On the Politico-theoretical Problematic posed by
the Current Phase of the Indian Maoist Movement for Working Class Politics

Pothik Ghosh

I

The question of overcoming the problem of systemic cooption that faces the Maoist insurgency raging in certain tribal and preponderantly agrarian (in the sense of socio-occupational geography) areas of the country is essentially a question of how to beat the legal-illegal dichotomy that is constitutive of capitalism – a system made possible only in and through contradictions – and its horizon of legality. (This threat of cooption confronts the current Maoist movement – as it indeed would and does any movement against the ways and codes of dominant institutions that regulate and reinforce the various sectors of capitalist life – either in the form of the movement being determined and articulated by the dualised logic of capitalist regulation that compels it to envisage itself as responding to a war while fighting it; or in the form of being accommodated by and within the given form/forms of the capitalist state.) This question, of course in being posed but also in being answered, also gives rise to a corollary in that it posits the problematic of how a workers’ opposition to a state formed through revolutionary eruption can, because of such opposition and not despite it, retain its working-class orientation. To get back to the Maoist movement, the problem of its subsumption by capitalism – manifest either as its cooption within the given capitalist state-forms or in its determination and articulation by the dualised logic of the capitalist state even as it is apparently still in its movemental moment – can be effectively dealt with and beaten only when the ‘illegal’ ontology, which is seeking to become yet another law in and through its dualism-articulated struggle against the prevailing law to displace it from its legitimate place to occupy it, is challenged from within its own zone where it has already become, both structurally and functionally, the law. Before we proceed any further we would do well to realise that an ontology of working-class resistance, which is designated as illegal within the dualised horizon of capitalist legality, is an ontology that in its formation is an expression of the tendency to transgress and unravel the horizon of capitalist legality and thus move beyond the legal-illegal duality and contradiction it constitutively engenders. But this ontology gets designated (or symbolised) as ‘illegal’ because of its struggle against the prevailing law, which maintains and reinforces the capitalist horizon of conflict and contradiction that the struggle of this ontology in its formation seeks to transcend. Simply put, the foundational translegal or law-unraveling manoeuvre of an ontology of resistance comes to be designated as illegal because of the inescapable duality inherent in all struggles, of which its specific struggling orientation too is an intrinsic part. The recognition of the necessity of this duality, to paraphrase Engels, is constitutive of the freedom called dialectic.

But the only way this endogenous challenge against the law-constituting structure and function of the ‘illegal’ ontology at its own location can become truly translegal – which would mean it does not acquiesce to or align with the established law against which the ‘illegal’ is ranged – is when the given horizon of capitalist ‘legality’ that is maintained and reinforced by the established law is sought to be decimated through a proliferating series of determinate and simultaneous challenges to it at its various multiple locations. These challenges, needless to say, are specific manoeuvres to overcome the capitalist horizon of the legal and the legal-illegal dichotomy it constitutively engenders at each of those respective specific locations. These challenges or manoeuvres, in their continuous proliferation, come to constitute the totality of the horizon of trans-capitalist process, which is the inverse opposite (negativity) of the capitalist horizon of legality and ontological fixities. This real horizon of continuous motion, in emerging as an inversely opposite (negative) alternative to the symbolist horizon of ontological fixities through critical transcendence and displacement of the latter, and its constitutive logic of duality, overcomes, in terms of concrete situation, the state and the law. That, clearly, renders the twin or binary conceptions of legal-illegal redundant. This is the theoretical essence of Marx’s idea of “revolution in permanence”, which Mao Zedong complemented through refoundation in the Chinese conditions through his formulation of the “two-line struggle”. Such an understanding, and its deployment, brings to fore and makes one sensitive to the ineluctable operation of dual power in a working-class revolutionary struggle. It, therefore, indicates why it’s impossible to conceive of completing a socialist revolution in one country, or one socio-occupational geographic zone, to the exclusion of all else.

II

To grasp this impossibility and go beyond it – especially with regard to the current Maoist movement being stuck in its ‘original’ tribal-peasant socio-occupational zones – we need to understand that the history of capitalism is a history of contradictions. Its various moments are, as a consequence, pitted against each other, even as each of those moments are constituted by contradictions and duality that are determinate (or specific) in terms of their respective formal configurations of the general political economy of alienating and competitive capitalism. So, the universal political-economic logic of contradiction and duality, which constitutes the specific forms of such contradictions and duality in particular moments of history – which in turn have been particularised and have thus congealed into conflictive locations with regard to one another – has to be grasped in its determinateness. Therefore, the theoretical (subjective or vanguardist) outside, which was envisaged by Lenin in his attempt to theorise the party in What is to be Done and which has been integral to the Leninist practice ever since, must be seen as the expression of the one in a determinate moment of contradictory and dualised history of capitalism. The ontological form through which the logic of the one expresses itself at a determinate moment should, precisely because of its determinateness, be seen as specific to that moment and therefore provisional. It must not be mistaken, as it often is both by the upholders and detractors of Leninist vanguardism, for a transhistorical ontology, which actually implies the imposition of a form that expresses the logic of the one at particular historical moment of contradiction and duality on another logically similar but historically (and thus idiomatically) different moment of capitalism.

Each of these historically different moments of capital must, however, be seen as arising internally from one another through a process of internal motion that is wrought by determinate subjective interventions in their momentary and thus ontic specificity. This motion is really a process of quantitative changes (at the historical-formal level) leading to a qualitative mutation of and rupture from that given historical form or idiom. This will obviate the Althusserian absolutisation of relative autonomy of various moments or levels of capital’s lived history. Althusser’s idea of relative autonomy is productive when we are envisaging intervention at specific moments in their determinateness but not when we see the entire capitalist system in the totality of the process it must become in order to supersede itself. In other words, the determinate intervention at a specific historical moment must be seen to be giving rise to a new moment of duality that must be intervened in if the spirit of the preceding intervention – overcoming duality and contradiction to obtain to the one – is to be sustained by discerning the logic of that prior intervention in the new moment into which the preceding one has unfolded and in the process has obscured the possibility of relocating that logic by dislocating it. So, intervention has to be envisaged both in terms of the given segmentised and fragmentary stasis of the capitalist system and the internal continuity of its own motion. This means that the former type of intervention needs to be correlated with and envisaged as the latter. For, that is how it actually is, and must be seen, refracted through the prism of terms of its own logic of transcending segmentised duality to obtain to the one – the process expressed and constituted through and in the critical manoeuvre of dissolving its preceding congealed momentary appearances.

III

B.T. Ranadive’s ‘Russian’ and ‘Trotskyite’ line during the Telangana movement of accomplishing revolution through general strike and mass insurrection in the cities is, in the context of the failure of the current Maoist insurgency to move beyond its tribal-peasant bases, particularly valid today. The practitioners of this line must, however, know that its validity is contingent on the line not falling into the undialectical and partial (in Laclau’s sense) trap of envisaging itself as privileged over the Maoists’ model of agrarian (New Democratic) revolution, which is fully valid within its own determinate socio-occupational geography. This line must, in its articulation, see itself in constellational continuity with the localised, momentary anti-capitalist form of the Maoist agrarian revolutionary movement only insofar as that form emerges as an expression of the trans-capitalist and thus processual constitutive logic at that historical moment or location of the rural-tribal-agrarian. The form in question is an expression of the trans-capitalist processual logic in its formative and enunciative moment and this moment must, therefore, be distinguished from the congealed, institutionalised moment of the form when/where the formalised content or the logic of the form per se dominates. (This constellational logic could be understood through Lefebvre’s recognition of “revolution lagging behind itself”; or in an Adornoesque-Benjaminian vein articulated as the momentary forms of the revolutionary process being registered and grasped as the various afterimages of its processual essence. This constellational logic could also be stated in Althusserian terms by envisaging the various localised or momentary forms of the working-class struggle as traces or effects of their respective foundational encounters in order to overcome the necessity those forms exude in their particularity of being free and floating signifiers.) This constellational logic of revolution is conceptualised in Negri’s Spinozist-Marxist idea of the multitude, which rightly sees the historical forms or socio-occupational subjects enacting the singular logic called the working class multiple. This naturally renders the party of the working class movemental, and the vanguard dynamically hierarchical. Many of our current comrades, who kind of propose the Ranadive line of urban strikes leading up to a mass insurrection as a ground from which to critique the Maoists, make precisely the same non-constellational, ‘workerist’ (sectionalist) mistake as committed by Ranadive in the context of the Telangana peasant movement of the undivided CPI in the late forties and early fifties.

Their critique of Mao’s model of agrarian revolution and his formulation of “New Democracy” is plagued by the same problem for they are unable to see how those anti-capitalist forms – which Mao posed at a specific, Chinese moment of the unfolding of the global revolutionary process – have been constituted through the determinate enactment of the trans-capitalist and trans-ontological processual logic in the specificity of their socio-occupational, political geographic and historico-temporal moment. This error could, however, be averted if Mao’s Chinese Revolution is not seen as a one-time occurrence that ended in 1949, but is situated in constellational continuity with Mao’s praxes embodied in what has subsequently come to be known as “The Great Leap Forward” and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” and which constituted the unfolding of the revolutionary logic of Mao’s China that had congealed in the state form through the ‘seizure’ of power by the Communist Party of China in 1949 precisely because of that congealment. These two moments of Mao’s praxis can be clearly seen to be embodying (or performing) his idea of what he called “continuous revolution”.[Mao explicated this theory of his in, among other places, a speech to Supreme State Conference on January 28, 1958, where he clearly stated, “I advocate the theory of the permanent revolution. You must not think that this is Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. In making revolution, one must strike while the iron is hot, one revolution following another; the revolution must advance without interruption….” He expanded on this formulation in his Sixty Articles on Work Methods when he wrote, “ideological and political struggle among men as well as revolution will continue to exist forever and universally…”.] Clearly then, this theory of Mao’s was a re-enactment of Marx’s formulation of “revolution in permanence”. [See Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 for this formulation.]

Mao’s continuous revolution was nothing but the codification of the practice of mobilisation – through “The Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution – of the emerging new social subject of working-class politics to critically undermine and supersede the inevitable institutionalisation and congealment of his earlier “New Democratic” moment of the trans-capitalist revolutionary process. That, in phenomenological terms, meant the waging of struggle to eliminate the nomenklatura and “capitalist roaders” in the party. The nomenklatura and capitalist roaders can, generally speaking, be designated as the bureaucratised elite of a Communist Party when it ceases to be a movement-form to become a state-form. In the specific instance of Mao’s China, this elite, which signified the restoration of capitalism through its embodiment of the differential (and thus bourgeois) configuration of class power, had been formed as a result of the congealment, institutionalisation and statisation of the global revolutionary process enunciated by and constitutive of the form of the Communist Party of China at its New Democratic moment. [Though these moments of revolution have, in the specific experience and praxis of Mao’s China, turned out to be posed in the frame of successive temporality, that is not necessarily how revolutionary moments would always become discernible. Our position vis-à-vis the Maoist movement here, for instance, shows that different moments ripe for revolutionary, working-class intervention inhabit the same temporal moment (in scalar terms) of a temporality that empirically has just the vector (or teleology) of capitalism, but are separated in their being located within different socio-occupational geographies. The overgeneralisation that the Indian Maoists have been effecting through their dogmatic and Stalinised adherence to the formalisation of the revolutionary experience and practice in the New Democratic, agrarian revolutionary moment of Mao’s China has led to the conflation of the processual revolutionary essence and the form that essence constituted in the process of expressing itself determinately at a specific moment of its unfolding. This has meant the undermining of the processual, historico-logical or, what Moishe Postone calls the quasi-objective, character of the revolutionary operation. That has, not surprisingly, brought the Indian Maoists and some of their ‘workerist’ critics on the same page in terms of the theoretical approach they have adopted to expand the current Maoist movement or in criticising this endeavour respectively. The tenor of the latter’s rejection of Mao’s and the Maoist forms of intervention indicates they are not willing to distinguish the dualising logic of those forms per se in their moment of congealment from the processual revolutionary logic they constitutively express. They throw the baby with the bathwater even as the Maoists, whom they seek to criticise, envisage the bathwater itself to be the baby.]

To come back to the praxis of continuous revolution in revolutionary China, the Mao who is a living, practising embodiment of this idea of continuous revolution is many as each time he is organic to the multiple, constellationally bound – essentially united and therefore formally conflicted — social subjects of the working-class logic. Thus Mao’s emphasis on constantly occupying the antithetical position – so much so that in his understanding of the dialectic there is no moment of synthesis – (Zizek on Mao in In Defence of Lost Causes) renders his individuality into that of a trans-subjective revolutionary, which is composed of both his institutionalisation and his own iconoclasm vis-à-vis the congealment of his preceding revolutionary selves. His practice led to the Communist Party of China being envisaged as a horizon of movement-form that is constitutive of the unfolding of the constant dialectical dance of congealment and decongealment; institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation; revolution-restoration-and-revolution; and negation, negation of negation, negation of negation of negation ad infinitum. The Indian Maoists’ claim that they are capable of repeating Mao on this score is erroneous as their conceptualisation of the Maoist path flows from their reification of Mao’s specific experience of revolutionary moments in the form of linear temporal succession of stages.

As a result, they fail to see the many subjectivities embodied in Mao the individual in multiple moments that are in logical continuity through and because of the conflict of their congealed momentary forms with one another. Thus the assertion of various intellectuals, sympathetic to the CPI (Maoist), to make the logic of the Maoist movement unfold is nothing but a proposal to spread ‘Maoism’ through the overgeneralisation of the locally valid and localised experience and resultant practice of the CPI (Maoist) in its tribal-agrarian socio-occupational zones. Such a proposal implies, tendentially, the authoritarian and coercive imposition of the party and its ‘revolution’ as state-forms on a heterogeneity of working-class experiences. This is clearly a Blanquist programme of envisaging revolution in terms of capturing the twin and constitutively twinned spheres of circulation and regulation without transforming the sphere of capitalist production through the decimation of value creation, which is a constant realisation of the tendency to make the state and its function of distributing value wither away. For, the persistence or emergence of the state, and the circulation-distribution spheres that it is constitutively integral to, retroactively implies the creation and extraction of value at the point of production. Such a Blanquist strategy, needless to say, undermines the communist invariant of the one (revolutionary process) a la Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism) and restores  capitalism and its foundational logic of dualised contradiction, existence of classes and (class) differences and class domination.

An Introduction to Alexandra Kollontai on Sexual and Women’s Question

Satyabrata

This is intended to be an introduction to Alexandra Kollontai’s works on the sexual and women’s question where these two interrelated aspects have, taken together and in their separateness, been analysed from a working-class perspective. Kollontai was a member of the workers’ opposition in the erstwhile Soviet Union. Most of her works in this compilation were written at a time when ideological struggles raged like a typhoon within the working-class movement in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Justice can, therefore, be done to them only if they are read in a critical and revolutionary fashion by refounding them in the current context and conjuncture, thereby reclaiming their originary impulse. Marx has spoken, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party as also elsewhere, of a community of women. To that extent, the sexual and women’s questions deserve a Marxian spirit of enquiry rather than adventurism.

