When I think of the Nithari incident, I find there is so much to say, but when I try to translate my thoughts in to signifiers sheer disgust makes entire lexicon revolt. What I have been able to say is not enough, not significant, but I am thankful to my self that I made an effort. The majority of us are, in Eliot’s terms, hollow men.
The pusillanimity of Indians sometimes shocks me. Their children get killed, and then eaten up by the ... and they can't do a thing to the culprits!!! And the administration does everything to protect the eaters of human flesh. The entire system is corrupt. It needs to be changed. All our current leaders should be publicly lynched and thrown in to the gutters of Ghazia Bad so that no animal or bird eats their flesh and falls sick.
The only father who won't mind his son being killed, cooked and eaten up is Harivansh Raay Bacchan, one of my favourite poets, whose son, the greedy and opportunist guy, my keyboard refuses to type his name, even after Nithari is seen on TV channels barking about the lack of crime in UP. I wonder why doesn't Abhishek Bacchan disown his father. He should be worried about his own children, he is soon going to get married, what if Pandher fancies eating his children's flesh. That is more likely going to be tasty.
We might read some news about it when and if that happens till then let's read a news article about the investigation in to the Nithari cannibalism.
Days after the Central Bureau of Investigation filed a chargesheet in the Ghaziabad court against Nithari killings accused Surinder Koli, Moninder Singh Pandher and suspended sub-inspector Simranjit Kaur several questions remain unanswered.
Most pressing are the ones about the manner in which the agency conducted the probe and the virtual clean chit to Pandher even while placing the onus of kidnapping, raping and killing children on his servant, Koli.
"What can the investigating agency do in this matter?" asks Joginder Singh, former CBI director. "No one was willing to come forward and testify. They found just one witness. Public perception is one thing, and proving it in the court of law is just another," he told rediff.com while discussing the case.
However, few are willing to buy this argument. The critics ask: What about Pandher? How is it possible that the owner of the house was unaware of what was happening or what his servant was doing without his express consent?
That Pandher wields a lot of political clout is rather evident from the fact that though he had been arrested earlier and kept under surveillance, his movementswithin Noida-Nithari were not restricted.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about Pandher's dealings with SI Kaur, especially since large sums of money were recovered from her bank account.Was he paying her off to try and hush up the case? Were Kaur's seniors aware of the matter at all? The sub-inspector has since been booked under provisionsof the Prevention of Corruption Act.
What remains unclear are the details behind the disappearance and murder of Payal, who had gone missing in May last year. Her father had named Pandher andKoli as a suspects in her disappearance and it was the discovery of her cellphone that led to the uncovering of the gruesome Nithari killings.
Another interesting point in the whole episode is the role of maidservant Maya who did odd jobs around the house. Why is it that she never reported anythingto the police? How is it that she was totally oblivious of what is going on?
What was Pandher's actual role in these gruesome murders? What happened to his initial confessions about his alleged involvement in the kidnapping and killingsof the children?
There is also tremendous speculation over his political connections, especially in Punjab. Who did Pandher call from his cellphone when he was in trouble,what about the call records?
The CBI, even if it has the above details, has decided not share them with the media. Pandher's son had claimed that his father rarely went to the house in Nithari village. Is it true or just another attempt to hide the truth from the public? Till the CBI speaks, we will never know.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Biofuel: Another Environmental Disaster?
Five-year freeze needed on biofuelsGeorge MonbiotOil produced from plants sets up competition for food between cars and people. People - and the environment - will lose.IT USED to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes moreharm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plantsabsorb carbon as they grow — it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governmentson both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.In the U.K.'s budget this month, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliersin the U.K. will have to ensure that 2.5 per cent of the fuel they sell is made from plants — if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligationrises to 5 per cent in 2010. By 2050, the Government hopes that 33 per cent of our fuel will come from crops. Last month, President George W. Bush announcedthat he would quintuple the U.S. target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24 per cent of the nation's transport fuel.Formula for disasterSo what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004, I warned that biofuels would setup a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in dangerof starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column— except for when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thoughtthese effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grainshave reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The U.S. Departmentof Agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happenthis year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year." According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol:the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, theywill catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The U.N. has just published a report suggesting that 98 per cent of the natural rainforestin Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022. Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2032. But they reckonedwithout the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soonto become responsible for the extinction of the orang-utan in the wild.But it gets worse. As the forests are burned, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancyDelft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of CO2 emissions, or 10 times as much as petroleum produces. I feel I need tosay that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes 10 times as much climate change as ordinary diesel.There are similar impacts all over the world. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil, and soya farmers areripping up the Amazon rainforests.As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it's likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia,and Africa are starting to complain about incursions on to their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging Westerngovernments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups.In February the European Commission was faced with a straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that theaverage carbon emission from new cars in 2012 would be 120 gm per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers,it caved in and raised the limit to 130 gm. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel.We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuelfrom palm oil or sugar cane. Even then, the targets should be set low and increased only cautiously. I suggest a five-year freeze.This would require a huge campaign, tougher than the one that helped to win a five-year freeze on growing genetically modified crops in the U.K.That was important — GM crops give big companies unprecedented control over the food chain. But most of their effects are indirect, while the devastationcaused by biofuel is immediate and already visible.This is why it will be harder to stop: encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stoppingthem requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
The Enlightened Moderation: Aristocrats in Pakistan Grapple, along with other things, English
Pakistan and the battle for English
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6500227.stm
The BBC Urdu service's MASUD ALAM, back living in Pakistan after 15years, reflects on his countrymen's use of English.
There are only a few video clips of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder ofPakistan, in the archives of state-run television in Pakistan and theyare aired with unfailing regularity on occasions of national import.
One excerpt is from a speech in which the father of the nation says afew lines in Urdu, to rapturous applause from the crowd, followed bythe disclaimer in English "my Urdu is tangawala Urdu".
(For those not familiar with Mr Jinnah, the man was as westernised inhis lifestyle as any Lincolns Inn-educated Indian barrister at thestart of 20th Century could be.)
Tangawala means coachman, and perhaps in the early days of Pakistan'sindependence, they didn't speak Urdu very well. They still don't.
The same goes for leaders - politicians and army generals alike - whosucceeded Mr Jinnah.
A good majority of them couldn't speak the country's national language fluently.
From Jinnah to the current leader, President Pervez Musharraf, thepreferred language of Pakistani rulers has been English.
The masses, by general inclination keen to follow the ruling class,have honestly tried to keep pace.
But after 60 years of excruciating practice, they have managed onlyhalf the linguistic excellence: they've learnt to speak bad Urdu butconstructing a grammatically correct sentence in English remains achallenge.
'Chips in isle'
The language of the urban Pakistani is now a hotchpotch of Urdu,Punjabi and a few words of English spoken with an accent that can beunderstood only by someone who speaks the same way.
My daughter is learning this cocktail language and having fun with it.
The other day she had a conversation with the man who runs the canteenat her school, that went something like this: "Can I have chips?"
(In Urdu) "Finish."
"You must have some left?"
"All finish."
"This is not fair. You want us to bring our own potatoes to school?"
"And isle."
"Sorry?"
"Isle? Isle... for frying."
When her friends elbowed her into recognising that it was "oil" theman was talking about, they all had a good laugh.
'No assess'
But things can get a little more complicated when such cryptic talk isdone over the phone, with a complete stranger.
At a friend's place of work I overheard a man calling up the computerhelp desk. "I can't assess the drive," he complained.
"But that's my job, what exactly is your problem?" is what I assumethe person on the other end must have said.
Our man kept repeating that his inability to "assess the drive" was the problem.
After a few minutes of totally incoherent exchanges, the poor helperfinally realised the problem was "access".
The first generation of Pakistani bureaucrats and military officershad derived their entire English vocabulary from Rudyard Kipling's TheJungle Book, the booklets of Standard Operating Procedures found inmilitary and bureaucratic circles, and the official correspondencewith lowly functionaries of the British Raj.
On social occasions, this word bank was embellished with phrases like"jolly good" and "old chap" to sound authentic - often to theamusement of the gora sahib (foreign master).
But after 1947, in this brand new country of Pakistan, there was nowhite-skinned patronising colonist to frown or frolic at the sight andsound of a subject trying too hard to speak like the master. Thisemboldened the native no end.
He was now free to choose English over his mother tongue. And he didso with relish.
However his vocabulary was limited to the world of officialdom, as itexisted in 1940s British India. To overcome this handicap he took toimprovisation, and in the process, made valuable additions to theEnglish language.
Manufacturing phrases
Gen Musharraf, the army chief, is the epitome of this creative trend.
He deposed an elected prime minister and installed himself as the"chief executive" rather than the old-fashioned "chief martial lawadministrator" - the epithet preferred by three generals and for sometime, by a civilian prime minister, before him.
He is also the proud manufacturer of the term "enlightenedmoderation", the meaning of which is being debated years after it wascoined.
He showed his flair for linguistic innovation more recently when hesuspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, bymaking him "non-functional".
He is now very disappointed that the flourish is lost on the country'slawyers who are engaging in mass protests against the chief justice's"suspension".
Lower down the order, the government functionaries continue to showthe same zest at modernising English language in their day to daybusiness.
The Capital Development Authority is on a binge of road-making thesedays. One such project is the upgrading of a two-lane road into a dualcarriageway. It is labelled "dualisation" - a word three onlinedictionaries I consulted, have yet to recognise.
Long arm
To the common man, English is still a wild horse he'd like to mountevery now and then but one he cannot tame. Year after year Englishremains the single most likely subject students at all levels flunk.
Even those who passed their English exams and made it to the presentparliament - for which university education was mandatory - are notalways known to have a comfortable relationship with English.
Punjab province's Chief Minister, Pervez Elahi, is among those few whoseem to correctly guess Gen Musharraf's profound ideas likeenlightened moderation.
His most recent demonstration of this talent was seen last month whenhe lifted a court-imposed ban on kite flying to celebrate the festivalof Basant. (The kites, with glass shards glued to the string, arenotoriously dangerous.)
It was pure enlightenment. But when the move resulted in killingseveral people in Lahore - as the court had cautioned against - MrElahi refused to extend the permission to other cities. That wasmoderation.
But not all ministers have the same level of perception when it comesto expressions in English language.
When the law minister, Wasi Zafar, was recently described as the "longarm of law" by a local journalist, the minister mistook it for anexpression in his native Punjabi which roughly translates into "upyours".
His apt response, on national TV, was: "If anyone gives me the longarm, my long arm to his whole family."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6500227.stm
The BBC Urdu service's MASUD ALAM, back living in Pakistan after 15years, reflects on his countrymen's use of English.
There are only a few video clips of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder ofPakistan, in the archives of state-run television in Pakistan and theyare aired with unfailing regularity on occasions of national import.
One excerpt is from a speech in which the father of the nation says afew lines in Urdu, to rapturous applause from the crowd, followed bythe disclaimer in English "my Urdu is tangawala Urdu".
(For those not familiar with Mr Jinnah, the man was as westernised inhis lifestyle as any Lincolns Inn-educated Indian barrister at thestart of 20th Century could be.)
Tangawala means coachman, and perhaps in the early days of Pakistan'sindependence, they didn't speak Urdu very well. They still don't.
The same goes for leaders - politicians and army generals alike - whosucceeded Mr Jinnah.
A good majority of them couldn't speak the country's national language fluently.
From Jinnah to the current leader, President Pervez Musharraf, thepreferred language of Pakistani rulers has been English.
The masses, by general inclination keen to follow the ruling class,have honestly tried to keep pace.
But after 60 years of excruciating practice, they have managed onlyhalf the linguistic excellence: they've learnt to speak bad Urdu butconstructing a grammatically correct sentence in English remains achallenge.
'Chips in isle'
The language of the urban Pakistani is now a hotchpotch of Urdu,Punjabi and a few words of English spoken with an accent that can beunderstood only by someone who speaks the same way.
My daughter is learning this cocktail language and having fun with it.
The other day she had a conversation with the man who runs the canteenat her school, that went something like this: "Can I have chips?"
(In Urdu) "Finish."
"You must have some left?"
"All finish."
"This is not fair. You want us to bring our own potatoes to school?"
"And isle."
"Sorry?"
"Isle? Isle... for frying."
When her friends elbowed her into recognising that it was "oil" theman was talking about, they all had a good laugh.
'No assess'
But things can get a little more complicated when such cryptic talk isdone over the phone, with a complete stranger.
At a friend's place of work I overheard a man calling up the computerhelp desk. "I can't assess the drive," he complained.
"But that's my job, what exactly is your problem?" is what I assumethe person on the other end must have said.
Our man kept repeating that his inability to "assess the drive" was the problem.
After a few minutes of totally incoherent exchanges, the poor helperfinally realised the problem was "access".
The first generation of Pakistani bureaucrats and military officershad derived their entire English vocabulary from Rudyard Kipling's TheJungle Book, the booklets of Standard Operating Procedures found inmilitary and bureaucratic circles, and the official correspondencewith lowly functionaries of the British Raj.
On social occasions, this word bank was embellished with phrases like"jolly good" and "old chap" to sound authentic - often to theamusement of the gora sahib (foreign master).
But after 1947, in this brand new country of Pakistan, there was nowhite-skinned patronising colonist to frown or frolic at the sight andsound of a subject trying too hard to speak like the master. Thisemboldened the native no end.
He was now free to choose English over his mother tongue. And he didso with relish.
However his vocabulary was limited to the world of officialdom, as itexisted in 1940s British India. To overcome this handicap he took toimprovisation, and in the process, made valuable additions to theEnglish language.
Manufacturing phrases
Gen Musharraf, the army chief, is the epitome of this creative trend.
He deposed an elected prime minister and installed himself as the"chief executive" rather than the old-fashioned "chief martial lawadministrator" - the epithet preferred by three generals and for sometime, by a civilian prime minister, before him.
He is also the proud manufacturer of the term "enlightenedmoderation", the meaning of which is being debated years after it wascoined.
He showed his flair for linguistic innovation more recently when hesuspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, bymaking him "non-functional".
He is now very disappointed that the flourish is lost on the country'slawyers who are engaging in mass protests against the chief justice's"suspension".
Lower down the order, the government functionaries continue to showthe same zest at modernising English language in their day to daybusiness.
The Capital Development Authority is on a binge of road-making thesedays. One such project is the upgrading of a two-lane road into a dualcarriageway. It is labelled "dualisation" - a word three onlinedictionaries I consulted, have yet to recognise.
Long arm
To the common man, English is still a wild horse he'd like to mountevery now and then but one he cannot tame. Year after year Englishremains the single most likely subject students at all levels flunk.
Even those who passed their English exams and made it to the presentparliament - for which university education was mandatory - are notalways known to have a comfortable relationship with English.
Punjab province's Chief Minister, Pervez Elahi, is among those few whoseem to correctly guess Gen Musharraf's profound ideas likeenlightened moderation.
His most recent demonstration of this talent was seen last month whenhe lifted a court-imposed ban on kite flying to celebrate the festivalof Basant. (The kites, with glass shards glued to the string, arenotoriously dangerous.)
It was pure enlightenment. But when the move resulted in killingseveral people in Lahore - as the court had cautioned against - MrElahi refused to extend the permission to other cities. That wasmoderation.
But not all ministers have the same level of perception when it comesto expressions in English language.
When the law minister, Wasi Zafar, was recently described as the "longarm of law" by a local journalist, the minister mistook it for anexpression in his native Punjabi which roughly translates into "upyours".
His apt response, on national TV, was: "If anyone gives me the longarm, my long arm to his whole family."
The best match of 2007 World Cup
South Africa v Sri Lanka, Super Eights, Guyana
'If only the stumps had hair'
Rahul Bhattacharya in Guyana
March 28, 2007
Lasith Malinga gave the game an unexpected twist right at the end with four wickets from four balls © Getty Images
Many before the game, including your humble previewer, had not thought it possible for South Africa and Sri Lanka to match the drama of their previous encounterat the last World Cup. But an ambling kind of afternoon exploded into a startling finish as a man with what looks like a mangled skunk on his head full-pitchedhis way to four wickets from four balls. He was told by the press later it was a record.
One moment the South Africans were warming to the idea of their first points of the Super Eights, the next moment Lasith Malinga was rolling them over assuddenly as his bowling arm appears in delivery stride. Five runs were needed from five overs with five wickets in hand - consider it again - when it allbegan happening.
Shaun Pollock was defeated by a superb slower delivery - by Malinga's standards, for it still registered 135 kmph. A yet slower delivery duped Andrew Hallinto popping one up. Thereafter it was back to extremely fast stuff. An over was finished and a new one begun. The rock steady Jacques Kallis tickled aswinging yorker to the keeper: that was the hat-trick. Makhaya Ntini might as have well not bothered to appear before the missile that zoned into the bottomof his middle stump: four in four.
With nine wickets down, and three runs to get Robin Peterson received a full one at 144 kmph which eluded the edge and the stumps. "It was pretty stressfulout there in last five overs," said Graeme Smith. "Quite a few of the boys were having a cigarette or two."
The reverse-swingers kept coming. One of them was squirted by Peterson to point and Sanath Jayasuriya made a classic misfield and conceded a single. Twoto win, one to tie. Malinga slung down another special so close to home. "If only the stumps had hair..." noted a journalist.
To a seven-two offside field with two slips, Chaminda Vaas bowled one of the more nerveless maidens in World Cup history, and then Malinga was back fora final shot. Mahela Jayawardene told him: "We were nowhere in the game, you've got us here. Just enjoy yourself."
But his efforts couldn't win Sri Lanka their first Super Eights match. South Africa were givenquite a scare by Malinga but managed to srape home by a wicketin the end © Getty Images
Two balls later it finished with a low streak past slip to leave everyone in a daze. Peterson knocked down the stumps at the non-strikers' and later thoughthe had actually run into it. Adjudicators awarded the Man-of-the-Match to Charl Langeveldt, then Malinga, and then both jointly. "Malinga was incredible,"said Smith. "He made me age a bit."
Against a great burst of fast bowling this was a great escape for the South Africans. Not only would they have seen and heard the 'choker' word whereverthey went, but also been under pressure to win at least three of their next four games. Defeating Sri Lanka in what were almost Sri Lankan conditions wasa coup. "Bar the last five overs," said Smith, "we dominated the game."
