DIARIES – Radical Notes

Sri Lankan History and the Struggle of the Eelam Tamils

June 5, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

This video offers a brief history of Sri Lanka and the Eelam struggle according to Thozhar Thiagu, activist and General Secretary of the Tamil National Liberation Movement in Tamil Nadu, India. I met with Thiagu at his office and at his home in Chennai, Tamil Nadu in February 2009. The struggle for Tamils in Sri Lanka continues despite the alleged end of the war in May 2009. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the final weeks of war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are displaced without food, shelter or medical supplies. Seeking refuge from government bombardment of their homeland in the north and eastern provinces, thousands of Tamils have fled from Sri Lanka since the mid 1980’s.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Self-Determination, Sri Lanka, State Repression, Video

The Left and Electoral Politics in India

May 25, 2009 by Radical Notes 1 Comment

Deepankar Basu
Sanhati

In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament, the Social Democratic Left (SDL henceforth) In India, composed of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), the Communist Party of India (CPI), and a bunch of smaller left-wing parties, has witnessed the severest electoral drubbing in a long time. This year, the CPM won a total of 16 parliamentary seats; compared to its performance in the last general elections in 2004, this is a whopping decline of 27 seats. The CPI, on the other hand, won 4 seats in 2009, suffering a net decline of 6 parliamentary seats from its position in 2004. Does this mean that the Indian population has rejected even the mildly progressive and social democratic policies that the SDL tried to argue for at the Central level? Is this a mandate for the Congress party and by extension a mandate for neoliberalism? I think not. This is a mandate against the SDL but not against social democratic policies; this is a mandate against neoliberalism and for welfare-oriented policies. To the extent that the Congress was pushed by the SDL to partially implement such pro-people policies, it can possibly be interpreted as an indirect endorsement of Congress’s late-in-the-day populism. After making a few comments on the national mandate, in this article, I focus my attention on West Bengal, the bastion of the SDL in India.

Mandate versus Outcome

Let us begin by distinguishing between the mandate and the electoral outcomes. The change in the number of seats won and lost (the electoral outcome) is only a partial, and imperfect, reflection of the change in the actual level of support parties enjoy among the people (the mandate); often the particular logic of electoral arithmetic draws a wedge between the mandate of the people and the electoral outcome in terms of seats won or lost. For instance, it is possible for a party to increase its share of votes polled without this increase leading to any increase in the number of seats won; conversely, it is possible for a party to decrease its share of votes polled without losing in terms of seats. An example of the former is BSP’s performance at the national level in 2009: it has emerged as the third largest national party, increasing its share of votes polled from 5.33 percent in 2004 to 6.17 percent in 2009, but this has not translated into any appreciable increase in terms of seats. An example of the latter is CPM’s performance in Tripura: its share of the votes polled dropped from 68.8 percent in 2004 to 61.69 percent in 2009, but that did not affect its position in terms of seats. Hence, to understand the structure of the "popular will," it is necessary to go beyond the position in terms of seats won and lost; one needs to study the changes in the shares of votes polled.

Focusing on the share of votes polled is also enough, among other things, to dispel certain misinterpretations of the mandate of the 2009 general elections that seem to have wide currency. The first misinterpretation that is gaining ground is the alleged existence of a "wave" in favor of the Congress party which swept it to power overcoming the ubiquitous current of anti-incumbency. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Despite having won 206 parliamentary seats, the Congress merely won 28.55 percent of the votes polled in 2009; this is a little less than a 2 percentage point increase from 2004. 29 percent can hardly be interpreted as a "massive wave"; besides, this overall increase also hides substantial decreases in several important states such as Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. The second misinterpretation that is doing the rounds is that this general election saw the definite demise of regional parties and all federalist tendencies of the Indian populace; the people voted overwhelmingly for national parties, the argument goes, because they want stability. Whether people desire stability is a questions that cannot be entered into at the moment, but the fact that the populace did not reject regional parties in favor of national parties can be seen by looking at the share of votes going to the Congress and the BJP together: according to provisional figures released by the Election Commission of India, the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP in fact declined from 48.69 percent in 2004 to 47.35 percent in 2009. Thus, the share of votes going to the two main national parties has declined; so much for the ascendancy — what historian Ramachandra Guha called the "course correction" — of the tendency for centralization in the Indian polity.

Social Democratic Performance: National Level

How did the social democratic parties perform in terms of the share of votes polled? At the national level, the CPM lost only marginally in terms of its share of votes polled, which declined from 5.66 percent in 2004 to 5.33 percent this year; the CPI, on the other hand, gained marginally at the national level, increasing its share of votes from 1.41 to 1.43 percent. Thus, going by these national figures, there is no evidence of any nationwide "wave" against the social democrats’ opposition, however feeble, to the neoliberal policies of the Central government. Those who want to interpret the current debacle of the social democrats as a national mandate against progressive economic and social policies need to rethink their arguments; the evidence does not support such an argument. In fact, as I will argue below, if there can be discerned any "wave" in favor of the Congress in the mandate, it is largely a "wave" against neoliberal economic policies and not the other way round as many pro-establishment analysts are making it out to be.

But the national level figures hide many interesting state-level variations, so we must look at state-level data. There is another reason why we need to supplement national level with state-level analysis: since the SDL is prominent only in the three states of Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal, the national figures are not very relevant to assessing the electoral prospects of the social democrats. Hence, we must look at state-level data for Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal to understand the sharp change in the electoral performance of the social democratic Left in India and draw conclusions about its continued relevance in the Indian polity.

Social Democratic Performance: State Level

How did the social democrats perform in the different states? First, the SDL managed to increase its vote share in a few states: Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal, and Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Apart from Manipur, of course, the total vote share of the SDL in these states remains insignificant; hence, the increase in the vote share did not even remotely translate into changes in seats. Second, the SDL lost its share of votes polled in a large number of states: Assam, Bihar, Jammu & Kashmir, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. The percentage declines in Punjab and Jharkhand were very large, though that did not affect the reckoning in terms of seats because the SDL did not have seats to start with, i.e., in 2004. Third, the states where the loss of vote share wreaked havoc for the SDL’s reckoning in terms of seats were Kerala and West Bengal: in Kerala, the share of votes going to the SDL declined from 39.41 percent in 2004 to 37.92 percent in 2009; in West Bengal, the share of votes garnered by the SDL declined from 50.72 percent in 2004 to 43.3 percent in 2009.

Let me summarize the evidence presented so far: the SDL’s marginal decrease in vote share at the national level was made possible by the offsetting of the decrease in vote share in several states by the increase in others. The fact that this marginal decrease led to such a debacle in terms of seats is driven by the fact that the bulk of the decrease in vote share was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal whereas the increase in vote share was spread out electorally across states where the SDL is marginal. Thus the state-level distribution of the increase and decrease of vote shares for the SDL turns out to have profound implications in terms of electoral outcomes at the national level.

Social Democrats Help the Congress

This, of course, brings us to this important question: why was the bulk of the decrease in vote share for the SDL concentrated in Kerala and West Bengal? The clue to an answer is provided by the fact that both states, Kerala and West Bengal, currently have social democratic governments, led by the largest social democratic left party in the country, CPM. In both states, the social democratic governments have, over the past few years, increasingly accepted, adopted, and pushed neoliberal economic policies, often in the name of development and industrialization. Thus, we saw the emergence of a paradoxical situation: the SDL opposed, however feebly, the continued adoption of neoliberal polices at the level of the Central government, while the same set of policies was aggressively pursued in the states where they were in power. The debacle of the SDL in the two most electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal can, therefore, be understood as a strong rejection of this doublespeak and hypocrisy of the SDL. The rejection of the SDL at the level of these two states, moreover, dovetails into the overall mandate in favor of progressive and social democratic policies, and against the neoliberal turn, at the national level. Of course there were other local factors, both in West Bengal and in Kerala, that overlaid this broad rejection of the neoliberal turn and turned the mandate decisively against the SDL in both these states. Before we look at some of these factors, especially for West Bengal where the debacle of the SDL was the most stunning, a comment about the so-called national "wave" in favor of the Congress is in order.

