Tata sponsored ‘Green Hunt’ in Kalinga Nagar to destroy democratic tribal movement

March 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Yesterday (25 March) the Collector of Jajpur district assured Dabar Kalundia, a tribal leader of Bisthapan Birodhi Jan Manch (BBJM) that he would come to Baligotha village on 28 March for a meeting with the dissenting villagers and find a solution to the prevailing conflict. But within a day the Collector has broken his word as today about 24 platoons of armed policemen have been deployed in Kalinga Nagar to suppress the democratic & non-violent movement of the BBJM. It is feared that there will be bloodshed at a larger scale than 2 Jan 06 when 14 tribal men, women & children were killed in a police shootout. The villagers fear the police will attack tomorrow morning.

For more than 3 months now the resistance villages of Kalinga Nagar have been besieged by police forces who have randomly arrested dozens of villagers who stepped out of their village. People have been framed under false charges. There has been repeated midnight attacks by policemen and Tata goons to annihilate key activists of the BBJM. Hired assassins have also tried to eliminate the tribal leaders of the movement and one such attempt caused the death of Amin Banara of Baligotha village. Recently large number of police forces had been deployed on the pretext of building a road through the villages. Every attempt of the police and administration to quell the dissent of the people has been countered in democratic and non-violent ways by the BBJM.

The BBJM has clarified several times that it is not a Maoist backed organisation and does not want violence. The BBJM has made it clear that it will not accept displacement and mindless industrialisation that is already causing massive pollution in the area leading to widespread disease, crop failure, air, water & sound pollution. The Collector also agreed to the meeting only after the BBJM wrote several letters to him demanding that their concerns be addressed first as the Collector had been announcing in some meetings in the area that the Common Corridor Road would be built at any cost.

Surprisingly the print and electronic media have so far ignored developments in Kalinganagar which itself is a threat to democracy. Mainstream political parties also have reached a consensus with the ruling party which creates concerns among all citizens who understand the implications of mobilization of armed police in kalinganagar villages resisting Tata induced displacement.

We demand that the Govt should stop acting like a hired mercenary of Tata Steel company and withdraw all police forces from the area immediately. If there is any bloodshed the sole responsibility will lie on the Govt. The Govt should also give up the Common Corridor Road project as it will be built on fertile farm land and the community land of the tribals. The Govt should respect the sacrifice of the 14 tribals killed by the police and scrap the Tata project immediately. There should be no further displacement & dispossession of tribal people from their land. The Govt should immediately start working towards restoring peace in the area by assuring the tribals that there will be no attacks on them by the police or Tata goons. A medical team should be sent to the villages immediately as people have not been able to visit doctors for days in fear of arrest.

We appeal to all concerned citizens, progressive groups & media persons to raise their voice against the Fascist tendencies of the Govt and express solidarity with the tribals of Kalinga Nagar.

Prafulla Samnatara, Lok Shakti Abhijan
Lingaraj, Samajbadi Jan Parishad
Radhakant Sethi, CPI-ML Liberation
Prashanta Paikrai, PPSS
Bhalachandra Sadangi, CPI-ML New Democracy
Lingaraj Azad, NSS

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On the Kafila Debate on Arundhati Roy’s ‘Outlook’ Article on Maoists

March 25, 2010 by 6 Comments

Pothik Ghosh: There is no doubt the Indian Maoist movement – which has erupted in the sense of pure socio-occupational and physical geography in the agrarian-tribal location – has rendered the externalised imposition of a given Marxological/communistological historiography to define (in discourse) and articulate (in the materiality of lived practice) its struggle uniquely determinate to the specificity of its historico-geographic location redundant. But to assert that it has done so by claiming something that is purely autonomous tribal aspiration and struggle would be equally fallacious. For, tribal identities as they exist and pose themselves in and through struggles – both in areas of Maoist influence as also in sangh parivar-infested tribal areas of especially Orissa and Madhya Pradesh – are formed by being inscribed within the determinate, if not discursive, mode of capital. Those identities and their movements are thus either articulated by the specific configuration of dualised and hierarchised capitalist power, or are responses to the respective historico-geographic specifications of such a general configuration of power.

In such a situation, one must speak of rupture, not in terms of romantically reified forms, but in terms of what is yielded through the posing of a continuous critique. The empirically discernible form of the Indian Maoist movement in emergence is clearly a rupture with both the capitalist continuum of history (and thus its historiographic sense) and the established Marxological narrative (an analytic really) of the history of capitalism. But then the subsequent affirmative emphasis on this Indian Maoist form as form, both for its original physical geographic location and outside it, marks a return of the logic of duality via the return of the tendency of representation and the discursive structure of capitalism. This form, therefore, can continue to be the horizon of rupture, which it has been in its emergence, only when it posits its own negation as a form qua form for other specific temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal and socio-occupational moments.