Smith himself set up the game, setting a hot pace against the new ball and winning a battle of wits. Early on Malinga left him a mark on the belly and Jayawardeneinstalled a leg trap, with a very short square leg and a leg gully, but Smith weaved through them with superb flicks. He then began muscling over the infieldso that when Murali was introduced, perhaps a few overs too late, the required rate had fallen to 3.5.
Immediately Muralitharan snuck one past the edge and the ball kept so low that it crept away beneath the keeper's gloves. The next over Smith was out stumped.
Fifty runs were needed from 18 overs with eight wickets in hand when Murali came within three inches of his own hat-trick with a classic double-strike,a flighted doosra and a fast offbreak, and then an appeal for bat-pad which umpire Daryl Harper excellently judged not out.
From the end Jayasuriya began spinning things past the right-handers' bats. At the drinks interval and a man with a broom swept dust off the pitch. It wasclear that for Sri Lanka to win Murali had to extend his genius a little more. But Jayawardene removed Murali. He brought on Malinga.
'If only the stumps had hair'
Rahul Bhattacharya in Guyana
March 28, 2007
Lasith Malinga gave the game an unexpected twist right at the end with four wickets from four balls © Getty Images
Many before the game, including your humble previewer, had not thought it possible for South Africa and Sri Lanka to match the drama of their previous encounterat the last World Cup. But an ambling kind of afternoon exploded into a startling finish as a man with what looks like a mangled skunk on his head full-pitchedhis way to four wickets from four balls. He was told by the press later it was a record.
One moment the South Africans were warming to the idea of their first points of the Super Eights, the next moment Lasith Malinga was rolling them over assuddenly as his bowling arm appears in delivery stride. Five runs were needed from five overs with five wickets in hand - consider it again - when it allbegan happening.
Shaun Pollock was defeated by a superb slower delivery - by Malinga's standards, for it still registered 135 kmph. A yet slower delivery duped Andrew Hallinto popping one up. Thereafter it was back to extremely fast stuff. An over was finished and a new one begun. The rock steady Jacques Kallis tickled aswinging yorker to the keeper: that was the hat-trick. Makhaya Ntini might as have well not bothered to appear before the missile that zoned into the bottomof his middle stump: four in four.
With nine wickets down, and three runs to get Robin Peterson received a full one at 144 kmph which eluded the edge and the stumps. "It was pretty stressfulout there in last five overs," said Graeme Smith. "Quite a few of the boys were having a cigarette or two."
The reverse-swingers kept coming. One of them was squirted by Peterson to point and Sanath Jayasuriya made a classic misfield and conceded a single. Twoto win, one to tie. Malinga slung down another special so close to home. "If only the stumps had hair..." noted a journalist.
To a seven-two offside field with two slips, Chaminda Vaas bowled one of the more nerveless maidens in World Cup history, and then Malinga was back fora final shot. Mahela Jayawardene told him: "We were nowhere in the game, you've got us here. Just enjoy yourself."
But his efforts couldn't win Sri Lanka their first Super Eights match. South Africa were givenquite a scare by Malinga but managed to srape home by a wicketin the end © Getty Images
Two balls later it finished with a low streak past slip to leave everyone in a daze. Peterson knocked down the stumps at the non-strikers' and later thoughthe had actually run into it. Adjudicators awarded the Man-of-the-Match to Charl Langeveldt, then Malinga, and then both jointly. "Malinga was incredible,"said Smith. "He made me age a bit."
Against a great burst of fast bowling this was a great escape for the South Africans. Not only would they have seen and heard the 'choker' word whereverthey went, but also been under pressure to win at least three of their next four games. Defeating Sri Lanka in what were almost Sri Lankan conditions wasa coup. "Bar the last five overs," said Smith, "we dominated the game."
Smith himself set up the game, setting a hot pace against the new ball and winning a battle of wits. Early on Malinga left him a mark on the belly and Jayawardeneinstalled a leg trap, with a very short square leg and a leg gully, but Smith weaved through them with superb flicks. He then began muscling over the infieldso that when Murali was introduced, perhaps a few overs too late, the required rate had fallen to 3.5.
Immediately Muralitharan snuck one past the edge and the ball kept so low that it crept away beneath the keeper's gloves. The next over Smith was out stumped.
Fifty runs were needed from 18 overs with eight wickets in hand when Murali came within three inches of his own hat-trick with a classic double-strike,a flighted doosra and a fast offbreak, and then an appeal for bat-pad which umpire Daryl Harper excellently judged not out.
From the end Jayasuriya began spinning things past the right-handers' bats. At the drinks interval and a man with a broom swept dust off the pitch. It wasclear that for Sri Lanka to win Murali had to extend his genius a little more. But Jayawardene removed Murali. He brought on Malinga.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Interview: The Future of History, Part I
Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is one of America’s most distinguished historians. He was an active figure in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. His seminal book, A People’s History of the United States, is widely used in college and university classrooms. He is also the author of Declarations of Independence and You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. His latest book is The Zinn Reader.
For further information about Zinn you can visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
Q. In The Zinn Reader, you write, “Important to me as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class was to read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.” Nineteen ninety-eight marked the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. The question arises, Is Marx relevant today?
A.: I don’t know if you know this, but I decided to deal with the question of the relevance of Marx even before the 150th anniversary. I decided to do that by writing a play about him. It’s called Marx in Soho. It’s a monologue in which Marx appears in the present, a kind of fantasy, of course. The reason I wanted to do something about Marx is because there are some things he said in the 19th century that turn out to be inadequate for an understanding of what the world is like today. He had a foreshortened view of how long it would take for a socialist revolution to come about. There was a point where he and Engels thought the revolutions in Europe of 1848 would lead to workers’ revolutions. They did not.
He did not really figure on capitalism’s ability to survive, on the ingeniousness of the system in devising obstacles to revolution, its power in suppressing revolutionary movements, and its ability to wean the working class and its consciousness away from the idea of revolutionary change. Although Marx followed events in the U.S. in the mid-19th century and was a correspondent for a while for the New York Tribune, he could not anticipate that the American system would be able to fend off revolutionary movements by a combination of tactics. I say “tactics” as if they were deliberate, but I think that probably it’s not an accurate description to call them tactics. Let’s say there are a number of developments in American capitalism that made it possible for the system to survive. One of them was the fact that capitalism in the U.S., drawing on the enormous wealth of this country, was able to respond to workers’ movements by giving concessions, respond to unionism by agreeing to raise wages and lower hours. The system responded to economic crises with reforms, as it did in the 1930s under the New Deal. In doing so, it created a more satisfied section of the working class, which has remained content with the system or, when it became discontented, did not become discontented with capitalism as a system but became discontented with specific manifestations of the system. Most working people in the U.S. do not see the problems they have as systemic, but as problems which are correctable by reforms. So the system, by having the wealth sufficient to distribute more goodies to sections of the working class and yet maintain huge profits, has been able to sustain itself.
At the time of World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois, certainly one of the most far-sighted of American intellectuals, saw that the American system was giving some rewards to its workers and was able to do this on the basis of its exploitation of people abroad. He saw the imperialism of World War I, of the Western powers, and he saw that the Western powers, by drawing out the wealth of the Middle East and Latin America and Asia, was able to give some small part of its profits to its own working class and therefore enlist that working class in a kind of national unity which then enabled them to call this working class to war and sustain that war.
There’s a big difference between having a working class that is 80 percent of the population and seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be 40 million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers’ revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for.
I think he also did not see, and this was pointed out by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran when they wrote their post-Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the economic crisis that Marxists expected to happen after the end of World War II did not take place because of the militarization of capitalism.
A kind of military Keynesianism was in operation, whereby spending a huge amount of money on military contracts, the government was creating employment and was giving shots of “drugs,” in the long run poisonous but in the short run sustaining the system.
On the other hand, there were analyses that Marx made of the capitalist system which turn out to be very perceptive. Probably the most obvious one is the increasing concentration and centralization of capital on a worldwide scale. What we talk about now as the global economy, globalization, Marx foresaw. He saw the world becoming more and more interconnected economically. He saw the corporations turning into mega corporations and the mergers and the possession of the material resources of the world becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Very often it’s said Marx talked about the immiseration of the proletariat and the concomitant increasing wealth of the upper classes, the polarization of wealth and poverty. Very often they say, Marx was wrong about this. In the U.S. it doesn’t look that clear because of this large middle class that is not at one pole or the other. If you look at it on a worldwide scale, world capitalism has moved in that direction. If you take the wealth of the rich countries as against the wealth of the poor countries, and especially if you take the wealth of the upper income brackets in the rich countries against the 90 percent of the people in the poor countries, you have a polarization of wealth which is more stark than it was in the 19th century.
One of the things Marx pointed out was that once money was introduced into the world economy, the pursuit of wealth became infinite. It was no longer a matter of material possessions, of land, as it was in feudal times, now there was no longer a limit to the accumulation of wealth once money was introduced.
Those who trumpet the virtues of capitalism point out that the USSR appropriated Marx and his name and the good name of socialism. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in disarray both Marx’s analyses and a socialist political philosophy are therefore discredited.
I know that that’s what’s being said. Marxism would only be discredited if the Soviet Union had created the kind of society that Marx and Engels foresaw as a socialist society. But when Marx and Engels talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, they had a very special conception of what that meant. It meant that the majority of the people, the working class, would be in charge of the society. They did not mean by dictatorship of the proletariat that a political party would represent itself as total spokesperson for the working class. In fact, not only would a political party not be the spokesperson, but certainly not a central committee, certainly not a Politburo, certainly not one person. Marx and Engels did not envision that kind of dictatorship.
At one point, Marx was talking about the Paris Commune of 1871 and the remarkably democratic character of the Paris Commune, the communards, the people who gathered and legislated, made decisions in the context of endless daily, hourly, 24-hours- a-day discussions in the streets of Paris by the people of Paris. He said you want to know what I mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Look at the Paris Commune. When Marx talked about what a socialist society would look like, he certainly did not expect that a socialist society would set up gulags, would imprison dissidents and shoot not just capitalists, but fellow revolutionaries, as was done in both the Soviet Union and in China. Marx and Engels saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a temporary phenomenon during which the socialist character of society would become more and more communal, more and more democratic, and that the state, as they said, would become less and less necessary. Marx and Engels talked in The Communist Manifesto about their aim being the free development of the individual.
The Soviet Union and other countries that have called themselves Marxist and have established police states acted contrary to the spirit of Marx’s ideas. So I was very glad that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union you could no longer associate the Soviet Union and socialism, you could no longer say, this is a place where socialism exists. To me it seemed that now the air could be cleared and that we could begin to think of socialism as it was thought of in the early part of the century in the U.S., before the Soviet Union existed, when the Socialist Party in the U.S. was a powerful force, when its candidate for president got close to a million votes. You had socialist newspapers all over the country read probably by several million people. At that time the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, was a very powerful force in organizing strikes and struggles around the country.
It is very interesting that socialism in this country was at its most influential before a Soviet Union existed. Because then the people could, without the imposition of some foreign, distorted example, take a look at the ideas of socialism. It made a lot of sense to them. They could see Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Jack London, and Lincoln Steffens and see admirable people in the U.S. who had turned to socialism because they saw what capitalism was doing to people. Socialism at that time represented a common-sense idea, that you take the wealth of the country and try to use it in a rational and humane way.
Q.: The Reaganites take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. They say Reagan’s aggressive weapons policy and expansion of the military helped to bankrupt the USSR. What’s your take on that? Do you have an alternative view on why the Soviet Union collapsed?
A.: I always have an alternative view. I have no doubt that the militarization of the Soviet economy was a factor in impoverishing the Soviet Union But that was a very long-term development. It didn’t happen only under Reagan. The Soviet Union and the U.S. engaging in an arms race and both countries spending an exorbitant amount of their national wealth on the military. It also has been a factor in causing the U.S. to have a social service structure which is less generous to its people than, let’s say, the social service sector of much poorer countries, like the countries of Scandinavia, New Zealand, France, and Germany with their universal health care systems.
Without pretending to know exactly what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, it seems to me that one of the truly important factors was the growing discontent with the system, with the police state, with the lack of freedom. I’m thinking of the growing ties of the Soviet Union with the rest of the world, you might say the phenomenon that Marx described, that the world would become more interconnected, that people and goods would travel more and more across borders, culture would be disseminated all over the world, people would get to know about what’s happening in other countries. For people in the Soviet Union, as more travel took place, as radio and television brought information to them, I think their society became more distasteful to them. Restrictions on their travel, on their freedom of speech became more onerous. I think they developed an underground of dissent. We know that there was an underground press, underground literature, self- publication, literally, of things that circulated unofficially and spread subversive ideas. All of these had a corrosive effect on a society that was very tyrannical. I guess I believe that tyrannies ultimately, sometimes it takes years, must collapse. Whoever happens to be the leader of a rival country at the time the collapse takes place will take credit for it, as Reagan did in this case.
Q.: Were you struck by the nonviolent transformation of the Soviet Union and its neighboring satellite states, with the exception of Rumania? Here were virtual military dictatorships undergoing a peaceful transfer of government.
A.: I think that’s a very fascinating development and a very important piece of history for us to look at. What it does is reinforce the notion that it is possible to bring about important social change without violence, without a bloodbath. To me, it is a vindication of the notion that we should give up the idea of using military force to bring about social change. In fact, social change can come about by the actions of a great social movement. The resort to military force to bring about social change, the resort to armed insurrection or what the revolutionary movement might call armed struggle is evidence that the revolutionary movement has not built up enough support among the population. I think as soon as you have mass outpourings of people into the streets, and this happened in East Germany, too, and they could see that the resistance was overwhelming, they could not function any more. So to me this is very powerful evidence. Or take the Soviet Union as an example. We came very close in the U.S. to the decision to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in order to destroy it. The tyranny fell by itself, mostly from internal causes.
I think one of the most striking examples of the idea that important social change can take place and should take place without massive violence is what happened in South Africa. It was interesting that the African National Congress, which certainly was ready to engage in sabotage and even individual acts of violence, was not willing to have an all-out civil war in South Africa. They knew that it would result in millions of people being killed; most of them black South Africans. They were willing to spend more time, more energy, utilize a variety of tactics and ultimately apartheid collapsed in South Africa. Who would have predicted that Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, would become the leader of the new South Africa? While the new South Africa has not solved fundamental problems, no question about that, still, Black political power at least creates the possibility of a change that was not possible under the old regime.
Q.: You got involved in the theater in the 1960s, didn’t you? You wrote a play about Emma Goldman, entitled Emma. It’s been performed in the U.S., Japan, and England. What drew you to her?
A.: I had heard of Emma Goldman from reading a book when I was a teenager called Critics and Crusaders, which is long out of print but had a very important influence on me. It was a book of essays on different radicals in American history. There was a chapter on each one, including Emma Goldman, the anarchist and feminist. I had read that chapter on her, but had pretty much forgotten about it, as she was forgotten by American culture for a long time. She had been a very powerful figure at the turn of the century. She was shoved into the background not just by the general culture, but also by left culture, because the Communist Party was the dominant force in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. Emma Goldman was anti-Communist. She had written a very strong attack on the Soviet Union as a result of her experiences there. She was relegated to obscurity not just by the establishment, but also by the left.
I did not know anything about her until I encountered at some meeting in Pennsylvania in the mid or late 1960s a fellow historian named Richard Drinnon who told me he had written a biography of her called Rebel in Paradise. His biography of Emma Goldman is stunning. It led me to read her autobiography, Living My Life. What fascinated me was that here we were in the 1960s, the New Left had distanced itself from traditional Communist Party doctrine and, without calling itself anarchist, had many of the anarchist sensibilities in being anti-state, anti-dogmatism, and wanting to make revolutionary changes in the culture simultaneously with changes in the politics and economics. So Emma Goldman fitted, in my view, a New Left conception of the universe.
I found that my students, far from seeing her as an antiquated and irrelevant figure, as I feared at one time when I began to give them her writings, were excited by her ideas and her approach to life, her powerful feminism, her anarchism, her position against the state, against capitalism, against religion, against all of the traditional rules of sexual behavior, of marriage. She was a free spirit. The play was a matter of the desire and the opportunity joining.
Q.: What influenced your play writing? Did you have any models, were you interested in Bertolt Brecht’s work, for example?
A.: There were a number of influences in my life that led me toward play writing. First there were people in my own family who had been involved in the theater. My wife was an actress for a while in Atlanta and here in Cambridge. My daughter did some acting in the Altanta production of the Diary of Anne Frank in 1962. She played Anne Frank and won a prize as the best actress of the year in Atlanta. Our son was a musician and an actor and devoted his life to the theater, which he is still doing, running a little theater in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. We saw the first Broadway productions of Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Brecht’s politics and theatrical imagination spoke to me. When I got involved in theater, I learned a number of things that were very happy learning experiences for me. I learned that when you become a theater person, it’s very different from being an academic. You immediately become part of a group project. The academy, the university, is very isolating. Presumably you’re a member of a department and presumably you have colleagues, but it never works that way. You really are alone. You’re writing your things alone. It’s not a collective enterprise. In the theater it immediately, inevitably becomes a collective enterprise as soon as your play is taken over by the director. The director becomes equal, in fact more than equal, to you. As soon as the actors come in, the set designer and costumer and stage manager come into the picture, you have a little collective working on this project. Everybody is eager to do this well, as you are. So it was very heartwarming to suddenly find myself with a group of people who were all working together on this project. Actors and actresses rehearse for six weeks and go on stage every night for another six weeks and give their all, give their time, their heart, for nothing or for very little because they’re in love with and believe in what they’re doing. I have enormous admiration for these people.
Returning to Brecht, he gave a remarkable, and I have to say, theatrical performance at the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was very funny. Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee was at a time when they were investigating Hollywood. People who want to read the full transcript of it can get Eric Bentley’s book Thirty Years of Treason, which reproduces the transcripts of actors and actresses and writers and directors who appeared before the HUAC in 1947 and 1948. Brecht baffled them. They didn’t know what to do with him. The answers he gave were like conundrums that led them into labyrinths of confusion out of which they never came. They would say, Mr. Brecht, is it true that you wrote the following lines in your play The Good Woman of Setzuan? And he would say, No, I think you don’t have it quite right. Did you read that in the German? You could see the nervous tremors that developed in the members of the committee sitting there. Somebody who watched or listened to that testimony before the HUAC said it was like a zoologist being cross-examined by apes.
