in the parliamentary terrain. Young people are contesting the destruction of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. As the participants in such struggles try to make sense of the world, rather than just their corner of it, they will be looking at history. This Encyclopedia will be making its own contribution to all such attempts at recomposition of ideologies and political and organizational outlooks.
Communalism and Indian History
(Text of a talk given at the University of Pittsburgh in April 2009)
Communalism is the term used in India, and more generally throughout South Asia, to denote the politics of religious sectarianism. Communal politics in India and Pakistan are premised on one fundamental assumption: that India is a society fractured into two overarching religious communities – Hindus and Muslims. These communities are not only supposed to be separate and distinct, but also irreconcilably opposed. Their cultures, values, social practices and beliefs have little in common. Their histories are histories of discord, of mutual hostility, hatred, conflict and battles for domination. The boundaries of the communities are categorically drawn by a century of mutual antagonism.
This is not a matter of one academic perception contesting another. Two incidents from the past quarter century should warn that it goes well beyond that. Between 1987 and 1992, the Bharatiya Janata Party, affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, and allied to other constituents of the Sangh’s network of organizations like the Viswa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, campaigned for the destruction of a four and a half century old mosque on the spurious claim that it had been built by destroying a temple on the exact spot where Rama, a mythic hero, had been born. This campaign was the centerpiece of their struggle for power. Flouting court orders and constitutional obligations, on 6th December 1992 they did gather a massive mob, and with a provincial government controlled by them, they had no difficulty in destroying the mosque. This campaign moved the BJP, a party that in 1984 had a handful of members in the Indian parliament, to the centre stage, and riding its Hindutva wave, by the second half of the 1990s it was in power as part of a rigthtwing coalition.
In 2002, some unidentified people set fire to a coach in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, Gujarat province. A number of kar sevaks, or Hindutva volunteers to build the Rama temple at Ayodhya, were killed in the fire. Within 24 hours, a systematic pogrom broke out. Using voter lists and sales tax records, houses and shops of Muslims were attacked. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets were issued, showing weeks of advance planning. A report of how Hindu women had been dragged into a Madarsa (Muslim educational institution) and raped before being killed was reported (the Press council of India later reported that it was a false news). Using these techniques, over 2000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands forced into camps for months. A very larger number of Muslim women were gang raped.
There was a great similarity between Nazi racism and this communal politics. When one enraged Jewish youth shot and killed a Nazi in France, Hitler and Goebbels unleashed the krsytallnacht. The same logic was used by the Hindutva brigades. Every Indian Muslim was held responsible for the crimes committed at Godhra, supposedly by some Muslims. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, an RSS man, declared that the pogroms were merely Newton’s third Law.
Communal politics relies above all on a historical narrative to gain legitimacy in the public domain. So the struggle over history is one of the vital struggles in present day India and the battle for secularism and democracy. It is significant that whenever the RSS and its affiliates have been close to power in any province, or the county as a whole, radical and secular historians have been among their principal ideological targets. While India has a good many very accomplished radical economists, sociologists or political scientists, they have never been so directly targeted. The RSs campaigns have indeed been international, as when Romila Thapar’s appointment in 2004 as the First holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South by the library of Congress was met by a ferocious campaign, including an online petition to bloc her and large volumes of hate mail.
So we need to trace the history of communal historiography in some detail. British colonial rulers were the first in the field, and they operated in a number of ways. There were two currents of British writings about India – the Anglicists or the Utilitarians, and the Orientalists. James Mill, the Utilitarian, attempted to justify British rule by presenting the early period of Indian history as rude and barbarous. He denied that ancient India had produced anything of lasting social or cultural value. For example, he denied that Aryabhata had produced significant mathematics, denied that zero and the positional numbering system came from Indian mathematics. He wrote that the Hindu, like the Eunuch, excels in the quality of the slave. And he proceeded to divide Indian history into three periods – the Hindu period, the Muslim period and the British period. The other school, the Orientalists, presented a romanticized picture of a great Indian past, ruined by racial intermixing between Aryan Hindus and Semitic Muslims. Colonial administrators, such as Sir Henry Elliott, wanted to respond to the rising demands for civil liberties by producing histories that showed how blood-stained was Muslim rule in india, so that the Hindus would accept British rule as good. Elliott made his purpose explicit in his introduction to the book The History of India as Told By its Own Historians. He selected those narratives that would create an image of a murderous Islamic horde, an image that also suited the viewpoint of 19th century Christian conquerors, steeped since the Crusades in an anti-Islamic standpoint. Other British administrators followed similar lines, fixing these voices from the past that showed Hindus and Muslims as antagonists, particularly after the revolt of 1857, in which Hindus and Muslims did unite to try and overthrown British rule.
Emergent Indian nationalism had different possible strategies. But I am going to describe only one – the one that would eventually give rise to Hindutva.
The British ridicuked the Hindus as cowardly, effeminate,and so on. Indira Chowdhury and others have described the nationalist responses to these. Here, I just want to say that one response was to turn to the past and find freedom fighter ancestors. Naturally, this meant finding Hindus who had fought Muslims (there had been no British to fight, before the mid 18th century). Moreover, many of the early writers were Bengalis, so when they identified Rajput kings or Marathas, relion based identity alone could provide a link between the author and the “national’ hero. Hindus thus began to be seen as the original nation and the others as interlopers. While I cannot discuss the individuals in detail, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, and Aurobindo Ghosh were three crucial figures. A more aggressive Hindu identity was built up by Swami Dayanand and his Arya Samaj, stressing the Vedas as the source of Indian ethos, campaigning for a ban on cow slaughter (the occasions for many a communal riot in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
While Indian nationalism was not systematically communal – it looked at the British as the opponents, not the Muslims – it did have a Hindu tinge, till Nehru and diverse socialists and communists arrived, much later, on the scene. As a result, Muslim modernization also followed a similar path and produced a Muslim tinge in nationalism, which would eventually give rise to aggressive Muslim communalism.
It was an aggressive Hindu communalism that emerged first, though. In the 20th century, two important organizations were founded – the Hindu Mahasabha by V. D. Savarkar, and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh by K. B. Hegdewar. Both were organizations following a fuhrerprinzip, both had fascist links in the 1930s, and both developed a communalist view of history very similar to Nazi racism. This ideology was very distinct from an Indian nationalism with a Hindu tinge. It clearly saw the Muslims, rather than the British, as the enemies. The RSS, for example, was to tell its members to stay away from the anti-colonial struggles, including in 1942, when the massive Quit India movement was launched. As for Savarkar, an approver identified him as having been a co-conspirator with Nathuram Godse for the Gandhi assassination a few months after independence. Godse was convicted and hanged, but Savarkar got off, because by the Evidence Act, the word of one approver was not enough to convict him.
The sharp anti-communal backlash after a Hindu communalist had assassinated Gandhi checked the aspirations of the Hindu communal forces for several decades. But a “soft Hindu” viewpoint continued, drawing in inputs from aggressive Hindu communalism, both its openly political spokespersons like Savarkar and Golwalkar (Hedgewar’s successor as the chief of the RSS), and the foremost communalist historian of the age, R. C. Majumdar.
Savarkar’s Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, along with his earlier works Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, and Hindu Rashtra Darshan laid down certain basic paramenters, summing up ideas he had been developing over half a century.
· Vedic Aryans were the original inhabitants of India. They were the Hindus. They had created Indian culture and civilization, and had inspired other civilizations.
· The definition of Hindu was not religion as much as nation (Savarkar was a self-proclaimed atheist), but only those who had their punyabhumi (Holy Land), as well as pitribhumi (Fatherland), in India, were true members of the nation.
· Muslims were portrayed as the eternal Other of the Indian nation, their permanent enemies, seeking always to harm them.
· The Muslims aimed to reduce the Hindu population by all means, including murders, abduction of Hindu women on a large scale, and forced conversion.
M.S. Golwalkar followed the same line of arguments. In his 1939 book We, or Our Nationhood Defined, he extolled the Nazis, particularly the Krystallnacht, and suggersted that Hindus should follow the Nazis. Savarkar also advocated retributional rape of Muslim women.
While the more extreme positions remained the property of the then small current, a dilute version was widely propagated. A number of conservative historians played a role in this. A. S. Altekar, for example, argued that women had a very high status in ancient India, and it was Islamic invasion and the designs of Muslims on Hindu women that led to their domestic confinement and lack of equality. But it was R. C, Majumdar who rendered heroic services to Hindutva. An indefatigable worker, he edited and also wrote the bulk of the eleven volumes History and Culture of the Indian People, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan with ample government subsidy. This gave the book a stamp of authority, making it the standard general reference for Indian history for two decades or more. Majumdar put into the academic domain many of the key arguments of Hindu communalism. The fantastic claim that Indo-Europeans originated in India and went out from here to civilize the world, now so much in fashion among academic circles close to the VHP, found its articulation in serious literature in vol.I, of the Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan series. Majumdar also legitimized communal identities in the academic sphere, by talking about Muslim rulers, instead of Turks, Afghans, and Mughals. For the colonial period, he rejected the view that the revolt of 1857 constituted a freedom struggle, claiming that real freedom struggles began in 1905 with the anti-Bengal partition movement (which was led by Calcutta based Hindu upper caste leaders, and in course of which they alienated Muslims). For Majumdar, only the Muslims were communalists. Yet the two-nation theory is present, implicitly, through his volumes.
How successful Majumdar was is something that came home to me about a decade back. After the BJP dominated national Democratic Alliance had come to power, they launcherd a very sharp attack on secular history and historians, reconstituting the Indian Council for Historical Research, trying to take out a series of school text books written by Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra and others and replacing them by shoddy, communal books. At that time, while fighting this agenda, my wife and I, both professional historians, decided to examine text books from West Bengal, where the Marxist left has been strong both intellectually and in politics (a CPIM led government has been in power since 1977), to bring out a contrast between secular and communal writings. What we found was that while secular scholars, whether nationalists or Marxists, might have done a lot of research, text books still toed a communal line. Out of about a dozen school and a dozen college level text books written in Bengali, we found the majority writing only about Muslim communalism and not about Hindu communalism in talking about the colonial era. We found comments such as “Muslim rule in its early centuries was established by sword and by blood” liberally sprinkled. Of course, rulers have often been conquerors. But did medieval India have Muslim rule? Were all or most Muslims part of the ruling elite? Was the ruling elite fully Muslim? Did Hindu rulers not establish their rule by the sword? This image, then, was intended to create a picture of Muslims, collectively, as fanatically violent, whereas others were not so. For example, the same text books did not use the same kind of language to describe the British conquest of India, the extremely brutal mass killings after the Santal Rebellion or the Revolt of 1857.
In fact, the text books were marching hand in hand with the courses taught. A study of about 15 years of question papers on the colonial rule and the freedom movement, for undergraduate students of Calcutta University, West Bengal’s biggest University, showed that practically every alternate year, there is a question on either “Muslim Politics”, usually from 1906 (formation of the Muslim league) to 1940 (the year of the Lahore Resolution) or on whether Sir Syed Ahmed was the father of the two nation theory. No question has ever been set on Hindu communalism.
In other words, even many professed leftists, people who vote for the left parties in election times and are active in leftist teachers’ associations, do not think there is anything wrong in absorbing a dose of Majumdar.
The Hindutva agenda therefore has the great advantage of being present as part of the national common sense in a diluted form. However, having said this, I would also argue, that just as Nazism was not simply one more version of pre-existing racism and anti-Semitism, so present day Hindutva and its intense hate propaganda against Muslims cannot be reduced to communal elements in other types of history writing. So let me take up in a little more detail a few of the major concerns of the Hindutva forcers.
I. India was the original homeland of the Aryans. The Aryans were Hindus, and they spread out from India to educate and enlighten the world. This leads to a narrative structure that involves a whole series of denials and rewritings. It has to deal with the urban Indus Valley civilization (now mostly in Pakistan). So the Vedas are pushed back from about 1500-1000 BCE to 5000 BCE. The so-called Sarasvati civilization, supposedly located in Rajasthan and Haryana, is claimed to be older than the Indus Valley civilization. Also, by making the Aryans the sole original inhabitants, Dravidian culture of South India is erased, and the adivasis of much of western, central and eastern India are just wiped out.
II. Since the Rama Janambhumi movement was the core of the Hindutva mobilizations, it means that the Ramayana or the story of Rama is turned from a myth into history. While numerous variants of the Rama katha exist in reality, only one version is privileged and turned into authentic history that cannot be challenged. While Gutpa kings of the fourth asnd fifth centuries CE renamed Saketa as Ayodhyas because they were creating a Hindusim, in opposition to Buddhism, and patronizing Brahmanical domination, this Ayodhya is now claimed as the real birthplace of Rama. It is claimed that a Rama temple was first built there by Maharaj Kush (son of Rama) and another one built by the Gupta rulers. It is further claimed that Babar’s general Baqi Khan destroyed that temple to build a mosque over it, so that the war cry of the mobilizations was “mandir wahan i banayenge’ (we will build the temple just there). In RSS run schools, the Vidya Bharatis, booklets are given to students to learn by heart. History is taught, not critically, but as something to be remembered as true, without reference to sources. Some of the questions and answers are like this:
Q. Who was the first foreign invader who destroyed Sri Ram temple? A. Menander of Greece (150 B.C.)
Q. Who got the present Rama Temple built? A. Maharaja Chandragupta Vikramaditya (A.D. 380–413).
Q. Which Muslim plunderer invaded the temples in Ayodhya in A.D. 1033? A. Mahmud Ghaznavi’s nephew Salar Masud.
Q. Which Mughal invader destroyed the Rama Temple in A.D. 1528? A. Babur.
Q. Why is Babri Masjid not a mosque? A. Because Muslims have never till today offered Namaz there.
Q. How many devotees of Rama laid down their life to liberate Rama temple from A.D. 1528 to A.D. 1914? A. Three lakh fifty thousand.
Q. How many times did the foreigners invade Shri Ramajanma-bhumi? A. Seventy–seven times.
Q. “Which day was decided by Sri Ram Kar Sewa Samiti to start Kar Sewa? A. 30 October, 1990.
Q. Why will 2 November 1990 be inscribed in black letters in the history of India? A. Because on that day, the then Chief Minister by ordering the Police to shoot unarmed Kar Sewaks massacred hundreds of them.
Q. When was the Shilanyas of the temple laid in Sri Ram Janmbhumi? A. 1 November 1989.
Q. What was the number of the struggle for the liberation of Ram Janmabhumi which was launched on 30 October 1990? A. 78th struggle.
III. The aim of all Muslim rulers in India was to finish off the Hindus. A Belgian named Koenraad Elst in his book Negationism in India claims that every new invader made literally hills of Hindu skulls. In Afghanistan the entire Hindu population was slaughtered. The Bahamani sultans in the Deccan made it a rule to kill 100,000 Hindus in a year. Elst’s source is K. S. Lal’s Growth of Muslim Population in India. Lal, without providing any statistical evidence, comers to the conclusion that between 1000 and 1525, the Hindu population decreased by 80 million, making it the biggest genocide in history. Not surprisingly, when the RSS tried to set up an alternative academic association, in opposition to the staunchly secular Indian History Congress, Lal was chosen as one of its patrons. Interestingly, Lal’s writings, as well as the entire RSS arguments about how Muslims are bent on killing non-Muslims, got a new life after Western politicians and scholars started talking about Jihad as a permanent feature of Islamic politics, and so on. However, here, as in the Ram Janambhumi case, contemporary issues are linked to the assessment of the past. Since the early 20th century, there has been a recurrent theme often called “the dying Hindu”. Hindu population is supposedly declining, and Muslims are supposed to be overtaking the Hindus rapidly. In 1980, the Viswa Hindu Parishad launched an aggressive campaign about how by 2000 the Muslims, permitted polygamy, were going to overtake the Hindus, who were monogamous. A little digression at this point will be necessary. Hindu polygamy was not illegalized till the 1950s. But the claim that Muslims are going to overtake the Hindus has been in existence since the early 20th century. A second point to note is that when Hindu polygamy was banned, Hindutva forces in parliament and outside it campaigned shrilly against it. They had two arguments. One was that parliament did not have the right to change Hindu laws, only Hindu pundits and holy men could do it. The other argument, made in parliament, no less, was that banning polygamy would lead to an increased in prostitution.
IV. In the same way, Hindutva forces attempt a wholesale rewriting of the freedom struggle. For Savarkar, the entire period from the Arab conquest of Sindh, or at least from the Turkish conquest of North India, was a period of freedom struggle. One of the most important stumbling blocks to such a picture is of course the Mughal era. The Mughals built a stable empire, because they were able to create a composite ruling class. Rajputs, Marathas, and other Hindus formed part of the Mughal elite, and sometimes crack Mughal generals, not only under Akbar, but even under the much reviled Aurangzeb. This has been ably demonstrated by many scholars, notably Athar ali in his The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb and The Apparatus of Empire.
V. Another aspect of the Hindutva use of history as a central weapon to spread poison is the claim that destroying temples was an essential aspect of Muslim rulership. I want to look at the cases of two temples that really were destroyed, in part or in full, by two different rulers. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who raided India rather than trying to conquer any part of the country, was supposed to have attacked the Somnatha temple many times because of his fanatical Islamic outlook. A college text book in Maharashtra, examined by Communalism Combat magazine, took the opportunity of writing about Mahmud and Somnatha to attack Islam generally. Here, secular historians have taken two approaches, both valid, but taking up different dimensions. The great historian, Muhammad Habib, in his book on Mahmud, was critical of Mahmud. But Habib pointed out that there was a clear possibility that what attracted Mahmud to Somnatha was its wealth, rather than religion. A very different line of study was followed by Romila Thapar. In her book on the Somnatha temple, she showed that there had been a variety of narratives, those of the conquerors, local products, and so on. The event was perceived and represented in a number of ways. Thapar’s object was not to find out the “real” motive of Mahmud. Rather, she sought to understand how his raids entered historical imagination. What are often considered facts about the raid, argued Thapar, are in fact the products of a long process of historical fashioning and encoding of memories. From among various versions, the colonial rulers se,lected and fixed the narrative of Muhammad Ibrahim Ferishta, because this account underlined the violence and fanaticism of Muslims. Canonised bythe writings of Alexander Dow, this colonial story of Somnatha entered the nationalist as well as communalist writings.
VI. The other temple is the Keshav Rai temple of Mathura, destroyed by Aurangzeb. Once again, there are different ways of looking at this. Historians like Satish Chandra have pointed out that Aurangzeb attacked the temple because it was part of a Jat rebellion. The nationalist historian B. N. Pande had a different approach. He collected a substantial number of firmans (imperial decrees) of Aurangzeb to argue that in a large number of cases, Aurangzeb had granted tax-free land to Hindu and Jain temples and Sikh Gurdwaras so that they could be maintained.This does not deny the destruction of a particular temple, but indicates that the course of history was rather more complicated than communalists would like.
As my discussions suggest, secular responses to communal history have varied. Many secular historians have found reason to celebrate the emperor Akbar. He sought to marginalize the orthodox elements (as did Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad Tughluq during the Sultanat). More than that, he built up, as I said, a composite ruling class. He undercut the powers of the theologians, and put forward a concept, sulh-i-kul, which saw different religions as paths to the same God, and emphasized the need for the state to be impartial. Communal historiography has responded by arguing that Akbar was at best an exception, and temple destructions and bigotry began returning from the time of his son Jahangir, culminating in Aurangzeb’s systematic anti-Hindu policy. Secular strategy here has been to deny this, using a variety of facts, and even to show that Aurangzeb’s anti-Hindu policy was dictated more by political necessity than religious fanaticism, and was restricted to a small phase of his half century long reign. Iqtidar Alam Khan has argued that the main trend in medieval Indian statecraft under the Mughals was a tendency to secularism, without which modern Indian notions of secularism cannot be understood. Another secular scholar, Neeladri Bhattacharya, has seen in this a secular teleology that is inadequate. Bhattacharya correctly points out that the sources from the past speak with many voices, and we cannot arbitrarily decider that one is right and the others wrong. The capture of the Maratha king Sambhaji was followed by a debate over what to do with him. Eventually Aurangzeb decided to have him executed. Satish Chandra cites the contemporary author Khafi Khan to argue that it was a political decision, and Aurangzeb referred the matter to theologians just to get a religious gloss over it. Bhattacharya argues that Chandra’s decision to accept Khafi Khan’s version, and to treat the consultation of the theologians as in some way inauthentic, shows how facts are emplotted within structures of narratives, how conflicting evidence is negotiated, how causal connections are made through narrative strategies, and how the narrative truth emerges in the process. I do not wish to debunk Chandra. But the existence of conflicting voices suggest that we cannot always reconcile them into a simple and coherent narrative. Confronted with communal stereotypes, and aware of the urgency of countering them, secular historians have too often framed their arguments within problematic binaries. Muzaffar Alam’s The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200-1800, in fact shows us that there was not a single narrative of assimilation overcoming all hurdles, but a diversity of voices, ranging from assimilation to orthodoxy.