The repeated failure of the Indian Maoist/Naxal movement to not only expand beyond the specific historico-geographic boundaries within which it has emerged, but, therefore, as a result face imminent defeat, if not cooption (the experience of the constituents of Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Jharkhand and Liberation in Bihar would be telling on that score), in its purported historico-geographic and socio-occupational bastions is, if one were to talk in terms of effects, precisely due to this problem of reifying one moment of the process, which is meant to unfold by constituting itself through critique of its reified/abstracted moments, and thus obstruct its critically constitutive unfolding.

The point is, the Indian Maoist movement can be defended or saved as the specific embodiment of the general revolutionary logic of event or rupture that it is, only if that logic unfolds through its critical re-enactment, or reconstitution if you will, for other historical locations through the emergence of forms idiomatically specific to the diverse historicalness of those locations. To that extent, socialism ceases to be a systemic horizon in a teleological sense and becomes a horizon of continuous motion that is not serial but dialectical having to be constantly constituted through critical opposition and rupture. It was not for nothing that Marx in his ‘The Class Struggles in France’ came up with the idea of “revolution in permanence”.

Thus, socialism, as a mobile and open ‘epistemological discourse’, can be aphoristically called a multiplicity of singularities. That is also the epistemological context of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, and his injunction therein to “blast open the continuum of history” must be seen as a critical struggle against the distortionary conflation of labour’s life-world and its history with the textual abstraction of a centred historiography and/or analytic. It’s a struggle to reclaim life and its history from such abstraction and domination and in the same movement pose the idea of life-world in critical opposition to the discourse of textuality, even as we show that the life we live empirically, before its reclamation through critique, is an analytic abstraction or text. This idea of the life-world, which was formulated by Marx as a conceptualisation of the horizon of constantly self-constituting and thus dialectical motion, is something that is constitutively posed in our continuous Benjaminian struggle to disrupt the analytic continuum of history that constantly forms following every successful move to blast it open. The counter-discursive horizon that this continuous critical struggle to overcome the horizon of discursivness or reason in history, which is history as a continuum, poses is what Benjamin called montage and Trotsky narrative in the context of formulating a revolutionary discourse of history. It’s really a narrative (Trotsky) or montage (Benjamin) of singularities, where the constitutive narrative/montage link among them is the fact of them being singularities or events. It’s this horizon of revolutionary history, which is a horizon of constant ruptures, that Foucault posed as “genealogy” against the horizon of conservative and reactionary history, which is canonically called History and is a serial continuum. Foucault’s term for singularities and their repeated self-constituting evental emergence is respectively fragments and archaeology, something that was his active critical-political-methodological engagement, as opposed to a detached discursive-methodological engagement, with history both as it is lived and is formulated as discourse. The generalised horizon that is posited by him for his event-constituting archaeological manoeuvre is termed by him, in a quasi-structuralist kind of way, as the “history of problematics”. My subjective preference is, however, for the Benjamanian concept of gestus over Foucauldian fragment, which as a word still has the whiff of the old whole-fragment (universal-particular) dualised and discursive discourse.

However, to the extent that genealogy, montage or narrative are all discourses of history, they appear as a serialised continuum in much the same way as the analytic-centric form of conservative History. But we must remember that the former is a discourse of life-world, which makes it a discourse of counter-discourse, even as the latter is a discourse of lived life, which in not being critical and in being established, is really an abstraction and thus a textual discourse. Thus in the material operation of empirical living, the former posits continuous critical opposition and rupture with abstract schemas that seek to prevent life from constantly constituting itself critically and thus autonomously; even as the latter seeks to transform lived life into a non-critical piece of the abstract schema of history as it is given in the positive materiality of empirical human lives. Thus motion in the latter is really the continuance of the abstract schema through time. The former is a discourse, as you also seem to be pointing out, of living history while constituting it, while the latter is a discourse of living history as the a priori abstraction in which it is given.

To return, through this theoretical excursus, to the immediate question at hand, is to once again focus on the need to generalise the logic of event or rupture enacted by the Maoist movement and the failure on that count. It is in this context that Arundhati Roy’s Outlook article poses a problematic. The article is a problem, not per se, but in that it enacts a modality of radical politics at the urban location that obstructs the recognition of this need to constantly generalise the evental logic that has found its specific expression for the agrarian-tribal location in the form of the Maoist movement. It is, in fact, more of a problem because this modality of radical politics is fast becoming a dominant modality among urban radicals. The failure to recognise this need for generalisation of the logic encapsulated by the Maoist movement for all other locations beyond the agrarian-tribal geography conveniently enables urban radicals like us to displace the identity crisis and anxiety we experience as denizens of our specific urban ground on to some other ground – in this case the ground of insurgent tribals and peasants – and live our own class rage, without recognising it as such, cathartically and vicariously. That enables such urban radicals to exempt themselves from taking up the more difficult struggle of engaging with and critically opposing the configurations of capitalist class power – which in its myriad ideological forms of culture, economy, society is the real cause of anxiety and crisis that urban creatures face – on their own specific ground to overcome the crisis they experience as city inhabitants.

That, of course, is not the failure of Roy or the Maoists, much less their tribal-peasant base, alone. It’s the failure of all working-class forces, which includes me and my comrades as well, in all other locations. The point is to begin, as Zizek says citing Lenin, from the beginning by recognising this failure.