Marxists have made the eleventh and last thesis of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach‘ – “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” – famous by transforming it into a shibboleth. The thesis has become, for many working-class activists on the ground, a justificatory dogma to carry on with their business-as-usual activism of ‘changing the world’ while shunning all serious and necessary endeavour of critical and self-reflexive inquiry. In that context, it would perhaps be pertinent to countenance Marx’s second thesis from the same work: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth[emphasis mine] i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality and non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

Mao Zedong expressed this idea of Marx in a simpler and more matter-of-fact manner when he proclaimed that “To investigate a problem is to solve it”. The works that have been constitutive of this article shall, therefore, serve their purpose only if they enable investigation and interpretation of the women and sexual questions as they currently exist in relation to class struggle, than if her formulations are dogmatically accepted. That would, among other things, simultaneously change the forms in which Kollontai grasped and posed those questions leading to a non-metaphysical, non-voluntaristic and materialist intervention on those questions.

(1)

In chapter six of Nalini Jameela’s  Autobiography of a Sex Worker, the author has attempted to theorise certain aspects of sexuality in relation to and from her socio-occupational position. Her defence of prostitution, clearly an attempt to resist the condemnation of her occupation from within the framework of bourgeois morality, ultimately remains trapped within the totality of the capitalist system which is constitutive of that bourgeois morality too. To that extent, her theorisation can be said to be embodying a petty-bourgeois tendency. For, the occupational defence of prostitution by Jameela fails to take into account the fact that the existence of prostitution as a social and ideological phenomenon is inimical to her interests as a member of the working class.

The bourgeois ideal of sexual relations would, needless to say, have no place in the order of things that revolutionary working class politics envisages. If anything, such relations would have to be decimated and superseded by such politics. The working class should, therefore, be critical of such relations as their idealisation by it would rob its members of their class orientation and compel them as a class to deviate from their supreme mission. To begin at the beginning we would, however, need to grasp sexuality as a human essence, even as we seek to comprehend its manifestation through different historically given forms of sexual relations, in order to understand the two in their dialectical articulation and interplay. I attempt to do that by choosing to define sexuality by refracting it through the psychoanalytic conceptual prism of Eros, and subsequently show how this Eros is realised in bourgeois social formations through its formal manifestations among working class members of those formations. I would, in the same movement, also attempt to show how those formal manifestations, which are nothing but by-products of the Eros, play the role of capitalist ideological state apparatus (see the note below) both in a structural and functional sense.

Eros:

The concept of ‘love’ is different from ‘Eros’. Eros can be said to be that part of the libidinal instinct that has undergone minimum repression due to cultural, psychological and social barriers of the mind. Freud’s work (my conclusions are primarily derived from my reading of Repression (1915), The Libido Theory (1923) andNegation (1925)) prove that love is less original, instinctually, than Eros; as in forms of love (other than Eros) a large part of the original instinct gets repressed and what remains is only a fraction of the original libidinal instinct. This repression is primarily due to cultural, psychological and social barriers. The psychological barrier is manifest by the cultural barrier, which in turn is manifest by the social. Society has as its base the economy and hence it will not be fallacious to state that repression is chiefly due to economic barriers. The economic sub-structure, therefore, decides the degree and direction of the libido’s repression. The Eros of the present society has also much of its original libidinal instinct repressed due to the persistence of its particular economy. The economic sub-structure of a society can then be said to have shaped the form Eros takes in it. The Eros of Shakespeare’s Romeo, for instance, is one that is famous because of its idealisation by capitalist modernity. (Though according to many, this was not the best portrayal of love by the playwright.) That Romeo is one of the most celebrated characters of popular literature is precisely due to the valorisation of this bourgeois Eros of which Shakespeare made him into an embodiment and symbol. Capitalist modernity idealises Romeo’s Eros because it expresses a property prejudice that is typical of the bourgeois social and ideological formation. An example from the First Scene of Act I of Romeo and Juliet itself is evidence of such prejudice.

Benevolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?

Romeo: Not having that which having makes them short.

Benevolio: In love?

Romeo: Out-

Benevolio: Of love?

Romeo: Out of her favor where I am in love.

Here Romeo’s grief is not that he is out of love but that his Eros is not satisfied, which could only be satisfied by ownership of the object of Eros.

This (private) ownership is a bourgeois prejudice and the striving for such ownership in sexual relations is not only idealised but also institutionally safeguarded by the structure of marriage in bourgeois society. Psychoanalysts are correct when they say there is a resistance offered by the object of Eros to the subject, but they are correct only insofar as things are within the bourgeois framework of thought. Eros existed in different forms under different socio-economic systems. Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is one work from where such examples can be cited. During and after the November Revolution, Alexandra Kollontai did some seminal work on how Eros would be within a social formation constitutive of a socialist mode of production. Her work Make Way for Winged Eros was an attempt to theorise a form of Eros free from the property prejudice typical to capitalist modernity. She attempted to conceptualise a society where the resistance offered by the object of Eros is eliminated even as her analysis simultaneously transforms the object of Eros into subject. Her dialectical analysis of Eros can be said to be one of the earliest attempts to theorise a healthy sexual norm for society. Her concept of ‘winged Eros’ is necessarily an important contribution to the less-inquired-into aspects of the psychology of the working class.

Eros is a gift inherent in man’s nature. An understanding of this nature is the basic premise on which science develops in order to better the condition of the masses. There are several hurdles to be overcome by the working class in scientifically conceptualising a form of Eros that sublimates its repressive and, at times, coercive manifestations in the class struggle. The ruling classes here also come with their hypocritical solutions. On one hand, they preach chastity or brahmacharya with the help of religion, whose hegemony the working class accepts in its quest for some salve to alleviate the pain it suffers due to the oppression of the ruling class. On the other, they conjure up fantasies such as ‘free’ sexual relations and legalised prostitution and so on to create an unhealthy atmosphere among the working class. The working class has fallen victim to the ideological coercion of the capitalist system. At a time when unemployment, poverty and exploitation are to be fought by the working class, it is stuck in the confusion of bourgeois pigeonholes in the sexual moment. Capitalism offers pigeonholes to create sectarianism within the working class on this issue – chastity for the reactionary conservative, institutionalised marriage for the establishmentarian and a hypocritical ‘free’ love for the progressive elements among the embourgeoised working class. In any case, the working class is of help to the bourgeoisie. Individual members of the working class are bound to think within the framework of the bourgeois system right from the time when Eros starts surfacing in their minds.

Embourgeoisment of Eros:

The bourgeois ideologists, through the media, art and literature, have several times preached a form of Eros that is nothing but sexuality. Freud’s discoveries have been misrepresented and misused by the bourgeois propagandists to reduce something that could create compassion and camaraderie among the opposite sexes of the working class with which it could carry forward its struggle for liberation to a shameless use-and-throw relation based on sex that has given rise to antagonisms among the sexes. Male and female chauvinism are a result of economic inequality and in capitalist modernity, these antagonisms are successfully directed against each other to keep the bourgeoisie safe. Kollontai has critiqued such antagonisms, though in the concrete forms they appeared then, in her Social Basis of Women’s Question. The following statement of Rosa Luxemburg’s best captures Kollontai’s premise in this work: “For the property owning bourgeois woman, her home is her world; for the proletarian woman the whole world is her home.” Kollontai’s work in question expands the horizons of feminism to link it to class struggle.

(2)

At the same time, bourgeois ‘free’ love has reduced the woman to being a commodity of satisfying the distorted Eros of man and vice-versa. And then there is, of course, the property prejudice for the commodity and striving for private ownership of that commodity. This often results in aggression among the sexes, as this particular commodity is a living commodity and, more importantly, a human being. The bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of serious Freudian discoveries regarding the Eros. It has used the electronic media fully to divert the working class’s struggle for the liberation of mankind. Movies, songs, music, and so on are all being used as a means to confine the thoughts of the proletariat of this sexually suppressed society within the boundaries of the libido. The so-called romantic heroism of the movies is nothing but hooliganism of the sexually repressed masses coloured and replicated on screen. This ‘heroism’ is again reflected in the ideology of today’s working class. As Brecht said, “Art is not only a mirror that reflects reality but also a hammer with which to shape it.” Capitalist modernity is hammering into the working classes, at a time of economic and social crises, libidinal ego, which has, to an extent, robbed the working class of its more important and fundamental ideology with which it could triumph over all hurdles. It has stolen away from the masses, using Eros, the scientific outlook, that is the supreme weapon in the hands of the working class in its perilous journey towards freedom. The working class is confined to and confused by the several forms of Eros presented by capitalism. A scientific enquiry as to what form of Eros could be suitable for the masses is very much ideologically necessary for facilitating class struggle. Or else, Eros shall continue to act as an ideological state apparatus for the bourgeoisie. Kollontai had made such scientific inquiry and her works provide a deep insight into Eros and shall hopefully contribute to the shaping of something that shall stop Eros from acting as an ideological state apparatus.

Bourgeois Marriage:

Marxists have done much work on institutionalised marital relations from the perspective of reproduction of labour-power. The genetico-evolutionary psychological process that leads to the institutionalisation of relationship between the sexes is to be studied. Right from the time when Eros starts concretising in the mind, it is infused with bourgeois ideology that dilutes it so as to bring forth into consciousness its main economic motto – ownership of private property. The ‘Eros’ thus formed is full of property prejudice in that one’s ‘Eros’ can only be satisfied when one owns privately, the object of Eros, whether for a short time or for one’s entire life. Love, libido and imagination of Eros of the person is, therefore, ideologically centralised in and around the private ownership of the individual in which Eros manifests. This embourgeoisment of Eros has taken place at a particular historical epoch and exists today. Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the Statecan be referred to in order to figure out how this transition took place.

Here Eros (as it exists in the form today) acts as the ideological state apparatus, which furthers the cause of the state into the family. These act as the organs of the ruling class, to contain the working masses within horizons set by them that hamper class struggle. The form that Eros has taken today is bound to change in the process of evolution, either for worse under capitalist degradation or for better through the unfolding of the working class struggle.

What we see now, however, is its degradation, thanks to the operation of the bourgeois ideology. From arranged marriages – where sheer commodification of (wo)man takes place – to love marriages – where marriage overshadows love making rejuvenation of human relationships impossible. It is only the working class that can free itself and the larger society from the chains, both in this sphere and the rest. Kollontai in herTheses on Communist Morality in Sphere of Marital Relationship offers certain criticisms of the dominant bourgeois marriage that can be helpful for the working class to overcome one among the many, but an important, hurdle that capitalism has placed in its path of liberation.

Bourgeois family:

The bourgeois family is the most acceptable institutionalised form sexual relations among denizens of bourgeois social formation, which includes individual members of the working class too, takes. This form serves the purpose of capitalism as a means of reproducing labour-power and as an ideological state apparatus for reproducing the condition and relation of production. Althusser in his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ explains how the ‘school’ has replaced the ‘Church’ and the “School- Family couple constitutes the dominant part in the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production threatened in its existence by the world class struggle”. He has laid his emphasis primarily on the school. It is necessary to add that the bourgeois family plays an equally important role in reproducing the relation of production and it is embourgeoised Eros that gives rise to this family.

Apart from this purely economic function of the family acting as a hurdle in class struggle, the bourgeois family has other hazardous effects on the worker. The instincts suffer repression when Eros in institutionalised by marriage into the family, and libidinal instincts outside the boundaries of marriage and bourgeois family meet their fate in being repressed. The question, therefore, is what form sexual relations shall take once they supersede the various institutional forms of marriage in the process of unfolding of the working-class struggle. Post Soviet revolution, Kollontai, who was an active part of it, wrote Communism and the Family. It is necessary to study this work from three perspectives:

1. From the perspective of the individual worker. In which one has to take into account psychology.

2. From the perspective of the working class. In which one has to take into account the class struggle that shall lead to dictatorship of the working class and its liberation. Here, the role of the family as an ideological state apparatus has to be understood more specifically.

3. From the perspective of culture, where, at this point of time, how the structure of the bourgeois family can be transformed through an ideological struggle, which can, for the moment, be like a breeze and not a typhoon.

It is necessary to come back to the repression of instincts in marital family in order to expand our horizon of study into another ‘evil’, which is a by-product of the Eros, marriage and family, and which has evolved in the course of evolution of each of the above three and into which capitalist exploitation has consequently entered. Prostitution.

Prostitution:

Prostitution can be said to be the selling of sex by masses of unemployed women who find their employment in concretising their expenditure of labour as sex so as to meet the needs of sexually repressed individuals. The cause of repression of individuals in the bourgeois society has been, to a considerable extent, cited above. Individuals, both married and unmarried whose Eros is not satisfied when they travel along the bourgeois path of satisfying Eros attempt to buy Eros. The centralisation of Eros around the private ownership of the subject of Eros primarily gives rise to such repression. There exists a dialectical relation between the repressed individuals and prostitution, in that each exists because of the other. The structure of bourgeois family has to be changed for prostitution to wither away and the embourgeoisment of Eros has to be stopped if the family is to wither away. And, in the final analysis, the bourgeois system has to be overthrown if embourgeoisment of Eros is to be eradicated. The root of prostitution lies in the bourgeois economic system. One might question the presence of prostitution is earlier historical epochs, where the bourgeois system of exploitation did not exist. In those times, the form and manifestation of prostitution were also different. That prostitution is a function of the economy prevailing in a society is no myth. In India, Kautilya in his Arthashastra made prostitution taxable (Arthashastra [2.27.27]). This historico-empirically substantiates the assertion that prostitution is a part of the prevailing economy. One standard, liberal-bourgeois argument in defence of prostitution is, if prostitution is made legal, the number of rapes will reduce!But will sexual repression and its effects vanish!? The instinctual impulses of rape shall rather implode or explode elsewhere creating an unhealthy environment.

The genetico-evolutionary study of prostitution in accordance with the economy and family ties that existed in each historical epoch shall clear all doubts regarding the relation of prostitution as a part and manifestation of the economy. Today, however, prostitution has emerged as an independent trade. Here sex work is the concrete form of labour that creates value in women and is sold. Women have been reduced to a commodity elsewhere but the climax of commodification is prostitution where the woman ceases to be a human being and serves only as a commodity whose value is determined by the degree to which it can satisfy the libido of its purchaser.