The more recent works, whether Thapar on Somnatha or Alam on political Islam, are extremely important. Secular histories have always been intimately connected to the politics of the public sphere. Over the last quarter of a century, a very different type of communal historiography has emerged – not published in peer reviewed journals or as books by formidable publishing houses with well known academic credibility, but in popular magazines, in tracts put out by local groups or by ‘social and cultural organisations’ that are fronts for the RSS, or by publishing houses that do not care for academic norms even when claiming to publish scholarly books. Tracts like Rama Janambhumi ka Rakta Ranjit Itihas by Ram Gopal Pandey, or Pratap Narain Misra’s Kya Kahati Hai Saratyu Dhara? Claim to be based on authentic history. The latter pamphlet does not have the author speak. It is the river Saraytu that is bearing witness. Obviously, these do not conform to our historical methods. Equally obviously to a secular historian living in India, these carried much more weight than the secular books, articles and pamphlets we turned out by the hundreds back in 1987-92. The point is not that these are palpably wrong. It is not difficult to prove that to any serious academic audience. The point is that people, and not merely illiterates or semi-literates, believed in these, at times even while they accepted many claims of academic historians. Certainly, we need to challenge communal ‘facts’, as these ‘facts’ often make up the constitutive ingredients of a narrative, so that debunking false facts, such as the date of composition of the Vedas or the claim that the Aryans originated in India, can puncture the whole narrative of Hindus being the original inhabitants of India and therefore being alone fit to be considered the Indian nation.
But challenging communal history has to go beyond challenging the authenticity of communal facts. The communal tracts produce a social imagination of a very different kind. It is necessary to comprehend the premises of popular understanding, to ask why even now, after nearly half a century of high quality secular historiography, it is R.C. Majumdar and even Savarkar and Golwalkar who should influence the common sense of popular and school and undergraduate history? We have to see how specific conceptions come to be accepted as true, look at the production of the stories and the politics of that production. But we also have to look at how the popular and the academic interact. Historians may not have to provide “correct solutions” for the present, but political practices of the present cannot be easily delinked from the questions of memory and history. Reconstitution of identities is premised on reconstitution of the past. If we think that communal politics of the RSS type is leading India to increasing sectarian violence and an authoritarian state, regardless of whether we agree with the “fascist” label, we have to understand the centrality of history for this political project. And we have to contest it by, among other things, putting forward secular history in ways not restricted to academic terms.
Communalism is the term used in India, and more generally throughout South Asia, to denote the politics of religious sectarianism. Communal politics in India and Pakistan are premised on one fundamental assumption: that India is a society fractured into two overarching religious communities – Hindus and Muslims. These communities are not only supposed to be separate and distinct, but also irreconcilably opposed. Their cultures, values, social practices and beliefs have little in common. Their histories are histories of discord, of mutual hostility, hatred, conflict and battles for domination. The boundaries of the communities are categorically drawn by a century of mutual antagonism.
This is not a matter of one academic perception contesting another. Two incidents from the past quarter century should warn that it goes well beyond that. Between 1987 and 1992, the Bharatiya Janata Party, affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, and allied to other constituents of the Sangh’s network of organizations like the Viswa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, campaigned for the destruction of a four and a half century old mosque on the spurious claim that it had been built by destroying a temple on the exact spot where Rama, a mythic hero, had been born. This campaign was the centerpiece of their struggle for power. Flouting court orders and constitutional obligations, on 6th December 1992 they did gather a massive mob, and with a provincial government controlled by them, they had no difficulty in destroying the mosque. This campaign moved the BJP, a party that in 1984 had a handful of members in the Indian parliament, to the centre stage, and riding its Hindutva wave, by the second half of the 1990s it was in power as part of a rigthtwing coalition.
In 2002, some unidentified people set fire to a coach in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, Gujarat province. A number of kar sevaks, or Hindutva volunteers to build the Rama temple at Ayodhya, were killed in the fire. Within 24 hours, a systematic pogrom broke out. Using voter lists and sales tax records, houses and shops of Muslims were attacked. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets were issued, showing weeks of advance planning. A report of how Hindu women had been dragged into a Madarsa (Muslim educational institution) and raped before being killed was reported (the Press council of India later reported that it was a false news). Using these techniques, over 2000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands forced into camps for months. A very larger number of Muslim women were gang raped.
There was a great similarity between Nazi racism and this communal politics. When one enraged Jewish youth shot and killed a Nazi in France, Hitler and Goebbels unleashed the krsytallnacht. The same logic was used by the Hindutva brigades. Every Indian Muslim was held responsible for the crimes committed at Godhra, supposedly by some Muslims. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, an RSS man, declared that the pogroms were merely Newton’s third Law.
Communal politics relies above all on a historical narrative to gain legitimacy in the public domain. So the struggle over history is one of the vital struggles in present day India and the battle for secularism and democracy. It is significant that whenever the RSS and its affiliates have been close to power in any province, or the county as a whole, radical and secular historians have been among their principal ideological targets. While India has a good many very accomplished radical economists, sociologists or political scientists, they have never been so directly targeted. The RSs campaigns have indeed been international, as when Romila Thapar’s appointment in 2004 as the First holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South by the library of Congress was met by a ferocious campaign, including an online petition to bloc her and large volumes of hate mail.
So we need to trace the history of communal historiography in some detail. British colonial rulers were the first in the field, and they operated in a number of ways. There were two currents of British writings about India – the Anglicists or the Utilitarians, and the Orientalists. James Mill, the Utilitarian, attempted to justify British rule by presenting the early period of Indian history as rude and barbarous. He denied that ancient India had produced anything of lasting social or cultural value. For example, he denied that Aryabhata had produced significant mathematics, denied that zero and the positional numbering system came from Indian mathematics. He wrote that the Hindu, like the Eunuch, excels in the quality of the slave. And he proceeded to divide Indian history into three periods – the Hindu period, the Muslim period and the British period. The other school, the Orientalists, presented a romanticized picture of a great Indian past, ruined by racial intermixing between Aryan Hindus and Semitic Muslims. Colonial administrators, such as Sir Henry Elliott, wanted to respond to the rising demands for civil liberties by producing histories that showed how blood-stained was Muslim rule in india, so that the Hindus would accept British rule as good. Elliott made his purpose explicit in his introduction to the book The History of India as Told By its Own Historians. He selected those narratives that would create an image of a murderous Islamic horde, an image that also suited the viewpoint of 19th century Christian conquerors, steeped since the Crusades in an anti-Islamic standpoint. Other British administrators followed similar lines, fixing these voices from the past that showed Hindus and Muslims as antagonists, particularly after the revolt of 1857, in which Hindus and Muslims did unite to try and overthrown British rule.
Emergent Indian nationalism had different possible strategies. But I am going to describe only one – the one that would eventually give rise to Hindutva.
The British ridicuked the Hindus as cowardly, effeminate,and so on. Indira Chowdhury and others have described the nationalist responses to these. Here, I just want to say that one response was to turn to the past and find freedom fighter ancestors. Naturally, this meant finding Hindus who had fought Muslims (there had been no British to fight, before the mid 18th century). Moreover, many of the early writers were Bengalis, so when they identified Rajput kings or Marathas, relion based identity alone could provide a link between the author and the “national’ hero. Hindus thus began to be seen as the original nation and the others as interlopers. While I cannot discuss the individuals in detail, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, and Aurobindo Ghosh were three crucial figures. A more aggressive Hindu identity was built up by Swami Dayanand and his Arya Samaj, stressing the Vedas as the source of Indian ethos, campaigning for a ban on cow slaughter (the occasions for many a communal riot in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
While Indian nationalism was not systematically communal – it looked at the British as the opponents, not the Muslims – it did have a Hindu tinge, till Nehru and diverse socialists and communists arrived, much later, on the scene. As a result, Muslim modernization also followed a similar path and produced a Muslim tinge in nationalism, which would eventually give rise to aggressive Muslim communalism.
It was an aggressive Hindu communalism that emerged first, though. In the 20th century, two important organizations were founded – the Hindu Mahasabha by V. D. Savarkar, and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh by K. B. Hegdewar. Both were organizations following a fuhrerprinzip, both had fascist links in the 1930s, and both developed a communalist view of history very similar to Nazi racism. This ideology was very distinct from an Indian nationalism with a Hindu tinge. It clearly saw the Muslims, rather than the British, as the enemies. The RSS, for example, was to tell its members to stay away from the anti-colonial struggles, including in 1942, when the massive Quit India movement was launched. As for Savarkar, an approver identified him as having been a co-conspirator with Nathuram Godse for the Gandhi assassination a few months after independence. Godse was convicted and hanged, but Savarkar got off, because by the Evidence Act, the word of one approver was not enough to convict him.
The sharp anti-communal backlash after a Hindu communalist had assassinated Gandhi checked the aspirations of the Hindu communal forces for several decades. But a “soft Hindu” viewpoint continued, drawing in inputs from aggressive Hindu communalism, both its openly political spokespersons like Savarkar and Golwalkar (Hedgewar’s successor as the chief of the RSS), and the foremost communalist historian of the age, R. C. Majumdar.
Savarkar’s Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, along with his earlier works Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, and Hindu Rashtra Darshan laid down certain basic paramenters, summing up ideas he had been developing over half a century.
· Vedic Aryans were the original inhabitants of India. They were the Hindus. They had created Indian culture and civilization, and had inspired other civilizations.
· The definition of Hindu was not religion as much as nation (Savarkar was a self-proclaimed atheist), but only those who had their punyabhumi (Holy Land), as well as pitribhumi (Fatherland), in India, were true members of the nation.
· Muslims were portrayed as the eternal Other of the Indian nation, their permanent enemies, seeking always to harm them.
· The Muslims aimed to reduce the Hindu population by all means, including murders, abduction of Hindu women on a large scale, and forced conversion.
M.S. Golwalkar followed the same line of arguments. In his 1939 book We, or Our Nationhood Defined, he extolled the Nazis, particularly the Krystallnacht, and suggersted that Hindus should follow the Nazis. Savarkar also advocated retributional rape of Muslim women.
While the more extreme positions remained the property of the then small current, a dilute version was widely propagated. A number of conservative historians played a role in this. A. S. Altekar, for example, argued that women had a very high status in ancient India, and it was Islamic invasion and the designs of Muslims on Hindu women that led to their domestic confinement and lack of equality. But it was R. C, Majumdar who rendered heroic services to Hindutva. An indefatigable worker, he edited and also wrote the bulk of the eleven volumes History and Culture of the Indian People, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan with ample government subsidy. This gave the book a stamp of authority, making it the standard general reference for Indian history for two decades or more. Majumdar put into the academic domain many of the key arguments of Hindu communalism. The fantastic claim that Indo-Europeans originated in India and went out from here to civilize the world, now so much in fashion among academic circles close to the VHP, found its articulation in serious literature in vol.I, of the Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan series. Majumdar also legitimized communal identities in the academic sphere, by talking about Muslim rulers, instead of Turks, Afghans, and Mughals. For the colonial period, he rejected the view that the revolt of 1857 constituted a freedom struggle, claiming that real freedom struggles began in 1905 with the anti-Bengal partition movement (which was led by Calcutta based Hindu upper caste leaders, and in course of which they alienated Muslims). For Majumdar, only the Muslims were communalists. Yet the two-nation theory is present, implicitly, through his volumes.
How successful Majumdar was is something that came home to me about a decade back. After the BJP dominated national Democratic Alliance had come to power, they launcherd a very sharp attack on secular history and historians, reconstituting the Indian Council for Historical Research, trying to take out a series of school text books written by Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra and others and replacing them by shoddy, communal books. At that time, while fighting this agenda, my wife and I, both professional historians, decided to examine text books from West Bengal, where the Marxist left has been strong both intellectually and in politics (a CPIM led government has been in power since 1977), to bring out a contrast between secular and communal writings. What we found was that while secular scholars, whether nationalists or Marxists, might have done a lot of research, text books still toed a communal line. Out of about a dozen school and a dozen college level text books written in Bengali, we found the majority writing only about Muslim communalism and not about Hindu communalism in talking about the colonial era. We found comments such as “Muslim rule in its early centuries was established by sword and by blood” liberally sprinkled. Of course, rulers have often been conquerors. But did medieval India have Muslim rule? Were all or most Muslims part of the ruling elite? Was the ruling elite fully Muslim? Did Hindu rulers not establish their rule by the sword? This image, then, was intended to create a picture of Muslims, collectively, as fanatically violent, whereas others were not so. For example, the same text books did not use the same kind of language to describe the British conquest of India, the extremely brutal mass killings after the Santal Rebellion or the Revolt of 1857.
In fact, the text books were marching hand in hand with the courses taught. A study of about 15 years of question papers on the colonial rule and the freedom movement, for undergraduate students of Calcutta University, West Bengal’s biggest University, showed that practically every alternate year, there is a question on either “Muslim Politics”, usually from 1906 (formation of the Muslim league) to 1940 (the year of the Lahore Resolution) or on whether Sir Syed Ahmed was the father of the two nation theory. No question has ever been set on Hindu communalism.
In other words, even many professed leftists, people who vote for the left parties in election times and are active in leftist teachers’ associations, do not think there is anything wrong in absorbing a dose of Majumdar.
The Hindutva agenda therefore has the great advantage of being present as part of the national common sense in a diluted form. However, having said this, I would also argue, that just as Nazism was not simply one more version of pre-existing racism and anti-Semitism, so present day Hindutva and its intense hate propaganda against Muslims cannot be reduced to communal elements in other types of history writing. So let me take up in a little more detail a few of the major concerns of the Hindutva forcers.
I. India was the original homeland of the Aryans. The Aryans were Hindus, and they spread out from India to educate and enlighten the world. This leads to a narrative structure that involves a whole series of denials and rewritings. It has to deal with the urban Indus Valley civilization (now mostly in Pakistan). So the Vedas are pushed back from about 1500-1000 BCE to 5000 BCE. The so-called Sarasvati civilization, supposedly located in Rajasthan and Haryana, is claimed to be older than the Indus Valley civilization. Also, by making the Aryans the sole original inhabitants, Dravidian culture of South India is erased, and the adivasis of much of western, central and eastern India are just wiped out.
II. Since the Rama Janambhumi movement was the core of the Hindutva mobilizations, it means that the Ramayana or the story of Rama is turned from a myth into history. While numerous variants of the Rama katha exist in reality, only one version is privileged and turned into authentic history that cannot be challenged. While Gutpa kings of the fourth asnd fifth centuries CE renamed Saketa as Ayodhyas because they were creating a Hindusim, in opposition to Buddhism, and patronizing Brahmanical domination, this Ayodhya is now claimed as the real birthplace of Rama. It is claimed that a Rama temple was first built there by Maharaj Kush (son of Rama) and another one built by the Gupta rulers. It is further claimed that Babar’s general Baqi Khan destroyed that temple to build a mosque over it, so that the war cry of the mobilizations was “mandir wahan i banayenge’ (we will build the temple just there). In RSS run schools, the Vidya Bharatis, booklets are given to students to learn by heart. History is taught, not critically, but as something to be remembered as true, without reference to sources. Some of the questions and answers are like this:
Q. Who was the first foreign invader who destroyed Sri Ram temple? A. Menander of Greece (150 B.C.)
Q. Who got the present Rama Temple built? A. Maharaja Chandragupta Vikramaditya (A.D. 380–413).
Q. Which Muslim plunderer invaded the temples in Ayodhya in A.D. 1033? A. Mahmud Ghaznavi’s nephew Salar Masud.
Q. Which Mughal invader destroyed the Rama Temple in A.D. 1528? A. Babur.
Q. Why is Babri Masjid not a mosque? A. Because Muslims have never till today offered Namaz there.
Q. How many devotees of Rama laid down their life to liberate Rama temple from A.D. 1528 to A.D. 1914? A. Three lakh fifty thousand.
Q. How many times did the foreigners invade Shri Ramajanma-bhumi? A. Seventy–seven times.
Q. “Which day was decided by Sri Ram Kar Sewa Samiti to start Kar Sewa? A. 30 October, 1990.
Q. Why will 2 November 1990 be inscribed in black letters in the history of India? A. Because on that day, the then Chief Minister by ordering the Police to shoot unarmed Kar Sewaks massacred hundreds of them.
Q. When was the Shilanyas of the temple laid in Sri Ram Janmbhumi? A. 1 November 1989.
Q. What was the number of the struggle for the liberation of Ram Janmabhumi which was launched on 30 October 1990? A. 78th struggle.
III. The aim of all Muslim rulers in India was to finish off the Hindus. A Belgian named Koenraad Elst in his book Negationism in India claims that every new invader made literally hills of Hindu skulls. In Afghanistan the entire Hindu population was slaughtered. The Bahamani sultans in the Deccan made it a rule to kill 100,000 Hindus in a year. Elst’s source is K. S. Lal’s Growth of Muslim Population in India. Lal, without providing any statistical evidence, comers to the conclusion that between 1000 and 1525, the Hindu population decreased by 80 million, making it the biggest genocide in history. Not surprisingly, when the RSS tried to set up an alternative academic association, in opposition to the staunchly secular Indian History Congress, Lal was chosen as one of its patrons. Interestingly, Lal’s writings, as well as the entire RSS arguments about how Muslims are bent on killing non-Muslims, got a new life after Western politicians and scholars started talking about Jihad as a permanent feature of Islamic politics, and so on. However, here, as in the Ram Janambhumi case, contemporary issues are linked to the assessment of the past. Since the early 20th century, there has been a recurrent theme often called “the dying Hindu”. Hindu population is supposedly declining, and Muslims are supposed to be overtaking the Hindus rapidly. In 1980, the Viswa Hindu Parishad launched an aggressive campaign about how by 2000 the Muslims, permitted polygamy, were going to overtake the Hindus, who were monogamous. A little digression at this point will be necessary. Hindu polygamy was not illegalized till the 1950s. But the claim that Muslims are going to overtake the Hindus has been in existence since the early 20th century. A second point to note is that when Hindu polygamy was banned, Hindutva forces in parliament and outside it campaigned shrilly against it. They had two arguments. One was that parliament did not have the right to change Hindu laws, only Hindu pundits and holy men could do it. The other argument, made in parliament, no less, was that banning polygamy would lead to an increased in prostitution.
IV. In the same way, Hindutva forces attempt a wholesale rewriting of the freedom struggle. For Savarkar, the entire period from the Arab conquest of Sindh, or at least from the Turkish conquest of North India, was a period of freedom struggle. One of the most important stumbling blocks to such a picture is of course the Mughal era. The Mughals built a stable empire, because they were able to create a composite ruling class. Rajputs, Marathas, and other Hindus formed part of the Mughal elite, and sometimes crack Mughal generals, not only under Akbar, but even under the much reviled Aurangzeb. This has been ably demonstrated by many scholars, notably Athar ali in his The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb and The Apparatus of Empire.
V. Another aspect of the Hindutva use of history as a central weapon to spread poison is the claim that destroying temples was an essential aspect of Muslim rulership. I want to look at the cases of two temples that really were destroyed, in part or in full, by two different rulers. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who raided India rather than trying to conquer any part of the country, was supposed to have attacked the Somnatha temple many times because of his fanatical Islamic outlook. A college text book in Maharashtra, examined by Communalism Combat magazine, took the opportunity of writing about Mahmud and Somnatha to attack Islam generally. Here, secular historians have taken two approaches, both valid, but taking up different dimensions. The great historian, Muhammad Habib, in his book on Mahmud, was critical of Mahmud. But Habib pointed out that there was a clear possibility that what attracted Mahmud to Somnatha was its wealth, rather than religion. A very different line of study was followed by Romila Thapar. In her book on the Somnatha temple, she showed that there had been a variety of narratives, those of the conquerors, local products, and so on. The event was perceived and represented in a number of ways. Thapar’s object was not to find out the “real” motive of Mahmud. Rather, she sought to understand how his raids entered historical imagination. What are often considered facts about the raid, argued Thapar, are in fact the products of a long process of historical fashioning and encoding of memories. From among various versions, the colonial rulers se,lected and fixed the narrative of Muhammad Ibrahim Ferishta, because this account underlined the violence and fanaticism of Muslims. Canonised bythe writings of Alexander Dow, this colonial story of Somnatha entered the nationalist as well as communalist writings.
VI. The other temple is the Keshav Rai temple of Mathura, destroyed by Aurangzeb. Once again, there are different ways of looking at this. Historians like Satish Chandra have pointed out that Aurangzeb attacked the temple because it was part of a Jat rebellion. The nationalist historian B. N. Pande had a different approach. He collected a substantial number of firmans (imperial decrees) of Aurangzeb to argue that in a large number of cases, Aurangzeb had granted tax-free land to Hindu and Jain temples and Sikh Gurdwaras so that they could be maintained.This does not deny the destruction of a particular temple, but indicates that the course of history was rather more complicated than communalists would like.
