By Saswat Pattanayak

Well, some news is actually good!

Like the news that Munna Bhai is back with his friend Circuit to the silver screen! In an unflinching tribute to his beloved late father Sunil Dutt, who is much missed in this brilliant sequel, Sanjay Dutt has made more than acting come alive. Writer-Director Raju Hirani has once again excelled in popularizing the conventionally absurd, eulogizing the most susceptible, and sketching raw feelings with innate deftness of a master filmmaker.



None of the Mumbai films released this year made much sense this year, with the sole exception of Madhur Bhandarkar’s Corporate, which dealt with feminism’s oppositional intersection with capitalism in a profoundly relevant manner. And in fact, all the rest of the flicks this year, were disastrous experience for someone who has grown up admiring Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt when it comes to Hindi film industry. In fact, the much touted movies like Kunaal Kohli’s Fanaa, and Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna were so pathetic that they deserve entry into the Bollywood Hall of Shame.

Before rushing to ImaginAsian theater, I had a sneak review of Lage Raho Munna Bhai, which did not say much (actually Jason Buchanan got the film’s plot wrong).

Moreover, the film really caught me off guard with introduction of Mahatma Gandhi, considering that with the exception of Kamal Hassan’s Hey Ram (2000), none of the recent movies have treated the Mahatma in a worthy light. In fact, the current crops of Hindi film industry directors have developed some sort of an obsession with making films ridiculing Gandhi and his ideals. So when Munna Bhai got Gandhi as his conscience keeper, it was alarming in the beginning. Indeed, in a scene, Munna came to practice “Gandhi-giri”, and rather displayed some of his own brand of “Dadagiri” to get things done. But as the movie proceeded, there were more complex crossroads between theory and practice that easily left anyone with a deep impression for appreciation.

Just like its predecessor, Munna Bhai MBBS, which radically destroyed the halo around the unholy medicos, this film while actually glorifying the academia, also does its bit to sensitize the fact that no knowledge is good, if it’s not shared. In a bitter way, it denounces the academic elitism of the ivory towers, and the gross arrogance characteristics of the ‘educated’ class, which apathetically witnesses powerful Godmen get away with superstitious spells, and takes active part in promoting such belief structures. It goes even to an extent of patronizing the Marxist analysis of history which is based on mass, not iconic struggles. When an elite history professor flaunts his knowledge on Gandhi, Circuit offers him a slice of his knowledge: history of the misguided youths.

Skillfully done, even the most ardent Gandhian would derive immense pleasure from the absolutely riveting portrayal of the Mahatma. On the flip, devoid of the Kamal Hassan sophistication in filming the Gandhian methods, Lage Raho Munna Bhai may have ended up simplifying Gandhi albeit a bit too much. But looking from the perspective of someone who equates October 2 with a ‘dry day’, the lessons from history is very well learnt with the vulnerabilities and humility intact.



Sunil Dutt legacy:

Lage Raho Munna Bhai has unforgettable moments of Sanjay becoming a radio personality first, to woo his love, then to spread Gandhian messages, and finally to win back his love. One can only recall that Sunil Dutt indeed began his career as a famous radio personality on Radio Ceylon hosting an extremely popular “Lipton Ki Mehfil” in early 1950’s.

Beyond the obvious, Sunil Dutt would have continued to be proud of his son Sanjay, who has been in the past variously accused in aiding of terrorism cases. Like a statesman of high caliber and integrity that his father was while contesting polls from Mumbai, Sanjay Dutt has always silenced his apprehensive critics through his commitment to social justice instead. Sanjay’s unwavering allegiance to his father’s legacy can be traced in movies of his later career. A little known film “Tathastu” made this year starring Sanjay Dutt also reflects the father-son relationship at most beautiful junctions.

Sunil Dutt and his wife Nargis (Fatima Rashid) were widely known as brilliant leading stars for some of the finest Hindi cinemas of yesteryears. But the part that they have most inspired Sanjay with were their commitment to peoples’ causes. Nargis whose progressive works were well known was nominated to Rajya Sabha by Indira Gandhi herself. And Sunil Dutt, through his commitment to carry on the tasks that Nargis had left behind, joined politics in later part of his career. Contesting from Congress ticket would not have come easy for someone in Mumbai, the stronghold of right-wing Hindu fanatic bosses who continue to have a hold over film industry operatives. And yet, Dutt through sheer dedication in his various involvements at grassroots levels, won from his constituency for five terms and passed away while being at office. Not as a successful politician, rather as a conscientious objector and a secular progressive activist, Sunil Dutt liked to live his life.