The so-called nationwide "wave" in favor of Congress, if there was one, resulted to a large extent from the slew of populist policies that it adopted, paradoxically pushed towards this by the SDL, over the last few years. These include the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the step-up in public investment in agriculture, the debt relief program for farmers, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2006, the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Bill 2008, and the setting up of the Sacchar Committee to inquire into the continued marginalization of Muslims in the country. The Congress cashed the benefits of this populist swing electorally claiming it to be its own policies whereas, in truth, the SDL was largely instrumental in pushing for these policies at the central level. Other such social democratic policies pushed for by the SDL include: opposition to financial sector reforms (pensions, insurance), opposition to outright privatization of the public sector, opposition to privatization of health care and education. These defensive actions by the SDL have partially limited the unbridled power of capital to exploit labor and have provided some relief to the mass of the working people in India. It is, therefore, no surprise that corporate India is exultant at the social democrats’ drubbing at the hustings in 2009. The stock market in Bombay went into a tizzy immediately after the results were out and trading had to be stopped for a while to deal with the unprecedented euphoria! As many media reports show, the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and other business groups have already started preparing their "wish-list" of reforms, by which they mean another round of neoliberal policy assault; quite unsurprisingly, land reforms does not figure in this wish-list of "reforms."

The SDL’s ability to counter the Congress claim that the populist thrust was a result of a progressive shift in the party, in reality fiercely opposed by entrenched interests within the Congress, was severely limited by the SDL’s de facto record in the states where it was in power: Kerala and West Bengal. Thus, paradoxically, while the SDL was largely responsible for creating the populist shift in the Congress party and thereby creating a "wave" in its favor, it could not transform this effort into any substantial electoral advantage for itself; and this was largely because of its doublespeak and hypocrisy, saying one thing at the Central level and doing exactly the opposite at the State level.

Probably nothing brings out this doublespeak and hypocrisy of the SDL better than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA, which provides a guarantee of a minimum of 100 days of work to the rural poor, came into effect on February 2, 2006 in 200 of India’s poorest districts. This provision was originally brought by grassroots-level mass movements in Rajasthan and other states in India, and was later adopted and forcefully pushed by the SDL at the central level. While the NREGA has been constantly attacked in the mainstream press as a waste of resources and a useless policy initiative, it has in fact created substantial benefits for the rural proletariat and poor peasants; even though there is still a lot of room for improvement, the NREGA has managed to improve the lives of the rural poor by putting a floor on agricultural wages and assuring some days of employment, both of which resulted in increased rural incomes.

West Bengal: A Closer Look

How did the NREGA fare in West Bengal and Kerala compared to other states? In 2006-07, the person-days of NREGA employment generated per rural household was 6 in West Bengal and 3 in Kerala, with both states figuring in the list of the 3 worst performers. Compared to this, the all-India average was 17 person-days, and Chhattisgarh generated 34, Madhya Pradesh 56, Assam 70, and Rajasthan 77 person-days. A similar picture emerges for the next year, too: in 2007-08, West Bengal generated 8 person-days and Kerala 6 person-days, much below the all-India average of 16 person-days. The dismal performance of the state government led the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS), a non-party, registered trade union of agricultural workers, to file a public interest litigation in the Calcutta High Court on non-implementation of the 100-days work guarantee scheme in West Bengal.

Coming back to the factors specific to West Bengal that led to this stunning electoral defeat of the SDL, we must complement the story of the state government’s surrender to neoliberalism with its misguided arrogance. The utter failure in the implementation of the NREGA went hand in hand with other overt neoliberal policy moves: privatization of health care, privatization of education, the full-scale assault on the public distribution system, and an aggressive State-sponsored attack on farmers to "acquire" their agricultural land for a neoliberal industrialization drive. Singur and Nandigram stand as symbols, at the same time, of both this attack by the State on behalf of corporate capital and also of the fierce resistance to this brutality by the poor peasants and landless laborers. The arrogance of the SDL-led state government was on gruesome display during the "re-capture" of Nandigram in March 2007, a violent attack on the people opposing forcible land acquisition, and also in the manner it dealt with the case of Rizwanur Rahman. Coming as it does in the background of the dismal conditions of the Muslims in the state, the total insensitivity displayed in the Rizwanur Rahman case increased the ire of the common Muslim population against the SDL-led state government. Taken together, all these factors created a massive wave of anger and resentment against the state government and resulted in the unprecedented electoral debacle of the SDL in West Bengal.

A Spurious Argument

At this point, we need to closely scrutinize an alternative argument that is doing the social democratic rounds. This argument, which purports to provide an explanation of the electoral defeat of the SDL in West Bengal, runs something like this: the Left Front made a great tactical mistake in severing ties with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Center on the issue of the 123 treaty (nuclear deal) with the USA; this severing of ties with the Congress allowed the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress (INC) to forge an alliance in West Bengal; this alliance managed to consolidate the anti-Left votes and directly resulted in the electoral drubbing of the SDL in West Bengal.

This argument, if true, would provide some solace to the SDL leadership in India. By shifting the responsibility of the electoral debacle onto the logic of alliance arithmetic, the SDL would manage to skirt some difficult issues of policy and politics. But, alas, the argument does not hold water when confronted with evidence. There is a simple way to determine the validity or otherwise of this, to my mind, spurious argument. If it were true that the SDL debacle was fueled mainly by the consolidation of anti-Left votes (because of the Congress-TMC alliance), it would mean the following: the SDL’s share of votes polled would remain relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2009. This is a straightforward testable implication of the above argument. What does the evidence say on this?

In Table 1 we have summarized data about the change in the vote share of the Left Front (CPM, CPI, AIFB, and RSP) at the level of the parliamentary constituencies between the general elections in 2004 and 2009; a negative number implies an increase in the vote share from 2004 to 2009, and a positive number implies a decline. As can be seen from Table 1, out of the 42 parliamentary constituencies in West Bengal, the SDL’s vote share went down in 39, ranging from 0.49 percent in Balurghat to a whopping 34.8 percent in Hooghly! The only 3 constituency where the SDL managed to increase their vote share is: Malda North, Murshidabad, and Ghatal; in all the other constituencies its vote share fell between 2004 and 2009. There were 25 constituencies where the share of votes garnered by the SDL fell by more than 5 percentage points, there were 11 constituencies where the vote share fell by more than 10 percentage points, and there were 5 constituencies where the vote share declined by more than 15 percentage points. Can we, in the face of this overwhelming evidence of a massive anti-SDL wave, still stick to the story of the supposed consolidation of anti-Left votes as the primary reason behind the SDL debacle?

Table 1: Constituency-Wise Decrease in Vote Share of the Left Front from General Election 2004 to 2009

Constituency	Change	Constituency	Change
Malda North	-5.71	Kanthi	7.67
Murshidabad	-1.09	Malda South	7.68
Ghatal	-0.66	Arambagh	7.74
Balurghat	0.49	Darjeeling	7.99
Uluberia	1.58	Mathurapur	8.06
Medinipur	1.70	Bishnupur	8.28
Jalpaiguri	2.11	Tamluk	8.50
Asansol	2.51	Bongaon	8.89
Kolkata South	2.80	Basirhat	9.05
Diamaond Harbor	2.98	Birbhum	9.65
Raigunj	3.13	Krishnanagar	12.53
Dum Dum	3.62	Barasat	12.54
Bardhaman Purba	3.69	Joynagar	12.91
Jangipur	3.80	Barrackpur	12.97
Ranaghat	3.88	Kolkata North	13.64
Bahrampur	3.99	Sreerampur	13.72
Alipurduars	4.48	Bolpur	15.65
Jadavpur	5.35	Purulia	15.94
Howrah	5.61	Bankura	16.62
Cooch Behar	6.88	Bardhaman-Durgapur	16.99
Jhargram	7.12	Hooghly	34.80

Beyond Elections

There is no denying the fact that the SDL played an important role in halting the juggernaut of neoliberalism in India through its intervention in the formation of the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA; and this was largely possible, given the political situation five years ago, because of the sizeable parliamentary presence of the SDL at the Central level. If nothing else, the reaction of corporate India to the electoral debacle of the SDL is proof of the partial efficacy of the SDL’s past interventions. But there are, I would submit, at least two serious problems of a strategy that focuses primarily on electoral politics as the SDL does.

