[Reader-list] New Year message from Dr Binayak Sen

[prakash ray]

Dear all,

This is New Year message from Dr Binayak Sen

Prakash

This New Years' message was hand-written in jail by Dr Binayak Sen for
the MFC and JSS groups. Ilina Sen (who transcribed and emailed) has
given permission for it to be forwarded to us as well.

Mary Ganguli

---------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 3:32 AM
Subject: mfc


My warmest greetings to all friends in the MFC, and best wishes for
2009.

As an Indian child of parents from the territory that is now
Bangladesh, displacement was a lived reality for me from my
childhood, as it was for millions of other children of my generation.
But then, in so many ways, the history of the last 500 years (1492 is
a useful reference date), is the history of successive waves of
displacement- either as displacement from as in the case of the native
Americans, or displacement to, as in the case of slave labour from
Africa or India. A particularly gruesome episode is being played out
before our eyes in Palestine. The NBA brought the issue of
displacement into the mainstream of Indian public discourse. In
Chhattisgarh, seasonal migration provides an example of large scale
displacement, and a particularly iconic experience was watching a
young migrant mother lying on the floor of a train while her baby
slowly dehydrated from gastroenteritis. The Salwa Judum in Bastar
has displaced huge numbers of people at gunpoint, and over 100,000
people have been pushed over the border into Andhra Pradesh.

In China today, 100 million people are in the process of being
displaced by the Three gorges dam and other projects. As usual, in
India, we go one better.The redoubtable Prof Swaminathan has chaired a
committee that has concluded that Indian agriculture can accommodate
at most a third of its population in agriculture, as opposed to half
as at present.. The difference is a small matter of 200 million
people.

Displacement is about the sequestration of privileged access to
resources and need not always involve a geographical reference. Thus,
the chronic nutritional deprivation from which half our children and
a third of our adults suffer can be regarded as a special form of
displacement. What displacement invariably does entail is the
ruthless cutting short of the micro evolutionary process involved in
any instance of eco adaptation, involving chemical or physical
factors as in Bhopal, or the social environment as in south Bastar.

That's enough. Too bad I can't take part. All the best for your
deliberations.. Choose your politics before your politics chooses
you.