Capitalist appropriation and exploitation have entered into this trade also and studying the functional and status hierarchy that exists in the brothels bear that out. It is at this point that prostitution needs to be critiqued, targeting its specificity as a form of alienated labour in capitalism and not as a moral question of non-marital sex. Be it sex-work or any other form, work under capitalism is itself a means of exploitation, every worker under this mode is exploited, so is the sex worker. In Marx’s letter to Friedrich Bolte, Marx writes “sectarianism and working class movement increase in inverse proportion”. A form of sectarianism has developed among a large section of the working class because of the concrete form the work of the prostitute.

For the worker other than the sex-worker, sex work is ‘unethical’ and hence the sex-worker is condemned. On the part of the sex worker, she is someone who is denounced by the rest of the working class and hence her struggle is against other workers who suffer the vices of the same form of exploitation. This is one of the main manifestations of embourgeoisment of Eros in class struggle. The Eros, the family and prostitution in bourgeois society forms a vicious circle that together constitutes and acts as a strong ideological state apparatus for reproducing the conditions and relations of production.

Critique of Nalini Jameela’s Chapter six of Autobiography of a Sex-worker:

Jameela’s theorisation can be said to be based on a defense of capitalism. Initially in this chapter, she says ‘sex work and sexual exploitation are two different things’. That is true only insofar as one abstracts sexuality from sex work. But under capitalism work itself is exploitation in that surplus labour is exploited from the worker in the brothels as well as outside. As for Jameela, she is not in the lower stratum of any brothel but rather sells sex independently and hence her class position is not that of a worker but is an expression of a petty-bourgeois tendency. Something that is clearly reflected in her theorisation.

She defends selling of sex, comparing it to selling of any other commodity – education, entertainment and so on – not analysing or going against the process of commodification and commercialisation of each. Her fight is to legalise commodification and commercialisation of sex as other spheres have been commodified. She has, probably, not experienced the adversity such commodification and commercialisation regularly visit on the masses, and has not given a thought to the kind of adversity the commodification and commercialisation of sex has brought and would further bring in society. For this thought of her and for people sharing her position and yet sincerely want the liberation of working class in general and women in particular, Kollontai’s Sexual relations and Class Struggle can be the starting point of enquiry. A working-class critique of Jameela’s stand on prostitution can be extracted from Kollontai’s explanation of the adversity of prostitution in herProstitution and Ways of Fighting It. One point, which Jameela over emphasises in her theorisation, is that prostitutes are free from family ties, ‘they do not have to cook for their husbands’, etc. She forgets that in doing so, the prostitute does not liberate herself, economically or sexually. Instead, she reduces herself to the status of a tool to be played with and discarded.

Conclusion

Nothing is as small as it seems to be. Any aspect whose study is neglected falls victim to the ideology of the dominating class, having adverse effects on class struggle. A rereading of Kollontai’s writings shall, hopefully, throw some light on one of the questions that has been regarded as small, particularly by the Indian working-class movement, and hence has led it to side with the ruling class on the aspect of sexuality in its struggle for liberation.

Note:

The concept of Ideological State Apparatuses is an addition to the Marxist classical theory of State and was given by Louis Althusser in his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1969-1970). According to Althusser, the ideological state apparatuses function relatively autonomous of the base. Whereas the repressive state apparatuses (police, army, etc) function chiefly by violence, the ideological state apparatuses (church, family, school, political parties, etc) function primarily through ideology (secondarily and occasionally by violence) and serve the same function as the State. Quoting Althusser,

“1. All State Apparatuses function both by repression and ideology, with the difference that the (repressive) State apparatus function massively and predominantly by repression, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology.

2. Whereas the (repressive) State Apparatus constitutes an organised whole whose different parts are centralised beneath a commanding unity, that of the politics of class struggle applied by the political representatives of the ruling classes in possession of State power, the Ideological State Apparatuses are multiple, distinct, ‘relatively autonomous’ and capable of providing an objective field to contradictions which express, in forms which may be limited or extreme, the effects of clashes between the capitalist class struggle and the proletarian class struggle, as well as their subordinate forms.

3. Whereas the unity of the (Repressive) State Apparatus is secured by its unified and centralised organisation under the leadership of the representatives of the classes in power executing politics of class struggle of the classes in power, the unity of the different Ideological State Apparatuses is secured, usually in contradictory forms, by the ruling ideology, the ideology of the ruling class.”

Savyasaachi

In an education system the curriculum and modes of its transaction need to determine the design of the infrastructure – the size and shape of classrooms, the looks of the building, the library, the student-faculty-administration interface, the equipment and so on.

What is the nature of curriculum space and what goes into its making?

We are all familiar with the idea that everything is woven around and into the curriculum – everything here includes not merely all aspects of an institution system but also the larger society; the history, culture, economy, politics and so on. It is one of most contested spaces – what should be included has been debated across the table and has also been a source of conflict and violence between the left, liberal and right persuasions in the fields of politics, economy and culture. Each of these has wanted its agenda to be pushed in.

All contestations are for being ‘included’ – that is against a one-sided view of history and society. There is a diversity of voices, the body of knowledge has grown over the past several decades and the objective conditions have changed rapidly and that process continues. How are these to be accommodated in the curriculum and from whose perspective?

The perspective of the student is most important. From this perspective, contestations are concerned with finding ways to learn from a plurality of visions and knowledge-systems. This is about the dynamism of studentship as opposed to the authoritative figure of the ‘teacher’. This is a shift towards opening the question of what is ‘learnable’ and free knowledge from the monopolist control of the ‘authoritative teacher’ (one who has the authority over the text and the body of knowledge that should be transacted in class) and the ideological ally (from any of the three persuasions mentioned above).

The neoliberal economy has monopolised the curriculum space. It is instrumentalising the space for transacting knowledge and skills required by different sectors of the corporate economy.  This has been undermining the ‘dynamism of studentship’ that has been emerging alongside ‘plural knowledge-systems and perspectives’.

The undermining of ‘studentship’ has only contributed to the making of a neoliberal disaster. That, however, is creating the ground for the emergence of an even stronger idea of dynamic studentship with its concern for the ‘learnable’.

The neoliberal disaster

The neoliberal regime is oblivious to the increasing technological lag. That is, it lags far behind the aspirations of the frontier people (the masses) and thereby the requirements for a just society. The masses want jobs and justice, the neo-liberal economy give more unemployment; the masses want health, the neo-liberal economy creates conditions for more health hazards, the masses want quiet time, the neoliberal economy floods their free time with loud blaring music; the masses want the truth about perpetrators of violence and brutality, the neoliberal economy creates conditions for further conflict and violence… the list can be endless.

The neoliberal mindset misses the point that with each new step to boost the economy it increases the speed of the chain reaction. There is an escalation of the rate at which difference lead to conflict, violence, war and terrorism. Under these conditions, an economy cannot function. Massive amount of energy, finance and institutional processes are devoted to unproductive work of containing violence and terrorism. That, needless to say, does nothing but compound those crises. For instance, the production of arms and ammunition adds no value to life; on the contrary it takes away a large chunk of resources from the economy. It contributes nothing to value of food, shelter, education and health.

The neoliberal, paying no heed to all that, erodes all theoretical spaces. In other words, there is no space and time for discussing questions that emerge from the dilemmas of human predicament, questions that seek to examine the assumptions behind our beliefs and practices. Without such theoretical spaces blunders are bound to occur – for instance, the reduction of the problem of terrorism to an issue that can purportedly have technological solutions. There is little time and space to analyse as to how terrorism could quite plausibly be a product of the neoliberal economy with its emphasis on the market. To understand and deal with the problem requires a radical re-examination of the assumptions of neoliberalism. It is not about annihilating ethnic groups that have got arms. It is about the inability to conduct a fundamental investigation into the premises of the system despite facts and public opinion that point to the failure of neoliberalism at levels of economy, society and polity.

It not uncommon to hear in academic seminars, policy meetings and debates that the theoretical is anti-practical and theoretical discussions slow down the completion of projects. There is a tacit agreement that when a discussion gets into a deadlock on account of theory a decision can be taken on the basis of the practical. Often at meetings one hears “too much of democracy is not going to lead anywhere”. In other words, there is no time for discussion. Time constraints are imposed by financial considerations – ‘the work needs to be one within the time-frame for which the money has been sanctioned’.

There is a conflict between financial time and discussion time. In this conflict the discussion time shrinks and this obviously implies a shrinking of theoretical space.

Such conflict and shrinking has filtered down to other fields of social and political life. Debates on policy are short and snappy, what with political activists being averse to theory. They want action and have no time for reflection. In universities there are fewer students who opt for the social sciences for they do not get one a job. Such pressure has compelled the re-invention of more market-friendly syllabi in the social sciences.

The meaning of theory itself has changed. A good example is ‘theory for computer programs’ taught in schools and institutes. It refers to a list of terms and procedures to run the program and there is no space for asking the why how and what. Here theory itself has become the instrument.

In social sciences, theory is more often than not envisaged as the lens or the frame (legal, conceptual, experiential, religious…) through and within which we see the world. In the first instance, the world appears either smaller (as if viewed through a convex lens) or larger (seen through the concave) than what it is. In the case of theory being the frame, the world is viewed with the terms of reference specified by the task to be accomplished. In both instances, theory is the ally of fragmentation and encourages the exclusion of critical voices of people from diverse experiences and plural cultures.

The neoliberal economy has converted theory into an instrumentality for manufacturing consent.

Army recruitment through text books/Shrinking theoretical spaces

An instance of the mindless neoliberal economic regime is advertisements for recruitment to the Army in school textbooks.

The National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT), on the recommendation of a parliamentary committee, has given a part of the textbook space to the Army. It has granted permission to the Indian Army to advertise in five textbooks – creative writing and translation, computer and communication technology, human ecology and family sciences, Indian Heritage and Crafts and Graphic Design.

 

 

This news of March 18, 2009, in the Indian Express underscores the partnership among the army, the NCERT and the state. It is not coincidental that an advertisement from the Army is included in textbooks. This decision emanates from an ideological assumption that is integral to the core of the neoliberal regime. The Army is the foundational sector of the economy, not only is it expected to defend civic space it also is at the apex of the innovation chain from where technology trickles down to civil society and transforms its character.

What brings them together? What do the state, education and the market share? What is common between the military and the NCERT? What implications does this partnership have for the future of creative writing, the rules of translation, the form and content for computer, communication and technology, the guidelines for human ecology and family sciences, Indian heritage and crafts, and graphic design?

The army and the education system are contraries.

The army is grounded in no tolerance for questioning and education is grounded in no restraint on questioning.

How different is this positioning of a recruitment advertisement in textbook from recruitment of child soldiers?

In this advertisement, the state and the NCERT have legitimised a genocidal disposition: “to catch them young” before they begin to disagree and question, and instill in them a sense of ‘pride and honor’ that comes from unquestioning respect for authority and unquestioned faith in the superiors, from killing innocent people and not be tried in the court of justice, for destroying ecology, for escalating the arms race and contributing to the criminalisation of everyday life.

According to anthropologists, the genocidal disposition exaggerates (the vision of concave lens) and underplays (the vision of convex lens) differences and arranges them as binaries.  For instance, modernity is projected as larger than life and the panacea for all problems; the only way to freedom, fraternity and well-being. Its binary opposite, tradition, is ridiculed and made to appear small. The most lethal aspect of these binaries is that they cannot be co-present – it is either one or the other.Some of these genocidal binaries are as follows:

modernity-tradition; civilisation-savagery; us-them; centre-margin; humanity-barbarity; progress-degeneration; advanced-backward; developed-underdeveloped;  adult-childlike; nurturing-dependent; normal-abnormal; subject-object; human-sub-human; reason-passion; culture-nature; male-female; mind-body; objective-subjective; knowledge-ignorance; science- magic; truth-superstition; master-slave; good-evil; moral-sinful; believer-pagans; pure-impure; order-disorder; law-uncontrolled; justice-arbitrariness; active-passive; wealthy-poor; nation-states- non-state processes; strong-weak; dominant-subordinate; conqueror-conquered (1)

Genocide is the most malignant form of militarisation, for it takes pride in brutalising life – mass killings in the name of human rights. It begins with learning to be proud of using weapons. It is not so easy to shoot the bullet that will kill – not until ones kills a person does the sense of pride settles in.

It is also constitutive of the neoliberal economy. The pride of the neoliberal economy is its vast military-industrial complex. There are a large number of studies that show how the neoliberal economy is a military-industrial complex that has its origin in the post-war (World War I and II) reconstruction effort.

Speed has been the core of neoliberal economy. Fredrick Winslow Taylor its hero.

The salient features of the economy today are as follows:

The rate of extracting natural resources is several times faster than the rate at which nature can reproduce them. Thus this economy has destroyed nature’s capacity to regenerate. There is depletion of water, climate change, pollution, destruction of the natural base for people’s livelihood…. It has created a condition of technological obsolescent waste.

Militarisation is necessary to sustain this economy. It refers to training to follow without question, the line of command from the superiors to the juniors. This, it has been argued, is necessary for ensuring security and safe keeping of resources held under monopolies. Further, the conflicts this economy produces from competition for monopoly necessitates military intervention.

Learning Demilitarisation and Restoration of citizenship

Militarisation of education undermines citizenship. The militarised disposition annihilates our sense of studentship and what is learnable. And that, in turn, undermines the core of citizenship.

In this way, critical voices are rendered silent, public spaces become inaccessible to a diversity of people, bi-lingualism declines, and plural ways of knowing are destroyed.

Militarisation uproots diversity of cultures from their nurturing grounds to create space for installations of weaponry, to mine mineral resources, to construct industrial zone and so on. Many cultures are forced to exist in ‘coma’, paralysed by the proximity of military cantonments, several others are customised for ornamental display before foreign dignitaries, and several are tailored by designers’ consumerism. Most important of all, culturally diverse people who resist mining, refuse to be paralysed, decline becoming ornamentations before foreign dignitaries and hold a mirror to the dreadful face of modernity are silenced.

The learnable in critical voices is studentship to disarming the mind of the genocidal of terms, categories and principles. This is critical to demilitarisation of the economy and citizenship.

Experience and the learnable

Experience is learning of that which is learnable and to let go of the rest.

The most original notion of ‘the learnable’, knowable from stories of origin across diverse cultures and from contemporary works in philosophy, has as its impulse the ‘call’ to dispel the darkness of lies, falsehood, untruth and deception, and the ‘yearning’ for ‘light’.

It is a call for immersion, for radical insistence, of identification, for listening, and, in contemporary works of philosophy, bringing forth the light from within the ‘sacred word’. Common to each of these ways is ‘letting go’. Without letting go, the learnable is out of reach. Experience tells us of the “rest that needs to be let gone of”.

There is a yearning for clarity on what ‘to let go of’. That is constitutive of the foundational element of our being in the world. Such yearning becomes a pursuit of the ‘learnable’.  This is constitutive of studentship as a call to being-in-pursuit.

