radicalblogger

“Tears for Our Brave Jawans” ?

2011-11-27T19:58:00.000-08:00

Star Ananda, the television face of West Bengal’s most powerful bourgeois media group, had a panel discussion on the killing of Kishenji, the CPI (Maoist) leader. The intention was put CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta on the mat, for having dared to express some sympathy for the slain Kishenji.

Guruas Dasgupta’s stance is not new. Within reformist politics, he has always shown exemplary courage. Back in the 1970s, when he was a CPI youth leader, he was well-known as one of the people defending tortured Naxalites during the notorious Sidhhartha Sankar Ray regime. But back then, even Indira Gandhi was hiding her politics under the mask of socialism. Today, when unabashed nationalism and economic liberalism rule, when India is seeking to position itself as not merely a regional power but as an emerging global powerhouse, Dasgupta, who also happens to be a leading trade unionist, the General Secretary of the AITUC, and an MP from Ghatal, is the most important mainstream left leader to have questioned the entire story behind Kishenji’s death. Like Varvara Rao, he has questioned whether there was truly an encounter or whether Kishenji had been arrested and then killed in cold blood.

Among the various modes of attack on Dasgupta, one came from police and ex-army people, including the left’s one time darling, General Shankar Roychowdhury. The point was, people shed copious tears when someone like Kishenji is killed, but when our brave jawans lay down their lives, whether in Kargil or elsewhere, whether they are soldiers, the paramilitary if the police, people ignore their heroic deaths in defence of the country.

We should consider a few brief points here, which can be developed at later times, but which do need at least a summary articulation.

First, what is or should be the revolutionary attitude to the armed forces, to the police, etc? Is it not obvious, someone might ask, that even if a revolution does take place, for law and order maintenance, for peace-keeping, for myriad reasons we will continue to need the police? And is it not even more obvious that as long as we have threats from across the border we must have an alert army? And finally, even today, whatever your criticism of governments, should you not salute the heroic jawans for doing their duty?

Any revolutionary, who answers these simply by quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, or from any other chosen canonical figure, is engaging in sterile politics. If we arrive at conclusions similar to what thy said, it has to be on the basis of our reflections on the current reality.

Why will we need the army, and why do we need it now? The Indian army is not a merely silent actor carrying out the will of the people expressed through their elected members of parliament wehose majority determines the composition of the government and the shape of policy, as official theory would have us believe. As the recent debate over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act showed, the army is an active and vocal shaper of policies. The chief Minister of a province, an elected representative, wanted the AFSPA lifted from some parts of the province. The army replied that this was not acceptable to it. Any talk of modifications of the AFSPA has been met with strident opposition from the army. It is therefore necessary to mention briefly what the AFSPA is about. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) is one of the more draconian legislations that the Indian Parliament has passed. Under this Act, all security forces are given unrestricted and unaccounted power to carry out their operations, once an area is declared disturbed. Even a non-commissioned officer is granted the right to shoot to kill based on mere suspicion that it is necessary to do so in order to "maintain the public order". It was first applied to the North Eastern states of Assam and Manipur and was amended in 1972 to extend to all the seven states in the north- eastern region of India. They are Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, also known as the "seven sisters". The enforcement of the AFSPA has resulted in innumerable incidents of arbitrary detention, torture, rape, and looting by security personnel. This legislation is sought to be justified by the Government of India, on the plea that it is required to stop the North East states from seceeding from the Indian Union. The 1972 amendments to the AFSPA extended the power to declare an area disturbed to the Central Government. In the 1958 version of the AFSPA only the state governments had this power. In the 1972 Lok Sabha debates it was argued that extending this power to the Central Government would take away the State's authority. In the 1958 debates the authority and power of the states in applying the AFSPA was a key issue. The Home Minister had argued that the AFSPA broadened states' power because they could call in the military whenever they chose. The 1972 amendment shows that the Central Government is no longer concerned with the state's power. Rather, the Central Government now has the ability to overrule the opinion of a state governor and declare an area disturbed. The army can shoot to kill, under the powers of section 4(a), for the commission or suspicion of the commission of the following offenses: acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons, carrying weapons, or carrying anything which is capable of being used as a fire-arm or ammunition. To justify the invocation of this provision, the officer need only be "of the opinion that it is necessary to do so for the maintenance of public order" and only give "such due warning as he may consider necessary".

The army can arrest anyone without a warrant under section 4(c) who has committed, is suspected of having committed or of being about to commit, a cognisable offense and use any amount of force "necessary to effect the arrest".

Section 5 says that the army has to hand over arrested persons to the police with the "least possible delay". There is no definition in the act of what constitutes the least possible delay. As a result, arbitrary arrests are regular.

Section 6 gives full immunity to the army for any action, since no legal proceeding can be brought against any member of the armed forces acting under the AFSPA, without the permission of the Central Government.

According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, some 8000 persons who have “disappeared” cannot be traced because of laws like the AFSPA which frees the Indian army from any accountability in Kashmir. Our brave jawans, in other words, are busier killing Kashmiri youth than in fighting in Kargil.

This raises another, even more basic question – what is the Indian army doing in Kashmir? Answer – trying to hold on to valuable real estate. If Kashmir is an integral part of India, why does India spend so much time killing civilians of that part of India? Why does the army and the paramilitary forces beat up journalists for covering incidents of protest in Kashmir, to say nothing of the Kashmiris who are routinely killed, tortured, sexually assaulted? Despite all media hype to the contrary, when has anyone proved in a court of law that Maoists assaulted or raped women the way the army and the paramilitary do with impunity in Kashmir, in Manipur, and anywhere else?

There is another important difference that one feels should be highlighted. It is true, that of late, surrendered Maoists (or are they captured Maoists or locals cxompelled to play roles taught by the state?) have said things about how the CPI (Maoist) tortures people, and forces them to do certain things. It is also known that if you hold so-called courts where armed guerrillas are all over the place, verdicts contrary to the ones sought by the guerrillas might not be delivered. Nevertheless, the bulk of people joining the CPI (Maoists) have done so out of certain ideological-political commitments. One can debate the precise nature of that ideology, as we in Radical socialist have repeatedly done. For that, the present author was once attacked as a degenerate by a Maoist supporter. But one has to make a distinction between an institution like the state, which prints Gandhi all voer the place, including in every note, which claims it is there to upholds the constitution, and then uses massive violence. The “brave jawans” are cannon fodder of the state. At the same time, in order to make them feel important, in order to keep them happy while they do the dirty work of the state, the state has various sops – ranging from alcohol at low rates to, in “disturbed areas”, the right to rape and kill with impunity.

It is true, that deaths of young men, even in uniform, are sad losses to the country and to their families most certainly. But these deaths are very often unnecessary deaths, created by contending states and their struggles for power and their conflicting ambitions. When we re asled why we do not shed tears for jawans who died fighting the Maoists, we need to ask, exactly why are those jawans being sent to fight? In vast tracts of India, tribals are repressed. Had the state spent half the money it does for Green Hunt and similar operations, on real development for the people, supplying them with education, health care, providing them with opportunities to earn more , would the CPI(Maoist) have found such strong support in those areas? But the state cannot do it. The Indian elite can enrich itself, can amass vast amount of capital, by superexploiting adivasis, by repeatedly evicting them whenever mineral wealth is to be extracted, and so forth. So the jawans who are dying in Green Hunt or in Manipur or in Kashmir, even if they have been led to believe, through repeated propaganda drives that they are serving the country, are in precise fact serving the country’s rulers.

Before shedding tears for them, will General Roychowdjhury shed tears for the unnamed and unnumbered adivasis who across india lose land, way of life, and are tortured for ever standing up and protesting (I am leaving aside those killed, for of course, General Roychowdhury and all his cothinkers will yell that everyone killed must be a Maoist)?

West Bengal: The Class Struggle is Not Over

2011-09-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

For a long time, the CPI(M) had been mistakenly identified with class struggle. As a result, there was much elation on the Right after 13 May 2011, when it was evident that Mamata Banerjee would head a rightwing government in the province of West Bengal, earlier ruled for 34 years by the CPI(M). A totally stunned CPI(M) has been in no position to wage any kind of struggle, since this party and its cadres all the way to the village panchayat level had become accustomed to police protection and government support whenever it wanted to wage a “struggle”.

But the working class found new channels to express itself. Unorganised sector workers have sarted organizing themselves. An 'Asangothito Khetra Sramik Sangrami Mancha' (Militant Forum of Unorganised Sector Workers) was formed by June 2011. For three months, the organizers campaigned among different sections of the unorganized workers. An early deputation to the new government, which had promised Parivartan (change) had elicited a simple response: we have just now come to power, so we need some time. Incidentally, the labour minister in the new government is a renegade ex-Naxalite.

From 6^th to 8^th September, for three days, close to 11,000 workers gathered at the Metro Channel, Calcutta’s usual place for open air meetings and gatherings. The principal demands were:

# Recognition and issuing of identity cards to all unorganised sector workers (including sex workers) ;

# Fixation of minimum wage for all unorganised sector workers as per the norms of the 15th Indian Labour Conference , along with strict implementation of the Minimum Wages Act;

# Provision of cheap food for all, starting with 7 kgs of rice per adult at Rs. 2 per kg;

# Strict implementation of all provisions, especially 100 days of work, in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, with expansion to a guarantee of 270 days of work for all rural and urban workers;

#Inclusion of all unorganised sector workers, including workers of closed factories, as priority group or BPL in the 2011 Socioeconomic Survey

# Effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act (Scheduled Tribes and Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act);

#Permanent status for all contract workers employed in perennial jobs in the organised sector;

#Recognition and extension of facilities available to all socially backward castes and tribes.

On the 8^th, a deputation went to meet ministers. The response was blunt b—the government has a shortage of funds, so nothing can be done now. Few things have revealed the class character of the government so clearly. The workers too have thrown down the gauntlet, telling the government that unless their demands are met they will step up the level of agitation.

In India, at the moment, 37 per cent of the people have a body-mass index of less than 18.5, indicating they are suffering from malnutrition. The demand for making the PDS a stronger one is a rock-bottom minimum. The callous reaction of the government to this, while it discusses means of keeping the middle class and upper class voters happy, is something that will have more repercussions in days to come.

As callous as the government have been the major media. The Bengal Post alone carried a positive news. On the 9^th, The Telegraph printed a photo with a caption that said it all:

Return of rally raj

- CITY CENTRE CHOKES, citizens suffer

And:

Processions by two unorganised workers' associations converge on Metro Channel on Thursday and (above) traffic stalls on the Park Street flyover.

What better a way of telling the working class that they are not citizens? Their sufferings merit at best an end of year tax savings donation to a charity. Unless they mobilize and fight, the working class will have no alternative. And the struggle has been joined, under new leaderships.

http://www.radicalsocialist.in/articles/statement-radical-socialist/news/409-west-bengal-the-class-struggle-is-not-over

From

A Moment of Silence, Before I Start this Poem

2011-09-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

[Written 2002]

Before I start this poem,
I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence
in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence
for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces
over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation
as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.
Before I begin this poem: two months of silence
for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
where homeland security made them aliens
in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
where death rained down and peeled back
every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
and the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam -
a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two
about the scent of burning fuel,
their relatives' bones buried in it,
their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos,
victims of a secret war ... ssssshhhhh .... Say nothing ...
we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
whose names, like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off our tongues.
Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador ... An afternoon
of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos ... None of whom
ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans
who found their graves far deeper in the ocean
than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung
from the heights of sycamore trees
in the south, the north, the east, and the west...
100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of
right here, Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous
magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been
Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written And if
this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New
York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek
ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.
And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem
We could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of
Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and
the Playboys. If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt
fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

Emmanuel Ortiz, 9.11.02

Radical Socialist - Trotsky's Struggle to Build the Fourth International

2010-09-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

Radical Socialist - Trotsky's Struggle to Build the Fourth International

Radical Socialist - Maoism, Green Hunt and Democratic Rights

2010-09-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

Radical Socialist - Maoism, Green Hunt and Democratic Rights

When The Telegraph invites CPI(M) to be moderate, it is time to beware

2010-05-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph has an editorial in its edition of 15 May. It points to the coalition government between the Tory Party and the Liberal-Democrats in Britain, and contrasts this with the attitude of the left in India. The left is evidently too unbending, too stuck in its old ideas, and does not recognize the need to give up pigheadedness in the greater national interest.

The point is made with reference to the first UPA. As a revolutionary Marxist, my criticism is normally in the opposite direction. The Left, i.e., the parliamentary cretinist left, yielded far too much. It argued that there was a need to fight fascism, i.e., the BJP. From this it concluded that there was a need to support a Congress-led government at the centre, even though that government was following an aggressively neo-liberal policy. (For details, any interested reader can look up the article written at that time by Soma Marik and myself). It allowed the government to push forward with its neo-liberal agenda, with only very limited resistance. But yes, it did present some resistance. As a Social Democratic force (the biggest components being Social Democrats of Stalinist origin and Stalinist organizational practice) the parliamentarist left cannot entirely ignore its basic constituencies. All too often, the far left mistakenly sees the actions of the Left Front government in West Bengal and assumes that that is the entirety of the parliamentary left’s outlook. But it is not so simple. Outside West Bengal, the CITU remains a major component of militant trade unionism. It is not possible to think of any serious all-India struggle while entirely ignoring this left. And that is exactly where The Telegraph has its objections. It wants the Left to give up all ties with the workers and peasants and become, not a social democratic party but a bourgeois party plain and simple. Without having any illusions about the CPI(M) as a revolutionary party, or even as a left reformist party, in this debate, I would support Prakash Karat against Aveek Sarkar’s editorial writer.

Radical Socialist

2009-11-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

Radical Socialist

Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance in India

2009-04-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

(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.

Communalism and Indian History

2009-04-30T18:19:00.001-07:00

(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.

Fight the Liberal-Left Masks that Protect the Fascists

2008-11-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-12-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter to Tariq Ali

2007-11-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

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

“Radical” Defenders of Ragging

2007-10-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Report on nandigram

2007-05-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

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.)

We lost Beleghata, so they dared Singur

2006-12-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

Four years back, they beat us at Beeleghata. Five years back, they beat us at Tolly's Nullah. Few were there to fight. That is why this time they dared so much at Singur. I wrote this statement for ICS, of which I was then a member. We need to go back and look anew at the old battles.
Stalinists Observe Human Rights Day by Fighting for Neoliberal Policies

(Statement of the West Bengal Committee, Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, Indian Section of the Fourth International)

On 10th December, 2002, on the day observed annually as Human Rights Day, police in Calcutta unleashed brutality on shanty dwellers in the Beliaghata Canal area. A large number of people were evicted from the only homes they had ever known, for the crime of being “illegal squatters”, in a country where a huge number of people live below the poverty line and where the idea of a room of one’s own is a distant dream for most men and women. Protesters were beaten up, and over a hundred were arrested, including Sujato Bhadra, former General Secretary of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, West Bengal, Shaktiman Ghosh of the Hawkers Sangram Committee, and Pranab Bandyopadhyay, veteran Gandhian and local community activist. Subsequently, the shanties were set on fire.

For the last half a decade, the neoliberal turn of the ruling combine in West Bengal, the Left Front, has been steadily deepening. They have not given up their authoritarian mould learnt from Stalin (the CPI( M), the major partner, remains one of the world’s most fervent admirers of Stalin, going to the extent of defending the mass murders of the 1930s), while adding to it a sustained commitment to neoliberalism. As, for them, a top-down bureaucratic control had been synonymous with socialism, the failure of that bureaucratic dictatorship compelled these rudderless leftists to an open accommodation with the most acute capitalist counter-offensive. West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee explained that his party was opposed to globalisation only insofar as a handful of countries benefited from it. So as long as the capitalists of India also make a killing, it is good.

