[Reader-list] Response to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn/ Nandigram

[Anjalika Sagar]

Response to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn et al on
 Nandigram
 
 We (the undersigned) read with growing dismay the
 statement signed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and
 others advising those opposing the CPI(M)'s 
 pro-capitalist policies in West Bengal not to "split
 the Left" in the face of American imperialism. We
 believe that for some of the signatories, their
 distance from events in India has resulted in their
 falling prey to a CPI(M) public relations coup and
 that they may have signed the statement without fully
 realising the import of it and what it means here in
 India, not just in Bengal .
 
 We cannot believe that many of the signatories whom we
 know personally, and whose work we respect, share the
 values of the CPI(M) - to "share similar values" with
 the party today is to stand for unbridled capitalist
 development, nuclear energy at the cost of both
 ecological concerns and mass displacement of
people
 (the planned nuclear plant at Haripur, West Bengal),
 and the Stalinist arrogance that the party knows what
 "the people" need better than the people themselves.
 Moreover, the violence that has been perpetrated by
 CPI(M) cadres to browbeat the peasants into 
 submission, including time-tested weapons like rape,
 demonstrate that this "Left" shares little with the
 Left ideals that we cherish. 
 
 Over the last decade, the policies of the Left Front
 government in West Bengal have become virtually
 indistinguishable from those of other parties
 committed to the neoliberal agenda. Indeed, "the
 important experiments
 undertaken in the State" – the land reforms referred
 to in the statement - are being rapidly reversed.
 According to figures provided by the West Bengal state
 secretary for land reforms, over the past five years
 there has been a massive increase of landless peasants
 in the state due to government acquisition of land
 cheaply for handing over to corporations and
 developing posh upper class neighbourhoods. 
 
 We urge our friends to take very seriously the fact
 that all over the country, democratic rights groups,
 activists and intellectuals of impeccable democratic
 credentials have come out in full support of the
 Nandigram struggle. 
 
 The statement reiterates the CPI(M)'s claim that
 "there will be no chemical hub" in Nandigram, but this
 assurance is itself deliberately misleading. This is
 the explanation repeatedly offered by CPI(M) for the
 first round of resistance in Nandigram – that people
 reacted to a baseless rumour that there would be land
 acquisitions in the area. In fact, as the Chief 
 Minister himself conceded in the State Assembly, it
 was no rumour but a notification issued by the Haldia
 Development Authority on January 2, 2007 indicating
 the approximate size and
location of the projected
 SEZ, which 
 triggered the turmoil. 
 The major factor shaping popular reaction to the
 notification was Singur. Singur was the chronicle of
 the fate foretold for Nandigram. There, land was
 acquired in most cases without the consent of
 peasant-owners and at gun-point (terrorizing people
 is one way of obtaining their consent), under the
 colonial Land Acquisition Act (1894). That land is now
 under the control of the industrial house of the
 Tatas, cordoned off and policed by the state police
 of West Bengal. The dispossessed villagers are lost to
 history. A fortunate few among them will become wage
 slaves of the Tatas on 
 the land on which they were once owners.
 
 While the CPM-led West Bengal government has announced
 that it will not go ahead with the chemical hub
 without the consent of the people of Nandigram, it has
 not announced any plans of withdrawing its
commitment
 to the
 neo-liberal development model. It has not announced
 the shelving of plans to create Special Economic
 Zones. It has not withdrawn its invitation to Dow
 Chemicals (formerly known as Union Carbide, the
 corporation responsible
 for tens of thousands of deaths in Bhopal) to invest
 in West Bengal. In other words, there are many more
 Nandigrams waiting to happen. 
 
 In any case, the reason for the recently renewed
 violence in Nandigram has been widely established to
 have nothing to do with the rumour or otherwise of a
 chemical hub. Print and visual media, independent
 reports, the Governor of West Bengal (Gopal Gandhi)
 and the State Home Secretary's police intelligence all
 establish that this round of violence was initiated 
 by the CPI(M) to re-establish its control in the area.
 We all have seen TV coverage of unarmed villagers
 barricaded behind walls of rubble, while policemen

train their guns on them.
 
 With the plans it has for the future, regaining
 control over Nandigram is vital for the CPI(M) to
 reassure its corporate partners that it is in complete
 control of the situation and that any kind of
 resistance will be comprehensively crushed. The
 euphemism for this in the free marketplace is 
 'creating a good investment climate'.
 
 The anti-Taslima Nasreen angle that has recently been
 linked to the Nandigram struggle against land
 acquisition is disturbing to all of us. However, we
 should remember that it is largely Muslim peasants who
 are being dispossessed by land acquisitions all over
 the state. There is a general crisis of confidence of
 the Muslim community vis-à-vis the Left Front
 government, inaugurated by the current Chief
 Minister's aggressive campaign to "clean up"
 madarsas, followed by the revelation of the Sachar
 Committee that Muslim employment in
government jobs in
 West Bengal is among the lowest in the country. While
 we condemn the attempts to utilize this discontent
 and channelize it in sectarian ways, we feel very
 strongly that it would be unfortunate if the entire
 anger of the community were to be mobilized by
 communal and sectarian tendencies within it. Such a 
 situation would be inevitable if all Left forces were
 seen to be backing the CPI(M). 
 This is why at this critical juncture it is crucial to
 articulate a Left position that is simultaneously
 against forcible land acquisition in Nandigram and
 for the right of Tasleema Nasreen to live, write and
 speak freely in India .
 