First, most of its interventions, even though salutary, are at best defensive actions. The ruling classes set the agenda and move forward with a concrete program of neoliberal reforms and the SDL reacts to that agenda: it tries to halt the speed of the reforms, tries to win a battle here or there, without in any real sense questioning the logic of the whole move. The logic of the whole move can only be questioned when there is a positive agenda guiding political intervention. In the absence of such a positive political program, it boils down to the following: the ruling class ushers in the policy triumvirate of liberalization, privatization, and globalization, and the SDL merely reacts to these. In such a scenario, the best outcome can only be a return to the status quo, not a move forward towards a socialist future.

This brings me to the second, and related, problem of the SDL strategy. The fact that the Communist parties, now part of what I have called the SDL, have lost the political offensive in the context of the class struggle in India also finds reflection in their over-emphasis on electoral politics, to the virtual exclusion of all non-electoral struggles. Over the last two decades, there is not one significant non-electoral struggle that the SDL initiated or led; all its attention and energy has been fixed towards how to maintain its electoral position. More often than not, the SDL has been willing to enter into opportunistic and unprincipled alliances to attain short-term electoral goals, little realizing that this opportunism leads to long-term political setbacks. At times it has even gone with the BJP to keep Congress out of power, quickly reversing the logic at the next moment and aligning with the Congress to defend secularism. Caught in these endless electoral antics and working within a framework whose rules have been set by the ruling classes, the SDL has gradually distanced itself from its programmatic concerns of a people’s democratic revolution. To recover its potency and relevance, the SDL must refashion itself by forging links with the rising tide of mass movements in India against the neoliberal offensive and overcome its obsession with electoral politics. If post-poll statements of the SDL bigwigs are anything to go by, however, they have decided to do exactly the opposite: blame the electoral debacle on external factors, avoid any serious rethinking, and continue with elections as the primary focus of SDL politics.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Correction

While computing the numbers for Table 1, I had not fully taken account of the delimitation of parliamentary constituencies that took place in 2008. Hence, some of the numbers in Table 1 are inaccurate because the parliamentary constituencies themselves have changed. Thus, while it is difficult to accurately see how the 7 percent statewide decline in vote share of the Left Front is distributed across all the parliamentary constituencies (which is what Table 1 inaccurately reported) because of the 2008 delimitation of constituencies, we can nonetheless figure out the changes in vote shares in those that remained relatively unchanged by the delimitation process: Balurghat saw a marginal decline of 0.49 percent, Raigunj a decline of 3.13 percent, Alipurduars a decline of 4.48 percent, Cooch Behar a decline of 6.88 percent, Darjeeling a decline of 7.99 percent, Birbhum a decline of 9.65 percent and Bolpur witnessed a massive decline of 15.65 percent. But the statewide decline in the vote share of the Left Front remains unchanged and thus my main argument remains unaffected; only the distribution of the change in vote share across parliamentary constituencies has changed. Once the Election Commission of India comes out with data at the assembly segment level, one can recompute the numbers that make Table 1 to get a more accurate picture; the trend of declining vote share for the Left Front, though, will remain unchanged.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: India, Politics, West Bengal

Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India: An Aggregate Study

May 17, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Amit Basole and Deepankar Basu

Sanhati

PDF Version of the Article

Abstract: This paper uses aggregate-level data as well as case-studies to trace the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian working people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes. This summary account is meant to inform and link up with on-going attempts at radically restructuring Indian society.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx.

INTRODUCTION
Assessing the nature and direction of economic development in India is an important theoretical and practical task with profound political and social implications. After all, any serious attempt at a radical restructuring of Indian society, if it is not to fall prey to empty utopianism, will need to base its long-term strategy on the historical trends in the evolution of the material conditions of life of the vast majority of the population. Attempting to contribute to past debates and as part of on-going attempts at radical transformation of Indian society, this paper tries to provide a summary account of the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy over the last few decades.

The principal questions that motivate this study are: what types of production relations does the vast majority of the working population in Indian agriculture and industry labor in? How is economic surplus appropriated from the producers? The aim is not merely to arrive at a label such as “capitalist,” “semi-feudal” etc; nor to enter into a debate over whether the transition to capitalism is occurring as expected or not. Rather we are motivated by a desire to understand the material conditions under which the working population labors and the manner in which it is exploited.

The analysis is largely pitched at the aggregate level, complemented, wherever possible, with micro-level studies and data. While a study of the structural evolution of the Indian economy is of interest in itself, this paper uses trends in the structural evolution of the Indian economy to make inferences about the mode of generation, appropriation and use of the surplus product in Indian society.1 The focus on surplus appropriation, in turn, is motivated by the Marxist idea that the form of extraction of unpaid surplus labour provides the key to understanding the structure and evolution of any class-divided society. This important insight was most clearly articulated by Marx in Volume III of Capital:

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of the state in each case.(page 927, Marx, 1993; emphasis added.)

The emphasis on the form in which surplus labour is extracted from the direct producers is important and worth dwelling on a little. Every class divided society rests on the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour of the direct producers; the fact that one group of people can, due to their location in the process of production, appropriate the surplus labour of another group is what defines a class. The appropriation of the surplus labour of direct producers by the ruling class is as much true of a feudal organization of production as it is of a capitalist mode of production. What distinguishes the two is the form in which this surplus labour is appropriated by the ruling classes, not the fact of surplus extraction per se. It is only in the capitalist mode of production that the surplus labour of the direct producers, i.e., the workers, takes the form of surplus value and is mediated through the institution of wage-labour. While this makes the exploitation of workers less apparent under capitalism, it also distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from non-capitalist modes, where the appropriation of surplus labour is much more visible, direct and brutal. For instance, in the feudal organization of society in Medieval Europe, the surplus labour of the serf was immediately visible as the work he did on the lord’s land; the surplus labour took the form of the product of the serf’s labour. The visibility of exploitation, understood as the appropriation of unpaid labour time of the direct producers, is lost under capitalist relations of production; it is obscured by the institution of wage-labour.

The study attempts to identify the evolution of the modes of appropriation of surplus labour in India indirectly by studying the evolution of key structures of the Indian economy at the aggregate level. The underlying assumption of the whole study is that the evolution of the aggregate economic structures, like ownership patterns in the agrarian economy, the evolution of labour forms like tenancy, wage-labour, bonded labour, the size-distribution of firms in the informal sector, the patterns of employment and migration, the importance of merchant and finance capital, etc., can provide useful and reliable information about the mode of surplus extraction. While it is possible to form a picture of the aggregate evolution of the Indian economy using data available from sources like the NSSO, the Agricultural Census, the Census of India – and that is precisely what we do in this study – we are fully aware of the limitations of such aggregate accounts. Many micro-level variations are lost in the aggregate story and so, wherever possible, the aggregate picture is complemented with case studies.