Whereas right-wing hawkish Indian political leadership celebrated India’s nuclear state status, it should be remembered that Sunil Dutt went from Nagasaki to Hiroshima in order to condemn nuclear weapons. During Punjab crisis, despite anti-Congress wave, he walked 2000 km with his daughter and others from Mumbai to Amritsar in order to plead for peace. At a time when the country was enamored with being declared a superpower (a kind of ‘dadagiri’ if you may) in the making, Dutt traveled through the entire South Asian region in a peace expedition called “Hands Across the Borders”. More importantly, when Babri Masjid was demolished by the Hindu brigade in 1993, Sunil Dutt resigned from his seat as a Member of Parliament, in an exemplary gesture against the communal politicians. Such was the legacy of Sunil Dutt who led his entire political life fighting the communal elements spreading hate and religious intolerance. A peacenik, secularist, progressive politician, and a relentless campaigner in care for cancer and HIV/AIDS affected.

A lesson worth reliving:
Amidst the much mushroomed Bollywood movie scene that proclaims individualistic love, worse, individualistic infidelities, (of the Karan Johar and Mahesh Bhatt variety), misplaced history lessons of free market youths (like Rang De Basanti, hastily made films about Bhagat Singh), of inundated Diasporic cinema of regressive value (Deepa Mehta range of Fire and Water), of sheer reactionary brand of patriotism (Fanaa, Sarfarosh, Border etc), one has to pause awhile and watch Lage Raho Munna Bhai for whatever it has to offer. Its not just principles of Ahimsa and Satyagraha that rejuvenates the undoubtedly best film of this year, but also the fact that anyone in the world can be a Mahatma, and indeed many already are Mahatmas through their committed lives for the sake of others. These Mahatmas are ordinary people like Munna and Circuit who even reform themselves to incorporate Gandhi’s talisman which behooves on us to take steps for the poorest of the poor and to behave appropriately to bring happiness in lives of people we otherwise consider ‘lower’ than us.

For a generation of Indians who take fancy in opposing reservation policies for the oppressed class of people, for those youths who take great pride in their ‘superior’ religions and ‘higher’ castes; for those youths who take pride in their ‘high culture’ sophistication in pursuing ‘cleaner’ high society life, those who gloat in their higher ‘merit’ academic lifestyles, and for those arrogant and innocent and cool and the chic, Lage Raho Munna Bhai will probably provide the greatest lesson of life. This film is the quintessence of the Marx and the Mahatma.

A must-see. A must-felt movie.

Tags: Saswat, Film, Bollywood, India, History, Colonialism

By Saswat Pattanayak

There is no reason why Vande Mataram, the Indian national song, should be in controversy any longer. This song should be now scrapped and deleted from its current status.

Ever since India’s ‘independence’, this song has created controversies, and for obvious reasons. However, just as the ‘secular’ leadership of India had tried to suppress the skeletons in its cupboard, the opportunistic media had also vociferously supported the need for the song to go on in its truncated form.

And India, mostly kept ignorant about the damaging consequences of having such a song was lulled into believing that everything was well so long as we could come to a consensus. For the consensus, however the four power estates of Indian democracy utilized a) the voices of Hindu seculars approving the song’s first two paragraphs, b) the voices of Muslim seculars approving the same paragraphs, c) the voices of Hindu fanatics demanding the whole song to be made compulsory, and d) the confusion of the vast majority of Indians who had no clue whatsoever of any possibility of controversy over a ‘patriotic’ song. But the structure deliberately left out a segment of public which had from the beginning staged protest against the song.

Since the mainstream premise of such a song begins with unquestioned patriotism, anyone who opposes an element within that realm is at once accused of being anti-national. Hence, the remaining group of people, the fifth group which fervently opposed the song everytime, unfortunately most of the time comprised radical Muslims, were denounced to the extent of being silenced by the media.

Bankim Chandra as a Patriot: The lies my teacher told me

In matters of social concerns, half-truths are synonymous with blatant lies. This is so, because half-truths promote biases, prejudices and stereotypes. The text books that most of us studied during our school days were full of the half-truths. This is nothing surprising or exceptional, though. Every government under a popular democracy has to resort to lies in order to sustain its power base. Hence the dominant Congress with its pseudo-Gandhian philosophy also worked towards integrating its lies by to projecting a reconciled difference and reaching a “consensus”.