Q.: One of the great cultural figures of the 20th century is Charlie Chaplin. The witch hunters in Washington, too, investigated him. Was that politically driven? Wasn’t Chaplin deported?
A.: Chaplin was not an American citizen, and they would not allow him to stay in this country. There’s no question but that it was politically driven on the basis of the fact that he’d been a supporter of various progressive and left-wing causes and because of the films that he made. Although they did not want to declare his films subversive, there’s no question they were. Modern Times was a devastating critique of the capitalist industrial system. Of course, they did not want to admit that his film The Great Dictator was a powerful anti-fascist film at a time when so many leaders of this government were soft on fascism. His other comedies, his silent comedies, were permeated with class-consciousness, with subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of the police and a system that reduced people to poverty—the tramp, and the immigrant. None of that would have endeared him to defenders of the American establishment.
Chaplin’s works were not dry polemics. They were enormously entertaining. They were funny.
That’s what made him even more dangerous. The system can handle dogmatic, dry, and boring critics of the system. But it infuriates them to see somebody who is a critic, who is on the left and whose films are being watched by hundreds of millions of people around the globe, who’s funny, who’s entertaining. There were times when the HUAC deliberately did not call certain people to the stand because these people were too popular. I have a friend, a student activist, who’s the son of Robert Ryan, the actor. He told me, and I don’t think he’d mind me repeating this, that his father, who was a progressive person who supported anti-fascist causes and who had a real consciousness about the American system, was not called before the HUAC, as so many other people were, because he was a popular figure in the movies. He was a kind of John Wayne figure, a hero, a tough guy, 100 percent American. Too many Americans identified with Robert Ryan in that heroic way. He was white Anglo-Saxon, handsome, heroic, didn’t fit the stereotype of the subversive. You might say they preferred to call short Jewish writers to the stand to exemplify communism, which would make it easier for bigotry to become a factor in anti-communism.
Q.: The U.S. gives $98 million a year to the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s fiercely debated. What would be an ideal situation in terms of funding?
A.: There are countries in Western Europe where the government gives 100 times as much money, proportionately, as the U.S. does. Denmark, Holland, Germany, England, and the Scandinavian countries subsidize the arts in a far more important way than the U.S. does. Yet this pitiful amount of money, less than the amount allocated for military bands, becomes the subject of debate on whether art should be subsidized when that art sometimes is outrageous, maybe politically or culturally, because it maybe involves nudity or lesbianism or in some way is offensive to those people who are still living in another century. By another century I don’t mean the 21st century. I mean the 14th. In a decent society art would be subsidized because artists need to be paid, because writers and painters need to survive.
I remember once on a flight from Capetown, South Africa to London, I met a German woman who got on in Frankfurt. It turned out she was an actress. What are you doing in London? I’m going on vacation. She told me that she gets a salary from the German government. They don’t ask her what she’s going to play in, if she’s going to be acting every week of the year. When there are plays, she acts in them. When there are no plays, she goes on vacation. But she is paid an annual salary, just as Congresspeople in this country are paid an annual salary, even though they spend a lot of time doing other things besides being in Congress.
Q.: One school argues that if you accept government funding, you accept government restrictions, controls, and constraints. What side do you come on in that?
A.: The system impoverishes artists.Since a good part of our taxes go for stupid things, like nuclear weapons, I think we have a right to demand that part of our taxes be used for the arts. Sure, when this happens there will be forces in the society which will then try to determine the content of these arts, but that’s another fight that must be waged. So we have a double battle in the culture, one to get the government to subsidize the arts, and the second to make sure that the subsidization is not accompanied by political strings. Z
David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.
For further information about Zinn you can visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
Q. In The Zinn Reader, you write, “Important to me as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class was to read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.” Nineteen ninety-eight marked the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. The question arises, Is Marx relevant today?
A.: I don’t know if you know this, but I decided to deal with the question of the relevance of Marx even before the 150th anniversary. I decided to do that by writing a play about him. It’s called Marx in Soho. It’s a monologue in which Marx appears in the present, a kind of fantasy, of course. The reason I wanted to do something about Marx is because there are some things he said in the 19th century that turn out to be inadequate for an understanding of what the world is like today. He had a foreshortened view of how long it would take for a socialist revolution to come about. There was a point where he and Engels thought the revolutions in Europe of 1848 would lead to workers’ revolutions. They did not.
He did not really figure on capitalism’s ability to survive, on the ingeniousness of the system in devising obstacles to revolution, its power in suppressing revolutionary movements, and its ability to wean the working class and its consciousness away from the idea of revolutionary change. Although Marx followed events in the U.S. in the mid-19th century and was a correspondent for a while for the New York Tribune, he could not anticipate that the American system would be able to fend off revolutionary movements by a combination of tactics. I say “tactics” as if they were deliberate, but I think that probably it’s not an accurate description to call them tactics. Let’s say there are a number of developments in American capitalism that made it possible for the system to survive. One of them was the fact that capitalism in the U.S., drawing on the enormous wealth of this country, was able to respond to workers’ movements by giving concessions, respond to unionism by agreeing to raise wages and lower hours. The system responded to economic crises with reforms, as it did in the 1930s under the New Deal. In doing so, it created a more satisfied section of the working class, which has remained content with the system or, when it became discontented, did not become discontented with capitalism as a system but became discontented with specific manifestations of the system. Most working people in the U.S. do not see the problems they have as systemic, but as problems which are correctable by reforms. So the system, by having the wealth sufficient to distribute more goodies to sections of the working class and yet maintain huge profits, has been able to sustain itself.
At the time of World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois, certainly one of the most far-sighted of American intellectuals, saw that the American system was giving some rewards to its workers and was able to do this on the basis of its exploitation of people abroad. He saw the imperialism of World War I, of the Western powers, and he saw that the Western powers, by drawing out the wealth of the Middle East and Latin America and Asia, was able to give some small part of its profits to its own working class and therefore enlist that working class in a kind of national unity which then enabled them to call this working class to war and sustain that war.
There’s a big difference between having a working class that is 80 percent of the population and seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be 40 million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers’ revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for.
I think he also did not see, and this was pointed out by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran when they wrote their post-Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the economic crisis that Marxists expected to happen after the end of World War II did not take place because of the militarization of capitalism.
A kind of military Keynesianism was in operation, whereby spending a huge amount of money on military contracts, the government was creating employment and was giving shots of “drugs,” in the long run poisonous but in the short run sustaining the system.
On the other hand, there were analyses that Marx made of the capitalist system which turn out to be very perceptive. Probably the most obvious one is the increasing concentration and centralization of capital on a worldwide scale. What we talk about now as the global economy, globalization, Marx foresaw. He saw the world becoming more and more interconnected economically. He saw the corporations turning into mega corporations and the mergers and the possession of the material resources of the world becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Very often it’s said Marx talked about the immiseration of the proletariat and the concomitant increasing wealth of the upper classes, the polarization of wealth and poverty. Very often they say, Marx was wrong about this. In the U.S. it doesn’t look that clear because of this large middle class that is not at one pole or the other. If you look at it on a worldwide scale, world capitalism has moved in that direction. If you take the wealth of the rich countries as against the wealth of the poor countries, and especially if you take the wealth of the upper income brackets in the rich countries against the 90 percent of the people in the poor countries, you have a polarization of wealth which is more stark than it was in the 19th century.
One of the things Marx pointed out was that once money was introduced into the world economy, the pursuit of wealth became infinite. It was no longer a matter of material possessions, of land, as it was in feudal times, now there was no longer a limit to the accumulation of wealth once money was introduced.
Those who trumpet the virtues of capitalism point out that the USSR appropriated Marx and his name and the good name of socialism. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in disarray both Marx’s analyses and a socialist political philosophy are therefore discredited.
I know that that’s what’s being said. Marxism would only be discredited if the Soviet Union had created the kind of society that Marx and Engels foresaw as a socialist society. But when Marx and Engels talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, they had a very special conception of what that meant. It meant that the majority of the people, the working class, would be in charge of the society. They did not mean by dictatorship of the proletariat that a political party would represent itself as total spokesperson for the working class. In fact, not only would a political party not be the spokesperson, but certainly not a central committee, certainly not a Politburo, certainly not one person. Marx and Engels did not envision that kind of dictatorship.
At one point, Marx was talking about the Paris Commune of 1871 and the remarkably democratic character of the Paris Commune, the communards, the people who gathered and legislated, made decisions in the context of endless daily, hourly, 24-hours- a-day discussions in the streets of Paris by the people of Paris. He said you want to know what I mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Look at the Paris Commune. When Marx talked about what a socialist society would look like, he certainly did not expect that a socialist society would set up gulags, would imprison dissidents and shoot not just capitalists, but fellow revolutionaries, as was done in both the Soviet Union and in China. Marx and Engels saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a temporary phenomenon during which the socialist character of society would become more and more communal, more and more democratic, and that the state, as they said, would become less and less necessary. Marx and Engels talked in The Communist Manifesto about their aim being the free development of the individual.
The Soviet Union and other countries that have called themselves Marxist and have established police states acted contrary to the spirit of Marx’s ideas. So I was very glad that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union you could no longer associate the Soviet Union and socialism, you could no longer say, this is a place where socialism exists. To me it seemed that now the air could be cleared and that we could begin to think of socialism as it was thought of in the early part of the century in the U.S., before the Soviet Union existed, when the Socialist Party in the U.S. was a powerful force, when its candidate for president got close to a million votes. You had socialist newspapers all over the country read probably by several million people. At that time the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, was a very powerful force in organizing strikes and struggles around the country.
It is very interesting that socialism in this country was at its most influential before a Soviet Union existed. Because then the people could, without the imposition of some foreign, distorted example, take a look at the ideas of socialism. It made a lot of sense to them. They could see Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Jack London, and Lincoln Steffens and see admirable people in the U.S. who had turned to socialism because they saw what capitalism was doing to people. Socialism at that time represented a common-sense idea, that you take the wealth of the country and try to use it in a rational and humane way.
Q.: The Reaganites take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. They say Reagan’s aggressive weapons policy and expansion of the military helped to bankrupt the USSR. What’s your take on that? Do you have an alternative view on why the Soviet Union collapsed?
A.: I always have an alternative view. I have no doubt that the militarization of the Soviet economy was a factor in impoverishing the Soviet Union But that was a very long-term development. It didn’t happen only under Reagan. The Soviet Union and the U.S. engaging in an arms race and both countries spending an exorbitant amount of their national wealth on the military. It also has been a factor in causing the U.S. to have a social service structure which is less generous to its people than, let’s say, the social service sector of much poorer countries, like the countries of Scandinavia, New Zealand, France, and Germany with their universal health care systems.
Without pretending to know exactly what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, it seems to me that one of the truly important factors was the growing discontent with the system, with the police state, with the lack of freedom. I’m thinking of the growing ties of the Soviet Union with the rest of the world, you might say the phenomenon that Marx described, that the world would become more interconnected, that people and goods would travel more and more across borders, culture would be disseminated all over the world, people would get to know about what’s happening in other countries. For people in the Soviet Union, as more travel took place, as radio and television brought information to them, I think their society became more distasteful to them. Restrictions on their travel, on their freedom of speech became more onerous. I think they developed an underground of dissent. We know that there was an underground press, underground literature, self- publication, literally, of things that circulated unofficially and spread subversive ideas. All of these had a corrosive effect on a society that was very tyrannical. I guess I believe that tyrannies ultimately, sometimes it takes years, must collapse. Whoever happens to be the leader of a rival country at the time the collapse takes place will take credit for it, as Reagan did in this case.
Q.: Were you struck by the nonviolent transformation of the Soviet Union and its neighboring satellite states, with the exception of Rumania? Here were virtual military dictatorships undergoing a peaceful transfer of government.
A.: I think that’s a very fascinating development and a very important piece of history for us to look at. What it does is reinforce the notion that it is possible to bring about important social change without violence, without a bloodbath. To me, it is a vindication of the notion that we should give up the idea of using military force to bring about social change. In fact, social change can come about by the actions of a great social movement. The resort to military force to bring about social change, the resort to armed insurrection or what the revolutionary movement might call armed struggle is evidence that the revolutionary movement has not built up enough support among the population. I think as soon as you have mass outpourings of people into the streets, and this happened in East Germany, too, and they could see that the resistance was overwhelming, they could not function any more. So to me this is very powerful evidence. Or take the Soviet Union as an example. We came very close in the U.S. to the decision to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in order to destroy it. The tyranny fell by itself, mostly from internal causes.
I think one of the most striking examples of the idea that important social change can take place and should take place without massive violence is what happened in South Africa. It was interesting that the African National Congress, which certainly was ready to engage in sabotage and even individual acts of violence, was not willing to have an all-out civil war in South Africa. They knew that it would result in millions of people being killed; most of them black South Africans. They were willing to spend more time, more energy, utilize a variety of tactics and ultimately apartheid collapsed in South Africa. Who would have predicted that Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, would become the leader of the new South Africa? While the new South Africa has not solved fundamental problems, no question about that, still, Black political power at least creates the possibility of a change that was not possible under the old regime.
Q.: You got involved in the theater in the 1960s, didn’t you? You wrote a play about Emma Goldman, entitled Emma. It’s been performed in the U.S., Japan, and England. What drew you to her?
A.: I had heard of Emma Goldman from reading a book when I was a teenager called Critics and Crusaders, which is long out of print but had a very important influence on me. It was a book of essays on different radicals in American history. There was a chapter on each one, including Emma Goldman, the anarchist and feminist. I had read that chapter on her, but had pretty much forgotten about it, as she was forgotten by American culture for a long time. She had been a very powerful figure at the turn of the century. She was shoved into the background not just by the general culture, but also by left culture, because the Communist Party was the dominant force in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. Emma Goldman was anti-Communist. She had written a very strong attack on the Soviet Union as a result of her experiences there. She was relegated to obscurity not just by the establishment, but also by the left.
I did not know anything about her until I encountered at some meeting in Pennsylvania in the mid or late 1960s a fellow historian named Richard Drinnon who told me he had written a biography of her called Rebel in Paradise. His biography of Emma Goldman is stunning. It led me to read her autobiography, Living My Life. What fascinated me was that here we were in the 1960s, the New Left had distanced itself from traditional Communist Party doctrine and, without calling itself anarchist, had many of the anarchist sensibilities in being anti-state, anti-dogmatism, and wanting to make revolutionary changes in the culture simultaneously with changes in the politics and economics. So Emma Goldman fitted, in my view, a New Left conception of the universe.
I found that my students, far from seeing her as an antiquated and irrelevant figure, as I feared at one time when I began to give them her writings, were excited by her ideas and her approach to life, her powerful feminism, her anarchism, her position against the state, against capitalism, against religion, against all of the traditional rules of sexual behavior, of marriage. She was a free spirit. The play was a matter of the desire and the opportunity joining.
Q.: What influenced your play writing? Did you have any models, were you interested in Bertolt Brecht’s work, for example?
A.: There were a number of influences in my life that led me toward play writing. First there were people in my own family who had been involved in the theater. My wife was an actress for a while in Atlanta and here in Cambridge. My daughter did some acting in the Altanta production of the Diary of Anne Frank in 1962. She played Anne Frank and won a prize as the best actress of the year in Atlanta. Our son was a musician and an actor and devoted his life to the theater, which he is still doing, running a little theater in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. We saw the first Broadway productions of Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Brecht’s politics and theatrical imagination spoke to me. When I got involved in theater, I learned a number of things that were very happy learning experiences for me. I learned that when you become a theater person, it’s very different from being an academic. You immediately become part of a group project. The academy, the university, is very isolating. Presumably you’re a member of a department and presumably you have colleagues, but it never works that way. You really are alone. You’re writing your things alone. It’s not a collective enterprise. In the theater it immediately, inevitably becomes a collective enterprise as soon as your play is taken over by the director. The director becomes equal, in fact more than equal, to you. As soon as the actors come in, the set designer and costumer and stage manager come into the picture, you have a little collective working on this project. Everybody is eager to do this well, as you are. So it was very heartwarming to suddenly find myself with a group of people who were all working together on this project. Actors and actresses rehearse for six weeks and go on stage every night for another six weeks and give their all, give their time, their heart, for nothing or for very little because they’re in love with and believe in what they’re doing. I have enormous admiration for these people.
Returning to Brecht, he gave a remarkable, and I have to say, theatrical performance at the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was very funny. Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee was at a time when they were investigating Hollywood. People who want to read the full transcript of it can get Eric Bentley’s book Thirty Years of Treason, which reproduces the transcripts of actors and actresses and writers and directors who appeared before the HUAC in 1947 and 1948. Brecht baffled them. They didn’t know what to do with him. The answers he gave were like conundrums that led them into labyrinths of confusion out of which they never came. They would say, Mr. Brecht, is it true that you wrote the following lines in your play The Good Woman of Setzuan? And he would say, No, I think you don’t have it quite right. Did you read that in the German? You could see the nervous tremors that developed in the members of the committee sitting there. Somebody who watched or listened to that testimony before the HUAC said it was like a zoologist being cross-examined by apes.
Q.: One of the great cultural figures of the 20th century is Charlie Chaplin. The witch hunters in Washington, too, investigated him. Was that politically driven? Wasn’t Chaplin deported?
A.: Chaplin was not an American citizen, and they would not allow him to stay in this country. There’s no question but that it was politically driven on the basis of the fact that he’d been a supporter of various progressive and left-wing causes and because of the films that he made. Although they did not want to declare his films subversive, there’s no question they were. Modern Times was a devastating critique of the capitalist industrial system. Of course, they did not want to admit that his film The Great Dictator was a powerful anti-fascist film at a time when so many leaders of this government were soft on fascism. His other comedies, his silent comedies, were permeated with class-consciousness, with subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of the police and a system that reduced people to poverty—the tramp, and the immigrant. None of that would have endeared him to defenders of the American establishment.
Chaplin’s works were not dry polemics. They were enormously entertaining. They were funny.