As my discussions suggest, secular responses to communal history have varied. Many secular historians have found reason to celebrate the emperor Akbar. He sought to marginalize the orthodox elements (as did Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad Tughluq during the Sultanat). More than that, he built up, as I said, a composite ruling class. He undercut the powers of the theologians, and put forward a concept, sulh-i-kul, which saw different religions as paths to the same God, and emphasized the need for the state to be impartial. Communal historiography has responded by arguing that Akbar was at best an exception, and temple destructions and bigotry began returning from the time of his son Jahangir, culminating in Aurangzeb’s systematic anti-Hindu policy. Secular strategy here has been to deny this, using a variety of facts, and even to show that Aurangzeb’s anti-Hindu policy was dictated more by political necessity than religious fanaticism, and was restricted to a small phase of his half century long reign. Iqtidar Alam Khan has argued that the main trend in medieval Indian statecraft under the Mughals was a tendency to secularism, without which modern Indian notions of secularism cannot be understood. Another secular scholar, Neeladri Bhattacharya, has seen in this a secular teleology that is inadequate. Bhattacharya correctly points out that the sources from the past speak with many voices, and we cannot arbitrarily decider that one is right and the others wrong. The capture of the Maratha king Sambhaji was followed by a debate over what to do with him. Eventually Aurangzeb decided to have him executed. Satish Chandra cites the contemporary author Khafi Khan to argue that it was a political decision, and Aurangzeb referred the matter to theologians just to get a religious gloss over it. Bhattacharya argues that Chandra’s decision to accept Khafi Khan’s version, and to treat the consultation of the theologians as in some way inauthentic, shows how facts are emplotted within structures of narratives, how conflicting evidence is negotiated, how causal connections are made through narrative strategies, and how the narrative truth emerges in the process. I do not wish to debunk Chandra. But the existence of conflicting voices suggest that we cannot always reconcile them into a simple and coherent narrative. Confronted with communal stereotypes, and aware of the urgency of countering them, secular historians have too often framed their arguments within problematic binaries. Muzaffar Alam’s The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200-1800, in fact shows us that there was not a single narrative of assimilation overcoming all hurdles, but a diversity of voices, ranging from assimilation to orthodoxy.
The more recent works, whether Thapar on Somnatha or Alam on political Islam, are extremely important. Secular histories have always been intimately connected to the politics of the public sphere. Over the last quarter of a century, a very different type of communal historiography has emerged – not published in peer reviewed journals or as books by formidable publishing houses with well known academic credibility, but in popular magazines, in tracts put out by local groups or by ‘social and cultural organisations’ that are fronts for the RSS, or by publishing houses that do not care for academic norms even when claiming to publish scholarly books. Tracts like Rama Janambhumi ka Rakta Ranjit Itihas by Ram Gopal Pandey, or Pratap Narain Misra’s Kya Kahati Hai Saratyu Dhara? Claim to be based on authentic history. The latter pamphlet does not have the author speak. It is the river Saraytu that is bearing witness. Obviously, these do not conform to our historical methods. Equally obviously to a secular historian living in India, these carried much more weight than the secular books, articles and pamphlets we turned out by the hundreds back in 1987-92. The point is not that these are palpably wrong. It is not difficult to prove that to any serious academic audience. The point is that people, and not merely illiterates or semi-literates, believed in these, at times even while they accepted many claims of academic historians. Certainly, we need to challenge communal ‘facts’, as these ‘facts’ often make up the constitutive ingredients of a narrative, so that debunking false facts, such as the date of composition of the Vedas or the claim that the Aryans originated in India, can puncture the whole narrative of Hindus being the original inhabitants of India and therefore being alone fit to be considered the Indian nation.
But challenging communal history has to go beyond challenging the authenticity of communal facts. The communal tracts produce a social imagination of a very different kind. It is necessary to comprehend the premises of popular understanding, to ask why even now, after nearly half a century of high quality secular historiography, it is R.C. Majumdar and even Savarkar and Golwalkar who should influence the common sense of popular and school and undergraduate history? We have to see how specific conceptions come to be accepted as true, look at the production of the stories and the politics of that production. But we also have to look at how the popular and the academic interact. Historians may not have to provide “correct solutions” for the present, but political practices of the present cannot be easily delinked from the questions of memory and history. Reconstitution of identities is premised on reconstitution of the past. If we think that communal politics of the RSS type is leading India to increasing sectarian violence and an authoritarian state, regardless of whether we agree with the “fascist” label, we have to understand the centrality of history for this political project. And we have to contest it by, among other things, putting forward secular history in ways not restricted to academic terms.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Fight the Liberal-Left Masks that Protect the Fascists
Kunal Chattopadhyay
The relationship between fascism and liberalism is not one of direct opposition. While political liberalism and fascist politics are greatly different, the economic liberalism, which after all is the core and starting point of liberalism, has not found it difficult to adapt to fascism, or even to actively support it. A study of electoral patterns show that throughout the life of the Weimar Republic, the basic Communist and Socialist vote held firm, while the liberal-democratic vote shifted from the Democratic Party to the Volkspartei, the far right DNVP and ultimately the National Socialists. At the same time, the Nazis used liberalism all the way to their seizure of power.
This is even more true for India. Unlike Weimar Germany, with a fairly limited democratic experience, India had close to a century long democratic tradition. The Congress, despite its class and other limitations, introduced certain democratic forms. The struggle for independence also saw a sustained struggle for civil liberties, which continued even after independence. As a result, a purely militaristic bid for power by fascists, as in Chile, was unlikely. A quick coup of the type desired immediately after 1947 was halted in its tracks after the Gandhi murder. Thereafter, Golwalkar clearly adopted a strategy of penetrating into civil society. Even though the RSS and its fronts are today much closer to power than they were in the 1950s, fascists and their fellow-travellers sing a number of seemingly different tunes, to disarm the unwary.
The reasons for these reflections are a number of arguments being raised concerning Kandhamal. The most important aids to the Hindutva-fascists are being provided by certain seemingly liberal or left wing, or even civil libertarian voices. A renegade from the British SWP moved all the way to the BJP in India, and writes as someone seeking a “balance” instead of one-sided attacks on “Hindus”. But this one person is not all. Former leftists, close to the CPI(M), or even claiming a kind of Maoist pedigree [I use the term maoist in its generic sense, rather than meaning specifically the CPI(Maoist) as many people nowadays do] are also in the fray these days.
The strategy of the RSS and its extra-parliamentary wings should be clear to anyone who does not choose to wear blinkers. Wherever the BJP, alone or in a coalition, gets power, the extra-parliamentary wings of the RSS, including the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, and others, will use both legal and illegal means to propagate hatred against minorities as an instrument of mobilizing Hindus behind the Hindutva banner. Their instruments will include beatings, killings, rape, setting fire, and other such nice techniques. Frenzy will be whipped up among the poor and socially marginalized, like the adivasis. These have happened, in varying degrees, in Gujarat (the model), Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and now Orissa, even if matters have not reached pogrom level everywhere. Whenever it does, people with left and liberal masks and past are mobilized by the fascists. These renegades from progressive battles flaunt their pedigrees all the better to defend the fascists in a roundabout way.
The usual argument calls for balance. Who killed the people in the Sabarmati Express? It is still murky. Yet we were repeatedly told that it is because we did not condemn adequately and quickly enough the murder of Hindus, the Hindu sentiment was hurt, and Newton’s Third Law took over. Interestingly, the pseudo-liberal agents of the Hindutva brigade were nowhere to be seen when it was revealed that many of the reports, such as the dragging out of women from the train and their being raped inside a Madrasa was a lie peddled by a few rabidly rightwing newspapers. Yet those were the reports used to inflame passions and legitimize the mass rapes and murders of Muslims. In just the same way, this is what we see being repeated over Kandhamal. Aggressive posturing concluding in rapes, murders, the use of open terrorism by the Sangh Parivar and forces within the state that it has successfully subverted [unless you are one of those who believe that all terrorists are Muslims], were part of a long term plan to communalise Orissa. The rape of Sister M. was one particularly glaring incident, but not a one off action. As social movements, women’s rights activists, human rights activists, or just plain concerned citizens began protesting it was also felt necessary to neutralize their protests in a number of ways. So on one hand we have the revolting claims about the sexual habits of Sister M and so on, as if a rape becomes less a rape if any of those assertions were at all true. On the other hand, we have the liberal and leftist face, which pretends that we are at fault for not condemning the murder of Lakshmanand Saraswati. There is absolutely no evidence linking Lakshmanand’s murder with the Christians. His murder, by whoever, was a one off action. It was not part of a sustained terrorism and pogrom. If it is argued that unless his murder is condemned we cannot condemn the systematic violence on Christians, or that his murder justifies the rape of Sister M., then a single murder and a pogrom are being equated. In the name of even handedness, we are being told that the violence on minorities is less important. Will those pseudo-liberal, pseudo-left pseudo-civil libertarians please tell us, how many minority persons equal one figure of the Hindutva pantheon?
A second technique is to seek to dilute the gravity of the situation by lumping it with all other sorts of violence. For example, in the wake of the bomb explosion at Salboni, the police are harassing innocent people. I would have been surprised if they did not do so. We need to stand up for the democratic rights of all. I for one am publicly on record, repeatedly, defending people when arbitrary police action is imposed in the name of fighting Maoism. But do we lump this together with the pogrom? That would ensure that resistance to pogroms are not built.
Such apparently liberal, or left, or even revolutionary heros and heroines need to be fought, exposed, resisted, and driven out of all progressive movements and forums. These are double agents of the fascists in civil society, seemingly in the progressive or at least liberal camp, but actually doing their best to blunt the edge of anti-fascism and anti-communalism. Such rotten pseudo-progressives will call for war to the bitter end on the CPI(M) but soft pedal on the RSS, its fronts, and allies. They will counter every call for democratic rights in Kashmir with crocodile tears for the Pandits, while concealing the role of Jagmohan in the ouster of Pandits from Kashmir. They will defend the democratic rights of right wing hooligans accusing a women’s rally for secularism of being in the pay of the ISI, while condemning any male who defends the secular woman as interfering in women’s autonomy. While a simple action like driving them out without a political battle is erroneous, it is essential to challenge them whenever and wherever they peddle their poisonous ware. Fighting the fascist fifth column is a necessary component of fighting fascism. To resist the violence in Kandhamal, we have to recognize its specifically pogrom-like character, instead of confusing it with quotidian violence.
The relationship between fascism and liberalism is not one of direct opposition. While political liberalism and fascist politics are greatly different, the economic liberalism, which after all is the core and starting point of liberalism, has not found it difficult to adapt to fascism, or even to actively support it. A study of electoral patterns show that throughout the life of the Weimar Republic, the basic Communist and Socialist vote held firm, while the liberal-democratic vote shifted from the Democratic Party to the Volkspartei, the far right DNVP and ultimately the National Socialists. At the same time, the Nazis used liberalism all the way to their seizure of power.
This is even more true for India. Unlike Weimar Germany, with a fairly limited democratic experience, India had close to a century long democratic tradition. The Congress, despite its class and other limitations, introduced certain democratic forms. The struggle for independence also saw a sustained struggle for civil liberties, which continued even after independence. As a result, a purely militaristic bid for power by fascists, as in Chile, was unlikely. A quick coup of the type desired immediately after 1947 was halted in its tracks after the Gandhi murder. Thereafter, Golwalkar clearly adopted a strategy of penetrating into civil society. Even though the RSS and its fronts are today much closer to power than they were in the 1950s, fascists and their fellow-travellers sing a number of seemingly different tunes, to disarm the unwary.
The reasons for these reflections are a number of arguments being raised concerning Kandhamal. The most important aids to the Hindutva-fascists are being provided by certain seemingly liberal or left wing, or even civil libertarian voices. A renegade from the British SWP moved all the way to the BJP in India, and writes as someone seeking a “balance” instead of one-sided attacks on “Hindus”. But this one person is not all. Former leftists, close to the CPI(M), or even claiming a kind of Maoist pedigree [I use the term maoist in its generic sense, rather than meaning specifically the CPI(Maoist) as many people nowadays do] are also in the fray these days.
The strategy of the RSS and its extra-parliamentary wings should be clear to anyone who does not choose to wear blinkers. Wherever the BJP, alone or in a coalition, gets power, the extra-parliamentary wings of the RSS, including the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, and others, will use both legal and illegal means to propagate hatred against minorities as an instrument of mobilizing Hindus behind the Hindutva banner. Their instruments will include beatings, killings, rape, setting fire, and other such nice techniques. Frenzy will be whipped up among the poor and socially marginalized, like the adivasis. These have happened, in varying degrees, in Gujarat (the model), Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and now Orissa, even if matters have not reached pogrom level everywhere. Whenever it does, people with left and liberal masks and past are mobilized by the fascists. These renegades from progressive battles flaunt their pedigrees all the better to defend the fascists in a roundabout way.
The usual argument calls for balance. Who killed the people in the Sabarmati Express? It is still murky. Yet we were repeatedly told that it is because we did not condemn adequately and quickly enough the murder of Hindus, the Hindu sentiment was hurt, and Newton’s Third Law took over. Interestingly, the pseudo-liberal agents of the Hindutva brigade were nowhere to be seen when it was revealed that many of the reports, such as the dragging out of women from the train and their being raped inside a Madrasa was a lie peddled by a few rabidly rightwing newspapers. Yet those were the reports used to inflame passions and legitimize the mass rapes and murders of Muslims. In just the same way, this is what we see being repeated over Kandhamal. Aggressive posturing concluding in rapes, murders, the use of open terrorism by the Sangh Parivar and forces within the state that it has successfully subverted [unless you are one of those who believe that all terrorists are Muslims], were part of a long term plan to communalise Orissa. The rape of Sister M. was one particularly glaring incident, but not a one off action. As social movements, women’s rights activists, human rights activists, or just plain concerned citizens began protesting it was also felt necessary to neutralize their protests in a number of ways. So on one hand we have the revolting claims about the sexual habits of Sister M and so on, as if a rape becomes less a rape if any of those assertions were at all true. On the other hand, we have the liberal and leftist face, which pretends that we are at fault for not condemning the murder of Lakshmanand Saraswati. There is absolutely no evidence linking Lakshmanand’s murder with the Christians. His murder, by whoever, was a one off action. It was not part of a sustained terrorism and pogrom. If it is argued that unless his murder is condemned we cannot condemn the systematic violence on Christians, or that his murder justifies the rape of Sister M., then a single murder and a pogrom are being equated. In the name of even handedness, we are being told that the violence on minorities is less important. Will those pseudo-liberal, pseudo-left pseudo-civil libertarians please tell us, how many minority persons equal one figure of the Hindutva pantheon?
A second technique is to seek to dilute the gravity of the situation by lumping it with all other sorts of violence. For example, in the wake of the bomb explosion at Salboni, the police are harassing innocent people. I would have been surprised if they did not do so. We need to stand up for the democratic rights of all. I for one am publicly on record, repeatedly, defending people when arbitrary police action is imposed in the name of fighting Maoism. But do we lump this together with the pogrom? That would ensure that resistance to pogroms are not built.
Such apparently liberal, or left, or even revolutionary heros and heroines need to be fought, exposed, resisted, and driven out of all progressive movements and forums. These are double agents of the fascists in civil society, seemingly in the progressive or at least liberal camp, but actually doing their best to blunt the edge of anti-fascism and anti-communalism. Such rotten pseudo-progressives will call for war to the bitter end on the CPI(M) but soft pedal on the RSS, its fronts, and allies. They will counter every call for democratic rights in Kashmir with crocodile tears for the Pandits, while concealing the role of Jagmohan in the ouster of Pandits from Kashmir. They will defend the democratic rights of right wing hooligans accusing a women’s rally for secularism of being in the pay of the ISI, while condemning any male who defends the secular woman as interfering in women’s autonomy. While a simple action like driving them out without a political battle is erroneous, it is essential to challenge them whenever and wherever they peddle their poisonous ware. Fighting the fascist fifth column is a necessary component of fighting fascism. To resist the violence in Kandhamal, we have to recognize its specifically pogrom-like character, instead of confusing it with quotidian violence.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
An Open Letter to Tariq Ali
Dear Tariq,
When I was a very young radical, still a Maoist rather than a Trotskyist, it was your name, rather than that of Ernest Mandel, or of anyone else, that we came across, here in our part of India. There are still older comrades in West Bengal, who talk about a certain period of Fourth International history, in terms of “in those days of Tariq Ali”. This is why, a statement, even though signed by Chomsky, Zinn and others, along with the man who seems to have carried out the coup, a gentleman named Vijay Prashad, becomes most painful because you are among the signatories. As you once wrote in one of your wonderful books, about another comrade of yours, ‘there was fire in his belly in those days’. Perhaps we have all grown older, but some of us have refused to grow “wiser”.
I read, and re-read, with a growing sense of wonder, shame and above all anger, the statement that some of you have signed. If you are uninformed, what gave you the authority to issue a pompous statement based on that lack of information? I write to you, because I consider you a comrade who has committed a mistake in signing this statement.
Right at the beginning, you write:
News travels to us that events in West Bengal have overtaken the optimism that some of us have experienced during trips to the state. We are concernedabout the rancor that has divided the public space, created what appear to be unbridgeable gaps between people who share similar values.
Who are these people who share similar values? Just what do you know about the values shared by those in governmental authority in West Bengal? You, and those others amongst you, who made trips here, met some of the CPI(M)’s intellectuals, who put on a special face for foreign delegations. But as someone who has known Marxism for longer than I have, you know well that it is never possible to judge people solely by what they say about themselves. When someone uses words like democracy, even socialism, anti-imperialism, unless you know the context, unless you know exactly what their political practice is, you cannot assume that they say those words in the same way that you, or someone else does.
So let us begin by looking at values. Just a small example of values. When the Singur –Nandigram issues began blowing up, Medha Patkar, who happens to be one of India’s most respected social movement activists, someone who has therefore been vilified by parties and governments across India, extended her solidarity for the militant people. CPI(M) leaders took umbrage. CPI(M) State Secretariat member (and Central Committee member) Benoy Konar, in a speech, called on women to show Medha Patkar their buttocks. When Medha tried to go to Nandigram, her car was blockaded, and some people, supporters of the CPI(M), indeed followed Konar’s advice and showed Medha their buttocks. I could quote dozens of newspaper and television reports, but most clippings I have are in Bengali, so I give you the url of Medha’s own report. http://www.kafila.org/2007/03/15/medha-patkar-on-civil-war-in-nandigram/
I dare you, or any of your co-signatories, with the exception of Mr. Vijay Prashad, to come forward and assert that you share similar values as these people.
I am sure, that once this open letter is circulated, it will also be trivialized by the murders who are posing as leftists and persuading you to sign on behalf of them. So let me say that this is not the only issue I am talking about when we say values. I will be talking about political outlook and values in other ways. But Tariq, in the most extreme days of the IMT line, when talking about guerilla warfare, did you ever call on your comrades to do unto political opponents, that which Benoy Konar suggested and that which his followers obliged by doing?
If by values you mean left wing values, you would have to define more precisely what sort of leftism you are talking about. CPI(M) leaders and their government here in West Bengal are deeply wedded to a very authoritarian form of bourgeois democracy. I will be able to mention only a few cases below. But perhaps the clearest evidence is this – despite the fact that in the period 1971-1977, the Congress in power used utmost brutality, had people illegally arrested, tortured, many actually killed, in three decades in power, the CPI(M) led government has failed to carry though the prosecution of a single police officer of that era.