 History has shown us that internal dissent is
 invariably silenced by dominant forces claiming that a
 bigger enemy is at the gate. Iraq and Iran are not
 the only targets of that bigger enemy. The struggle
 against SEZ's and corporate globalization is an

intrinsic part of the struggle against US imperialism.
 
 We urge our fellow travellers among the signatories to
 that statement, not to treat the "Left" as
 homogeneous, for there are many different tendencies
 which claim that mantle, as indeed you will recognize
 if you look at the names on your own statement. 
 Mahashweta Devi 
 Arundhati Roy 
 Sumit Sarkar
 Uma Chakravarty
 Tanika Sarkar
 Moinak Biswas
 Kaushik Ghosh
 Saroj Giri
 Sourin Bhattacharya
 Nirmalangshu Mukherji
 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay
 Swapan Chakravorty
 Rajarshi Dasgupta 
 Anand Chakravarty 
 Apoorvanand
 Shuddhabrata Sengupta
 Nivedita Menon
 Aditya Nigam
Anjalika Sagar
 
 Dear Friends, thank you for getting in touch. Please
 see my response and feel free to distribute if you
 like,
 All good wishes, solidarity, 
 Susan George
 ************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* *********
********* ********* ********* ********* *****
 To my friends in India:
 Without wishing to place responsibility on anyone but
 myself, I want to apologise for having signed the
 common letter concerning Nandigram and hereby withdraw
 my signature. I signed because the statement seemed
 reasonable, recognised that the signatories "could not
 say anything definitive", seemed compatible with
 principles like left unity and non-violence which I
 try to uphold and, above all, had been previously
 signed by people I greatly admire and respect. Due to
 a certain urgency, I gave my name without consulting
 friends in India, particularly the two Indian Fellows
 of the Transnational Institute, Praful Bidwai and
 Achin Vanaik, as I ought normally to have done. 
 Now I have received further information from Indians
 who have regretted my signature and, while exercising
 great comradely restraint towards me personally, have
 pointed
to the recent tragic events in Nandigram as
 unequivocally the responsibility of the CPI[M]. All
 the communications sent to me blame the government,
 but having consulted other signatories, I learn that
 some of them have received thanks and letters of
 support, also from India. 
 While my instinct is quite naturally to side with
 those who have written to me personally, particularly
 my TNI comrades, I regret above all that I was
 presumptuous enough to comment, however mildly, on a
 situation I was not, and am not, in any position to
 judge. I hope my Indian friends will forgive this
 presumption and accept my regrets for having signed a
 letter which has been used politically in India in
 ways I cannot condone and do not approve. 
 In solidarity,
 Susan George
 Text of Chomsky et al's Statement
 To Our Friends in Bengal.
 News travels to us that events in West Bengal have
 overtaken the optimism that some of
us have
 experienced during trips to the state. We are
 concerned about the rancor that has divided the public
 space, created what appear to be unbridgeable gaps
 between people who share similar values. It is this
 that distresses us. We hear from people on both sides
 of this chasm, and we are trying to make some sense of
 the events and the dynamics. Obviously, our distance
 prevents us from saying anything definitive. We
 continue to trust that the people of Bengal will not
 allow their differences on some issues to tear apart
 the important experiments undertaken in the state
 (land reforms, local self-government) . 
 We send our fullest solidarity to the peasants who
 have been forcibly dispossessed. We understand that
 the government has promised not to build a chemical
 hub in the area around Nandigram. We understand that
 those who had been dispossessed by the violence are
 now being allowed back to their
homes, without
 recrimination. We understand that there is now talk of
 reconciliation. This is what we favor. 
 The balance of forces in the world is such that it
 would be impetuous to split the left. We are faced
 with a world power that has demolished one state
 (Iraq) and is now threatening another (Iran). This is
 not the time for division when the basis of division
 no longer appears to exist. 
 
 Noam Chomsky, author, Failed States: The Abuse of
 Power and the Assult on Democracy.
 Tariq Ali, author, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of
 Hope and editor, New Left Review.
 Howard Zinn, author, A Power Governments Cannot
 Suppress. 
 Susan George, author, Another World is Possible if,
 and Fellow, Transnational Institute.
 Victoria Brittain, co-author, Enemy Combatant: A
 British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back,
 former editor, Guardian.
 Walden Bello, author, Dilemmas of Domination. The
 Unmaking
of the American Empire, and Chair, Akbayan,
 the fastest growing party in the Philippines.
 Mahmood Mamdani, author, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:
 America, The Cold War and the Roots of Terror. 
 Akeel Bilgrami, author, Politics and the Moral
 Psychology of Identity.
 Richard Falk, author, The Costs of War: International
 Law, the UN and World Order After Iraq.
 Jean Bricmont, author, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using
 Human Rights to Sell War. 
 Michael Albert, author, Parecon: Life After
 Capitalism, and editor, ZNET.
 Stephen Shalom, author, Imperial Alibis: Rationalizing
 US Intervention After the Cold War.
 Charles Derber, author, People Before Profit. The New
 Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money and
 Economic Crisis. 
 Vijay Prashad, author, The Darker Nations: A People's
 History of the Third World