That’s what made him even more dangerous. The system can handle dogmatic, dry, and boring critics of the system. But it infuriates them to see somebody who is a critic, who is on the left and whose films are being watched by hundreds of millions of people around the globe, who’s funny, who’s entertaining. There were times when the HUAC deliberately did not call certain people to the stand because these people were too popular. I have a friend, a student activist, who’s the son of Robert Ryan, the actor. He told me, and I don’t think he’d mind me repeating this, that his father, who was a progressive person who supported anti-fascist causes and who had a real consciousness about the American system, was not called before the HUAC, as so many other people were, because he was a popular figure in the movies. He was a kind of John Wayne figure, a hero, a tough guy, 100 percent American. Too many Americans identified with Robert Ryan in that heroic way. He was white Anglo-Saxon, handsome, heroic, didn’t fit the stereotype of the subversive. You might say they preferred to call short Jewish writers to the stand to exemplify communism, which would make it easier for bigotry to become a factor in anti-communism.
Q.: The U.S. gives $98 million a year to the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s fiercely debated. What would be an ideal situation in terms of funding?
A.: There are countries in Western Europe where the government gives 100 times as much money, proportionately, as the U.S. does. Denmark, Holland, Germany, England, and the Scandinavian countries subsidize the arts in a far more important way than the U.S. does. Yet this pitiful amount of money, less than the amount allocated for military bands, becomes the subject of debate on whether art should be subsidized when that art sometimes is outrageous, maybe politically or culturally, because it maybe involves nudity or lesbianism or in some way is offensive to those people who are still living in another century. By another century I don’t mean the 21st century. I mean the 14th. In a decent society art would be subsidized because artists need to be paid, because writers and painters need to survive.
I remember once on a flight from Capetown, South Africa to London, I met a German woman who got on in Frankfurt. It turned out she was an actress. What are you doing in London? I’m going on vacation. She told me that she gets a salary from the German government. They don’t ask her what she’s going to play in, if she’s going to be acting every week of the year. When there are plays, she acts in them. When there are no plays, she goes on vacation. But she is paid an annual salary, just as Congresspeople in this country are paid an annual salary, even though they spend a lot of time doing other things besides being in Congress.
Q.: One school argues that if you accept government funding, you accept government restrictions, controls, and constraints. What side do you come on in that?
A.: The system impoverishes artists.Since a good part of our taxes go for stupid things, like nuclear weapons, I think we have a right to demand that part of our taxes be used for the arts. Sure, when this happens there will be forces in the society which will then try to determine the content of these arts, but that’s another fight that must be waged. So we have a double battle in the culture, one to get the government to subsidize the arts, and the second to make sure that the subsidization is not accompanied by political strings. Z
David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.
Richard Conway Casey, the first visually challenged federal judge, departs
Richard Conway Casey, 74, Blind Federal Judge Richard Conway Casey of the United States District Court in Manhattan, who was the nation's first blind federaltrial judge and presided over high-profile cases including an abortion-law challenge and the Peter Gotti trial, died on Thursday.
Richard Conway Casey, 74, Blind Federal Judge Richard Conway Casey of the United States District Court in Manhattan, who was the nation's first blind federaltrial judge and presided over high-profile cases including an abortion-law challenge and the Peter Gotti trial, died on Thursday. He was 74. The apparentcause was a heart attack, his office said.
Judge Casey, who spent almost a decade on the bench, was nominated for federal judgeship by President Bill Clinton in 1997, 10 years after he became blindfrom retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease.
He presided over several trials that attracted public interest, including the constitutional challenge of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act andthe prosecution of Mr. Gotti, the Gambino crime family boss.
On the bench, he was blunt with lawyers and witnesses alike.
During the 2004 trial to consider the law banning certain second-trimester abortions, Judge Casey asked a doctor if doctors ever hear a baby cry duringan abortion. He asked the same doctor if a mother can detect in advance that a baby will be born blind.
In several interviews with The Associated Press in recent years, Judge Casey said he used humor and a newly developed love of skiing to help cope with hisloss of sight.
'It doesn't start out funny being blind,' he said. You get mad. You get angry. You get depressed. But then you choose to either sit there and wait to die,or you get up and you move on. Once you make that decision, then you can find humor.'
Sometimes, he found the humor in himself.
When a law clerk walked him into a courtroom wall, he snapped, 'You're fired. Bring back my guide dog.' Laughter filled the room.
He was born in Ithaca, N.Y., and played football at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center,he worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 1960 to 1963, getting convictions of three Russian spies.
By 1964, he joined a firm now called Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, focusing on securities and corporate litigation.
That same year, he learned he had retinitis pigmentosa. He lost his vision entirely in 1987, just after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl. A seasonticket holder since 1961, he continued to attend games.
His survivors include a son, Richard Conway Casey Jr., and a granddaughter.
Judge Casey had to overcome skeptics when he took on a load of 300 to 400 cases beginning in late 1997, using computer and audio technology while studyingdocuments and preparing to speak in court.
Some questioned whether a blind judge could accurately assess the credibility of a witness he could not see. Judge Casey said truth could be found by followingthe facts to see if they held together in a coherent, logical way. He did occasionally swap a trademark case with a colleague because it depended on visualobservation.
Richard Conway Casey, 74, Blind Federal Judge Richard Conway Casey of the United States District Court in Manhattan, who was the nation's first blind federaltrial judge and presided over high-profile cases including an abortion-law challenge and the Peter Gotti trial, died on Thursday. He was 74. The apparentcause was a heart attack, his office said.
Judge Casey, who spent almost a decade on the bench, was nominated for federal judgeship by President Bill Clinton in 1997, 10 years after he became blindfrom retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease.
He presided over several trials that attracted public interest, including the constitutional challenge of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act andthe prosecution of Mr. Gotti, the Gambino crime family boss.
On the bench, he was blunt with lawyers and witnesses alike.
During the 2004 trial to consider the law banning certain second-trimester abortions, Judge Casey asked a doctor if doctors ever hear a baby cry duringan abortion. He asked the same doctor if a mother can detect in advance that a baby will be born blind.
In several interviews with The Associated Press in recent years, Judge Casey said he used humor and a newly developed love of skiing to help cope with hisloss of sight.
'It doesn't start out funny being blind,' he said. You get mad. You get angry. You get depressed. But then you choose to either sit there and wait to die,or you get up and you move on. Once you make that decision, then you can find humor.'
Sometimes, he found the humor in himself.
When a law clerk walked him into a courtroom wall, he snapped, 'You're fired. Bring back my guide dog.' Laughter filled the room.
He was born in Ithaca, N.Y., and played football at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center,he worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 1960 to 1963, getting convictions of three Russian spies.
By 1964, he joined a firm now called Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, focusing on securities and corporate litigation.
That same year, he learned he had retinitis pigmentosa. He lost his vision entirely in 1987, just after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl. A seasonticket holder since 1961, he continued to attend games.
His survivors include a son, Richard Conway Casey Jr., and a granddaughter.
Judge Casey had to overcome skeptics when he took on a load of 300 to 400 cases beginning in late 1997, using computer and audio technology while studyingdocuments and preparing to speak in court.
Some questioned whether a blind judge could accurately assess the credibility of a witness he could not see. Judge Casey said truth could be found by followingthe facts to see if they held together in a coherent, logical way. He did occasionally swap a trademark case with a colleague because it depended on visualobservation.
Bras found, with panties still at large: (New York Times)
Bras Found, With Panties Still at Large By JONATHAN MILLER Some days it doesn't pay to stop for a bite at Chuck E. Cheese's, especially if you're travelingaround with more than 100 stolen bras.
Just a day after two men and a woman made off with more than $15,000 in undergarments from a Victoria's Secret store in Jersey City, more than 100 braswere stolen from a Victoria's Secret in South Jersey.
This time the police made an arrest, although they have yet to determine whether the two crimes are related. I'm hoping it's the same people,' Lt. ChristinePetersen, a detective in the Jersey City Police Department, said yesterday. It sounds pretty good. But until we see the videotape, we can't say for sure.'
The police in Burlington Township, about 70 miles south of Jersey City, said that about 4 p.m. on Wednesday they received a call from an employee at Victoria'sSecret in the Burlington Center Mall, who said that the store had been burglarized by two men and a woman.
Minutes later, the police there responded to another call, this time a report of 'suspicious suspects' in a nearby Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant, accordingto Lt. Wayne Maver.
Inside the restaurant, Lieutenant Maver said, officers came upon Helmut Happe, 23, and Stephanie Chamba, 21, Ecuadorean immigrants from Union City, N.J.,who in their car and in their possession had 108 bras -- but no panties. Maybe a third guy got off with the other merchandise,' the lieutenant said.
Mr. Happe and Ms. Chamba are being held in the Burlington County jail, charged with shoplifting, possession of stolen property and possession of burglarytools. The police are seeking the third suspect.
On Tuesday, two men and one woman stole 189 bras and 145 panties, valued at $15,500, from the Victoria's Secret in the Newport Center Mall in Jersey City.The police had originally reported the figure at a little under $12,000, but they said that a subsequent check of the store's inventory yielded a higherfigure.
The police said the thefts were strikingly similar: three people working in concert and using shopping bags lined with aluminum foil -- known as boosterbags -- to thwart electronic detection systems.
Lieutenant Petersen said the police were still working on comparing images taken from an in-store videotape in Jersey City with photographs in BurlingtonTownship.
Lieutenant Petersen said that many people had asked her recently how someone could walk off with so many undergarments. There was a simple explanation,she said: 'Have you looked at Victoria's Secret panties? There's not much there.'
Just a day after two men and a woman made off with more than $15,000 in undergarments from a Victoria's Secret store in Jersey City, more than 100 braswere stolen from a Victoria's Secret in South Jersey.
This time the police made an arrest, although they have yet to determine whether the two crimes are related. I'm hoping it's the same people,' Lt. ChristinePetersen, a detective in the Jersey City Police Department, said yesterday. It sounds pretty good. But until we see the videotape, we can't say for sure.'
The police in Burlington Township, about 70 miles south of Jersey City, said that about 4 p.m. on Wednesday they received a call from an employee at Victoria'sSecret in the Burlington Center Mall, who said that the store had been burglarized by two men and a woman.
Minutes later, the police there responded to another call, this time a report of 'suspicious suspects' in a nearby Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant, accordingto Lt. Wayne Maver.
Inside the restaurant, Lieutenant Maver said, officers came upon Helmut Happe, 23, and Stephanie Chamba, 21, Ecuadorean immigrants from Union City, N.J.,who in their car and in their possession had 108 bras -- but no panties. Maybe a third guy got off with the other merchandise,' the lieutenant said.
Mr. Happe and Ms. Chamba are being held in the Burlington County jail, charged with shoplifting, possession of stolen property and possession of burglarytools. The police are seeking the third suspect.
On Tuesday, two men and one woman stole 189 bras and 145 panties, valued at $15,500, from the Victoria's Secret in the Newport Center Mall in Jersey City.The police had originally reported the figure at a little under $12,000, but they said that a subsequent check of the store's inventory yielded a higherfigure.
The police said the thefts were strikingly similar: three people working in concert and using shopping bags lined with aluminum foil -- known as boosterbags -- to thwart electronic detection systems.
Lieutenant Petersen said the police were still working on comparing images taken from an in-store videotape in Jersey City with photographs in BurlingtonTownship.
Lieutenant Petersen said that many people had asked her recently how someone could walk off with so many undergarments. There was a simple explanation,she said: 'Have you looked at Victoria's Secret panties? There's not much there.'
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Violence in Singur: A must-read article by Kunal Chattopadhyay
Violence in Singur: Hardselling Capitalist Globalization in the nameof Left Alternative
Kunal Chattopadhyay
Several thousand police and paramilitary forces arenow roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghlydistrict, West Bengal. On 2nd December, they firedtear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a fewoutside supporters who had gone to the area.Television channels, so far strongly supportive of themoves of the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government, nowfound themselves projecting a story totally atvariance with the words their newscasters were beingmade to utter. Even as the bourgeois media went onmouthing claims that locals (later changed toOutsiders) were attacking the police, what could beseen , for example on the Kolkata or the Tara Newschannels, or even in Star-Ananda, was the picture ofhalf a dozen hulking cops converging on individualhapless villagers, and brutally beating them up withtruncheons. One could also see the tear gas shellsbeing lobbed and the rubber bullets being fired, andhuge paddy dumps being set on fire. All the while, theChannels were seeking to divert attention by askingviewers to send sms on whether they condemned thebehaviour of the (right-wing opposition) TrinamoolCongress members' action in smashing up property inthe Vidhan Sabha (the State legislature, where TMCMLAs had gone berserk on 1st December).
Left wing Model of Development?To understand what was happening we need to go backand look at the model of development being pushed bythe Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government. WhenBhattacharjee replaced Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister,it was a signal to the Indian capitalist class as wellas capitalists from everywhere else, that a newattitude was being developed by the CPI(M). Singur isnot an isolated case. All over India, the process oftaking over peasants' land is going on. The SpecialEconomic Zone Bill says that the SEZs created bytaking over land will be like a foreign country. Thosewho invest capital in those areas will function underlaws different from the laws for the people throughoutthe country. In Kharagpur, West Bengal, the Tatas wantanother 1240 acre land. Total targeted land in WestBengal is nearly 1,00,000 acres. In Gujarat, it is theReliance group that is staking major claims. Farmersin Gujarat are fighting the Reliance group just asfarmers in West Bengal are fighting the Tatas. Inaddition there are transnational companies. The Salimgroup of Indonesia were feted a short while back bythe Left Front ministers. The group had a strong roleduring the coup in Indonesia that led to the murder ofsome half a million communists. But that is all oldhat, and seemingly the left ministers cannot bebothered by such sentimental issues when behaving likehardheaded businesspersons.
It is in this context that the government's plan forSingur must be seen. The story of the "industrialturn-around" of West Bengal begins with the electionresults earlier in 2006. The CPI(M) led Front had wona thumping victory, thanks to the first past the postsystem. With just over 50% votes, it had obtained 235seats, reducing all oppositions to such a minorproportion that as per legislative assembly rulesthere could not even be a formal leader of theopposition. As the CM was addressing a pressconference at the CPI(M) office, an aide brought in amessage, and the elated CM informed the press that theTatas wanted to build a car factory in West Bengal.Within a few days, a hush hush deal was struck. TheTatas asked for close to 1000 acres of primeagricultural land – nothing else would do for them.The government complied with such alacrity that onemight be pardoned for thinking that they were boundserfs of the Tatas. They did not consult the GramSabha or any other elected local bodies, though eventheir gurus at the World Bank go through the motionsof 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 willput West Bengal in the industrial map of India.According to CPI(M) Politbureau member and West BengalState Party Secretary Biman Bose, those who areopposing the move are fronting for other big companieswho sell overpriced cars!
We need to look a little more closely at the entireprocess. The land that Tata wants is primeagricultural land. There is plenty of poor qualityland in West Bengal, for example in Purulia district,or elsewhere. Plenty of old industries are in crisisand their land could also have been converted. Butthis particular area has a good road connection, as itlinks up with the Delhi Road. That is the first realreason why Tata is pushing for this, and only thisarea. A second reason, likely to come up after adecade, will be argued below.
So how did the state government act? Did it, in itsnew found faith in market economics, tell Ratan Tataand his minions to go and negotiate land price withthe peasants? Even that would have been detrimental tothe sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, ifdirect sale of land had simply ousted them. Butkeeping to the spurious logic of the free market, atleast this should have been done. Instead, the stategovernment used an act, the Land Acquisitions Act,which was originally devised in the colonial period,to take over the peasants' land. They were offered aprice worked out as the average of the previous threeyears' 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, itseems Tata will not even pay this much to thegovernment. According to Debabrata Bandyopadhyay,former Commissioner, Land Reforms, West Bengal, (andwho is, according to many people, the mainburueacratic impulse behind Operation Barga, theregistration of sharecroppers, the reform measure thata generation back had enabled the Left Front to gainsolid and unwavering rural support), the governmenthas in fact saddled the people of West Bengal with ahuge burden in order to bring in Tata Motors.The West Bengal government claims this investment willcreate many new jobs and be a major developmentalproject. What is the truth? Between 1980 and 1994,General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the three top UScar manufacturers, cut down the total number of theirglobal employees from 7,50,000 to 3,75,000. Why shouldthe Tatas behave any differently? If they are reallygoing to sell cars at the rate of Rs. 1 lakh (US $2246), they will be cutting costs. They have nointention of running a loss making factory.
Another question is, why do they want nearly 1000acres of land? Maruti-Suzuki, a major car manufacturerin India, need 296 acres of land on which they produceover 600,000 cars per year. Moreover, we shouldremember that while Maruti builds the entire car inits factory, Tata will only assemble the car there. Sowhat is all this land needed for? It is likely, thatafter the hue and cry has died out, much of this landwould be reconverted to agricultural land, but run bythe Tatas as an agribusiness. Reliance in Gujarat isgoing in for marketing organic food. The HindustanMotors of the Birla Group, which had been given about750 acres of land in Konnagar half a century back,could use only 350 acres and has now sought permissionto reconvert the rest of the land. Moreover, plenty ofindustrial land was left, for example in the Durgapurindustrial area. So targeting high qualityagricultural land and insisting that nothing else willdo is bound to create this kind of doubt. Clearly, thetale of alternative, left wing model of developmentpeddled by Battacharjee, his industries ministerNirupom Sen, and his finance minister Ashim Dasgupta,is a murky tale indeed.
Media reports indicate that the land is being takenover by the West Bengal Industrial DevelopmentCorporation at a cost of Rs. 140 crores. The Tatashave informed the West Bengal Government that theywill compensate the government to the tune of 20 crorerupees after five years with a 0.01 per cent interest.The discounted value of the money in today's termswill be about 12 crore rupees. So the West Bengalgovernment is giving to the Tatas the sum of Rs. 128crore rupees (28749185 US dollars). This money willcome either from taxes, or from loans contracted bythe WBIDC, which again must be repaid through taxes orthrough cutting costs in social sectors like healthand education.