There is nothing wrong in reaching a consensus, but in this attempt, the critical voices should not be silenced systematically either. And in this case, Vande Mataram should not have been allowed to triumph in a land that should have had it banned subsequent to pursuance of its ideals of secularism. Rajendra Prasad whose fanaticism with Hindutva is well known, of course wanted the song to be given equal status with national anthem. This was unfortunate, although not entirely unexpected of him, considering that the rabid religious elements still wanted to declare India as a Hindu Rashtra. But the condescending statesmen of the time also acquiesced to the demand, albeit in the truncated form.

The future generations of India were not to be told of the lies and deception that went behind projecting Vande Mataram as a national song. As a result, today most people do not even think twice before patronizing the song. Even the ardent Hindu fanatics forgave a Muslim composer making tunes and money off the obsession.

The colonial crisis?

The demands by the rightist brigade to make the song compulsory in educational institution has raised eyebrows. In this case, again, the criticism has mostly come from religious minorities, even at the expense of being categorized as anti-national. We all know it too well how the Hindu fanatics are running to any extent to blame the Muslims of India as instigators of terrorism instead of looking within for managing a society based on complete anarchy and making living off the institutional ignorance. And now, the Hindu supremacists, whose ideological forefathers were infamously hands in gloves with the imperialists (and which is why they were banned from contesting polls in secular India) have picked up sensitive threads of patriotism.

In the classic case of ignorance, the mainstream media propaganda, clearly overlooks certain facts that people of India have right to know and act upon. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Anti-Muslim: Bankim Chattarjee, the man who wrote this song Vande Mataram was a rabid Hindu fundamentalist whose goal was not emancipation of India from the clutches of the colonialists, rather to establish a Hindu Rashtra by any means. His stress on Islam corruption of India is not only devoid of the highly secular past of India during the Moghul rule, but also smacks of religious chauvinism targeted against Muslim freedom fighters of the colonial period.

Historian R.C. Majumdar writes, “Bankimchandra converted patriotism into religion and religion into patriotism”. In fact Anand Math, the work from which Vande Mataram is derived, is a text of Hindu nationalism, and not Indian nationalism. The work is selectively targeted against Muslims all over the texts. Anand Math is a Hindu temple where there are scenes of Jivananda calling Muslims names: “We have often thought to break up this bird's nest of Muslim rule, to pull down the city of the renegades and throw it into the river - to turn this pig-sty to ashes and make Mother earth free from evil again. Friends, that day has come.”

A G Noorani (Frontline, January 2-15, 1999) quotes M.R.A. Baig’s analysis of the novel in which the song finds exclusive place:

“Written as a story set in the period of the dissolution of the Moghul Empire, the hero of the novel, Bhavananda, is planning an armed rising against the Muslims of Bengal. While busy recruiting, he meets Mahendra and sings the song 'Bande Mataram' or 'Hail Mother'. The latter asks him the meaning of the words and Bhavananda, making a spirited answer, concludes with: 'Our religion is gone, our caste is gone, our honour is gone. Can the Hindus preserve their Hinduism unless these drunken Nereys (a term of contempt for Muslims) are driven away?'... Mahendra, however, not convinced, expresses reluctance to join the rebellion. He is, therefore, taken to the temple of Ananda Math and shown a huge image of four-armed Vishnu, with two decapitated and bloody heads in front, "Do you know who she is?" asks the priest in charge, pointing to an image on the lap of Vishnu, "She is the Mother. We are her children Say 'Bande Mataram'" He is taken to the image of Kali and then to that of Durga. On each occasion he is asked to recite 'Bande Mataram'. In another scene in the novel some people shouted 'kill, kill the Nereys'. Others shouted 'Bande Mataram' 'Will the day come when we shall break mosques and build temples on their sites?””

2. Pro-British: If there ever was a piece of Indian literature that was most pronouncedly pro-colonialists, then it was Anand Math. Interestingly, and naturally enough, the right wing political parties have picked up their ideal role model in Chatterjee since their ideologues were themselves allies of the British rulers in India. Anand Math is replete with anti-Muslim slogans, no doubt. But it also celebrates the British rule in India. It in fact goes to the extent of saying that British were friends of India, and it was only the Muslim people against whom the Hindus should fight against.

In the last chapter of the work, the author speaks through the supreme character: “Your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed. There is nothing else for you to do.
Your vow is fulfilled. You have brought fortune to your Mother. You have set up a British government. Give up your fighting. Let the people take to their ploughs. Let the earth be rich with harvest and the people rich with wealth.
There are no foes now. The English are our friends as well as rulers.”

This is the context of the song that goes on to celebrate Hindu religious deities entirely and exclusively.