Pratyush Chandra: One point that interests me in Jairus Banaji’s post in Kafila and the subsequent debate on the post is his focus on labour as the centre of the movement. I think this focus is fundamental in order to ground various local/localised struggles in political economy (or rather in its critique) and to understand the underlying interconnections between them (whether the leadership of these struggles understand them in this manner is immaterial – did not Marx appreciate Paris Commune even when Blanquists were in hegemony?).

Marx’s conceptualisation of labour and of capital-labour relations is rich enough to provide tools for comprehending various struggles against capitalist accumulation (both primitive and normal). He understood subsumption of labour by capital as a process (not some particular fixed states), which starts from being formal to real – from a stage where labour is subsumed through non-capitalist “forms” of exploitation to the actual subsumption in “pure” wage-labour form. Between these two poles, subsumption can take a plethora of forms. Who knows better than Jairus that unwaged labour (reproductive or otherwise) is also part of the capitalist subsumption of labour.

So how do we understand tribals and “peasants” struggles against land and resource alienation within this framework? They are essentially fighting against capitalist efforts to alienate them from their resources, which create (or, better, reproduce) conditions for the subsumption of their labour by capital. Whether they will become wage labourers is not at all essential; if they are not employed, or even employable, they still remain labourers as part of the reserve army of proletarians or surplus population (stagnant, latent and floating) reproducing themselves on their small pieces of land, or by food gathering (in forests or trash cans). Their struggle, in a Marxist sense, can be understood as part of the anti-systemic working class struggle to control the conditions of production and, I stress, reproduction too.

Now coming to the forms of struggle (armed, unarmed, etc), I think we as Marxists (of all hues and colours) cannot act as idealists, by considering only those movements as working class movements or anti-capitalist movements, which are projected in our idioms, and are developing according to our framework of strategic-building. The working class can throw diverse forms of struggles according to its internal constituents or class composition. However, one must critique forms in order to show the limitations and problems of those forms, in order to avoid the problem of overgeneralisation of particular forms, and also in order to undertake the revolutionary task of generalisation seriously, which essentially means to see a revolutionary building up against capitalism within and through all forms of working-class struggles.

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Petition: Stop Encounter Killings in the name of countering Maoism!

March 23, 2010 by Leave a Comment

To: Home Minister of India

We strongly condemn the recent killings of senior CPI (Maoist) leaders Sakhamuri Appa Rao and S. Kondal Reddy in ‘encounters’ by the Andhra Pradesh police.

While the AP police have claimed that they were killed in gun battles in two different incidents in Prakasam and Warangal districts, there are strong grounds to believe that the two Maoist leaders were first arrested in Maharashtra, taken back to AP and then shot in cold blood.

The use of assassination, kidnapping and torture by the forces of the Indian State to contain the Maoist insurgency is not new or surprising but it remains even now, as before, an illegal, immoral and reprehensible strategy.

Firstly, the use of such methods by the Indian police, paramilitary forces or army – under whatever pretext- go against basic provisions of the Indian Constitution and puts them on par with ordinary criminals or even terrorists. The fact that the Maoists do not believe in the Indian Constitution does not mean the Indian government should also abandon its commitment to the only consensus document that gives it its own legitimacy. The Indian State has a duty to uphold the Constitution, irrespective of the opponents it faces, and failure to do so robs it of its entire claim to represent ‘Indian law’.

Secondly, there is enough evidence to show that the use of such dirty methods, once justified by the political masters, unfortunately becomes a bad habit making the Indian security forces a threat to the lives of millions of ordinary Indian citizens. The fact that India has one of the world’s highest numbers of custodial deaths and ranks extremely high in the list of countries using torture is testimony to this dubious phenomenon. The people at the receiving end of such violations of law by the Indian State on a day-to-day basis are the Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, poor communities as also the people of Kashmir and the North-East and this is completely unacceptable.

We demand that the Indian government put an immediate end to the use of abduction, torture and fake encounter killings to tackle the Maoist and other armed insurgencies. Lawless governance and impunity for wrongdoers in uniform leads to loss of faith in democracy. The institutional failures that give rise to insurgencies also need to be understood and tackled in a political manner for any lasting solutions.

Sincerely,

Please sign

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State Repression in Orissa: A No-Escape Situation?

March 21, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Satyabrata

This is the most repressive period in the history of Orissa.

Troops have been deployed in Koraput regions for the enforcement of Operation Greenhunt. The State Government of Orissa has asked for more troops to the Central Government so that it can deal wit the “left-extremists”. Already, in the preparatory phase of this repressive period, the State Government has been arresting leaders of several movements calling them ‘Maoists’. The intentions of the State Government can be seen clearly if one engages critically with what it has been doing of late. Abhay Sahoo and Biswajit Ray of POSCO movement were arrested with false cases in their names. There has been no militant incident in the POSCO movement in spite of the torturous attitude of the Police and pro-POSCO goons in the region. The CM has declared, with no respect for democratic voices, that the “POSCO-problem” will be solved by April 10, situations will be POSCO-favouring. One can judge what effect this statement shall have on the people that have been resisting the POSCO project. If they resist it with arms, there is the always available “Maoist” tag, if they don’t, things are easy – in the former case there is Operation Greenhunt to deal with the movement and in the later case, the police and the local goons shall suffice.