The most important issue of course is the story ofsacrifices. Ever since independence, when foreigncolonialism could no longer be blamed directly, peoplehave been asked to make sacrifices for the nation. Notvery surprising, though, that it is workers and poorpeasants, tribals and low caste people, who end upmaking the sacrifices, while the wealthy, thebourgeoisie, the urban middle and upper middle class,the upper castes, all end up with profits. For whom isBhattacharjee proposing this development? For Tata?For the shareholders of Tata's companies? What aboutthe ordinary people? The peasants are being given apaltry compensation. Even that is murky. In manycases, the land was sold to other people, by a smallnumber of landed elements who knew about the deal inadvance. But they still had the papers, so they wereidentified 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 aspeasants. Cash compensation is no good to them forthey will not be able to use the cash in an effectiveway. Urbanisation of the area, inevitable if a factorycomes up, will raise the cost of living. Thelandowners are not going to become traders all atonce. 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, areaffected. While peasants here are not rich farmers,nor are they absolutely poor. Net income of the ownerof 1 acre of land is about Rs. 1,00,000. So for 1000acres 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 orlandowners (in some cases the owners are absentee),there are the share-croppers and agriculturallabourers. All told, some 7/8 thousand people areemployed, and their total income, Rs 250 million, wasbeing added to the GDP of West Bengal. This seven toeight thousand is based on economic calculationssuggesting that for around 5000/6000 peasants therewill be an added 1200 or so share-croppers and about1000 agricultural labourers. And how many workers willthe Tatas employ? Despite the Right to InformationAct, in West Bengal all real information is firmlyhidden. The West Bengal Government has refused todivulge these figures to organisations who have soughtthem. But one such organisation estimates it will bearound 250 employees. If their average monthly incomeis pegged at Rs. 50,000 the total wage bill will be150 million rupees (This average takes in the highsalaries of the managerial cadre). Then there will bethe profits of the shareholders and the concern, whichafter all is the main reason for this investment.Clearly, this is a model of development that willintensify disparities.
If Fraud does not Work, Use Force:Initially, the government went into raptures about thebenefits to the province. Somehow, though, thepeasants did not respond. And so, pressure on thembegan to mount. Apprehensive of losing their solesafeguard to life, the farmers got together to launcha resistance movement under the banner of 'KrishijamiRaksha Samiti' (Association for the Protection ofAgricultural Land). From the very beginning, womenhave been in the forefront of the movement. Inrecollection of a famous song of the tebhaga movement,the greatest peasants' movement in Bengal in thetwentieth century, with 'life and honour as stakes,'they began to 'hone the scythe.'[1] The stategovernment, hardly bothered about the plight of thefarmers, remained stubborn, repeatedly reiteratingthat the Tata factory would come up on that piece ofland. If the slogan of the alleged Rambhaktas (the RSSand its allied outfits) was 'Mandir wahin banayenge"(the temple will be built just at that spot), theslogan of West Bengal's alleged bam (left) CM was"factory wahin banayenge". On 25 September, there wasa massive attack. In a pre-planned move, a reign ofterror was unleashed on thousands of peacefulprotesters at the Block Development Officer's officein Singur. It was the first day cheques were beinghanded over to those who had agreed to hand over theland for compensation, and the demonstration was aform of pressure on them as well. By the afternoon,several cases were detected in which those who hadalready sold off their land to others, but themutation process was not complete, were being givencheques, denying the present legal owner. Protestingsuch illegal deeds by government officials, thedemonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, evengheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period.At this point, Mamata Banerjee, leader and Supremo ofthe Trinamool congress, arrived and joined the dharna.A little after midnight, a black-out was created, andunder 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 toCalcutta by force, and had to be admitted to ahospital.
Hundreds were severely injured in the police assaultand 72 put behind bars. Women with small children werearrested under the Arms Act and/or charged withattempt to murder. Payel Bag, atwo-and-a-half- year-old, spent four days in prison,along with two pre-teen boys. 26-year-old RajkumarBhul became the first martyr of the Singur struggleafter he collapsed with severe internal haemorrhagefrom police beating. Bhul's mother, in an open letterto the Chief Minister, squarely blamed him for herson's death. According to Sumit Chowdhury, one of themost commited "outsider" activists, who has beenwriting and organising solidarity, when he went toSingur two days later as part of a fact finding team,and also during subsequent trips, "the hapless andangry women in the villages – some with broken arms,bandaged eyes and scars here and there – said that thepolicemen were drunk, cursed in the filthiestlanguage, kicked and molested them".
The subsequent responses not only of the government,not only of one or two individuals, but of the entireCPI(M) was damning. Prakash Karat, the GeneralSecretary of the CPI(M), who has never set foot inSingur, announced from the CPI(M) headquarters inDelhi that Singur has one-crop land, that the farmersare queuing up for cash, and that the demonstratorswere anti-development hoodlums. Evidently, theprotests against land takeover for SEZs and similarissues are reserved for provinces where the CPI(M) isnot a major partner in the government. Equallyevidently, when Prakash Karat wrote his introductionto a recent publication entitled The Left andEnvironmentalism, he should have entered a caveat thatall his pious utterances do not apply to West Bengaland his comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.On the night of the violence, Buddhadev Bhattacharjeehad his alibi. He and other party top brass were inDelhi. But the alibi is thin. The same day, he alsomet the Tata top management. The next day, there was areport about a community package promised by the Tatasfor Singur. But examined carefully, it was mostlyverbiage. One needs to remember that the massiveinvestment of the in Orissa and Jharkhand, two ofEastern India's poorest provinces (though very rich inminerals and forest resources), has not led to anypositive development in the conditions of poorpeasants, tribals, and others. On returning toCalcutta, the CM posed as injured Christ, stating,"forgive them for they know not what they do". After ahuge outcry, two days later he was forced to say thatpolice action had been "unwarranted". But no singlepoliceman is known to have been punished.At a meeting called by the Chief Minister, even anumber of Left Front partners criticised the way thefactory was coming up, but at the end of the meetingthe government announced that the Tata Motors factorywould come up on Singur at any cost. On 9th October,the opposition parties, both right and left, called atwelve hour bandh (general strike including totalstoppage of public activities). The CPI(M) threatenedto unleash its cadres.[2] But if anything, this threatmade 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 thegovernment, was treated as a member of one of theMaoist groups.[3]
Terror was of different kinds. Nirupom Sen, theindustries minister, warned the locals that alldevelopmental work in Singur would be halted if landwas not handed over. One minister even termedopposition to the project as 'anti-national' . As aresult of this unrelenting government pressure, someland transfer began. There was an added dimension tothe handing over. As we noted earlier, some people hadactually sold the land to others, but the mutation hadnot been done. So they took advantage of this to claimcompensation.
The struggle continued nonetheless, and thereforeterror took on more concrete shapes. Several of thedeep tube-wells of the area, essential for regularirrigation of the fields, were vandalised at night.And this happened despite the massive (already, atthat point, several hundred) policemen and womenposted in the region. From early November, agitationand terror both stepped up, with the governmentthreatening to take over the land and hand it over tothe Tatas at any cost by December. Women played amilitant role, resisting all threats andblandishments.
One of the regular refrains of the government and theCPI(M) was that the real owner have acceptedcompensation, it is outsiders who are causing trouble.We will discuss the issue of "outsiders" later. Herewe should note that indeed, the lead in the strugglewas taken, not by well to do peasants, but by sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and the smallerowners. This is the rural mix which fought six decadesback, in the tebhaga uprising.[4] This was the basewhich gave the left its decisive majority even in theoccasional periods in the last three decades when inthe cities the Left was on the defensive. So it wasinevitable that the Left Front, notably the CPI(M),would not be willing to accept that this base will nowspeak in its own voice. Yet that was inevitable. Thetebhaga movement had been so massively successfulbecause the authentic voice of the rural poor had beenwell represented by the undivided CPI and the AllIndia Kisan Sabha. By the present decade, the AIKS wasa bureaucratised carcass living on the memory of pastglories. Present day leaders of the AIKS have not evenseen the tebhaga. The younger among them becameleaders after the Left Front was already in power. Sofor them the role of the peasant organisation is tocollect money, collect votes, and on occasion collectlots of people in trucks and take them to Calcutta forcentral rallies. The apparently impressiveanti-imperialist demonstrations, and so on, organisedby the CPI(M) conceal a reality where massorganisations act as transmission belts of a highcommand, herding people in different ways. And soresentment and opposition grows. In Singur, the directattack on livelihood turned the sullen resentment intoorganised politics, as the Krishijami Raksha Samitibrought together most of this rural poor, albeit in asmall area. This challenge could never be allowed togrow. The Left Front has always been sensitive to theemergence of left wing oppositions and alternativesfrom within the working class and poor peasantry. Itis aware that it has little to fear if the right wingis even fully mobilised. As long as there is noserious left wing alternative, it can expect to getfairly close to half the votes every time, andtherefore get a majority in the first-past-the postsystem. Mamata Banerjee was the only right-wing leaderto recognise this, and therefore to develop a populistpolitical style. But lacking a solid trade union andrural poor implantation, she has never, even at hermost creditworthy performance proved to be a match forthe CPI(M).
Every time a single trade union, or a single ruralarea, has shown autonomy, the CPI(M) has thrown moreforces in the field to smash it, than it has fordefeating its right wing opponents. Early in the LeftFront period, electricity workers had a couple of leftwing, but non-Left Front Unions – the Workers' Unionand the Technical Workers Union, in a number ofplants. Repeated violence, repeated attacks on theworkers, arrests, were used indiscriminately to smashthe unions. In the 1990s, the struggle of the KanoriaJute Mills took on epic proportions, as did theregime's attempts to malign the struggle. So inretrospect, it was not, or should not have beensurprising, that despite (or because of) its Leftcredential, this regime was more aggressive to thepeasant struggle than almost any other regime inIndia.
Since this may sound a bit of a hyperbole, let us takea concrete, very right wing example, to make ourpoint. Medha Patkar has already made the point. A lotof people thought Medha was indulging in shock tacticswhen she said the Left Front is worse than the Gujaratgovernment.[ 5] But this is the picture if we restrictourselves to the attitude to peasants andindustrialisation, and the violence on them. Patkarargued that even in Gujarat, she had not beenrestricted 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 PresidencyCollege, Calcutta, to speak at the invitation ofstudents there, SFI thugs beat up students of theIndependent consolidation, and the college authoritiesshut the gates on her face. She then climbed on top ofthe gates and spoke. But we can also go beyond whatshe said to add another point. In Gujarat, thegovernment made a commitment that it would provideland for land to all the people ousted due to theSardar Sarovar Dam. The Narmada Bachao Andolan arguedthat it cannot be done. Indeed, proper land-for-landrehabilitation has not proved possible even for thosewho have been properly identified. As I saw in twotrips earlier this year, village communities have beensplit up, with one village resettled in 8-10 newsites. People have been given plots for cultivation,but not enough grazing land and open fields necessaryfor their survival. Often there are conflicts with theoriginal inhabitants. Sometimes, after people weresettled, this new land was partially taken away inorder to build the canal network that would carry thewaters from the dam to the target areas. Sorehabilitation has received much flak. But if we lookat the entire process, we find two waves of campaigns.We find a fairly long period, so that people could getsome information and try and seek redress. Pro-dam butpro-rehabilitation NGOs, such as Arch-Vahini and itsactivists like Anil Patel, waged one type of campaign.They sought a compromise, and the whole concept ofland-for-land rehabilitation came because of suchinterventions. When the NBA, led by Patkar and others,criticises the rehabilitation and resettlementschemes, it is because they see the land-for-landproposal as inadequate in theory and fraudulent inpractice. They see it breaking up the community,creating much social disorder, and all for the benefitof small elite groups. Whether they are right aboutthe dam benefiting only small groups is of course muchdebated. But we have sought to show that the pictureis much more open and shut in the case of West Bengal.The peasants, share-croppers and agriculturallabourers are being pushed out of land. They are notgetting any alternative land. Many are not getting anyrehabilitation at all. It is our experience, fromMadhya Pradesh, were the government has used cashcompensation rather than land-for-land rehabilitationwhenever possible, that peasants, unaccustomed tolarge sums of money, sent it on consumer goods, onbuilding big houses, and so on. At the end of arelatively short period, many of them had neither landnor money. Of course, if we extrapolate from this andargue that in all respects the West Bengal governmentis worse, we would be in error. But Patkar has notmade such a sweeping generalisation, nor are we.Perhaps confirmation of a different kind came in thenewspapers recently. On 5th December, Ananda BazarPatrika reported that there were differences withinthe BJP. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had toldhis party that it is opportunistic of them to try toexploit Buddhadev Bhattacharjee' s recent difficulties,and they should support him over the issue of landacquisition.
November 30 – December 2 and the aftermath:On 30th December, Mamata Banerjee and her supporterswere prevented from going to Singur, because Section144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, disallowing anycongregation of five or more persons, had been clampedin that entire area. Angry, and losing her head as sheis often accustomed to doing, Ms. Banerjee told hersupporters to turn their motor cavalcade back anddrive straight to the West Bengal LegislativeAssembly. From late afternoon, TV channels had a fieldday. No sports, no cartoon channel could compete withthe live show, and then the re-runs, of MLAs smashingfurniture, and generally wrecking havoc. Then shecalled for a Bengal bandh on 1st December. In view ofthe massive publicity given to the antics of herparty, the bandh was a partial failure, even in areasthought to be her stronghold. South Calcutta, herpersonal fief, alone saw a near complete shut down. Anemboldened Bhattacharyya moved in for the kill. On 2ndDecember, several thousand police started stormingSingur. According to Samir Saha, reporting in theBengali Dainik Statesman, ordinary police, RapidAction Force and State Armed Police all togethernumbered 20,000. Even the pro-CPI(M) Kolkata TVchannel reported at least 6000 police. From the first,they seemed to have been instructed to go on theoffensive. A wide area was surrounded, and then teargas firing began at random. The next task was to findout the aggrieved peasants. For the police, it was ofcourse difficult to know who was an aggrieved peasantand who a party loyalist. So this task had been givento party cadres. As Ganashakti, the CPI(M) daily,admitted on 4th December, in many cases localsthemselves were identifying and fighting theopposition. Only, they were not fighting alone. Theywere moving as agents of the police, identifyingspecific houses.
There was of course some resistance. And theresistance acted as proof that the police attack wasright and proper. But if paddy stacks are set on fire,if even tomorrow's food, let alone next year's, issnatched away thereby, who would not resist? Sopeasants, already pledged to resist till the end, didstrike back. The fight was utterly uneven. Stones,knives, perhaps a few crude home-made bombs (if at allwe are to give credence to this part of the policestory) were hurled. According to the Chief Minister,the violence was entirely the work of outsiders,anti-socials, SUCI and Naxalites.[6] CPI(M) StateSecretaiat member and long time trade union leaderShyamal Chakraborty asserted, "The police wereattacked first. The police showed great restraint. Ifthey had not tackled in this manner they themselveswould have been beaten up."[7]
From the paddy fields, reporter Ashish Ghosh could seethe 'anti-socials' being dragged into police camps.They included lungi-clad aged peasants, as well asyoung rural women. Near the highway, Ghosh could see adifferent scene. The Superintendent of Policesmilingly reporting to the Inspector General, "Sir, wehave already arrested fifty. By tonight we will set upcamp at Beraberi.", and the IG responding, "in threemore days we will complete the operation". Sittingnext to the police was the CPI(M) Panchayat PradhanDibakar Das. Food packets were being brought from acar for the high officers and their cadre friends.Meanwhile ripe paddy was being trampled underfoot orset on fire, one scene even the most pro-governmentchannel could not avoid shoeing, since in one casethat was also a major battle field which the channelswere keen to sow, since it "proved' their claim thatit was all the work of outsiders.
The Outsider:For the last two months, the 'outsider' has been amajor target of CPI(M) propaganda, especially outsideSingur. On 4th December, Ganashakti wrote, onlyoutsiders are resisting the government at Singur.Ephemera are always bolder. So a poster put up by theStudents' Federation of India, the student wing of theCPI(M), asserted that urban people dressed as peasantshad done all the mischief. In other words, even if yousee peasants being beaten up on TV, don't worry, theywere all urban Naxalites playing at revolution inSingur. Ganashakti of course charged Medha Patkar too,with being an outsider. A CPI(M) leader, evidentlymore illiterate than the average, asked why she didnot agitate in Gujarat against land take over, and whyshe came to West Bengal. Medha, typical of her trackrecord, managed to get to Singur despite the thousandsof cops and plenty of party cadres keeping a watch onoutsiders. This of course suggested she had a lot oflocal sympathisers and insider help. But of course, werule out such a possibility a priori. And so,Ganashakti also had a big story about how many routesthere are to Singur, and why the police failed to stopNaxalites and Medha Patkar from entering the village.Medha confronted the police, and for her pains she,Association for the Protection of Democratic Rightsactivist Amitadyuti Kumar, and Sumit Chowdhury werearrested, dragged to a car and thrown out. She wasthen taken to a State Government Guest House inCalcutta, seemingly because someone higher up hadrealised that a faux pas had been committed. But sherefused to be a guest of the State Government. Afterspending the entire night in the police van, fromwhich she refused to budge, she gave the police aslipand went off to Chandernagore, where the seventyarrested people had been kept.
If Medha Patkar was one outsider, the "Naxalites" wereanother category. As the CM told the media on the 3rd,there had been students of Jadavpur Univeristy. Thiswas a coded signal. Jadavpur University, rated inrecent times by the UGC as one of India's top five,has an ill-reputation because all its teachers are nothousebroken partisans of the CPI(M), and even more,because the Faculty of Engineering and TechnologyStudents' Union has been under the uninterruptedcontrol, since 1977, of the Democratic Students Front,a non-party far left association which has allowed inevery shade of radical left, Maoist, Trotskyist, andother. As late as 2005, JU engineering students hadbeen beaten up by the police in order to break apeaceful hunger strike. So when Bhattacharjee said JUstudents, he implied radical left, militant, and"mal-adjusted" . Yet how many JU students did theyfind? Out of the around seventy arrested, there is onestudent of JU, currently in a hospital, with a brokenhand.