However, the left front has a distinct vote bank, and therefore requires a different discourse. It has to proclaim that all its policies are for the majority. It boasts that it has a government of a different kind. It even claims that it is opposed to unwarranted evictions of toiling people, and asks people to remember how Sanjay Gandhi and Jagmohan had evicted people from the Turkoman Gate area during the Emergency of 1975-77. Since a series of its own measures nowadays are palpably anti-poor, anti-working class, it needs redefining what being for the people means. Development is the key word. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, development used to mean creation of new jobs, setting up new schools, public health care systems, and so on. Now, the word has been entirely emptied of the old meanings in even the most reformist and moderate forms. What does the improved Left Front mean by development? When pavement hawkers were removed, with payloaders smashing their stalls and the cops seizing their goods, a government utterly incapable of providing jobs to people, declared that urban development and beautification was the goal. The meaning became clear soon enough. In order to enable motor manufacturers to sell more cars, shiny new flyovers, built with money loaned by Japanese and other funding agencies, started coming up. At the same time, tram services were reduced, and kept in archaic forms of the pre-independence era rather than being modernised. This, despite the evidence that they provide a cheap and environmentally safe mass transport alternative, and that increasingly they have become important across Europe. In fact, it is part of the acceptance of the globalisation agenda, that instead of improving public transport systems, the government has gone in a big way for the development of conditions facilitating the sale of more and more cars.

The partially successful eviction of hawkers was followed by yet another development discourse – this time targeting shanty dwellers along some 11 canals in and around Calcutta. The first attack in 2001 threw out settlers along the Tolly Nullah. A year later, a People’s Commission On Eviction and Displacement, heard about the evictions and issued its Interim Report. The Commission consisted of Justice R. Sachar (retired) Chairman, Justice Moloy Sengupta (retired), Pijush Som, Dunu Roy, Maitreyi Chatterjee, Samar Bagchi, Sanjay Parikh, Colin Gonzalves and Monideep Chatterjee. The Commission report stated that : “In all the cases investigated, the commission found that it was the poorest of the poor who were the victims of demolition/displacement. The commission was shocked to find the residents of the rail bridge at Tollygunge living under railway platform, in extremely inhuman conditions like rats in their holes, with the fear of being crushed by a train at any time. They have been living animal-like existence for decades, it is extremely distressing that the government has not paid any attention to their pitiable condition. Similarly, those at Beliaghata (canal side) were living in an area completely unfit for human habitation. Most of the persons evicted were either rickshaw pullers, domestic workers, casual labourers, tribals, fishermen, and self employed persons. A large number were scheduled caste and scheduled tribe. We found their family income before demolition very low, and most often, below the minimum wage. After demolition their families shall become utterly destitute”.

Concerning the citizens’ right to information, the Commission noted: “Article 19(i)(a) of the constitution of India speaks of freedom of speech and expression. This has been interpreted to include the right to receive information – the right to know. And yet we have found not only in this case, but in all the cases of eviction and displacement, that as far as the government of West Bengal is concerned, they appear to have a right to hide the truth from the public. The West Bengal government officials appear to go out of their way not only to keep all information relating to their development plans top secret, but in fact, they do worse, and deliberately mislead the public as to their intent. This point was forcefully stressed by Mitul Dhar, one of the deponents before the commission.”

Concerning rehabilitation, the findings of the commission began with the damning indictment that: “The simple principle of rehabilitation which is required to be followed is: ensure requisite rehabilitation at the new place before displacing a person and uprooting him from his traditional roots. The people are questioning as to why the brunt of development is borne by the suffering displaced persons who are not benefited by such developmental activities. This commission therefore makes a strong appeal to the government to follow a policy on rehabilitation before displacing the poor”.

The Commission also found that the use of force had been massive: “In all cases we found extreme force being used against the civilian population. In this respect, a comparison with the British police may be in order. There is absolutely no attempt made to carry out the evictions with even a trace of humanity. It is obvious that in the contemplation of government, the poor figure lower in the ranking order than animals, and perhaps even lower than garbage. Bulldozers were invariably used, a large police force with lathis and guns were invariably on sight. The Rapid Action Force was used in the Tolly Nullah eviction. Lathi charges were common. The demolition of houses with people inside was reported. Eviction at gun point was reported.”

These were some of the interim recommendations of the Commission:
1. The persons proposed to be evicted should be given full information and consulted well in advance in respect of whether the eviction is necessary at all, and if necessary the framing of the rehabilitation scheme necessary and the manner and mode of shifting.
2. Resettlement is a result of development projects. These development projects, as well as the rehabilitation schemes, must flow from the right to life and livelihood.
3. In all cases, it should be the responsibility of the state not to shift people and, as far as possible, to integrate peoples' housing in the very place where they are staying according to a scheme.
4. In cases where it is unavoidable that people be shifted, the new site ought to be as close as possible to the original site. Adequate time should be given for a transition to the new site. The entire scheme should be planned in consultation with the people. Adequate finance should be made available including finances for shifting people and the cost of construction.
5. In no circumstances should the shifting be done in bad weather.
6. The state should avoid in all cases, the use of force. This is unacceptable in a democratic state.
7. Refugees living in the country for decades have to be treated like human beings and be rehabilitated in a humanitarian manner.
Quite clearly, Minister for Urban Development Ashok Bhattacharyya and his boss, the patron of arts, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, found this a joke. So flagrantly violating all norms of humane behaviour, ignoring the UN Commission on Human Rights, 54th Conference principles, as well as the “National Policy On Resettlement And Rehabilitation,” 1998, they have proceeded to evict people without any alternatives being provided. They have denied that the government has any duty whatsoever to provide for any living space for these people, since they are illegal occupants. Possibly, their first illegality was to be born at all, since they cannot afford to live in the Brave New World of privatization, increasingly expensive housing and transportation, to say nothing of food costs, being brokered by Bhattacharjee as the way to development.

It was symbolic, that the Left Front Government chose 10th December as the latest date. It sent out a message that the squatters and such other people do not merit human treatment. It is for the oppressed to draw the necessary conclusions. Once again, many had hoped that the government would relent and either provide alternative space, or stop the eviction. Others had placed their hopes on the Trinamool Congress of Ms. Mamata Bandyopadhyay, or on lesser Left Front parties like the Forward Bloc, CPI and the RSP. They must now recognize that in fact, none of these parties will really fight. In a political system where parties contest for votes, it is important for Ms. Banerjee to show an apparent pro-poor stance while she is out of power. But she will not fight. She was conveniently in a hospital, and the rest of her party was marked by its absence. Indeed, the Mayor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation is a leader of her party and he has strongly supported the evictions. As for the FB, CPI and the RSP, while they were concerned with their local bases, they are even more concerned with their ministerial berths. They know quite well that none of their parties are going to wage a fight for a break with capitalism, so why risk cabinet berths for issues where the mind of capital is clearly made up? The only way ahead is to build organizations of the different oppressed groups, and to begin the process of linking these up, as well as to fight within the organized labour movement for a turn to active solidarity with all such marginalized groups of people.

· Stop all further evictions.
· Immediate rehabilitation as well as payment of compensation to all the evicted people without looking at issues of whether they were “legal” squatters.
· Resist neoliberal globalisation.
· Oppose capitalism and all parties serving the capitalist class.
· Build organizations of the oppressed.

Defending Human Rights the Buddha Way

2006-12-12T23:16:00.002-08:00

10th December was observed as Human Rights Day all over the world, including in West Bengal. The interesting thing about West Bengal was the programme organized by the State Human Rights Commission. In the presence of Shyamal Kumar Sen, the Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee explained that there is a difference between preserving human rights and hobbling the police. When it is a matter of fighting terrorists, police should not be demoralized by criticisms. Excesses against terrorists should not be viewed as human rights abuse.
This speech by Mr. Bhattacharjee came just five days after The Telegraph, English language paper claiming to be most widely circulated in West Bengal, wrote an editorial, where it advocated a very hard line against Maoists. It argued: “The menace of Maoist violence is not new to West Bengal. When it had first surfaced in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was eradicated through counter-violence. Mr Bhattacharjee must learn from that experience and nip the present movement in the bud before Maoist weeds strangle the hundred flowers of West Bengal.”
There is a pattern in this approach. And that pattern is called drive to authoritarianism. It is possible to conduct seemingly democratic elections, when an organised cadre force, backed by the police at need, threatens and cows the whole of rural Bengal, as well as substantial parts of cities, before election time. At that stage, a few protests do emerge, and of necessity, some of them become violent. Every violent protest can then be labelled Maoist, or terrorist. If this sounds too outlandish, we should remember some news The Telegraph or Ganashakti never published. A few years back, there was a panic (and manic) arrest of people suspected to be Maoists. Now the CPI(Maoist) or its predecessors, the CPI(ML) PW and the MCC, were not banned organisations in West Bengal. But people were picked up on suspicion, tortured, harassed. One man named Abhijit Sinha was so shattered by his experiences that he committed suicide. An Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights activist was arrested for possessing, among other things, a copy of From Marx to Mao Tse-tung, written by George Thomson. This is a book any political science M.A. student might consult. In May 2002, Sheila Roy and Mamata Ray in North Bengal were suspected of being close to the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, and were made to stand in the courtyard of their own house and brutally beaten up. Mithu Roy and Shampa were two of the urban women arrested in this phase. Shampa, a first year student of Gurudas College, was arrested for being a member of the Peoples’ War Group.On 16th August 2002, she was presented before the Baharampur Court, and told the judge that for the past four days she had been kept in the police lock up without any food.
Coming to recent events, like the peasant protest at Singur, we have had a very interesting development. First, a sizeable part of the mass media (not including The Statesman and the Bengali Dainik Statesman) has been supporting the ruling party and the government to such an extent that even honest reporting of news has been given a go by. Just like the CPI(M), these papers went on repeating that only outsiders were fomenting trouble. An English daily even sought to link up every issue in West Bengal with Singur. A train hijack was associated with Singur. And the responsibility for the violence in Singur was laid on the doors of Maoists coming from outside. As a matter of fact, the Chief Minister was even more explicit. According to him, these were Maoists from Jadavpur University. Yet, eyewitness accounts, police arrest lists, all show that in fact, most of the people were locals, and it was a massive police force that committed violence, entering peoples’ houses, often helped by local members or supporters of a particular party, and dragging out and beating up people. One woman, Swapna Banerjee of Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha, was arrested, and a widely circulated English daily promptly turned her into the key Maoist organiser. The police also treated her in the same way. So she was taken to the police lock up, and according to her own testimony, she was locked up inside the toilet. Even after the bail petition was granted by the Calcutta High Court, it took nearly 48 hours before she was released.
In another case, Abhishek Mukherjee, a young man who had suposedly attacked a Tata showroom, was charged with ‘Conspiracy Against the State’.
Just these few cases give an indication of the utter lawlessness of the police in West Bengal. If some minister or CPI(M) functionary turns up to say, as they are doing these days, that the police always behaves like this, we need to turn to the Chief Minister’s comments. We do not, at least according to the Constitution of India, live in a police state. We live in a democratic state, says the constitution. There is a rule of law, not a rule by the police, says the constitution. Every person is presumed innocent, till found guilty by a court of law, in a trial where proper procedures are followed and the accused have full rights to defend themselves. The elected government is supposed to represent the people, not rule it like a medieval ruler with his soldiers.
If our “Marxists” wish to show contempt for the constitution, we should pay heed to the attitude of Marx and Engels. Writing to August Bebel in 1874, Engels commented: a free state is one in which the state is free vis-a-vis its citizens, a state, that is, with a despotic government. So for Marx and Engels, the aim was to maximize democratic popular control over the state. As Marx put it about the same time: Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it. And near the end of his life, Engels dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s when he explained that the dictatorship of the proletariat he and Marx had talked about was realised by the Paris Commune, which had an absolutely democratic, pluralistic, multi-party government, accountable to the people.
So what is Mr. Bhattacharjee arguing for? What are certain newspapers urging him to do? We can now put it down in simple terms. Mr. Bhattacharjee believes that if he wins elections, this gives him a mandate for riding roughshod over every oppositional viewpoint, emerging from all layers of society. He and his government are willing to allow people the right to protest if police have actually beaten a suspected thief to death. But for any matter relating to government policy, civil society protest will not be tolerated. First, it will be branded anti-development. Then there will be the charge of being ‘outsiders’. And finally terrorism related accusations would be brought forth. Once that is done, the police would have the right to apply any manner of brutality, without being challenged. For after all, the Chief Minster says criticising them when they are fighting terrorists will break their morale. And then they will shoot people in the back, claiming these were encounter deaths. This was how the Naxalite movement was broken in the early 1970s.
What the turncoats from Marxism and the liberal ex-professors of History do not seem to realise is the simple lesson of history, that once we create a police state, it does not stop with the “right” victims. When the Weimar Constitution, hailed as the most democratic of constitutions, was created, it left one loophole for emergency rule. This loophole would be used for years to rule without a parliamentary majority, further whittle down democratic rights, till that in turn paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. The Maintenance of internal Security Act was originally brought forward by Mrs. Indira Gandhi ostensibly to fight Naxalites. In 1975, leaders and cadres of every opposition party realised that by not fighting tooth and nail against the MISA, they had created the situation where they too could be arrested and put under bars.
We can of course understand the motivations. Hailing from a Stalinist tradition, Mr. Bhattacharjee and his party are people who never recognised real right to dissent. They remain one of the few big political parties in the world that even today believes that the genocide (of communists, of peasants not willing to hand over land for collectivisation, of national minorities) carried out by Josef Stalin was really good, and it “built socialism”. So even when they give up socialism and opt for globalised capitalism, they have not changed their methodology.
As for that section of the media yelling for blood, we can understand their motives too. Liberalism comes in two basic forms, within which there has always been a contradiction. Political liberalism stresses civil liberties. Economic liberalism stresses the right of capital above all. If, to uphold that, political rights like civil liberties have to be jettisoned, so be it. Behind the seemingly proper words “counter-violence” lies the reality that the state is being asked to ignore all constitutional guarantees. We have, under the tender ministrations of Mr. Bhattacharjee, already slipped a long way down that road. Unless we act at once, the result will be terrible, not just for Maoists, but for all of us who value our democratic rights.

2006-12-09T16:36:00.000-08:00

Violence in Singur: Hardselling Capitalist Globalization in the name of Left Alternative

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Several thousand police and paramilitary forces are now roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghly district, West Bengal. On 2nd December, they fired tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a few outside supporters who had gone to the area. Television channels, so far strongly supportive of the moves of the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government, now found themselves projecting a story totally at variance with the words their newscasters were being made to utter. Even as the bourgeois media went on mouthing claims that locals (later changed to Outsiders) were attacking the police, what could be seen , for example on the Kolkata or the Tara News channels, or even in Star-Ananda, was the picture of half a dozen hulking cops converging on individual hapless villagers, and brutally beating them up with truncheons. One could also see the tear gas shells being lobbed and the rubber bullets being fired, and huge paddy dumps being set on fire. All the while, the Channels were seeking to divert attention by asking viewers to send sms on whether they condemned the behaviour of the (right-wing opposition) Trinamool Congress members’ action in smashing up property in the Vidhan Sabha (the State legislature, where TMC MLAs had gone berserk on 1st December).