Recently in Narayanpatna of Koraput, a completely democratic mass movement was crushed with murders and arrests in the name of dealing with Maoists. K. Singana and Andrew Nachika of Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh were murdered, Gananath Patra was arrested as a threat to national security and Tapan Mishra was arrested being branded as a Maoist. The same movement still continues in other regions of Koraput like Bandhugaon, etc and Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh leads them too. Now troops are being deployed in the regions to deal with Maoists. In Narayanpatna one incident of ousting landlords and liquor traders started the whole series of repressive steps that the State took resulting in the brutal crushing of the movement. The State’s killing machine only needs alibi to kill without which its normal repression is sufficient to crush any movement. The movements of this region have no way out. If they don’t take to arms, landlords and local militia shall crush them; if they do, Operation Greenhunt shall gun them down. The movements shall conclude in the State’s desired form of conclusion with the restoration of the status quo.

Bhubaneshwar, the State’s capital, lacks the basic organization of intellectuals and activists who can raise voices on behalf of the oppressed in the villages and the media is drunk with hegemonic liquor and stands with complete indifference and apathy to the movements.

The movements against Vedanta, the Niyamgiri movement – all are skeptical of what fate they are destined to face under the present circumstances. Troops upon troops are being employed in the regions of movements to “deal” with them. The basic problem from the perspective of the movements is that they have not been able to go beyond territorial limitations and have not generalized their movements to create an inter-movemental political space that could challenge the State at the same time taking the movements ahead.

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Posco Protest on April 1, 2010

March 21, 2010 by Leave a Comment

On the first of 1st of April, at 11a.m., POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, is organizing a protest mobilization at Balitiuth near Badabanda Station, Jagatsinghpur. All sympathisers of the POSCO movement are requested to be present. The POSCO Pritirodh Sangram Samiti is looking forward to solidarity from other movements, intellectuals and activists.

Contact Prashant Paikarai, Ph: +91 9437571547

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Hari Sharma (1934-2010)

March 20, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Chin Banerjee, Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, Daya Varma, Vinod Mubayi, Charan Gill

It is with deepest sorrow that we announce the death of our friend and comrade, Hari Prakash Sharma, on March 16 following a prolonged battle with cancer. Hari took his last breath in his home of 42 years at Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), British Columbia, surrounded by his comrades Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, and Chin Banerjee. All of them had come together in 1976 to form the Vancouver Chapter of the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA), which had been founded by Hari and many others at a meeting in Montreal in 1975.

Hari was born on November 9, 1934 at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh though his family came from Haryana. His father was a railway employee, so he moved from one place to another wherever his father was posted. Hari received his BA from Agra University and his Master’s in Social Work from Delhi University. The insight into the social life of India Hari got from his travels by train enabled by his father’s employment in the railways and his extensive travels by foot through the villages of India stimulated Hari to start writing short stories in Hindi. Hari is regarded as one of the finest writers of short stories in Hindi and many people had urged him to resume his writing in Hindi. One of his stories was adapted as a play and staged in New Delhi.

Hari moved to the US in 1963 for further education and did his Master in Social Work from the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964 and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1968. He taught briefly at UCLA before accepting a position at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia in 1968, where he stayed till his retirement in 1999. He was honored by the University as Professor Emeritus.

Hari, like many enlightened academics of the 1960’s plunged in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and Canada. This is also the period when he espoused Marxism, which ideology he held dearly and steadfastly until his death.

As a member of the Faculty of Simon Fraser University he became a champion of the academic rights of colleagues who were faced with the threat of dismissal for their support of the student-led movement for democratizing the university. He became an associate and friend of another Marxist Kathleen Gough, who was suspended for her political activities. Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma co-edited the 469-page book, Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, which was published in 1973 by the Monthly Review Press, New York. The book was sought by political activists of that time and many people know of Hari as an eminent leftist scholar because of that book.

The 1960’s were a period of international revolutionary upheaval. The Naxalbari peasant uprising happened in the spring of 1967. Hari was greatly inspired by it. He went to India and visited Naxalbari area. It is then he got committed to the path opened by Naxalbari and retained his faith in its ultimate success until his last days, while many of his comrades had simply written off Naxalbari as a thing of the past. Hari developed contact with peasant revolutionaries and maintained a living contact till his last days.

While associating with the Naxalbari movement in India, Hari carried on anti-imperialist work in Vancouver through the weekly paper, Georgia Straight, published by the Georgia Straight Collective, of which he was a founding member. In 1973 Hari went to the Amnesty International in London and the Commission of Jurists in Geneva and sent a written representation to the UN Human Rights Commission to publicize the condition of more than thirty-thousand political prisoners in Indian jails.

In 1974 he and his comrade Gautam Appa of the London School of Economics organized a petition of international scholars to protest the treatment of political prisoners in India, which he handed to the Indian Consulate in Vancouver, BC on August 15 of the same year.