In your statement, you present a euphemistic comment, saying that you are concerned about the rancor that has divided the public space. The “rancor” that you talk about is the result of a long period of violation of civil liberties, of brutal repression of political opposition and massive use of party cadres as thugs. The most respected Civil Liberties organization in West Bengal , the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, has recently been targeted by the chief minister, who claimed that the APDR is a Maoist outfit. The crime of the APDR was that it has consistently argued that everyone has political and civil rights, and these cannot be circumscribed without threatening all of us. Let me again give some illustration. Attacks on the Maoists, especially the organizations CPI(ML) Peoples’ War, the Maoist Communist Centre, and after they merged, the CPI(Maoist) have been massive. Anyone suspected of being a Maoist has been arrested, even without real charges. And why is someone suspected? In Medinipur district, an activist of the APDR was arrested as a suspected Maoist, on the strength of material found in his possession. Such material included a copy of George Thompson’s From Marx to Mao-tse Tung. I still have a copy at home, and I am wondering when it will be my turn to be arrested. In Kolkata, a man was arrested on suspicion of being a Maoist, and he was so traumatized by police action, that he committed suicide. (Ananda Bazar patrika, 9.7.2002). Four days after Ananda Bazar Patrika wrote about this, the CPI(M) daily newspaper, Ganashakti, reported that Benoy Konar told journalists, in reply to a question on whether the police had overstepped the boundaries of human rights, that it is difficult to determine the boundaries of human rights. In addition, Konar treated the media to the homily that the baton of the police is used as a repressive apparatus. (Ganashakti, 11.7,02). In 2002, the Chief Minister said that the KLO in North Bengal or the Maoists elsewhere were holding up development. So the priority for development was used to justify violence on them. The Home Minister’s budget speech for 2002-2003 seeking additional funds for the police highlighted the commitment of the state to modernisation of the police for counter-insurgency; at a time when the government’s debt burden had risen to 7500 billion rupees. (Amit Bhattacharya, ‘Duhsomoy: Ganatantra, Manabadhikar O Paschimbanger ‘Sangbedanshil’ Sarkar’, in Bartaman Lokayatik, 2002-2003, Nos. 3-4 and 1-2, pp. 238-270 . See especially pp. 245-7; and also Ananda Bazar Patrika, 7.8.2002) . There has been a long, very long trail of state and party sponsored violence. The APDR has regularly listed cases. Two comrades, members of the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women, Kolkata), Mira Roy and Soma Marik, have written a booklet, Women Under the left Front rule: Expectations Betrayed, where violence on women have been discussed extensively. Not all are cases of political violence. In many cases, we have seen how rapists have been defended by leaders of the ruling party. For example, in August 1991, a young woman had been arrested from a hotel in Kanthi, where she had registered with a male friend. She was then raped by the police. Virtually defending the police, Acting Chief Minister Benoy Chowdhury told the West Bengal Assembly that she had registered under an assumed name with a male friend. In other words, since she was a presumably unmarried woman “gone bad” it was fair enough if the police had a little fun with her. Values I share with them? No thanks.
Violence over Singur and Nandigram are not unrelated to the foregoing. At one level, they reflect the culture of violence supported by the ruling party. At another level, they reflect the submission to neo-liberal globalization, even while a huge rhetoric is floated abroad for the consumption of international left-wing intellectuals. After all, we boast of an intellectual chief minister capable of quoting noted poets as part of his political spiels. So he needs the endorsement of intellectuals.
You write, “We continue to trust that the people of Bengal will not allow their differences on some issues to tear apart the important experiments undertaken in the state (land reforms, local self-government).” Since the signature is mostly of leftwing persons, and since in particular I am writing to you, a well-known Marxist, I trust the signatories, and especially you, know that there is no unified and homogeneous people. I am sorry if I have to spell out such truisms. But in these days of triumph of neo-liberalism, this kind of woolly-woolly, non-class language is being resorted to, even by those whom I have always treated as charter members of the class struggle camp. West Bengal is part of India, and India is a bourgeois state with an economy where extremes coexist. From the latest in Information Technology in Sector V of Salt Lake, it will take you just about two and a half hours by car to get to Nandigram, where you have plenty of poor peasants eking out a living much as their grandparents did. Not that there has been no change, no development, but that has been limited development in a backward capitalist economy. Since the current conflicts seem minor to you, compared to the “important experiments”, let us look at those experiments briefly. As I am not writing a treatise, I do not intend to write for long pages, nor to provide extensive footnotes. It is however necessary to question fundamentally the false claims of the West Bengal Government, that you seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Some years back, when the PRC had just started its trek back to class collaborationist politics, a comrade in the PRC named Franco Grisolia wrote to two of us, asking for a note on the CPI(M) led government, as well as CPI(M)’s support to the UPA at the center, because this model was being held up by supporters of Bertinotti to justify their turn to the right. So Soma Marik and I wrote a longish essay, The Left Front and the United Progressive Alliance, one version of which was published in Italian, and another version, in English, was put up in the website of our comrades of Socialist Democracy, Irish supporters of the Fourth International.
Just one paragraph from that essay will reveal an interesting story: “The key issue of land distribution, in fact, tells an interesting story. In 1967, and again in 1969, two short-lived United Front governments had been formed. There had been a mass upsurge, and huge land seizures and distribution. OF ALL the ceiling-surplus land vested with the state since 1953 (when the West Bengal Estate Acquisition Act was passed) and the year 2000, as much as 44 per cent of this land (6 lakh acres) was obtained in the five-year period between 1967 and 1972, thanks to the energetic initiatives of the two United Fronts; another 26% (3.5 lakh acres) had been acquired earlier. In the last 20 years of Left Front rule only 1.53 lakh acres were acquired, which amounts to almost a quarter of what was achieved during the very short UF regime and almost a half of what was obtained during the 14 years (1953-1967) of Congress rule.” The two United Front governments saw an active left, and one moreover facing a serious challenge from the emerging Maoist forces who eventually became the CPI (ML). Land reform at that time was based on popular initiative, not bureaucratic measures. The collapse of the governments clearly taught the CPI (M) a lesson – to wit, do not rock the boat of the bourgeoisie and their partners if you want a long stint.
As for the important local self government experiments that you talk about, what, really, is significant? The three tier panchayat system has been in operation in other provinces as well. Digvijay Singh, the Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, took measures to extend it to the level of the individual village. Despite much talk about panchayats being organs of self-rule of peasants, rich peasants and teachers formed the bulk. And given the fact that the poorer classes seldom were able to let their children finish secondary education, let alone college, teachers came from rich peasant families, or from non-agricultural families. A survey in one of the districts, Purulia, further showed that real help was received from the government’s developmental projects by a significant part of the rural rich, using their positions in the panchayats. (Prabir Bhattacharyya, ed, Anva Artha 19: Bamfront Sarkar—Ekti Mulyayan, Calcutta, May 1985, pp.11-14.)
You next write: “We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who have been forcibly dispossessed. We understand that the government has promised not to build achemical hub in the area around Nandigram. We understand that those who had been dispossessed by the violence are now being allowed back to their homes, without recrimination. We understand that there is now talk ofreconciliation. This is what we favor.”
This paragraph was drafted by/ is based on arguments by someone who is a dab hand at creating confusions that eventually aid exploiters, but is at the same time able to pull the wool over the eyes of leftists who are a little away from the scene. “We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who have been forcibly dispossessed.” Exactly which groups are you talking about? Evidently not those of Singur, since the next sentence clearly talks about Nandigram. In Singur, a colonial era law was used to dispossess peasants, to hand over land to one of India’s major capitalist concerns, the Tatas. Even if we accept, (as I do not, as I hope you still do not), the logic of the “free market”, why should a supposedly progressive government use a colonial law to dispossess peasants for the benefit of a capitalist group that is so rich that it can bid for and win in a battle to control a First World company? Why did the government not tell the Tatas to go and negotiate directly with the peasants so that they could get whatever benefits they were able to wrest? Moreover, perhaps your informants forgot to tell you, that there were vast numbers of share croppers, agricultural labourers, as well as people in various industries and transportation sectors in and around Singur, for whom the rich agricultural land of singur mattered. Thus, people in the potato industry (for Singur grows potato) lost out. People transporting potato lost out. Wage labourers lost out. And these, the proletarian sections, have received what compensation? The answer, dear Tariq, is zilch.
So let us pass on to Nandigram. There, your statement is extraordinarily damaging. If it had come from comparable intellectuals in India, I would have used stronger language. I suppose that ignorance lets you partially off the hook. What is sad is that you think it perfectly legitimate to issue a statement even though you are ignorant about the details.
There have been two charges of being dispossessed. On 6th January, 2007, CPI(M) thugs attacked peasants, and the retaliatory violence drove out a number of them. A further lot left of their own, fearful of the situation. They all stayed in a place called Khejuri. The CVPI(M) has claimed high figures – sometimes mentioning 1500, sometimes 3000. No independent investigation has proved this. Several of us went to Nandigram after the CPI(M) attack of 14 March, when 14 persons, at least, were murdered, and at least four women were raped. At that time, our investigations suggested that tht total number of CPI(M) supporters forced to leave Nandigram were around 300. The APDR twice sent teams to Khejuri, and suggested a figure of around 350. Out of these, some 35 had cleasrly been identified by peasants in Nandigram as active elements in the so-called cadre force of CPI(M) , i.e., the gun toting criminals who eventually carried out the November attacks to “reconquer” Nandigram. Now, in the first days, tens of thousands fled. Over the last few days they have trickled back, after having pledged loyalty to the CPI(M). So there is no recrimination, provided you have the 100% support for the CPI(M).
You write that you understand that the government has promised not to build a chemical hub around Nandigram. This specific reference comes as a surprise. Because it is actually once again a case of your walking into a trap. First, the chemical hub, and a number of similar proposals, are all of the same type – calls to build SEZs. If SEZs are built, who will they benefit? They will not follow even India’s far from excellent labour laws. Secondly, the chemical hub, wherever built, is going to be an environmental disaster. Finally, and most crucially, the West Bengal government never formally promised not to build the chemical hub in Nandigram. What they said was that it will not be built in Nandigram if the people do not want it. Now, after the CPI(M) conquest,( for that is what it was, it was not even the state apparatus going in, but armed forces of the major party of the Left Front), what if people are compelled to say that yes, they do want the chemical hub? Let me remind you, that the CPI(M) is among the world’s largest surviving parties of Stalinist origin, and while the Moscow tie is long gone , the Moscow style has been retained -- but in the service of capitalism. Today’s (21st November) newspapers already carry a news about how peasants have been forced to give written apologies to the CPI(M) in order to go and work in their fields.
You talk of reconciliation. Between whom do you wish for reconciliation? Now that the CPI(M) has actually conquered the territory by force, would a humble acquiescence, given the inability to do anything else, be treated as reconciliation? Perhaps a little more detail about who the cadres were and how they fought the peasants would come in handy. Cadres — local criminals mostly involved in robbery cases — for the operation were drawn from Chandrakona and Garbeta zonal committees. Also, cadres were sent from Narayangarh and Keshiary areas. Another group of around 250 armed CPM supporters and criminals came from the villages of Punishol at Onda and Rajpur, Taldangra in Bankura.
Sources said criminals were given money in advance and given a free-hand to bring whatever they could from the empty homes once the operation is complete. Sources said one such group that has returned to Onda came with motorcycles.
The Bankura group reached Nandigram after travelling by train and then road. The group boarded trains and allegedly got off at Balichak, four stations after Kharagpur, and then headed towards Nandigram via Khejuri in the guise of daily wage earners. They take the same disguise when they go to Bihar and Jharkhand to collect arms, sources said.
Most of these people are suspected to be running arms smuggling rackets. The arms used in the recapture operation are believed to have been supplied from these suppliers.
Another cache of arms came from Purulia where party workers had received arms to combat Maoists. It is also suspected that the arms gone missing after the Purulia arms drop are with CPM supporters and were smuggled to Nandigram.
The coal mafia from Burdwan is also believed to have played a key role in the operation. The money from the mafia is believed to have supplied funds for the operation, helped in procuring ammunition and hire vehicles that carried the armed men to the interior areas as the attack progressed.
In your final paragraph, written in bold type in the version I received, you write:
“The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous tosplit the left. We are faced with a world power that has demolished one state (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran). This is not the time for division when the basis of division no longer appears to exist.”
So here we get the motivation that led you to write the letter. You do not wish for a split in the left in the face of resurgent US imperialism. Let me go back several years. As you are aware, the Fourth International had been great supporters of the Nicaraguan Revolution, and we, here in locally, tried our best to campaign for Nicaragua. At one stage, when Halima Lopez Sarkar was appointed the Nicaraguan ambassador to India, the CPI(M) decided to take up the campaign for Nicaragua. Of c ourse, with their incomparably bigger force, they could do much more. But when I had a talk with a Sandinista comrade who came here, he accused us of being sectarian to the CPI(M). I pointed out that our problem was simple – the CPI(M) would not even let us do any united front work while retaining our independent political stance. So even if we accept, as you obviously do, that the CPI(M) is a legitimate part of the left, how would we be able to avoid a split? In emails where what passes for debates, CPI(M) supporters are not only abusive towards us, but even to RSP or forward Bloc, partners of the CPI(M) in the Left Front who have been critical about Nandigram as well as the CPI(M)’s sudden volte face over the Nuclear Deal.
Yet you are confident, that it is we who are impetuously causing the split. Tariq, the split is decades old. The CPI(M)’s idea of political hegemony is simple – bash everyone on the left till they genuflect before you. But according to you and your fellow signatories, the basis of divisions no longer appears to exist. If by this you mean that Nandigram’s resistance has been smashed, that armed terrorists of the CPI(M) have silenced the peasants, you are of course right. The basis however exists, because we have been unable to accept what was done.
Your argument, that in the face of the US, we must not fight the CPI(M), can be extended to every tin pot dictator who takes a formal anti-US stand. Meanwhile, the CPI(M) led government constantly strives to welcome multinationals, it fights tooth and nail in defence of globalization. In lieu of several more pages of details, I offer you the URL of Sanhati (Solidarity), an anti-globalization website -- http://www.sanhati.com/ . here you will find plenty of discussions about the Left front government and globalization.
Nonetheless, you will say, what about the Left and its ability to influence the Government of India, or its ability to bring out millions in demonstrations? Once more, even accepting your premise that when you say CPI(M) you still say Left (would you make the same concession for the right wing of the old Italian CP?) , why can we not oppose the CPI(M) on other issues? Or are you saying, that in the face of the US war threat, all class questions inside India disappear? Are you saying that those who are in government and are implementing World Bank-IMF dictated economic policies are such valiant fighters against imperialism that we must accept the loving pats they give us, even through their guns? Would demobilizing militant fighters be then the best road to militant anti-imperialism? I never learnt that from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg or Mandel.
Long years of defeat and retreat have made many of us cautious. I agree that the power of US imperialism is greater than it was. But I firmly believe that we can best contribute to the anti-imperialist struggles by consistent anti-capitalism at the point of our existence. When I joined the Trotskyist movement, nearly three decades back, this was clear to me. This was clear to me even before that, when I understood the meaning of Che’s call to create two, three, many Vietnams. And yes, on 14th November, despite attempts to turn the protest demonstration into an “apolitical” show by some high profile figures, there were banners and posters, like the one that said, Nandigram is Bengal’s Vietnam, or the poster where Marx says, “Not in My name.” Don’t, please, call for a cession of the struggles of toilers in Marx’s name, and don’t claim that bourgeois reformism, like some land distribution, some registration of sharecroppers, or panchayat elections, make West Bengal a planet apart. Stand by those who have been murdered, and their comrades, and don’t call for a reconciliation between defenders of the ruling class who use sophisticated Marxist sounding jargon, and the crude, unsophisticated, but militant fighters who resist them.
With comradely greetings
Kunal Chattopadhyay
When I was a very young radical, still a Maoist rather than a Trotskyist, it was your name, rather than that of Ernest Mandel, or of anyone else, that we came across, here in our part of India. There are still older comrades in West Bengal, who talk about a certain period of Fourth International history, in terms of “in those days of Tariq Ali”. This is why, a statement, even though signed by Chomsky, Zinn and others, along with the man who seems to have carried out the coup, a gentleman named Vijay Prashad, becomes most painful because you are among the signatories. As you once wrote in one of your wonderful books, about another comrade of yours, ‘there was fire in his belly in those days’. Perhaps we have all grown older, but some of us have refused to grow “wiser”.
I read, and re-read, with a growing sense of wonder, shame and above all anger, the statement that some of you have signed. If you are uninformed, what gave you the authority to issue a pompous statement based on that lack of information? I write to you, because I consider you a comrade who has committed a mistake in signing this statement.
Right at the beginning, you write:
News travels to us that events in West Bengal have overtaken the optimism that some of us have experienced during trips to the state. We are concernedabout the rancor that has divided the public space, created what appear to be unbridgeable gaps between people who share similar values.
Who are these people who share similar values? Just what do you know about the values shared by those in governmental authority in West Bengal? You, and those others amongst you, who made trips here, met some of the CPI(M)’s intellectuals, who put on a special face for foreign delegations. But as someone who has known Marxism for longer than I have, you know well that it is never possible to judge people solely by what they say about themselves. When someone uses words like democracy, even socialism, anti-imperialism, unless you know the context, unless you know exactly what their political practice is, you cannot assume that they say those words in the same way that you, or someone else does.
So let us begin by looking at values. Just a small example of values. When the Singur –Nandigram issues began blowing up, Medha Patkar, who happens to be one of India’s most respected social movement activists, someone who has therefore been vilified by parties and governments across India, extended her solidarity for the militant people. CPI(M) leaders took umbrage. CPI(M) State Secretariat member (and Central Committee member) Benoy Konar, in a speech, called on women to show Medha Patkar their buttocks. When Medha tried to go to Nandigram, her car was blockaded, and some people, supporters of the CPI(M), indeed followed Konar’s advice and showed Medha their buttocks. I could quote dozens of newspaper and television reports, but most clippings I have are in Bengali, so I give you the url of Medha’s own report. http://www.kafila.org/2007/03/15/medha-patkar-on-civil-war-in-nandigram/
I dare you, or any of your co-signatories, with the exception of Mr. Vijay Prashad, to come forward and assert that you share similar values as these people.
I am sure, that once this open letter is circulated, it will also be trivialized by the murders who are posing as leftists and persuading you to sign on behalf of them. So let me say that this is not the only issue I am talking about when we say values. I will be talking about political outlook and values in other ways. But Tariq, in the most extreme days of the IMT line, when talking about guerilla warfare, did you ever call on your comrades to do unto political opponents, that which Benoy Konar suggested and that which his followers obliged by doing?
If by values you mean left wing values, you would have to define more precisely what sort of leftism you are talking about. CPI(M) leaders and their government here in West Bengal are deeply wedded to a very authoritarian form of bourgeois democracy. I will be able to mention only a few cases below. But perhaps the clearest evidence is this – despite the fact that in the period 1971-1977, the Congress in power used utmost brutality, had people illegally arrested, tortured, many actually killed, in three decades in power, the CPI(M) led government has failed to carry though the prosecution of a single police officer of that era.
In your statement, you present a euphemistic comment, saying that you are concerned about the rancor that has divided the public space. The “rancor” that you talk about is the result of a long period of violation of civil liberties, of brutal repression of political opposition and massive use of party cadres as thugs. The most respected Civil Liberties organization in West Bengal , the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, has recently been targeted by the chief minister, who claimed that the APDR is a Maoist outfit. The crime of the APDR was that it has consistently argued that everyone has political and civil rights, and these cannot be circumscribed without threatening all of us. Let me again give some illustration. Attacks on the Maoists, especially the organizations CPI(ML) Peoples’ War, the Maoist Communist Centre, and after they merged, the CPI(Maoist) have been massive. Anyone suspected of being a Maoist has been arrested, even without real charges. And why is someone suspected? In Medinipur district, an activist of the APDR was arrested as a suspected Maoist, on the strength of material found in his possession. Such material included a copy of George Thompson’s From Marx to Mao-tse Tung. I still have a copy at home, and I am wondering when it will be my turn to be arrested. In Kolkata, a man was arrested on suspicion of being a Maoist, and he was so traumatized by police action, that he committed suicide. (Ananda Bazar patrika, 9.7.2002). Four days after Ananda Bazar Patrika wrote about this, the CPI(M) daily newspaper, Ganashakti, reported that Benoy Konar told journalists, in reply to a question on whether the police had overstepped the boundaries of human rights, that it is difficult to determine the boundaries of human rights. In addition, Konar treated the media to the homily that the baton of the police is used as a repressive apparatus. (Ganashakti, 11.7,02). In 2002, the Chief Minister said that the KLO in North Bengal or the Maoists elsewhere were holding up development. So the priority for development was used to justify violence on them. The Home Minister’s budget speech for 2002-2003 seeking additional funds for the police highlighted the commitment of the state to modernisation of the police for counter-insurgency; at a time when the government’s debt burden had risen to 7500 billion rupees. (Amit Bhattacharya, ‘Duhsomoy: Ganatantra, Manabadhikar O Paschimbanger ‘Sangbedanshil’ Sarkar’, in Bartaman Lokayatik, 2002-2003, Nos. 3-4 and 1-2, pp. 238-270 . See especially pp. 245-7; and also Ananda Bazar Patrika, 7.8.2002) . There has been a long, very long trail of state and party sponsored violence. The APDR has regularly listed cases. Two comrades, members of the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women, Kolkata), Mira Roy and Soma Marik, have written a booklet, Women Under the left Front rule: Expectations Betrayed, where violence on women have been discussed extensively. Not all are cases of political violence. In many cases, we have seen how rapists have been defended by leaders of the ruling party. For example, in August 1991, a young woman had been arrested from a hotel in Kanthi, where she had registered with a male friend. She was then raped by the police. Virtually defending the police, Acting Chief Minister Benoy Chowdhury told the West Bengal Assembly that she had registered under an assumed name with a male friend. In other words, since she was a presumably unmarried woman “gone bad” it was fair enough if the police had a little fun with her. Values I share with them? No thanks.
