[Reader-list] Fwd: (indiaclimatejustice) statement on parilamentary lefts defeat

[asit das]

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From: asit das <asit1917 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 27, 2011 at 5:53 PM
Subject: (indiaclimatejustice) statement on parilamentary lefts defeat
To: delhi-platform <delhi-platform at googlegroups.com>, indiaclimatejustice <
indiaclimatejustice at googlegroups.com>


End of the Left’ in India? Statement by Leftists after recent
election results
MAY 24, 2011
tags: Bengal elections <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/bengal-elections/>,
CPI-M <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/cpi-m/>, Left Front
defeat<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/left-front-defeat/>
by Nivedita Menon

*Text of statement by Jairus Banaji, **Sukumar Muralidharan, Dilip Simeon,
Satya Sivaraman and Rohini Hensman* *endorsed by 224 others*.

In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian media
have been gloating at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal especially
and have repeatedly suggested that this signals the ‘end of the Left in
India’. Even at the best of times our news channels tend to avoid serious
analyses of the underlying trends within the country, since they have
transformed the news itself into a form of entertainment on models surpassed
only by the U.S. news networks.

For its part the CPI(M) leadership has been at pains to minimise the
significance of the defeat (in Bengal especially) and said that it would be
wrong to write off the Left. For them ‘the Left’ means the Left Fronts in
Bengal and Kerala and of course chiefly the CPI(M) itself.  They stress the
fact that they still retain a considerable vote share, just over 40% in West
Bengal for example, and there is indeed some truth in this claim.

We the undersigned beg to differ sharply from both the positions stated
above. To begin with, *the Left in India is not the Left parties alone and
therefore the defeat of the Left parties does not mean the defeat of the
Left*. The Left in India has never been reducible to these large
parliamentary fronts and party machines, much less to the groups embattled
in the forests of India, but has always been a much wider spectrum of
organisations, movements and forms of struggle that range from the hundreds
of left-wing trade unions that exist in the country in all the major
industrial centres, unions that are essentially independent of party control
and seeking today to form a national federation, down to the dozens of
popular campaigns and the organisations connected with them.

These campaigns have fought consistently on issues such as displacement at
major sites like the Koel Karo dam, the Baliapal missile range, the Hirakud
dam, the Sardar Sarover project, etc., and there has been and continues to
be mass opposition to the forced acquisition of land by industrial capital
(POSCO, Vedanta, Jindals, the Tatas, Ambanis, and so on) in different parts
of the country.  There have also been militant resistance movements to SEZs,
most notably in Bengal itself (at Nandigram and Singur).

There have been grassroots campaigns for the Right to Information (RTI) and
for rural employment schemes. There have been movements and campaigns
against communal violence and for justice for the victims of the violence
that politicians have repeatedly instigated, notably, the horrific massacres
in1984 (Delhi), 2002 (Gujarat) and 2008 (Kandhamal in Orissa).  There have
been movements of resistance to the hideous injustices and violence of the
caste system; to the oppression of women; to homophobia; and against the
forcing of millions of children into wage-slavery. There has been a strong
culture of human rights organisations in India and fearless investigations
into the atrocities committed at all ends of the political spectrum. There
are *many*cultural and political groups that exist that have never
identified or associated with the politics and the peculiar left traditions
of the CPI(M) that are still largely moulded by the discredited legacies of
Stalinism.

We feel that the defeat of the parliamentary left *should* mean space for a
stronger left movement, a ‘new left’ if you like, that reflects the
aspirations of the mass of people more creatively, with more imagination and
greater integrity. There is too much deprivation and misery in the country
for the media or the middle classes to seriously be able to delude
themselves into thinking that popular resistance will cease with the defeat
of the Left Fronts.  As long as ordinary people are subjected to violence,
to oppression and the most appalling poverty, as long as they are denied
homes, health services, proper nourishment, decent jobs, denied land for
survival, and denied social, political and sexual equality, there *will* be
resistance and opposition.  Indians will not settle down passively into the
dream images purveyed by TV advertisements, and with the massive depletion
of public policy in areas like health and employment they are certainly not
about to become one big smiling middle-class family.

The reality is that dispossession continues on a large scale; the culture of
communal hatred, violence and conspiracy still thrives in the background
waiting to strike again; and large parts of the country are under military
occupation. Police brutality continues unabated, lakhs of court cases lie
unattended, thousands of people remain in jail as under-trial prisoners, and
hundreds of victims of caste and communal violence wait hopelessly for
justice. Communal, caste and sexual bias is still endemic at various places
in the state apparatus.  And by all the social indicators India remains one
of the worst performing countries in the world.

So it *is* premature of ‘write off’ the Left but not because the Left Front
has retained substantial vote shares in Kerala and Bengal. Votes have never
been a real marker of the strength of a political movement and its culture.
Indeed, the Left Front parties now have a historic opportunity to transform
themselves,  starting with a conscious effort to introduce more democracy in
their ranks and a culture of open debate. Whether their leaderships want
such a radical overhaul is doubtful, since even the elementary requirement
of accountability for the recent debacle is currently being evaded.

However, regardless of their evolution, it is clear that as long as Indian
democracy survives and survives in its broken state as a system unable to
nourish the mass of its population or live without violence and the
subjugation of whole communities, the Left outside parliament, the left as a
culture of democracy and resistance, a network of movements and
organisations, and a new more vigorous set of campaigns, will *continue to
flourish*.  A younger, more radical generation will undoubtedly be attracted
to it and to its values of solidarity, equality, freedom and opposition to
capitalism both in India and worldwide.