In 1975 Hari enthusiastically accepted an invitation from his friends in Montreal. He along with many others founded the Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) on June 25, 1975, exactly on the same day on which Indira Gandhi declared the State of Emergency in India. Hari’s tireless work against dictatorship in India and in defense of political prisoners and oppressed peoples, and his energetic organization of progressive people across North America in the struggle against Imperialism and for social justice, led to the revocation of his passport by the Indira Gandhi government in 1976.

Having engaged in various anti-racist struggles in the 1970s, IPANA in Vancouver, under Hari’s leadership became a primary force in the formation of the British Columbia Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR: 1980), which proved to be an extremely effective instrument against the tide of racism in the province at the time. Hari and IPANA also played a leading role in the formation of the Canadian Farmworkers’ Union (CFU: 1980), which for the first time took up the cause of farm workers who had been historically excluded from protection under the labour laws and any protective regulation.

From the 1980s Hari’s work also began to focus on the condition of minorities in India, which came to a crisis with the attack on the Golden Temple and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Hari stood firm in his defense of the human rights of Sikhs and, increasingly of Muslims who became the primary targets of the rising Hindutva forces gathered under the banner of the Bhartiya Janata Party. He organized a parallel conference on the centralization of state power and the threat to minorities in India to coincide with the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver in 1987.

In 1989 Hari brought large sections of the South Asian community together to form the Komagata Maru Historical Society to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident, in which Indian immigrants traveling to Canada on a chartered ship were turned away from the shores of Vancouver by the racist policies of the Canadian Government. As a result of the society’s work a commemorative plaque was installed in Vancouver. In 2004, during a screening of the documentary film on this incident by Ali Kazimi, Continuous Journey, the Mayor of Vancouver presented a scroll to Hari dedicating the week to the memory of Komagata Maru.

Following the attack on Babri Masjid in December 1992 Hari became the prime mover in the formation of a North American organization dedicated to the defense of minority rights in India called, Non-resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD). This organization brought together Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians of origin in South Asia through educational and cultural activities. It had its most significant moment in Vancouver in 1997, when it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the independence of India from colonial rule by bringing together people from the entire spectrum of the South Asian community to focus on how much remained to be done on the subcontinent and the urgent need for peace between Pakistan and India.

Recognizing the need to build a North American front against the growing menace of Hindutva fascism in India, Hari travelled to Montreal in September 1999 to join the founding of International South Asia Forum (INSAF). He became is first President and organized the Second Conference in Vancouver from Augst10-12, 2001.

Hari’s leadership again led to the development of NRISAD into South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) in Vancouver to embrace the necessity of going beyond a focus on India to the entire South Asian region in the quest of peace and democracy based on secularism, human rights and social justice. SANSAD has pursued these goals vigorously, condemning the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (for which he was denied a visa to go to India), championing the human rights of Kashmiris, promoting peace between Pakistan and India, supporting the rights of women in Pakistan, condemning violence against journalists and academics in Bangladesh, supporting the movement for democracy and social justice in Nepal, and defending the human rights of Tamils under the attack of the Sri Lankan state.

Besides being an able political organizer and a gifted writer of short stories, Hari was also a talented photographer. He photographed the common people of India, their lives and struggles. His photographs hang in many homes and have been displayed in many exhibitions. He proved himself to be an excellent director of political drama.

Political ideals remain steadfast. However, there has, naturally been, divergence of opinion on the strategy and tactics of achieving these ideals. During the course of long political activity of more than 50 years, Hari made many friends and comrades. It is natural that among these comrades there also arose disagreements on many issues. Nevertheless, Hari remained a comrade or a friend of all of them and they all are deeply saddened by his passing away.

Hari leaves behind him a legacy of activism in the service of the oppressed. He is an inspiration to engagement in the struggle for a better world, to a never-flagging effort to create a world without exploitation, without imperialist domination, without religious, caste, ethnic or gender oppression, a world that Marx envisioned as human destiny.

A Memorial Service for Hari will be held at Riverside Funeral Home and Crematorium, 7410- Hopcott Road, Delta, B.C. (Ph. 604-940-1313) , at 3:00 pm on Sunday, March 21, 2010.

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Sri Lanka: Parliamentary General Election 2010

March 19, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Election Manifesto of the New-Democratic Party

Introduction

The entire people of Sri Lanka are facing acute crises and problems at two levels. One concerns the failure to resolve the national question caused by chauvinistic capitalist oppression. The other concerns the economic crises and problems that developed as a result of class oppression. Besides these, people have to struggle against a variety of problems faced by them in their daily lives. In all of these problems, the ruling classes comprising the government and the opposition factions are on one side and the overwhelming majority comprising the working people are on the other. Another fact that needs to be noted is that the imperialist forces of global hegemony and forces of regional hegemony have continued to meddle and tamper with the national question which is the main contradiction, and in the economic issues arising from the class contradiction, which is the fundamental contradiction. The effects and consequences of the above factors are been experienced as sorrow and suffering by the people at all levels of the political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society. Hence we briefly place before the public in the Election Manifesto of the New Democratic Party the basic political stand and the demands put forward by the Party.