Another arrested "outsider" is Swapna Banerjee. Afifty year old school teacher, Banerjee is a member ofthe Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha. Women'sinvolvement in the struggles led to her being closelyinvolved in the area for several months. Immediately,The Telegraph, on 3rd December, invented a story thatshe was the main ultra-left figure in organising andfomenting trouble.[8] Between the police, the ChiefMinister, and the inventive staff of The Telegraph,local resistance was wiped off the map. Becharam Mannabecame a non-person, as did 81 year old Saraswati, whogave an interview to Soma Marik a few days earlier andpromised to continue fighting till the end.[9]But there is another, even more crucial aspect of theinvention of the outsider. On one hand, we are toldthat even the nation is too small a unit. We are askedto accept globalisation as the inevitable goal. On theother hand, in every battle where we try to organiseresistance, we are told we are outsiders, or that wehave outsiders amongst us. Medha Patkar is of coursethe great outsider in India. She has been branded anoutsider in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, and now inWest Bengal. In Gujarat, the regional language papersare always attacking her, arguing that as an outsidershe has no business talking about the Sardar SarovarDam on the Narmada, which is supposedly the sole hopefor Saurashtra and Kutch. In Madhya Pradesh, I wasasked why Medha Patkar is sniping at the MPgovernment, and not at others. And for the last fewdays, the CPI(M) and the media that has, in theinterests of big capital, placed itself entirely atthe disposal of the CPI(M) for the moment, argued thatas an outsider, Patkar has no business in West Bengal.In flagrant violation of law, she was stoppedrepeatedly from going to Singur, even when she was notviolating Section 144 of the CrPC. She was kept lockedup, along with Anuradha Talwar of the SramajeebiMahila Samity, at Dankuni on the night of 4thDecember, and told on the 5th that she could goanywhere else but Singur. Yet, she had not beenformally arrested, so she could not be served anexternment order. In other words, what was being doneto her was sheer hooliganism, even if done by men inuniforms, backed by a Chief Minister.
What was unique was not the charge, "outsiders". Thisis a necessary salami tactics applied by rulers. Theywould like each fight to be an isolated one. They canbring 20,000 police from all over West Bengal, but thepeasants of Singur have to be alone. For they know, atthe present level of class struggle probably betterthan the toiling people, that in solidarity and unityalone lie chances of victory.
What was unique was something else. This was the factthat a so-called Communist Party is doing thepropaganda. After all, exactly who built this party?What was its founding ideology? Were Muzaffar Ahmed,S.A. Dange, themselves factory workers? How many acresof land did Muhammad Abdullah Rasul or BankimMukherjee cultivate? Did not Somnath Lahiri say, thatthey were often called the "strike-babus" , becausethey would rush to any mill where a strike had brokenout, in the hope of making contact with militantworkers. And even if we forget those heroic pioneersof the early twentieth century, and concentrate on theprosaic present day leaders, Shyamal Chakraborty isstill hailed as a Centre of Indian Trades Unionleader. When did he last, if ever, work in a factory?Is it not a fact that Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechuryrepresent West Bengal in the Upper House ofParliament? If the CPI(M) is going to turn regionalchauvinist at this date, should it not start byinquiring about how that could happen? We for our partbelieve that the Leninist party building conceptclearly rejects this particular notion of "insider"and "outsider". We are even prepared to concede thatwithin the parliamentary framework, even a CPI(M),which is certainly not a Leninist party, can sendKarat to parliament from wherever they are sure of asafe seat. The question is, why then the chauvinisticwitch-hunt unleashed on Medha Patkar? What this showsis, behind the mask of regionalism and localism is theclass position. And it forces everyone to startrethinking the nature of the CPI(M). How many milesmust a party walk right, till it ceases to be a partof the left?
After 2nd December:The struggle is difficult after 2nd December. Theorganisation of resistance has been crushed for themoment by stationing 20,000 police. Arrests have meantthat energies have gone into court cases; money has togo for putting up bail bonds. But the struggle is notover. On 5th December, a few small parties, the SUCI,and two of the CPI(ML) groups called a bandh. Despiteall bluster, TV channels could only prove that roadswere empty, buses plied empty, and the Chamber ofCommerce expressed unhappiness at the losses incurred(surely the losses were due to the success, not thefailure of the bandh). On 8th December, a march toSingur, called by two CPI(ML) groups, was brutallybeaten up by the police. Hundreds were injured. Trueto form, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported only theviolence 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 andthe Trinamool Congress (these choice epithets areoften used by CPI(M) leaders). Long years in power hasenabled the CPI(M) to use a patronage network and getplenty of intellectuals, not the most straight-backedof all beings, to line up with it and paint it inglowing terms. But the violence resulted incondemnations pouring in from many intellectuals andartistes of Bengal. Mahasweta Devi, internationallyreputed author, issued a short, blunt statement: "Thisis a war. Ask yourself, on which side are you? Let warmeet war." Well known leftist poet Sankho Ghosh, aTagore scholar of great repute, condemned the attackson the peasants and committed himself to organisedprotest mvements. Artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyaycondemned the arrest of Medha Patkar and questionedwhy, if India is a democracy, she did not have theright to go to Singur. Statements came from singersPratul Mukhopadhyay and Srikanata Acharya, poets likeNirendranath Chakraborty and Mallika Sengupta, authorslike Sanjib Chattopadhyay, film director HaranathChakraborty, academics like Esha De of CalcuttaUniversity, Avee Dutta-Majumdar of Saha Institute ofNuclear Physics, around thirty teachers of Jadavpuruniversity who took part in a silent demonstration inthe University campus, and others. The students ofEngineering Faculty in Jadavpur University boycottedthe first day of their end-of-semester examination asa mark of protest. On 8th December, Medha Patkar spokeat both Presidency College, Calcutta, and JadavpurUniversity, at the invitation of students. A number ofonline petitions have also been launched, while twoprotest letters have been sent to the Governor of WestBengal, the Chairperson of the National Human RightsCommission and the National Commission for Women,signed by human rights and womens' organisation, NGOs,and networks as well as by leftwing groups. Well knownacademics who are also activists, like Achin Vanaikand Professor Vibhuti Patel, also signed them.Arundhati Roy, Mainstream Editor Sumit Chakravarty,were among those who protested in Delhi, in front ofthe CPI(M) office.
Yet an organised force like the CPI(M), backed by thebulk of the media, which is not even reportingprotests in any even handed manner, will certainly tryto turn all these into a three-day wonder, urgingpeople to move on to other things. The leadingnewspaper in West Bengal, Ananda Bazar Patrika, andits English counterpart, The Telegraph, have taken thelead in this. Reporting the massive violence, TheTelegraph sought to play it down, to trivialize it, byusing tennis match rhetoric about post-police action,it was "advantage Mamata". It pontificated editoriallythat in a democracy, street demonstrations werepursued by parties that do not have faith in thedemocratic system. And then it went on to cite asexample Lal Krishna Advani's notorious "ratha yatra"of 1989, which had stirred up communal riots in 43towns. As though that had been a street demonstration,and as though that could be used to justify theillegal externment of Medha Patkar.
The Singur land has been taken over, but the story isjust beginning. The West Bengal government proposes togive vaster stretches of land, for example to theSalim Group of Indonesia, again from peasants. Itproposes to take over land to build a nuclear powerplant. And even for Singur, there is at the least theneed to fight for a proper rehabilitation for thegreat many who have got nothing or next to nothing,for a land-for-land resettlement. International andnational solidarity is needed, particularly becauseStalinists all over the world today still point to theLeft Front as a shining example. CPI(M) MP NilotpalBasu's article on the Left Front was reprinted even inthe US progressive paper Guardian earlier this year.Even Noam Chomsky, the libertarian, found reasons topraise the Left Front government when he came toCalcutta. The myth of the Left Front as alternativehas to be disposed of, before a struggle for a realalternative can succeed. Let the tragedy of thepeasants of Singur create at least the possibility ofthat. They deserve such revenge.
[1] The first lines of the song went: Hei Samaalo dhanho kasteta dao shan hoJan kabul aar maan kabulAar debona aar debona rakte bona dhan moder jan hoOh keep a watch on the paddy, hone your scytheWith life and honour as stakeWe will never again hand over the paddy sown with ourlife's blood[2] Cadre has come to sound like an obscene andutterly alienating word in West Bengal. Cadre todayevokes the image of stick or other more murderousweapons wielding thugs, tragically carrying the redflag. Yet, notwithstanding the Stalinist nature of themajor left parties, and despite their clear reformistturn from 1942, and again after 1951 (there was ashort in-between period in 1948-51 when they hadbecome ultra-left) communist party cadre had meant themost sincere, dedicated social movement activist.[3] Though on paper in West Bengal none of the Maoistgroups are banned, in practice, people suspected ofMaoist affiliation are routinely arrested andvariously heckled and tortured by the police,especially outside Calcutta.[4] See Kunal Chattopadhyay, Tebhaga Andolaner Itihas,Kolkata, 1987, reprint, 1997. In English the mostdetailed study is Adrienne Cooper's Sharecropping andSharecroppers' Struggle in Bengal 1930-1950, Calcutta,1988.
[5] Medha Patkar made this point repeatedly, includingin a speech in Jadavpur University Campus on 8thDecember.[6] The Socialist Unity Centre of India is a smallerStalinist formation, opposed to the Left Front.Naxalite is a way of referring to the Maoists of alltrends, in view of the origin of Maoism in India fromthe peasant struggles in Naxalbari, in North Bengal.The CPI(ML) Liberation is active in Singur.[7] Dainik Statesman, 3 December 2006, page 1, newsbox 'Policer Kaaj Police Korechhe: Buddha' ('ThePolice have Done Their Duty: Buddha')[8] The Telegraph has been among the most consistentspokespersons of the ruling class. Whereas even TheStatesman, despite its historic connections with theTata family, has reported relatively objectively, TheTelegraph and its Bengali sister publication, AnandaBazar Patrika, have been running a sustained campaignvilifying protestors and arguing that there is noalternative to industrialization at any cost. TheTelegraph has indeed gone further. On 5th December, itran an editorial virtually calling for the suspensionof what little democracy remains in West Bengal.Entitled 'No Velvet Glove', the Editorial thundered:"The menace of Maoist violence is not new to WestBengal. When it had first surfaced in the late Sixtiesand early Seventies, it was eradicated throughcounter-violence. Mr Bhattacharjee must learn fromthat experience and nip the present movement in thebud before Maoist weeds strangle the hundred flowersof West Bengal." Even after the passage of decades,people still remember much of what had been done atthat time. The "eradication of Maoism" meant theCossipore-Baranagor e massacre, when an entire area hadbeen sealed off and every known youth connected theleasdt bit to the Naxalites murdered. It included themassive application of the Maintenance of InternalSecurity Act, from which Bush could learn somethingabout fighting terrorism. It included the killings ofprisoners. It included "encounters" where prisonerswere shot in the back and proclaimed dead inencounters.[9] Interview taken by Soma Marik, 19th November 2006.Courtesy Soma Marik.
Kunal Chattopadhyay
Several thousand police and paramilitary forces arenow roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghlydistrict, West Bengal. On 2nd December, they firedtear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a fewoutside supporters who had gone to the area.Television channels, so far strongly supportive of themoves of the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government, nowfound themselves projecting a story totally atvariance with the words their newscasters were beingmade to utter. Even as the bourgeois media went onmouthing claims that locals (later changed toOutsiders) were attacking the police, what could beseen , for example on the Kolkata or the Tara Newschannels, or even in Star-Ananda, was the picture ofhalf a dozen hulking cops converging on individualhapless villagers, and brutally beating them up withtruncheons. One could also see the tear gas shellsbeing lobbed and the rubber bullets being fired, andhuge paddy dumps being set on fire. All the while, theChannels were seeking to divert attention by askingviewers to send sms on whether they condemned thebehaviour of the (right-wing opposition) TrinamoolCongress members' action in smashing up property inthe Vidhan Sabha (the State legislature, where TMCMLAs had gone berserk on 1st December).
Left wing Model of Development?To understand what was happening we need to go backand look at the model of development being pushed bythe Buddhadev Bhattacharjee government. WhenBhattacharjee replaced Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister,it was a signal to the Indian capitalist class as wellas capitalists from everywhere else, that a newattitude was being developed by the CPI(M). Singur isnot an isolated case. All over India, the process oftaking over peasants' land is going on. The SpecialEconomic Zone Bill says that the SEZs created bytaking over land will be like a foreign country. Thosewho invest capital in those areas will function underlaws different from the laws for the people throughoutthe country. In Kharagpur, West Bengal, the Tatas wantanother 1240 acre land. Total targeted land in WestBengal is nearly 1,00,000 acres. In Gujarat, it is theReliance group that is staking major claims. Farmersin Gujarat are fighting the Reliance group just asfarmers in West Bengal are fighting the Tatas. Inaddition there are transnational companies. The Salimgroup of Indonesia were feted a short while back bythe Left Front ministers. The group had a strong roleduring the coup in Indonesia that led to the murder ofsome half a million communists. But that is all oldhat, and seemingly the left ministers cannot bebothered by such sentimental issues when behaving likehardheaded businesspersons.
It is in this context that the government's plan forSingur must be seen. The story of the "industrialturn-around" of West Bengal begins with the electionresults earlier in 2006. The CPI(M) led Front had wona thumping victory, thanks to the first past the postsystem. With just over 50% votes, it had obtained 235seats, reducing all oppositions to such a minorproportion that as per legislative assembly rulesthere could not even be a formal leader of theopposition. As the CM was addressing a pressconference at the CPI(M) office, an aide brought in amessage, and the elated CM informed the press that theTatas wanted to build a car factory in West Bengal.Within a few days, a hush hush deal was struck. TheTatas asked for close to 1000 acres of primeagricultural land – nothing else would do for them.The government complied with such alacrity that onemight be pardoned for thinking that they were boundserfs of the Tatas. They did not consult the GramSabha or any other elected local bodies, though eventheir gurus at the World Bank go through the motionsof 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 willput West Bengal in the industrial map of India.According to CPI(M) Politbureau member and West BengalState Party Secretary Biman Bose, those who areopposing the move are fronting for other big companieswho sell overpriced cars!
We need to look a little more closely at the entireprocess. The land that Tata wants is primeagricultural land. There is plenty of poor qualityland in West Bengal, for example in Purulia district,or elsewhere. Plenty of old industries are in crisisand their land could also have been converted. Butthis particular area has a good road connection, as itlinks up with the Delhi Road. That is the first realreason why Tata is pushing for this, and only thisarea. A second reason, likely to come up after adecade, will be argued below.
So how did the state government act? Did it, in itsnew found faith in market economics, tell Ratan Tataand his minions to go and negotiate land price withthe peasants? Even that would have been detrimental tothe sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, ifdirect sale of land had simply ousted them. Butkeeping to the spurious logic of the free market, atleast this should have been done. Instead, the stategovernment used an act, the Land Acquisitions Act,which was originally devised in the colonial period,to take over the peasants' land. They were offered aprice worked out as the average of the previous threeyears' 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, itseems Tata will not even pay this much to thegovernment. According to Debabrata Bandyopadhyay,former Commissioner, Land Reforms, West Bengal, (andwho is, according to many people, the mainburueacratic impulse behind Operation Barga, theregistration of sharecroppers, the reform measure thata generation back had enabled the Left Front to gainsolid and unwavering rural support), the governmenthas in fact saddled the people of West Bengal with ahuge burden in order to bring in Tata Motors.The West Bengal government claims this investment willcreate many new jobs and be a major developmentalproject. What is the truth? Between 1980 and 1994,General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, the three top UScar manufacturers, cut down the total number of theirglobal employees from 7,50,000 to 3,75,000. Why shouldthe Tatas behave any differently? If they are reallygoing to sell cars at the rate of Rs. 1 lakh (US $2246), they will be cutting costs. They have nointention of running a loss making factory.
Another question is, why do they want nearly 1000acres of land? Maruti-Suzuki, a major car manufacturerin India, need 296 acres of land on which they produceover 600,000 cars per year. Moreover, we shouldremember that while Maruti builds the entire car inits factory, Tata will only assemble the car there. Sowhat is all this land needed for? It is likely, thatafter the hue and cry has died out, much of this landwould be reconverted to agricultural land, but run bythe Tatas as an agribusiness. Reliance in Gujarat isgoing in for marketing organic food. The HindustanMotors of the Birla Group, which had been given about750 acres of land in Konnagar half a century back,could use only 350 acres and has now sought permissionto reconvert the rest of the land. Moreover, plenty ofindustrial land was left, for example in the Durgapurindustrial area. So targeting high qualityagricultural land and insisting that nothing else willdo is bound to create this kind of doubt. Clearly, thetale of alternative, left wing model of developmentpeddled by Battacharjee, his industries ministerNirupom Sen, and his finance minister Ashim Dasgupta,is a murky tale indeed.
Media reports indicate that the land is being takenover by the West Bengal Industrial DevelopmentCorporation at a cost of Rs. 140 crores. The Tatashave informed the West Bengal Government that theywill compensate the government to the tune of 20 crorerupees after five years with a 0.01 per cent interest.The discounted value of the money in today's termswill be about 12 crore rupees. So the West Bengalgovernment is giving to the Tatas the sum of Rs. 128crore rupees (28749185 US dollars). This money willcome either from taxes, or from loans contracted bythe WBIDC, which again must be repaid through taxes orthrough cutting costs in social sectors like healthand education.
The most important issue of course is the story ofsacrifices. Ever since independence, when foreigncolonialism could no longer be blamed directly, peoplehave been asked to make sacrifices for the nation. Notvery surprising, though, that it is workers and poorpeasants, tribals and low caste people, who end upmaking the sacrifices, while the wealthy, thebourgeoisie, the urban middle and upper middle class,the upper castes, all end up with profits. For whom isBhattacharjee proposing this development? For Tata?For the shareholders of Tata's companies? What aboutthe ordinary people? The peasants are being given apaltry compensation. Even that is murky. In manycases, the land was sold to other people, by a smallnumber of landed elements who knew about the deal inadvance. But they still had the papers, so they wereidentified 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 aspeasants. Cash compensation is no good to them forthey will not be able to use the cash in an effectiveway. Urbanisation of the area, inevitable if a factorycomes up, will raise the cost of living. Thelandowners are not going to become traders all atonce. 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, areaffected. While peasants here are not rich farmers,nor are they absolutely poor. Net income of the ownerof 1 acre of land is about Rs. 1,00,000. So for 1000acres 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 orlandowners (in some cases the owners are absentee),there are the share-croppers and agriculturallabourers. All told, some 7/8 thousand people areemployed, and their total income, Rs 250 million, wasbeing added to the GDP of West Bengal. This seven toeight thousand is based on economic calculationssuggesting that for around 5000/6000 peasants therewill be an added 1200 or so share-croppers and about1000 agricultural labourers. And how many workers willthe Tatas employ? Despite the Right to InformationAct, in West Bengal all real information is firmlyhidden. The West Bengal Government has refused todivulge these figures to organisations who have soughtthem. But one such organisation estimates it will bearound 250 employees. If their average monthly incomeis pegged at Rs. 50,000 the total wage bill will be150 million rupees (This average takes in the highsalaries of the managerial cadre). Then there will bethe profits of the shareholders and the concern, whichafter all is the main reason for this investment.Clearly, this is a model of development that willintensify disparities.