Letting go and the learnable

What can we learn from different cultures concerning genocide and the learnable? Genocide is more than the massacre of people – it destroys the foundational element of being-in-the-world – it leaves no ground for the pursuit of the “learnable”.

From discussions on this subject we know that genocide is totalising. It has been pointed out that this is the final statement of modernity about itself. At its best and worst, modernity offers nothing other than instruments of mass destruction of nature and culture. In generates an ‘unstoppable vicious cycle’ of violence reproducing violence that at rapid speed draws everyone in. It pushes the victim who in turn becomes the perpetrator in the name of justice – an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. The distinction between the perpetrator and the victim gets obliterated and there remains no one who is not part of the vicious cycle and can thus be the judge. This impossibility of justice is a foundational crisis. It is the loss of humanity, of faith and of the ground for the pursuit of the learnable.

How have cultures responded to similar occasions in history?

Here are some examples that show the learnable.

Studentship

The sabad is the sacred word of the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs that was compiled for a people who were being mercilessly brutalised. This picture illustrates that brutalisation.

 

 

The museum at the Golden Temple in Amritsar has several paintings that show the brutality of the rulers. The gurus, literally the teachers, compiled the Granth Sahib in such times.

The verses in the Granth call upon the gathering (sangat) to contemplate the sabad and learn from it compassion, sharing and offering of the self in the service of the other. It emphasises that a gathering of people that contemplates sabad issatsang: companionship of people who yearn to receive the truth that comes forth from the sabad.

There is no hate speech; there is no prompting for justice in the form of ‘eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’.

The fifth guru, Arjan Dev, who compiled the Granth, was tortured to death. He was made to sit on a hot plate and hot sand was poured over him. In such moment of pain and suffering he smiled and contemplated the sabad.

The sixth guru, Hargobind, after having fought a bloody war with the Muslims conferred with his sangat and came to the conclusion that a mosque be constructed to bring a final end to the violence and counter-violence between the two communities. To make it Vishwakarma, the Hindu divinity for architecture, came in human form. This heritage stands in Guru Hargobingpur and is looked after by Sikhs, who welcome any Muslim who comes to pray.

The sixth guru picked up the sword, there was war without hate speech. There was no animosity but instead there was the effort dissolve the ‘other’ by making it an integral aspect of the ‘self’ and this came close the notion of the ‘One’ that was core of the sabad.

The ninth guru, Tegbahadur, stood-up against the rulers to create a safe space for the Kashmiri Pundits, who were not being allowed to follow the path of their ‘faith’. He was beheaded.

The tenth guru, Gobind Singh, proud of his father decided to free the text of fickleness of human interpretations. Thus thesabad became the guru. And he said, “Guru appe chela“, literally a teacher is himself a student. In relation to the sacred word these words say studentship is learning to receive the light embedded in the sabad. This ‘learnable’ came forth in the light of his life experience of several wars, the beheading of his father for defending the rights of Kashmiri pundits.

This ‘let go of’ teacher and dissolved the authority of the teacher over the text into the text. That cleared the ground for the diversity of people to come to the text and be ‘received by it’ and ‘receive it in turn’. The learning to receive is the ‘learnable’ – to receive the ‘other’ and become ‘One’ with it.

To ‘let go’ in this instance of the authority of the teacher over the text, is a radical insistence and at the same time an immersion and an identification with the One. This is an aspect of dynamic studentship – to be one’s own teacher -that is learning on one’s own.

Ekalavya- Learning to receive

This is a story from Mahabharata.

Dronacharya the guru for archery refused to teach Eklavya, the son of Hiranyadhanu, the king of Nishaad, because he was not a Kshatriya.

Eklavya went to the forest and made with his hands a figure of Drona out of mud.

He called him his guru. Daily he would pay respect to this image of his guru and practise archery.

One day Eklavya sealed the mouth of a dog with his seven arrows. The dog could not open his mouth and ran back to where Dronacharya and Arjun had camped.

Everyone was surprised by this amazing skill in archery.

While searching for this archer, they found Eklavya practicing, who confirmed he had sealed the dog’s mouth.

Dronacharya was curious to know who the boy was and where did he learn archery.

Eklavya told Dronacharya his name and of his father Nishaadraaj Hiranyadhanu (an army chief in Jaraasandh’s army).

Eklavya reminded Drona how he had declined to teach him. He showed Dronacharya his (Dronacharya’s) statue.

Eklavya told him how he learnt archery in the presence of this image. Dronacharya was surprised.

Dronacharya loved Arjun and he wanted him to be the best archer. He thus asked Eklavya to give his right hand thumb by way of guru dakshina (a tribute given to the teacher).

Eklavya without any hesitation picked up a knife and cut his right thumb and offered it to his ‘guru’.

There are at least three important events in this story.

First, the teacher’s (Dronachraya’s) refusal to teach Eklavya.

Second, Eklavya’s self learning: making the mud image of his teacher, learning in the ‘presence of the image’, and becoming a master.

Third, Dronacharya demanding his tribute and Eklavya giving it without a word of protest.

Dronachraya’s refusal to accept Eklavya as his student is an assertion of the teacher’s authority over the subject. It is also an example of a mode of non-inclusive learning process.

Eklavya’s making the mud image of his teacher is an assertion that ‘the person’ in flesh and blood is not necessary for learning. In fact, the image opens up the possibility for self-learning. Later, when Dronayacharya appears in person he only proves Eklavya’s point. The person of the teacher is not only unnecessary it is, in fact, harmful. The person of the teacher can be overbearing, it takes away from the student the most crucial condition for learning: the freedom to experiment and explore (the thumb in this case).

Eklavya includes himself in the learning process. The making of the image undermines the teacher’s claim to authority on the subject.

The ‘image’ of the teacher is, in fact, better than the teacher himself.

Who then is the teacher? Who is it one learns from?

What is the interplay between the image and the person in the making of dynamic studentship?

Eklavya is an example of dynamic studentship.

He is ready to receive and this yearning springs forth from an inner calling to learn. The refusal does not undermine either the yearning or the calling. The giving of the thumb further underlines the preparedness to ‘receive’ teachings unconditionally, as an important element of dynamic studentship. The giving of the thumb is an acknowledgement of the worthiness of learning as well as recognition of the source from whence it comes forth. This is integral to ‘receiving’.

Any reservation or conditionality would make learning incomplete or even impossible. The giving of the thumb undermines the intention with which it was asked, namely to destroy it. It is said that the people of Eklavya’s community continued to use the bow without using the right thumb.

That which is learnable stays, and is not conditional to circumstance.

The dynamic studentship demonstrated by Eklavya opens the question about how did he learn to become better than Arjun? What is it that he learnt that made him better?

The arrow released by Eklavya did not kill the dog but prevented it from barking. The skill here is not just accuracy or precision but the ‘belonging’ of the arrow to the intention of the one who releases.  This is a demonstration of knowledge that belongs to itself, and this is what constitutes the learnable. Unlike the arrow in “time flies like an arrow” this arrow goes no further than to the time and space (embedded in the intention of the one who releases) to which it belongs.

Eklavya did not have to become (Arjun or a Kashtriya) someone other than himself in order to learn.

He began from wherever he was and whatever he knew. How did he proceed thereafter? There is nothing that can be learnt about this from the text.

What can be inferred is that he worked out a relation of learning between himself, the bow and the arrow, and the image of the guru. With the yearning to ‘receive’ and the ‘calling’ to be not deterred from this, as the heart and mind of this learning-relation, the bow and the arrow were receiving Eklavya as much as Eklavya was receiving the bow and the arrow. In other words, they learnt to listen to each other and in time learnt to belong to each other.

Socrates and the Sophist (2)

A sophist on his return from Asia met Socrates on the street. There began a conversation between them:

Sophist: Are you still standing there and still saying the same thing about the same things.

Socrates: Yes that I am. But you are so extremely smart, you say never the same thing about the same thing.

The learnable is between “never saying the same thing about the same thing to saying the same thing about the same thing”. It is the yearning and calling for truth-telling.

The sophist may not be incorrect, for there are so many different facets to the same thing across time and space. What is required is the yearning to learn that which is the same about the same thing across time and space. This is learnable about the ‘thing’. Socrates seems to suggest that it is common sense to wonder why the same thing does have the same things told about it.

Self grounding – Saying same things about same things

We can learn about this from Heidegger’s writings and his life (3).

He attempts to show that the learnable is beyond the factual, the experimental and the measurable. By ‘beyond’ is meant that the ‘learnable’ is not determined by any of these three concerns of science, and at the same time in its absence, the notion of the ‘learnable’ science is no longer ‘discovering research’.

This is perhaps when science becomes the slave of politicians and finance capital.

What does Heidegger have to say about the “learnable”.

That it is mathematical.

“The word ‘mathematical’ stems from the Greek expression ta mathemata, which means what can be learned and thus, at the same time, what can be taught; manthanein means to learn, mathesis the teaching, and thus in two-fold sense. First, it means studying and learning; then it means the doctrine taught.

“Learning is a kind of grasping and appropriating. But not every taking is a learning…to take means in some way to take possession of a thing and have the disposal over it. Now, what kind of taking is learning…? The mathemata are the things insofar as we take  cognizance of things as what we already know them to be in advance – the body as body like, the plant as plant like, the thingness of a thing…it is an extremely particular taking, a taking where he who takes only takes what he basically already has…. The student is merely instructed to take for himself what he already has. If a student merely takes over all that is offered he does not learn. He comes to learn only when he experiences what he takes as something he himself really already has. True learning occurs only where the taking of what one already has is a self-giving and is experienced as such. Teaching, therefore, does not mean anything else than to let others learn, that is, bring one another to learning. Teaching is more difficult than learning; for only he who can truly learn – and only as long as he can do it – can truly teach.”

What is it that we already have and how do we take it as self giving?

“We see three chairs and say that there are three chairs…. We can count three only if we already know three. What we take cognizance of (number three) is not drawn from any of the things….”

The question is what is the relation between experience and science? What does learning from experience mean?

Heidegger seeks to elaborate the point by discussing Newton’s axiom “Every body left to itself uniformly moves in a straight line (p 262).”

This law is at the apex of modern science.

“Where do we find it? There is no such body. There is no experiment which could ever bring such a body to direct perception…This law speaks of a thing that does not exist. It demands a fundamental representation of things which contradicts the ordinary… (p 265).”

What we learn is that the law is freed from the bindings of experience. Heidegger learns this from Galileo’s experiment.

“It becomes a decisive insight of Galileo that all bodies fall equally fast, and that the difference in the time of fall derives only from the resistance of air, not from the different inner natures of the bodies or from their own corresponding relation to their particular place. Galileo supposedly conducted this experiment from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the city where he was professor of mathematics, in order to prove his statement. In his experiment, bodies of different weights did not arrive at the same time after having fallen from the tower, but the difference in time was slight. Inspite of these differences and, therefore, really against the evidence of experience, Galileo held his proposition…. Opposition towards Galileo increased…he had to give up his professorship and leave Pisa.”

Heidegger tells us that Galileo freed knowledge from revelation as well as from experience. He showed the “self-grounding of the form of knowledge as such…. There is new experience and formation of freedom itself, i.e., binding with obligations that are self imposed…an inner drive to establish its own essence as the ground of itself and thus of all knowledge (p 272).”

How did Galileo learn? Heidegger says “…by taking the knowledge itself from out of himself. Galileo says: “I think in my mind of something moveable that is left entirely to itself…. This “to think in the mind is taking knowledge itself from out of himself (p 266-67).”

Heidegger argues that the use of reason enables the ‘I’ to take knowledge from out of one’s self.

Experience and experiment

Each of these instances of learning as self-giving, is an experiment with immersion, radical insistence, identification (as elements of pursuit and as modes of self-giving) that draw out knowledge from the experience(s) of what we already know. This knowledge (that comes forth by means of immersion, radical insistence and identification) is also independent of experience and is its basis.

The Sikh tradition (Guru Arjun Dev, Guru Tegbahadur and Guru Gobind Singh) shows that contemplation is immersion, radical insistence and identification with the sabad that draws out the knowledge (of the sabad) that is self-grounding. It needs nothing outside itself to be validated.

Eklavya similarly shows immersion, radical insistence and identification with image of his guru. In a similar manner, Galileo demonstrates immersion, radical insistence and identification with ‘the mathematical’ when he stands by his principle of falling bodies.

However, what each one has to let go of is different – the Sikh gurus had to let go of their lives; Eklavya had to let go of his thumb and Galileo had to let go of his professorship and later towards the end of his life was forced to recant his views and was forced to live in house arrest. Heidegger, who brings us the insight into the self-giving becoming of beings in this world, supported Hitler and in ways more than one set himself apart from his own ‘I think’.

A mode of drawing out from within is simultaneously ‘the letting go’ of the ‘I’.

The experiment is about when does the letting go become a ‘self giving’ of ‘self-grounded knowledge’.  How ‘that knowledge that is self grounded’ becomes available in a lifetime.

To what extent Galileo and Heidegger gifted to themselves ‘self-grounded knowledge’. To the extent they let go of the ‘I’, and released from its bondage shifted to self-binding freedom that belongs to ‘self-grounded knowledge’ (and not the ‘I’). They were not fully released from the ‘I’ and did not, therefore, belong to the ‘self-grounded knowledge’.

In contrast, the Sikh Gurus and Eklavya were fully released from the ‘I’ and wholly belonged to ‘self-grounded knowledge’. They are exemplars of ‘studentship’. In other words, self-grounded knowledge can be accessed and made available in the lifetime of the student when he belongs to self-grounded knowledge and this is possible when he lets go of the ‘I’.

Towards intellectual self reliance – decommissioning neoliberal education

How can mindlessness of the increasing technological lag – far behind the aspirations of the frontier people – promoted by the neoliberal education be decommissioned?

Earlier in this discussion, the inclusion of people’s voices required a consideration of ‘what is learnable’ because what is being learnt from neoliberal knowledge has been responsible for a series of disasters, one bigger than the other.

In the previous sections the discussions on what is learnable shows that all learning is about ways of bring forth what we already know.

This can help us understand the lag between technology and people’s aspirations.

It would be entirely erroneous to say that there is more need for technology to fill in this lag. For, more technology will only let their voices go unheard and would thus contribute to the lag making it even wider.

The lag draws us out to consider ‘listening’ to the voices of people. What are they all saying – what is learnable is to come from within; learning what we already know; finding ways to bring forth what we already know. This is not just questioning the neoliberal monopoly of knowledge and undermining monopoly over neoliberal knowledge.

Most importantly, it is saying that all learning of what we already know yearns to intellectual self-reliance. All attempts of studentship to belong to self-grounded knowledge are towards intellectual self-reliance.

