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[1] From: aa5756@wayne.edu Date: Wed Jul 13, 2005 Subject: A washingtonpost.com article Personal Message: No More Silence! Arab Genocide, Arab Silence By Joseph Britt What responsibility do Arabs have to stop genocide being committed by Arabs? To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/12/AR2005071201366.html?referrer=emailarticle ------------------------ [2] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Jul 12, 2005 Subject: The challenge to the Indian Left ??”V Krishna Ananth The challenge to the Indian Left ??”V Krishna Ananth Monday, July 11, 2005 Daily Times, Pakistan The mainstream Left, in a sense, is too small a force to resist the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation agenda and more so given its failure, over a period of time, to reinvent itself ideologically and politically The Left parties??™ decision to withdraw from the coordination committee of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came as no surprise. Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and AB Bardhan, general secretary of the Communist Party of India, could not have carried on with the charade, which is what the coordination committee had been turning into. More so with elections to the State Assemblies in Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu due before May 2006 and with finance minister, P Chidambaram, committing himself and the Congress party to pursuing Dr Manmohan Singh??™s reforms agenda. The point is that the decision to enlarge private stakes in the BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd) and Chidambaram??™s pronouncements since then were a message to the Left that the present government intends to take a similar path with other Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) such as the Oil and Natural Gas Commission and the National Thermal Power Corporation. The Left parties, whose organisational strength is drawn significantly from the employees in the public sector, cannot remain mute spectators to such measures, especially when the government depends on their support for survival. The trade unions in India, after all, have resisted this Thatcherite prescription since 1991 when they were first formulated and attempted by governments. It is to the credit of the trade union movement in India that they have prevented successive governments since PV Narasimha Rao??™s time from pushing this part of the reforms agenda and also changes in the Industrial Disputes Act which would facilitate hiring and firing of workers at the free will of employers. It is another matter that the unions and the Left parties have only been able to enlist support for their anti-liberalisation campaign from members of the trade unions in the PSUs, the nationalised banks and insurance companies and not other sections of the Indian society. But then, this task is easier prescribed than done, given the array of forces behind the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation project. The mainstream Left, in a sense, is too small a force to resist this challenge and more so given its failure, over a period of time, to reinvent itself ideologically and politically. Mere strike actions by the organised workers ??” as unions in the banking, insurance and other PSUs have carried out since July 1991 ??” may have been sufficient to prevent changes in labour laws. But the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG) agenda is larger than mere changes in laws and derives its legitimacy, as does the capitalist project, from several other quarters. Culture happens to be the most important of them. This is to say that the LPG agenda is pushed with ease across the country thanks to the consent its promoters manage to manufacture by redefining the denominators of progress and quality of life in a particular manner and then pushing to the fore a group of them to aspire for this life. This can be seen, for instance, in the way the communication revolution is perceived by a cross-section of Indians. And also the campaign that is carried out through the television sets and in recent times the FM stations. That the radio, which seemed to be on the verge of being phased out of the nation??™s mind, has not just revived but is becoming a commercially viable proposition should indicate the extent to which the Indian society is caught up with market ideology. Anyone familiar with the commercials that sustain the FM radio will realise the objective behind these; to allow consumer goods and cosmetics to penetrate the remote countryside and elsewhere, not reached by TV channels. The Left, at least its leaders in Delhi and in the State headquarters are unaware of these developments. It is another matter that such ideas and such notions of a better quality of life are challenged, day after day, by platforms that are not necessarily part of this mainstream discourse. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Praishad (KSSP), for example, launched a campaign in the past few years that restricted the market for the colas and even demystified technology by training rural folk to make toilet soaps. The saddest part of the KSSP story is that the CPI(M) decided to hound out the important leaders of these campaigns. The architects of the Parishad and the anti-cola campaign were all dedicated members of the CPI(M) at its various levels. The purpose of recalling all this is to say that while the Left parties are justified in their decision to pull out of the UPA??