If Fraud does not Work, Use Force:Initially, the government went into raptures about thebenefits to the province. Somehow, though, thepeasants did not respond. And so, pressure on thembegan to mount. Apprehensive of losing their solesafeguard to life, the farmers got together to launcha resistance movement under the banner of 'KrishijamiRaksha Samiti' (Association for the Protection ofAgricultural Land). From the very beginning, womenhave been in the forefront of the movement. Inrecollection of a famous song of the tebhaga movement,the greatest peasants' movement in Bengal in thetwentieth century, with 'life and honour as stakes,'they began to 'hone the scythe.'[1] The stategovernment, hardly bothered about the plight of thefarmers, remained stubborn, repeatedly reiteratingthat the Tata factory would come up on that piece ofland. If the slogan of the alleged Rambhaktas (the RSSand its allied outfits) was 'Mandir wahin banayenge"(the temple will be built just at that spot), theslogan of West Bengal's alleged bam (left) CM was"factory wahin banayenge". On 25 September, there wasa massive attack. In a pre-planned move, a reign ofterror was unleashed on thousands of peacefulprotesters at the Block Development Officer's officein Singur. It was the first day cheques were beinghanded over to those who had agreed to hand over theland for compensation, and the demonstration was aform of pressure on them as well. By the afternoon,several cases were detected in which those who hadalready sold off their land to others, but themutation process was not complete, were being givencheques, denying the present legal owner. Protestingsuch illegal deeds by government officials, thedemonstrators sat on a dharna at the BDO office, evengheraoing the District Magistrate for a brief period.At this point, Mamata Banerjee, leader and Supremo ofthe Trinamool congress, arrived and joined the dharna.A little after midnight, a black-out was created, andunder 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 toCalcutta by force, and had to be admitted to ahospital.
Hundreds were severely injured in the police assaultand 72 put behind bars. Women with small children werearrested under the Arms Act and/or charged withattempt to murder. Payel Bag, atwo-and-a-half- year-old, spent four days in prison,along with two pre-teen boys. 26-year-old RajkumarBhul became the first martyr of the Singur struggleafter he collapsed with severe internal haemorrhagefrom police beating. Bhul's mother, in an open letterto the Chief Minister, squarely blamed him for herson's death. According to Sumit Chowdhury, one of themost commited "outsider" activists, who has beenwriting and organising solidarity, when he went toSingur two days later as part of a fact finding team,and also during subsequent trips, "the hapless andangry women in the villages – some with broken arms,bandaged eyes and scars here and there – said that thepolicemen were drunk, cursed in the filthiestlanguage, kicked and molested them".
The subsequent responses not only of the government,not only of one or two individuals, but of the entireCPI(M) was damning. Prakash Karat, the GeneralSecretary of the CPI(M), who has never set foot inSingur, announced from the CPI(M) headquarters inDelhi that Singur has one-crop land, that the farmersare queuing up for cash, and that the demonstratorswere anti-development hoodlums. Evidently, theprotests against land takeover for SEZs and similarissues are reserved for provinces where the CPI(M) isnot a major partner in the government. Equallyevidently, when Prakash Karat wrote his introductionto a recent publication entitled The Left andEnvironmentalism, he should have entered a caveat thatall his pious utterances do not apply to West Bengaland his comrade Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.On the night of the violence, Buddhadev Bhattacharjeehad his alibi. He and other party top brass were inDelhi. But the alibi is thin. The same day, he alsomet the Tata top management. The next day, there was areport about a community package promised by the Tatasfor Singur. But examined carefully, it was mostlyverbiage. One needs to remember that the massiveinvestment of the in Orissa and Jharkhand, two ofEastern India's poorest provinces (though very rich inminerals and forest resources), has not led to anypositive development in the conditions of poorpeasants, tribals, and others. On returning toCalcutta, the CM posed as injured Christ, stating,"forgive them for they know not what they do". After ahuge outcry, two days later he was forced to say thatpolice action had been "unwarranted". But no singlepoliceman is known to have been punished.At a meeting called by the Chief Minister, even anumber of Left Front partners criticised the way thefactory was coming up, but at the end of the meetingthe government announced that the Tata Motors factorywould come up on Singur at any cost. On 9th October,the opposition parties, both right and left, called atwelve hour bandh (general strike including totalstoppage of public activities). The CPI(M) threatenedto unleash its cadres.[2] But if anything, this threatmade 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 thegovernment, was treated as a member of one of theMaoist groups.[3]
Terror was of different kinds. Nirupom Sen, theindustries minister, warned the locals that alldevelopmental work in Singur would be halted if landwas not handed over. One minister even termedopposition to the project as 'anti-national' . As aresult of this unrelenting government pressure, someland transfer began. There was an added dimension tothe handing over. As we noted earlier, some people hadactually sold the land to others, but the mutation hadnot been done. So they took advantage of this to claimcompensation.
The struggle continued nonetheless, and thereforeterror took on more concrete shapes. Several of thedeep tube-wells of the area, essential for regularirrigation of the fields, were vandalised at night.And this happened despite the massive (already, atthat point, several hundred) policemen and womenposted in the region. From early November, agitationand terror both stepped up, with the governmentthreatening to take over the land and hand it over tothe Tatas at any cost by December. Women played amilitant role, resisting all threats andblandishments.
One of the regular refrains of the government and theCPI(M) was that the real owner have acceptedcompensation, it is outsiders who are causing trouble.We will discuss the issue of "outsiders" later. Herewe should note that indeed, the lead in the strugglewas taken, not by well to do peasants, but by sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and the smallerowners. This is the rural mix which fought six decadesback, in the tebhaga uprising.[4] This was the basewhich gave the left its decisive majority even in theoccasional periods in the last three decades when inthe cities the Left was on the defensive. So it wasinevitable that the Left Front, notably the CPI(M),would not be willing to accept that this base will nowspeak in its own voice. Yet that was inevitable. Thetebhaga movement had been so massively successfulbecause the authentic voice of the rural poor had beenwell represented by the undivided CPI and the AllIndia Kisan Sabha. By the present decade, the AIKS wasa bureaucratised carcass living on the memory of pastglories. Present day leaders of the AIKS have not evenseen the tebhaga. The younger among them becameleaders after the Left Front was already in power. Sofor them the role of the peasant organisation is tocollect money, collect votes, and on occasion collectlots of people in trucks and take them to Calcutta forcentral rallies. The apparently impressiveanti-imperialist demonstrations, and so on, organisedby the CPI(M) conceal a reality where massorganisations act as transmission belts of a highcommand, herding people in different ways. And soresentment and opposition grows. In Singur, the directattack on livelihood turned the sullen resentment intoorganised politics, as the Krishijami Raksha Samitibrought together most of this rural poor, albeit in asmall area. This challenge could never be allowed togrow. The Left Front has always been sensitive to theemergence of left wing oppositions and alternativesfrom within the working class and poor peasantry. Itis aware that it has little to fear if the right wingis even fully mobilised. As long as there is noserious left wing alternative, it can expect to getfairly close to half the votes every time, andtherefore get a majority in the first-past-the postsystem. Mamata Banerjee was the only right-wing leaderto recognise this, and therefore to develop a populistpolitical style. But lacking a solid trade union andrural poor implantation, she has never, even at hermost creditworthy performance proved to be a match forthe CPI(M).
Every time a single trade union, or a single ruralarea, has shown autonomy, the CPI(M) has thrown moreforces in the field to smash it, than it has fordefeating its right wing opponents. Early in the LeftFront period, electricity workers had a couple of leftwing, but non-Left Front Unions – the Workers' Unionand the Technical Workers Union, in a number ofplants. Repeated violence, repeated attacks on theworkers, arrests, were used indiscriminately to smashthe unions. In the 1990s, the struggle of the KanoriaJute Mills took on epic proportions, as did theregime's attempts to malign the struggle. So inretrospect, it was not, or should not have beensurprising, that despite (or because of) its Leftcredential, this regime was more aggressive to thepeasant struggle than almost any other regime inIndia.
Since this may sound a bit of a hyperbole, let us takea concrete, very right wing example, to make ourpoint. Medha Patkar has already made the point. A lotof people thought Medha was indulging in shock tacticswhen she said the Left Front is worse than the Gujaratgovernment.[ 5] But this is the picture if we restrictourselves to the attitude to peasants andindustrialisation, and the violence on them. Patkarargued that even in Gujarat, she had not beenrestricted 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 PresidencyCollege, Calcutta, to speak at the invitation ofstudents there, SFI thugs beat up students of theIndependent consolidation, and the college authoritiesshut the gates on her face. She then climbed on top ofthe gates and spoke. But we can also go beyond whatshe said to add another point. In Gujarat, thegovernment made a commitment that it would provideland for land to all the people ousted due to theSardar Sarovar Dam. The Narmada Bachao Andolan arguedthat it cannot be done. Indeed, proper land-for-landrehabilitation has not proved possible even for thosewho have been properly identified. As I saw in twotrips earlier this year, village communities have beensplit up, with one village resettled in 8-10 newsites. People have been given plots for cultivation,but not enough grazing land and open fields necessaryfor their survival. Often there are conflicts with theoriginal inhabitants. Sometimes, after people weresettled, this new land was partially taken away inorder to build the canal network that would carry thewaters from the dam to the target areas. Sorehabilitation has received much flak. But if we lookat the entire process, we find two waves of campaigns.We find a fairly long period, so that people could getsome information and try and seek redress. Pro-dam butpro-rehabilitation NGOs, such as Arch-Vahini and itsactivists like Anil Patel, waged one type of campaign.They sought a compromise, and the whole concept ofland-for-land rehabilitation came because of suchinterventions. When the NBA, led by Patkar and others,criticises the rehabilitation and resettlementschemes, it is because they see the land-for-landproposal as inadequate in theory and fraudulent inpractice. They see it breaking up the community,creating much social disorder, and all for the benefitof small elite groups. Whether they are right aboutthe dam benefiting only small groups is of course muchdebated. But we have sought to show that the pictureis much more open and shut in the case of West Bengal.The peasants, share-croppers and agriculturallabourers are being pushed out of land. They are notgetting any alternative land. Many are not getting anyrehabilitation at all. It is our experience, fromMadhya Pradesh, were the government has used cashcompensation rather than land-for-land rehabilitationwhenever possible, that peasants, unaccustomed tolarge sums of money, sent it on consumer goods, onbuilding big houses, and so on. At the end of arelatively short period, many of them had neither landnor money. Of course, if we extrapolate from this andargue that in all respects the West Bengal governmentis worse, we would be in error. But Patkar has notmade such a sweeping generalisation, nor are we.Perhaps confirmation of a different kind came in thenewspapers recently. On 5th December, Ananda BazarPatrika reported that there were differences withinthe BJP. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had toldhis party that it is opportunistic of them to try toexploit Buddhadev Bhattacharjee' s recent difficulties,and they should support him over the issue of landacquisition.
November 30 – December 2 and the aftermath:On 30th December, Mamata Banerjee and her supporterswere prevented from going to Singur, because Section144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, disallowing anycongregation of five or more persons, had been clampedin that entire area. Angry, and losing her head as sheis often accustomed to doing, Ms. Banerjee told hersupporters to turn their motor cavalcade back anddrive straight to the West Bengal LegislativeAssembly. From late afternoon, TV channels had a fieldday. No sports, no cartoon channel could compete withthe live show, and then the re-runs, of MLAs smashingfurniture, and generally wrecking havoc. Then shecalled for a Bengal bandh on 1st December. In view ofthe massive publicity given to the antics of herparty, the bandh was a partial failure, even in areasthought to be her stronghold. South Calcutta, herpersonal fief, alone saw a near complete shut down. Anemboldened Bhattacharyya moved in for the kill. On 2ndDecember, several thousand police started stormingSingur. According to Samir Saha, reporting in theBengali Dainik Statesman, ordinary police, RapidAction Force and State Armed Police all togethernumbered 20,000. Even the pro-CPI(M) Kolkata TVchannel reported at least 6000 police. From the first,they seemed to have been instructed to go on theoffensive. A wide area was surrounded, and then teargas firing began at random. The next task was to findout the aggrieved peasants. For the police, it was ofcourse difficult to know who was an aggrieved peasantand who a party loyalist. So this task had been givento party cadres. As Ganashakti, the CPI(M) daily,admitted on 4th December, in many cases localsthemselves were identifying and fighting theopposition. Only, they were not fighting alone. Theywere moving as agents of the police, identifyingspecific houses.
There was of course some resistance. And theresistance acted as proof that the police attack wasright and proper. But if paddy stacks are set on fire,if even tomorrow's food, let alone next year's, issnatched away thereby, who would not resist? Sopeasants, already pledged to resist till the end, didstrike back. The fight was utterly uneven. Stones,knives, perhaps a few crude home-made bombs (if at allwe are to give credence to this part of the policestory) were hurled. According to the Chief Minister,the violence was entirely the work of outsiders,anti-socials, SUCI and Naxalites.[6] CPI(M) StateSecretaiat member and long time trade union leaderShyamal Chakraborty asserted, "The police wereattacked first. The police showed great restraint. Ifthey had not tackled in this manner they themselveswould have been beaten up."[7]
From the paddy fields, reporter Ashish Ghosh could seethe 'anti-socials' being dragged into police camps.They included lungi-clad aged peasants, as well asyoung rural women. Near the highway, Ghosh could see adifferent scene. The Superintendent of Policesmilingly reporting to the Inspector General, "Sir, wehave already arrested fifty. By tonight we will set upcamp at Beraberi.", and the IG responding, "in threemore days we will complete the operation". Sittingnext to the police was the CPI(M) Panchayat PradhanDibakar Das. Food packets were being brought from acar for the high officers and their cadre friends.Meanwhile ripe paddy was being trampled underfoot orset on fire, one scene even the most pro-governmentchannel could not avoid shoeing, since in one casethat was also a major battle field which the channelswere keen to sow, since it "proved' their claim thatit was all the work of outsiders.
The Outsider:For the last two months, the 'outsider' has been amajor target of CPI(M) propaganda, especially outsideSingur. On 4th December, Ganashakti wrote, onlyoutsiders are resisting the government at Singur.Ephemera are always bolder. So a poster put up by theStudents' Federation of India, the student wing of theCPI(M), asserted that urban people dressed as peasantshad done all the mischief. In other words, even if yousee peasants being beaten up on TV, don't worry, theywere all urban Naxalites playing at revolution inSingur. Ganashakti of course charged Medha Patkar too,with being an outsider. A CPI(M) leader, evidentlymore illiterate than the average, asked why she didnot agitate in Gujarat against land take over, and whyshe came to West Bengal. Medha, typical of her trackrecord, managed to get to Singur despite the thousandsof cops and plenty of party cadres keeping a watch onoutsiders. This of course suggested she had a lot oflocal sympathisers and insider help. But of course, werule out such a possibility a priori. And so,Ganashakti also had a big story about how many routesthere are to Singur, and why the police failed to stopNaxalites and Medha Patkar from entering the village.Medha confronted the police, and for her pains she,Association for the Protection of Democratic Rightsactivist Amitadyuti Kumar, and Sumit Chowdhury werearrested, dragged to a car and thrown out. She wasthen taken to a State Government Guest House inCalcutta, seemingly because someone higher up hadrealised that a faux pas had been committed. But sherefused to be a guest of the State Government. Afterspending the entire night in the police van, fromwhich she refused to budge, she gave the police aslipand went off to Chandernagore, where the seventyarrested people had been kept.
If Medha Patkar was one outsider, the "Naxalites" wereanother category. As the CM told the media on the 3rd,there had been students of Jadavpur Univeristy. Thiswas a coded signal. Jadavpur University, rated inrecent times by the UGC as one of India's top five,has an ill-reputation because all its teachers are nothousebroken partisans of the CPI(M), and even more,because the Faculty of Engineering and TechnologyStudents' Union has been under the uninterruptedcontrol, since 1977, of the Democratic Students Front,a non-party far left association which has allowed inevery shade of radical left, Maoist, Trotskyist, andother. As late as 2005, JU engineering students hadbeen beaten up by the police in order to break apeaceful hunger strike. So when Bhattacharjee said JUstudents, he implied radical left, militant, and"mal-adjusted" . Yet how many JU students did theyfind? Out of the around seventy arrested, there is onestudent of JU, currently in a hospital, with a brokenhand.
Another arrested "outsider" is Swapna Banerjee. Afifty year old school teacher, Banerjee is a member ofthe Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha. Women'sinvolvement in the struggles led to her being closelyinvolved in the area for several months. Immediately,The Telegraph, on 3rd December, invented a story thatshe was the main ultra-left figure in organising andfomenting trouble.[8] Between the police, the ChiefMinister, and the inventive staff of The Telegraph,local resistance was wiped off the map. Becharam Mannabecame a non-person, as did 81 year old Saraswati, whogave an interview to Soma Marik a few days earlier andpromised to continue fighting till the end.[9]But there is another, even more crucial aspect of theinvention of the outsider. On one hand, we are toldthat even the nation is too small a unit. We are askedto accept globalisation as the inevitable goal. On theother hand, in every battle where we try to organiseresistance, we are told we are outsiders, or that wehave outsiders amongst us. Medha Patkar is of coursethe great outsider in India. She has been branded anoutsider in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, and now inWest Bengal. In Gujarat, the regional language papersare always attacking her, arguing that as an outsidershe has no business talking about the Sardar SarovarDam on the Narmada, which is supposedly the sole hopefor Saurashtra and Kutch. In Madhya Pradesh, I wasasked why Medha Patkar is sniping at the MPgovernment, and not at others. And for the last fewdays, the CPI(M) and the media that has, in theinterests of big capital, placed itself entirely atthe disposal of the CPI(M) for the moment, argued thatas an outsider, Patkar has no business in West Bengal.In flagrant violation of law, she was stoppedrepeatedly from going to Singur, even when she was notviolating Section 144 of the CrPC. She was kept lockedup, along with Anuradha Talwar of the SramajeebiMahila Samity, at Dankuni on the night of 4thDecember, and told on the 5th that she could goanywhere else but Singur. Yet, she had not beenformally arrested, so she could not be served anexternment order. In other words, what was being doneto her was sheer hooliganism, even if done by men inuniforms, backed by a Chief Minister.