Left wing Model of Development?
To understand what was happening we need to go back and look at the model of development being pushed by the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government. When Bhattacharjee replaced Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister, it was a signal to the Indian capitalist class as well as capitalists from everywhere else, that a new attitude was being developed by the CPI(M). Singur is not an isolated case. All over India, the process of taking over peasants’ land is going on. The Special Economic Zone Bill says that the SEZs created by taking over land will be like a foreign country. Those who invest capital in those areas will function under laws different from the laws for the people throughout the country. In Kharagpur, West Bengal, the Tatas want another 1240 acre land. Total targeted land in West Bengal is nearly 1,00,000 acres. In Gujarat, it is the Reliance group that is staking major claims. Farmers in Gujarat are fighting the Reliance group just as farmers in West Bengal are fighting the Tatas. In addition there are transnational companies. The Salim group of Indonesia were feted a short while back by the Left Front ministers. The group had a strong role during the coup in Indonesia that led to the murder of some half a million communists. But that is all old hat, and seemingly the left ministers cannot be bothered by such sentimental issues when behaving like hardheaded businesspersons.
It is in this context that the government’s plan for Singur must be seen. The story of the “industrial turn-around” of West Bengal begins with the election results earlier in 2006. The CPI(M) led Front had won a thumping victory, thanks to the first past the post system. With just over 50% votes, it had obtained 235 seats, reducing all oppositions to such a minor proportion that as per legislative assembly rules there could not even be a formal leader of the opposition. As the CM was addressing a press conference at the CPI(M) office, an aide brought in a message, and the elated CM informed the press that the Tatas wanted to build a car factory in West Bengal. Within a few days, a hush hush deal was struck. The Tatas asked for close to 1000 acres of prime agricultural land – nothing else would do for them. The government complied with such alacrity that one might be pardoned for thinking that they were bound serfs of the Tatas. They did not consult the Gram Sabha or any other elected local bodies, though even their gurus at the World Bank go through the motions of suggesting the need to consult with local bodies. Tata Motors want to launch a new car model by 2008, the one-lakh-rupee car. According to the Left Front, this is development, and cannot be opposed. It will put West Bengal in the industrial map of India. According to CPI(M) Politbureau member and West Bengal State Party Secretary Biman Bose, those who are opposing the move are fronting for other big companies who sell overpriced cars!
We need to look a little more closely at the entire process. The land that Tata wants is prime agricultural land. There is plenty of poor quality land in West Bengal, for example in Purulia district, or elsewhere. Plenty of old industries are in crisis and their land could also have been converted. But this particular area has a good road connection, as it links up with the Delhi Road. That is the first real reason why Tata is pushing for this, and only this area. A second reason, likely to come up after a decade, will be argued below.
So how did the state government act? Did it, in its new found faith in market economics, tell Ratan Tata and his minions to go and negotiate land price with the peasants? Even that would have been detrimental to the sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, if direct sale of land had simply ousted them. But keeping to the spurious logic of the free market, at least this should have been done. Instead, the state government used an act, the Land Acquisitions Act, which was originally devised in the colonial period, to take over the peasants’ land. They were offered a price worked out as the average of the previous three years’ price, plus a 30% hike known as the solacium. The full details of the deal with Tata are not known, but from the little information that came out, it seems Tata will not even pay this much to the government. According to Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, former Commissioner, Land Reforms, West Bengal, (and who is, according to many people, the main burueacratic impulse behind Operation Barga, the registration of sharecroppers, the reform measure that a generation back had enabled the Left Front to gain solid and unwavering rural support), the government has in fact saddled the people of West Bengal with a huge burden in order to bring in Tata Motors.
The West Bengal government claims this investment will create many new jobs and be a major developmental project. What is the truth? Between 1980 and 1994, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the three top US car manufacturers, cut down the total number of their global employees from 7,50,000 to 3,75,000. Why should the Tatas behave any differently? If they are really going to sell cars at the rate of Rs. 1 lakh (US $ 2246), they will be cutting costs. They have no intention of running a loss making factory.
Another question is, why do they want nearly 1000 acres of land? Maruti-Suzuki, a major car manufacturer in India, need 296 acres of land on which they produce over 600,000 cars per year. Moreover, we should remember that while Maruti builds the entire car in its factory, Tata will only assemble the car there. So what is all this land needed for? It is likely, that after the hue and cry has died out, much of this land would be reconverted to agricultural land, but run by the Tatas as an agribusiness. Reliance in Gujarat is going in for marketing organic food. The Hindustan Motors of the Birla Group, which had been given about 750 acres of land in Konnagar half a century back, could use only 350 acres and has now sought permission to reconvert the rest of the land. Moreover, plenty of industrial land was left, for example in the Durgapur industrial area. So targeting high quality agricultural land and insisting that nothing else will do is bound to create this kind of doubt. Clearly, the tale of alternative, left wing model of development peddled by Battacharjee, his industries minister Nirupom Sen, and his finance minister Ashim Dasgupta, is a murky tale indeed.
Media reports indicate that the land is being taken over by the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation at a cost of Rs. 140 crores. The Tatas have informed the West Bengal Government that they will compensate the government to the tune of 20 crore rupees after five years with a 0.01 per cent interest. The discounted value of the money in today’s terms will be about 12 crore rupees. So the West Bengal government is giving to the Tatas the sum of Rs. 128 crore rupees (28749185 US dollars). This money will come either from taxes, or from loans contracted by the WBIDC, which again must be repaid through taxes or through cutting costs in social sectors like health and education.
The most important issue of course is the story of sacrifices. Ever since independence, when foreign colonialism could no longer be blamed directly, people have been asked to make sacrifices for the nation. Not very surprising, though, that it is workers and poor peasants, tribals and low caste people, who end up making the sacrifices, while the wealthy, the bourgeoisie, the urban middle and upper middle class, the upper castes, all end up with profits. For whom is Bhattacharjee proposing this development? For Tata? For the shareholders of Tata’s companies? What about the ordinary people? The peasants are being given a paltry compensation. Even that is murky. In many cases, the land was sold to other people, by a small number of landed elements who knew about the deal in advance. But they still had the papers, so they were identified as owners deserving compensation. In many, even most cases, owners did not want to sell the land. They are aware that what skills they have are as peasants. Cash compensation is no good to them for they will not be able to use the cash in an effective way. Urbanisation of the area, inevitable if a factory comes up, will raise the cost of living. The landowners are not going to become traders all at once. As one of them quipped, if we all set up shops, in any case, who will buy?
Five villages of Singur, namely Gopalnagar, Beraberi, Bajemelia, Khaser Bheri and Singher Bheri, are affected. While peasants here are not rich farmers, nor are they absolutely poor. Net income of the owner of 1 acre of land is about Rs. 1,00,000. So for 1000 acres the net income is around Rs. 100 million (US $2246030). The gross income is even more, about Rs. 250 million (US$ 5615075). Apart from the peasants or landowners (in some cases the owners are absentee), there are the share-croppers and agricultural labourers. All told, some 7/8 thousand people are employed, and their total income, Rs 250 million, was being added to the GDP of West Bengal. This seven to eight thousand is based on economic calculations suggesting that for around 5000/6000 peasants there will be an added 1200 or so share-croppers and about 1000 agricultural labourers. And how many workers will the Tatas employ? Despite the Right to Information Act, in West Bengal all real information is firmly hidden. The West Bengal Government has refused to divulge these figures to organisations who have sought them. But one such organisation estimates it will be around 250 employees. If their average monthly income is pegged at Rs. 50,000 the total wage bill will be 150 million rupees (This average takes in the high salaries of the managerial cadre). Then there will be the profits of the shareholders and the concern, which after all is the main reason for this investment. Clearly, this is a model of development that will intensify disparities.

If Fraud does not Work, Use Force:
Initially, the government went into raptures about the benefits to the province. Somehow, though, the peasants did not respond. And so, pressure on them began to mount. Apprehensive of losing their sole safeguard to life, the farmers got together to launch a resistance movement under the banner of ‘Krishijami Raksha Samiti’ (Association for the Protection of Agricultural Land). From the very beginning, women have been in the forefront of the movement. In recollection of a famous song of the tebhaga movement, the greatest peasants’ movement in Bengal in the twentieth century, with ‘life and honour as stakes,’ they began to ‘hone the scythe.’[1] The state government, hardly bothered about the plight of the farmers, remained stubborn, repeatedly reiterating that the Tata factory would come up on that piece of land. If the slogan of the alleged Rambhaktas (the RSS and its allied outfits) was ‘Mandir wahin banayenge” (the temple will be built just at that spot), the slogan of West Bengal’s alleged bam (left) CM was “factory wahin banayenge”. On 25 September, there was a massive attack. In a pre-planned move, a reign of terror was unleashed on thousands of peaceful protesters at the Block Development Officer’s office in Singur. It was the first day cheques were being handed over to those who had agreed to hand over the land for compensation, and the demonstration was a form of pressure on them as well. By the afternoon, several cases were detected in which those who had already sold off their land to others, but the mutation process was not complete, were being given cheques, denying the present legal owner. Protesting such illegal deeds by government officials, the demonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, even gheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period. At this point, Mamata Banerjee, leader and Supremo of the Trinamool congress, arrived and joined the dharna. A little after midnight, a black-out was created, and under the cover of darkness, a huge police force, according to the victims well lubricated with alcohol, attacked and brutally beat up the protestors, men, women and children. Ms. Banerjee was also manhandled, and her sari torn. She was then bundled off to Calcutta by force, and had to be admitted to a hospital.
Hundreds were severely injured in the police assault and 72 put behind bars. Women with small children were arrested under the Arms Act and/or charged with attempt to murder. Payel Bag, a two-and-a-half-year-old, spent four days in prison, along with two pre-teen boys. 26-year-old Rajkumar Bhul became the first martyr of the Singur struggle after he collapsed with severe internal haemorrhage from police beating. Bhul’s mother, in an open letter to the Chief Minister, squarely blamed him for her son’s death. According to Sumit Chowdhury, one of the most commited “outsider” activists, who has been writing and organising solidarity, when he went to Singur two days later as part of a fact finding team, and also during subsequent trips, “the hapless and angry women in the villages – some with broken arms, bandaged eyes and scars here and there – said that the policemen were drunk, cursed in the filthiest language, kicked and molested them”.
The subsequent responses not only of the government, not only of one or two individuals, but of the entire CPI(M) was damning. Prakash Karat, the General Secretary of the CPI(M), who has never set foot in Singur, announced from the CPI(M) headquarters in Delhi that Singur has one-crop land, that the farmers are queuing up for cash, and that the demonstrators were anti-development hoodlums. Evidently, the protests against land takeover for SEZs and similar issues are reserved for provinces where the CPI(M) is not a major partner in the government. Equally evidently, when Prakash Karat wrote his introduction to a recent publication entitled The Left and Environmentalism, he should have entered a caveat that all his pious utterances do not apply to West Bengal and his comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.
On the night of the violence, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee had his alibi. He and other party top brass were in Delhi. But the alibi is thin. The same day, he also met the Tata top management. The next day, there was a report about a community package promised by the Tatas for Singur. But examined carefully, it was mostly verbiage. One needs to remember that the massive investment of the in Orissa and Jharkhand, two of Eastern India’s poorest provinces (though very rich in minerals and forest resources), has not led to any positive development in the conditions of poor peasants, tribals, and others. On returning to Calcutta, the CM posed as injured Christ, stating, “forgive them for they know not what they do”. After a huge outcry, two days later he was forced to say that police action had been “unwarranted”. But no single policeman is known to have been punished.
At a meeting called by the Chief Minister, even a number of Left Front partners criticised the way the factory was coming up, but at the end of the meeting the government announced that the Tata Motors factory would come up on Singur at any cost. On 9th October, the opposition parties, both right and left, called a twelve hour bandh (general strike including total stoppage of public activities). The CPI(M) threatened to unleash its cadres.[2] But if anything, this threat made people fearful and stay indoors.
From this point, terror became the order of the day. Any ‘outsider’, unless a staunch supporter of the CPI (M) come to campaign for handing over the land to the government, was treated as a member of one of the Maoist groups.[3]
Terror was of different kinds. Nirupom Sen, the industries minister, warned the locals that all developmental work in Singur would be halted if land was not handed over. One minister even termed opposition to the project as ‘anti-national’. As a result of this unrelenting government pressure, some land transfer began. There was an added dimension to the handing over. As we noted earlier, some people had actually sold the land to others, but the mutation had not been done. So they took advantage of this to claim compensation.
The struggle continued nonetheless, and therefore terror took on more concrete shapes. Several of the deep tube-wells of the area, essential for regular irrigation of the fields, were vandalised at night. And this happened despite the massive (already, at that point, several hundred) policemen and women posted in the region. From early November, agitation and terror both stepped up, with the government threatening to take over the land and hand it over to the Tatas at any cost by December. Women played a militant role, resisting all threats and blandishments.

One of the regular refrains of the government and the CPI(M) was that the real owner have accepted compensation, it is outsiders who are causing trouble. We will discuss the issue of “outsiders” later. Here we should note that indeed, the lead in the struggle was taken, not by well to do peasants, but by share croppers, agricultural labourers, and the smaller owners. This is the rural mix which fought six decades back, in the tebhaga uprising.[4] This was the base which gave the left its decisive majority even in the occasional periods in the last three decades when in the cities the Left was on the defensive. So it was inevitable that the Left Front, notably the CPI(M), would not be willing to accept that this base will now speak in its own voice. Yet that was inevitable. The tebhaga movement had been so massively successful because the authentic voice of the rural poor had been well represented by the undivided CPI and the All India Kisan Sabha. By the present decade, the AIKS was a bureaucratised carcass living on the memory of past glories. Present day leaders of the AIKS have not even seen the tebhaga. The younger among them became leaders after the Left Front was already in power. So for them the role of the peasant organisation is to collect money, collect votes, and on occasion collect lots of people in trucks and take them to Calcutta for central rallies. The apparently impressive anti-imperialist demonstrations, and so on, organised by the CPI(M) conceal a reality where mass organisations act as transmission belts of a high command, herding people in different ways. And so resentment and opposition grows. In Singur, the direct attack on livelihood turned the sullen resentment into organised politics, as the Krishijami Raksha Samiti brought together most of this rural poor, albeit in a small area. This challenge could never be allowed to grow. The Left Front has always been sensitive to the emergence of left wing oppositions and alternatives from within the working class and poor peasantry. It is aware that it has little to fear if the right wing is even fully mobilised. As long as there is no serious left wing alternative, it can expect to get fairly close to half the votes every time, and therefore get a majority in the first-past-the post system. Mamata Banerjee was the only right-wing leader to recognise this, and therefore to develop a populist political style. But lacking a solid trade union and rural poor implantation, she has never, even at her most creditworthy performance proved to be a match for the CPI(M).
Every time a single trade union, or a single rural area, has shown autonomy, the CPI(M) has thrown more forces in the field to smash it, than it has for defeating its right wing opponents. Early in the Left Front period, electricity workers had a couple of left wing, but non-Left Front Unions – the Workers’ Union and the Technical Workers Union, in a number of plants. Repeated violence, repeated attacks on the workers, arrests, were used indiscriminately to smash the unions. In the 1990s, the struggle of the Kanoria Jute Mills took on epic proportions, as did the regime’s attempts to malign the struggle. So in retrospect, it was not, or should not have been surprising, that despite (or because of) its Left credential, this regime was more aggressive to the peasant struggle than almost any other regime in India.
Since this may sound a bit of a hyperbole, let us take a concrete, very right wing example, to make our point. Medha Patkar has already made the point. A lot of people thought Medha was indulging in shock tactics when she said the Left Front is worse than the Gujarat government.[5] But this is the picture if we restrict ourselves to the attitude to peasants and industrialisation, and the violence on them. Patkar argued that even in Gujarat, she had not been restricted in her movements as much as in West Bengal. We should add, that by now the virus is spreading. First, she was debarred from Singur as an “outsider” fomenting trouble. Now, when she went to Presidency College, Calcutta, to speak at the invitation of students there, SFI thugs beat up students of the Independent consolidation, and the college authorities shut the gates on her face. She then climbed on top of the gates and spoke. But we can also go beyond what she said to add another point. In Gujarat, the government made a commitment that it would provide land for land to all the people ousted due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The Narmada Bachao Andolan argued that it cannot be done. Indeed, proper land-for-land rehabilitation has not proved possible even for those who have been properly identified. As I saw in two trips earlier this year, village communities have been split up, with one village resettled in 8-10 new sites. People have been given plots for cultivation, but not enough grazing land and open fields necessary for their survival. Often there are conflicts with the original inhabitants. Sometimes, after people were settled, this new land was partially taken away in order to build the canal network that would carry the waters from the dam to the target areas. So rehabilitation has received much flak. But if we look at the entire process, we find two waves of campaigns. We find a fairly long period, so that people could get some information and try and seek redress. Pro-dam but pro-rehabilitation NGOs, such as Arch-Vahini and its activists like Anil Patel, waged one type of campaign. They sought a compromise, and the whole concept of land-for-land rehabilitation came because of such interventions. When the NBA, led by Patkar and others, criticises the rehabilitation and resettlement schemes, it is because they see the land-for-land proposal as inadequate in theory and fraudulent in practice. They see it breaking up the community, creating much social disorder, and all for the benefit of small elite groups. Whether they are right about the dam benefiting only small groups is of course much debated. But we have sought to show that the picture is much more open and shut in the case of West Bengal. The peasants, share-croppers and agricultural labourers are being pushed out of land. They are not getting any alternative land. Many are not getting any rehabilitation at all. It is our experience, from Madhya Pradesh, were the government has used cash compensation rather than land-for-land rehabilitation whenever possible, that peasants, unaccustomed to large sums of money, sent it on consumer goods, on building big houses, and so on. At the end of a relatively short period, many of them had neither land nor money. Of course, if we extrapolate from this and argue that in all respects the West Bengal government is worse, we would be in error. But Patkar has not made such a sweeping generalisation, nor are we.
Perhaps confirmation of a different kind came in the newspapers recently. On 5th December, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported that there were differences within the BJP. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had told his party that it is opportunistic of them to try to exploit Buddhadev Bhattacharjee’s recent difficulties, and they should support him over the issue of land acquisition.

