Had he lived, he would turn 85 today. To his virtues, let me quote Sartre:
Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the process of history to the clear light of day… [he constitutes] step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.
There are many empires, uncountable hundreds, vying for the patriotic mind. (more…)
An Allegory for Niyamgiri and the Dongria Kondh.
Green Ants is a movie that can be interpreted at various levels- it can be constructed as a classic tale of the human and environmental costs of human greed, as a study of the encroaching tides of western rationality upon profoundly different ways of thought or as an indictment of a civilisation that respects no other. At its heart is a question: can you really consider yourself civilised if you cannot understand another person’s perspective, or at the very least respect it?
The story of green ants is a tale about corporate profit clashing with aboriginal beliefs. It is, in some ways, the story of advancing capitalism. Capitalism has always laid waste what came before it- whether it was the “red” Indian or the brown one, the yellow man or the black one. The white man, they say, was blind to his own history and imported his blindness to the colonies. This was done by subordinating, undermining and dividing cultures with the ruthlessness only the religion of profiteering can muster. How can it be otherwise? If all is fair where money is to be made, how easy it must be to poison societies where wealth is respected but not worshipped. Historically, imperial ambitions have always mixed well with religious fervour: the only difference in the modern world is that money is the new false god.
In Herzog’s movie, a mining company wants to excavate the holy ground of a group of Australian aborigines: they believe that the land that is to be mined is where the green ants, upon whom existence depends, dream; and upon that dream rests reality. On the face of it, it is irrational and absurd, but really is it any more absurd that ordering existence for the benefit of the unqualified zeal for profit? Than unrestrainedly exploiting resources, when the finiteness of them is beyond question? The “American dream” is today what constructs reality- and it is no more tangible (and some would argue possible) than the green ants’ dream. This film, to some extent, exposes it for the myth it is by deconstructing other myths that have sustained other cultures in their fight for survival.
The sharpest voice protesting capitalism today says that it steals from the poor to reward the rich. The latest recession, for instance, will hit aid to dependant Africa and the sundry poor of the world worse than anyone else, because they are the most expendable. It was caused because of the recklessness of big business and banks; yet they received a trillion dollars in stimulus packages. This is a story about how stealing from the poor, the unrepresented, the helpless, is the easiest and quickest crime in history and one that has always borne rich dividends. It is made easy by dismissing their qualms and their claims as irrational, backward, irrelevant and placing them against “real” truths, like the fact that the world needs to mine constantly to support a wasteful and extravagant system. It is made easy by the fact that the privileged of the world- economically, culturally, socially privileged- are so few and yet so powerful, and the only ones that have the resources to be able to stick together. And the fact that they disguise their minority so effectively by forcing the majority to fight between themselves for scraps. In fights for survival, metaphysical questions about the “system” and its validity are a luxury. It is only when one’s basic beliefs about existence are questioned that one begins to consider actually fighting, and by then it is often too late.
by Nandini Ramachandran
The recent demolition of the West Bengal CPI (M) in Calcutta’s municipality elections brokered many fates. It has broken the left party’s stranglehold on political life within the state, a potentially fatal blow to a weakening force. In a country where some form of election is a daily occurrence, municipal elections inevitably get the short shrift. Not so here. Newspapers and pundits portend that it marks a turned tide, that 2011 assembly elections shall see the party in the bay rather than in Bengal. Writers’ Building (in Calcutta, even administration must have a booksy air) might finally see new occupation: Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress.
The party in present form is evidently just the Lady, a few trusted deputies, and her unwavering agenda of uprooting the CPI (M). One wonders how this party will cope with the delegation of government, should it be handed the spotlight. To the facile observer, Banerjee’s Didi might echo that other formidable and self-reliant Lady CM: Mayawati’s Behenji (even their honorifics collide). An important difference remains. Mayawati has had spells of power to considerably enrich herself, while Mamata is that rare mystery: an impecunious politico. She is currently Union Railway Minister, a post she has held previously, an easy route to padded bank accounts. Perhaps her restraint was just prudence: what is a ministry compared to the treasury of an entire state? Will she stay uncorrupted by power once her crusade is accomplished? It is a wager Bengal appears willing to take.