™s consultative committee, they will need to do more to fight the LPG agenda. Prakash Karat and AB Bardhan will have to wonder and deliberate within their respective parties, in real earnest, and identify the possibilities of a Common Minimum Programme (CMP) with outfits and organisations that are engaged in the struggle for human rights, fishing rights, land rights, housing rights, civil liberties and against the indiscriminate destruction of nature and forests to build factories and dams or set up firing ranges for the police and others to practice their new weapons and against such activities as uranium mining that endanger the lives of the indigenous people in the area. Such an agenda will also have to internalise the struggle against the oppressive caste order in all its dimensions (and not in the way the Mulayam Singhs and Lalu Prasads and Mayawatis and Ram Vilas Paswans are doing) and against gender discrimination. And while doing so, the general secretaries of the communist parties cannot expect this platform to be a subsidiary of the Left parties. For some of these movements are stronger and larger than the mainstream left. For instance, the Narmada Bachao Andolan is more powerful than the Left parties in a wider sense of the term. Or the campaign against uranium mining in Jaduguda and Vedchii conducted over the years by Surendra and Sangamitra, both of them being disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, are morally powerful platforms. The Left leaders will be doing justice to their decision to stay away from the UPA coordination committee from now if they agree to take this to its logical end and set for themselves a far more meaningful task and in that sense a more substantive CMP than beat around the bush about their CMP with the Congress-led UPA. VK Ananth, a former affiliate of The Hindu, is now a freelance writer. His email is krishna_ananth@... -------------------------------- [3] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Jul 12, 2005 Subject: In Defence of Reason (and Universalism) In defence of reason Pankaj Mishra applauds Amartya Sen's cosmopolitan view of India's cultural and political history in The Argumentative Indian Saturday July 9, 2005 The Guardian The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity by Amartya Sen 432pp, Allen Lane, ?‚??25 EP Thompson once wrote that since "all the convergent influences of the world" - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, secular, Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian - run through India, "there is not a thought that is being thought in the west or east that is not active in some Indian mind". This sounds true, and indeed there have been Indians, such as the polymath Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri, who appeared to hold in their minds almost all of the important thoughts thought in the west or east. But holding them is, perhaps, not enough, or is only a tiresome form of pedantry, as Chaudhuri himself often proved. It is certainly rare to see them as elegantly synthesised as they are in the cosmopolitan mind of Amartya Sen. Long celebrated as an economist with a compassionate face, Sen has published several articles and books exploring such philosophical and political concepts as democracy, development, freedom and reason. He develops these themes further with his usual clarity and wisdom in his new book. There are interrelated essays and lectures here on the Bengali poet and essayist Rabindranath Tagore, the links between India and China, gender inequality, class and caste relations, calendars, secularism and identity, India and the nuclear bomb, the Indian diaspora, and western views of India. Sen was born in Bengal, and remains, despite long stints in western academia, an Indian citizen. Unlike VS Naipaul, another interpreter of India for western audiences, Sen largely absents himself and his Bengali bhadralok (elite) background from his pages; his rare venture into autobiography is hemmed in by apologies to the reader. Sen also seems incapable of rage or even very strong opinions. After expressing a mild objection to Salaam Bombay!, he seems keen to stress that Mira Nair is "one of the leading directors of our times". His prose is benignly professorial, always measured, and occasionally rises to dry irony, such as when he writes about James Mill, who, in his history of India, managed to describe the deceitful and perfidious character of Hindus without knowing any Indian language or having visited India. "He evidently did not want," Sen remarks, "to be biased by closeness to the subject matter." Sen's more illuminating differences with Naipaul are political. Naipaul sees India as damaged by Muslim invaders and emasculated further by an otherworldly and hierarchical Hinduism - a wounded civilisation that has only recently been revived by contact with western political philosophy and industrialism. Sen points instead to an old tradition of reason and scepticism, which, beginning with the Vedas, was upheld often by India's Muslim rulers, and which he thinks forms the basis of Indian democracy and secularism. According to him, "seeing Indian traditions as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplifications of India's past and present". By highlighting Indian achievements in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine and political economy, Sen also wishes to challenge the commonplace prejudice that the west has "exclusive access to the values that lie at the foundation of rationality and reasoning, science and evidence, liberty and tolerance, and of course rights and justice". He writes about the third-century BC emperor Ashoka, who renounced empire-building and attempted a new form of governance based on Buddhist principles of compassion and tolerance. He also presents the example of the 16th-century Moghul emperor Akbar, who by arguing for a religiously neutral state, set up the "foundations of a non-denominational, secular state which was yet to be born in India or for that matter