Violence over Singur and Nandigram are not unrelated to the foregoing. At one level, they reflect the culture of violence supported by the ruling party. At another level, they reflect the submission to neo-liberal globalization, even while a huge rhetoric is floated abroad for the consumption of international left-wing intellectuals. After all, we boast of an intellectual chief minister capable of quoting noted poets as part of his political spiels. So he needs the endorsement of intellectuals.
You write, “We continue to trust that the people of Bengal will not allow their differences on some issues to tear apart the important experiments undertaken in the state (land reforms, local self-government).” Since the signature is mostly of leftwing persons, and since in particular I am writing to you, a well-known Marxist, I trust the signatories, and especially you, know that there is no unified and homogeneous people. I am sorry if I have to spell out such truisms. But in these days of triumph of neo-liberalism, this kind of woolly-woolly, non-class language is being resorted to, even by those whom I have always treated as charter members of the class struggle camp. West Bengal is part of India, and India is a bourgeois state with an economy where extremes coexist. From the latest in Information Technology in Sector V of Salt Lake, it will take you just about two and a half hours by car to get to Nandigram, where you have plenty of poor peasants eking out a living much as their grandparents did. Not that there has been no change, no development, but that has been limited development in a backward capitalist economy. Since the current conflicts seem minor to you, compared to the “important experiments”, let us look at those experiments briefly. As I am not writing a treatise, I do not intend to write for long pages, nor to provide extensive footnotes. It is however necessary to question fundamentally the false claims of the West Bengal Government, that you seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Some years back, when the PRC had just started its trek back to class collaborationist politics, a comrade in the PRC named Franco Grisolia wrote to two of us, asking for a note on the CPI(M) led government, as well as CPI(M)’s support to the UPA at the center, because this model was being held up by supporters of Bertinotti to justify their turn to the right. So Soma Marik and I wrote a longish essay, The Left Front and the United Progressive Alliance, one version of which was published in Italian, and another version, in English, was put up in the website of our comrades of Socialist Democracy, Irish supporters of the Fourth International.
Just one paragraph from that essay will reveal an interesting story: “The key issue of land distribution, in fact, tells an interesting story. In 1967, and again in 1969, two short-lived United Front governments had been formed. There had been a mass upsurge, and huge land seizures and distribution. OF ALL the ceiling-surplus land vested with the state since 1953 (when the West Bengal Estate Acquisition Act was passed) and the year 2000, as much as 44 per cent of this land (6 lakh acres) was obtained in the five-year period between 1967 and 1972, thanks to the energetic initiatives of the two United Fronts; another 26% (3.5 lakh acres) had been acquired earlier. In the last 20 years of Left Front rule only 1.53 lakh acres were acquired, which amounts to almost a quarter of what was achieved during the very short UF regime and almost a half of what was obtained during the 14 years (1953-1967) of Congress rule.” The two United Front governments saw an active left, and one moreover facing a serious challenge from the emerging Maoist forces who eventually became the CPI (ML). Land reform at that time was based on popular initiative, not bureaucratic measures. The collapse of the governments clearly taught the CPI (M) a lesson – to wit, do not rock the boat of the bourgeoisie and their partners if you want a long stint.
As for the important local self government experiments that you talk about, what, really, is significant? The three tier panchayat system has been in operation in other provinces as well. Digvijay Singh, the Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, took measures to extend it to the level of the individual village. Despite much talk about panchayats being organs of self-rule of peasants, rich peasants and teachers formed the bulk. And given the fact that the poorer classes seldom were able to let their children finish secondary education, let alone college, teachers came from rich peasant families, or from non-agricultural families. A survey in one of the districts, Purulia, further showed that real help was received from the government’s developmental projects by a significant part of the rural rich, using their positions in the panchayats. (Prabir Bhattacharyya, ed, Anva Artha 19: Bamfront Sarkar—Ekti Mulyayan, Calcutta, May 1985, pp.11-14.)
You next write: “We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who have been forcibly dispossessed. We understand that the government has promised not to build achemical hub in the area around Nandigram. We understand that those who had been dispossessed by the violence are now being allowed back to their homes, without recrimination. We understand that there is now talk ofreconciliation. This is what we favor.”
This paragraph was drafted by/ is based on arguments by someone who is a dab hand at creating confusions that eventually aid exploiters, but is at the same time able to pull the wool over the eyes of leftists who are a little away from the scene. “We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who have been forcibly dispossessed.” Exactly which groups are you talking about? Evidently not those of Singur, since the next sentence clearly talks about Nandigram. In Singur, a colonial era law was used to dispossess peasants, to hand over land to one of India’s major capitalist concerns, the Tatas. Even if we accept, (as I do not, as I hope you still do not), the logic of the “free market”, why should a supposedly progressive government use a colonial law to dispossess peasants for the benefit of a capitalist group that is so rich that it can bid for and win in a battle to control a First World company? Why did the government not tell the Tatas to go and negotiate directly with the peasants so that they could get whatever benefits they were able to wrest? Moreover, perhaps your informants forgot to tell you, that there were vast numbers of share croppers, agricultural labourers, as well as people in various industries and transportation sectors in and around Singur, for whom the rich agricultural land of singur mattered. Thus, people in the potato industry (for Singur grows potato) lost out. People transporting potato lost out. Wage labourers lost out. And these, the proletarian sections, have received what compensation? The answer, dear Tariq, is zilch.
So let us pass on to Nandigram. There, your statement is extraordinarily damaging. If it had come from comparable intellectuals in India, I would have used stronger language. I suppose that ignorance lets you partially off the hook. What is sad is that you think it perfectly legitimate to issue a statement even though you are ignorant about the details.
There have been two charges of being dispossessed. On 6th January, 2007, CPI(M) thugs attacked peasants, and the retaliatory violence drove out a number of them. A further lot left of their own, fearful of the situation. They all stayed in a place called Khejuri. The CVPI(M) has claimed high figures – sometimes mentioning 1500, sometimes 3000. No independent investigation has proved this. Several of us went to Nandigram after the CPI(M) attack of 14 March, when 14 persons, at least, were murdered, and at least four women were raped. At that time, our investigations suggested that tht total number of CPI(M) supporters forced to leave Nandigram were around 300. The APDR twice sent teams to Khejuri, and suggested a figure of around 350. Out of these, some 35 had cleasrly been identified by peasants in Nandigram as active elements in the so-called cadre force of CPI(M) , i.e., the gun toting criminals who eventually carried out the November attacks to “reconquer” Nandigram. Now, in the first days, tens of thousands fled. Over the last few days they have trickled back, after having pledged loyalty to the CPI(M). So there is no recrimination, provided you have the 100% support for the CPI(M).
You write that you understand that the government has promised not to build a chemical hub around Nandigram. This specific reference comes as a surprise. Because it is actually once again a case of your walking into a trap. First, the chemical hub, and a number of similar proposals, are all of the same type – calls to build SEZs. If SEZs are built, who will they benefit? They will not follow even India’s far from excellent labour laws. Secondly, the chemical hub, wherever built, is going to be an environmental disaster. Finally, and most crucially, the West Bengal government never formally promised not to build the chemical hub in Nandigram. What they said was that it will not be built in Nandigram if the people do not want it. Now, after the CPI(M) conquest,( for that is what it was, it was not even the state apparatus going in, but armed forces of the major party of the Left Front), what if people are compelled to say that yes, they do want the chemical hub? Let me remind you, that the CPI(M) is among the world’s largest surviving parties of Stalinist origin, and while the Moscow tie is long gone , the Moscow style has been retained -- but in the service of capitalism. Today’s (21st November) newspapers already carry a news about how peasants have been forced to give written apologies to the CPI(M) in order to go and work in their fields.
You talk of reconciliation. Between whom do you wish for reconciliation? Now that the CPI(M) has actually conquered the territory by force, would a humble acquiescence, given the inability to do anything else, be treated as reconciliation? Perhaps a little more detail about who the cadres were and how they fought the peasants would come in handy. Cadres — local criminals mostly involved in robbery cases — for the operation were drawn from Chandrakona and Garbeta zonal committees. Also, cadres were sent from Narayangarh and Keshiary areas. Another group of around 250 armed CPM supporters and criminals came from the villages of Punishol at Onda and Rajpur, Taldangra in Bankura.
Sources said criminals were given money in advance and given a free-hand to bring whatever they could from the empty homes once the operation is complete. Sources said one such group that has returned to Onda came with motorcycles.
The Bankura group reached Nandigram after travelling by train and then road. The group boarded trains and allegedly got off at Balichak, four stations after Kharagpur, and then headed towards Nandigram via Khejuri in the guise of daily wage earners. They take the same disguise when they go to Bihar and Jharkhand to collect arms, sources said.
Most of these people are suspected to be running arms smuggling rackets. The arms used in the recapture operation are believed to have been supplied from these suppliers.
Another cache of arms came from Purulia where party workers had received arms to combat Maoists. It is also suspected that the arms gone missing after the Purulia arms drop are with CPM supporters and were smuggled to Nandigram.
The coal mafia from Burdwan is also believed to have played a key role in the operation. The money from the mafia is believed to have supplied funds for the operation, helped in procuring ammunition and hire vehicles that carried the armed men to the interior areas as the attack progressed.
In your final paragraph, written in bold type in the version I received, you write:
“The balance of forces in the world is such that it would be impetuous tosplit the left. We are faced with a world power that has demolished one state (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran). This is not the time for division when the basis of division no longer appears to exist.”
So here we get the motivation that led you to write the letter. You do not wish for a split in the left in the face of resurgent US imperialism. Let me go back several years. As you are aware, the Fourth International had been great supporters of the Nicaraguan Revolution, and we, here in locally, tried our best to campaign for Nicaragua. At one stage, when Halima Lopez Sarkar was appointed the Nicaraguan ambassador to India, the CPI(M) decided to take up the campaign for Nicaragua. Of c ourse, with their incomparably bigger force, they could do much more. But when I had a talk with a Sandinista comrade who came here, he accused us of being sectarian to the CPI(M). I pointed out that our problem was simple – the CPI(M) would not even let us do any united front work while retaining our independent political stance. So even if we accept, as you obviously do, that the CPI(M) is a legitimate part of the left, how would we be able to avoid a split? In emails where what passes for debates, CPI(M) supporters are not only abusive towards us, but even to RSP or forward Bloc, partners of the CPI(M) in the Left Front who have been critical about Nandigram as well as the CPI(M)’s sudden volte face over the Nuclear Deal.
Yet you are confident, that it is we who are impetuously causing the split. Tariq, the split is decades old. The CPI(M)’s idea of political hegemony is simple – bash everyone on the left till they genuflect before you. But according to you and your fellow signatories, the basis of divisions no longer appears to exist. If by this you mean that Nandigram’s resistance has been smashed, that armed terrorists of the CPI(M) have silenced the peasants, you are of course right. The basis however exists, because we have been unable to accept what was done.
Your argument, that in the face of the US, we must not fight the CPI(M), can be extended to every tin pot dictator who takes a formal anti-US stand. Meanwhile, the CPI(M) led government constantly strives to welcome multinationals, it fights tooth and nail in defence of globalization. In lieu of several more pages of details, I offer you the URL of Sanhati (Solidarity), an anti-globalization website -- http://www.sanhati.com/ . here you will find plenty of discussions about the Left front government and globalization.
Nonetheless, you will say, what about the Left and its ability to influence the Government of India, or its ability to bring out millions in demonstrations? Once more, even accepting your premise that when you say CPI(M) you still say Left (would you make the same concession for the right wing of the old Italian CP?) , why can we not oppose the CPI(M) on other issues? Or are you saying, that in the face of the US war threat, all class questions inside India disappear? Are you saying that those who are in government and are implementing World Bank-IMF dictated economic policies are such valiant fighters against imperialism that we must accept the loving pats they give us, even through their guns? Would demobilizing militant fighters be then the best road to militant anti-imperialism? I never learnt that from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg or Mandel.
Long years of defeat and retreat have made many of us cautious. I agree that the power of US imperialism is greater than it was. But I firmly believe that we can best contribute to the anti-imperialist struggles by consistent anti-capitalism at the point of our existence. When I joined the Trotskyist movement, nearly three decades back, this was clear to me. This was clear to me even before that, when I understood the meaning of Che’s call to create two, three, many Vietnams. And yes, on 14th November, despite attempts to turn the protest demonstration into an “apolitical” show by some high profile figures, there were banners and posters, like the one that said, Nandigram is Bengal’s Vietnam, or the poster where Marx says, “Not in My name.” Don’t, please, call for a cession of the struggles of toilers in Marx’s name, and don’t claim that bourgeois reformism, like some land distribution, some registration of sharecroppers, or panchayat elections, make West Bengal a planet apart. Stand by those who have been murdered, and their comrades, and don’t call for a reconciliation between defenders of the ruling class who use sophisticated Marxist sounding jargon, and the crude, unsophisticated, but militant fighters who resist them.
With comradely greetings
Kunal Chattopadhyay
Sunday, October 28, 2007
“Radical” Defenders of Ragging
One of the things we inherited from our erstwhile colonial masters was the cruel and humiliating tradition of “ragging” junior students. Administrations have traditionally tended to ignore or play down the matter. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the reality that ragging divides the student community and turns students into torturers. This certainly suits administrations far more than getting radical student communities raising questions about imperialism, the exploitation of peasants and workers, environmental degradation, or other social issues. I remember that when we were students, in Jadavpur University, it was our organisation, the JU Democratic Students Front, that used to generate anti-ragging consciousness. Our elected office bearers used to move among the students, halting ragging. On occasion, we got hold of raggers and demanded that the administration must take action against them.
The times have changed. There was a case of ragging in Jadavpur University, and under pressure from Supreme Court and the UGC, the University administration took some action. This was followed by divisions among the students, and an “agitation” demanding rescinding of action against the raggers. A series of posters and leaflets came out. Elected office bearers of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students Union resigned, because they did not agree with the position of many students that they should, if necessary, simply dismiss the charge of ragging, arguing that ragging had indeed taken place, and that while they did not want administrative punishment, they could not take the position that raggers should go scott free.
In this context, a pamphlet appeared, issued by Anirban Mondal (History PG II) and Agniswar Chakraborty (MCA-I), both of JU. They are part of an organisation called Chhatra Andolan Prastuti, of which they are leading members. This fact must be borne in mind when reading or trying to make sense of their pamphlet. Because, much of the pamphlet is not about ragging, but about an attack on the DSF leadership, as well as other student groups. This is clearly a bid by a new group to get popular support. And it is done by championing, with radical verbiage, a colonial criminal action.
Wat does the pamphlet say about ragging in general and the specific case in jadavpur University? We are informed that those who commit ragging and those who support them, barring rare exceptions, are parts of us. They are not ‘criminals’. This claim is buttressed by an acknowledgement that ragging is not unusual in the Jadavpur University Campus.
However, a major effort is made to dilute the issue of ragging by a series of arguments. First, every kind of societal power inequality and abuse of power is then called ragging. As a result, the real ragging gets lost. I was reminded, when reading this, of Heidegger’s argument that agriculture being turned into a motorized food industry was similar to the gas chambers. I soon realised that the similarity was not accidental. The core argument was post-modernist, with a fascistic bent.
Since this may appear strong, let me explain that not all opposition to bourgeois democratic authority is progressive. It has happened repeatedly in the history of radical and socialist movements that less theoretically aware sectors have made precisely this mistake. Paul Lafargue, a French Socialist who was also Marx’s son in law, once thought that it was possible for socialists to latch on to the dictatorial hankerings of General Boulanger, since he was opposed to the bourgeois republic. Then there was the notorious Red Referendum, when the Communist Party of Germany sided with the Nazis in a referendum against the Social Democrats. So it is possible that this fascistic pamphlet will be taken as a radical one by some left leaning students with inadequate conceptual tools.
Having described all power inequations as ragging, our ideologues go on to state that if in the family the mother is compelled to do something against her will at the dictation of the father, do we expect any verdict from a court? If due to some mistake (not my word, theirs) mental torture is perpetrated by a lover on the beloved (wow!, mental torture on the beloved – what a great love), the tortured one does not apply law. Society seeks solutions without the intervention of the state. Only when mistakes go beyond the average social level can special steps be taken. But if the authorities are to decide whether the level has gone beyond the social average, then it is unacceptable. Exemplary punishments are obstacles to real solutions.
Vague arguments follow, about how it is possible to get someone involved in a false ragging case.
But the core arguments are the ones I have summarised. What is their solution? As one subheading says – mass hearing, popular courts, general meetings.
Having admitted that ragging occurs regularly in Jadavpur University (an admission made in a different place, when they were trying to score a brownie point against the DSF leadership) our heroes now want us to believe that in such an atmosphere, a mass hearing can democratically solve the problem of ragging. But how will the charge be proved? In the case in Jadavpur University, a charge was that the names of the witnesses were kept concealed. This was done because of the threats that witnesses face. We have seen the “democratic” demand made to the elected Union office bearers – “since we elected you, you must say what ever we want you to say, even if it is, that no ragging had taken place”. Would it have been a popular court, or lynch law directed against the victim and the few witnesses who had dared to come forward?
In general, our “radical” ideologues clearly do not recognise the need for any law based community. This is not a socialist argument of any kind. Even the transition from capitalism to communism will need a public order. The idea, that mental torture (or even physical torture) in the name of love cannot be taken to court is something most feminists would reject. In India, just recently, we have had women’s movement activists fight hard for amendments to the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act. They did not argue that there should be no such laws.
It sounds very radical to say that xconsumerist society and power structures are causing ragging, so the fight must be against exploitation and authority. (Page 12 of the pamphlet). Inreality, this is like saying that till that happy day when total saocial change comes about, we must not demand specific measures from the state. In this entire discourse, the persons who get totally lost are the victims. They are told, you are agents of the authorities if you complain to them. Even though it is unlikely that you will get justice, go to mass meeting. Now what are these mass meetings? In the hostel, in one case, it was a group who supported the raggers. It was not a case that the entire student community was present. Even if they had been, I am supremely confident of the filibustering abilities of our pamphleteers and their cothinker. They would have driven away the mass, leaving only die hard supporters, who would then have declared, as the Hostel mass meeting sis, that there had been no ragging.
At the end, the defence of ragging is given a revolutionary, no longer merely radical, gloss. We are told that all these charges of ragging or anything are only attempts by the authorities to break the unity of the students. Lovely, ain’t it? Hail the unity of the bully and the bullied, for thus will we achieve the revolution!! It is to be hoped that students of JU will recognise this garbage for the right wing, fascistic argument that it is, and firmly reject it.
The times have changed. There was a case of ragging in Jadavpur University, and under pressure from Supreme Court and the UGC, the University administration took some action. This was followed by divisions among the students, and an “agitation” demanding rescinding of action against the raggers. A series of posters and leaflets came out. Elected office bearers of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students Union resigned, because they did not agree with the position of many students that they should, if necessary, simply dismiss the charge of ragging, arguing that ragging had indeed taken place, and that while they did not want administrative punishment, they could not take the position that raggers should go scott free.
In this context, a pamphlet appeared, issued by Anirban Mondal (History PG II) and Agniswar Chakraborty (MCA-I), both of JU. They are part of an organisation called Chhatra Andolan Prastuti, of which they are leading members. This fact must be borne in mind when reading or trying to make sense of their pamphlet. Because, much of the pamphlet is not about ragging, but about an attack on the DSF leadership, as well as other student groups. This is clearly a bid by a new group to get popular support. And it is done by championing, with radical verbiage, a colonial criminal action.
Wat does the pamphlet say about ragging in general and the specific case in jadavpur University? We are informed that those who commit ragging and those who support them, barring rare exceptions, are parts of us. They are not ‘criminals’. This claim is buttressed by an acknowledgement that ragging is not unusual in the Jadavpur University Campus.
However, a major effort is made to dilute the issue of ragging by a series of arguments. First, every kind of societal power inequality and abuse of power is then called ragging. As a result, the real ragging gets lost. I was reminded, when reading this, of Heidegger’s argument that agriculture being turned into a motorized food industry was similar to the gas chambers. I soon realised that the similarity was not accidental. The core argument was post-modernist, with a fascistic bent.
Since this may appear strong, let me explain that not all opposition to bourgeois democratic authority is progressive. It has happened repeatedly in the history of radical and socialist movements that less theoretically aware sectors have made precisely this mistake. Paul Lafargue, a French Socialist who was also Marx’s son in law, once thought that it was possible for socialists to latch on to the dictatorial hankerings of General Boulanger, since he was opposed to the bourgeois republic. Then there was the notorious Red Referendum, when the Communist Party of Germany sided with the Nazis in a referendum against the Social Democrats. So it is possible that this fascistic pamphlet will be taken as a radical one by some left leaning students with inadequate conceptual tools.