The study is broadly divided into two sections, one dealing with the agrarian economy and the other with what has come to be called the “informal” industrial sector. This twin focus is motivated by several considerations. First, the agrarian economy accounts for the largest section of the country’s workforce and population; this makes it a natural focus of any study which attempts to understand the evolution of the Indian economy and society at the aggregate level. Second, while the non-agrarian economy consists of the industrial and the services sector, the majority of the workforce in these two sectors is, again, found in what has been called the “informal” sector; that is why this becomes one of the foci of this study. Third, to the extent that an understanding of the relations of production (and forms of surplus extraction) is at issue, the “formal” industrial and services sector are probably beyond the domain of any debate; most serious scholars and activists would agree that the “formal” sector is characterized by capitalist relations of production. Since, what seems to be at issue is the “correct” characterization of the relations of production and forms of surplus extraction in the agrarian economy and the non-agricultural “informal” sector, this study focuses on precisely these two as an intervention in the broader debate about the characterization of Indian society.

Here we present a summary account of our findings, first for the agricultural sector and then for the “informal” industrial sector and end by raising some political and philosophical issues for discussion; for more empirical details and sources of the data readers are requested to look at the full article (which is posted here as a pdf).

AGRICULTURE: TRENDS AND SUMMARY
Our analysis of aggregate level data has revealed the following significant trends in the agrarian economy of India:

1.The share of GDP contributed by agriculture has steadily declined over the last five decades; this decline has not been matched by a decline in the share of the workforce engaged in agriculture. The result of these two trends has been a declining share of per capita value added from the agricultural sector. This has essentially consigned a large section of the Indian working population to very low productivity (and low income) work.

2.The average size of agricultural holdings, both ownership and operational, has seen a steady decline over the last five decades, with the average ownership holding in 2002-03 being 0.73 hectares.

3.The ownership of land remains as skewed as it was five decades ago; several measures capture this skewed pattern of ownership in the agrarian economy. For instance, the Gini coefficient of landholding ownership concentration has remained practically unchanged between 1960-61 and 2002-03. In fact it has marginally increased between 1991-92 and 2002-03.

4. While the aggregate distribution of land ownership remains as skewed as before, interesting and important patterns are visible within this unchanging aggregate picture. The share of land owned by large (10 ha or more) and medium (4 ha to 10 ha) landholding families has steadily declined over the last few decades from around 60% to 34%; the share owned by small (1 ha to 2 ha) and marginal (less than 1 ha) landholding families has increased from around 21% to 43%, while the share of semi-medium (2 ha to 4 ha) families has remained unchanged at around 20%.

5.Parallel to this decline in the share of land held by large landholding families is their decline as a share of rural households; on the other hand, there is a large increase in the share of small and marginal landholding families among rural households. In 2002-03, 80% of rural households were marginal landholding families; the corresponding figure was 66% in 1960-61. Both these trends seem to indicate the declining economic, social and political power of the landowning class in India.

6.The geographical (inter-state) variation of landholding ownership pattern allows us to divide the Indian states into two groups: large landholding states, and small landholding states. In the “large” landholding states, a substantial share of total area is still owned by relatively large landholding families; in the “small” landholding states, the share of land held by large or medium landholding families is very small. The former group consists of: Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan; the second group consists of: Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, J&K, Kerala, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal.

7.Going hand-in-hand with the decline in the share of land owned by large landowning families, is the steady decline of tenant cultivation and its gradual replacement by self cultivation in Indian agriculture. The share of operational holdings using tenant cultivation declined from about 24% in 1960-61 to about 10% in 2002-03. There are large geographical variations in the extent of tenancy, with the largest share of leased-in land as a share of total operated area occurring in Punjab and Haryana, two prominent examples of what we have called large landholding states; Orissa has high prevalence of tenancy and is an example of what we have called small landholding states. The proportion of area owned and the proportion of area operated by the different size-classes are almost equal; hence, there is no evidence of reverse tenancy on any substantial scale at the aggregate level, though this might hide reverse tenancy at state or regional level.

8.In most places where tenancy exists, the largest form of the tenancy contract is still sharecropping. In 2002-03, share cropping accounted for about 40% of the land under tenancy; this has more or less stayed constant over the decades. An important exception is Punjab and Haryana, the two states which have the largest share of leased-in land, where the predominant form of the tenancy contract is for fixed monetary payment.

9.Effective landlessness is large and has steadily increased over the past few decades. The share of effectively landless households in total rural households has increased from about 44% in 1960-61 to 60% in 2002-03.

10.Small holding agricultural production has increasingly become economically unviable over the years. In 2003, the average income from cultivation was insufficient to cover even the very low level of consumption expenditures of the majority of rural households. This is one of the primary causes behind the recent increase in rural indebtedness. This increasing difficulty of sustaining incomes through cultivation was probably what led close to 40% of farmers in 2005 to suggest, in the course of a NSSO Survey, that given a chance, they would opt out of agriculture. Changes in the agrarian structure of India seem to have already brought the question of collectivization on the historical agenda. We return to this point in the conclusion.

11. Disaggregating total incomes of rural households engaged in agriculture show that wage income has become the main source of income for a large majority of the population. For about 60% of the rural households in 2003, the major share of income came from wage work, supplemented by income coming from petty commodity production, both in the agricultural and non-agricultural sector. Another 20% of rural households drew equal shares of their total income from wage work and cultivation, both at about 40%.

12.Prevalence of informal sources of credit through moneylenders had seen a sharp decline over the 1960s and 1970s, but the decline seems to have been halted since the early 1980s. The moneylender has made a comeback in rural India, facilitated by a steady retreat of the institutions of formal credit.
13.There was significant capital accumulation in the agricultural sector during the 1970s and 1980s; this has drastically fallen during the 1980s and has picked up a little during the 1990s. The fall in the growth rate of capital formation has been largely driven by the fall in public sector investments in the agrarian economy.

Putting all these trends together, one is led to the following tentative conclusions (more in the nature of a working hypothesis): over the past few decades, the relations of production in the Indian agrarian economy have slowly evolved from what could be characterized as “semi-feudal” towards what can tentatively be termed “capitalist”; this conclusion emerges from the fact that the predominant mode of surplus extraction seems to be working through the institution of wage-labour, the defining feature of capitalism. Articulated to the global capitalist-imperialist system, the development of capitalism in the periphery has of course not led to the growth of income and living standards of the vast majority of the population. On the contrary, the agrarian economy has continued to stagnate and the majority of the rural population has been consigned to a life of poverty and misery.

Aggregate level data suggests that the two main forms through which the surplus product of direct producers is extracted are (a) surplus value through the institution of wage-labour (which rests on equal exchange), and (b) surplus value through unequal exchange (which mainly affects petty producers) where input prices are inflated and output prices deflated for the direct producers due to the presence of monopoly, monopsony and interlinking of markets; semi-feudal forms of surplus product extraction, through the institution of tenant cultivation and share cropping, has declined over time. Merchant and usurious capital continues to maintain a substantial presence in the life of the rural populace, both of which manage to appropriate a part of the surplus value created through wage-labour, apart from directly extracting surplus value from petty producers through unequal exchange.

The process of class differentiation has been considerably slowed down and complicated due to the steady incorporation of the Indian economy into the global capitalist system, which has supported and even encouraged the growth of a large “informal” production sector. This informal production sector can be best understood as being involved in petty commodity production, both of agricultural and nonagricultural commodities. Petty commodity production refers to the organization of production where the producer owns the means of production and primarily uses family and other forms of non-wage labour in the production process. Petty commodity production is exploited mainly by merchant and usurious capital where the main form of surplus extraction is through the mechanism of unequal exchange and not through the institution of wage-labour; unequal exchange is often facilitated and maintained through interlinked product, labour and credit markets. The coexistence of both wage-labour and petty commodity production, whereby landless labourers, marginal farmers and small farmers participate in both, in one as free labour and in the other as owner-producer, has impeded the development of proletarian class consciousness and complicated the task of revolutionary politics. It is to a detailed study of petty commodity production in the non-agricultural sector that we now turn.