What we experience in the ordinary day to day life is where learning starts. Learning to listen is the key to bring forth knowledge from within. Not all that can be heard can be retained nor can all of it be ‘letting go’. To be able to differentiate what needs to be let gone of,  immersion, radical insistence, identification will reach out to what does not need to be let gone of.

The diversity of voices and plural knowledge-systems that are being pushed out of the public domain by the neoliberal education system is a recipe for disaster. It is becoming very difficult to know how to get out of this system or how to live with it. This is deception-democracy that is limited to inclusive participation. More often than not inclusiveness has legitimised undemocratic practices.

Participation is not sufficient for democracy. Only if participation enables truth telling can democracy be viable and citizenship be restored. This seems to be a step in the direction of mindfulness of the ‘lag’. It is important to note here that this lag encourages deception and lies.

Truth telling dispels deception. What is knowable in this context can be known by ‘truth telling’. What is learnable is truth telling. Truth telling brings forth what is already known. Truth telling can begin from the experiences of everyday life.

Studentship for Truth telling: what is learnable in truth telling?

How is studentship of truth telling possible?

What curriculum and modes of its transaction need to put in place? This is important for it will determine the contours of the education system. This includes design of the infrastructure – the size and shape of classrooms, the looks of the building, the library, the student-faculty-administration interface, the equipment and so on.

What is the nature of curriculum space and what goes into its making?

Intellectual self-reliance is how truth telling can be learnt. In the absence of intellectual self-reliance truth telling is impossible. What can be the curriculum for this?

Based on the discussion so far the key principles of the curriculum are ‘learning as self-giving’; listening (includes immersion, radical insistence and identification) as ways of bringing forth that which is already known (this is self-grounding of knowledge); and letting go of the “I”.

What can we learn regarding truth telling from our exemplars, discussed earlier?

As regards learning as self-giving we learn from the Sikh gurus that this is possible when the text is free from the authority of the teacher and the “word” is accessible to all. This is possible when a teacher himself lets go of his authority. This allows for the student to be one’s own teacher.

With respect to teacher’s readiness to let go of authority over the text, we learn from the Eklavya tale that not all teachers are ready to do that.  But learning can even then become self-giving. With due deference, the student lets go of the personhood of the teacher. The importance of the ‘image’ of the teacher is crucial to the ‘self-giving’. Image here refers to the teacher within one’s own self. It demonstrates that the role of a teacher is not to offer but to enable recognition of the teacher within.

Without the letting go of the ‘I’, self-giving is not possible. So, self–giving can often strengthen the ‘I’ – ‘It is ‘I’ who learnt by myself”. Until such time that the ‘I’ is let gone of, it is not clear whether the student has learnt the learnable – that self-grounding of knowledge. The letting go one’s own being in the world is the most profound letting go of the ‘I’ (the examples of Sikh gurus). There are other ways of letting go of the ‘I’ – the willingness to let go of the institutional definition of the ‘I’. Galileo giving up his professorship did not disprove the principle he stood by.

The question, however, is does Heidegger’s support for Hitler undo his work as a philosopher and his radical thought? Is support an unwillingness to let go of his ‘I’? Is it also a reflection of the state not willing to let ‘learning as self-giving’ be legitimised within its own institutional structures’.

The curriculum for truth telling is continuously challenging boundaries, not letting them fructify.

Can neoliberal educational institutions be transformed to facilitate truth telling?

Over the past few decades there have been several attempts at truth telling. Each of these has experimented with institutional ways to listen to the truth. What are the implications of these for the education system?

The neoliberal destructions are appropriately described as ecocide and ethnocide. There is now a growing concern over making development processes transparent and accountable.

This is in fact an expression of the yearning for truth telling.

This yearning has now legitimised social audits, environmental audits, public hearings, truth commissions and world social fora. In each of these there is space for truth telling.

There are now in place systems for exercise of human rights, right to information and work along with systems of transitional justice.

There are efforts to establish peace zones across the globe.

Simultaneously there have evolved, in keeping with requirements of truth telling, open learning systems, free university, basic education, experiential learning, concern for resilience and non-reductionist knowledge.

These have been preparing the ground to go beyond the neoliberal education system.

Savyasaachi is Associate Professor in Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

Notes

(1) Alexander Laban Hinton. 2002. Annihilating Differences -The Anthropology of Genocide, University of California Press, and Berkeley Ch 1.

(2) This conversation has been taken from Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics” in David Farrell Krell(ed).1978. Matrin Heidegger: Basic writings, London, Routledge &Kegan Paul.

(3) The quotes in this section are from Ibid.

Gautam Navlakha

Introduction

Sixty-two years is a long time for learning lessons and to cease being indulgent towards the fallacies and  faults of the Indian state in obfuscating the issue of people’s right to self-determination in Jammu & Kashmir. There is a tendency in India to read wars being carried out inside the country as phenomena that are less than a war. And that is because it takes place within the borders of the ‘nation-state’, where deployment of ‘armed forces of the Union’ is somehow considered legitimate even when it is engaged in brutal suppression of the people. The most ardent supporters of non-violence have had no qualms in acquiescing to this venture in the name of the “nation”, “secularism”, fighting “Islamicist” forces, averting another partition…. And it has been accompanied by a reluctance to grasp the real nature of such wars where casualties occur in the form of ‘encounter’ killings, custodial deaths, enforced disappearances, rapes, search-and-cordon operations, arbitrary detentions, torture. The list is really endless. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in Jammu and Kashmir the staggering scale of these crimes over nearly two decades have failed to arouse popular revulsion. However, when a non-violent mass agitation took place last year, it shook the Indian state and society to its very core because it pulverised every lie that had been fed to us and it became evident that people wanted to opt out of India. Then the elections to the J&K legislative assembly took place, and a largely malleable Indian media jumped to the conclusion that people had rejected ‘azaadi’. But they were once again left wondering when the voter turnout for the 15th Lok Sabha elections plummeted. (If elections are to be regarded as a barometer for deciphering the people’s mood then it is the turnout in parliamentary elections that should be held as the most important marker of shift in that mood.) And then came the widespread protests against the rape and murder of Nelofer and Asiya in Shopian on May 29, 2009. Once again it became evident that whatever lies Indian spinmeisters have tried to weave, anger against the Indian state continues to simmer. Therefore, it will not do to ignore and devalue aspirations of a people. But, the issue of people wanting to opt out of India is not just an emotional issue. Or, a mere matter of human rights violations. It has an objective basis in the political-economic and environmental dimension, which must inform any search for solution. What are its main contours?

1. 1. According to a statement issued on the floor of the Assembly by the former Deputy Chief Minister on August 1, 2006, there were more than 667,000 security forces in J&K. This is an incredibly high concentration of troops for an area whose total population is less than 12 million. More than half belong to the Indian army. In a meeting with the press on June 17, 2007, the GOC in C of the Northern Command of the India army, Lt. General H S Panang let out that there are 337,000 army personnel in J&K. In other words the ratio of deployment of security force personnel to people is 1 for 18 persons!  This deployment is not only incredibly high but also way out of proportion to the threat posed by armed resistance. India’s army chief is on record saying that only 600 militants operated in entire J&K. But news reports from time to time refer to the threat posed by infiltration. Although, in actual fact, the number of infiltration bids have fallen sharply; in 2001 it was said to be 2,417 but dropped to 537 in 2004, 597 in 2005, 573 in 2006, 535 by 2007. In 2008, according to the army chief, there has been a 65% decline up to July 31, 2008, to 150, as compared to the same period in 2007 (The Times of India, August 23, 2008). The Indian government also claimed more than 75 per cent decline in militancy-related incidents between 1990 and 2008, from 3,500 to 709 incidents, which is officially supposed to mean that the situation is no longer considered critical (1,000+ is the criterion for terming the situation critical).  Firing incidents came down from 671 to 183.  Bomb explosions declined from 1,000 to just 50.  Killings of civilians declined from 914 to 69. (The Times of India, January 25, 2009). Significantly, almost all the civilians killed in 2008 were at the hands of the Indian security forces. For instance, during the agitation last year, 57 persons were killed by the Indian security forces in the Kashmir Valley alone. All this means that fighting armed resistance cannot be an over-riding motive for deployment of troops.

1.2. In counter insurgency warfare there is a blurring of distinction between “(f)ront and rear; strategic and tactical; combatants and non-combatants”.  The Doctrine on sub-conventional warfare of the Indian Army  says that “…the military operations should aim firstly, at neutralizing all hostile elements…and secondly, at transforming the will and attitudes of the people…. However, the manifestation of such a realization can take from a couple of years to decades as attitudes take time to form and to change”. (Pp21-22)

1.3. In plain English this means that people have to be made to give up their aspirations and reconcile themselves to living under an Indian dispensation. But since people are not so easily reconciled, security forces are needed to be deployed in a manner that they can monitor public and private lives of people. And a whole system of informers, gunmen, reward and punishment…instituted. There are reportedly 671 security forces camps in J&K (excluding those in Jammu, Kargil, Leh, Akhnoor and Udhampur). These occupy 100,000 acres.  Besides, it is in the nature of things that when a hostile armed force occupies land, then land adjacent to what is legally transferred also gets annexed. Thus actual land in possession of the Indian security forces is much higher than shown in official records.

1.4. Now the largest source of employment in J&K is agriculture and horticulture. According to the Economic Survey of 2008-09, more than 49 per cent of the people depend on land, one way or another. The biggest source of earning is from horticulture, followed by tourism. But J&K’s dependence on food imports have risen because per capita yields have fallen. For instance, rice yields per hectare fell by 2.78 per cent in  2008-09. In a situation where existing yields are falling, although agriculture forms the main source of livelihood, the question of land becomes critical. For, it concerns both food production and livelihood needs of the people. If the security forces occupy land, which would otherwise be available for cultivation, then, for an economy so dependent on agriculture and horticulture, it amounts to a net loss. Remove this land from cultivation, and one sees a significant decline in earnings and a dwindling in the number of jobs available. What is also eroded, inter-alia, is the opportunity for increasing food output.

1.5. Therefore, involuntary alienation of land, especially cultivable land, will always be a sensitive issue for people. But when land is acquired for armed security personnel who maintain an obtrusive presence among civilians designed to control their public and private lives and, indeed, even “transform their will and attitude”, as is the case in J&K, it compounds the problem. This contributes to increasing J&K’s dependence on New Delhi for its survival. It is worth recalling that in 2008, the Jammu-based agitation had imposed an economic blockade against the Valley, which meant that imports of foodstuffs to the Valley were curtailed. This clearly highlighted the vulnerability of a people who are dependent on the Jammu-Srinagar highway passing through the Banihal pass for their daily needs.  For several weeks Indian security forces failed to clear the highway. It was this that compelled the leadership of the movement to call for the “Muzzafarabad chalo”  (Let us March to Muzzafarabad)  agitation. This lesson ought not to be forgotten.

2.1. Faced with burgeoning public demand for Indian troop reduction in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian Government constituted three committees in March 2007. An expert committee headed by the defence secretary to look into the question of troop reduction; a review committee headed by M A Ansari to study the Armed Forces (Special) Powers Act as well as the Disturbed Area Act; and a high powered committee headed by the Union minister of defence to study the recommendations of the two panels.

2.2. It was evident that the most important committee was the ‘expert’ committee, headed by the defence secretary. On December 5, 2007, in response to an ‘unstarred’ question  #1672 in the Rajya Sabha, which asked the defence minister to state “whether the committee headed by the defence Secretary…to look into demand of troops reduction in J&K has submitted any report and if so the salient features thereof,”  the answer was:

“The main recommendations pertain to reconciling of the details of the properties occupied by the Security Forces and the rentals paid as also to resolve old cases that have remained unsettled for many years; vacation of public utility services by the security forces such as school buildings, hospitals; the timings of the convoys of the security forces maybe reworked so as to cause least inconvenience to the local population; Dos and Don’ts issued by the Security Forces need to be strictly followed. Implementation of the recommendations is an ongoing process….”

2.3. The conspicuous absence of any reference to ‘troop reduction’ speaks for itself. But also missing were terms such as ‘relocation’ (moving forces from one place to another) and/or ‘restructuring’ (increasing the presence of police and reduce in particular army’s deployment)  or reconfiguration (replacing one force with another i.e. the Army with the Border Security Force, the BSF with the Central Reserve Police Force, and the CRPF with the India  Reserve Battalion). Instead, no more than cosmetic changes were recommended by way of resolving old cases, vacating some buildings and reworking of convoy timings. This amounts to trivialising a popular demand and raises serious doubts about the Indian government’s sincerity to address real issues.

3.1. When Omar Abdullah took over as the new CM, and in fact even during the election campaign, he had made many a promises. Once he came to power the language changed. One of the election promises was ending impunity provided to Indian armed forces under Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Now he claims that impunity will be revoked if the situation “improves”. What is the measure of improvement? And who decides whether it has improved or not? Fact is this decision is not in his hand. It requires New Delhi’s approval. It was left to the Indian home minister to declare on March 18, 2009, that the revocation of the AFSPA is an “old demand” but a “final decision” will be taken after the elections to Indian Parliament. Elections have come and gone and there is little to show for any movement.

3.2. Indian home ministry officials told reporters that it would take two years for the CRPF to hand over control to the local administration. Although it was said that five battalions (bns) of the CRPF will be withdrawn once the Amarnath Yatra (pilgrimage to Amarnath) was over and another five bns, it was said would be pulled out later, the reduction of all of 10 bns or approximately 11,000 personnel out of 667,000 is not a significantly large reduction. [Altogether 16 bns of CRPF (10 from J&K and 6 from NE) 5 bns of BSF and 2 of ITBP will be moved to fight left-wing extremists.] Besides, even if this was accompanied it would be only by replacing the CRPF personnel with a new force, which is called the India Reserve Battalion, from the Indian state of Haryana. [IRB’s are  armed police personnel that each Indian state is helped to raise with financial help extended by the central government and used by the Indian government for deployment wherever it deems necessary.]

3.3. The minister of state for defence also categorically ruled out “thinning” of troops in J&K. In fact, the army opposed dilution or withdrawal of the AFSPA for its personnel in J&K. In response to the MHA’s “phased withdrawal of AFSPA” from districts such as Srinagar, Budgam, Jammu and Kathua, senior army officer told The Times of India (July 8, 2009) that “they (the government) should not rush to assume normalcy has returned, although situation has been brought under control”. The CM also discovered that “we (i.e. J&K state) have over 70 bns of the CRPF and the strength of the state police is not even one-third of it…. So, any rushed decision in this respect can be detrimental to state’s security” (The Asian Age, July 8, 2009). Thus, after promising reduction, including withdrawal of the AFSPA, what is the real situation? Very little has changed.