November 30 – December 2 and the aftermath:
On 30th December, Mamata Banerjee and her supporters were prevented from going to Singur, because Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, disallowing any congregation of five or more persons, had been clamped in that entire area. Angry, and losing her head as she is often accustomed to doing, Ms. Banerjee told her supporters to turn their motor cavalcade back and drive straight to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. From late afternoon, TV channels had a field day. No sports, no cartoon channel could compete with the live show, and then the re-runs, of MLAs smashing furniture, and generally wrecking havoc. Then she called for a Bengal bandh on 1st December. In view of the massive publicity given to the antics of her party, the bandh was a partial failure, even in areas thought to be her stronghold. South Calcutta, her personal fief, alone saw a near complete shut down. An emboldened Bhattacharyya moved in for the kill. On 2nd December, several thousand police started storming Singur. According to Samir Saha, reporting in the Bengali Dainik Statesman, ordinary police, Rapid Action Force and State Armed Police all together numbered 20,000. Even the pro-CPI(M) Kolkata TV channel reported at least 6000 police. From the first, they seemed to have been instructed to go on the offensive. A wide area was surrounded, and then tear gas firing began at random. The next task was to find out the aggrieved peasants. For the police, it was of course difficult to know who was an aggrieved peasant and who a party loyalist. So this task had been given to party cadres. As Ganashakti, the CPI(M) daily, admitted on 4th December, in many cases locals themselves were identifying and fighting the opposition. Only, they were not fighting alone. They were moving as agents of the police, identifying specific houses.
There was of course some resistance. And the resistance acted as proof that the police attack was right and proper. But if paddy stacks are set on fire, if even tomorrow’s food, let alone next year’s, is snatched away thereby, who would not resist? So peasants, already pledged to resist till the end, did strike back. The fight was utterly uneven. Stones, knives, perhaps a few crude home-made bombs (if at all we are to give credence to this part of the police story) were hurled. According to the Chief Minister, the violence was entirely the work of outsiders, anti-socials, SUCI and Naxalites.[6] CPI(M) State Secretaiat member and long time trade union leader Shyamal Chakraborty asserted, “The police were attacked first. The police showed great restraint. If they had not tackled in this manner they themselves would have been beaten up.”[7]
From the paddy fields, reporter Ashish Ghosh could see the ‘anti-socials’ being dragged into police camps. They included lungi-clad aged peasants, as well as young rural women. Near the highway, Ghosh could see a different scene. The Superintendent of Police smilingly reporting to the Inspector General, “Sir, we have already arrested fifty. By tonight we will set up camp at Beraberi.”, and the IG responding, “in three more days we will complete the operation”. Sitting next to the police was the CPI(M) Panchayat Pradhan Dibakar Das. Food packets were being brought from a car for the high officers and their cadre friends. Meanwhile ripe paddy was being trampled underfoot or set on fire, one scene even the most pro-government channel could not avoid shoeing, since in one case that was also a major battle field which the channels were keen to sow, since it “proved’ their claim that it was all the work of outsiders.

The Outsider:
For the last two months, the ‘outsider’ has been a major target of CPI(M) propaganda, especially outside Singur. On 4th December, Ganashakti wrote, only outsiders are resisting the government at Singur. Ephemera are always bolder. So a poster put up by the Students’ Federation of India, the student wing of the CPI(M), asserted that urban people dressed as peasants had done all the mischief. In other words, even if you see peasants being beaten up on TV, don’t worry, they were all urban Naxalites playing at revolution in Singur. Ganashakti of course charged Medha Patkar too, with being an outsider. A CPI(M) leader, evidently more illiterate than the average, asked why she did not agitate in Gujarat against land take over, and why she came to West Bengal. Medha, typical of her track record, managed to get to Singur despite the thousands of cops and plenty of party cadres keeping a watch on outsiders. This of course suggested she had a lot of local sympathisers and insider help. But of course, we rule out such a possibility a priori. And so, Ganashakti also had a big story about how many routes there are to Singur, and why the police failed to stop Naxalites and Medha Patkar from entering the village. Medha confronted the police, and for her pains she, Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights activist Amitadyuti Kumar, and Sumit Chowdhury were arrested, dragged to a car and thrown out. She was then taken to a State Government Guest House in Calcutta, seemingly because someone higher up had realised that a faux pas had been committed. But she refused to be a guest of the State Government. After spending the entire night in the police van, from which she refused to budge, she gave the police aslip and went off to Chandernagore, where the seventy arrested people had been kept.
If Medha Patkar was one outsider, the “Naxalites” were another category. As the CM told the media on the 3rd, there had been students of Jadavpur Univeristy. This was a coded signal. Jadavpur University, rated in recent times by the UGC as one of India’s top five, has an ill-reputation because all its teachers are not housebroken partisans of the CPI(M), and even more, because the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union has been under the uninterrupted control, since 1977, of the Democratic Students Front, a non-party far left association which has allowed in every shade of radical left, Maoist, Trotskyist, and other. As late as 2005, JU engineering students had been beaten up by the police in order to break a peaceful hunger strike. So when Bhattacharjee said JU students, he implied radical left, militant, and “mal-adjusted”. Yet how many JU students did they find? Out of the around seventy arrested, there is one student of JU, currently in a hospital, with a broken hand.
Another arrested “outsider” is Swapna Banerjee. A fifty year old school teacher, Banerjee is a member of the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha. Women’s involvement in the struggles led to her being closely involved in the area for several months. Immediately, The Telegraph, on 3rd December, invented a story that she was the main ultra-left figure in organising and fomenting trouble.[8] Between the police, the Chief Minister, and the inventive staff of The Telegraph, local resistance was wiped off the map. Becharam Manna became a non-person, as did 81 year old Saraswati, who gave an interview to Soma Marik a few days earlier and promised to continue fighting till the end.[9]
But there is another, even more crucial aspect of the invention of the outsider. On one hand, we are told that even the nation is too small a unit. We are asked to accept globalisation as the inevitable goal. On the other hand, in every battle where we try to organise resistance, we are told we are outsiders, or that we have outsiders amongst us. Medha Patkar is of course the great outsider in India. She has been branded an outsider in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, and now in West Bengal. In Gujarat, the regional language papers are always attacking her, arguing that as an outsider she has no business talking about the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada, which is supposedly the sole hope for Saurashtra and Kutch. In Madhya Pradesh, I was asked why Medha Patkar is sniping at the MP government, and not at others. And for the last few days, the CPI(M) and the media that has, in the interests of big capital, placed itself entirely at the disposal of the CPI(M) for the moment, argued that as an outsider, Patkar has no business in West Bengal. In flagrant violation of law, she was stopped repeatedly from going to Singur, even when she was not violating Section 144 of the CrPC. She was kept locked up, along with Anuradha Talwar of the Sramajeebi Mahila Samity, at Dankuni on the night of 4th December, and told on the 5th that she could go anywhere else but Singur. Yet, she had not been formally arrested, so she could not be served an externment order. In other words, what was being done to her was sheer hooliganism, even if done by men in uniforms, backed by a Chief Minister.
What was unique was not the charge, “outsiders”. This is a necessary salami tactics applied by rulers. They would like each fight to be an isolated one. They can bring 20,000 police from all over West Bengal, but the peasants of Singur have to be alone. For they know, at the present level of class struggle probably better than the toiling people, that in solidarity and unity alone lie chances of victory.
What was unique was something else. This was the fact that a so-called Communist Party is doing the propaganda. After all, exactly who built this party? What was its founding ideology? Were Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, themselves factory workers? How many acres of land did Muhammad Abdullah Rasul or Bankim Mukherjee cultivate? Did not Somnath Lahiri say, that they were often called the “strike-babus”, because they would rush to any mill where a strike had broken out, in the hope of making contact with militant workers. And even if we forget those heroic pioneers of the early twentieth century, and concentrate on the prosaic present day leaders, Shyamal Chakraborty is still hailed as a Centre of Indian Trades Union leader. When did he last, if ever, work in a factory? Is it not a fact that Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury represent West Bengal in the Upper House of Parliament? If the CPI(M) is going to turn regional chauvinist at this date, should it not start by inquiring about how that could happen? We for our part believe that the Leninist party building concept clearly rejects this particular notion of “insider” and “outsider”. We are even prepared to concede that within the parliamentary framework, even a CPI(M), which is certainly not a Leninist party, can send Karat to parliament from wherever they are sure of a safe seat. The question is, why then the chauvinistic witch-hunt unleashed on Medha Patkar? What this shows is, behind the mask of regionalism and localism is the class position. And it forces everyone to start rethinking the nature of the CPI(M). How many miles must a party walk right, till it ceases to be a part of the left?
After 2nd December:
The struggle is difficult after 2nd December. The organisation of resistance has been crushed for the moment by stationing 20,000 police. Arrests have meant that energies have gone into court cases; money has to go for putting up bail bonds. But the struggle is not over. On 5th December, a few small parties, the SUCI, and two of the CPI(ML) groups called a bandh. Despite all bluster, TV channels could only prove that roads were empty, buses plied empty, and the Chamber of Commerce expressed unhappiness at the losses incurred (surely the losses were due to the success, not the failure of the bandh). On 8th December, a march to Singur, called by two CPI(ML) groups, was brutally beaten up by the police. Hundreds were injured. True to form, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported only the violence unleashed also on a few journalists.
Some other developments are worth noting. For decades, the Left Front has had the pretence of being a “cultured” political force, as opposed to the “uncouth”, “uncivilised” politics of the Congress and the Trinamool Congress (these choice epithets are often used by CPI(M) leaders). Long years in power has enabled the CPI(M) to use a patronage network and get plenty of intellectuals, not the most straight-backed of all beings, to line up with it and paint it in glowing terms. But the violence resulted in condemnations pouring in from many intellectuals and artistes of Bengal. Mahasweta Devi, internationally reputed author, issued a short, blunt statement: “This is a war. Ask yourself, on which side are you? Let war meet war.” Well known leftist poet Sankho Ghosh, a Tagore scholar of great repute, condemned the attacks on the peasants and committed himself to organised protest mvements. Artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyay condemned the arrest of Medha Patkar and questioned why, if India is a democracy, she did not have the right to go to Singur. Statements came from singers Pratul Mukhopadhyay and Srikanata Acharya, poets like Nirendranath Chakraborty and Mallika Sengupta, authors like Sanjib Chattopadhyay, film director Haranath Chakraborty, academics like Esha De of Calcutta University, Avee Dutta-Majumdar of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, around thirty teachers of Jadavpur university who took part in a silent demonstration in the University campus, and others. The students of Engineering Faculty in Jadavpur University boycotted the first day of their end-of-semester examination as a mark of protest. On 8th December, Medha Patkar spoke at both Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jadavpur University, at the invitation of students. A number of online petitions have also been launched, while two protest letters have been sent to the Governor of West Bengal, the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Women, signed by human rights and womens’ organisation, NGOs, and networks as well as by leftwing groups. Well known academics who are also activists, like Achin Vanaik and Professor Vibhuti Patel, also signed them. Arundhati Roy, Mainstream Editor Sumit Chakravarty, were among those who protested in Delhi, in front of the CPI(M) office.
Yet an organised force like the CPI(M), backed by the bulk of the media, which is not even reporting protests in any even handed manner, will certainly try to turn all these into a three-day wonder, urging people to move on to other things. The leading newspaper in West Bengal, Ananda Bazar Patrika, and its English counterpart, The Telegraph, have taken the lead in this. Reporting the massive violence, The Telegraph sought to play it down, to trivialize it, by using tennis match rhetoric about post-police action, it was “advantage Mamata”. It pontificated editorially that in a democracy, street demonstrations were pursued by parties that do not have faith in the democratic system. And then it went on to cite as example Lal Krishna Advani’s notorious “ratha yatra” of 1989, which had stirred up communal riots in 43 towns. As though that had been a street demonstration, and as though that could be used to justify the illegal externment of Medha Patkar.
The Singur land has been taken over, but the story is just beginning. The West Bengal government proposes to give vaster stretches of land, for example to the Salim Group of Indonesia, again from peasants. It proposes to take over land to build a nuclear power plant. And even for Singur, there is at the least the need to fight for a proper rehabilitation for the great many who have got nothing or next to nothing, for a land-for-land resettlement. International and national solidarity is needed, particularly because Stalinists all over the world today still point to the Left Front as a shining example. CPI(M) MP Nilotpal Basu’s article on the Left Front was reprinted even in the US progressive paper Guardian earlier this year. Even Noam Chomsky, the libertarian, found reasons to praise the Left Front government when he came to Calcutta. The myth of the Left Front as alternative has to be disposed of, before a struggle for a real alternative can succeed. Let the tragedy of the peasants of Singur create at least the possibility of that. They deserve such revenge.

[1] The first lines of the song went: Hei Samaalo dhan ho kasteta dao shan ho
Jan kabul aar maan kabul
Aar debona aar debona rakte bona dhan moder jan ho
Oh keep a watch on the paddy, hone your scythe
With life and honour as stake
We will never again hand over the paddy sown with our life’s blood
[2] Cadre has come to sound like an obscene and utterly alienating word in West Bengal. Cadre today evokes the image of stick or other more murderous weapons wielding thugs, tragically carrying the red flag. Yet, notwithstanding the Stalinist nature of the major left parties, and despite their clear reformist turn from 1942, and again after 1951 (there was a short in-between period in 1948-51 when they had become ultra-left) communist party cadre had meant the most sincere, dedicated social movement activist.
[3] Though on paper in West Bengal none of the Maoist groups are banned, in practice, people suspected of Maoist affiliation are routinely arrested and variously heckled and tortured by the police, especially outside Calcutta.
[4] See Kunal Chattopadhyay, Tebhaga Andolaner Itihas, Kolkata, 1987, reprint, 1997. In English the most detailed study is Adrienne Cooper’s Sharecropping and Sharecroppers' Struggle in Bengal 1930-1950, Calcutta, 1988.

