Ankit Sharma

Bharati Chaturvedi (ed.) Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in a Mega City, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2010

Delhi is often thought of as the culturally best endowed city in the country. It has had a rich heritage, from the Walled City of the Mughals (presently called Old Delhi) to the Lutyens' capital of the British raj; now there are chains of multinational corporations working in the peripheral areas of the city, and the city has declared its "world-classiness", reshaping its infrastructure to host the grand spectacle that was the Commonwealth Games. Hence, most writings on the city stick to celebrating the warm-heartedness of the "dilliwallas," its ever increasing count of flyovers and shopping-malls. Weighed down by such images that flood the media Finding Delhi comes as a relief to its reader because it tries to engage with that part of Delhi that is left out in the sort of accounts mentioned above: the not too pretty underbelly of the Indian capital.  The book offers an account of the city culled out of the experiences of fourteen different writers, ranging from urban planners to informal-sector workers, concentrating on diverse urgent issues like public transport, women in the city, housing rights of the poor, problems faced by street vendors, and the situation of the homeless ahead of the Commonwealth Games. The writers try to represent the city from an unconventional angle, where they concentrate on the living conditions of the poor living in the city, and the damage done to their lives due to the infrastructural developments that have taken Delhi way "ahead" of cities like Mumbai and Kolkata. It can, in fact, be argued that the book aims to confront the middle class, whose India is "shining", with this "other angle" in an attempt to make them to realize that the actual cost of this accelerated drive toward "development" is being paid by the poor, in the form of ever deteriorating living conditions; presumably the monologues of a waste collector, a domestic worker, a dhobi and a fruit vendor are included in book to fulfill this end.

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Anu Muhammad is an eminent Marxist and a renowned academician from Bangladesh. He is currently serving as Professor in the Department of Economics in Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka. He is also the general secretary of National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources Power and Ports and has been involved in various people's movements in Bangladesh. He, along with the committee, played an instrumental role in the success of the Phulbari Movement against Open Pit Mining in Phulbari, Bangladesh. He writes extensively on globalisation, social transformation, gender, NGO and energy issues and has authored more than 20 books. In this interview Prof Muhammad speaks to Manoranjan Pegu on the politico-economic trajectory of Bangladesh, in the context of capitalist globalisation and ensuing geo-political changes in South Asia, and assesses the significance of recent popular unrest in the country.

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 Ravi Kumar  

That the instruments of imparting education extend beyond the classical notions of classroom learning is a fact few can disagree with today. It is, however, not enough to realise that the process of educating a human being transcends the limited universe of whatever form of formalised institution of teaching-learning transactions and is finally linked to the approach that one adopts to comprehend the processes of knowledge formation. This process of education is also closely linked to the desires of the dominant social structures to limit our view of the complex processes of knowledge creation. A limited and fragmented view of the world not only hides the systemic contradictions but also makes possible a process of regimentation. For instance, one can never fully appreciate the fact that the elite castes of India - not unlike the entrenched hegemonic class interests in any social order - need to segment the processes of education so that it in turn sustains the segmentation of the social order. Not unless one overcomes one's ideological myopia to grasp the link between the processes of knowledge production in a society and its larger logic of production.  It is this myopia that compels us to explain the teacher-taught relationship through the undemocratic metaphor of teacher as god. It is the intrinsic uncritical appeal of such a metaphor that leads us even today to claim that the teacher reveals the path to the kingdom of god. And it is this belief in the existence of a particular kind of system that celebrates the existence of gods - which bases itself on uncriticality and opposition to dissent, and concomitant subordination to spiritual and/or temporal authorities - that is responsible for our failure to understand how, for example, the Dronacharya-Eklavya relationship, by virtue of it being embedded in class-caste relations, is an expression of the segmentation of society along class lines through segmentation of education. And this holds true as much for ancient India, as for us in our times, wherein a vision of understanding educational processes as going beyond classroom and institutionalised structures is seldom encouraged. Even if it is done the connections between the mode of production and educational systems is rarely explored.

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 Raju J Das

The reason for the power of saffron politics is only partly political. India's business class is not unconnected to this. The power of saffron politics also raises troubling questions about the sense of citizenship.

Some commentators focus on the political factors behind the success of the saffron electoral-machine. One argument has been that Congress has played a 'soft' hindutva (for example, by giving tickets to some disgruntled members of hindutva forces as in Gujarat). Others say that Congress' secularism has not cut much ice with the voters who fall for the communal propaganda. There is some truth in the political interpretations of electoral success of communal politics. What is neglected in these discussions - both on TV and in newspapers - is often what tends to be neglected in many discussions of India's polity as such: the role of business. What is the possible connection between the business houses and communal politics? Are the business houses - the so-called corporate citizens - a secular force? This issue needs to be more thoroughly investigated. I can only indicate a few things.