Having described all power inequations as ragging, our ideologues go on to state that if in the family the mother is compelled to do something against her will at the dictation of the father, do we expect any verdict from a court? If due to some mistake (not my word, theirs) mental torture is perpetrated by a lover on the beloved (wow!, mental torture on the beloved – what a great love), the tortured one does not apply law. Society seeks solutions without the intervention of the state. Only when mistakes go beyond the average social level can special steps be taken. But if the authorities are to decide whether the level has gone beyond the social average, then it is unacceptable. Exemplary punishments are obstacles to real solutions.
Vague arguments follow, about how it is possible to get someone involved in a false ragging case.
But the core arguments are the ones I have summarised. What is their solution? As one subheading says – mass hearing, popular courts, general meetings.
Having admitted that ragging occurs regularly in Jadavpur University (an admission made in a different place, when they were trying to score a brownie point against the DSF leadership) our heroes now want us to believe that in such an atmosphere, a mass hearing can democratically solve the problem of ragging. But how will the charge be proved? In the case in Jadavpur University, a charge was that the names of the witnesses were kept concealed. This was done because of the threats that witnesses face. We have seen the “democratic” demand made to the elected Union office bearers – “since we elected you, you must say what ever we want you to say, even if it is, that no ragging had taken place”. Would it have been a popular court, or lynch law directed against the victim and the few witnesses who had dared to come forward?
In general, our “radical” ideologues clearly do not recognise the need for any law based community. This is not a socialist argument of any kind. Even the transition from capitalism to communism will need a public order. The idea, that mental torture (or even physical torture) in the name of love cannot be taken to court is something most feminists would reject. In India, just recently, we have had women’s movement activists fight hard for amendments to the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act. They did not argue that there should be no such laws.
It sounds very radical to say that xconsumerist society and power structures are causing ragging, so the fight must be against exploitation and authority. (Page 12 of the pamphlet). Inreality, this is like saying that till that happy day when total saocial change comes about, we must not demand specific measures from the state. In this entire discourse, the persons who get totally lost are the victims. They are told, you are agents of the authorities if you complain to them. Even though it is unlikely that you will get justice, go to mass meeting. Now what are these mass meetings? In the hostel, in one case, it was a group who supported the raggers. It was not a case that the entire student community was present. Even if they had been, I am supremely confident of the filibustering abilities of our pamphleteers and their cothinker. They would have driven away the mass, leaving only die hard supporters, who would then have declared, as the Hostel mass meeting sis, that there had been no ragging.
At the end, the defence of ragging is given a revolutionary, no longer merely radical, gloss. We are told that all these charges of ragging or anything are only attempts by the authorities to break the unity of the students. Lovely, ain’t it? Hail the unity of the bully and the bullied, for thus will we achieve the revolution!! It is to be hoped that students of JU will recognise this garbage for the right wing, fascistic argument that it is, and firmly reject it.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Report on nandigram
A Brief Report on Nandigram
On 25th March, several of us made a trip to Nandigram, partly to distribute aid, partly to find out the situation. Three of us subsequently went to the SSKM Hospital and met some of the victims who were being treated. This brief report/deposition is based on our observations and documentation at Nandigram and Kolkata.
The following were the persons interviewed, on 25th March 2007, with such identification as we could obtain.
Buddhadev Mondal -- independent social activist, Nandigram town.
Ashish Mondal -- Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee, Mahespur.
Samad -- Jamait-ulema i Hind and Convenor, BUPC, Etimkhana, Nandigram.
Kamallata -- Kalicharanpur. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Anuradha Mondal -- Southkhali Char. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Nur Jahan Bibi -- Garchakraberia. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Mehrunnisa -- No. 7 Jalpai. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Sheikh Sultan -- Nandigram. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Manasi -- Sarberia. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Bhagirath Patra -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Amina Bibi, Garchakraberia.
Goley Ara Bibi, Garchakraberia.
Khokon Adhikary, Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Pusparani Mondal -- Gokulnagar Dakshin Pally, Adhikaripara.
Chhabirani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Babita Das -- Kalicharanpur.
Nilima Das -- Gokulnagar Dakshin Pally, Adhikaripara.
Bakulrani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Jahnavirani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Namita Dasadhikary -- Adhikaripara.
In addition, we interviewed large groups of people. Particularly those at Sonachura were clear that we should not disclose their identity or photos, so they have been consistently mentioned as “women at Sonachura” and “group at Sonachura”.
At SSKM we talked with Bhabani Giri of Kalicharanpur and Tapasi Das of Adhikaripara, on 28th March 2007.
Before the 14th of March:
On the night of 6-7 January 2007, armed party cadres of the CPI(M) had launched an attack. Despite the fact that the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee[BUPC] had made appeals, and according to locals, the obvious evidence of arms collection by thugs, the police made no efforts to prevent the attack. Subsequently, not only were there regular raids from the Khejuri side, but also an economic blockade organised by the Haldia Development Authority, headed by CPI(M) MP Lakshman Seth, by stopping the ferry, which is so important for the people. For two and a half months, the police remained mute spectators, instead of intervening to halt these multi-pronged attacks on the people of Nandigram. Women at Sonachura said that there had been hit and run attacks ever since the 7th of January. Amina Bibi has her own land, and has family members in the administration. She is active in the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee from Garhchakraberia. She also reported that violence had been going on ever since January. When they asked the Panchayat Pradhan for details about the land acquisition circular from Haldia, he refused to pay heed to them.
Amina Bibi
When they took out a procession on 3rd January, they were attacked at Bhutar More, where women and children were beaten up without provocation. This led to an attack on a police car which was burnt. However, on that day nobody died. But on the 6th, when they took out a procession to Block 10 (Sonachura), three men died. She reported cases of attacks and planned firing from Garupara, Adhikaripara, etc. Series of attacks were also planned at Sonachura, Bhangabera, Tulaghata, Chandar Pool and Tekhali Bazaar. She affirmed that their agitation was essentially peaceful, and they did not possess firearms, but they were determined not to give up their land. And so, according to her, the violence of 14th March was the culmination of these sporadic but planned attacks.
How About the Several Thousand Ousted from Nandigram:
The figure was contested by everyone we talked with. However, there was an acknowledgement that some people had left the area. Women at Sonachura remarked that the CPI(M) leader Joydev Paik, who was once trusted by them, had assured them even on the evening of 6th January that there would be no violence, but had left the area. Such CPI(M) leaders were the ones who left. According to them only five families of their locality had left. It was a general sentiment that because the CPI(M) lacked local support that they had to call in outsiders as well as the police, even after leaving Nandigram. Samad of Jamait Ulema-i-Hind (also Convenor of the BUPC) asserted that the total number of people who had left would be around 200-250. He challenged the CPI(M) to produce a list of names, and said that they would guarantee that if indeed innocent villagers had left in fear, they could return. Khokon Adhikary claimed that the people who had left were people who had joined the goonda forces and were carrying out attacks on the people of Nandigram. Both Samad and Adhikary ridiculed the march of people from camps in Khejuri to Kolkata, saying that it was easy to produce people who lived in blocks outside Nandigram and pass them off as Nandigram residents. Samad asserted that even in Nandigram, women had been brought in and attempt had been made to pass them off as women from Sonachura. But when they were asked details about their identity, they could not but be exposed. People who dared to do this in Nandigram, he said, could go to any length in Kolkata.
Occasionally, a different voice emerged. Some of us visited the house of a CPI(M) sympathiser in Adhikari Para who had fled. The house was identified by the villagers themselves. When asked, his wife reported that her husband had been staying in the Tekhali bazaar ever since “terror had been unleashed from both sides”. He had a shop in the market and had left after the first procession of the “Banchao Committee” had come out due to “fear”. Though initially she said that she was not under any pressure from the opposition party as she stayed with her in-laws, she later deposed that she did not leave the house fearing that it might be damaged in her absence. She had sent her daughter to her natal home for safety. In another case, Rekha Das, former member of the Adhikaripara Panchayat, and wife of a CPI(M) man who had fled, was urged by Khokon Adhikary to leave the village since her husband was not coming back. This was evidently a form of pressure on pro-CPI(M) people to leave Nandigram.
The Nature of the Land and livelihood:
One of the arguments we had read about in the media, was that much of the land proposed for take over was poor quality land, and many people were willing to give up their land. We had questions to ask about this. Our own impression, based on what we saw, was that the land under discussion was good quality land. According to villagers and Nandigram town residents, including Buddhadev Mondal (independent social activist), Ashish Mondal of the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee, Samad, former CPI(M) supporters (women) of Sonachura who did not wish to disclose their names, another mixed crowd at Sonachura, Khokon Adhikary, the propaganda is fabricated. One group at Sonachura said that in their area, lack of irrigation made some land single cropping. But even that soil provided them with enough paddy to eat and have a marketable surplus. Elsewhere, they said, irrigation had created multi-crop land. So the development needed was irrigation. Khokon Adhikary said land in Adhikaripara permitted two rice crops, khesari(a variety of pulse), as well as cash crops like sunflower and rajanigandha. At Garchakraberia, much khesari dal is grown. Women at Sonachura said they produced a variety of vegetables as well as a rabi and a kharif rice. It was also pointed out that the salty land was mostly close to the river, and had been acquired at the time of the Jellingham Project, several years back. Potato was another major crop, and so was the betel (paan) leaf. Some amount of pisciculture was also reported. People were mainly dependent on agriculture, and wanted development to mean improvement of agriculture. According to Samad, much of the targeted land had originally been khas (vested) land. Though people had been settled there, he suspected that they often did not have proper documentation(pattas), and they could be ousted without due compensation, and this, rather than the supposed low quality of soil, was the reason why this particular area was targeted.
Sunflower field – not poor soil
We did not find a single person coming forward and saying s/he wanted to give up the land and move out. Anuradha Mondal, an injured woman, works in other peoples’ homes. Even she asserted, that here she at least has her home plot at South Khali and has the option of working at the homes of better of people. If they were all evicted, she did not know how she would survive. Kamallata Das, who had received bullet injuries, asserted that they would not yield their land under any circumstance. Women at Sonachura said that they used to be CPI(M) cadres. Their families had small plots of land. They had never heard, at any panchayat meeting, women’s meeting, etc, that land would be taken for industry. Suddenly this was sprung upon them. They said, “Where would we live if our homestead is taken away. It was then that we decided to stay with the movement.” Since then they have been associated with the BUPC. They insisted that there had been no proper discussion, and that for them development did not mean superimposing the facilities that Kolkata has, in an area where majority of the people depend on agriculture. One woman said, when she had married, to come to her husband’s place from her natal home, one had to walk through knee-deep mud. This was a tangible development, that now they had good roads. But if the cost of development was that she would be thrown out of the area, what use was development to her? Khokon argued that the industrialization they wanted was to reopen closed industries. Land should be acquired for industry only where it was not suitable for agriculture. His was deadly against giving any land to Beni Santos, a group that was identified as mass murderers. There was 60,000 bigha of land in the area, and they would not surrender their land even for crores of rupees. Another group of people at Sonachura remarked that people of 37 moujas had refused to give up land, and so the local CPI(M) leaders had tried the tactics of bringing people from Blocks 2 and 3, outside Nandigram, to create an artificial majority.
What was the social composition of the movement?:
According to Samad, agitators comprised 60% Muslims and the other 40% mostly lower caste Hindus. Mobilisation techniques included, especially on 14th March itself, religious instruments, such as organizing a Gourango Puja and a Koran reading ceremony. The use of religious symbols did not imply a communalization of the movement that could be perceived, contrary to claims made by the Chief Minister. However, a degree of social conservatism and unstated patriarchy seemed to be present. There was also a strong degree of community solidarity. Our questions brought forth the answer that women and children had been put up front because it was assumed that the police would not fire in such a case. Women, who asserted that they had themselves gone ahead, said that the reason was, if the men-folk died, the entire family would starve, while if the women died, the men could re-marry. If indeed there had been ongoing violence since January, this strategy indicates that the idea that there would be no violence if women were placed before the men was hardly based on a serious consideration of the situation.
Was 14th March A Locally Conceived Plan?:
There has been a sustained drive to prove that the attack on 14th March was not centrally planned. At least two things give a lie to this. On the 12th, an all party meeting was called, which was boycotted by the forces in BUPC. This meeting gave the go ahead for the attack. Secondly, police units from far flung parts of West Bengal were called in, certainly not an action taken by some mere local officials, low level police officers, or local CPI(M) leaders.
The violence of 14th March:
Role of State:
From our interviews, it appeared that though men had been placed at the back, most firing had targeted men, and further, that people had died due to direct hits, in upper parts of the body. Moreover, Khokon Adhikary claimed that bullets of certain calibres, not standard issue for the police, had been used. Concerning the firing itself, interviews revealed that nobody had heard of any prior warning. There had been tear gas shell firing, lathi charge, and then the blow of a whistle, and an immediate recourse to firing bullets. This had been done despite the presence of an officer of IG rank (this we learnt from newspapers) at Bhangabera, and an Executive Magistrate at Adhikaripara. Our own pictures show that the distance between the police and the place where the Gourango Puja was being organized was so far that bricks hurled could not reach the police. So there is no truth in the speculation that the police were compelled to shoot on being attacked with bricks. Rather, we were repeatedly told that the leaders of the movement had warned against any violence, and had talked of peaceful demonstrations. The women had fallen on their knees and had begged the police to go back. Interestingly, the police had claimed that they were coming to repair the roads. In that case, it is inexplicable why such a massive police force was present, rather than a smaller force accompanying repairmen. What the foregoing suggested was that
a) The state machinery had been sent with some kind of instruction to use excessive force.
b) The state machinery had also been asked to connive at the role of non-state actors. This was clearly borne out by the testimony of injured people, such as Nur Jehan Bibi, who said that apart from police, people in black dress were shooting. Samad likewise affirmed the presence of party-men under police protection. Sheikh Sultan described these people as “policemen wearing sandals”, i.e., people who had been given uniforms but not regulation boots. Same comments were made by Amina Bibi as well as a group of women at Sonachura.
Role of the CPI(M)
Everyone was agreed that the CPI(M) goons (harmad bahini) had been present in large numbers. Large scale use of party cadres taking shelter behind the police indicates a previously worked out plan between party and administration. This has longer run implications, suggesting as it does that in West Bengal, there is little administrative autonomy, with the party’s will being imposed on officials as high up as an IG of Police. While the police had been brutal enough, CPI(M) cadres played a particularly violent role, on and after the 14th. Women at Sonachura testified that party members had not only come on the 14th but subsequently. They said that on the 15th, there was a pressure from the CPI(M) cadres that there must be a rally to show that “peace” had been restored in Nandigram, and that those who had been in the forefront of resistance must join in this demonstration. One of them was told by them, “In the past you had blown on conch shells to mobilize women. Why are you not coming out now?” Pusparani Mondal said that on the 15th, Badal Garu, Kaya Garu and Haripada Patra of Garupara had shoved and pushed at her and forced her to go to their party office. There, she was told in a very abusive manner, “So you have become a Matangini?” They threatened that her husband’s head would be chopped off, and told that in atonement for her past role, she must mobilize the women of the locality, join the CPI(M) “peace rally” on 15th afternoon, be at the forefront and carry a red flag. With great arrogance, she was warned off for daring to protest against the state, which was like a mighty tidal wave, while all their forces amounted to water in a small pitcher. Pusparani broke into tears while narrating how men of her father’s age could use such an abusive language. While women were the general targets activists were specific targets.
Namita Dasadhikary of Gokulnagar, said that police and party cadres jointly battered down their door and looted the house, as well as their jewelry shop at Tekhali Bazaar. They have no land, and the shop was their sole means of livelihood.
Bhagirath Patra, who has business at Haldia, was returning on the 18th. A group of people with their faces covered with black cloth caught hold of him, put a revolver against his temple, throttled him with a leather belt, beat him up with sticks and a revolver butt, snatched his money, and left him unconscious in a field. We met him at the Nandigram hospital.
A man who did not wish to be identified by name, a part of the mixed crowd at Sonachura, said that he works outside Nandigram, and on the 15th, without knowing that roads were closed, was trying to come back to Nandigram. He boarded a bus, which was halted at Chandipur, where CPI(M) cadres were taking down names, place of residence, name of the Anchal Pradhan, etc. A man who gave a wrong identification was beaten up, so this man decided to be truthful. But when he identified himself as coming from Sonachura, he was abused in a vulgar language, beaten up, and his money and wrist-watch snatched away.
The Pattern of Attack on the 14th:
Every narrative drove home the fact that the violence on the 14th was totally unexpected, not just to the rank and file, but even to the leadership. This was shown in the baffled comment by Samad, who said that they had had a prior discussion with the Superintendent of Police, who had, according to Samad’s version, told them that the police would come, but would retreat if provided with resistance. The plan of resistance was completely non-violent. As Kamallata and Ashish Mondal both affirmed, the leadership had given clear instructions that there was to be no violent confrontation with the police. Kamallata said that the leadership announced, using the microphone which was relaying the kirtan of the Gourango Puja, that police would come, but the police were friends of everyone, so no violence was to be shown. They were coming for peace, and when the people told them they would not give up their land, the police would retreat. Under no circumstances were the assembled people to confront the police. Instead, a non-violent strategy was planned, of organizing Gourango Puja and Koran reading. Samad showed considerable resentment when he stated that the SP and the IG had not kept their words, and had not followed the government rules regarding making an announcement (to disperse) before opening fire. As he also put it, while they came ostensibly to repair the road, in fact they brought the CPI(M) cadres. That they were cadres, not the police, was proved by the fact that as far as they went, the red flag was put up.
That no violence had been planned is evident from the fact that children had been placed in front, followed by teenagers, then older women, and the men behind them all. But the police came up, and immediately started lobbing tear gas shells. As the women were trying to put wet towels to their faces and telling the police that there was no lack of peace in Nandigram so they should go back, the police began firing bullets. However, according to Amina, the women seem not to have been the principal targets of the bullets. And that alone indicates planned firing. To shoot at men, and to hit them on the upper parts of their bodies, meant taking deliberate aim and firing at people who were standing behind the women and children.
Both Nur Jahan and Anuradha Mondal related that streams of police cars were coming. Within fifteen minutes of the cars coming up around 10 AM, the sequence of firing had begun. In other words, there had been no attempt whatsoever at parleying. Goley Ara Bibi related, “We had thought, we would have our say, the administration would have its say, then there would be a peaceful resolution. But for that, would we have taken along so many children?” She also stressed that they had no weapons. Unable to resist, many of them were beaten up, while many others became unwell due to the effects of the tear gas, as in the case of Amina Bibi. She was taken to the courtyard of a house near-by. Cadres threw stones and bricks at women, forcing them to dive into ponds. Amina Bibi also said that men received bullet injuries in greater number, while women were subjected to sexual assault.
Sheikh Sultan had gone to Bhutar More, Garchakraberia, where his elder sister lived. His brother in law told him to join the “peace procession” at Bhangabera. According to his estimate there were 1500 children, about 5000 women and 10 to 15 thousand men. He was shot at his right foot in such a way that the bone was exposed. He was still in trauma when we talked with him. He not only remembered his own injury, but the large scale violence on women and children, which was keeping him awake at nights.
Sheikh Sultan’s bullet injury
The women at Sonachura narrated other cases of violence. One woman talked of a man whose throat was bleeding (it is unclear whether this too was a bullet wound or a knife injury), while one woman had a gun shot wound in her stomach.
Challenging the claim that shots had been fired at the police, Samad asked whether a single policeman with gun shot injuries could be produced.
The distance: How could
People hit the police with stones?
At Adhikaripara, as at Bhangabera, Gourango Puja had been organised by Hindus. Women had been placed in front. As at Bhangabera, Muslims were organizing Koran reading. When the police came in, women requested them to go back. But the police attacked them instead, and threw down the image of the god. Both Khokon Adhikary and Pusparani Mondal corroborated this. Pusparani had told the police that they would themselves repair the roads, provide the police gave a written undertaking not to seize their land. In response the police started firing teargas shells in such large numbers that they could see nothing. This was followed by blank shots, and then live bullets.