3.4. Take another example. After the Baramulla firing incident on June 29, 2009, in which four persons were killed in firing by the security forces,  The district commissioner of Baramulla, Lateef ur Zama Deva, wrote a letter to Baramulla based GOC of 19 Infantry Division and GOC of Kilo Force (RR), wherein he wrote that “(t)he J&K police on the basis of deployment shall remain at the forefront at all respective locations brought under curfew with the back up of  army, in standby mode for flag marches and patrolling under the supervision of respective executive magistrates”. The army took strong exception and a senior army officer told Indian Express (2 July, 2009) that “(l)ike in any other place the civil administration makes requisition for Army column. But once the Army comes in it does not work under the magistrate and the problem area is handed over to the Army for a particular task”. Since the task is suppression of a movement, and because this is something which remains incomplete and can take decades to achieve, so long as Indian army remains it will not act under the civilian administration. His seniors did not come to his aid or endorse his stance.

3.5. What about the release of political prisoners? On the issue of releasing detainees New Delhi’s consent  is required. (Even the transfer of senior police officers needs New Delhi’s approval. This became apparent to the CM when he wanted to get rid of some senior police officers who, he claimed, had misled him over the Shopian rape and murder incident.) On taking over as CM he had said that those detained under the PSA during elections would be released. He could not do this. Why? Because he said, on January 15, that, while the list of prisoners was before a committee “but (this) committee now includes a member from central government who is yet to visit Kashmir”. As a matter of fact, Indian home ministry has always been a part of this committee and enjoys veto power over every proposal. In any case, in the past seven months the number of those detained under the dreadful PSA has jumped to 253. Going by the proceedings in the state assembly on August 7, 2009, where a PDP MLA had moved an amendment to section 10 A of the PSA, thereby calling for declaring invalid an order of detention if the grounds mentioned were vague, irrelevant or non-existent, the state law minister found even this mild demand unacceptable. Why? Because, he said, the preventive detention law was needed “for running the state”. He was at least being honest that without arbitrary powers, the hallmark of undemocratic rule, J&K cannot be governed.

3.6. The simple point is that J&K is not just like any other state in the Union of India enjoying additional powers of autonomy under Article 370. It is a “disturbed area” dominated by a hostile military force, which feels it is sufficient to invoke “national security” for every principle of constitutional nicety to be cast aside. Indeed, Article 370, which instead of becoming a mark of internal sovereignty, has became a conduit through which an appointed governor (nominated by the central government) could dismiss even an elected state government and then rule through ordinances and amend the J&K Constitution in such a way that it became legally possible for New Delhi to legislate on matters, which under autonomy were reserved for J&K. For example, between March 7 to September 6, 1986,  i.e., in just six months of governor’s rule in J&K, 29 laws were enacted  all of which extended to New Delhi  powers to enact laws for J&K. A high-powered committee, set up by the pro-India National Conference government of  J&K  in 1996 to look into the subversion of autonomy, also pointed to several “incongruities”. Such as the fact that the constitutional provision for establishing governor’s rule on a state had been undermined in the case of J&K. For, while under the Indian Constitution, the central government can take over powers from the elected state government the term of such can be extended beyond six months only by the upper house of the Indian Parliament. Thus a degree of parliamentary oversight is provided for. But in the case of J&K, central rule requires no such parliamentary approval. As a result, between1990-96 J&K remained under direct central rule without a break. Furthermore, by giving the central government nominee the power to amend the state constitution through ordinances, the legitimacy of the state Constitution, the basis for J&K’s autonomy, was eroded. Lest we forget, democratic practice reserves this right of amendment of Constitution for the people’s representatives. And ordinances/decrees issued by non-elected executives are considered a distinguishing feature of arbitrary, i.e. repressive rule.

4.1. We need to, therefore, appreciate the gamut of dependency relationship that exists between J&K and India to understand how the Indian state perpetuates its control over Kashmir. For instance, the budget for 2009-10 reveals that out of a total non-plan revenue expenditure of Rs 14,949 crore, a sum of Rs 8,126 crore (Rs 6,594 crore for salary and Rs 1,532 crore towards pension) is set aside for salary and pension for the state employees. However, the state’s own revenue generation is only Rs 4,330 crore, i.e., lower than even its salary and pension bill! And yet, the budget proposes to increase recruitment of state employees by 23,000 ( out of which 7,035 will be in the police), fill 7,000 vacancies of Class IV employees and also create 15,000 jobs for returning Kashmiri Pandits.

4.2. The Economic Survey, 2006-07, had earlier noted that “the weakness of J&K state finances arises not from lower revenues but higher expenditures”. The ratio of revenue expenditure to GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) of J&K at 39.2 per cent is more than twice that for all states average of 17.4 per cent, although only marginally higher than Northeastern states at 38.8 per cent, as computed by the Twelfth Finance Commission. And J&K’s revenue covers only 25 per cent of its expenditure. Which means that J&K’s revenue base is incapable of meeting its own expenditure incurred for maintaining  a huge government apparatus? “Consequently, the index of self-reliance of J&K…is 0.45” (p 230). The ratio of central transfers to total revenues which, at 78.6 per cent for J&K, is twice that for all states at 38.5 per cent, compares with the 67.6 per cent for the NE. But  J&K’s debt to GSDP ratio is higher than others and has been 50 per cent to start with. Thus, more than 50 per cent of J&K’s own revenue goes towards servicing debt.

4.3. However, despite “low own revenues, the public expenditure level of J&K, at 51.4 per cent, in contrast to 20.2 per cent for all (Indian) states is higher than that for all states  as percentage of GSDP and on a per capita basis per capita capital expenditure in J&K of Rs 2,285 is more than three times of all state average of Rs 626, albeit marginally higher than for NE which is Rs 1,924. If revenue expenditure is included then J&K’s total expenditure of Rs 9,661 is not very different from that for NE at Rs 8,637. But it is nearly three times that of all India average of Rs 3,969. And yet, these higher public expenditures in J&K “have not translated into growth mainly for two reasons. The first reason is the higher unit cost of service delivery – the cost of providing schooling to a child or the cost of providing healthcare to a person are typically higher than the all India average because of sparse population density, difficult terrain, poor connectivity and a host of other causes. The second reason is that the beneficial impact of public expenditure spills over beyond J&K as much of the contractors payments are transferred to and purchases are made beyond the state – a phenomenon referred to as ‘missing multiplier’.” (p 232). This is as clear an admission as one will get not only about the limited benefit of public expenditure in J&K but skewed nature of the relationship between India and J&K.

4.4. The Economic Survey, 2006-07, had also noted that  “Centre (i.e., Indian government) has fiscal room available to reduce taxes or increase programme spending – and satisfy its inter-temporal constraint – while the J&K’s only option are to increase taxes or reduce spending in order to achieve fiscal sustainability”. (pp 5) The authors of the Economic Survey advocated a “moratorium on filling vacant posts” (pp 171).  But the government went ahead with “employment intensity growth” in its budget  2007-08, and began to fill vacancies running at 23,000. In addition to that, it began recruitment for 15 battalions of IRB and five battalions of J&K police.  This defeated the very objective of fiscal policy, to reduce government expenditure and thereby reduce financial dependence on grants from India. And this process continues under the budget provisions for 2009-10.

4.5. An argument in favour of such government job creation is that one of the major causes of unrest in J&K is due to a very high incidence of unemployment. Since disputed nature of J&K inhibits private investments in general and industries in particular, there is no option but for the government to create employment. Thus irresolution of the dispute creates a logic that keeps increasing the financial outgo for J&K and pushes up its dependence on New Delhi. This, in turn, creates financial dependence on New Delhi for meeting J&K’s salary bill.

4.6. It is worth recalling that when Ghulam Nabi Azad took over as CM in November 2005, he had claimed that 50 per cent of the 2,73,508 government employees “had no work to do”. If he was speaking the truth then to enlarge government employment, particularly in the unproductive area of recruitment to armed battalions, makes little sense. A bigger and larger government apparatus will continue to dominate the economy, and dependence on New Delhi to cover revenue deficit is likely to go up. Even more disturbing, the size of armed battalions being raised in J&K will continue to raise the scale of unproductive expenditure. How does all this profit the people of J&K?

4.7. Another mark of dependence is in the field of capital expenditure. In 2004, the UPA government had with much fanfare unveiled a Rs 24,000-crore plan. This plan envisaged investing Rs 18,000 crore in the central sector. This included investments in Uri II and Kishanganga Project, Srinagar-Leh road upgradation by Indian army’s BECON and 1,000 micro hydropower stations to be built and managed by the Indian army as part of its ‘Operation Sadbhavna’.  The balance Rs 6,000 crore were given to the state to meet costs of various projects, including salary support for new government jobs created. The strength of government employees, which was less than three in 2004, has risen to 4.5 lakh with 50,000 daily-wage earners. As a result, not only has non-plan expenditure increased but so has the dependence on “handouts”.  Let me illustrate how dependence gets augmented.

4.8. Economic Survey, 2008-09 shows that J&K’s power requirement is 2,120 MW. It generates only 2,318.70 MW out of a 16,200 MW estimated hydel power potential. Of  this 2,318.70 MW, only 758.70 MW was generated by state owned utilities. Even this figure of 758 MW was reached when 450 MW Phase I Baglihar project was recently completed. The balance 1,518 MW is in the central sector. In other words, most projects that exist here do not feed J&K’s own needs. And J&K imports power for which it pays about Rs 2,000 crore. Significantly, the National Hydel Power Corporation which controls Uri I, Salal and Dul Hasti project earned Rs 300 crore as profit for the year ended March 31, 2009. Its coffers will swell once eight more NHPC projects – which includes Kishanganga, Sewa, Nimu Bazgo, Chutak, Uri II and three others that are joint ventures with the state government – are commissioned.

4.9. The J&K government has been lobbying for a long time with New Delhi to transfer 390 MW Salal project, which is free of any encumbrance as it has paid for its cost. That would have enabled J&K to not just reduce its outlay for power purchase, which is running between Rs 1,500-2,000 crore annually but also earn additional revenue. This would have reduced deficit in the power sector, running at Rs 2,000 crore. This deficit is met from special grant from New Delhi.

4.10. On December 22, 2006, a high-powered committee headed by Dr C Rangarajan (chairperson of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council) recommended that 390 MW Dul Hasti  hydro project should be transferred to the state  instead of  the  390 MW Salal project. Dul Hasti in Doda district has been plagued by cost and time over-runs. The project began in 1985. Work was started in 1989 by a French consortium. The project cost then was Rs 1,290 crore. In 1992, when some of their people were abducted, they pulled out. Four years later Jai Prakash Industries was roped in to complete the project by October 2003. The project cost ran to Rs 3,900 crore. Then it was supposed to be completed by end of 2007 but the cost had gone up to Rs 5,200 crore (of which Rs 1,500 crore was interest). It is this project which the panel wanted transferred. The panel had, however, said that this transfer would be at “accessible tariff” and it is for the Centre to compensate the NHPC. One reason for this switch from Salal to Dul Hasti, reportedly, was opposition of some Indian states.  Salal project charges Rs 0.52  per unit sold to UP, Delhi, Haryana and so on. These states did not want the project to be given to J&K because they expected the unit cost charged to them to rise. As of now, Dul Hasti remains with New Delhi.

5.1. Related to this is the issue of water. The Indus Water Treaty (IWT) has been a sore point because over the heads of people of J&K, India and Pakistan came to an agreement whereby Indus, Jhelum and Chenab waters were virtually handed over to Pakistan whereas Sutlej, Ravi and Beas rivers water remained with India. There is no doubt that the interests of the lower riparian state must  be protected. Pakistan depends for its drinking water and irrigation needs up to 77 per cent on the Indus water basin. However, as the upper riparian region, J&K’s rights can also not be ignored. Such is the nature of the agreement that both use of water for irrigation and for harnessing power get restricted because flow of water cannot be interrupted by building reservoir or controlled through placing any impediment in the path of water flow. For instance, because IWT prevents water storage projects, hydel power is generated through run-off-the-river projects that result in reduction of power generation to less than one-third of installed capacity, particularly during winter months. Many political parties in Indian-held J&K have pitched for compensating J&K for the loss, estimated to be over Rs 6,000, incurred by it due to the IWT. It is worth noting that the IWT was signed in 1960 when in neither part of J&K  there was even a semblance of ‘representative’ government.

5.2 .How can J&K protect its interests as an upper riparian party if it is to remain excluded from the IWT? Can a people argue their case unless they enjoy sovereignty?

5.3. The  issue of water sharing has been impacted by another factor. That of melting glaciers and receding snowline, which threatens to expose J&K to environmental catastrophe. The Siachen glacier is threatened by heavy militarisation of what is described as the third pole and forms part of the Indus Water basin. Melting of Kolhai glacier at a rapid pace may turn J&K into a desert.  Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain conducted an on-the-spot assessment of Kolhai last year and told Greater Kashmir (August 10, 2009) that “(t)he glacier has developed several crevasses and cracks over the years. Human interference, including the Amarnath pilgrimage, is one of the reasons for the glacier’s recession. Gujjars who are putting up in the glacier’s core area are one of the major contributors for its meltdown.”  The news report said that a study on Kolhai glacier conducted by remote sensing by the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, revealed that its spatial extent has changed from 19.34 sq km  in 1992 to 17.23 sq km in 2001, a net decrease of 2.11 sq km in 10 years. The long-term impact would be availability of water for drinking and irrigation. Thus Lidder and Sind basins of Jhelum are under threat. And this in turn may further create tensions for enforcement of IWT.

5.4. While experts do refer to increased militarisation or pilgrimage as factor in the melting of glaciers, the main reason behind rapid depletion of those glaciers is downplayed. Both Siachen and Kolhai are exposed to unprecedented human activity in its core as well as its vicinity. For instance, the presence of a brigade-strength military force in Siachen and the supply line to keep them fed, garbage disposed, use of  helicopters for moving men and material is warming the environment at Saltoro ridge. In the case of Kolhai, the phenomenal increase in the number of pilgrims rising from less than 12,000 in 1989 to four lakh this year (which came down from 5.25 lakh in 2008), the huge presence of security forces (no less than 26,000), movement of people, trucks, and helicopters have become the  biggest source of glacial meltdown. While soldiers and pilgrims, particularly in such large numbers, are detrimental to the environment, it is the population in the Valley which suffers its consequence since they depend on Sind and Lidder (which feeds Jhelum) for their drinking water and irrigation  requirement. And yet, the local population has little influence or control over its fate. It is dependent on the benevolence of the Indian state, which is busier consolidating its military hold over Siachen and promoting Amarnath pilgrimage.