The National Question and the Tamils

The New Democratic Party has consistently emphasised that the national question is the principal contradiction in Sri Lanka. The end of the war has not brought the national question to its end. Since chauvinism is even more closely bonded to the state machinery, national oppression against the Tamil, Muslim and Hill Country Tamil nationalities has intensified further. The three nationalities are affected in different ways according to their specific conditions of existence.

Generally, all three minority nationalities are subject to discriminatory treatment. Their right to education in their mother tongue and the right to conduct their affairs in their language are unlawfully denied to them. Besides, allocation of places in higher education, vocational training and the professions are unfavourable to them. In addition, owing to chauvinistic oppression against the Tamil nationality being implemented as a chauvinist war of national oppression in their traditional homelands, Tamils have suffered loss of life, disablement, and loss of property on an unprecedented, massive scale. Several hundred thousands have been forced to be displaced within the country and abroad. Amid this, in addition to land already appropriated from Tamils for establishing “High Security Zones”, planned colonisation of Sinhalese is being intensified with the aim of reducing them to a minority in their own territories.

Besides those in the open prisons called “Refugee Camps”, thousands are languishing in prisons and detention caps, as terror suspects, without trial or inquiry. Not merely Tamils and Hill Country Tamils but also Muslims and Sinhalese are put through such suffering for political reasons. The main cause for this situation is planned chauvinistic oppression by the state. Yet, attempts to resolve the national question, firstly as parliamentary deals, secondly as peaceful campaigns and thirdly as armed struggle, based on the claim that the Tamils could by themselves resolve the Tamil national question, failed. There were two fundamental reasons for the failure. Firstly, at no stage was the liberation struggle of the Tamil nationality carried forward as a mass struggle. That was the reason why weapons gained prominence while democratic practices were rejected. Secondly, the struggle with a narrow nationalist outlook was isolated from the struggles of other oppressed people. As a result, the struggle of the Tamils tended to rely on and side with Western powers and to deny support and even be hostile to struggles against imperialism and hegemony. As a result, the liberation struggle of the Tamils became isolated within Sri Lanka as well as internationally. It was because the three stages of struggle were guided by the same incorrect, upper class, elitist thinking that they pushed the Tamil people into a great tragedy. Thus there is a need to be freed from these errors, unite the Tamil people on a working class basis, create militant solidarity between them and other oppressed people and carry forward the fourth stage of the struggle. The New Democratic Party made clear its observations on the matter even before the struggle of the LTTE faced downfall.

Muslims

Since the Muslims are spread throughout the country, they face different kinds of oppression according to the environments in which they live. Also, their livelihood and small trade have been subject to attack by fanatically chauvinistic gangs, Muslims in different parts of the country have from time to time faced fierce chauvinist attacks. Tamil narrow nationalism has, in addition, targeted Muslims and carried out massacres. The expulsion of Muslims from the North in 1990 was a major act of cruelty against them. The government, while on the one hand engaging in activities that divide the Tamils and Muslims, has been colluding with chauvinistic gangs in seizing land and property from Muslims, and denying the Muslims their rights.

Hill Country Tamils

The Hill Country Tamils have, since deprivation of their right to citizenship in 1948, have struggled for their existence. The Sirima-Shastri Accord of 1963 was a great injustice perpetrated against them. Cruel exploitation of their labour and their expulsion of many from the plantations following the nationalisation of the plantations facilitated the implementation of that accord. Efforts have intensified to suppress the political voice that they may have through the right to vote that they won as a result of a prolonged struggle. Planned Sinhala colonisation and schemes like the Upper Kotmale Scheme designed to destroy plantations on the one hand and chauvinist attacks against them on the other persist. The so-called leaders of the Hill Country Tamils are accomplices of the chauvinists in activities designed to prevent the identification of the Hill Country Tamils as a distinct nationality. The people need to recognise the true nature of such leaders.

The Way to a Solution

In the current situation where the national question is being exacerbated and the minority nationalities are severely oppressed, the New-Democratic Party emphasises that, without resolving the national question, it is not possible resolve other problems faced by the country. From that position, the New-Democratic Party has consistently put forward the following idea as the basis for a long-term solution for the national question.

A just and lasting solution to the national question is possible only through rebuilding the country as a multi-ethnic, multi-nationality entity with autonomous regions for the nationalities and autonomous structures to preserve the unique identity of communities without a contiguous territory, based on the principle of the right to self determination within the framework of a united Sri Lanka which treats all nationalities and national minorities as equals.