Foreshadowing of the immanent change has been gathering for a while: the brutalities at Nandigram and Lalgarh; the clumsy break between the left alliance and the Congress in 2008 over the nuclear deal, which destroyed the former’s pretensions at national importance; the rebellion and public spat in the Kerala chapter last year; the death of the hypnotic Jyoti Basu earlier this year. Both Kerala and West Bengal, India’s two communist bastions, elect new state assemblies next year, a year that looks poised to hammer home some very unpleasant realities for the new decade.
The official left in India has been hamstrung, time and again, by the tensions involved in reconciling all-embracing revolution with too much revolution, and it has rarely emerged the stronger for it. In the ‘60s they squabbled about Maoism, in the ‘70s about Naxalism, in the ‘90s they conflated the two categories conveniently. The only coherent policy attributable to the current CPI (M) is a not-so-subtle game of playing both sides against the middle, and it has served them terribly this past five years. They are the socialist government that sold out farmers to Big Industry, paradoxically arguing against privatisation of public assets at the same time, while allied to the previous UPA regime. “Confused” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
I live with a Bengali forsworn to Mamata Banerjee, and arguably I am partisan. Yet, at this point, even the most dyed-in-the-wool red must recognise that the government in Calcutta does little to bolster either Marxist philosophy or praxis, let alone popularity. Thirty-five years of denied democracy is a hard pill to swallow however ardently one desires social transformation; coupled with the sceptres of murdered farmers, I find it impossible to resist the conviction that our socialist experiment, like so many globally, has failed. Marx has proven over the last century to be as fallible to twisted dogma as the next dead man. That said, Indian socialism has not failed the same way, or for the same reasons, that European communism did: our “communism” has forged independently tortured paths right from its official founding in Tashkent in 1933. No rhetoric can paint Mamata Banerjee into Lech Walesa.
Everything
Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we’ve longed for it since we were children.Anna Akhmatova.
Like all things that take root in India, communism has gone native. The way out of these woods is for us to discover as well, if we are not to go the way of rudderless Eastern Europe, and jeering at a flogged ideal rarely dispels it. The more marginalised and venal the parliamentary left gets, the stronger militant factions will grow. Hannah Arendt and her descendants might choose to interpret the tendency of socialist government to implode as proof of socialism’s natural totalitarianism. I believe that it is usually institutions that rightly bear the charge of tyranny, not ideas or individuals. We stand agreed that bureaucracy and socialism are not well-mixed. The dispute lies in which part of the equation we would emphasise and which we would purge.
We shall have to recover the shreds of our integrity if we are not to give up on the project sustainable, equitable futures. As we struggle to do so, the disillusioned Indian left might be revitalised by finding more projects like this one to occupy our variegated energies.
By Nandini Ramachandran
Numbers are a notoriously relative factor within Indian politics, existing only to be massaged at every corner. The distinctive semantics of numbers is nowhere clearer than in the convenient slippage between lakhs and millions in the media’s perpetual quest for the more glamorous statistic. 5 million is, after all, a far more imposing figure than 50 lakhs, unless one has cultivated the esoteric skill of fluently flitting back and forth between numerical systems. In a country where “crorepati” and “millionaire” are practically synonymous, it’s safe to assume such literacy remains an elite skill even among the educated. Add to that the inevitable and instinctive association between millions and dollars, and a million is virtually guaranteed more eyeballs than a paltry 10 lakhs.
Conversely, when an effort is being made to downplay the magnitude of a certain value, the ingenious “hundreds of lakhs” are trotted out in defiance of mathematical logic. Corporate accounts, for instance, enumerate in the hundreds and even thousands of lakhs by default. But the big money still talks in crores, the Indian billion, seamlessly transiting between the hoi polloi and the haute. By this marker, the recent sale of 3G spectrum to telecom majors within India was almost too haute to touch.