What was unique was not the charge, "outsiders". Thisis a necessary salami tactics applied by rulers. Theywould like each fight to be an isolated one. They canbring 20,000 police from all over West Bengal, but thepeasants of Singur have to be alone. For they know, atthe present level of class struggle probably betterthan the toiling people, that in solidarity and unityalone lie chances of victory.
What was unique was something else. This was the factthat a so-called Communist Party is doing thepropaganda. After all, exactly who built this party?What was its founding ideology? Were Muzaffar Ahmed,S.A. Dange, themselves factory workers? How many acresof land did Muhammad Abdullah Rasul or BankimMukherjee cultivate? Did not Somnath Lahiri say, thatthey were often called the "strike-babus" , becausethey would rush to any mill where a strike had brokenout, in the hope of making contact with militantworkers. And even if we forget those heroic pioneersof the early twentieth century, and concentrate on theprosaic present day leaders, Shyamal Chakraborty isstill hailed as a Centre of Indian Trades Unionleader. When did he last, if ever, work in a factory?Is it not a fact that Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechuryrepresent West Bengal in the Upper House ofParliament? If the CPI(M) is going to turn regionalchauvinist at this date, should it not start byinquiring about how that could happen? We for our partbelieve that the Leninist party building conceptclearly rejects this particular notion of "insider"and "outsider". We are even prepared to concede thatwithin the parliamentary framework, even a CPI(M),which is certainly not a Leninist party, can sendKarat to parliament from wherever they are sure of asafe seat. The question is, why then the chauvinisticwitch-hunt unleashed on Medha Patkar? What this showsis, behind the mask of regionalism and localism is theclass position. And it forces everyone to startrethinking the nature of the CPI(M). How many milesmust a party walk right, till it ceases to be a partof the left?
After 2nd December:The struggle is difficult after 2nd December. Theorganisation of resistance has been crushed for themoment by stationing 20,000 police. Arrests have meantthat energies have gone into court cases; money has togo for putting up bail bonds. But the struggle is notover. On 5th December, a few small parties, the SUCI,and two of the CPI(ML) groups called a bandh. Despiteall bluster, TV channels could only prove that roadswere empty, buses plied empty, and the Chamber ofCommerce expressed unhappiness at the losses incurred(surely the losses were due to the success, not thefailure of the bandh). On 8th December, a march toSingur, called by two CPI(ML) groups, was brutallybeaten up by the police. Hundreds were injured. Trueto form, Ananda Bazar Patrika reported only theviolence 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 andthe Trinamool Congress (these choice epithets areoften used by CPI(M) leaders). Long years in power hasenabled the CPI(M) to use a patronage network and getplenty of intellectuals, not the most straight-backedof all beings, to line up with it and paint it inglowing terms. But the violence resulted incondemnations pouring in from many intellectuals andartistes of Bengal. Mahasweta Devi, internationallyreputed author, issued a short, blunt statement: "Thisis a war. Ask yourself, on which side are you? Let warmeet war." Well known leftist poet Sankho Ghosh, aTagore scholar of great repute, condemned the attackson the peasants and committed himself to organisedprotest mvements. Artist Ramananda Bandyopadhyaycondemned the arrest of Medha Patkar and questionedwhy, if India is a democracy, she did not have theright to go to Singur. Statements came from singersPratul Mukhopadhyay and Srikanata Acharya, poets likeNirendranath Chakraborty and Mallika Sengupta, authorslike Sanjib Chattopadhyay, film director HaranathChakraborty, academics like Esha De of CalcuttaUniversity, Avee Dutta-Majumdar of Saha Institute ofNuclear Physics, around thirty teachers of Jadavpuruniversity who took part in a silent demonstration inthe University campus, and others. The students ofEngineering Faculty in Jadavpur University boycottedthe first day of their end-of-semester examination asa mark of protest. On 8th December, Medha Patkar spokeat both Presidency College, Calcutta, and JadavpurUniversity, at the invitation of students. A number ofonline petitions have also been launched, while twoprotest letters have been sent to the Governor of WestBengal, the Chairperson of the National Human RightsCommission and the National Commission for Women,signed by human rights and womens' organisation, NGOs,and networks as well as by leftwing groups. Well knownacademics who are also activists, like Achin Vanaikand Professor Vibhuti Patel, also signed them.Arundhati Roy, Mainstream Editor Sumit Chakravarty,were among those who protested in Delhi, in front ofthe CPI(M) office.
Yet an organised force like the CPI(M), backed by thebulk of the media, which is not even reportingprotests in any even handed manner, will certainly tryto turn all these into a three-day wonder, urgingpeople to move on to other things. The leadingnewspaper in West Bengal, Ananda Bazar Patrika, andits English counterpart, The Telegraph, have taken thelead in this. Reporting the massive violence, TheTelegraph sought to play it down, to trivialize it, byusing tennis match rhetoric about post-police action,it was "advantage Mamata". It pontificated editoriallythat in a democracy, street demonstrations werepursued by parties that do not have faith in thedemocratic system. And then it went on to cite asexample Lal Krishna Advani's notorious "ratha yatra"of 1989, which had stirred up communal riots in 43towns. As though that had been a street demonstration,and as though that could be used to justify theillegal externment of Medha Patkar.
The Singur land has been taken over, but the story isjust beginning. The West Bengal government proposes togive vaster stretches of land, for example to theSalim Group of Indonesia, again from peasants. Itproposes to take over land to build a nuclear powerplant. And even for Singur, there is at the least theneed to fight for a proper rehabilitation for thegreat many who have got nothing or next to nothing,for a land-for-land resettlement. International andnational solidarity is needed, particularly becauseStalinists all over the world today still point to theLeft Front as a shining example. CPI(M) MP NilotpalBasu's article on the Left Front was reprinted even inthe US progressive paper Guardian earlier this year.Even Noam Chomsky, the libertarian, found reasons topraise the Left Front government when he came toCalcutta. The myth of the Left Front as alternativehas to be disposed of, before a struggle for a realalternative can succeed. Let the tragedy of thepeasants of Singur create at least the possibility ofthat. They deserve such revenge.
[1] The first lines of the song went: Hei Samaalo dhanho kasteta dao shan hoJan kabul aar maan kabulAar debona aar debona rakte bona dhan moder jan hoOh keep a watch on the paddy, hone your scytheWith life and honour as stakeWe will never again hand over the paddy sown with ourlife's blood[2] Cadre has come to sound like an obscene andutterly alienating word in West Bengal. Cadre todayevokes the image of stick or other more murderousweapons wielding thugs, tragically carrying the redflag. Yet, notwithstanding the Stalinist nature of themajor left parties, and despite their clear reformistturn from 1942, and again after 1951 (there was ashort in-between period in 1948-51 when they hadbecome ultra-left) communist party cadre had meant themost sincere, dedicated social movement activist.[3] Though on paper in West Bengal none of the Maoistgroups are banned, in practice, people suspected ofMaoist affiliation are routinely arrested andvariously heckled and tortured by the police,especially outside Calcutta.[4] See Kunal Chattopadhyay, Tebhaga Andolaner Itihas,Kolkata, 1987, reprint, 1997. In English the mostdetailed study is Adrienne Cooper's Sharecropping andSharecroppers' Struggle in Bengal 1930-1950, Calcutta,1988.
[5] Medha Patkar made this point repeatedly, includingin a speech in Jadavpur University Campus on 8thDecember.[6] The Socialist Unity Centre of India is a smallerStalinist formation, opposed to the Left Front.Naxalite is a way of referring to the Maoists of alltrends, in view of the origin of Maoism in India fromthe peasant struggles in Naxalbari, in North Bengal.The CPI(ML) Liberation is active in Singur.[7] Dainik Statesman, 3 December 2006, page 1, newsbox 'Policer Kaaj Police Korechhe: Buddha' ('ThePolice have Done Their Duty: Buddha')[8] The Telegraph has been among the most consistentspokespersons of the ruling class. Whereas even TheStatesman, despite its historic connections with theTata family, has reported relatively objectively, TheTelegraph and its Bengali sister publication, AnandaBazar Patrika, have been running a sustained campaignvilifying protestors and arguing that there is noalternative to industrialization at any cost. TheTelegraph has indeed gone further. On 5th December, itran an editorial virtually calling for the suspensionof what little democracy remains in West Bengal.Entitled 'No Velvet Glove', the Editorial thundered:"The menace of Maoist violence is not new to WestBengal. When it had first surfaced in the late Sixtiesand early Seventies, it was eradicated throughcounter-violence. Mr Bhattacharjee must learn fromthat experience and nip the present movement in thebud before Maoist weeds strangle the hundred flowersof West Bengal." Even after the passage of decades,people still remember much of what had been done atthat time. The "eradication of Maoism" meant theCossipore-Baranagor e massacre, when an entire area hadbeen sealed off and every known youth connected theleasdt bit to the Naxalites murdered. It included themassive application of the Maintenance of InternalSecurity Act, from which Bush could learn somethingabout fighting terrorism. It included the killings ofprisoners. It included "encounters" where prisonerswere shot in the back and proclaimed dead inencounters.[9] Interview taken by Soma Marik, 19th November 2006.Courtesy Soma Marik.
Whose land is it anyway? A must-watch documentary
WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY?
The film is about an ongoing peasant movement in Singur village, to savetheir farm land (1000 acres) from being acquired by the state governmentof West Bengal in India for a factory by an industrial giant. This land isfertile and produces at least 4 crops per year. Wasting it on industrywill completely destroy the bio-diversity and ecology of the land and rob50000 people of their livelihoods. The larger area surrounding the landwill also be affected adversely. The new factory is scheduled to employ amaximum of 1000 people. The govt. has not given the people anyinformation, at all, about the proposed factory and land-use. The people'sright to information is being violated at every step. It is refusing tolisten to protests by affected peasants. It has unofficially banned mediareports on the real crisis, using the media as a propaganda tool. The realvoice of the people is not being allowed to be heard. The govt. is usingpolice and para-military forces to brutally quell any kind of protest bythe farmers and others. The issues are made even more interesting by thefact that the state government of West Bengal is a coalition of Leftparties and the fact that India is the world's largest democracy.
The 40 minute, English video documentary film aims to bring this movementto the world for everyone to see how human rights are being violated andmany other socio-economic issues completely mauled. It is the result ofabout 6 months of keeping a camera - eye on the crisis and is an effort tobring peasants' voices to the awareness of the world.
DVD: Rs. 150/= and VCD: Rs. 125/=
We would appreciate if you would see the film and support the cause bybuying copies and sharing it with as many people as possible. Pleasecontact the film maker Ladly Mukhopadhay at (0)9830028621 or co-directorAnanya at (0)9433033372 or <freebirdproductions@gmail.com>
The film is about an ongoing peasant movement in Singur village, to savetheir farm land (1000 acres) from being acquired by the state governmentof West Bengal in India for a factory by an industrial giant. This land isfertile and produces at least 4 crops per year. Wasting it on industrywill completely destroy the bio-diversity and ecology of the land and rob50000 people of their livelihoods. The larger area surrounding the landwill also be affected adversely. The new factory is scheduled to employ amaximum of 1000 people. The govt. has not given the people anyinformation, at all, about the proposed factory and land-use. The people'sright to information is being violated at every step. It is refusing tolisten to protests by affected peasants. It has unofficially banned mediareports on the real crisis, using the media as a propaganda tool. The realvoice of the people is not being allowed to be heard. The govt. is usingpolice and para-military forces to brutally quell any kind of protest bythe farmers and others. The issues are made even more interesting by thefact that the state government of West Bengal is a coalition of Leftparties and the fact that India is the world's largest democracy.
The 40 minute, English video documentary film aims to bring this movementto the world for everyone to see how human rights are being violated andmany other socio-economic issues completely mauled. It is the result ofabout 6 months of keeping a camera - eye on the crisis and is an effort tobring peasants' voices to the awareness of the world.
DVD: Rs. 150/= and VCD: Rs. 125/=
We would appreciate if you would see the film and support the cause bybuying copies and sharing it with as many people as possible. Pleasecontact the film maker Ladly Mukhopadhay at (0)9830028621 or co-directorAnanya at (0)9433033372 or <freebirdproductions@gmail.com>
"Insects of Reality", my opinion about the poet Payal Agrwal's poetic genius
Some people consider her a budding poet, but I believe that Payal Agrwal is by all means a full-blown poet. Even though she calls her verses "morbid", but just because her poetry reveals the morbidity of life, I cannot consider her lyrics as such. I am proud to be allowed to post few lines from her lyrical repertoire. I am sure that after reading the following lines, the readers will have the same opinion about Payal's lyrical genius as I expressed above.
INSECTS OF REALITY
by
PAYAL AGRWAL;
Insects of reality crawl on my skin
I run to the deepest corner of my mind
And hide behind the chest full of bad memories
And like in a nightmare it lays open
In the blink of an eye
Spilling the past like the pandora's box
Sanity explodes
Generating a huge dust cloud
Creating a chain reaction in its wake
That spirals out of control
Until nothing remains but
An unbearable sense of being alive
INSECTS OF REALITY
by
PAYAL AGRWAL;
Insects of reality crawl on my skin
I run to the deepest corner of my mind
And hide behind the chest full of bad memories
And like in a nightmare it lays open
In the blink of an eye
Spilling the past like the pandora's box
Sanity explodes
Generating a huge dust cloud
Creating a chain reaction in its wake
That spirals out of control
Until nothing remains but
An unbearable sense of being alive
Reasons behind India's defeat in World Cup 2007
After the dismal performance by Indian team in the world cup, the question is being asked what was responsible for Indian defeats.
Well there can be many reasons. Dravid thinks the reason was the way the world cup was structured, "You have one day bad and you are out very quickly",he said after Indian team lost to Sri Lanka. But the question remains why should only Indian team have a bad day and not Srilankan team?One thing that was interesting in Dravid's speech was the fact that we picked up very slowly even in the last world cup. I clearly remember people cursing advertisers when India performed miserably in the first few matches in the last world cup. I heard one person say on BBC that time, "I am not going to drink Pepsi anymore." Miraculously Indians started playing better immediately. This time the anger was not directed towards the advertisers, for whateverreasons, perhaps that was the reason we did not improve our performance.We can even hold media responsible for this defeat, which keeps chanting some names like mantra, believing and making everyone else believe that we have the best batsmen of the world. Even the batsmen who most of the time play worse than tail-enders started to believe they were the best batsmen of the world.But one lie told million times doesn't become a truth. If we had to include some players in the team because they performed well in the past, we mightas well have sent the players who won the 1983 world cup for India.The only saving grace for India will be if both Srilanka and Bangladesh reach at least semifinals then Dravid can have another reason for defeat, "We were playing against the best performing teams."I know it for sure, that the cricket management in India will blame the coach first and he will be sacked. Well there are no advertisers for coaches, and the management can not be bribed to retain a particular coach. I don't know how can the coach be held accountable, the coach cannot go on the field to perform in place of the players.
The players who did not perform will stick to the team like leech, sucking blood of Indians. Isn't it interesting that in the beginning of this world cup Sachin Tendulkar said, "If my body allows, I will play the next world cup." He never said "ifI perform well".But, ultimately this is merely a game, we shouldn't lose our sleep over the bad performance of your team or very good performance of the other team, victoryand defeat are part of the game. Let us hope that nothing untoward happens to the members of Indian team when they return. People should be thankful toDravid and other players that now they can watch the world cup with sportsman's spirit, admiring those who perform well and not cursing those who performbadly, and enjoy every bit of it without any tension.They must realize"Hazaar gam hain zamane mein, cricket ke siva,Rahaten aur bhi hain Jeet ki rahat ke siva."
Copyright:
Taraprakash
Well there can be many reasons. Dravid thinks the reason was the way the world cup was structured, "You have one day bad and you are out very quickly",he said after Indian team lost to Sri Lanka. But the question remains why should only Indian team have a bad day and not Srilankan team?One thing that was interesting in Dravid's speech was the fact that we picked up very slowly even in the last world cup. I clearly remember people cursing advertisers when India performed miserably in the first few matches in the last world cup. I heard one person say on BBC that time, "I am not going to drink Pepsi anymore." Miraculously Indians started playing better immediately. This time the anger was not directed towards the advertisers, for whateverreasons, perhaps that was the reason we did not improve our performance.We can even hold media responsible for this defeat, which keeps chanting some names like mantra, believing and making everyone else believe that we have the best batsmen of the world. Even the batsmen who most of the time play worse than tail-enders started to believe they were the best batsmen of the world.But one lie told million times doesn't become a truth. If we had to include some players in the team because they performed well in the past, we mightas well have sent the players who won the 1983 world cup for India.The only saving grace for India will be if both Srilanka and Bangladesh reach at least semifinals then Dravid can have another reason for defeat, "We were playing against the best performing teams."I know it for sure, that the cricket management in India will blame the coach first and he will be sacked. Well there are no advertisers for coaches, and the management can not be bribed to retain a particular coach. I don't know how can the coach be held accountable, the coach cannot go on the field to perform in place of the players.
The players who did not perform will stick to the team like leech, sucking blood of Indians. Isn't it interesting that in the beginning of this world cup Sachin Tendulkar said, "If my body allows, I will play the next world cup." He never said "ifI perform well".But, ultimately this is merely a game, we shouldn't lose our sleep over the bad performance of your team or very good performance of the other team, victoryand defeat are part of the game. Let us hope that nothing untoward happens to the members of Indian team when they return. People should be thankful toDravid and other players that now they can watch the world cup with sportsman's spirit, admiring those who perform well and not cursing those who performbadly, and enjoy every bit of it without any tension.They must realize"Hazaar gam hain zamane mein, cricket ke siva,Rahaten aur bhi hain Jeet ki rahat ke siva."
Copyright:
Taraprakash
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