[5] Medha Patkar made this point repeatedly, including in a speech in Jadavpur University Campus on 8th December.
[6] The Socialist Unity Centre of India is a smaller Stalinist formation, opposed to the Left Front. Naxalite is a way of referring to the Maoists of all trends, in view of the origin of Maoism in India from the peasant struggles in Naxalbari, in North Bengal. The CPI(ML) Liberation is active in Singur.
[7] Dainik Statesman, 3 December 2006, page 1, news box ‘Policer Kaaj Police Korechhe: Buddha’ (‘The Police have Done Their Duty: Buddha’)
[8] The Telegraph has been among the most consistent spokespersons of the ruling class. Whereas even The Statesman, despite its historic connections with the Tata family, has reported relatively objectively, The Telegraph and its Bengali sister publication, Ananda Bazar Patrika, have been running a sustained campaign vilifying protestors and arguing that there is no alternative to industrialization at any cost. The Telegraph has indeed gone further. On 5th December, it ran an editorial virtually calling for the suspension of what little democracy remains in West Bengal. Entitled ‘No Velvet Glove’, the Editorial thundered: “The menace of Maoist violence is not new to West Bengal. When it had first surfaced in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was eradicated through counter-violence. Mr Bhattacharjee must learn from that experience and nip the present movement in the bud before Maoist weeds strangle the hundred flowers of West Bengal.” Even after the passage of decades, people still remember much of what had been done at that time. The “eradication of Maoism” meant the Cossipore-Baranagore massacre, when an entire area had been sealed off and every known youth connected the leasdt bit to the Naxalites murdered. It included the massive application of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, from which Bush could learn something about fighting terrorism. It included the killings of prisoners. It included “encounters” where prisoners were shot in the back and proclaimed dead in encounters.
[9] Interview taken by Soma Marik, 19th November 2006. Courtesy Soma Marik.

Street-fighting Historian:Goutam Chattopadhyay (1924-2006)

2006-09-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

In tribute, Kunal Chattopadhyay* writes about his father’s life and times.
*Email: soma1kunal@airtelbroadband.in

Goutam Chattopadhyay was born on December 9, 1924. His father, Kshitish Prosad Chattopadhyay, was an eminent anthropologist, a student of W.H.R.Rivers and the founder of the Department of Anthropology, University of Calcutta. Goutam’s mother was Manjushree. Though he never flaunted his pedigree, Goutam was proud of being descended from reformers and modernisers like Raja Manmohun Roy, Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (on his father’s side) and Dwarkanath Tagore (on his mother’s side).

Goutam’s induction to politics, Indian nationalism, and leftism were partly through his father. Kshitish Prasad had been a friend of Subhas Chandra Bose, and when Bose decided not to be an ICS, his friend followed suit. Returning to India, Kshitish joined Calcutta University, but after the Swarajya Party won the Calcutta Corporation elections, became Education Officer at the request of his friend Subhas. His work included not only a massive expansion of the corporation primary school system, but also the giving of jobs to relatives of revolutionary nationalists. But when Kshitish proposed a scheme to enlarge the scope of corporation sponsored education to ensure the eradication of illiteracy from Calcutta, he found himself thwarted by several ‘bhadralok’ nationalist councilors. It was at this point that he gave up this job and returned to Calcutta University. But he never gave up his political views. He was to be severely beaten up by the police on January 26, 1931, when Bose, then Mayor, marched at the head of a procession with the Congress flag towards the Monument, flanked on two sides by Kshitish Prasad and Jyotirmayee Ganguly, daughter of Dwarkanath Ganguly and Kadambini Ganguly. When the police attacked, first Chattopadhyay and then Ganguly protected Bose with their bodies till the police struck them down. When the white khaddar-clad KPC was brought home, blood spattered all over the white, his six-year-old son asked how this had happened, to be told by his grandfather that the British had done this. He replied that in that case, when I grow up I too will beat up the British. This was young Goutam’s initiation into the realities of anti-imperialist struggles. But his direct participation came with the Holwell Monument agitation. He was then attracted to Marxism through his uncle Rajani Mukherjee, a follower of M. N. Roy and a trade unionist. He originally turned to the Bolshevik Party under the influence of his friend Pradyot Mukherjee, but soon turned to the Communist Party of India, when he decided the key task was to side with the Soviet Union in the anti-fascist peoples’ war. From 1943, he was a member of the CPI.

Joining the CPI in 1943 was a very categorical decision. It meant taking a hard political stand about the war and the role Indians should play. For Goutam, personally, it also meant taking up a political stand against a man he greatly respected and in private life referred to as ‘uncle’ till the end, for Subhas Chandra Bose had organized the INA with Japanese support.

Goutam studied in Ballygunge Government High School, and then in Vidyasagar College followed by Krishnanagar College, from where he graduated with English Honours. He was active in the All-India Students Federation, to become President of the Bengal Provincial SF, when Geeta Mukherjee was the General Secretary.

During the post-war upsurge, he was a student leader. Contemporaries remember him as a fiery orator. He was present during the night of November 21, 1945 when students held Dharmatolla after the death of Rameshwar Banerjee, and was also active during the three days of struggle during Rashid Ali Day. He participated in the Prisoners’ Release struggle and fought during the all-India general strike in solidarity with the long Post and Telegraph strike of 1946. His contemporary narration was in the pamphlet Rakter Sakshar (In Letters of Blood). In 1946 he went to Europe as the leader of the AISF delegation to the founding Congress of the International Union of Students, which met at Prague. But his fondest memory was of a trip from there to Yugoslavia, of which he wrote in a pamphlet, I Saw Yugoslavia. Throughout his life he would return to the crucial years 1945-47, when India was on the verge of a revolution that did not happen. The young man who spoke in meetings, recited the poems of Sukanto Bhattacharyya and Subhas Mukhopadhyay to impassioned audiences, and stood at barricades fighting the police and the army, would always prompt the mature scholar when he reflected on ‘The Almost Revolution’.

This would indeed be the most significant contribution Goutam would make as a historian, in a series of essays spanning the years 1976 – 2005. ‘The Almost Revolution’ appeared in B. De et al edited, Essays in Honour of Prof. S.C. Sarkar (1976). It argued that the post-war upsurge had broken out of the Congress mould and failed to turn into a revolution because there was no sufficiently strong alternative revolutionary leadership. This would be fleshed out by articles like those in Amit Gupta ed., Myth and Reality: The Struggle for Freedom in India, 1945-47, (1988), or ‘Bengal Students Movement’, in Nisith Ranjan Ray, Kalpana Joshi (Dutt) and others ed, Challenge: A Saga of India’s Struggle for Freedom (1984), in his histories of the students’ movement: Swadhinata Sangrame Banglar Chhatra Samaj (1973), Swadhinata Sangrame Bharater Chhatra Samaj (1990) and in his keynote address to the 2004 New Alipur College Session of the Paschim Banga Itihas Samsad, entitled ‘Dwitiyo Biswayuddhottar Ganabidroha-- Phire Dekha’ (published in Itihas Anusandhan-19, Calcutta 2005). In his life too, friendships made in this period were among those that were the firmest – with Santosh Bhattacharyya, but above all with Sunil Munshi, and his leaders Prabhat Dasgupta and Ramen Banerjee.

After independence he was among the local organizers of the South East Asian Youth Conference. When, soon after the Second CPI Congress and its left line, the Party was banned, this would figure in the list of charges against him. He was accused by the Indian state of having tried to foment rebellions across South East Asia. No doubt, Ho Chi Minh and Tan Malaka would have been puzzled to know that they were taking instructions from Goutam Chattopadhyay in Calcutta. But the Indian police took all this seriously enough, and he stayed underground for four years, including one stint in his own home, in a concealed room built by his father.

Many communist leaders inspired Goutam, and despite polemics (e.g., after the split) he retained his respect for them regardless of which party they were in. But three party leaders were probably the greatest inspirations for him. They were P. C. Joshi, Somnath Lahiri, and Biswanath Mukherjee. In later life he would often argue that whatever the ‘right deviation’ of the Joshi period, it was Joshi alone who had understood how communists should penetrate civil society. Lahiri epitomised for him the total commitment to proletarian leadership. And Biswanath Mukherjee, the legendary student leader, was also an eye opener for this life long urban communist, as to what it meant to do communist work among the peasantry. But despite later political differences he also remained extremely respectful of, in particular, B. T. Ranadive, S. A. Dange and E.M. S. Namnboodiripad.

In the period of the post-war upsurge he had given up his studies. He returned to them a decade later, changed subjects, did his MA in History from Calcutta University as a private candidate and stood first, scoring what were then record marks in some papers like the one on China. His communist stamp was very strong, and according to the story he narrated to his family members, when he applied for a job in a University, its Rector told him he would be taken in only if he dropped his political work. So he worked all his life as a lecturer in Surendranath College for Women. There too, his commitment to teachers’ rights and his work in defending that before a privately run college’s board led to his losing a part-time job he held in the Day College. He married Jayasree Ghosh, sister of Sada Prosonno Ghosh, a party comrade who had been his courier, in 1953. Their son Kunal was born in 1959.

In 1962 came the India-China war. Though he was critical of China, he did not give way to nationalist hysteria. With the party split came additional responsibilities. In 1967, during the elections, he was a prominent speaker and writer for the CPI. It was also a difficult period as his wife died. He was to go into a second, much briefer underground when the First United Front Government was overthrown.

In 1956, following the 20th CPSU Congress, there had occurred a great shake up in mainstream international communism. Goutam was to say later that having given up a belief in one infallible leader, he was never again willing to accept another such. So he remained a communist who tried to apply his understanding of Marxism in his own way. A member of the CPI, a loyal soldier, as he saw it, of the international revolution, he was internationalist to the core. For close to four decades, his writings in the weekly and the daily Kalantar, in Mainstream, in Saptaha, and a dozen other journals, and in a number of pamphlets, testify to this. His writings covered the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam War and the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese, the liberation of Angola, the Nicaraguan revolution, the Afghan revolution in its early phase, and so on. He was to retain his anti-imperialism all his life, and even in one of his last major speeches, delivered in memory of Christopher Hill, he finished with comments about the US war on Iraq. But his internationalism was always a critically thinking internationalism. In 1968, he thought that regardless of the specific economic proposals of Ota Sik (which he felt hardly differed from the Libermann proposals), the attempt at democratisation and pluralism by the Dubcek team was worthy of full-scale support. So he was deeply disappointed when Warsaw pact countries sent in their tanks in the ‘friendly’ occupation of Czechoslovakia. He also got into some trouble with the party leadership because in an article devoted to the triumph of fascism, he had criticised the ‘Third Period’ sectarian line of the Communist International and had commented that Trotsky had warned of the disastrous consequences this would bring for the German working class. Though he was never a Trotskyist or sympathizer, he had an unusually large collection of Trotsky’s writings for the late 1960s –early 1970s. He was also among the earliest to read and apply the ideas of Antonio Gramsci in his own political concepts, when they started coming out.

During the Bangladesh War, Goutam threw himself into solidarity work. His residence at 2 Palm Place was forever swarming with visitors from Bangladesh/East Pakistan, some scholars like Professor Salahuddin Ahmed, many more political activists from the CP Bangladesh, the National Awami Party (both factions) and even the occasional Awami League member. Aminul Islam (Badsha) was a favourite. Transfer of uniform, shoes, food, and canteens for carrying water, etc, to Mukti Yoddhas were organised and his house and those of his friendly neighbours became transit points. By this time he had married Manju Gupta, and she too worked with him as a party member and historian. Their son Dhiman was born in 1972.

This was also a trying time in India. The armed struggle line of Charu Mazumdar and his comrades, the clash between different sections of the left and the murder of each other’s cadres, and looming over it all the repressive machinery of the state was a permanent reality in West Bengal in those days. Chattopadhyay was in favour of Communist unity, and at the same time he was a staunch defender of civil liberties. After the Cossipore-Baranagore mass murder of naxalites, he wrote the article ‘Footfalls of Fascism in Bengal’, for the weekly New Wave, which editor O. P. Sangal refused to print in his name, printing it anonymously, saying Goutam might otherwise be in danger from the same thugs. Then, in 1975, at Curzon Park, police had brutally murdered the actor Probir Dutta. So terror stricken was Calcutta that hardly 75 intellectuals turned up at a protest meeting. Goutam was one of the few who did, and he spoke there. The commitment to civil liberties would remain intact all his life. He would march in the rally demanding prisoners’ release in 1977, after the fall of Indira Gandhi’s government, he would be articulate in his defence of Archana Guha’s right to a fair trial and as a result face a contempt of court case along with Debes Roy and Ashok Dasgupta (editor of Aajkaal), he would march and speak after the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, and sign protests condemning the arrest of Kaushik Ganguly and others as supposed PWG sympathizers.

From the late 1950s, however, Goutam was also involved as a scholar. His first interest was in the Bengal Renaissance, and he brought out two volumes of rare documents: Awakening in Bengal (1964), and Bengal: Early 19th Century (. These dealt with documents of the Derozians, and his interpretation of the Derozians would continue to be a part of the historical debates in later times.

But in subsequent years his major fields of attention would be the communist and working class movement and the freedom movement. Books and significant monographs would include Rus Biplab O Banglar Mukti Andolan (1967), Communism and Bengal’s Freedom Movement, vol. 1 (1970), Lenin O Samakalin Bangladesh (1970) (with Manju Chattopadhyay), Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian Communist Movement: A Study of Cooperation and Conflict (1973), translated also into Hindi and Telugu, Bengal Electoral Politics and Freedom Struggle (1984), Strike, Strike (1991), Gandhiji, Subhas Chandra O Bharater Communist Andolan (1995), Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian Leftists and Communists (1997), Subhas Chandra Bose: A Biography, (1997), Itihaser Pata Theke (2001), and a stream of essays and pamphlets on the history and conmtemporary problems of the communist movement, some of which are Peshwar Theke Meerut (1984), Biswa Sramik Andolaner Gorar Katha (1989), Samajtantrer Agni Pariksha o Bharater Communist Andolan (1992), edited volume Sanhati, Langal O Ganabani (1992), Sarbahara Biplaber Jayosankhya (Sushobhan Sarkar Memrial Lecture 1998), etc.

From the 1960s, he was associated with the CPI daily and weekly Kalantar, and wrote editorials, reviews of international affairs, and commentaries on Indian politics, and so on. Never one to write what he did not believe in, he took clear positions. A number of occasions where his work as a historian and as a communist activist came together included a sharp reply to Arun Shourie’s attacks on the CPI, entitled Bharatiya Moshijibir Communist Birodhi, Soviet Birodhi Kutsar Jabab (Bharat Chharo Andolan O CPI Prasango) (1984), and a similar response to attacks entitled Bharater Swadhinata Sangram O Communist Partyr Bhumika (1992).

Goutam Chattopadhyay was an inspirer of research and an organizer too. Countless students of different generations were to profit immensely from his assistance and guidance, as several recounted after his death. They included his direct students like Kanai Lal Chattopadhyay, Debarata Majumdar, etc, as well as others working in Calcutta University, Jadavpur University, JNU, etc, like Anuradha Roy.

He was associated for many decades with the Indian History Congress, was several times a member of its Executive Committee, and in the words of Irfan Habib, was “a mentor and guide”. He was elected Sectional President of the Modern India Section for the Srinagar Session of 1986 and delivered an address on the Role of the Working Class in India’s Freedom Struggle, in which he frankly combined his identities as communist activist and historian.