Pusparani Mondal
Violence and Sexual Assault on Women:
All the narratives indicate a high degree of violence against unarmed and peaceful women, including verbal sexual violence as well as sexual assault and rape. According to Anuradha Mondal, they had seen no police women. The entire attacking force consisted of men. While fewer women seem to have been deliberately shot, there were all kinds of violence perpetrated. Without distinguishing between police and party cadre, but with a clear indication that party cadres were involved, it was narrated repeatedly that stones and bricks were hurled at the women while their visibility was affected due to intensive teargas shelling. At Bhangabera, west of the bridge over which the police came, there was a big pond. Hurling bricks at the women, the attackers forced the women towards it. Many were compelled to jump into it. Yelling sexually offensive abuses, the attackers forced them into the pond, where stones continued to be thrown at them. Anuradha Mondal recalled being told, “So you came to save your land? Now we will drown you.” According to Mondal, among the women there were some who could not swim, and some may have been drowned. The thugs started stripping off women. Anuradha Mondal’s sari was snatched away, and she had to run to a house to borrow a sari in order to return home. Kamallata related that she and four others were running away. They were beaten up with rods. Her left arm was also injured by a gun shot. She managed to hide in a cremation ground. She saw the four others who had been with her being caught and completely stripped till not a thread remained on their bodies. Nur Jahan was beaten on her legs and neck with the butt of a rifle. In fright, she went and hid in a jungle for three days, before an old woman grazing her goats saw her and she was ultimately rescued. Nur Jahan and Sheikh Sultan both related that they had seen women’s breasts being cut off. Ashish Mondal, who had also been present at Bhangabera, confirmed this. Mehrunnisa and another woman fell into a pond, due to poor visibility. She said that four men had beaten up the two of them. Of all the injured we saw, Mehrunnisa was in the most severe pain, with her left side, lower back and neck almost immobile. She had saved herself by locking herself for the whole day in the toilet of someone’s house.
Kamallata Das Bullet Injury – Kamallata’s arm
At Adhikaripara, we heard more sustained reports of sexual and other violence on women. Both Khokon Adhikary and many of the women themselves corroborated this. The first person to be beaten up was identified as Ajay Dasadhikary’s wife. Women were raped, batons were pushed into their vaginas, they were stripped and raped, not only at the site of attack, but even when they ran away, by following them to their homes. Khokon mentioned specifically the wife of Satyendralal Adhikary, and Prabhat Adhikary’s daughter. Pusparani Mondal and another woman of the same area talked about the insertion of rods in women’s vagina in public, in front of other people. This was often done while the women were dazed due to tear gas. Many women showed us various parts of their bodies where they had been injured. They included Jahnavirani Mondal, Nilima Das, Babita Das, Namita Dasadhikary, Bakulrani Mondal, Chhabirani Mondal. Chhabirani Mondal was hit by something, either a rubber bullet or a splinter, on the left eye which was already suffering from cataract, and since then she has lost her vision in that eye. Jahnavirani Mondal mentioned the use of crude and offensive language.
Chhabirani Mondal Anuradha Mondal Injury on Anuradha’s leg
A case mentioned by several people was the rape of many [the number varied from narrator to narrator, ranging from 30-40 to over 100] young girls and women after dragging them to the abandoned house of Sankar Samanta. Women at Sonachura, as well as Samad, Ashish Mondal and Buddhadev Mondal mentioned this case. They alleged that CPI(M) cadres had kept guard outside the house, allowing none to go in, while these deeds were being perpetrated. Women’s clothing, especially underclothing, was found in huge numbers, as were bloodstains marked by the CBI team. Because the people were at that point more concerned with trying to recover dead bodies that had floated up in the pond, nobody knew what happened to those young women. We tried to ascertain whether the list of missing included such a large number of young women, but got no clear response. Nor could we understand what the CBI had done, apart from marking the bloodstains.
Women’s clothing at Bloodstain marked by CBI
Shankar Samanta’s house
Assault on children
Since the greatest number of children seems to have come from Garchakraberia, the people of Garchakraberia were most vocal in talking about the murder of children. An extremely brutal incident was repeated by a number of people. This was a case of a young child being torn from limb to limb. Nur Jahan claimed she had seen the incident herself, with two policemen killing the child and throwing the body into a water body. Mehrunnisa also claimed to have seen the incident, as did Sheikh Sultan. Asked questions about the identity of the victims, the respondents replied that they were trying to save their own lives and were in no position to make inquiries. People interviewed at Sonachura remarked that many people had taken along very small children and infants, and had to drop such children when running in fright. Some women were also reported to have died along with their children. A truckload of earth was dumped on the portion of the road that had been cut, and this was done so suddenly that many of the children who had fallen in due to the tear gas and shooting were to remain underneath that huge load of soil. Samad mentioned the testimony of a woman we could not meet, according to whom, at Adhikaripara a young boy of about 7-8 years had run to her for safety, but the thugs took him away and slit open his throat with a big knife. Kamallata and her husband rescued their two children from the mud deposited on the bank of the canal, where the hid for 4 days.
Where are the bodies?
The narratives we heard, from Samad, from Ashish Mondal, as well as from the people who had been injured, suggested a much higher death toll than the officially admitted 14. We were however unable to understand how so many bodies could be made to vanish, and asked the question to a number of our respondents. We were given different possible solutions. In the first place, it was remarked that a large number of cars had come, including unnumbered ambulances, trucks and vans, trekkers, and many of the bodies had been spirited away in these cars. A second possibility was that many of the bodies had had their stomachs slit open and then dumped into the canal, which would take the body to the sea. A third possibility was that some of the bodies were cremated. Finally, it was suggested that some bodies had been buried locally. We wondered why the CBI had not dug up any of the sites where locals claimed bodies were buried. We feel that as the delay mounts, these claims will come to be simply written off as fabrications. Yet, even if we accept the likelihood of some exaggeration, the very fact that guns of bores not used by the police were in operation suggests the use of a private army and the likelihood of the murder of a far greater number than merely 14. Likewise, the mystery surrounding the events at Shankar Samanta’s house need to be unraveled, and the body count become important there too.
Situation of the Injured
We were unable to make a trip to the Tamluk hospital, though it was important. At Nandigram, we met and talked with a number of the injured. They continued to be traumatized. Many of them were crying or shaking when talking with us. The doctor at the Nandigram hospital was satisfied that all that was needed was being done. But the patients clearly had a different perception, for we were told that everyone was being given the same medicine, at which they were surprised. From comments made by the doctor, it seemed that everyone was getting was a painkiller and an antacid apiece. Mehrunnisa was in great pain, and was complaining that proper treatment was not available.
Mehrunnisa
However, we had no doctors in our team and therefore could not carry out any examination. Manasi, another injured woman in the Nandigram hospital, suggested we should distribute aid directly, as many of them were not getting proper food. Bhagirath also complained that he was not getting proper treatment. He had been sent to the hospital by a doctor who recommended an X-Ray, but the x-ray had not been done. They were getting food from relief groups, rather than from the hospital. This contrasted sharply with the newspaper reports, according to which supporters of the ruling party were claiming that these people were malingerers who were living in the hospitals and getting food at public expense. Bhagirath wanted to go home as soon as possible, as he had a number of dependents.
At Adhikaripara, the state had taken no responsibility. Treatment was dependent on voluntary medical teams coming up. No medical tests had been carried out on women complaining of rape. Jahnavi complained of acute pain, and the lack of treatment. Chabirani was suggested by a local doctor to avail of her ration card to seek an expert medical opinion at Kolkata.
On 28th, some of us went to the SSKM hospital. There, we met two of the injured hospitalized in Kolkata. They were Bhabani Giri (Victoria Ward, Bed 13) and Tapasi Das (Victoria Ward, Bed 43). Bullet splinters had not yet been removed from Bhabani Giri’s shoulder and above her chest, and she was in acute pain, when we met her. Tapasi Das had a bullet hitting her hip in such a way that her urinary bladder was affected. She had been shot from behind when she was returning home. She had to have three operations, and a plastic surgery was still to come. On enquiring, we were told that medical expenses were being borne by the Trinamool Congress. Seemingly, the state was taking no responsibility for its victims. In particular, the victims are in need of psychological help and counseling, and nothing had been done by the state.
The continued terror and trauma till 25th
Our trip to Nandigram was on 25th March, eleven days after the violence. We found people still in shock and trauma. We have already mentioned the trauma of injured people. Apart from that, everywhere, people had a deep distrust of outsiders, with cameras etc. They wanted us to prove our bonafides with identity cards if possible, citing TV channels like 24 Ghanta, which were presenting their views in a totally distorted manner. Secondly, they were afraid that if we took their photos, they might be put in danger. This fear was particularly great in Sonachura, where the bulk of the people seem to have been CPI(M) supporters till fairly recently, and were all the more apprehensive of violence. People not only did not come out after dark, but even, in many cases, dared not stay at home at night, for fear of sudden attacks. In areas bordering on Khejuri or other areas strongly held by the CPI(M), people were apprehensive of moving about even in day time. A van driver near a bridge at Sonachura [on the opposite side of which was a CPI(M) area] told us that whenever he had to pass close to CPI(M) areas, he went in mortal fear. A huge crowd at Adhikaripara told us that on 23rd March, a woman who had gone to collect kerosene was beaten up so badly that she had to be hospitalized. As before the 14th of March, complaints to the police brought no redress. Everyone was skeptical about the CID, identifying it as an instrument of the CPI(M). Schooling was in doldrums. At Sonachura, we were told that 18 candidates had been unable to sit for the Higher Secondary examinations, because their centres were in Khejuri. It was alleged that the HS Council had willfully changed the centres, after the Madhyamik Examinations, despite knowing that such changes would be harmful for Nandigram students. Schools had not held their annual examinations.
What do the people want?
Different reactions were heard. Our discussions with people at the grass roots level showed locals willing to continue the struggle to retain their land at any cost. At the same time, there was a mood of deep frustration. They were not clear what would happen next. What was disturbing was the existence of a trend, stoked by outsider “leaders”, calling for retribution. Khokon Adhikary said those locals who had joined the goonda (harmad) forces should be turned into cripples and made to beg from door to door. But what was more serious was that at a meeting organized on 25th March by the Jamait-ulema i Hind in Sonachura, in the presence of Siddikullah Chowdhury, a state level leader (photo attached) of the organization said that murder should be replied by murder, rape by rape.
Delivering Inflammatory Speech
Attitudes also varied from area to area. Women at Sonachura and Garchakraberia were vocal and showed a greater willingness to mobilize again. At Adhikaripara the stress of the women was on peace and an end to the conflicts. In general, women seemed to feel that they had equal space at the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee. But our questions about future strategy tended to show that such decisions would be taken by the men. The decision to place women up front had been based on the perception that they were weaker. Even women who agreed that they should go ahead did so by adopting a patriarchal standpoint, that it was less of a loss if women died. While women’s participation in the resistance is certainly a very significant component, the persistence of such patriarchal values suggests that participation does not mean equality in decision making and in rights generally. In a movement fighting for rights, this dimension cannot be swept under the carpet.
At the political level, in 2006, a CPI member had been elected MLA, and the area has traditionally been considered a left area. But people have lost faith in the Left Front, and its talk about restoring normalcy and peace. This however does not mean that people have automatically become supporters of the Trinamool Congress or the Jamait-ulema I Hind. We got an impression by talking to many of the victims as well as the common people that BUPC provided them with a platform for raising their voices against the unilateral decision to take over land for industrialization. Buddadev Mondal, who helped our team in all its work, described himself as a non-party independent activist. A lot of women said that there with the BUPC while also acknowledging their leftist politics.
A question that needs to be clarified is, what will be the situation of the people, whatever their exact number, who are in camps at Khejuri. Given the threats uttered by some people at least, it seems to be a difficult proposition to enable those people to return to Nandigram. While making a clear distinction between state violence and popular violence, we also need to interrogate violence within civil society. Accordingly, investigation is needed in Khejuri as well, instead of depending solely on information given in Nandigram.
One observation we had was, people in Nandigram wanted outsiders to come, and listen to their views and experiences. While they had suspicions about outsiders who played shady roles, mentioning clearly certain newspapers and TV channels, generally they welcomed us and talked to us at length, giving us their views.
Report prepared by Debasish Sen, Kunal Chattopadhyay, Kuntal Ghosh, Maroona Murmu, Safiul Mollick, and Soma Marik (members of Teachers and Scientists Against Maldevelopment – TASAM, in their private capacity).
(Sorry. I could not post the pictures. Seems I still have to learn techniques.)
On 25th March, several of us made a trip to Nandigram, partly to distribute aid, partly to find out the situation. Three of us subsequently went to the SSKM Hospital and met some of the victims who were being treated. This brief report/deposition is based on our observations and documentation at Nandigram and Kolkata.
The following were the persons interviewed, on 25th March 2007, with such identification as we could obtain.
Buddhadev Mondal -- independent social activist, Nandigram town.
Ashish Mondal -- Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee, Mahespur.
Samad -- Jamait-ulema i Hind and Convenor, BUPC, Etimkhana, Nandigram.
Kamallata -- Kalicharanpur. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Anuradha Mondal -- Southkhali Char. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Nur Jahan Bibi -- Garchakraberia. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Mehrunnisa -- No. 7 Jalpai. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Sheikh Sultan -- Nandigram. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Manasi -- Sarberia. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Bhagirath Patra -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara. Interviewed at Nandigram Hospital.
Amina Bibi, Garchakraberia.
Goley Ara Bibi, Garchakraberia.
Khokon Adhikary, Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Pusparani Mondal -- Gokulnagar Dakshin Pally, Adhikaripara.
Chhabirani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Babita Das -- Kalicharanpur.
Nilima Das -- Gokulnagar Dakshin Pally, Adhikaripara.
Bakulrani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Jahnavirani Mondal -- Gokulnagar, Adhikaripara.
Namita Dasadhikary -- Adhikaripara.
In addition, we interviewed large groups of people. Particularly those at Sonachura were clear that we should not disclose their identity or photos, so they have been consistently mentioned as “women at Sonachura” and “group at Sonachura”.
At SSKM we talked with Bhabani Giri of Kalicharanpur and Tapasi Das of Adhikaripara, on 28th March 2007.
Before the 14th of March:
On the night of 6-7 January 2007, armed party cadres of the CPI(M) had launched an attack. Despite the fact that the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee[BUPC] had made appeals, and according to locals, the obvious evidence of arms collection by thugs, the police made no efforts to prevent the attack. Subsequently, not only were there regular raids from the Khejuri side, but also an economic blockade organised by the Haldia Development Authority, headed by CPI(M) MP Lakshman Seth, by stopping the ferry, which is so important for the people. For two and a half months, the police remained mute spectators, instead of intervening to halt these multi-pronged attacks on the people of Nandigram. Women at Sonachura said that there had been hit and run attacks ever since the 7th of January. Amina Bibi has her own land, and has family members in the administration. She is active in the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee from Garhchakraberia. She also reported that violence had been going on ever since January. When they asked the Panchayat Pradhan for details about the land acquisition circular from Haldia, he refused to pay heed to them.
Amina Bibi
When they took out a procession on 3rd January, they were attacked at Bhutar More, where women and children were beaten up without provocation. This led to an attack on a police car which was burnt. However, on that day nobody died. But on the 6th, when they took out a procession to Block 10 (Sonachura), three men died. She reported cases of attacks and planned firing from Garupara, Adhikaripara, etc. Series of attacks were also planned at Sonachura, Bhangabera, Tulaghata, Chandar Pool and Tekhali Bazaar. She affirmed that their agitation was essentially peaceful, and they did not possess firearms, but they were determined not to give up their land. And so, according to her, the violence of 14th March was the culmination of these sporadic but planned attacks.
How About the Several Thousand Ousted from Nandigram:
The figure was contested by everyone we talked with. However, there was an acknowledgement that some people had left the area. Women at Sonachura remarked that the CPI(M) leader Joydev Paik, who was once trusted by them, had assured them even on the evening of 6th January that there would be no violence, but had left the area. Such CPI(M) leaders were the ones who left. According to them only five families of their locality had left. It was a general sentiment that because the CPI(M) lacked local support that they had to call in outsiders as well as the police, even after leaving Nandigram. Samad of Jamait Ulema-i-Hind (also Convenor of the BUPC) asserted that the total number of people who had left would be around 200-250. He challenged the CPI(M) to produce a list of names, and said that they would guarantee that if indeed innocent villagers had left in fear, they could return. Khokon Adhikary claimed that the people who had left were people who had joined the goonda forces and were carrying out attacks on the people of Nandigram. Both Samad and Adhikary ridiculed the march of people from camps in Khejuri to Kolkata, saying that it was easy to produce people who lived in blocks outside Nandigram and pass them off as Nandigram residents. Samad asserted that even in Nandigram, women had been brought in and attempt had been made to pass them off as women from Sonachura. But when they were asked details about their identity, they could not but be exposed. People who dared to do this in Nandigram, he said, could go to any length in Kolkata.
Occasionally, a different voice emerged. Some of us visited the house of a CPI(M) sympathiser in Adhikari Para who had fled. The house was identified by the villagers themselves. When asked, his wife reported that her husband had been staying in the Tekhali bazaar ever since “terror had been unleashed from both sides”. He had a shop in the market and had left after the first procession of the “Banchao Committee” had come out due to “fear”. Though initially she said that she was not under any pressure from the opposition party as she stayed with her in-laws, she later deposed that she did not leave the house fearing that it might be damaged in her absence. She had sent her daughter to her natal home for safety. In another case, Rekha Das, former member of the Adhikaripara Panchayat, and wife of a CPI(M) man who had fled, was urged by Khokon Adhikary to leave the village since her husband was not coming back. This was evidently a form of pressure on pro-CPI(M) people to leave Nandigram.
The Nature of the Land and livelihood:
One of the arguments we had read about in the media, was that much of the land proposed for take over was poor quality land, and many people were willing to give up their land. We had questions to ask about this. Our own impression, based on what we saw, was that the land under discussion was good quality land. According to villagers and Nandigram town residents, including Buddhadev Mondal (independent social activist), Ashish Mondal of the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee, Samad, former CPI(M) supporters (women) of Sonachura who did not wish to disclose their names, another mixed crowd at Sonachura, Khokon Adhikary, the propaganda is fabricated. One group at Sonachura said that in their area, lack of irrigation made some land single cropping. But even that soil provided them with enough paddy to eat and have a marketable surplus. Elsewhere, they said, irrigation had created multi-crop land. So the development needed was irrigation. Khokon Adhikary said land in Adhikaripara permitted two rice crops, khesari(a variety of pulse), as well as cash crops like sunflower and rajanigandha. At Garchakraberia, much khesari dal is grown. Women at Sonachura said they produced a variety of vegetables as well as a rabi and a kharif rice. It was also pointed out that the salty land was mostly close to the river, and had been acquired at the time of the Jellingham Project, several years back. Potato was another major crop, and so was the betel (paan) leaf. Some amount of pisciculture was also reported. People were mainly dependent on agriculture, and wanted development to mean improvement of agriculture. According to Samad, much of the targeted land had originally been khas (vested) land. Though people had been settled there, he suspected that they often did not have proper documentation(pattas), and they could be ousted without due compensation, and this, rather than the supposed low quality of soil, was the reason why this particular area was targeted.
Sunflower field – not poor soil
We did not find a single person coming forward and saying s/he wanted to give up the land and move out. Anuradha Mondal, an injured woman, works in other peoples’ homes. Even she asserted, that here she at least has her home plot at South Khali and has the option of working at the homes of better of people. If they were all evicted, she did not know how she would survive. Kamallata Das, who had received bullet injuries, asserted that they would not yield their land under any circumstance. Women at Sonachura said that they used to be CPI(M) cadres. Their families had small plots of land. They had never heard, at any panchayat meeting, women’s meeting, etc, that land would be taken for industry. Suddenly this was sprung upon them. They said, “Where would we live if our homestead is taken away. It was then that we decided to stay with the movement.” Since then they have been associated with the BUPC. They insisted that there had been no proper discussion, and that for them development did not mean superimposing the facilities that Kolkata has, in an area where majority of the people depend on agriculture. One woman said, when she had married, to come to her husband’s place from her natal home, one had to walk through knee-deep mud. This was a tangible development, that now they had good roads. But if the cost of development was that she would be thrown out of the area, what use was development to her? Khokon argued that the industrialization they wanted was to reopen closed industries. Land should be acquired for industry only where it was not suitable for agriculture. His was deadly against giving any land to Beni Santos, a group that was identified as mass murderers. There was 60,000 bigha of land in the area, and they would not surrender their land even for crores of rupees. Another group of people at Sonachura remarked that people of 37 moujas had refused to give up land, and so the local CPI(M) leaders had tried the tactics of bringing people from Blocks 2 and 3, outside Nandigram, to create an artificial majority.
What was the social composition of the movement?:
According to Samad, agitators comprised 60% Muslims and the other 40% mostly lower caste Hindus. Mobilisation techniques included, especially on 14th March itself, religious instruments, such as organizing a Gourango Puja and a Koran reading ceremony. The use of religious symbols did not imply a communalization of the movement that could be perceived, contrary to claims made by the Chief Minister. However, a degree of social conservatism and unstated patriarchy seemed to be present. There was also a strong degree of community solidarity. Our questions brought forth the answer that women and children had been put up front because it was assumed that the police would not fire in such a case. Women, who asserted that they had themselves gone ahead, said that the reason was, if the men-folk died, the entire family would starve, while if the women died, the men could re-marry. If indeed there had been ongoing violence since January, this strategy indicates that the idea that there would be no violence if women were placed before the men was hardly based on a serious consideration of the situation.