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 Gilbert Sebastian  

T.K. Oommen (ed.) Social Movements I: Issues of Identity (pp.252+x, HB), & Social Movements II: Concerns of Equity and Security, (pp.352+xii, HB), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010.

The volumes edited by T.K. Oommen constitute a sociological contribution to the study of social movements in India. The first volume deals with identitarian movements and the second, with movements for equity and security. For spatial constraints, we do not attempt a review and critique of individual articles but confine ourselves to the theoretical issues identified by the editor himself.

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 Satyabrata  

Though I am not a part of the ongoing movement in Delhi University, being a student compels me to engage with the polemics – especially between Paresh Chandra and KYS – it has given rise to. Its relevance for politics conducted on the terrain of the university, of which I happen to be an integral part, cannot be overstated. 

“It is impossible to grasp Marx's Capital without understanding Hegel's logic.” – V.I. Lenin

In its critique of Paresh Chandra's article, the KYS has tried to draw lessons from the French May'68 movement as interpreted by one of its key leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I would like to quote some lines from a book by the same author before I return to the KYS's critique:

"The French crisis was first of all a crisis within a single institution – the university.[…][Quoting Touraine] 'The more modern and scientific a university becomes, the stronger grows its political and ideological commitment. The more young people are taught to think for themselves, the more they will challenge, criticize, and protest. The university continually creates its own opposition'."[1]

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 Spyros Themelis

In May 2010, something unusual happened in the UK: for the first time in many decades a hung parliament was pronounced and a coalition government was eventually formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, the first (36% of the total vote) and third (23%) party respectively. But was this something momentous and, if so, why?

In terms of government formation and power sharing, this was indeed a relatively rare event in the British electoral history. The last time the party with the most votes could not form a majority government was in 1974. Thirty six years is a long time in the electorate's memory. Hence, the result of 2010 was seen as something 'historic' and for many it signaled a 'big change' in British political affairs. To some, it even registered as a progressive turn that heralded the beginning of an era of consensus.

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 Pratyush Chandra  

This paper was prepared for Odisha Shramjivi Union (a joint initiative of various local tribal organisations in Orissa) as a perspective note for building strategies for rural labour mobilisation. 

In recent years, rural Orissa has been the hub of rural struggles. While many of these struggles are explicitly linked with the displacement drive initiated by neoliberal competition for attracting corporate capital investment in which the political elite of various regions, including Orissa, has been engaged, their trajectory too – the forms and contents of rural mobilisations and organisations – is defined by the internal, but open-ended, political economic configuration of rural Orissa. We must try to develop an understanding of this configuration that can help in formulating a framework for comprehending the nature of these rural struggles. We cannot take these struggles at their face value, satisfying ourselves with the vocalisation of internal perceptions – of their leadership or any segment within; rather we must locate them in the larger political economy and its contradictions. It is not that these perceptions, motivations and ideologies do not matter, but they have to be understood in terms of the composition of these struggles and the context. In fact, we start with a brief critique of these perceptions, which will help us introduce our theme and initiate our discussion.

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 Radical Notes  

Sectarianism has, for quite some time now, been the greatest bane of militant revolutionary working-class struggle. That this global phenomenon has become especially pestilential for the Indian communist movement would hardly amount to an overstatement. The fragmentary and effete disarray with which labour has, since the severe repression of the various communist and Left-democratic movements through the sixties and the early seventies, been confronting late capitalism in this part of the world, unambiguously indicates the restorative upswing that capitalism has been on. Neo-liberalism is the embodiment of this restorative political project. Communists, particularly on the subcontinent, must, if they wish to effectively rise up to the rather confounding challenges being posed by late capitalism, revive the Marxist legacy of "refoundation", the constant reclamation of the "hidden science" of working-class struggle from the ideological vagaries into which it inevitably and continually falls. If sectarianism is the inescapable evil necessity of revolutionary politics, refoundation is the equally indispensable dialectical antidote.

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 Paresh Chandra

Even though my participation in the current debate puts me incontrovertibly in the same "camp" as the KYS (Krantikari Yuva Sangathan), in fact precisely because this is so, it is important that I flesh out my differences with the way the KYS pamphlet formulates its critique of the UCD (University Community for Democracy). Without going into details, and without bothering to censure them for their aggressive style I will try to get at the definitive concept of their problematic and then proceed to show how I differ.

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