INFORMAL INDUSTRY: TRENDS AND SUMMARY
In the second part of this study we have attempted to take a broad look at the organization of informal industry in India. In particular we have focused on the evolution of firm size, the types of production relations and the modes of surplus extraction prevailing in informal industry. The following conclusions can be drawn:

1. The industrial sector as a whole (formal and informal) has not expanded greatly in terms of employment in the past three decades and today stands at around 18% (compared to China’s 24%) of total employment in the Indian economy.

2. The informal sector still accounts for around 75% of industrial employment in India. The employment share of the formal sector in general and large-scale industry in particular has been stagnant for the past three decades.

3. Informal industry produces a wide variety of commodities including food products, textiles, wood and metal products and provides services to several types of heavier and more capital-intensive industry.

4. The number of informal firms and workers has been more of less stationary since the 1980s and the relative share of petty-proprietorships, marginal and small capitalist firms is also largely unaltered.

5. As expected most informal firms do not own substantial amounts of capital equipment. The land or building on which the firm is situated accounts for 60-80% of asset value for informal firms.

6. Even though GVA for the formal sector far outstrips GVA in the informal sector, value added in informal industry has increased significantly in the last decade. Since the number of workers has remained more or less the same, this suggests that labor productivity has been rising in this sector.

7. The relations of production in informal industry are neither purely independent producer (characterized by producer’s ownership of labor and capital) nor only industrial capitalist (characterized by a proletarian workforce and a real subsumption of labor to capital). Rather a spectrum of putting-out relations based on formal subsumption of labor and a reliance on extraction of absolute rather than relative surplus value is observed.

8. In addition to putting-out arrangements, nominally self-employed or independent producers are often locked into a relation of dependency vis-à-vis merchant and finance capital. This situation is closely analogous to the position of the peasant in the countryside with respect to intermediaries.

9. Piece-wages, unequal exchange, bonded labor, contingent and casual labor, and gender and caste oppression all conspire to increase the producer’s exploitation largely via extraction of absolute surplus value.

10. In the face of the failure of modern industry to expand satisfactorily, informal industry has acted as the “employer of last resort” for surplus labor in the agricultural sector. Relations of dependency and lack of resources as well as incentives for technical change keep informal workers trapped in low productivity, low wage work. Surplus labor, low wages and intense (self) exploitation in turn create disincentives for technical change.

CONCLUSION
By way of conclusion, we would like to raise some political and philosophical issues and questions for further discussion without in any way claiming to have arrived at any conclusive answers. Though both the authors largely agree to the aggregate trends presented above, we derive different political and social implications from these trends. This derives partly from different political and philosophical perspectives that both of us see ourselves closest to. Rather than paper over our differences, we therefore, present our alternative viewpoints, which might even be contradictory, for further debate and discussion.

The first issue that we would like to put forward for discussion is the continued centrality of the agrarian question to any project for revolutionizing Indian society. This follows simply from the fact that the majority of the working people in India are related, directly or indirectly, with the agricultural sector; this is a direct result of the failure of the structural transformation of the Indian economy. Any attempt, therefore, at radical reconstruction of Indian society will have to deal with the agrarian question effectively. Dealing with the agrarian question will mean, among other things, rapidly increasing the productivity of agricultural activity, the surest way to increase the income of the vast masses of the working people involved in agriculture and thereby create a home market for domestic industry.

But here we come up with some difficult questions that need to be addressed. Traditionally, the Marxist tradition has seen redistributive land reforms as essential to the project of dealing with the agrarian question. The reasons have primarily been political, though some economic arguments have also been developed.2 Politically, land reforms have been seen as a way to decisively break the power of the parasitic class of feudal and semi-feudal landlords; economically, it has been understood as creating conditions for the development of the productive forces in rural society, increasing the productivity of labour, creating a surplus for supporting industrialization and providing a market for domestic industry.

Using Lenin’s distinction between the Prussian and the American paths for bourgeois development in the rural economy lends credence to the call for redistributive land reforms. Discussing the “two forms” of bourgeois development out of the feudal and semi-feudal order characterized by serfdom, he says:

The survivals of serfdom may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i. e., either by reform or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed by having big landlord economies at the head, which will gradually become more and more bourgeois and gradually substitute bourgeois for feudal methods of exploitation. It may also proceed by having small peasant economies at the head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the “excrescence” of the feudal latifundia from the social organism and then freely develop without them along the path of capitalist economy.

Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of the feudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a bourgeois farmer. (Lenin, 1907).

The three main communist streams in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) more or less accept this distinction, the first two explicitly and the last one implicitly.3 Hence, for all the three streams the main task (or axis) of the current stage of the Peoples (or New) Democratic Revolution is the agrarian revolution, with redistributive land reforms being one of its main tasks.

While it is true that India, because it did not witness any serious efforts at land reforms on a national scale, developed along the landlord path out of semi-feudalism, there are some important differences that need to be considered. One pole of landlord capitalism, viz., landlessness has been growing over the years; the other pole of landlord capitalism, viz., the continued dominance of a few “big peasants” seems to be at variance with the evidence. Aggregate level data about India that we have seen in the course of this study seems to throw up an unmistakable trend of the declining power of landlords (feudal or otherwise), not by any revolutionary means but just by the sheer pressure of demographic developments and economic stagnation. The total land owned by the large landholding families, the “big peasants” that Lenin refers to, have halved over the last five decades and today they own only about 12 percent of the total land. On the other hand, the land owned by medium-to-small landholding families has increased to over 65 percent. Does this, along with other evidence on the decline of tenancy and the increase of wage-labour, not indicate that the rural economy in India is inexorably being pushed in the direction of peasant capitalism? How would this important trend of the increasing dominance of peasant capitalism, and a gradual whittling down of landlord capitalism, change the course of the agrarian revolution? If landlords, as a class, are dwindling in economic and social power, is a programme aimed at breaking their political power still relevant? Is the contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses of the people still the principal contradiction in India today?
Another issue that will need to be addressed in the context of the slogan for redistributive land reforms is to see whether the resulting farms will be viable in any meaningful economic sense. Let us recall that the average size of ownership holding in India in 2003 was 0.81 hectares; so, the most equitable redistribution will result in the average holding of this size. If instead land is only taken from those owning more than 10 acres and all of it distributed among those currently owning less than 1 acre, then the average size of holding for those receiving redistributed land will roughly become 1.25 acres.

If we juxtapose this with the cost of cultivation data, we can easily see that agricultural units of approximately such sizes will not be economically viable in the sense of being able to generate any surplus product after sustaining a decent level of consumption of the producers. It is extremely doubtful whether these small farms can generate any economic surplus even after the onerous relations of unequal exchange have been removed from the picture. Can they, therefore, help in the industrialization effort by generating surplus or will they instead require a net resource flow in their direction with subsidized credit, power, inputs, etc. to continuously keep them viable? This question is extremely important as was shown in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution in Russia when the revolutionary regime was put in serious jeopardy by a severe food shortage.

The growth of capitalist relations, the continued fragmentation of the land, the decline in tenancy, the unviability of small-scale production and other related factors seem to suggest that a higher form of agrarian development, i.e., collective forms of agricultural production, is gradually being pushed on to the historical agenda of the revolutionary movements in India. Collective, cooperative and socialist forms of large-scale agriculture probably need to be seriously considered as an option emerging out of the very evolution of the material conditions of the vast masses of the working people. The agenda of redistributive land reforms creating bourgeois property in rural areas and facilitating capitalist development needs to be seriously rethought, not because of some ideological reasons but because the development of the agrarian structure seems to demand such a revaluation.