Was 14th March A Locally Conceived Plan?:
There has been a sustained drive to prove that the attack on 14th March was not centrally planned. At least two things give a lie to this. On the 12th, an all party meeting was called, which was boycotted by the forces in BUPC. This meeting gave the go ahead for the attack. Secondly, police units from far flung parts of West Bengal were called in, certainly not an action taken by some mere local officials, low level police officers, or local CPI(M) leaders.
The violence of 14th March:
Role of State:
From our interviews, it appeared that though men had been placed at the back, most firing had targeted men, and further, that people had died due to direct hits, in upper parts of the body. Moreover, Khokon Adhikary claimed that bullets of certain calibres, not standard issue for the police, had been used. Concerning the firing itself, interviews revealed that nobody had heard of any prior warning. There had been tear gas shell firing, lathi charge, and then the blow of a whistle, and an immediate recourse to firing bullets. This had been done despite the presence of an officer of IG rank (this we learnt from newspapers) at Bhangabera, and an Executive Magistrate at Adhikaripara. Our own pictures show that the distance between the police and the place where the Gourango Puja was being organized was so far that bricks hurled could not reach the police. So there is no truth in the speculation that the police were compelled to shoot on being attacked with bricks. Rather, we were repeatedly told that the leaders of the movement had warned against any violence, and had talked of peaceful demonstrations. The women had fallen on their knees and had begged the police to go back. Interestingly, the police had claimed that they were coming to repair the roads. In that case, it is inexplicable why such a massive police force was present, rather than a smaller force accompanying repairmen. What the foregoing suggested was that
a) The state machinery had been sent with some kind of instruction to use excessive force.
b) The state machinery had also been asked to connive at the role of non-state actors. This was clearly borne out by the testimony of injured people, such as Nur Jehan Bibi, who said that apart from police, people in black dress were shooting. Samad likewise affirmed the presence of party-men under police protection. Sheikh Sultan described these people as “policemen wearing sandals”, i.e., people who had been given uniforms but not regulation boots. Same comments were made by Amina Bibi as well as a group of women at Sonachura.
Role of the CPI(M)
Everyone was agreed that the CPI(M) goons (harmad bahini) had been present in large numbers. Large scale use of party cadres taking shelter behind the police indicates a previously worked out plan between party and administration. This has longer run implications, suggesting as it does that in West Bengal, there is little administrative autonomy, with the party’s will being imposed on officials as high up as an IG of Police. While the police had been brutal enough, CPI(M) cadres played a particularly violent role, on and after the 14th. Women at Sonachura testified that party members had not only come on the 14th but subsequently. They said that on the 15th, there was a pressure from the CPI(M) cadres that there must be a rally to show that “peace” had been restored in Nandigram, and that those who had been in the forefront of resistance must join in this demonstration. One of them was told by them, “In the past you had blown on conch shells to mobilize women. Why are you not coming out now?” Pusparani Mondal said that on the 15th, Badal Garu, Kaya Garu and Haripada Patra of Garupara had shoved and pushed at her and forced her to go to their party office. There, she was told in a very abusive manner, “So you have become a Matangini?” They threatened that her husband’s head would be chopped off, and told that in atonement for her past role, she must mobilize the women of the locality, join the CPI(M) “peace rally” on 15th afternoon, be at the forefront and carry a red flag. With great arrogance, she was warned off for daring to protest against the state, which was like a mighty tidal wave, while all their forces amounted to water in a small pitcher. Pusparani broke into tears while narrating how men of her father’s age could use such an abusive language. While women were the general targets activists were specific targets.
Namita Dasadhikary of Gokulnagar, said that police and party cadres jointly battered down their door and looted the house, as well as their jewelry shop at Tekhali Bazaar. They have no land, and the shop was their sole means of livelihood.
Bhagirath Patra, who has business at Haldia, was returning on the 18th. A group of people with their faces covered with black cloth caught hold of him, put a revolver against his temple, throttled him with a leather belt, beat him up with sticks and a revolver butt, snatched his money, and left him unconscious in a field. We met him at the Nandigram hospital.
A man who did not wish to be identified by name, a part of the mixed crowd at Sonachura, said that he works outside Nandigram, and on the 15th, without knowing that roads were closed, was trying to come back to Nandigram. He boarded a bus, which was halted at Chandipur, where CPI(M) cadres were taking down names, place of residence, name of the Anchal Pradhan, etc. A man who gave a wrong identification was beaten up, so this man decided to be truthful. But when he identified himself as coming from Sonachura, he was abused in a vulgar language, beaten up, and his money and wrist-watch snatched away.
The Pattern of Attack on the 14th:
Every narrative drove home the fact that the violence on the 14th was totally unexpected, not just to the rank and file, but even to the leadership. This was shown in the baffled comment by Samad, who said that they had had a prior discussion with the Superintendent of Police, who had, according to Samad’s version, told them that the police would come, but would retreat if provided with resistance. The plan of resistance was completely non-violent. As Kamallata and Ashish Mondal both affirmed, the leadership had given clear instructions that there was to be no violent confrontation with the police. Kamallata said that the leadership announced, using the microphone which was relaying the kirtan of the Gourango Puja, that police would come, but the police were friends of everyone, so no violence was to be shown. They were coming for peace, and when the people told them they would not give up their land, the police would retreat. Under no circumstances were the assembled people to confront the police. Instead, a non-violent strategy was planned, of organizing Gourango Puja and Koran reading. Samad showed considerable resentment when he stated that the SP and the IG had not kept their words, and had not followed the government rules regarding making an announcement (to disperse) before opening fire. As he also put it, while they came ostensibly to repair the road, in fact they brought the CPI(M) cadres. That they were cadres, not the police, was proved by the fact that as far as they went, the red flag was put up.
That no violence had been planned is evident from the fact that children had been placed in front, followed by teenagers, then older women, and the men behind them all. But the police came up, and immediately started lobbing tear gas shells. As the women were trying to put wet towels to their faces and telling the police that there was no lack of peace in Nandigram so they should go back, the police began firing bullets. However, according to Amina, the women seem not to have been the principal targets of the bullets. And that alone indicates planned firing. To shoot at men, and to hit them on the upper parts of their bodies, meant taking deliberate aim and firing at people who were standing behind the women and children.
Both Nur Jahan and Anuradha Mondal related that streams of police cars were coming. Within fifteen minutes of the cars coming up around 10 AM, the sequence of firing had begun. In other words, there had been no attempt whatsoever at parleying. Goley Ara Bibi related, “We had thought, we would have our say, the administration would have its say, then there would be a peaceful resolution. But for that, would we have taken along so many children?” She also stressed that they had no weapons. Unable to resist, many of them were beaten up, while many others became unwell due to the effects of the tear gas, as in the case of Amina Bibi. She was taken to the courtyard of a house near-by. Cadres threw stones and bricks at women, forcing them to dive into ponds. Amina Bibi also said that men received bullet injuries in greater number, while women were subjected to sexual assault.
Sheikh Sultan had gone to Bhutar More, Garchakraberia, where his elder sister lived. His brother in law told him to join the “peace procession” at Bhangabera. According to his estimate there were 1500 children, about 5000 women and 10 to 15 thousand men. He was shot at his right foot in such a way that the bone was exposed. He was still in trauma when we talked with him. He not only remembered his own injury, but the large scale violence on women and children, which was keeping him awake at nights.
Sheikh Sultan’s bullet injury
The women at Sonachura narrated other cases of violence. One woman talked of a man whose throat was bleeding (it is unclear whether this too was a bullet wound or a knife injury), while one woman had a gun shot wound in her stomach.
Challenging the claim that shots had been fired at the police, Samad asked whether a single policeman with gun shot injuries could be produced.
The distance: How could
People hit the police with stones?
At Adhikaripara, as at Bhangabera, Gourango Puja had been organised by Hindus. Women had been placed in front. As at Bhangabera, Muslims were organizing Koran reading. When the police came in, women requested them to go back. But the police attacked them instead, and threw down the image of the god. Both Khokon Adhikary and Pusparani Mondal corroborated this. Pusparani had told the police that they would themselves repair the roads, provide the police gave a written undertaking not to seize their land. In response the police started firing teargas shells in such large numbers that they could see nothing. This was followed by blank shots, and then live bullets.
Pusparani Mondal
Violence and Sexual Assault on Women:
All the narratives indicate a high degree of violence against unarmed and peaceful women, including verbal sexual violence as well as sexual assault and rape. According to Anuradha Mondal, they had seen no police women. The entire attacking force consisted of men. While fewer women seem to have been deliberately shot, there were all kinds of violence perpetrated. Without distinguishing between police and party cadre, but with a clear indication that party cadres were involved, it was narrated repeatedly that stones and bricks were hurled at the women while their visibility was affected due to intensive teargas shelling. At Bhangabera, west of the bridge over which the police came, there was a big pond. Hurling bricks at the women, the attackers forced the women towards it. Many were compelled to jump into it. Yelling sexually offensive abuses, the attackers forced them into the pond, where stones continued to be thrown at them. Anuradha Mondal recalled being told, “So you came to save your land? Now we will drown you.” According to Mondal, among the women there were some who could not swim, and some may have been drowned. The thugs started stripping off women. Anuradha Mondal’s sari was snatched away, and she had to run to a house to borrow a sari in order to return home. Kamallata related that she and four others were running away. They were beaten up with rods. Her left arm was also injured by a gun shot. She managed to hide in a cremation ground. She saw the four others who had been with her being caught and completely stripped till not a thread remained on their bodies. Nur Jahan was beaten on her legs and neck with the butt of a rifle. In fright, she went and hid in a jungle for three days, before an old woman grazing her goats saw her and she was ultimately rescued. Nur Jahan and Sheikh Sultan both related that they had seen women’s breasts being cut off. Ashish Mondal, who had also been present at Bhangabera, confirmed this. Mehrunnisa and another woman fell into a pond, due to poor visibility. She said that four men had beaten up the two of them. Of all the injured we saw, Mehrunnisa was in the most severe pain, with her left side, lower back and neck almost immobile. She had saved herself by locking herself for the whole day in the toilet of someone’s house.
Kamallata Das Bullet Injury – Kamallata’s arm
At Adhikaripara, we heard more sustained reports of sexual and other violence on women. Both Khokon Adhikary and many of the women themselves corroborated this. The first person to be beaten up was identified as Ajay Dasadhikary’s wife. Women were raped, batons were pushed into their vaginas, they were stripped and raped, not only at the site of attack, but even when they ran away, by following them to their homes. Khokon mentioned specifically the wife of Satyendralal Adhikary, and Prabhat Adhikary’s daughter. Pusparani Mondal and another woman of the same area talked about the insertion of rods in women’s vagina in public, in front of other people. This was often done while the women were dazed due to tear gas. Many women showed us various parts of their bodies where they had been injured. They included Jahnavirani Mondal, Nilima Das, Babita Das, Namita Dasadhikary, Bakulrani Mondal, Chhabirani Mondal. Chhabirani Mondal was hit by something, either a rubber bullet or a splinter, on the left eye which was already suffering from cataract, and since then she has lost her vision in that eye. Jahnavirani Mondal mentioned the use of crude and offensive language.
Chhabirani Mondal Anuradha Mondal Injury on Anuradha’s leg
A case mentioned by several people was the rape of many [the number varied from narrator to narrator, ranging from 30-40 to over 100] young girls and women after dragging them to the abandoned house of Sankar Samanta. Women at Sonachura, as well as Samad, Ashish Mondal and Buddhadev Mondal mentioned this case. They alleged that CPI(M) cadres had kept guard outside the house, allowing none to go in, while these deeds were being perpetrated. Women’s clothing, especially underclothing, was found in huge numbers, as were bloodstains marked by the CBI team. Because the people were at that point more concerned with trying to recover dead bodies that had floated up in the pond, nobody knew what happened to those young women. We tried to ascertain whether the list of missing included such a large number of young women, but got no clear response. Nor could we understand what the CBI had done, apart from marking the bloodstains.
Women’s clothing at Bloodstain marked by CBI
Shankar Samanta’s house
Assault on children
Since the greatest number of children seems to have come from Garchakraberia, the people of Garchakraberia were most vocal in talking about the murder of children. An extremely brutal incident was repeated by a number of people. This was a case of a young child being torn from limb to limb. Nur Jahan claimed she had seen the incident herself, with two policemen killing the child and throwing the body into a water body. Mehrunnisa also claimed to have seen the incident, as did Sheikh Sultan. Asked questions about the identity of the victims, the respondents replied that they were trying to save their own lives and were in no position to make inquiries. People interviewed at Sonachura remarked that many people had taken along very small children and infants, and had to drop such children when running in fright. Some women were also reported to have died along with their children. A truckload of earth was dumped on the portion of the road that had been cut, and this was done so suddenly that many of the children who had fallen in due to the tear gas and shooting were to remain underneath that huge load of soil. Samad mentioned the testimony of a woman we could not meet, according to whom, at Adhikaripara a young boy of about 7-8 years had run to her for safety, but the thugs took him away and slit open his throat with a big knife. Kamallata and her husband rescued their two children from the mud deposited on the bank of the canal, where the hid for 4 days.
Where are the bodies?
The narratives we heard, from Samad, from Ashish Mondal, as well as from the people who had been injured, suggested a much higher death toll than the officially admitted 14. We were however unable to understand how so many bodies could be made to vanish, and asked the question to a number of our respondents. We were given different possible solutions. In the first place, it was remarked that a large number of cars had come, including unnumbered ambulances, trucks and vans, trekkers, and many of the bodies had been spirited away in these cars. A second possibility was that many of the bodies had had their stomachs slit open and then dumped into the canal, which would take the body to the sea. A third possibility was that some of the bodies were cremated. Finally, it was suggested that some bodies had been buried locally. We wondered why the CBI had not dug up any of the sites where locals claimed bodies were buried. We feel that as the delay mounts, these claims will come to be simply written off as fabrications. Yet, even if we accept the likelihood of some exaggeration, the very fact that guns of bores not used by the police were in operation suggests the use of a private army and the likelihood of the murder of a far greater number than merely 14. Likewise, the mystery surrounding the events at Shankar Samanta’s house need to be unraveled, and the body count become important there too.
Situation of the Injured
We were unable to make a trip to the Tamluk hospital, though it was important. At Nandigram, we met and talked with a number of the injured. They continued to be traumatized. Many of them were crying or shaking when talking with us. The doctor at the Nandigram hospital was satisfied that all that was needed was being done. But the patients clearly had a different perception, for we were told that everyone was being given the same medicine, at which they were surprised. From comments made by the doctor, it seemed that everyone was getting was a painkiller and an antacid apiece. Mehrunnisa was in great pain, and was complaining that proper treatment was not available.
Mehrunnisa
However, we had no doctors in our team and therefore could not carry out any examination. Manasi, another injured woman in the Nandigram hospital, suggested we should distribute aid directly, as many of them were not getting proper food. Bhagirath also complained that he was not getting proper treatment. He had been sent to the hospital by a doctor who recommended an X-Ray, but the x-ray had not been done. They were getting food from relief groups, rather than from the hospital. This contrasted sharply with the newspaper reports, according to which supporters of the ruling party were claiming that these people were malingerers who were living in the hospitals and getting food at public expense. Bhagirath wanted to go home as soon as possible, as he had a number of dependents.
At Adhikaripara, the state had taken no responsibility. Treatment was dependent on voluntary medical teams coming up. No medical tests had been carried out on women complaining of rape. Jahnavi complained of acute pain, and the lack of treatment. Chabirani was suggested by a local doctor to avail of her ration card to seek an expert medical opinion at Kolkata.
On 28th, some of us went to the SSKM hospital. There, we met two of the injured hospitalized in Kolkata. They were Bhabani Giri (Victoria Ward, Bed 13) and Tapasi Das (Victoria Ward, Bed 43). Bullet splinters had not yet been removed from Bhabani Giri’s shoulder and above her chest, and she was in acute pain, when we met her. Tapasi Das had a bullet hitting her hip in such a way that her urinary bladder was affected. She had been shot from behind when she was returning home. She had to have three operations, and a plastic surgery was still to come. On enquiring, we were told that medical expenses were being borne by the Trinamool Congress. Seemingly, the state was taking no responsibility for its victims. In particular, the victims are in need of psychological help and counseling, and nothing had been done by the state.
The continued terror and trauma till 25th
Our trip to Nandigram was on 25th March, eleven days after the violence. We found people still in shock and trauma. We have already mentioned the trauma of injured people. Apart from that, everywhere, people had a deep distrust of outsiders, with cameras etc. They wanted us to prove our bonafides with identity cards if possible, citing TV channels like 24 Ghanta, which were presenting their views in a totally distorted manner. Secondly, they were afraid that if we took their photos, they might be put in danger. This fear was particularly great in Sonachura, where the bulk of the people seem to have been CPI(M) supporters till fairly recently, and were all the more apprehensive of violence. People not only did not come out after dark, but even, in many cases, dared not stay at home at night, for fear of sudden attacks. In areas bordering on Khejuri or other areas strongly held by the CPI(M), people were apprehensive of moving about even in day time. A van driver near a bridge at Sonachura [on the opposite side of which was a CPI(M) area] told us that whenever he had to pass close to CPI(M) areas, he went in mortal fear. A huge crowd at Adhikaripara told us that on 23rd March, a woman who had gone to collect kerosene was beaten up so badly that she had to be hospitalized. As before the 14th of March, complaints to the police brought no redress. Everyone was skeptical about the CID, identifying it as an instrument of the CPI(M). Schooling was in doldrums. At Sonachura, we were told that 18 candidates had been unable to sit for the Higher Secondary examinations, because their centres were in Khejuri. It was alleged that the HS Council had willfully changed the centres, after the Madhyamik Examinations, despite knowing that such changes would be harmful for Nandigram students. Schools had not held their annual examinations.
What do the people want?
Different reactions were heard. Our discussions with people at the grass roots level showed locals willing to continue the struggle to retain their land at any cost. At the same time, there was a mood of deep frustration. They were not clear what would happen next. What was disturbing was the existence of a trend, stoked by outsider “leaders”, calling for retribution. Khokon Adhikary said those locals who had joined the goonda (harmad) forces should be turned into cripples and made to beg from door to door. But what was more serious was that at a meeting organized on 25th March by the Jamait-ulema i Hind in Sonachura, in the presence of Siddikullah Chowdhury, a state level leader (photo attached) of the organization said that murder should be replied by murder, rape by rape.
Delivering Inflammatory Speech
Attitudes also varied from area to area. Women at Sonachura and Garchakraberia were vocal and showed a greater willingness to mobilize again. At Adhikaripara the stress of the women was on peace and an end to the conflicts. In general, women seemed to feel that they had equal space at the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee. But our questions about future strategy tended to show that such decisions would be taken by the men. The decision to place women up front had been based on the perception that they were weaker. Even women who agreed that they should go ahead did so by adopting a patriarchal standpoint, that it was less of a loss if women died. While women’s participation in the resistance is certainly a very significant component, the persistence of such patriarchal values suggests that participation does not mean equality in decision making and in rights generally. In a movement fighting for rights, this dimension cannot be swept under the carpet.
At the political level, in 2006, a CPI member had been elected MLA, and the area has traditionally been considered a left area. But people have lost faith in the Left Front, and its talk about restoring normalcy and peace. This however does not mean that people have automatically become supporters of the Trinamool Congress or the Jamait-ulema I Hind. We got an impression by talking to many of the victims as well as the common people that BUPC provided them with a platform for raising their voices against the unilateral decision to take over land for industrialization. Buddadev Mondal, who helped our team in all its work, described himself as a non-party independent activist. A lot of women said that there with the BUPC while also acknowledging their leftist politics.
A question that needs to be clarified is, what will be the situation of the people, whatever their exact number, who are in camps at Khejuri. Given the threats uttered by some people at least, it seems to be a difficult proposition to enable those people to return to Nandigram. While making a clear distinction between state violence and popular violence, we also need to interrogate violence within civil society. Accordingly, investigation is needed in Khejuri as well, instead of depending solely on information given in Nandigram.
One observation we had was, people in Nandigram wanted outsiders to come, and listen to their views and experiences. While they had suspicions about outsiders who played shady roles, mentioning clearly certain newspapers and TV channels, generally they welcomed us and talked to us at length, giving us their views.
Report prepared by Debasish Sen, Kunal Chattopadhyay, Kuntal Ghosh, Maroona Murmu, Safiul Mollick, and Soma Marik (members of Teachers and Scientists Against Maldevelopment – TASAM, in their private capacity).
(Sorry. I could not post the pictures. Seems I still have to learn techniques.)
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