6.1. In 2000-01, Indian commentators discovered that percentage of population living “below poverty line” in J&K was 3.48 per cent as against the all-India average of  26.10 per cent. It became an occasion for jingoists in India to claim how Indian largess had brought prosperity to J&K at the expense of rest of India. However, this underestimation of incidence of poverty generated different explanations among more sober analysts.  One recent claim was that “the (Indian) state had in place a system of ‘development’ practices aimed at buying the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people, what it ended up doing was to make militants richer while at the same time entrenching the institution of corruption deeper and deeper into the culture of the state”.  And then goes on to say that “the fall in poverty rates…pointed to open and surreptitious transfers, which while mitigating poverty, entrenched the already existing system of corruption even deeper”.[Dipankar Sengupta; ‘Policy Making in a Terrorist Economy, Epilogue, July 2009].  Another was provided by Swaminathan A Aiyar who wrote  in The Times of India, July 15, 2001, that one “explanation is the huge expansion of armed forces in the state in the 1990s. India now has over 600,000 military and paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. Their purchasing power is pretty formidable in a small state of 10 million people. Tourism in the Valley may have shrunk, but the armed forces represent tourists of another kind. Most tourists spend only a week in Kashmir, but men in uniform spend the whole year in the state. So, in some ways, every jawan is the equivalent of 52 tourists. They may buy fewer silk carpets and shawls than normal tourists, but are steady buyers of agricultural produce. And that probably has a major impact on local incomes, especially of small farmers…. The irony is that if peace returns, so too might poverty. The armed forces will go away.”

6.2. In the Economic Survey for J&K, 2006-07, it was reported that the decline in poverty ratio between 1993-94 to 1999-2000, from 25.17 per cent to 3.48 per cent in 1999-2000, had been “extremely steep” (p 224)  and noted that there was “no authentic and reliable data on BPL population…available for the state of J&K.” It pointed out that for the year 1993-94 no survey was conducted by the NSSO. Instead, the poverty ratio for Himachal Pradesh was  “adjusted for J&K by the Planning Commission”. It is important to note that internal war was at its peak during this period. Now all these explanations were put to rest by a fresh survey that was undertaken by the authorities and brought out in a report: ‘Below Poverty Line Survey 2008’ [Jammu and Kashmir State; Directorate of Economics and Statistics, J&K, Planning & Development Department, Jammu and Kashmir Government].  According to the report of the survey, “the total BPL Estimated Population Ratio of J&K State has been arrived at 21.63 per cent (24.21 lakh persons) with a dispersion of 26.14 per cent (22.00 lakh persons) from rural areas and 7.96 per cent (2.21 lakh persons) living in urban areas”. In other words, the decline in poverty was far less than estimated and explanations offered were, therefore, way off the mark. [At a workshop on the ‘Role of ICDS’, experts questioned the figure of BPL population at 3.5 per cent when 29 per cent of  children were under-nourished, 52 per cent women anaemic, 41 per cent vitamin-A deficient and 68 per cent suffer from iron deficiency as per the National Family State Health Zone. (Etalaat May 10, 2008). In fact, with per capita income remaining lower than the all-India average this drop was illusory.]

6.3. I cite this for a reason. There is no doubt that Indian military forces make large-scale purchases and government and other sources transfer funds to buy acquiescence of the people. But this does not spread beyond a narrow circle and certainly does not reach the ordinary people whose lives are mired in poverty. Secondly, such transfers, while resulting in  the expansion of economy, are of a kind which accentuates inequalities. This distortion where poverty has declined much less than previously estimated is quite remarkable for an economy which saw radical land reforms in the 1950s, and which boasted of a fairly equitable land holding implying low asset inequality. In other words, it means that in the past 20 years, if not more, the socio-economic profile of J&K has undergone a change for the worse. Thus, despite funds to buy hearts and minds of people pouring in and in spite of the presence of military forces, considered as “permanent tourists”, the economy has registered no sign of being benefited. If anything, such ‘assistance’ has only further distorted the economy and entrenched corruption.

7.1. Keeping this real nature of dependency, and distortions that have been institutionalised, in mind, sovereignty becomes of  utmost importance  for any meaningful solution to emerge.  To argue for autonomy, self-rule and so forth makes little sense when J&K faces this level of control.

7.2. It has been claimed that a deal, which will enable the border/line of control to become irrelevant, has been reached between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and that all that is needed is to fine-tune and sign it. Without going into the justness of such an approach, i.e., to decide people’s fate over their heads, from what is known in the public domain about some of the key areas of agreement two things stand out. First, it is said that the current constitutional system in operation on both sides will be frozen, with some modification, for the next 15-20 years. Second, some subjects such as water will be jointly managed by India and Pakistan.

7.3. What the above means is that existing relationship of dependence will be frozen barring some adjustments. Now how does this amount to a solution? Is it not necessary to argue that unless therelationship of dependence is ended self-rule/self-governance/autonomy would become a worthless exercise? When Indian civilian and military entities own, manage and control policies over land and water, and J&K continues to be dependent on New Delhi for meeting even its salary bill under the existing dispensation (in which the war and requirements of war are prioritised) then not just psychology of dependence and its corrupting influence, but the actual fact of dependence will make “self-rule” ring hollow. Just the same way as the much-vaunted autonomy under Article 370 was made hollow. Indeed, the overall structure of dependence will be like a noose around the neck of the state throttling the realisation of its full potential.

For this state of affairs to end, a radical movement away from the present is required. What that means in short is that people must become masters and mistress of their own destiny.

All this only underlines the significance of a democratic closure for the J&K dispute after 62 years of its non-resolution.  Democratic closure in the case of J&K means ascertaining the wishes of the people, once they are freed of encumbrance, before everything else.

A leaflet issued by CORRESPONDENCE & RADICAL NOTES

Admittedly it has been an old problem with most movements, that they have treated the media only as a means to an end, ‘a way of making themselves heard,’ and so long as they got some coverage with the help of conscientious friends within the media, they were satisfied. The larger dynamics of the media, as a certain sort of work, in a certain sort of work place, with human agents who are workers here, has not been addressed. Newspapers and news channels should be and can be the strongest arms of a democratic society; they can make sure that the voice of the people finds representation. Though cliché, one has to point out how the media can raise difficult questions, but the onus is upon journalists as responsible citizens and in their capacity as workers to raise them.

The decidedly undemocratic tenor of mainstream newspapers and news channels, whose editorial bosses seem to be dummies through which the state on the one hand and multinational capital on the other preach their doctrines, is not merely a sign of the larger move away from democratic values, but also of the way in which journalism is becoming an alienated activity. Responsible journalism, bent upon bringing out the democratic truth languishes as the unholy nexus of the state and moneyed interest decides the ‘line’ of a newspaper. The inability of journalists to raise their voices against recent pay-cuts in houses like The Times of India (TOI) is not unconnected from the destruction of democratic space within journalism and mass media.  Both of these get subsumed in the large movement away from true democracy – maximization of profit that a few make, in the last analysis determines all these tendencies.  That is to say that the general antipathy to democratic movements visible in the lack of  honest media coverage and an anti-people, non-democratic shift in the Indian situation at large not only go hand in hand but are also born out of the same tendencies.

Where do we see all this? For one, in the highly disproportionate coverage of various people’s movements by mainstream media. For instance, the space/airtime given to non-violent movements like Narmada Bachao or in Tehri is negligible. One could argue that violent movements catch the media’s attention more, but they are nonetheless covered very selectively. The struggles in the North East against AFSPA are barely covered. No true attempt to understand ULFA or LTTE is to be found in the mainstream, no attempt to go to the depths of the issue and to not simply report (reinforce) the state’s position. While the many social activists who have done serious work in the North East, J&K, or Chattisgarh report the excesses and violence committed by the paramilitary, Special Police Officers or the Salwa Judum on innocents, it is only rarely, if ever, mentioned by the media. At the moment though, with the Maoists taking centre stage on the front pages of newspapers and on prime time news, one cannot complain on grounds of quantity. But on grounds of quality, even here there is a lot to be said.

It has been assumed that the Maoist movement is not a mass movement; it’s only a bunch of ‘outsiders’ imposing themselves upon hapless tribes. The absurdity of the ‘outsider’ clause becomes obvious if one spares a moment’s thought to the way in which they function. The nature and width of their activities could not have been made possible without mass support. This is not the place to substantiate this assertion. What one needs to recognize at the primary level is that this is an open question and needs to be treated as such. If it is an open question with many opinions, the least the media can do is give space to these opinions, and accept the complex nature of the issue.  It might be pointed out that the debate shows on news-channels do bring in people of different opinions. However, a closer look at the dynamics of these shows will demonstrate how easily the biases of the mainstream hijack the entire debate. The newer, uncommon opinion cannot be expressed in the 10 seconds given to the participants, unlike the hegemonic narrative that we are all so familiar with. This inability to say everything in the imposed time limit is read as the lack of substance in these new voices, and a consensus on the issue is ‘created’.

Arnab Goswami is a good example. He seems to have found answers to all questions posed by him on his show. Furthermore, his show is an exercise in forcing his moment of epiphany upon others. ‘Mr. Varavara Rao, is Kobad Gandhy an ideologue or a terrorist, ideologue or terrorist, yes or no?’ We need to move beyond these multiple choice questions – reality is more layered than the media’s projection of it. We can all do with some thinking, including our editor-in-chief. Arnabism is actually symbolic of the lack of depth, and the fear of depths that haunts the journalism of big news houses. Maoist violence is highlighted again and again, often with cheap melodrama (showing the lack of humanity implicit in this form of reporting) as if it exists in a vacuum. Such portrayal denudes an act of its nature as an utterance, which responds to a situation (possibly another violent act on the state’s part) and is informed by necessities of a spatio-temporal/socio-political position. In the same way the struggles for self-determination are defined only in terms of their separatist or fundamentalist tendencies’, (one could go out on a limb and suggest that the refusal to understand or explain Islamic violence, as something more than madness or blood-thirstiness is a sign of the same problem). Just touching the surface, there too a very small section of the surface, the mainstream media presents it to its consumers (for that is what passive reception is) as the entire reality, the sole and complete truth.

It needs to be understood, and this cannot be stated any other way, that the media is responsible for manufacturing consent for war. It has taken the state’s call for war forward by eliminating dissenting voices within. In addition to several other things, the majoritarian nature of the media poses serious questions about any semblance of internal democracy. We have to make a choice between pushing for greater democracy within and allowing ourselves to get subsumed in the state’s narrative. If we choose the latter then we need to question the idea of journalism being ‘free and fair’ and see it as an instrument in the hands of a few who hold power and seek to keep it in their hands.

It is not only that journalists should try and understand the crucial position they can occupy in the struggles of the people. It is important for them to place themselves within these struggles, for even if they try to ‘keep out,’ their attempt to exclude themselves becomes the shape of their inclusion. It is never somebody else’s fight, it is always our own. In the final analysis journalists are nothing but (whether high paid or low) workers working under the imposition of capital, continuously losing control over their own work, unable to determine the conditions of their own existence.

Anjan Chakrabarti 

How should land be taken from the peasant for the process of urbanisation (real estate, infrastructural development, etc.) and industrialisation? This has remained one of the enduring questions in the West Bengal political scenario for the last few years. This is not surprising considering the fact that ‘land acquisition’ remains one of the indispensable conditions of existence for securing, facilitating and expanding capitalist organisation of surplus along industrial lines.(1) Henceforth if industrial capitalism is the goal, then ‘land acquisition’ as an issue is set to hog the limelight in the foreseeable future.

Two apparently contesting positions on land acquisition have correspondingly surfaced, one forwarded by CPI(M) and the other by the Trinamool Congress (TMC). The first argues that land be acquired directly by the state who then should deal with the developers while the second argues that it should be bought directly by the developers themselves. Interestingly, a third model of land acquisition has come to light in West Bengal whereby the state uses private agencies to acquire land from the farmers and then buy it back from those agencies for purposes it deems fit. This is the Vedic village model that caught negative attention with the case of land acquisition in the Rajarhat area of West Bengal. Scanning the three models of land acquisition I argue that, for all their suggested differences, they provide diverse kinds of conditions of existence for creating and expanding capitalist organisation of surplus. In the process, the models of land acquisition for the purpose of industrial capitalism signal different routes for facilitating uniform development logic of transition from agrarian society to an industrial capitalist society. In contrast, I contend that the language of resistance against land acquisition in West Bengal with its refusal to comply with the centrality of industrial capitalism suggests the possibility of a different and perhaps fourth model. This suggested way though entails adopting a fundamentally alternative way to envisage the relationship between agriculture and industry as compared to the above mentioned three models; it also calls for rethinking the present model of top down governance that prevents people from exercising the power to take any effective decision and action regarding their lived social life.

Moreover, our discussion reveals that TMC’s much vaunted model of land acquisition underlies a change in the strategy of ushering in industrial capitalism in West Bengal without in any manner contesting the logic of industrial capitalist development that one may argue was what the tumultuous protests against land acquisition in West Bengal signalled. That is, in proposing a switch from a state sponsored land acquisition policy to a market sponsored land acquisition policy, the TMC model calls for altering an important condition of existence for creating, securing and expanding the capitalist organisation of surplus. This is important to recognise because the much hyped ‘MATI’ slogan of TMC can be mistakenly misrecognised as a standpoint against the logic of capitalist industrial development. We want to argue here that nothing can be further from the truth. If its land acquisition policy is any indication, TMC’s position, notwithstanding its ‘pro-peasant’ and ‘pro-poor’ rhetoric, would have the effect of charting a different strategy for securing the march of industrial capitalism at a time when the social movements have de-facto put a halt to the current model of state sponsored land acquisition. It is thus not accidental that the TMC including its supreme leader are now going all out to convince the industrial captains (the capitalists) about the effectiveness of its path and that its stance in no way represents an anti-industrialisation or anti-capitalist policy. Evidently, it does not. It is in fact favourably disposed towards them.

The First Model of Land Acquisition: State Sponsored

This has been the dominant model of land acquisition in India thus far. The state directly acquires fragmented land from the peasants by compensating them or, as has happened in many cases, without doing so. Acquired land is reorganised into one or multiple bundles which are then marketed as exclusive and consolidated property to other state enterprises or to private agencies for their usage; the market for land acquisition is thus mediated by the state. Private land of the peasants and common property (land, resources, water, forest, etc.) are now turned into exclusive property of either state or private agencies.

With the advent of globalisation entailing the rapid expansion of private capitalist enterprises, this form of private-public partnership has deepened and gathered pace. It has almost become a norm for the state to acquire land for projects to be developed by private agencies. We can thus say that India in general and West Bengal in particular has been moving into a phase of consolidated privatisation of hitherto agricultural land in order to secure, facilitate and expand capitalist organisation of exploitation taking the material form of industrial expansion. It is not farfetched to say that the state sponsored model of land acquisition qua consolidated private property bundles constitute an indispensable condition of existence for the current form of industrialisation process unfolding in India.

