[Reader-list] Walking for Nandigram, November 14

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Moinak,

Thank you for that wonderfully evocative account of the march for 
Nandigram in Kolkata on the 14th of November, I was just about to send a 
forward of this text, (which I had just been reading  on Kafila.org) 
when I saw your mail make its way into my Reader List inbox. It made my day.

Readers will recognize Boddhisattva Kar, former Sarai independent fellow 
in a cameo role in this posting. I hope that he (Bodhi), who must be too 
busy getting arrested and released on a daily basis to be reading this 
list regularly right now, will also write and send us his own 
impressions of the gathering.

In a recent forwarded blog posting sent on to this list, our resident 
right-wing agent-provocateur Pawan Durani had cynically endorsed the 
following statement "Who is bothered about Nandigram? Only Bengalis. And 
if they are communists they still do not bother."

As will be clear from this posting, at least, or should I say 'only' one 
lakh Bengalis, of whom many would be communist or communist 
sympathizers, and who, like Moinak (or me) would be from families that 
have had long and close associations with the Communist Parties in 
Bengal, spontaneously and peacefully took to the streets of Kolkata to 
protest against the CPI(M)'s reign of terror in Nandigram. The 
generation of our parents and grandparents who became Communists in 
Bengal in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and who brought us up to 
own up to the ideas of internationalism, equality, democracy and a 
hatred of tyranny everywhere (including in states that would describe 
themseves as 'Communist')  would have been motivated by the kind of 
anger and sorrow that brought these one lakh people on to the streets of 
Kolkata. The continuity of the spirit that made millions of people read 
Marx, and take the possibility of a revolutionary project seriously in 
resides, not in the CPI(M) any longer, but in those who came unbidden by 
any party on to the streets of Kolkata for this gathering. Something has 
changed in Bengal.

What is interesting in this is that we are beginning to see the 
formation of a response that actually transcends the narrow and 
unquestioned loyalties of 'traditional' political affilations in Bengal. 
The automatic assumption that the left-leaning sections of the Bengali 
intelligentsia will fall in line when the 'cadre' call the shots is no 
longer working. The CPI(M) lost the working class when the CITU became 
an organized mafia that protected Capitalist and State Capitalist 
interests, it seems now to be beginning to lose the peasantry, and the 
intelligentsia, in the wake of Nandigram.

All it has going for itself is the rump of global Capitalism, an 
ideology that can be identified only with a xenophic state capitalist 
streak of paranoia, with its Kerala, Bengal and South Delhi variations, 
  the 'backing' of a murderous match fixer like Ashok Todi and the 
higher echelons of the Police hierarchy, and a few samples of a rentier 
cultural apparatchiki in Delhi. It's early days yet, and I could be 
wrong, but could this be the first sign of the beginning of the end of 
the stranglehold of the CPI(M) on the Bengali consciousness, and the 
first glimmer of the end of the so called  Left Front's paralytic hold 
on political power in West Bengal? I certainly hope so.

If you read right till the end of Moinak's post, you will see the 
tentative evocation of what Moinak calls - the hope for a 'project'. 
Nothing certain yet, no clear ideas, no ringing manifestos, but the 
hesitant, tentative recognition that something new is possible. For many 
days in the past few months, I have made posts on the reader list in 
anger, in sorrow and in irritation. This afternoon, in the sober 
after-light of Nandigram, reading about the whispers of the 'project' 
that emerged because one lakh people marched spontaneously together, I 
forward this post with unabashed joy. Thank you once again Moinak.

best, in solidarity with all those who marched in Kolkata, wishing I was 
there

Shuddha

---------



moinak biswas wrote:

> 
> The
> organizers were obviously not prepared for size of the turn-out. That it would
> be big they must have known, as the outrage had reached a boiling point since
> the second offensive against Nandigram villagers started on the 6th. .
> But no one could have anticipated the multitudes that would render numbers
> obscure on the streets yesterday. The organizers didn’t even bring enough of
> those little badges which just said ‘Dhikkar’ (‘Shame!’). But then who were the
> organizers? Some familiar faces were using a loudspeaker to issue basic
> instructions – ‘Please do not carry organizational banners; do not shout
> slogans; our route will be.. .’ No one was leading. Many people did not know
> who gave the call for the rally; they still do not know. No parties joined, no
> trucks and trains carrying obedient supporters; one lakh people on the streets,
> smiling in the early winter sun - the smile of release from inaction, from
> silence. They had been asking constantly over the last few days: Is there
> somewhere we can go? Do you know if there is something we could do? I saw my
> cousins, schoolmates, neighbours - many of whom admitted that this was the
> first time in their lives they had joined a procession. We exchanged looks
> across the street, from one row to the other; they smiled and said, ‘Could not
> stay home’. Commuters, stranded by the endless human stream, often joined in.
> Someone shouted from an immobilized tram, ‘March on, we are with you’. Flower
> petals came raining down on the marchers from an old house near Wellington Square.
> On Nirmal Chandra Street,
> a group of locals stood by, displaying words of mourning and anger on small
> placards. I was near the Calcutta
>  Medical College
> when Sibajida and Suman Mukhopadhyay called from Dharmatala, our destination,
> to say they had reached. ‘Reached! But we have only just started here. And how
> many are still following?’ No one had a clear idea how many; but someone from
> the back reported that the tail was moving near Hedua, a kilometre behind us.
> Calls were coming in from all points along the massive meandering stream,
> ‘Where are you? How long will you take?’ As if one was still receiving calls to
> leave home and join. You could just inhabit these old central districts of the
> city and wait for the march to pass through you, making you a part of its open
> torso. I felt like telling the first-timers that we were also doing this after
> a long, long time. A call came from Bankura; Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, missing
> the rally sorely, shouted: ‘When did you last see such a michhil ?’ I
> passed the question on to Sourin Bhattacharya, 70, walking in front of me -
> ‘When did we last see something like this, Sir? 'After Ayodhya', he says,
> 'After Guajarat’; he then adds, ‘But the CPM and the other Left in power joined
> those rallies in droves. When did one last see a mass of this size without
> political parties?’ The question is passed on, the students wait for us to
> remember; we look to our dadas, the quiet, grey brigade walking with us. Maybe
> the hunger marches of '66? But even then, they add, there were party workers.
> Some bystanders are found managing the lines. No one asks who they are, the
> most irrelevant question on November 14. We look around and find almost every
> face familiar, but the wonder is we didn’t know so many unknown faces would
> appear familiar. That's where numbers became obscure. We arrived at Dharmatala
> at quarter to four, the tail end was to come and mix into the sea forty-five
> minutes later. The protean mass in Dharmatala, standing, squatting on the main
> thoroughfare, drifting about and chatting, reuniting with friends, forming
> circles, cheering one another, singing, collecting relief for the affected in
> Nandigram, created a perfect picture of a rally without a centre, or rather,
> without the familiar centring. People weren't even sure for a while if there
> was to be the customary dais around which we should finally gather. Some
> suggested that the little truck leading the silent procession with the sole
> loudspeaker be made the dais; but Medha Patekar was seen already addressing the
> crowd from a make-shift stage. Let us have one stage then, the truck people
> quickly decided. It was impossible to go near the spot. The space, recently
> christened the 'Metro Channel' by anti-government protesters, was not meant for
> such a massive gathering. Indistinct voices came drifting in from there, but it
> was not designated as a focus for the eddying movements over the stretch
> between Lenin Sarani and S. N.
>   Banerjee Road. It wasn't possible to form the
> usual semi-circle of spectatorship around a single voice. Was it Mahasweta Devi
> speaking or Sankha Ghosh? Aparna Sen or Joy Goswami? Was it Pratul Mukhopadhyay
> singing? Anjan Dutt materialized beside us with Gautam Ghose, who was asking
> anxiously if Nabaneeta Dev Sen had been spotted. 'She is ill', Gautam said, 'We
> asked her not to come, but she has sneaked out of home'. The stage had its own
> little circle, like innumerable other circles of students, actors, office
> workers, little-magazine wallahs, bespectacled teachers, journalists, holding
> intense transactions of information and wisecracks. The circles opened and
> closed to allow for a shifting membership, merged into one another. One could
> not see the neat police circle around the gathering though, like those found in
> the aftermath of March 14. Why? We were asking ourselves. The fairly modest
> gathering outside the Kolkata Film Festival on the 11th had drawn an excessive
> display of force from the police, who arrested 68 of a crowd singing songs. On
> the 10th, they arrested stray people walking away from Medha's fast. Bodhisattwa
> Kar, who has earned the distinction of getting arrested on both occasions, must
> have been wondering too: where were the cordons, the neatly lined up
> law-keepers? The police looked scattered and vaguely distributed over
> Dharmatala. Were they mirroring the formless discipline of the crowd, a mass
> that was swelling and flowing on all sides, not tied up into a bunch by a
> single thread of harangue? Before people dispersed with companions in tow,
> looking forward to an adda where the narratives would start, they were asking -
> what next? A sequence of rallies and meetings, writing, image-making,
> arguments. But what about a project, something more sustainable?  as Sourin babu kept on saying. If one tried
> one could read many lips in the crowd uttering the same interrogative. The
> question was no doubt carried over to the addas that followed. Organizing the
> streets of November 14 into a legible sequence, a story, will perhaps be the
> small next step in the direction of formulating the 'project'. One hopes the
> story does not forget though that there was no one to pass a single thread of
> yarn from the beginning to the end of the michhil yesterday. 
> 
> 
> Moinak
> Biswas
> 
> 
> Calcutta, November
> 15, 2007
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