Goutam Chattopadhyay was always profoundly committed to secular history writing and teaching. He himself, both alone and with his wife Manju, wrote a number of text-books in Bengali. After the Janata era attack on History text books following Nanaji Deshmukh’s notorious note, Professor Sushovan Sarkar wrote an article, which was used as the rallying cry by Goutam Chattopadhyay and his teacher professor A. W. Mahmood to launch the Paschim Banga Itihas Samsad, dedicated to the promotion of secular and scientific history writing and research in the Bengali language. For many years he was Secretary, then President of the Samsad. The Samsad played a major role in fighting communalist attacks. He contributed to this to the end, presiding over a national seminar at Jadavpur University when two volumes of the Towards Freedom project were under attack by the NDA government. He and Salauddin Ahmed jointly led a cross-border meeting of Historians in 1991 defending secularism. It was fitting that his felicitation volume was brought out by the Itihas Samsad in 2005, with the entire Executive Committee (excluding him) as the Board of Editors.

Goutam Chattopadhyay died in the early hours of 2006, at 2 in the morning, of a sudden cardiac failure. On his work desk was the draft of a new book he was to edit for the National Book Trust, an anthology of writings of personalities of the Bengal Renaissance.

Originally written -- 9th January 2006

Trotsky, Lenin and the Stalinist General Line

2006-09-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

Trotsky’s greatest sin, it seems, was that he often disagreed with the “general line” of the party. Or so the contemporary devotees of Joseph Stalin would still like us to believe. Perhaps this should be viewed, rather, as Trotsky’s continuing commitment to the pre-Stalinist Marxist tradition, for which commitment to working class democracy, viewed as more expansive than the best that bourgeois democracy could afford to offer, and hence as his greatest legacy for socialists in the twenty-first century if they do not want to bow movingly to market forces, yet want to be relevant. For the days when one could say in a commanding tone, “this is the party line”, and expect everyone to lie down and play dead like tame dogs, are gone forever.

When Karl Marx started his political career, he began as a democrat. Unlike many earlier and contemporary socialists and communists, he did not advocate aneducational dictatorship of the party (or a group of wise and enlightened elite, by whatever name) over the working people. And his call for a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” was not a call for party dictatorship. One has to remember that in the Paris Commune, there were very few people holding close to Marx’s views, and that moreover it was an elected body with laws far more democratic than anything that then existed in any liberal state. Yet both Marx and Engels unhesitatingly called the Commune a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Young Trotsky’s Critique of Lenin

Trotsky stood in this tradition, as despite occasional ferocious statements, did Lenin, till 1921. In 1904, in his polemical pamphlet against Lenin entitled Our Political Tasks, Trotsky wrote that “The problems of the new regime are so intricate that they can be solve only through the rivalry of the various methods of economic and political reconstruction, by long “debates”, by systematic struggle – not only between the socialist and the capitalist worlds, but also between the various tendencies within socialism, tendencies that must inevitably develop as soon as the dictatorship of the proletariat creates tens and hundreds of new unsolved problems …. And no ‘strong authoritative organisation’ will be able to put down these tendencies and disagreement for the purpose of accelerating and simplifying the process, for it is only too clear that the proletariat capable of a dictatorship over society will not tolerable a dictatorship over itself.” This is not to try and replace the myth of the infallible Lenin followed by the infallible Stalin, by another myth of the prophetic Trotsky. Considering that at stake was also a debate over whether a minority, defeated in a democratically organised Congress, should accept the decisions of the Congress or not, where Trotsky was supporting the creation of a special category of members who had the right to flout decisions because they were leaders, he made his share of errors. On this issue he was wrong, not just according to some special canons of Leninism, but by any commonsense definition of democracy. However, by the time Trotsky came to write this particular pamphlet, Lenin had tried to bolster his claims with further arguments. Trotsky argued, against Lenin, on three points, which together constituted, according to him, an alternative (and superior) theory of organisation. The first is the opposition that he set up between the self activity of the class and a “fantastic” sectarian error, whereby Lenin allegedly wanted a ready made set of tactics to enable the Central Committee to control the masses. The second point is the opposition between democracy and Lenin’s “pitiless centralism” (to borrow a term used by Rosa Luxemburg). The third point is the contrast between a formalist and a historical political viewpoint. One important charge he made against Lenin and his supporters was that they believed in automatic success due to their possession of Marxist doctrine. One can refer to statements like: “The Party is the organized detachment of the working class”, or the “General Staff”. Trotsky himself was a Marxist. And it was certainly not his intention to decry the merits of Marxism. But he did question its exclusive possession by any individual, group of individuals, or party; and even more strongly did he reject the notion that possession of Marxism was a guarantee against mistakes. Acknowledging the existence of different political trends in the Russian working class movement, he insisted that they have to be situated in the historical context, and argued that part of their mistakes stem from an ahistoricity. “Each period has its own routine and tends to impose its own tendencies on the movement as a whole.” The necessary and correct industrial work gave rise to the errors of “economism”. The centralising of Iskra gave rise to the errors of Bolshevism. So ran his argument. The problems arose because “Each new tendency casts the previous one into anathema. For the bearers of new ideas, each preceding period seems no more than a gross deviation from the correct path, an historical aberration, a sum of errors, the result of a fortuitous combination of theoretical mystifications.” Trotsky’s position is of more general value, because even if Lenin is taken to be free of every error that Trotsky mentions, the “Leninism” that has been propagated, by Stalinists, and sometimes by sectarians who believe that revolutionary discipline means utterly wooden rigidity entirely measures up to Trotsky’s critique.

On one hand, then, references to The Party of the proletariat in the singular. On the other hand, the inevitability of the struggle of tendencies, not only between capitalism and socialism, but also within socialism. The tension this created in Trotsky's thought was to be resolved only in the 1930s, when he finally accepted that a vanguard party can remain one only in a pluralistic political system. Alternatives to this range from denunciations of “party persons taking the capitalist road”, gun-point arrest and summary executions of feared rivals (e.g., the Beria or the Mehmet Shehu cases), or, alternatively, the abandonment of the concepts of vanguard party and class vanguard, either openly and fully, or de-facto, partially, in the name of pluralism.

Revolution and Reaction in Russia

However, even before the 1930s, Trotsky was to take his position for deepening of democracy. Trotsky’s writings themselves present a confusing picture, and one has to pick one’s way carefully. There is no doubt that he genuinely considered himself a Leninist after 1917, though he continued to cherish his independence of mind. In late 1924, in his unpublished pamphlet ‘Our Differences’ Trotsky stated that he had been fundamentally wrong, because he had expected events to force the two factions together. He admitted that his “conciliationism” had led him to err, chiefly in the direction of not realising the need to split with the Mensheviks. He acknowledged that Lenin’s criticisms of his line regarding party unity were correct. However, Trotsky no less than Lenin progressed in his thinking, and we find him taking a dialectical stand in 1905 on the question of building the party. At that time, he was editing a popular socialist paper, Nachalo. Though his famous biographer Isaac Deutscher gives the impression that he only preached permanent revolution and unity, we find him devoting space to programme and organisation as a whole. And what emerges clearly from those articles is that while he decried what he felt were Bolshevik rigid attitudes, he did not thereby lapse into any spontaneism or into condoning arm-chair socialists.

In the period of reaction, no less than during the revolution of 1905, the revolutionary camp was not simply equated with the Bolshevik faction, nor was Bolshevism identical to Leninism. At the Third Congress of the RSDLP, a purely Bolshevik affair, one of the points where Lenin was defeated was over whether the committees should have a majority of workers, or not. On the other hand, at the Fourth or Unity Congress at Stockholm, a Menshevik majority (62 to 44 for the Bolsheviks) approved of the principles of democratic centralism. In a report on the Stockholm Congress Lenin called the principles of democratic centralism the heart of the system, and called for a generalisation of the elective principle. The application of this principle, Lenin held, “implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action …”

As the mass party of 1905-6 collapsed responses varied. Among Bolsheviks, there developed a current, originally in a majority, especially among the underground committees, that favoured boycotting the elections to the Duma (Russia’s very limited power semi-parliament), and later, for recalling the Duma deputies and sticking only to the underground structures. Among Mensheviks, a considerable number of theorists and ιmigrι leaders became “liquidators”, people who wanted to drop the old structures and build a workers’ party within the constraints of existing legality. In between these two extremes stood a majority of activists. Re-examining the issues and the documents in debate, one finds that Lenin and Trotsky also stood in between. But until 1912, Lenin tended to consider all legal activists as liquidators. According to Marcel Liebman, a historian sympathetic to him, Down to 1914, he had a tendency to pass up opportunities on open work.

A large group of worker activists or ‘praktiki’, who had been party members in 1905-6, sought to fuse legal work with the underground. They were criticised from opposite ends by Lenin and the liquidators. Younger Mensheviks, notably the ‘praktiki’, by and large rejected the liquidators’ proposals. Between 1909 and 1911, this meant a definite rise in Trotsky’s influence. Left Mensheviks, as well as Bolshevik – conciliators (i.e., those who wanted to unite the revolutionary forces though they supported the Bolshevik programme) found in Trotsky a leading figure who advocated a line they found close to their outlook. A distortion of this history began in 1923, when Lenin lay dying and a Triumvirate, consisting of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin tried to organise a tight control over the party. Zinoviev wrote a History of the Bolshevik Party which began the distortions of history completed over a decade later in Stalin’s History of the CPSU(B) – Short Course. In these histories, bereft of documentary evidence, lenin’s views were proclaimed the sole correct revolutionary general line. Trotsky was cast as an arch-villain who opposed Lenin and was therefore a renegade. The problem was of course, that Lenin till 1912 considered himself a part of the common Social Democratic Party, so opposing Lenin did not mean, for example, opposing any general line. Secondly, whether Lenin was correct at different moments can only be tested by looking at the specific history, not by a teleology that claims the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 as proof of Lenin’s correctness all his life (in High Stalinist myth, of course, he abandoned terrorism for Marxism at age 11, on hearing of the death sentence on his elder brother Alexander). Moreover, during the revolution of 1905, Lenin had changed his own position about party democracy, and argued that it was wrong to demand that the Soviet should accept the programme of the RSDRP. On the question of the party press, Lenin stressed that here there could be no question of a mechanical “rule of the majority over the minority ...” In other words, the party press should publish different viewpoints. Indeed, during the period of reaction, when Lenin differed with Bogdanov, leader of the boycottists, he had Bogdanov expelled from the Bolshevik faction, arguing that while a party was broad and contained many shades, a faction had to be tightly knit. This was an acknowledgement of the validity of the criticism made earlier by people like Trotsky or Luxemburg, and also a blow to the Stalinist myth that a party had to be monolithic.

From October Revolution to the Collapse of Democracy

In 1917, when Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks, he did so with the conviction that a proletarian revolution was in the offing, and all revolutionaries should unite. When he did so, he did not abjure his earlier views, and in exhorting his supporters in the Inter-Borough Organisation (a revolutionary, non-Bolshevik organisation) to unite with the Bolsheviks, he argued that the Bolsheviks had in practice “de-Bolshevised” themselves. And contrary to Cold War propaganda, serious historiography has repeatedly shown that the Soviet insurrection of October 1917 was more democratic than any of the alternatives. Throughout Russia, from late August, new elections to soviets were being organised. The Bolsheviks made significant gains. Thus, at the Second Congress of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of Urals, representing 505,780 workers and soldiers, which met on 17-21 August, the Bolsheviks had 77 deputies against 23 for the Mensheviks. On 31 August - 1st September, the Petrograd Soviet adopted a resolution on power, which led to the resignation of the old executive committee. On 5 September, the Moscow Soviet passed a resolution condemning the Provisional Government by 355 votes to 254. By September 21, the Saratov Soviet had 320 Bolsheviks against 103 SRs, 76 Mensheviks, and 34 non-party deputies. The First Congress of Soviets had stipulated that fresh Congresses were to be called every three month. But the Executive Committee elected by that Congress, controlled by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, now began to hesitate. So the Bolsheviks started putting pressure by organising regional congresses. These included the Moscow regional Congress, the All Siberian Congress, the Congress, the regional Congresses at Minsk (Byelo Russia), the Northern Caucasus, provincial Congresses in Vladimir and Tver, etc. But the most important was the Congress of Northern Soviets. Represented in it were Soviets from Petrograd, Moscow, Archangel, Reval, Helsingfors, Kronstadt, Vyborg, Narva, Gatchina, Tsarskoe Selo, the Baltic Fleet, the Petrograd Soviet of Peasant Deputies, the Petrograd District Soviets, and the soldiers organisations of the Northern, Western, South-Western and Rumanian fronts. Alexander Rabinowich’s classic work, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, lays out in detail the network of mass organisations through which the Bolsheviks established their hegemony. As Marc Ferro, a hostile historian, was compelled to write about the moment of insurrection, a state without a government (the nationwide network of council type institutions) was facing a government without a state (Kerensky’s government, based on absolutely no institutional support whatsoever). Between this and the Stalinist dictatorship lay a Civil War and a 14-country war of intervention, followed by a counter-revolution within the revolution as Stalin consolidated his rule between 1923 and 1928-29.

There did occur a phase, under the blows of the civil war, when every non-Bolshevik party sided with White Guard counter-revolution, that Lenin and Trotsky alike played a role in legitimising authoritarianism in the name of Marxism. What were wrong were not always the specific acts. In a Civil War, when your opponent is shooting at you, you cannot extend full democracy to them. Serious histories of the Civil War, like W. Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory, or of the Red Terror, like Leggett’s The Cheka, show that the Reds were in fact less violent than the Whites, who often shot workers because they were workers, something that does not stir the souls of upper class writers as much as the shooting of Nicholas and Alexandra. But when Trotsky (or Lenin) started justifying these actions not as emergency measures to save the republic but as Marxist theory, they committed serious errors. The climax came in 1921, when, at the end of the Civil War, but following the Kronstadt uprising, all opposition parties were banned, as were opponent factions within the party. Yet, Trotsky, while still in full power, as Commissar for War and Politbureau member, came out opposing the continuation of these measures by 1923. In late 1923, a strike wave broke out. Feliks Dzherzhinskii, head of the OGPU, successor of the disbanded Cheka, wanted party members in factories to finger the strike leaders and report them to the secret police. It was this proposal that moved Trotsky to write two letters to the Central Committee, demanding restoration of democratic rights. These started the New Course debate, which Stalin and the Triumvirate won only after gagging open discussions and rigging the only open voting that took place, in Moscow. By 1926-7, the Platform of the United Opposition was calling for restoration of Soviet Democracy. And alone among all the Bolshevik leaders, it was Trotsky who wrote, in The Revolution Betrayed, in a self-critical tone that “The degeneration of the party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state.” In analysing this degeneration, he came to the conclusion that “The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factious ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders.” On the basis of this analysis, when it came to drafting the programme of the Fourth International Trotsky wrote that “Democratization of the Soviets is impossible without legalization of soviet parties,” and he further said that “the workers and peasants themselves, by their own free votes will indicate what parties they recognize as Soviet parties.” This was absolutely a negation of any conception of the “general line of The Party”.