Immediate Steps

At the same time, taking into account the consequences of the war and the direct impact of chauvinistic attacks, the New-Democratic Party urges the following immediate steps.
• All the people been displaced as a result of the war should be immediately resettled in their own homes.
• Normal life should be restored for people affected by war, through reconstruction and rehabilitation.
• All losses due to war should be compensated and opportunity provided for communities to rebuild their lives based on self-reliance.
• Military camps should be removed from areas in which civilians live in large numbers.
• All those under detention without trial or inquiry should be released forthwith and due compensation paid for the injustice done to them.
• Planned colonisation should be stopped forthwith, High Security Zones done away with, and the right of communities to their traditional territory respected.
• Acts of communal hatred affecting the life and livelihood of Tamil, Muslim and Hill Country Tamil people should be ended immediately, and firm action taken against those who provoke communal hatred.
• The legal right of all speakers of Tamil to education in their mother tongue and to carry out all affairs including matters relating to the state in Tamil in any part of the country should be safeguarded.
• Provocation of hatred towards the Muslims and acts of violence directed against Muslim communities should be prevented.
• Moves to appropriate land belonging to the Muslims in their traditional areas should be prevented.
• Hill Country Tamils should be recognised as a nationality and their right to existence in regions in which they have lived for several generations should be affirmed.
• The Hill Country Tamils, especially the plantation workers, should be given an adequate wage increase, and be granted the legal right, opportunity and means to possess their own homes and land in order to maintain an independent economic existence by developing cultivation and animal husbandry.
• Educational and employment opportunities should be enhanced for the Hill Country Tamil community, which is still backward in education and employment.

Social Oppression

The well being of any nationality of Sri Lanka cannot be isolated from that of other nationalities. Hence, it is not possible to isolate the liberation of the Tamil, Muslim and Hill Country Tamil people cannot be viewed in isolation from the interests of the country as a whole. Likewise, we cannot ignore oppression based on class, caste and gender, nationally and within each community. It should again be reminded here as a lesson of historical experience that the tendency to be blind to social oppression, on the pretext of the liberation struggle of the Tamil people and unity of the nationality, has in no way helped the liberation of the Tamil people.

Many trade union rights and other legal rights won by the workers through struggle have been lost under the liberalised private sector economy, which is part of capitalist globalisation.

Several obstacles exist in society that prevent the victories scored in the struggle against casteism under the leadership of our Marxist Leninist party from leading to a total elimination of caste domination. Tamil narrow nationalism has been an accomplice to those evil forces.

While education and employment opportunities for women have increased, their work load too has increased. Besides that, there is also an increase in sexual harassment in their places of work. Thus, besides oppression based on caste, nationality and class, working women suffer gender-based oppression within the family and outside. Neither armed struggle nor urban employment has helped working class women to win liberation. The concerns of feminist campaigners remain confined to the boundaries of the well to do middle class.

We never accepted the argument that the unity of the nationality or of the community will be wrecked by raising issues of social oppression. The New Democratic Party has not exempted any social injustice. It has struggled against all forms of social oppression including chauvinistic oppression. Thus the following demands are included in the Election Manifesto of the Party.
• All trade union rights denied to the working class following the Open Economic Policy should be restored. All employment sectors should without exception be given the right to organise as a trade union.
• The rise in prices should be arrested, the cost of living controlled, and wage increases should be granted.
• The rights of working people including workers, peasants and fisher folk should be assured.
• Untouchability, caste-based discrimination, disregard and oppression that are still practiced as a result of residual caste ideology should be fully eliminated.
• In addition to strong legal action against all social violence against women, the idea of gender equality should be emphasised in all social institutions including schools.
• Sections of the people who remain backward on the basis of class, gender, caste and region should be granted special concessions in education, higher education and employment.

Alternative Political Path

To win the above demands, it is important to build a new front of mass struggle that brings together all nationalities and national minorities along an alternative political path based on broad unity of the people. It is only through the total rejection of the narrow Tamil nationalist outlook which portrayed the Sinhalese people as enemies and acting on the basis that the broad masses of Sinhala working people are an ally that it will be possible to defeat the chauvinism afflicting the Sinhalese people and enable them to accept the rights of other nationalities. Through that, it will also be possible to salvage the struggle of the Tamil people against national oppression from the tendency to isolate the Tamil people from other nationalities of Sri Lanka, and thereby carry forward the struggle.

Global domination by the US and the regional hegemonic ambitions of India, besides contributing to the transformation of the national conflict into war, have been obstacles to finding a just solution to the national question. The imperialist grip on Sri Lanka has tightened during the past three decades. Sri Lanka is now a major debtor nation. Sri Lanka, without a national economy, depends on earnings from the sale of its labour power in the international market, directly or indirectly through means such as the garment industry. Hence, it is important to rescue the sovereignty and the economy of the country from US-led Western imperialism and from Indian hegemony. All foreign involvements that seek to use the national question for purposes of intervention, and domination trade, political and military affairs should be opposed.

The New Democratic Party has never believed that useful political change can be brought about through the parliamentary system. It has never propagated such faith among the people. The importance of this election to the Party is the opportunity that it provides to take correct ideas among the people and thereby mobilise the people along an alternative political path.

The people by studying, understanding and supporting the stand of the Party will be strengthening the struggle for their rights. We pledge that, with the strength of that support, the New Democratic Party will work resolutely with the people within and outside parliament to mobilise the people and advance along the path of struggle.