The second large issue raised by our study concerns the mode of industrialization of the Indian economy. It is relatively uncontroversial that a shift of the agricultural population into the secondary and tertiary sectors will be required in order to raise real incomes of the vast majority. How this transformation is to be achieved is the question. The structural transformation required to relieve above-mentioned pressures on agriculture cannot be left to the anarchy of the global capitalist market. The “market-friendly” post-1991 period has been witness to a type of growth that has resulted in rising inequality and increasing number of low-wage, contingent and informal jobs. However the contradictions and problems of the pre-Reform, “planning period” also need to be taken seriously. There is an urgent need to break out of certain simple binaries and equations which have been imposed upon us. The first binary is that between State-managed capitalism and market-oriented capitalism. India’s experience shows that the vast majority of the working population has suffered greatly in both regimes. In our struggle against a particularly predatory type of neoliberal capitalism (whose days may in any case be numbered given the global crisis), we must not find ourselves unwittingly arguing for a return to the bureaucratic and corrupt State. Rather the spectacular failure of the neoliberal model can be an opportunity to demand greater decentralization and more autonomous development. The various people’s movements have been articulating precisely such a model of development.

The second simple equation is between rural areas and agriculture on the one hand, and cities and industry on the other hand. The social and ecological contradictions of the large-scale, capital intensive model of industrialization must be taken seriously. Nowhere has this model produced high levels of employment in an ecologically sustainable fashion while giving producers a say in the running of the workplace. It is becoming increasingly clear that the economic viability of such industrialization is obtained only by cost externalization. The Indian experience points to the necessity for developing dispersed, low capital-intensity, sustainable models of industry that nevertheless raise real incomes of the majority (see Datye 1997 for one such model). This is not a utopian pipe-dream but rather a historical necessity if “development” is not to remain an unfulfilled promise for the majority of Indians.
None of the above can be taken only as a demand for better or more enlightened development policy. Rather it articulates what has already been emerging from social and political movements and in turn seeks to ground the political demands in an empirical and theoretical context. There is a need to extend revolutionary people’s movements rooted in peasant agriculture and national resource struggles into the rural, semi-urban and urban industrial milieu. The urgent question here is how can the dispersed industrial working class be effectively politically organized at a national level? This working class does not always resemble the “classical” doubly-free, urban industrial proletariat. Yet, our attempt here has show that it remains exploited nonetheless and can and should form an important component of left revolutionary politics. Is an artisan-peasant alliance a possibility for the near future?
There is a difference of opinion between the two of us on the question of the model of industrialization that might fruitfully accompany efforts at a radical restructuring of Indian society. While one of us believes, as has been stated in the above paragraphs, that a dispersed, low capital-intensity, sustainable model of industrialization emerges from the Indian experience, the other believes that the scale and geographic dispersal of industrialization per se does not lead to its being more democratic or ecologically sustainable. What is rather more important is the institutional setting within which the industrialization effort is embedded. A small-scale industrialization effort in the context of local level inequalities of class, caste and gender can reinforce those inequalities and nullify all attempts at democratic control of the production process; on the other hand, a large-scale, high capital intensity and centralized industrialization effort within a socialist context might be amenable to democratic control if the institutions of workers’ control are in place. Sustainability, again, seems to have more to do with proper cost-benefit analysis rather than the scale of production as such. In a socialist context, where the surplus product of society is democratically controlled, the pace and direction of technical change will be determined in a rational and scientific manner and not left to the anarchy of capitalist production and the imperatives of profit maximization. In such a setting, internalizing the environmental costs of production would flow naturally from the imperatives of all round social development.

Despite the differing views advanced above, we hope the this study and the accompanying reflections and speculations will serve to fuel discussion and debate among those working for a radical restructuring of Indian society along socialist principles.

(We would like to thanks Debarshi Das and Mohan Rao for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.)

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Economic Notes, Economy, India, Marxism

NDP (Sri Lanka) – May Day Declaration

April 28, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

The following is the text of the May Day declaration issued by the Central Committee of the New-Democratic Party.

The on-going cruel war in the North has plunged the Tamil people into an unprecedented human tragedy. With attacks continuing incessantly, tears and blood flow like rivers. The people who emerged from the besiegement of war have been herded into camps without even the basic facilities, in Vavuniya and the Jaffna peninsula. The scenes in the Vanni are much like those obtaining in countries such as Somalia and Sudan. At the same time, the financial and economic crisis that has developed in the South has severely affected the workers, peasants and other toiling masses and severely burdened their lives. India on the one hand and the US and the West on the other are seeking to use the war conditions and the economic crisis to strengthen their respective hegemonic holds on the country. Neither the ruling Mahinda Chinthanaya government nor the UNP, which is striving to come to power, have the ability to rescue the country and the people from this dangerous situation and solve the problems faced by them. Military victory and electoral success based on it will only help to strengthen state power but not serve to provide solutions for the political and economic problems heading towards an abyss. The reality is that there will be no change for the better until the entire workers, peasants and other toiling masses are ready for alternative political thinking and action.

The forthcoming May Day, the day of revolutionary struggle of the workers of the world, is to be celebrated in a new environment in which the workers and oppressed people of the world are launching fresh uprisings. Hence the New-Democratic Party calls upon the people to resolve to mobilise along the path of mass political struggle to urge a just political solution to the national question, which is identified as the main problem facing the country, and to win the rights of all workers including the plantation workers.

The Mahinda Chinthanaya government, since came to power, has not proposed a solution to the national question which has been transformed into war. At the same time, with Indian backing, it is intent on its pursuit of war. Even to this day the government has shown no interest in putting forward a political solution. Likewise, it is preserving indifferent silence on the question of wage increase for plantation workers and other matters affecting the livelihood of the people. Besides, a cabinet sub-committee has proposed a scheme just as disastrous as the Upper Kotmale Scheme, namely that of redistributing large plantations to private smallholders. Through this scheme, the Hill Country Tamils will face severe problems as a class and a nationality, and be forced into a dangerous situation in which they could lose their entire livelihood. Therefore, it is essential to introduce an alternative program and make the plantation workers part of the program.

Also, the climate persists in which democratic, trade union and human rights are being violated and the freedom of the media is being threatened under the State of Emergency. Besides the rejection of demands for wage increases by workers and other employees, security of employment too is being denied.

Although much is spoken about a national economy, liberalisation and privatisation are being carried out in the name of development under the agenda of Globalisation. The country will not see real development or prosperity through them. The war will not be brought to an end. Until a just political solution is put forward for the national question, it will be deception to talk of peace and development for the country.

Hence, on this May Day the New-Democratic Party emphasises that the oppressed working people of the country and the repressed nationalities should mobilise along the path of mass political struggle for the people.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Politics, Press Release, Self-Determination, Sri Lanka, State Repression

Halt the mass murder of Sri Lankan Tamils in the Vanni Area

April 10, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

PRESS STATEMENT (10th April, 2009)

Contents of Appeal from concerned citizens of South Asia to halt the mass murder of Sri Lankan Tamils in the Vanni Area of North Sri Lanka.

Appeal is addressed to: Respected Mr. Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General; Respected Ms Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India and Heads of Government of South Asian Countries
________________________________________________________________________________

We are appalled at reports of mass deaths of Sri Lankan Tamils trapped in a small area of the Vanni region in northern Sri Lanka. Both electronic and print media have reported the death of over 700 Tamils in the last couple of days, with only a section of them being identified as LTTE cadres, meaning thereby that a vast number of those killed are civilians trapped in the area. There are serious apprehensions that thermobaric bomb – a bomb that uses a fuel-air explosive capable of creating overpressures equal to an atomic bomb – has been used in this mass killing.

For the last several weeks, we have expressed our concerns about this imminent massacre. In fact we pointed out that the possibilities of almost close to 150,000 Tamilians getting affected was not just most probable but real. We also pointed out that the Sri Lankan Government had been dangling this as the fruit of its declared `war on terror’ as the `final victory’ – and that the Government was pushing for the ‘final solution’ before the soon-to-ensue Sinhala New year day falling on 14th April, 2009.