The Creation of the General Line

The idea that there is something called the general line of the party, and that opposing it is a secular sin not less heinous than heresy as detected and rooted out by Torquemada, was a concept that developed as Lenin lay dying. Stalin’s funeral speech on Lenin’s death is overlaid with religious overtones. The embalming of Lenin showed the turn in the party upper ranks towards cultism. Trotsky later claimed he and Krupskaya had opposed this. This naturally meant a consolidation of every anti-democratic practice. Indeed, as early as the 1923 Congress of the party, which Lenin could not attend due to his stroke, Stalin responded to demands for broadening inner party democracy by arguing that a party of 400,000 could not have full democracy as long as it was ruling a country surrounded by imperialism. This was and has been the logic for imposing and maintaining de jure or de facto one party rule with a top down commandist structure in every so-called communist country. By the mid 1920s, one of Stalin’s then supporters (later executed for siding with Bukharin), Uglanov, was defining party democracy in terms that made it look exactly like bureaucratic rule. Responding to him, Trotsky wrote: “Comrade Uglanov for the first time has made an open attempt to overcome the contradiction between the programmatic definition of democracy and the actual regime by bringing the program down, drastically, to the level of what has existed in practice. As the essence of democracy he proclaims the unlimited domination of the party apparatus, which presents[ the report -- KC], draws in [comments by masses -- KC], checks and rectifies [itself, without the ranks having the right to reject the leadership itself—K.C.]. ... Attempting to define the essence of democracy, Comrade Uglanov has defined the essence of bureaucracy.” By the mid-1930s, the situation was worse. The 1934 Congress of the Party was called the Victor’s Congress, because the spine of all opposition within the USSR except those of Trotskyists and their allies, the Democratic Centralist group, had been broken. Their leaders had been made to grovel. Yet the majority of the delegates to even this Stalinist Party Congress, and the majority of Central Committee members, would be executed over the years, many in secret trials, some in show trials where they would “confess”, like the hapless Bukharin to save his wife and child.

The central story would be, that these people had started out as opponents of the “general line” and as a result had become counter revolutionaries. So in place of Marx’s notion of a pluralist commune state, the idea of the general line came to mean that there could be no alternative thinking. Stalin explained this in an interview with a journalist, Roy Howard, where he said that a party is part of a class, so since there were no opposed classes in the USSR there could not be a multi-party system. Obviously, this was grammatically no less than politically utter nonsense. A class can have more than one part, else why use the term part. So each part should be free to create its own party. Even more pertinent is the question whether parties and classes are to remain welded till the end of time. Would differences disappear if classes were abolished? If not, then there would be formed parties – over environmental alternatives, over alternative models of social construction. The reason why Trotsky, alone among the opponents of Stalin, could articulate this idea was because of his past. Even Bukharin, a very talented theoretician, was helpless, because after all, in power, he had said that if there were two parties in the USSR the place for the second party would be in prison. That was why, when the ruthless murder machine crushed the old Bolshevik Party, including the majority of the Central Committee that had made the October Revolution, the majority of pre-1917 activists, and the majority of the Civil War era cadres, only those who had a clear understanding of the democratic promise of classical Marxism could avoid the options of surrendering to the murder machine like Koestler’s Rubashov, or defecting to the capitalist west. Today, in most of the world, Stalinism is utterly discredited. From the vantage point of what we know clearly today, Khruschev’s speech was a bid to save the Stalinist system by purging it of its most extreme excrescences. Khruschev, after all, defended the mass murders of workers and peasants, of non-Bolsheviks (the Mensheviks and SRs) as well as the dissidents within the party. It was only Stalin’s murder of dissident Stalinists that he rued. Yet what is known today ( and even what was written in Soviet years by dissidents like Evgeniia Ginsberg, a survivor of the Gulag, or documented through painstaking research under dictatorial rule by Roy Medvedev) suggests that Stalin and his henchmen, who of course included Khrushchev, killed more communists (not only Russian but global) than did most bourgeois states, and that socialism cannot survive unless it clearly disavows his crimes. In a country like India, where the vast majority do not have access to any Western language information system, it is by simply suppressing or not making available in Indian language editions the information available to much of the world including Spanish and Portuguese speaking South America (the continent where leftists are currently advancing, but by openly rejecting Stalinism), that the Indian Stalinist left hopes to buy time for a few more years. The fables they spread, to the effect that revelations about the Moscow Trials, the mass murders etc are all undocumented gossip, can be disproved with ease. Contemporaries like Anton Ciliga (Ten Years in the Country of the Big Lie) or Alexander Orlov (The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes), as well as later historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror), Roy Medvedev, and others have shown how terrible were these purges. If socialism is to survive other than as a museum piece or as a part of Political Science curricula, it has to take the ideas of revolutionary democratic politics to heart. For that, Trotsky’s alternative to the brutal culmination of the politics of the general line remains an essential contribution.

2006-09-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

Permanent Revolution and Left Social Democracy

In the revolution of 1905, the term permanent revolution cropped up quite often. It, or related terms, were used by Franz Mehring, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, various Socialist Revolutionaries and even on one occasion, by Lenin. But the content Trotsky put into it was quite specific, and unique in the Social Democratic camp. Mensheviks like Martynov counterposed permanent revolution to the struggle for democracy, and carried away by revolutionary euphoria, championed this ‘vulgarised’ version as Trotsky characterised it.[i]
Discussion on the term and its origins, implications, etc, have often been confused. They have even been muddied with deliberate intent by generations of Stalinists, beginning with Stalin who asserted that “Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg … invented the utopian and semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution….subsequently, this semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution was caught by Trotsky”.[ii]
Even scholars who do not have that particular axe to grind often do little better. Knei-paz holds that Trotsky’s choice of the term was unfortunate, because it is sententious, bombastic, and misleading.[iii] Having retailed all the possible misunderstandings, he declares suddenly, “But we shall not quibble over semantics”.[iv] Knei-Paz’s search for the origin of the term are quite erroneous, for he attributes it to Proudhon, and considers Marx’s usage a ‘Blanquist’ aberration and also possibly a Pickwickian usage.[v]
Nocolas Krasso goes even further, forgetting conveniently Marx’s use of the term. He then safely asserts the ‘permanent revolution’ is “an inept designation” that shows the lack of scientific precision even in Trotsky’s profoundest insights. Apparently, Krasso believes, that thereby Trotsky evoked the idea of a continuous conflagration at all times and all places.[vi]
Actually, if we look at the contemporary left Social Democratic writers, we find many of them expressing unease with the mechanical determinism of “orthodox” theory.[vii]
Lenin based his tactics on the socio-economic analysis that he had carried out.[viii] His first analysis of Russian capitalism was primarily a national one. He argued that industrial capitalism constituted the apex of capitalist development.[ix] For him, accordingly, at this stage, every proletarian revolution was primarily a nationally self-contained one. The ‘ripeness’ of the country for revolution was determined by national conditions.
Lenin could not transcend the limits of Social Democratic orthodoxy because he tended to equate that orthodoxy with the cardinal tent that building a communist society was possible only on the basis of highly developed productive forces and the domination of a modern industrial proletariat. Trotsky had no dispute with him on this point. But his understanding of imperialism and the world economy led him to conclude that communism would be achieved globally, and that if the Russian workers come to power before others, they would use such power to promote faster social development short–circuiting capitalism, and helping the process of world revolution in which they too would find salvation.
Lenin, for his part, saw only two possibilities. All through 1905, and beyond, he went on evoking the rival models of 1789 and 1848.[x] In his major work of 1905, Lenin on one hand repeatedly emphasised the purely bourgeois character of the revolution, encasing his argument in the formulation that the degree of economic development, (the objective condition) determined the level of consciousness and organisation of the proletariat (the subjective condition).[xi] Lenin also rejected the Paris Commune as a model.[xii]
However, Lenin also wrote, in an article of September 1905, that “We stand for uninterrupted revolution”.[xiii] But by this he meant, not his 1917 formula of the growth in over of the bourgeois revolution, but only a kind of foreshortening of the historical process.
But between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions in Lenin’s schema there was to exist a period of capitalist consolidation.
As he commented, “Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution precisely because the struggle going on in it is … between two forms of capitalism … The proletarian –peasant republic, too, is a bourgeois democracy.”[xiv]
Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg both saw a temporary workers’ power as the only route to achieving victory in the democratic revolution. In a 1906 polemic with Plekhanov, Luxemburg agreed that the proletariat could not remain in lasting power, but could only use its temporary power to finish off the old regime.[xv]
The legitimate power was for her the power of a democratically elected constituent assembly, where the majority would inevitably be non-proletarian. Though a far more radical concept than Plekhanov’s and to some extent Lenin’s too, Luxemburg’s idea stopped at the utmost barrier of orthodoxy, the inevitably bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. In a work on the revolution of 1905, she wrote: “The present revolution in Russia goes far beyond the content of all previous revolutions…. It is then, both in method and in content, a radically new type of revolution. Bourgeois–democratic in form, proletarian–socialist in essence, it is also in content and form a transitional form between the bourgeois revolutions of the past and the proletarian revolutions of the future.” Though this may appear to be a ‘permanentist’ text, a little later in the same essay she again repeats that the “proletariat does not now place before itself the task of implementing socialism, but rather must first create the bourgeois–capitalist pre-conditions for the implementation of socialism.”[xvi]
The main difference between Lenin and Luxemburg was over the question of the precise mechanisms of the worker–peasant bloc. Lenin wanted to keep his options open, sometimes saying that a peasant party could arise, sometimes being more hesitant. Luxemburg, on the other hand, adopted here the formula put forward by Trotsky: “ dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry”. But at the 1909 conference, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky all rallied to this formula, while each chose to interpret it in his or her own way.
Between 1914 and 1917/18, Lenin and Luxemburg changed their positions. Lenin’s change is better documented. Prior to 1917, Lenin again and again presented a careful sequence of events. He clearly expected the peasantry to become treacherous once the bourgeois democratic revolution had been accomplished.[xvii] Indeed, in this, he was less optimistic than Trotsky for the latter had emphasized that “the Russian peasantry in the first and most difficult period of the revolution will be interested in the maintenance of a proletarian regime….”[xviii]
Under the impact of war and the new view of international capitalism that he developed, his philosophical studies, etc., led Lenin to change his position.[xix] A methodological break through prepared the way for a new socio-economic analysis. His Imperialism enabled him to situate capitalism in its concrete totality as a global system. After the February revolution Lenin therefore adopted an explicitly permanentist visualisation of the process of revolution.[xx]
Monty Johnstone and Loizos Mikhail both try to prove that the April Theses differed from Trotsky’s perspectives.[xxi] But the most vital point, which they have perforce to gloss over, is that Lenin gave up the idea that the Russian revolution could only clear the ground for a wide and rapid development of capitalism.
Luxemburg, too, changed her position. This is easiest seen by looking at her critical work, The Russian Revolution, where her criticisms of Lenin and Trotsky start by accepting the necessity of a proletarian revolution and the beginning of socialist construction.[xxii]
[i]. Martynov’s position is cited in L. Trotsky, 1905, pp., 317 – 8. See also his Stalin, pp. 68 – 9 for the opportunistic nature of the Mensheviks’ adaptation to the slogan.
[ii]. J. Stalin, Works, Moscow, 1954, Vol. 13, p. 93.
[iii]. B. Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thoguht of Leon Trotsky, London etc, p. 153.
[iv]. Ibid, p.154.
[v]. Ibid., p. 155 text and note 111, pp. 158 – 9.
[vi]. N. Krasso ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’ in N. Krasso (Ed), Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed, St. Louis, 1972, p. 16.
[vii]. See on this point E. Mandel, Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamics of His Thought, pp. 12 – 3.
[viii]. See N. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought,2v., London and Basingstoke,, 1983. My own arguments are based more on K. Chattopadhyay, Leninism and Permanent Revolution, Baroda, 1987, a work I wrote originally in 1978 – 9, without the aid of Harding’s valuable research.
[ix]. LCW, vol. 1, p. 438. Industrial capitalism, he held, organised and disciplined the workers – vol. 1, p. 236 and vol. 3, p. 546. The factory workers therefore were the representatives of the entire exploited population – vol. 1, p. 299.
[x]. Thus, against Parvus, he wrote that a Social Democratic majority government was impossible as a revolutionary dictatorship that would leave its mark in history. Trotsky was a ‘wind bag’ who failed to realise that Russia had to pass through her own 1789 – 93. LCW, vol. 8, pp. 291 – 2, See also Ibid., vol. 9, p. 241.
[xi]. Ibid., pp. 49, 28.
[xii]. Ibid., pp. 80 – 1. He criticised the commune for confusing the democratic and socialist tasks, and argued that it was a model to be eschewed. See by contrast Trotsky’s introduction to The Civil War in France, in Leon Trotsky, On the Paris Commune.
[xiii]. LCW, vol. 9, p. 237.
[xiv]. Ibid., vol. 15, p. 175. In this period, Lenin and Kautsky shared some common positions, as did Luxemburg. For this, see M. Lowy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 36 – 7, and M. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880 – 1938, London, 1979, pp. 100 – 8.
[xv]. R. Luxemburg, ‘Blanquisme et social democratie’, Quatrieme Internationale, April 2, 1972, p. 55.
[xvi]. Cited in M. Lowy, op. cit., p. 38.
[xvii]. Cf. LCW, vol. 13, pp. 239, 343, vol. 15, pp. 158 – 81, vol. 16, p. 379 for expectations of capitalist development, and vol. 9, p. 136 for the above mentioned assessment of the peasantry.
[xviii]. L. Trotsky, PRRP, pp. 71 – 2.
[xix]. For a full treatment, see my Leninism and Permanent Revolution, especially pp. 49 – 61.
[xx]. Cf. LCW, vol. 23, pp. 299 – 300, 306 – 7, 308, and vol. 24 (which contains the April Theses).
[xxi]. M. Johnstone, ‘Trotsky – Part One’, Cogito, No. 5, London, n.d., pp. 11-12; and L. Mikhail, op. cit., pp. 31-40.
[xxii]. For Luxemburg, see further N. Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London, 1972.

Reservations and Progressives in West Bengal

2006-09-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

As we all know, West Bengal is a progressive state. This is not simply a claim by the Left Front. It is a claim by every honest to goodness Bengali who does not believe in such pathetic measures like actually examining reality, preferring to look back to the Bengal renaissance and the golden age of Indian cricket, when Ganguly was king.

That is why, it is worth looking at some of the voices of progressive Bengal concerning reservations, and use these voices as a peg to present some arguments. I have in mind three sets of incidents. The first concern posters put up in my own University campus by the All India Democratic Students Organization. When the reservation issue came up early in 2006, their first poster charged the ruling class of seeking to fragment students’ unity by raking up the non-issue of reservations. When the agitation by the anti-reservation activists met police violence they simply condemned police violence. There was no condemnation of the politics of the YFE. So let me briefly quote from the YFE’s official statement. According to the YFE, “YFE stands for total Roll-back of the proposed legislation to increase the reservation percentage in central government institutions and central examinations. YFE stands for reviewing the complete reservation policy and phased eradication of reservation policy.” In explaining this, YFE goes into a bit of history. According to them, reservations were introduced by the British as a divide and rule policy, because they treated the Brahmins as untrustworthy. “In a country that was ruled for more than 1000 years by foreigners, people were divided on the basis of being backward or forward, although the entire country was backward, un-educated, poor, un-employed, depressed and deprived.” Thus, at one go, the entire period of Turko-Afghan and Mughal Rule is clubbed with British rule, and a psedu-history is constructed whereby this long foreign rule had created backwardness for all.
The casteist and communal attitude of YFE and itsa supporters also come out when we look at sites linked to the YFE, and the blogs posted there. Unlike printed articles, where either a relatively responsible media is doing it, and therefore ensuring some minimum cuts, or at least there is some legal control, the wild internet, free for those with money, which mostly rules out the people for whom reservations are sought, finds the elite and especially the sons and daughters of the elite give full freedom to their outlook. I copy just one here, for lack of space.
“ask mr p chidambaram to first collect the 49.5 percent revenue from the bloody bhangis and then we will pay even if he asks us to pay 200 percent of our incomes”. This was posted on 25 May in antireservation.org , and can be read at http://www.antireservation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=350&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30
In the West Bengal Chapter of YFE, one Suman posted a comment, which asked the middle class to rise up against the government.