The Government of India laughed its way to the Reserve Bank this past week, even as the Pakistani Government was busy ejecting its country out of the internet revolution. 3G spectrum, which enables the further diffusion of the web across India, sold for twice its estimated revenue, at a whopping 67,700-odd crores (677 billion rupees or 15 billion dollars, for those who prefer an alternate gloss). I should reiterate, before my compatriots get smug about our relative freedoms, that this diffusion is strictly an elite phenomenon, as anything that assumes more than barely-there literacy is bound to be. Besides, it’s easy to forget that internet access is expensive in the subcontinent, a reality that posher phones are not likely to address. The average internet monthly plan can (and does) feed entire families for weeks, if one neglects the attendant requirement of a computer/smart phone. My internet bill is half the (optimal) monthly minimum wage. Despite our burgeoning cyber-cafe culture, this disparity is not easily resolved. The web has been a home to many of us while remaining a myth to many more.
Sermons aside, when news of the final 3G deal broke on 19th May, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was asked how the windfall was to be spent “for social interest” by a zealous (if naive) television journalist. The minister acted coy, if only because he realises the bounty is hardly about to reach those who most need it: India’s budget allocates a paltry 900 crores towards agricultural production, indisputably India’s poorest profession (after, possibly, day-labour, but that is not even considered a profession within India’s three pronged system of manufacturing, agriculture, and services). We are, they tell us, a perennially poor country. So poor we can’t afford to offset an obscene 16% inflation rate on basic food grains and commodities.
Well, anyway. Woe betide the less fortunate. It is, after all, what they are there for: to be used as lightning rods for all the squalor and misery we live amidst. To most of my peers, the sale of 3G spectrum deserves attention because it marks a transition in our paradigm for mobile information (the pun is intended, but forced: I am using mobile as an adjective, not a noun). It’s a shift embodied by the iPhone: once 3G settles down, the iPhone will go from being a bewildering and largely useless gizmo to another splendid toy for the social climber’s stable. We are a young, voracious nation unwilling to be left out of the gadget wars, a fact telecom companies obviously respect enough to cough up such astonishing amounts. That is, I suppose, all for the better, if it ensures that I will never be bereft of wikipedia. And I can’t wait to be able to stream movies while I read, rock, surf, skype, and play video games on the train to heaven.
By Nandini Ramachandran
A White Man Who Ran
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
– From: Going, Going by Philip Larkin.
Britain goes to polls on 6th May 2010. In a single day, the tiny island will elect more legislators than the masses of India do over the course of two months. Clearly, British elections are not the mela we are used to around here during election season, where skeletons are harried out of closets for months in order to provide the electorate with a good show. All the same, 13 years under the same government is bound to make anyone twitchy, and the Britons are determined to make the best of a bad job. As Hugh Rifkind noted yesterday, this has proved to be an excellent election for bullshitters, and the only thing that need constrain one’s observations is one’s imagination.
For years, one would be laughed out of any British pub (or Indian clubs frequented by posh folk who ‘followed’ politics in the mother country) at the very mention of the Liberal Democrats (Lib-Dems). One such Albion-acolyte, an avuncular, scotch-swilling gentleman, suggested my breath and ‘youthful exuberance’ were better wasted upon the Greens. Astonishingly, in just under a month, the British media has resurrected the party and concocted a passable (and regrettably pale) shadow of Obama for the Scotch Uncles to get excited about. We are all (those of us who inhabit countries where elections remain a thankfully periodic affair) a few elections into the new century now, and we demand our jollies. It is a decade in which the liberal-left has felt singularly defeated; we now demand politicians come with a firm fix of messiah.
The omnipresence of information in our decade sometimes blinds us to how easily manipulated it remains, especially in the era of publicity politics – and one is easily seduced into buying into left-liberal pinups Obama-style. The usually clamourous Brit papers seem fully committed to Cleggmania; as with Obama, one must head to the Chomskyland, the world of Z magazine and Spiked! Online, to find anything resembling a critical appraisal of the man and his politics slanted from the left. The Guardian granted him a fanboy-editorial, and the Independent, a paper one can usually count on for nastiness, is being remarkably effusive. It is all eerily similar to the American press a year-and-a-half ago, in full grip of Obama-mania, converting a complex political dilemma into a simplified personal faith.