anywhere else". As Sen is fond of pointing out, Akbar was stressing religious tolerance and upholding reason over blind faith at a time when, in Europe, Giordano Bruno was being arrested for heresy prior to being burned at the stake. Sen wishes to undermine the "dominance of contemporary western culture over our perceptions and readings". This is not easily done. Most contemporary philosophers and intellectual historians in the west appear to know little about Asian or African cultures and do not seem troubled by their ignorance. The triumphalist histories of 19th-century Europe - which drew neat little lines from Antiquity to the Renaissance and Enlightenment - still shape western self-perceptions and assumptions of superiority. The cold war mythology, in which the west featured, contrary to much evidence, as the defender of individual freedom against totalitarian evil, can delude even liberal intellectuals into seeing the Bush administration's wars as human-rights campaigns. Sen does run the risk of sounding like a culturally defensive nationalist, arguing, behind a veneer of modesty, for the superiority of Indian civilisation, especially when he asserts that "a great many departures in science and mathematics occurred in India from the early centuries of the first millennium which altered the state of knowledge in the world", or that "some of the earliest open public deliberations in the world were hosted in India". But Sen believes in an idea of India that, he writes, quoting Tagore, militates "against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's people from others". What he is really trying to describe is an interconnected world rather than societies splendidly isolated from each other. He questions whether western modernity would have been possible without Arab, Indian and Chinese contributions in mathematics and science. He believes, and his essay on India and China displays this most vividly, that "it is through global movements of ideas, people, goods and technology that different regions of the world have tended, in general, to benefit from progress and development occurring in other regions". Sen often offers such views as an antidote to Samuel Huntington's crude but damagingly influential notion of self-enclosed and necessarily antagonistic civilisations defined by religion. He is at his best examining over-used concepts such as democracy, which recently has appeared to consist almost entirely of elections, even when they are supervised, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, by occupation armies. Sen points out how public debate and discussion and decision-making as much as balloting lie at the core of democracy. In places such as India, such democratic practices can assume a life-and-death significance. Recently celebrated as a success story of globalisation by Thomas Friedman, India has a terrible record in tackling hunger and undernutrition. Sen has repeatedly pointed out how the "very poor" in India get a small - and basically indirect - share of the cake that information technology and related developments generate. He wants to see how the argumentative tradition in India can be deployed against "societal inequity and asymmetry" and what actual use can be "made of the opportunities of democratic articulation and of political engagement". Sen does not say much about how the argumentative tradition is faring in India in the age of globalisation. The one "quintessential argumentative Indian" he names, the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, is little known in India. And even if he had named others, it would still have to be asked, if only for the sake of argument, whether they can be heard above the din of a media increasingly influenced by the Murdoch model, and preoccupied with stock markets, information technology tycoons, beauty queens, Bollywood starlets, fashion models and other celebrities. "Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice," Sen writes. But so are the celebratory shrieks of minorities empowered by globalisation. Acutely sensitive to class in his analysis of economic inequality, Sen rarely considers it in his political commentary, which often has a certain abstract quality: "The enthusiasts for religious politics in India ... have worked mainly through generating societal frictions in which the demographic correlates of religion have been used to separate out the communities for selective roguery." The human agents that appear absent in this slightly mechanical view are the members of the new Indian middle class, who form the support base of the Hindu nationalists and who murdered Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 in between carting off DVD players from looted shops. Sen deplores the xenophobia and megalomania of the Hindu nationalists, while approving their "outward-looking economic programme" for globalisation. But are these cultural and economic projects really so far apart? As the Bush-voting American middle class most recently proved, ultranationalism, religious fundamentalism and a belief in free markets are not only fully compatible but can feed off each other. One closes this stimulating book wishing that Sen would say more, from his unique vantage point, about the more unprecedented aspects of globalisation today: the all-powerful forms of corporate capitalism, for instance, that threaten much of what he cherishes - democracy, development, human diversity, traditional wisdoms - while trying to turn us all into desperate, if passive, consumers. ?‚?· Pankaj Mishra's most recent book is An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (Picador). To order The Argumentative Indian for ?‚??23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. |
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