*Jairus Banaji, Sukumar Muralidharan, Dilip Simeon, Satya Sivaraman, Rohini
Hensman*

*The statement, issued on Facebook on 19th May, has also been
signed/endorsed by:*  Omen Achom, Levin Ahmad, Nesar Ahmad, Riaz Ahmed,
Suhail Akhter, Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Aniket Alam, Arshad Alam, Mahtab Alam,
Julian Alford, Anjuman Ali, Sharib Ali, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Arindam
Banerjee, Debabrata Banerjee, Partha Banerjee, Sreenanti Banerjee, Sanjay
Barnela, Madapathi Channa Basavaiah, Amita Baviskar, Peter Beattie, Cedric
Beidatsch, Moggallan Bharti, Preeti Bhat, Varuni Bhatia, Sayan Bhattacharya,
Debashish Bhattacherjee, Sandeep Bhushan, Abhisek Bisoy, Madhumita Biswal,
Samarendra Biswas, Ishan Bose, Satya Brata, Vivek Chachan, Baidurya
Chakrabarti, Indranil Chakraborty, Uday Chandra, Garga Chatterjee, Sandeep
Chatterjee, Bibek Chattopadhyay, Kamal Chenoy, Ajith Cherian, V. K. Cherian,
Mayur Chetia, Ramachandraiah Chigurupati, Bennet D’Costa, John D’Souza,
Karthikeyan Damodaran, Hari Das, Meghna Dass, Vidyadhar Date, Anisha Datta,
Dayita Datta, Mihir Desai, Meena Dhanda, Robin Dharmaratnam, Pranoo
Deshraju, Elliott Eisenberg, Rajkumar Eligedi, Pradeep Esteves, Dave Ankit
Ferri, Paul Field, Vikram Gaadida, John Game, Satya P. Gautam, Ammar
al-Ghabban, Arundhati Ghosh, Pothik Ghosh, Rupen Ghosh. Sikha Ghosh, Sandhya
Gokhale, Meena Gopal, Rama Hansraj, Bonojit Hussain, Jamil Iqbal, Ashutosh
As Is, Ajit Ithikkat, Akash Jha, Ammu Joseph, Minto Joseph, Apoorva Kaiwar,
Sanjay Kak, Kalpana Karunakaran, Sreekanth Kappillil, Harsh Kapoor,
 Ravinder Kaur, Rauha Khalid, Sabah Khan, Rajiv Khanna, Abdul Haleem Kidwai,
Jamal Kidwai, Prakash P. Koshy, Koteswar Rao Kota, Michael R. Kraetke,
Shekhar Krishnan, Suchita Krishnaprasad, Uma Krishnaswami, Karthik
Krishnaswamy, Sławomir Królak, Mangesh Kulkarni, Avinash Kumar, Kundan
Kumar, Manmohan Kumar, Rajiv Kumar, Sahil Kumar, Bobby Kunhu, Rebecca
Kurian, Christopher Laffernis, David McInerney, Shalini Mahajan, Sampad
Mahapatra, Beni Majaw, Deity Majaw, Abhik Majumdar, Arnab Majumdar, Sadique
Pk. Mampad, Freny Manecksha, Rajses Mala, Mukul Mangalik,  Anant Maringanti,
Feroz Mehdi, Hormazd Mehta, Nivedita Menon, Bindu Menon, James Michael,
 Amitabh Mishra, Anand Mishra, Rasmi Ranjan Mishra, Shibaram Mishra, Srimoy
Mitra, K. G. Mohan, Anjali Monteiro, Sumathi Murthy, Luddite Ned, Tarun Guha
Neogi, Smriti Nevatia, Aditya Nigam, Alf Nilsen, Bhargav Nimmagadda,
Chittibabu Padavala, Dharam Pal, Rajiv Pandey, Himanshu Pandya, Sudarshan
Papanna, Prashant Pastore, Sujeet Patil, Mike Pearn, Gautam Pemmaraju,
Jahnavi Phalkey, Charlie Post, Suman Poudel, Aseem Prakash, Shree Prakash,
Ananta Prasad, Sundaram Pugwash, Bharat Punjabi, Chandramani Raj, Shamik K.
Rakshit, M. V. Ramana, Lalita Ramdas, Dwijen Rangnekar, Ranjit Ranjith,
Adhiraaj Ray, Bodhisatwa Ray, Chandrashekar Reddy, Arka Roy, Indrajit Roy,
Rahul Roy, Saroj Sabat, Anoop Saha, Lawgaone Sahara, Cssalil Salil, Jillett
Sarah Sam, Anindya Sanyal, Aditya Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Jhuma Sen, Sukla
Sen, Uditi Sen, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Chayanika Shah, Svati Shah, Siddharth
Shanbhag, Jyotirmoy Sharma, Mansi Sharma, Rakesh Sharma, Surabhi Sharma,
Aaditto Shen, Ajinkya Shenava, Cubbykabi Sherman, Maria Shipka, Jaya
Shobaneshwari, Medha Shriram, Ruchita Shrivastava, Ruchi Shroff, Garima
Singh, Mahesh Kumar Singh, Richa Singh, Subir Sinha, Sriram Srirangam, Megha
Sud, Ashwini Sukthankar, Sulekh Suman, Chirag Suvarna, Daniel Taghioff, J.
Jagadish Thaker, Prativa Thomas, Rashmi Varma, Umesh Varma, Deepak Verma,
Vidya Venkat, Kandamath Manayilvalappil Venugopalan, T. K. Vinodan, C.K.
Vishwanath Vishwanath, Rustic Wanderer, Judy Whitehead, Tahmidal Zami, Maung
Zarni, Sanil Zenbuddha.

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