The chief difference is the length of the campaigns – Obama’s mojo took years in the making and penetrated every level of popular culture (I was initially introduced to Obama as Rory Gilmore’s post-college job back in 2007): but then it was undertaken at an epic scale. British productions are, of necessity, subdued. In any case, the goal of the Obama-campaign was infinitely more ambitious: it convinced citizens that a system as politically infantile as rigidly bipartisan democracy is sustainable and capable of innovation. Cleggmania is merely intended to buffer the bumpy road to coalition politics; a cross any mature democracy in the postmodern world has to learn to bear.
Nonetheless, if this media gush-fest should succeed, it will only strengthen the narrative and ensure sequels, as each new faux-Obama slowly chips away at the real one’s achievements. Rahul Gandhi , for instance, looks very well set up to be 2014’s Obama, with a complimentary campaign of Change! Irony is so last century. Or maybe they’ll launch the Kaun Banega Obama? show, where politicians from across the globe compete to receive six months of great press and the Nobel Peace Prize. All too soon, the historic Black Man Who Could could only be remembered as the first in a dynasty of media-fashioned political leaders, propelled along by the power of the headline. It took Obama less than a year to bring everyone thudding back to earth – it will likely take Clegg, should he slip into power, correspondingly less. That said, I can’t deny I would rather see Clegg flamenco into Downing Street than watch Britain go wholly Tory in denial. Hilarity, if nothing else, is guaranteed.
I say this as a young Indian not particularly invested in the next British PM. I like the sound of accessible visas and university funding, and I am told the Lib-Dems have the best policy on both (of course, given my taste in media, it is unlikely that I would be told otherwise). If I were British-Asian, I suspect my calculations would be more agonised. It would then be a choice between representation and ideology. I would be intensely suspicious of the Lib-Dem’s miserable record when it comes to representing women and people of colour: it has the lowest number of MPs from both groups.
Of the 15 ethnic minority MPs in the last Parliament, 13 were Labour and 2 Tory; there were no African or Asian MPs in the 63-strong Lib-Dem contingent. The party is fielding only four this time with a shot at winning. In contrast, the Tories have opened up their party under David Cameron (though not without a fight). The Tories are fielding as many minority candidates as Labour (44), ten of whom are standing from reasonably safe seats. In an election where even the Tories are making a point about diversity and encouraging ethnic-minority candidates for the first time (albeit dubious ones, such as the ultra-right PR goddess Priti Patel), the Lib-Dem apathy must be looking especially dismal. In other constituencies and on the other extreme, political parties such as Respect, founded on the sole plank of identity politics, threaten Labour even in London’s solidly red East End and might swing marginal districts to the Tories if their bid to power fails (Respect is a Bangladeshi-focused party founded, weirdly, by a Scot).
Even worse, the party that does best with catapulting my community and gender to elected office- Labour – would be the worst hit by a Lib-Dem victory. In some areas the clash is especially poignant: Diane Abbott, the first black woman in British Parliament, is defending her seat against a 20-something white man standing on the Lib-Dem ticket. To quote the local newspaper:
“Meanwhile the Lib Dem challenger Keith Angus reckons, in this campaign video posted on YouTube, that it’s a two-horse race between him and Abbott. Well, yes, but only in the sense that one horse is a Grand National winner and the other is a Blackpool beach donkey.”
I am glad I am not this hypothetical British voter, bewildered amidst political psychosis, as surely as she is glad not to be me. It is true we have romanticised and embellished versions of each other’s lives. That is as much part of the diaspora as a consequence of it, and it is unlikely that I will ever stop checking in with the Scotch Uncles to try get a better glimpse into her world. The fact is we both make the same series of non-choices in our political lives: between converging forces more apart in rhetoric than in reality; but that is not something we enjoy being reminded about. Rather, we engage in the metaphysics of coalitions; the subtle skill of calculating when and whether undercutting can lead to undermining. This is expertise better sought from the study of third world democracy, where the coalition was mastered, than from first world variants hostile to the form. To that limited extent, I would say I am the luckier of the pair of us.
Nandini Ramachandran lives and writes in Bangalore. She plans to blog about media and politics in the region for Himal.
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