However, in recent times, this state sponsored model of land acquisition has come under serious questioning from the direct stakeholders, namely the peasants (a loose term encompassing different groups related to agrarian economy). As events in Kalinganagar, Nandigram, Singur and Raigarh, to mention only a few cases, exemplified the spirited resistance of the peasants and their supporting groups have put a spanner on the seemingly smooth process of this model of land acquisition forcing a rethinking on the part of Indian government. While the state governments did use a range of repressive apparatus in trying to break the back of these resistance movements, the following realisation has perhaps dawned on the concerned political establishment: state sponsored model of land acquisition without adequate compensation has become practically very difficult in the current democratic set up of India. One then has to somewhat change the model of land acquisition so as to secure and facilitate the goal of capitalist industrial development which evidently is taken as sacrosanct and beyond any questioning.

The Second Model of Land Acquisition: Marketisation

The Indian government has proposed to somewhat shift the process of land acquisition policy such that the government will secure a larger portion of land while the minority portion will be bought by the private agencies. While there are host of regulatory mechanisms that have been proposed, one outstanding aspect is the assurance of adequate compensation (if not resettlement) in any land acquisition package.  While concerned lobbies and political parties are haggling over the exact proportion of this private-public division and modalities of compensation, Trinamool Congress has come out with another position.

In line with its ‘MA, MATI, MANUSH’ program, TMC suggests that the state should in no way be involved in any acquisition of land. Land has to be obtained through the process of direct exchange between buyers (private or state agencies) and sellers (the farmers); unmediated market is the solution proposed by TMC. The implication is that the developers and/or industrialists will have to buy the land directly from the farmers. Apparently, this model valorises ownership since it is the owner of land who will be legitimately accounted in the game of exchange. What remains unclear though is the status and predicament of other stakeholders related to land, say, for example, the agricultural workers. Will they be evicted without any kind of compensation? There are other deeper issues related to ‘land acquisition’ which we do not touch here.(2)

In this TMC model, it is not farfetched to imagine the emergence of a huge ‘brokerage’ land market in which ‘land acquiring’ private companies scout for land and try to create ‘private land bank’. Once acquired and consolidated, they are then parcelled out in various proportions to industrial enterprises or some other agencies, public and private. Given the rapid pace of India’s march towards industrial capitalism, TMC’s model of land acquisition is bound to facilitate the emergence of such a kind of agrarian land market and its consequent ‘private land bank’.

Does this solution impede the process of industrialisation and the associated capitalist organisation of surplus it helps create and expand? Hardly so, I contend. It simply modifies the land acquisition related condition of existence of capitalist organisation of surplus from state sponsored to market sponsored. Is the market solution a better solution for industrial capitalists in comparison to the state sponsored one? Which of the two processes of acquiring land is better for the farmers? Is state sponsored land bank better in comparison to private land bank?  Let us not address these important and topical questions here.

The Third Model of Land Acquisition:  Public-Private Partnership

The third position stems from a mixture of the first and second. The first position concerns the motive of the state agencies to acquire land. This may be driven by state’s overall plan of development that entails paving the way for the expansion of capitalist organisation of surplus which though is currently made difficult by state’s inability to acquire land directly from the peasants. This inability can be mitigated by the second position involving the presence of unmediated market for land with buyers and sellers facing off one another. These two moments are telescoped in this way: as part of an overall plan of the capitalist led industrial development the state government outsource the process of buying land to an agency who then as if emerges as a genuine buyer in the market to acquire land directly from the peasants only to hand it over to the state government. Two kinds of contracts rule this model of land acquisition – a contract between state and private agency of land buyer and between the latter and the peasants. The former may take the form of a written or unwritten contract while the second has to be written and legally ratified. While this special kind of private-public partnership complicates the process of land acquisition, it has two advantages for the state: (i) it is able to wash its hands off the process of land acquisition even as it is able to get access to land, and (ii) it avoids getting directly implicated in any anomalies arising from the unmediated market process such as cheating on prices, fudging papers, arm twisting the sellers and so on.  This is the Vedic Village Model and one can imagine multiple variations of my presented case.

Because the logic of Vedic Village Model telescopes features of the first two models of land acquisition, it has quite ironically landed both CPI(M) and TMC in one line and made them strange bedfellows. On one side, CPI(M) became once again exposed on its development policy of favouring land acquisition (by whatever means it seems now) for industrial capitalists while TMC’s cup of embarrassment is full when it became apparent that its policy of marketisation of land acquisition turned out to be the chief conduit for the state to acquire land and that too to fulfil the development agenda favoured by the CPI(M).

The Common Agenda of the Land Acquisition Models

Despite the differences between the land acquisition models, they exhibit a unified approach along the following lines:

(i) Openly or in silence, all the three models accept capitalist led industrial development as the motor of change and in that backdrop consider land acquisition as inevitable for the process of industrialisation. While CPI(M) and Congress are unabashed about its need, TMC remains somewhat ambiguous in its rhetoric though its policy of land acquisition leaves us with no interpretation other than being favourably disposed towards capitalist industrial development. While TMC has firmly opposed state sponsored land acquisition drive, it has not challenged land acquisition per se nor has it ruled out land acquisition for capitalist led industrial development. As such, if stretched to its limit, the different parties, for all their animosity, share the goal of industrial capitalist development. The difference boils down to the diverse strategies to be adopted to achieve that goal.

(ii) All the three models of land acquisition make sense only in the context of the following axiom: acceptance of the pre-given relations of verticality between a so-called forward looking industry and a backward looking agriculture leading to a top down development model of inexorable transition from agricultural society to an industrial society. Much as the TMC’s rhetoric would imply otherwise, its model of land acquisition seem to be accepting of this axiom.

(iii) Moreover, all the positions share this common denominator: none have till now accepted delegating to the concerned people the power to say no to any proposed development projects which of course is tantamount to the rejection of the supremacy and inexorability of the logic of capitalist led industrial development. Of course, people may very well decide to prefer the option of saying yes to relocation and favour industrial development in that area; valorising agriculture and agrarian life is just as problematical as valorising industry and industrial life. Till now, the matter has been placed in manner that presupposes an unambiguous yes to relocation, a rather mechanical presupposition that flows from the pre-determined logic of industrial capitalist development rather than from people’s right of self-determination to say yes to relocation and industrial project. The issue is not fundamentally about whether people have the right to say no to dislocation or yes to relocation but instead it is whether one is able to exercise that right or not. It is a freedom that has no validity except in its realisation. If implemented, this freedom of exercising options reclaims what the logic of (capitalist) development has denied to these societies: effective choice to the kind of social life that people want to lead. In this context, the social movements we have been witness to testifies in no uncertain terms a fierce struggle in one axis: who will have effective control over social life in terms of decisions and actions. Internalizing the ability to exercise the power to say no within any suggested policy paradigm would entail not only a shift in development policy. It would additionally radically alter the current organisation and constitution of policy making that hitherto has steadfastly retained its top down monarchist moorings which in turn operates by denying the people the required space for making choice including over the kind of social life they would want to lead. If the relevant conduits of exercising power to say no such as say through voting on development projects as in case of Raigarh in Maharashtra are not internalised within the land acquisition framework (which of course would resultantly drastically change too) then, no matter what we put on paper and what our intentions are, the power to say no remains in effect null and void in so far as the outcome is concerned. None of the land acquisition models that we know of internalises this option to exercise no.(3)

Vote Bank Relevance of ‘MATI’

TMC’s goal is clear. It is not to initiate a social revolution but to oust the CPI(M) from state power. Its politics is thus state centric in general and vote bank centric in particular. Correspondingly, it wants to control and limit any movements to serve its limited purpose. In this context, TMC has successfully carved out a place in West Bengal political space as the supposed champion of the peoples struggles against the Left Front sponsored policy of state sponsored land acquisition which it used with good effect to break the grip of CPI(M)’s dominance over the poor. I have discussed this in details in another write up in Radical Notes.(4)

Despite this success through the highly advertised pro-poor re-positioning of the TMC, I am here suggesting that its proposed land acquisition policy and its claim of representing these peoples’ struggles are contradictory in nature. The former I have argued suggests a pro-capitalist development model albeit through a different route while the latter indicates a rejection of the capitalist development model. How is TMC dealing with this contradiction? What is the role of its Land Acquisition model in this situation?

TMC led those movements which turned out to be directed against the state which incidentally is ruled by CPI(M) led Left Front. Against its stated objective of ousting CPI(M) from state power, this strategy is understandable because after all it was the CPI(M) which came to personify this state sponsored model of land acquisition. A first glance all these social movements might suggest that people rejected state sponsored drive towards industrialisation. That is indeed true and the TMC’s success lay in cultivating and encapsulating this spirit of the social movements within its political slogan of ‘MATI’.

However, such an analysis when made has limited value that, if deemed as absolute and final, is perhaps purposefully done to incarcerate and circumscribe the language and aspiration of the movements. Obsession with state sponsored land acquisition obfuscates a deeper question that lay clearly at the heart of these movements. It pertains to the fact that the people were not just saying no to state sponsored land acquisition but to the very idea of giving up land and their forms of life for ensuring the march of industrial capitalism, a change which as it was proposed stood as something alien to their existence and hence summarily rejected. It was the very idea of land acquisition for industrial capitalism that is the bone of contention here; it was also about the process of acquiring land (the governance question) which surfaced as a question through the movements. One can read the social movements as signalling not a rejection of the form (state sponsored land acquisition) but the content (of land acquisition per se for industrial capitalism) itself. That is, the act of saying no to state sponsored development telescoped an aspiration and demand to have the power to say no to the idea of development as projected in the model of inexorable transition from agrarian society to an industrial society that, by its very logic, is supposed to be beyond any contestation.

Read in this light, TMC’s political strategy becomes evident: it is advertising the form as the content and in doing so trying to occult any proposed struggle over the content from the political space. That is, in its first stage, it wrapped CPI(M) into its critique of state sponsored model that captured the voice of the people’s immediate demand and now in its second stage is proposing a political solution calling for the replacement of CPI(M) with TMC so that this state sponsored land acquisition policy is rendered obsolete. However, its own alternative on the issue of land acquisition suggests that this in no way is a contestation of the content, that is, land acquisition furthering the logic of capitalist induced industrialisation process. Rather, it implies a change in strategy for enacting industrial capitalism in West Bengal that would involve a policy change in land acquisition from model 1 to models 2 and/or 3. Put bluntly, TMC’s model remains an apology of capitalist industrial development with its underlying relation of verticality between industry and agriculture that is based on a deeper logic of a devalued agriculture giving way to industrial society. No matter what it says on the contrary, its second model of ‘marketisation of land’ or the third model of ‘public-private partnership model of Vedic village’ can’t lead us to any other explanations than my suggested one.

This clearly reflects TMC’s vote bank strategy of ousting CPI(M) from state power. After all, state based politics is about winning control of state through elections. If its declared objective is limited to defeating CPI(M) in that plane, then it is rational for TMC to limit its political program to winning that control over the body of state. The CPI(M) made the blunder of its lifetime by aligning itself with a policy of state sponsored land acquisition that was rejected by the people through social movements. Having successfully clubbed CPI(M) with this highly unpopular state sponsored land acquisition policy TMC can now dream of fulfilling its objective of capturing state power. This is fine as far as it goes. However, those who are looking for any ‘revolutionary’ content in TMC need to take a step back from its rhetoric and give a quieter and deeper look at its actual policy of land acquisition. That policy is not only bent on occulting the content of social movement against land acquisition for industrial capitalism but by subsuming the content into the form it is veering towards obfuscating, wittingly or unwittingly, the ‘revolutionary’ content of the social movements as a whole. TMC’s ‘Leftism’ stumbles and falters in the face of this observation and the limitation of ‘MATI’ as symbolizing the ‘pro-poor’ and peasant friendly face of TMC starts becoming palpable.

Conclusion

Did the social movements against land acquisition imply a case for stasis? We don’t quite see it that way. At the minimum, we see these as packing a call to rethink and drop the idea of development from its moorings in a big bang shift that is top down and as if inexorably proceeding from a dismantling of agrarian society towards the creation of an industrial society. In contrast, these social movements perhaps encapsulate an aspiration to rethink development as an idea of community building (constituting both agricultural and industrial endeavours) rather than community destruction. They also signal a rejection of top down control and governance of peoples’ social life whereby the people are excluded from making effective choices regarding the trajectory of their social life. Set against this background, TMC’s effort to mask the contradiction with the help of its ‘pro-poor’ rhetoric that is at the same time supported by a land acquisition policy which tries to circumscribe the scope of the social movements against land acquisition within a simplified movement against state sponsored model of land acquisition has its limitations. This is because the contradiction involving people’s demand for control of their social life, including economic life, that involves a rejection of the inexorable logic of industrial capitalist development and that of a land acquisition policy (model 2 and 3) favouring industrial capitalist development is real and not going to fade away any time soon. Given that all sides are, notwithstanding their different routes, favourably disposed towards industrial capitalist development in West Bengal, the schism between the suggested policies of the political elite (no matter their diverse forms) and those demanded by the social movements would guarantee the persistence of the question of land acquisition in the body politic of West Bengal in the foreseeable future. Change in state power from CPI(M) to TMC that at this moment looks likely will not settle this issue any time soon.

Notes:

(1) By capitalist organisation of surplus we mean the process through which capitalists appropriate and distribute the performed surplus labour of the workers. Different economic, cultural, political and natural processes provide diverse conditions of existence for this process of surplus labour to be performed, appropriated, distributed and received which following Resnick and Wolff (Knowledge and Class: A Critique of the Political Economy, Chicago University Press, 1987) we name as class. Class therefore refers to processes relating to particular form of performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labour. While numerous organisations of class processes (capitalist, feudal, slave, independent, communist, communitic) co-exist in an economy, our focus in this paper remains capitalist class process or capitalist organisation of surplus. Depending upon the effects from varied conditions of existence, the capitalist organisation of surplus emerges in diverse forms across time and space; just as the changing capitalist organisation of surplus will constitute the condition providing processes; class and non-class processes overdetermine one another and impacted by their contradictory influences and effects on one another the processes tend to procreate or wither in a never ending state of flux. ‘Land acquisition’ is one such condition of existence whose varied forms will have its constitutive effect on the kind of capitalist organisation of surplus that will emerge; similarly the changing capitalist organisation of surplus, say, resulting from globalisation and increased competition, has greatly impacted the nature of ‘land acquisition’ and the debate occurring with respect to it. For an analysis of transition and development in India from a class focused overdeterminist perspective, see Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg (Transition and Development in India, Routledge, 2003), and for an account of land acquisition and dislocation see Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar (Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third, Routledge, 2009).

(2) See Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar (Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third, Routledge, 2009) for details.

(3) See Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar (Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third, Routledge, 2009) for details of this alternative way.

(4) Anjan Chakrabarti. ‘The Return of the Repressed: Explanation of the Left Front defeat in West Bengal‘. Thursday, 21 May 2009, Radical Notes