Our worst fears are turning true. The sheer scale of artillery and explosive attacks and the massive deaths of Tamils points out to the grave situation of the Vanni region becoming the graveyard for thousands of Tamil civilians. Now the perceived usage of thermobaric bomb by the mindless Sri Lankan Army and Government has taken the situation beyond limits. Sri Lanka President Rajapakse himself has threatened ‘complete rout and annihilation’ of Tamils.

Sri Lanka has turned a terror state though they keep blaming LTTE as a terrorist outfit. The brazen and insulting manner by which Sri Lankan authorities have attacked any person or agency seeking accountability of the Sri Lankan Government to human rights standards can be gauged by the fact that several British Parliamentarians were forced to take up the issue of being branded terrorists by the Sri Lankan officials in a debate in the UK House of Commons! Even Louise Arbor, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Philip Alston were not spared.

The reality is that the Sri Lankan Government has utilised the so called `war on terror’ as a cover to systematically destroy all democratic processes and institutions in Sri Lanka. Government and its minions have turned the state into a terror apparatus, crushing not just the Tamils, but also others challenging its actions. As a result, numerous non-Tamil, Sinhalese citizens have also fallen prey to the Sri Lankan terror state. Journalists have been the major targets with 19 journalists, both Tamil and Sinhala being killed in the last 2 years, over 35 exiled, driven away from the country or silenced, and numerous publications closed down. The assassination of Lasantha Wickramathunge, Editor of Sunday Leader, a widely respected Sri Lankan weekly in January highlights the fate of anyone challenging the ruling dispensation.

Respected and expert UN bodies have investigated and brought out reports about different aspects of the breakdown of democratic and judicial systems. Recently, on 9th February, 2009, 10 top UN Experts issued a statement sharing the deep concern of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights over the rapidly deteriorating conditions facing civilians in the Vanni region and the significant number of civilian casualties. They also deplored the restrictions on humanitarian access to conflict areas which heightens the ongoing serious violations of the most basic economic and social rights.

We are extremely concerned that in this racist genocide war Sri Lankan government is using banned and illegal weapons and ammunitions, including thermobaric bombs which kills vast numbers of people across a wide territory. Sri Lanka security forces have a long record of using cluster bombs and engaging in aerial targeted bombings of civilian areas which are banned under the Geneva Conventions. Sri Lankan Government has never denied the use of cluster bombs. Across the world there is a tremendous outpouring of anguish and agony at the prospects that surviving Tamil civilians will be mass annihilated through the use of weapons of mass destruction. It is therefore very critical that the UN urgently intervene and restrain the Sri Lankan Government from using banned bombs, explosives and weaponry.

It is very important that the truth about the actual use of these ‘weapons of mass destruction’ including thermobaric bombs be independently verified and its source of supply identified. If indeed these horrific weapons have been used, the international community should immediately initiate prosecution of the highest functionaries of the Sri Lankan state and the Government of the country that supplied these bombs for commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

We would also like to point out that the humanitarian crisis has been made worse because the Sri Lankan Government has banned independent observers of UN agencies, the ICRC and other independent institutions from operating in the war zone. It is of utmost importance that independent observers are sent both to monitor the situation as also to ensure humanitarian aid reaches the area.

The innocent Tamil civilians have been living a precarious life without food, water and health supplies for the last several weeks. Emaciated, starved, severely malnourished and seriously injured, the women, children, aged persons and remaining men are already dying. They deserve the protection that can be offered by concerned world citizens who by demanding an end to the war will also be asserting a chance for these innocent men, women and children to live.

As citizens of South Asia, we therefore demand that the UN and the International Community, effectively intervene to ensure immediate cessation of the brutal and savage war in Sri Lanka and ensure immediate humanitarian relief to the suffering thousands caught in the middle of the war. We also call upon the as also the Governments in the South Asian region, viz., the Government of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives to intervene forcefully to stop the genocidal war that threatens peace not just in Sri Lanka, but in all of South Asia.
________________________________________________________________________________
Appeal is jointly issued by:
K.G.. Kannabiran, National President, PUCL, Hyderabad; Justice Rajinder Sachar, former chief Justice, Delhi High Court, Arundhati Roy, New Delhi, Pushkar Raj, General Secretary, PUCL; Pamela Philipose, Women’s Feature Service; Swami Agnivesh, New Delhi, Prof. Amit Bhaduri, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Rt Rev. P J Lawrence, Bishop of Church of South India, Diocese of Nandyal, Praful Bidwai, Columnist, New Delhi, Sumit Chakravorty, Editor, Mainstream Weekly, New Delhi; Tapan Bose, New Delhi; Rita Manchanda, South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Nepal; Prof Kamal Mitra Chenoy, School of International Studies and President, JNU Teachers Association, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Ernest Deenadayalan, Bangalore; Pradip Prabhu, Kashtakari Sanghatana, Dahanu/Mumbai; Prashant Bhushan, Advocate, Supreme Court, New Delhi, M.G. Devasahayam IAS (Retd), Chennai, Sukumar Murlidharan, Journalist, New Delhi, Rev. Dhyanchand Carr, Madurai, Henri Tiphagne, People’s Watch, Madurai, MSS Pandian, Chennai, Sushil Pyakurel, Former Commissioner, Human Rights Commission of Nepal, Kathmandu, Mubashir Hasan, Lahore, Pakistan and others
——————–
The Statement of Concerned South Asian Citizens is being released to the press in Chennai by
Dr. V. Suresh, President, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) – Tamil Nadu/Puducherry,
Chennai Contact Details: +91-94442-31497; rightstn@yahoo.com
Delhi: Sahana Basavapatna (+91 9968296202); Bipin Kumar (+91 9868280198), The Other Media.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Press Release, Sri Lanka, State Repression

SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-STUDENTS-WORKERS UNION

April 5, 2009 by Radical Notes 2 Comments

A Leaflet

Today is the time of economic crisis. All national and multinational companies are feeling the effect, especially, the workers in them. Millions of workers have lost their jobs throughout the globe. This is not the first time that the workers are facing such problems. Several times in the last century similar problems have been created for workers. In the beginning of this century, after the 9/11 attacks, there was a similar period. Production of workers, i.e., students coming out of universities have outnumbered, by more than a hundred times, the intake capacities of companies. The only solution that has been offered is competition. Study hard… compete and get better appropriated than your fellow mates. There can be just one solution – the “better” students/workers, i.e., those who are compliant to the bosses’ interests and demands, will get or sustain their jobs; and, in that case there will be a growing brigade of unemployed and underemployed (underpaid, casual and temporary) workers, still expecting and competing to get accommodated. All this is because something needs to be sustained in the companies, namely, high profits. That can’t be compromised or shared with workers!!!

Some of us are over-optimistic about getting out with an MBA degree and joining some company in a highly paid managerial post. This section needs to realise that the intake capacity with regard to these posts in companies is much more restricted than that of workers proper. They share the same fate in a much larger magnitude. When there is a reduction in the number of workers, managers who “manage” them will be more and more redundant.

In this process of profit realisation, the sufferer is the student and/or the worker community. They compete and struggle amongst and against each other, weakening themselves ‘as a whole’.

It is high time for this community to get organized and cooperate in their struggle for liberation, rather than compete against each other. It is high time for them to ask themselves what they have lost in the process of competition and assess the magnitude of what they are going to lose if they continue competing blindly. It is high time they get organized and ask the big bosses of companies and the governments as to why ‘we’ have to lead a life of subjugation so that the profit is maintained. It is high time for them to choose between this alternative path of questioning the present state of affairs and the path of blind competition.

Science-Technology-Students’-Workers’ Union (STSWU) is an organization that provides this alternative platform to students and workers to meet the challenges of their class – locally, nationally and internationally.

