radicalblogger

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The JNU students union elections, hard on the heels of the Delhi University  Students’ Union election, have considerable significance. Unfortunately, it is rather different from how much of the Indian left has been reading these elections. For ages, the JNU elections and the JNU students’ union has been a stamping ground and a promoting ground for the major left parties at the all India level, just as, at a smaller scale, Presidency College and Jadavpur University have been so, for left and far left alike, in West Bengal. As a result, sectarian existence, targeting opponent left organisations, all these have been very important elements of JNU student politics.  So we saw four left student organisations contesting the JNUSU elections – the AISF (CPI), SFI (CPI-M), AISA (CPI_ML Liberation) and the DSF (breakaway from SFI). Ask any of them and they will tell you that the BJP is fascist. Look at their parent parties and you will find that for parliamentary/assembly election...

[I spoke for the first time in my life in a meeting organized by the SFI. I had gone to listen, not to speak. Because it was a protest over Gaza. But some of the students requested me to speak. So I did. Below is an edited version of what I said.] This was posted on Facebook a few days after the speech was delivered. Reposting it here.  Thank you for inviting me to speak. I had not come at all prepared, so I may be less than fully coherent. I want you to excuse me if that happens.  My first and crucial point is, such protests need to recognise that we live in a different world than the one I inhabited when I was a student in this very University. In those days the left was stronger, anti-imperialism and anti-racism were stronger. Today, the Right is stronger by far. As a result, its ideology has reached out to vaster masses and confused them. When we protest over Palestine, as I have been doing, we must pay heed to this reality and respond to false issues and non iss...

One of the major ways in which the politics of India has shifted is the total restructuring of the mainstream media. This is what makes serious alternative media so urgently necessary. And by that, I do not mean just a series of websites and blogs and facebook groups. I am quite aware of the value of these, and have often quarreled with friends who reject these. But their rejection, erroneous though it is, has some real basis. Websites and blogs and Facebook groups are mostly in English. Even when they are in the Indian bhashas, they are available only if you have enough time to sit in front of a computer, enough money to have a computer and internet or at least access regularly to net connected computers, and so forth. That is why an alternative media also, and above all, means serious journals and newspapers. Not that such have not been attempted. In Bangla, I can think of efforts like Manthan etc in recent times. But the fragmentation of the radical left, the zero sum game mo...