So the AIDSO, which claims to be the student organisation of the one true revolutionary party founded by India’s Lenin, has nothing to criticise in the caste, communal or class outlook of the YFE and its supporters. If we are to argue that we should condemn all police violence, under all circumstances, I wonder what will be the reaction if the police is called out to stop riots?

But I would be doing an injustice to the AIDSO if I pretended they were alone in this. People senior to them in the academic world have likewise taken strange positions. In recent times, one university in West Bengal has twice advertised the post of a lecturer in one of their departments. On both occasions, there had been applicants, surely possessing minimum qualifications, since they had been called for interviews. Yet on both occasions, the post remained unfilled, with the selectors declaring that none had been found to be suitable.

This same logic, of being particularly finicky when selecting for reserved posts, can be found time and again. In a number of discussions with academicians of repute, I have come across the argument that if posts are advertised as requiring some specialisation, there might not be any SC, ST or OBC applicants available. I have not seen the same academicians being troubled over that fact. Yet the UGC has grants for additional coaching of students coming from socially deprived backgrounds. In my own Department, for example, I have never seen any attempt to utilise these funds.

What these lead one to surmise is that we are really not keen to support the filling up of reserved posts. If we go back again to the YFE site, we will find them arguing that reservations have failed in India. No doubt. But why is it so? The answer is, because the upper castes have done little to ensure that the policy succeeds.

This is the wider context within which I propose to discuss some of the issues like merit, economic reservation, and exclusion of the creamy layers. To say that the creamy layers should be excluded sounds very just. In reality, this is the best way to ensure that OBCs absolutely do not get in, particularly in the better institutions. For example, how many poor students, with no coaching from top level institutions specialising in coaching for IIMs, IITs, the Medical colleges, etc, get in into those institutions? Reading the YFE and allied sites and particularly their blogs and discussion groups, one is struck by the number of well to do in their ranks. One proposal doing the rounds was to withdraw money from the nationalised banks and put them in the foreign banks which have come in. Obviously, only people who have the kind of money, the withdrawal of which might pose any pressure, were discussing these issues. In other words, those objecting most strongly for the exclusion of the creamy layer OBCs are members of the elite themselves. Some of their medical fraternity friends are truly equal, having purchased seats legally.

The emrgence of a dalit or OBC creamy layer would certainly not ensure social justice for all dalits and OBCs. But then, the YFE is not talking socialism either, is it? But if the ST, SC and OBC creamy layer is expanded, some good may occur. Exclusion of the creamy layers would really mean the seats being ultimately transferred to the general category on the ground that no OBC was found. Kancha Ilaiah has argued that the emergence of a well educated elite within each caste community is necessary for that caste community reaching the modernist stage. If upper caste intellectuals use a suddenly progressive argument, stressing class rather than caste, stressing the poor rather than the elite, they need to show that they mean it, by launching a mass movement for uniform educational facilities for all, and for free hostel and boarding facilites for all students who are so poor that they would have to drop out in search of jobs. If that policy was implemented in a sustained manner for a decade, we might find that reservations could indeed begin to be phased out. It is worth remembering that the Mandal Commission had indeed recommended something close to this. But upper caste intellectuals from West Bengal who are hiding behind progressive masks (the openly elitist ones do not bother and I am not bothered with them) have neither written dozens of articles and manifestos along these lines, nor taken out a single demonstration. They really would not like the idea of uniform schooling, where their children must rub shoulder with “ill-bred” children. But where is career open to merit, if there is not equal scope for the development of merit?

My 11th September

2006-09-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

For several days I have been seeing the media go gaga in its annual US worship. I do not support the killing of innocent people anywhere, and that includes New York. Indeed, I have relatives and close friends in new York, and shudder to think that some of them might have died.
But why must we compulsorily mourn every year the death of a few thousand Americans? Because they hail from the richest part of the world? My friend Steve Bloom, a non-jewish Jew who pointed to his nose to make that point, showed me the skyline (at that time with the World Trade Centre) and said, that small portion is the financial heart of the world. He also admitted to a slight vested interest. As a revolutionary socialist he is commited to overthrowing it. But he makes his living by painting the houses of the rich.
No, it is not what you might think. Steve does not just take brush and paint a bedroom light yellow. He paints walls so they look like other things. You can have a brick and mortar will looking like a marble wall, and so on.
So Steve, you, I we all have more than a slight interest in the uS. When you see KANK, you think Hindi is the national language of NY. Then you realise that NY is the national dream of those willing to shell out the hefty rates for KANK tickets. And that is why, we empathise more when several thousand New Yorkers die.
But I wanted to remember a different 9/11 -- my 9/11, the tragedy of my generation. I have not been a believer in peaceful revolution since 1972, when I was briefly around a Maoist circle. But this did not prevent me from appreciating the popular enthusiadsm that went into the election of Salvador Allende as the President of Chile.
The U.S. ambassador to Chile and other senior Nixon officials saw a regional crisis -- and a blow to Washington's international prestige -- if an avowed Marxist won a fair presidential election in South America.
Ambassador Edward Korry began sending frantic, minute-by-minute commentaries about the last days of Chile's 1970 campaign. Korry's cables became known inside the State Department as "Korrygrams" because of their unusual language and undiplomatic opinions.
On election day, Korry sent no fewer than 18 updates. He reported that he could hear "the mounting roar of Allendistas acclaiming their victory" from the streets. Korry wrote: "We have suffered a grievous defeat."
The next three weeks, Korry flooded Washington with lurid reports alleging a communist takeover. In one cable, he announced that "there is a graveyard smell to Chile, the fumes of a democracy in decomposition. They stank in my nostrils in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and they are no less sickening here today."
Allende's victory also sent Nixon into a rage and started the president's men plotting how to stop Allende's inauguration. Cables focused on a scheme to derail formal ratification of Allende's victory by Chile's congress on Oct. 24, 1970.
According to one idea, the congress would defy the electorate and pick the runner-up, Jorge Alessandri, "who would renounce the presidency and thus provoke new elections in which [outgoing president Eduardo] Frei would run."
On Sept. 12, Korry and Assistant Secretary of State John Richardson met secretly with Frei at the presidential palace. While much of the conversation remains classified, Korry reported that Frei saw only a "one in 20 chance" to stop Allende, but added that he could not "afford to be anything but the president of all Chileans at this time."
Despite the odds, Nixon ordered the CIA to try. The covert action to reverse the results of the Chilean election -- by political or military means -- took the code name, "Project FUBELT."
On Sept. 16, CIA director Richard Helms informed his senior covert action staff that "President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was not acceptable to the United States," according to one declassified CIA memo.
"The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him," Helms added. The CIA had 48 hours to present an action plan to Kissinger.
Soon, the CIA was pressuring Frei. "CIA mobilized an interlocking political action and propaganda campaign designed both to goad and entice Frei" into the "so-called Frei re-election gambit," according to a declassified "Report on CIA Chilean Task Force Activities." The scheme had "only one purpose," Helms told the NSC: "to induce President Frei to prevent Allende's [formal] election by the congress on 24 October, and, failing that, to support -- by benevolent neutrality at the least and conspiratorial benediction at the most - - a military coup which would prevent Allende from taking office." The election gambit was known as Track I.
The back-up plan for a military coup was called Track II. The CIA inducements to Frei included offering substantial sums of money to his "re-election" campaign, bribing other Christian Democrats outright, and orchestrating visits and calls from respected leaders abroad.
To influence Frei through his wife, the CIA instigated the wiring of telegrams to Mrs. Frei from women's groups in other Latin American nations.
Other mailings to Frei included CIA-planted news articles from around the world about Chile's peril. The articles were part of a covert "black" propaganda campaign which, the CIA boasted, resulted in at least 726 stories, broadcasts and editorials against an Allende presidency. Despite these labors, the Frei "re-election gambit" failed, as Frei refused to have the Christian Democrats block Allende's ratification.
Allende won the election on a reformist program, but his victory sparked a mass movement of the working class and poor peasants which had immense revolutionary potential. Allende and his Stalinist backers in the Chilean Communist Party spent the next three years restraining, discouraging and disorienting the mass movement, blocking any decisive challenge to the Chilean ruling class and American imperialism, while the right-wing and fascist elements prepared their counterattack. During this period there were six unsuccessful right-wing coup attempts, most of them with direct American aid.
And yet, Allende, and even more the Communist party, which stood to the right of tghe socialist Party, insisted on strict legality.No popular regime could coexist with the Chilean armed forces which were led by the most reactionary representatives of the capitalists and landlords. Every one of their leaders was a CIA-trained professional reactionary.
In a seminar organized by the Stalinist journal World Marxist Review, the spokesman for Chilean Stalinism, Banchero, clearly stated his party's attitude to the state: "A distinctive feature of the revolutionary process in Chile is that it began and continues within the framework of the bourgeois institutions of the past.... In Chile, where an anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly, and anti-feudal democratic people's revolution is now under way, we have essentially retained the old state machine. Government offices are staffed mainly with the old officials.... The administration exercises its functions under the guidance and control of the popular government.
"The armed forces, observing their status of a professional institution, take no part in political debate and submit to the lawfully constituted civilian power. Bonds of cooperation and mutual respect have evolved between the army and the working class in the name of the patriotic goal of shaping Chile into a free, advanced, and democratic land.
"Ultra-left elements clamor for the immediate 'introduction' of socialism. We hold, however, that the working class will gain full power gradually: it will be in step with our gaining control of the state machine that we shall begin to transform in the interests of the further development of the revolution."
I also remember Marxism Today coming out with an article by Lios Corvalan, Stalnist leader, saying the army would be constitutional, the day we got news of the coup.
Allende and the CP refused to ride roughshod over the bourgeois oppositon which had a majority in /congress, and they refused to hear any talk about building a revolutionary militia.
After the January 1972 by-elections Allende was forced to drop his socialist Minister of the Interior, while his plans for the reform of the two-chamber system were effectively blocked by the opposition.
In June 1972 more pressure and secret talks between government and opposition produced another cabinet crisis when Allende fired his left-wing economics minister, Pedro Vuskovic, and dropped his nationalization plans. This predictably had the full support of the Stalinists who, as in Spain in 1938, had become the extreme right wing of the coalition.
By the end of 1972 the reaction was ready for its second phase. This was the truck owners' strike in the south against nationalization. After four weeks, Allende not only capitulated to the reaction, but also agreed to bring three generals into his cabinet, and for the second time dropped another Interior Minister. The most prominent of the appointments was General Morio Prats--head of the Armed Forces and notorious anti-working class reactionary. The Interior Minister--Del Canto--was dropped because he permitted "illegal occupation" of private industries by workers. This shift to the right was inexorable.
This was not only a signal victory for the reactionaries, but a significant gain for the Stalinists, who all along fought against any factory occupations or land seizures and ruthlessly opposed any struggle which was not controlled by them or Allende.
All over the world, the Stalinist lie machine went to work to distort the meaning of these ominous changes. Comment (November 1972), the British CP journal, did not hesitate to defend Allende--and Prats:
"Is this not a sign of weakness? Or a surrender? Or a betrayal? ... the entry of these officers into the government, strange though it seems, is an indication that the right wing has been outmaneuvered and defeated in this engagement of the class battle."
And yet, while these class traitors betrayed a possible revolution, I also need to keep reminding people, usually on the extreme left, that sections of the left, including Allende, were, in the owrds of afriend of the late 1970s, "honest reformists'. Allende did not personally capitulate, though his politics was a capitulationist one. Behind the growing intrigues of the opposition, the arrogance of the generals, the mounting vacillation of President Salvador Allende and the capitulation of the Stalinists during 1972-73 lay the insoluble crisis of Chilean and world capitalism.
When Allende took power, Chile was in the throes of a major economic and financial crisis which has since been considerably exacerbated. The Central Bank's reserves had dropped from $500 million to $280 million and by April 1972 were estimated to be no more than $60 million. At the same time Chile's foreign debts exceeded $3,000 million, most of which was subject to scrutiny by European central bankers.
Failure to repudiate this massive national debt, coupled with the continued drop in copper export prices, meant that Allende had to devalue the Chilean escudo four times in two years.
But despite anger, people still had faith in Allende. In June 1973, the right wing made their first attempt at power in the aftermath of the copper miners' strike. This attempt of the Second Armored Regiment failed, but it showed how extremely vulnerable the regime was to a coup.
This attack stimulated the working class to go into action, to seize factories and to strengthen the assemblies of rank-and-file workers which sprang up in October to November 1972.
Even at this late hour, the situation could have been changed by resolute and decisive leadership.... The Chilean Stalinists, however, followed a course which was not only false but, worse still, contradictory. As Corvalan wrote: "The patriotic and revolutionary slogan must be: 'No to civil war! No to fascism.'" But fascism is civil war against the workers and the existence of the capitalist state carries in it the potential danger of civil war against the working class. By renouncing civil war and leaving the struggle in the hands of the reactionary bourgeois officers, Chilean Stalinism only facilitated and expedited the defeat of the workers.
But the Chilean workers were to receive an even more ominous blow. In this desperate search for allies, the Chilean Stalinists began to make the most opportunistic appeals to the ranks of the fascists and extreme nationalist parties. Corvalan unashamedly begged the followers of Pablo H. Rodriguez, the fascist, for a "dialog" to avoid civil war, to "unite our country, to avoid artificial divisions between Chileans, who have a common interest." The fascists predictably treated Corvalan's entreaties with contempt and derision ... and pressed on with the preparation of civil war.
All was not betrayal. if it had been, there would have been no need for a coup. No US government is plotting a coup against theBuddhist pseudo-marxists of West Bengal.In his first year, Allende employed Keynesian measures to hike salaries and wages, thus pumping up the purchasing power of the middle and working classes. This "consumer revolution" benefited 95 percent of the population in the short run because prices were held down and employment went up. Producers responded to rising demand by employing previously underused capacity. The government took over virtually all the great estates. It turned the lands over to the resident workers, who benefited far more than the owners of tiny plots or the numerous migrant laborers. By 1972 food production had fallen and food imports had risen. Also during 1971-72, the government dusted off emergency legislation from the 1932 Socialist Republic to allow it to expropriate industries without congressional approval. It turned many factories over to management by the workers and the state.The Popular Unity government tried to maintain cordial relations with the United States, even while staking out an independent position as a champion of developing nations and socialist causes. It opened diplomatic relations with Cuba, China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), and Albania. It befriended the Soviet Union, which sent aid to the Allende administration, although far less than Cuba received or than Popular Unity had hoped for. v The problem was that there was no sustained reformist solution possible. The downward Kondratiev (or recessionary long wave) that had begun foreclosed a simple solution of the kind possible in the 1950s.
And so, the contradictions came to a head. With full knowledge, planning and support of the US and american corporations, General Pinochet went into action. Allende was determined neither to flee nor surrender, and at this last moment, he died the death of e hero and martyr, fighting from the Moncada Palace until killed. Tens of thousands were rounded up and killed. The National Stadium was used as a concentration camp holding 40,000 prisoners. Approximately 130,000 individuals were arrested in a three-year period, with the number of dead and "disappeared" reaching into the thousands within the first few months. Most of the people targeted had been supporters of Allende; the September 13 decree also outlawed the parties that had been part of Popular Unity, and all political activity was declared "in recess".
Back in 1973, I was struck by the scale of the tragedy. although a supporter of armed struggle (of a rather juvenile variety), I was still moved by the tragedy. My father was a communist since 1942, and he had taight me that internationalism meant solidarity for struggles, regardless of the party leading it, even though we could criticise the parites.
So my blood boils even now, every 11th September, when i remember the scale of violence on the workers and peasants, and it boils doubly when I see rascally journalistic lapdogs in India shedding tears for the US. do they write articles about Chile? do they think that tens of thousands murdered in Chile are less valuable because the Chielan curreency was worth less than the dollar?