To join, contact Satyabrata.
Email: satyabrata@radicalnotes.com
Mob. No. 09238535626

Workers of all countries, unite!

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Education, India, Labour, Politics, Students, Working Class

Slumdog Millionaire: Do Slumdogs Make a Nation Proud?

March 15, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Gilbert Sebastian

The film, Slumdog Millionaire depicts the sorry state-of-affairs in our country: extreme poverty, communal carnages, ‘children left to moral and material abandonment’, gangs operating forced beggary, mafia underworld, torture in police custody, arrogance of the elite, insensitivity of the middle class …. In short, it paints the horrendous reality and the ugly face of the Other India and also the dreams, aspirations and heroic struggles of those inhabiting therein. Plausibly, the depiction of the day-to-day heroic struggles of the underdogs in our country looks exotic for the audience from affluent countries (quite like the thrill of an adventurous trekking!) which might explain the reason why the film was a greater success in those countries than in our own country. It depicts the underbelly of the fast-growing economy leaping forward with 8-9 per cent growth even in the midst of the global financial meltdown – the only country, other than China, with impressive growth rates today. For all the criticisms of portraying the gloomy side of the Indian reality, hardly anyone contests the veracity of such a depiction. The film, of course, ends giving illusions of a millionaire’s life even to the slumdogs, an illusion of social mobility that characterises the liberal democratic social order. In other words, a way-out is shown within the bounds of the system itself.

Of course, the upwardly mobile classes in India detest projecting a grim face of India to the world outside because it is thought of as a slur on the image of an India globalising. It took Danny Boyle, a foreigner to paint this ugly face of ‘India shining’. The film reminds us of the statement by B.R. Ambedkar, “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on the Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” The age-old Indian system of multi-layered oppression ensured that most individuals and groups find themselves more privileged with respect to some others, leaving their moral bases for challenging oppression weak. Is it simply that we, the Indian middle and upper classes have ourselves, become too complacent or indifferent towards the day-to-day existential struggles of our ‘long suffering people’, struggles, probably much more severe than in any other Third World country? Or is this cunning of silence to be explained with reference to the fact that the existence of a vast population of have-nots ensures the comfort of the elite. After all, do not the elite of the affluent countries have to take care of their young, cook, wash and do other mundane things by themselves when the elite in India do not have to do any of these? However, the sustainability of this level of comfort is suspect since the existence of a vast population of the underdogs can lead to social upheavals and increased levels of violence in society, an aspect not left untouched by this film. Or is it that we are trapped in the snare of our own patriotism, guided by the mindset that we shouldn’t wash our dirty linen in public?

President Pratibha Patil congratulated the artists of Slumdog Millionaire for “making India proud”. Congress President Sonia Gandhi felt that the team of this film “have done India proud”. Shall we, indeed, become proud of the achievements of these individual artists or put our heads down in shame on the sorry state-of-affairs in our country on the 62nd year of ‘independence’? With the Oscar recognition to the film, “Jai ho” is the new fashion of greeting that is going rounds among the so-called patriotic Indians. But just a minute, please. Jai ho what? Jai ho this sorry state-of-affairs? Jai ho our country, excluding its luckless millions? Let us face it: If only this film leads to serious efforts especially by those in positions of ‘doability’ to undo the evil of unprotected childhoods – a condition of children being left to ‘moral and material abandonment’ could the yells of Jai ho have any meaning or relevance. Can the State, the policy makers and all in positions of ‘doability’ initiate sincere efforts to remove this curse? It is the election year, after all. Let us have serious efforts for the implementation of at least one of the Directive Principles in our Constitution, Article 39(f): “The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing that children are given opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity and that childhood and youth are protected against exploitation and against moral and material abandonment.” Along with the infamous horrors of Nithari near NOIDA, 7,912 children, mostly from very poor backgrounds, gone missing in Delhi during the one and half years from Jan. 2007 to June 2008 and 2210 children gone missing in Delhi during 1 June 2008 to 12 Jan. 2009 (Indian Express, ‘ExpressNewsline’, 3 March 2009, New Delhi) is no mean context for initiating these efforts. Listening to the unthinking yells of Jai ho, one is reminded of two lines from the Telugu poet, N.K.:

Even to this day, the shackles of my country are not broken …
Who has composed a tune for ungotten freedom?

Gilbert Sebastian works as an Associate Fellow at Council for Social Development, New Delhi. Contact: gilbert_sebs@yahoo.co.in

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Films, India

‘Mine’ – A film on the Dongria Kondh’s fight against Vedanta

March 13, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

With stunning footage from the mountain forests of Orissa state, India, Survival‘s new short film, Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain tells the current situation of the Dongria Kondh tribe as they face and fight their own destruction. Right now, UK-based, FTSE100 firm Vedanta Resources is pushing ahead with a bauxite mine which will devastate their livelihoods and sacred sites. In this film, their voice is heard. The film is narrated by Indian-born actress Joanna Lumley and features music by Skin.

Quotes

There is no question of any placement of any person or persons. The Dongria Kondh tribe does not reside in this area. Vedanta Resources letter to Survival, 2008

We are used to the Indian government here. But the Vedanta government has come and devastated so many people. They won’t let us live in peace. They want to take these rocks from the mountain. But if they take away these rocks, how will we survive? Because of these the rain comes. The winter comes, the wind blows, the mountain brings all the water. If they take away these rocks, we’ll all die. We’ll lose our soul. Niyamgiri is our soul. Sikaka Lodu, Dongria Kondh man, November 2008

You should go to Lanjigarh and find out how the refinery came to be there. Life is so hard there. Now that people there have realised what is happening they are speaking out against it. Initially they welcomed the company but now they realise their mistake because they live like dogs. Now they realise they’ve lost their land and their homes forever. Vedanta has stolen everything from them. Go to Lanjigarh and see it for yourself. Sikaka Lodu, Dongria Kondh man, November 2008

Listen to me, dear brothers and sisters, did you hear everything? We need people from outside to stand with us. Then we have to fight. Then we can survive. We can save our land. And we can be in charge of our territory. Pidikaka Bari, Dongria Kondh man, November 2008

Courtesy: Survival International

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Displacement, Environment, Films, India, Orissa, Video

MP Suresh Premachandran – Impunity in Sri Lanka

March 4, 2009 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Suresh Premachandran, Parliament member from Sri Lanka talks about impunity and violation of inalienable rights of Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Suresh is from the northern district of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, currently this area is the most adversely affected by the war. Facing threats to his life for speaking out against government aggression he has moved his family several times in recent years from Sri Lanka, to India, Canada and finally back to India. Suresh talks about the welfare camps, ceasefire agreement, the Sri Lankan government’s want for continuing the war in the name of creating a single ethno country and the need for the global community to speak up. Suresh can be reached at kandiah57@hotmail.com.

Courtesy: Sam Mayfield

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: International Relations, Sri Lanka, State Repression, Video

RADICAL NOTES IN PRINT

March 2, 2009 by Radical Notes

RADICAL NOTES IN PRINT NOW!!! Major original contributions in Radical Notes, considerably revised by the authors in response to on-and-off-site comments, are now printed as books and booklets by Aakar Books.

Radical Notes-4 THE SRI LANKAN CRISIS AND THE SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS by S. Sivasegaram, ISBN – 978-81-89833-85-5, Price: Rs 95.

Radical Notes-3 THE US FINANCIAL CRISIS by Deepankar Basu, ISBN – 978-81-89833-84-8, Price: Rs 50.

Radical Notes-2 NEOLIBERALISM AND HINDUTVA by Shankar Gopalakrishnan, ISBN – 978-81-89833-80-0, Price: Rs 50.

Radical Notes-1 AKHTARUZZAMAN ELIAS – BEYOND THE LIVED TIME OF NATIONHOOD by Pothik Ghosh, ISBN – 978-81-89833-50-3, Price: Rs 50.

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Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Book Announcement