[Reader-list] All you who do not sleep tonight...

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all, (apologies for cross posting on Kafila.org)

Sometimes I wonder whether, when I use the phrase 'rentier cultural 
apparatchiki' it actually describes faces, real people, or is it just an 
abstract category, that one deploys in anger and sadness.

Well, em, here are some faces, some names - people we meet, say hello 
to, read the books of, see the art of, watch the films of...

As the weather turns in Delhi, we will meet them more often, there will 
be soirees, readings, screenings, exhibition openings, so much fun in 
the winter whirlwind, and they will turn up - two by two, or one by one, 
and in the silence between us will hang the heavy weight of the name of 
a place called Nandigram.

Read these names, read them carefully -

Irfan Habib, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, Shireen Moosvi, Jayati 
Ghosh, Indira Chandrasekhar, Rajen Prasad, Arjun Dev, D.N. Jha, Vivan 
Sundaram, M.K. Raina, C.P. Chandrasekhar, and Saeed Mirza.

Please read, also below, their exemplary contribution - to our 
understanding of the unfolding situation in West Bengal
in the Hindu yesterday - 
http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/15/stories/2007111561391600.htm

Notice - how they nod their heads sagely between the words -

  ' "complete sympathy" for peasantry *anywhere* fighting forcible 
dispossession by or on behalf of corporate interests'

Except of course, in West Bengal. West Bengal is not *anywhere*. It is 
the citadel. And so when they express their complete sympathy with 
fighting peasants - *anywhere*. They are actually completely consistent. 
West Bengal is not *anywhere*. There is no soil, no rivers, no fish, no 
rice, no nothing,  there are no people in West Bengal. There are a few 
acres of land, which has come unhinged from a settlement that was 
thought to be permanent, and these gentlemen and ladies are busy gluing 
the permanent settlement back, more securely, with all the adhesive that 
they can secrete together.

Their verdict - can be read to mean - "Agitation warranted if any storm 
happens in any teacup anywhere, but agitation unwarranted if villages 
are pillaged and burnt in West Bengal".

But villages can be pillaged, indeed must be pillaged, because these 
villages are not *anywhere*. They are in West Bengal. And there are no 
people in West Bengal. Just as a notice for the acquisition of land is 
not a land acquisition notice, when it gets posted in a West Bengal 
Panchayat office, so too, there may be voters and cadres, but there are 
no people in West Bengal. And those who are not voters and cadres are 
non-persons anyway. They (the non-people) have been dissolved, and the 
party will think of how to reconstitute a new people, so that their 
consent can be ascertained for the building of a chemical hub. New 
improved people in new improved West Bengal, how could that be 
*anywhere*?  It never existed, it never will. It won't be *anywhere*. 
How could we get such a simple equation wrong? How can we not understand?

A rentier is someone who lives off the investments they have made in a 
piece of property. These worthy eminences invested the substance of 
their lives, and their intelligences, - in the party, or should I say 
the corporation, that they hold dearer than all the words they have ever 
written, and all the pictures they have ever made.

The party-corporation has now called a shareholders meeting, and 
promised higher dividends, in radical prestige, in social capital, in 
whispering distance to power, in the ability to make a phone call and 
get things done, and the shareholders have closed ranks, made sure that 
their investments are  secure. They have issued a promotors notice to 
the market. Their investments are secure. The party is safe. Normalcy 
has returned. This is not *anywhere*. This is West Bengal. The people 
who are not yet the people, or who may once have been the people, have 
spoken. its just that it is a bit difficult to hear them speak. Or maybe 
it is just me that is hard of hearing.

Anyhow, I hope that each one of these 'activists', (for that is how the 
newspaper report below describes them) these worthy gentlemen and 
ladies,  have bought an adequate supply of sleeping pills tonight.

Because, as I know some of them, and as they are, at the end of the day, 
ordinary, way too ordinary, men and women, with headaches, joint pains 
and bad hair days ike the rest of us, they might have some trouble 
sleeping tonight.

There is after all, that prickly and inconvenient human faculty-thing 
called a conscience, and that strange piece of connected human tissue 
called a spine, or back-bone, which sometimes makes the softest beds a 
torture if you twist it or bend it too often.  Am I being presumptuous 
in thinking that they are troubled by their consciences and their backbones.

Or did they lose both, conscience and back bone,on the way back from the 
last meeting of the corporation-party. There is a species that in the 
course of evolution decided to do away with the inconvenience of the 
back-bone. As far as I know it is not trobuled over much by a conscience 
either. In Biology, they are called 'Sarisreep' - Phylum Reptilia.

 From the sidelines, it is interesting and instructive to watch the 
shareholders of the corporation-party evolve into a wonderful new 
life-form that exhibits so many anatomical similarities to the Phylum 
Reptilia.

Good luck to them, I hope they use their waking and sleepless hours to 
think about the distances that they have travelled, or should I say 
crawled, each one of them.

best

Shuddha


--------------------------------------------------
Agitation unwarranted, say activists
The Hindu, November 15, 2007

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: Academics and artistes on Wednesday described as “totally 
unwarranted” the agitation in the Nandigram area of West Bengal after 
the Left Front government’s repeated announcements that no chemical hub 
would be established there.

In a statement, they also said the protests being organised against the 
return of Communist Party of India (Marxist) sympathisers to the area 
are “as unjustified as they are unhelpful” for the restoration of normality.
Sympathy with peasantry

Expressing “complete sympathy” with peasantry engaged anywhere in 
struggles against forcible dispossession by or on behalf of corporate 
interests, they said the continuation of the agitation in Nandigram was 
a “means of making the region out of bounds for CPI(M) sympathisers.”
Return of refugees

Also, according to them, it was a means of preventing the return of 
refugees driven out of their homes and into refugee camps since January, 
of keeping out the administrative personnel of the State, and of 
establishing the unchallenged writ of a coterie over the entire area; 
all of which violated basic human rights and constituted a blatantly 
anti-democratic act reminiscent of what happened at Kespur in West 
Medinipur district a few years earlier.

The signatories said no voices of protest other than from the Left Front 
were raised against the “flagrant denial of basic rights” to thousands 
of people whose only fault was that they supported the Left Front.

“In the absence of intervention by the State machinery and civil society 
organisations, and of unwillingness for a political dialogue by the 
Opposition Trinamool Congress, is it surprising that the displaced 
CPI(M) sympathisers made their own moves to return to their homes?”
Displacement

The real need of the hour is to ensure that this return does not give 
rise to a further round of displacement — “this time for the opponents 
of the Left Front, and that peace and normality returns to Nandigram at 
the earliest.”

The signatories include Irfan Habib, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, 
Shireen Moosvi, Jayati Ghosh, Indira Chandrasekhar, Rajen Prasad, Arjun 
Dev, D.N. Jha, Vivan Sundaram, M.K. Raina, C.P. Chandrasekhar, and Saeed 
Mirza.