If the people will grant us parliamentary representation at this election, we pledge that we will continue to be an honest political force which is true to the people and act to build a new political culture and advance our political cause.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: ,

Orissa : Throttling of Freedom of Thought and Expression

March 16, 2010 by Leave a Comment

We express our concern on the police raid of the house of Sri Dandapani Mohapatra, a writer and journalist. On 11th March 2010, while Sri Mohapatra was away in some meeting, violating all procedures, the police raided his house for nearly six hours ransacking all his belongings and not even allowing his ailing wife and children to take their food. The police had not given a copy of any search warrant to his family members, nor stated any reason for the raid. As per Sri Mohapatra the police took away a number of old journals such as Ghadaghadi, Inquilab and Marga O Chinta – none of which is proscribed by the government – without giving a seizure list, which is mandatory. In a democratic set up of government to possess such materials is within the purview of freedom of thought and expression. Strangely, the police have taken the signatures of Sri Mohaptra’s son and that of the local Sarpanch on a number of plain sheets of paper. We learnt from Sri Mohapatra that after raiding the house, the SDPO Chhatrapur had threatened him on the same day in the evening asking him to come to the Police station by 15th of March or face the dire consequences. It is ascertained from Sri Mohaptra that no criminal case is pending against him under any allegation. This is outright police highhandedness and gross misuse of power.

After talking to Sri Mohapatra and on perusal of some of his writings we have reasons to believe that the only intention of the police in raiding the house of Sri Mohapatra could be to suppress his dissent opinion – which he has been expressing through his writings continuously for the last many years – simply by terrorizing. It needs to be noted that Sri Dandapani Mohapatra is the General Secretary of Dakhshina Odisha Sahitya Sammelani, a literary organization of south Orissa, and has been associated with writing and publishing for a long time. He was publishing a satirical magazine called Ghadaghadi between 1984 to 1990. He has published a few books of his poems. Currently, he has been writing for a weekly tabloid called ‘Sahanamela’.

It is a matter of concern that the police, without following the due process of law, have disclosed to a section of media that the raid was undertaken due to suspected Maoist links.

We condemn the police action as it violates the fundamental rights of personal liberty as well as freedom of speech and expression. The police highhandedness is not only directed against the expression of dissent of Sri Mahapatra, it also gives a red signal to all such persons who express their dissent fearlessly. We urge upon the government to stop this undemocratic practice in general and to conduct a high level inquiry into the incident. We also appeal to all the freedom loving people to condemn such undemocratic activities.

Pramodini Pradhan, Convenor, PUCL –Bhubaneswar
Biswapriya Kanungo, Advocate and Human Rights Activist

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , ,

Petition: Assault on Democracy

March 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

To: The President of India
The President of India,
Rashtrapati Bhavan,
New Delhi – 110 004.

Dear Madam Visitor,
Subject: Assault on Democracy

On 18 February 2010, the Delhi Police presented a charge-sheet against Mr. Kobad Ghandy. This document also alleges criminal activities, and support for criminal activities, against several individuals and organisations that have been active in safeguarding and promoting civil and democratic rights, for several decades now. These organisations and individuals have been actively protesting the violation of civil and democratic rights of large numbers of people in the context of ‘Operation Green Hunt’ – the government’s military offensive against ‘Maoists’. Several of those affected by the allegations in the charge-sheet are members of the academic community of Universities in Delhi, who also happen to share in the work and activities of the organisations identified in it.

The allegations against these individuals and organisations are utterly baseless and unsubstantiated; they consequently appear to be motivated solely by the government’s intention to silence all such protests, and to criminalise all such legitimate and democratic activities. This is in continuation with intensifying attempts by the state to curtail spaces for democratic dissent and protest, within and outside the university, and indeed, to erode the very principles of democracy.

Worldwide, universities have traditionally been a crucial space for freedom of expression, the exploration of ideas and critical debate. They have always been, and should always be, sites where even the strongest critique of the state can be – in fact, must and should be – made possible. This is an essential character, not just of the university as an institution, but of the democratic principles of the society it exists in. The attempt to silence these individuals and organisations, therefore constitutes an assault on this very fundamental essence of the university, as well as on the character of democratic society.

We would like to unequivocally affirm that, for the university to remain a space in which democratic principles and practices are sacrosanct and inviolable, the voices that emerge from it must be allowed to do so freely. We consequently also strongly condemn attempts like the baseless allegations in the charge-sheet, to violate precisely this quality of the university and its community.

We request you, in your capacity as Visitor of Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, to intervene and protect the universities and their communities from such assaults. We also request you to ensure that the individuals and organisations targeted in the charge-sheet are not victimised by the baselessly punitive and retributive actions of the state, and that their civil and democratic rights are upheld.

Sincerely,

PLEASE SIGN

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , , ,

Video: Is Marx Back? An Interview with Leo Panitch

March 11, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In this interview Leo Panitch deals with the problems of working class politics and organisation – of trade unions, parties, bureaucratisation and social democracy. There is a very interesting discussion of the Soviet experience and on the international left’s attitude towards various transformatory praxes and experiments throughout the world, including the Latin American.

Courtesy: Socialist Project

Filed Under: DIARIES, INTERVIEWS Tagged With: ,
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