Baahute tumi maa shakti
hR^idaye tumi maa bhakti
tomaara i pratimaa gaDi
mandire mandire
TvaM hi Durgaa dashapraharaNadhaariNii
kamalaa kamaladala vihaariNii
vaaNii vidyaadaayinii namaami tvaaM

Its target is the Muslim people of India and their tradition which has been blatantly misrepresented in the work. And its ally in the vicious hatred campaign is the British rule in India. The mothers in Bande Mataram are the Hindu goddesses and there is no reason why people of other religions should be forced to sing their praises. Just because certain Bengal revolutionaries used this slogan and popularized it, and some more Bengali intellectuals upheld Bankim Chatterjee as an iconic litterateur, it does not mean the great peoples of India will forget the rich multi-cultural tradition that has been in existence in the country since centuries now and in the name of Hindu chauvinism, people should not be misled any further to denounce Moghul rule and celebrate British Raj.

Knowingly or unknowingly, people have believed in the mainstream history of India from almost a harmless angle. They believe that Gandhi was the ‘father of the nation’, that Congress was the party that gave freedom to India, they believe that Hindus contribute the most to the country’s cultural landscape, and they celebrate Saraswati and Sivaji. People are apparently content with the reservation policies working against the Dalits, with nominal celebrations of Islam culture, with not paying reparation to the tribal peoples for having snatched their dear lands.

Even as these acceptances come as mediocre consensus of some form to carry on with a liberal democracy, these have been still in a Gandhian tradition of positive compromises. Our objections should not be towards the social fiber of Indian constitution which is secular, democratic and socialist in its spirit. But if anyone tries to enforce their religious ideals down the future generations of the country, one and all of us must stand in solidarity to oppose the vicious steps. Once and for all, it must be declared that India is not a Hindu country and no Hindu glorifications can take place at an official level, not even if some right wing fanatics come to power once in a while.

We have had many a dramatic stands of consensus in the past. Indeed, this has been the policy of Indian ‘nation’ since its very birth. Although the country is composed of different nation-states, we declared a consensus that we were almost one nation. Although India had distinctly different language groups we declared Hindi as the adopted core. Despite numerous tribal and distinctly exclusive peoples historically inhabiting the country, we agreed that it was a country of the Aryas.

Need to oppose the reactionaries:

But what’s missing from the discourse is not the sense of agreement, but the sense of disagreement. We never studied anything where the genuine disagreements were brought forth for healthy dialogues. We agreed India was the most ancient civilization, that Paravati and Laxmi were goddesses, that Hindus needed more festivities than any other religious groups, that New Delhi needed to be the capital city and Vande Mataram was the national song.

The problem is not in the ultimate acceptance of something as official policy. This is needed for sound governance. The issue at stake is the manner in which the officiating agencies of India never propose the need for the measures that would seriously dwell upon critical issues at stake. Everywhere, regional and national chauvinistic forces are at work in India. The conservatives are creating vandalisms all over with their openly racist and primitively backward views, starting from setting up Saraswati Vidya Mandirs which goes unchallenged even though separation of education from religion should be the spirit of secularism, to install statues in parochial terms. They go on to disrupt Valentines Days, link Muslim cricketers and filmstars with underworld, even as they have formed the most pernicious underworld themselves, only operating wide open in the corridors of political power. They go on to revise history to celebrate Shivaji and claim a Gujarat civilization named after a Hindu goddess. And as their wont, they go on to celebrate their fellow hindu fanatic, one Nathuram Gadse, the killer of Gandhi by revising text books to omit the assassination incident.

We have been taking all these lying down even as the rightist brigade, safely harbored by the domestic business houses of India continues to celebrate the absurd. And now they want the rest of the country to celebrate these sectarian crimes as well, and hence there is a need for the rest of us to resist and desist the temptation to fall into the opium trap. The trap works variously. At times, the enlightened people just assume that its alright if things are this way or that way. Thats the Hindu privilege some people enjoy since their feelings do not get hurt, as long as the hymn remains as the national song.

And if the secular Hindus and religious Muslims of India have not denounced the song in such a serious manner to seek its withdrawal as India’s national song, it speaks of their great tradition of tolerance to Hindu bigotry. This should not be misconstrued as an organic weakness and allowed to be taken advantage of any further.

Tags: Saswat, Literature, India, Islam, Hinduism, Colonialism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Giving into pressure from his promoters, the so-called opposition parties in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has, as usual, condemned Pakistan for Mumbai blasts, and threatened disruptions to any peace talk with Pakistan. The right-wingers of India are jubilant at this prospect of forthcoming war with Pakistan, in which they hope to wipe out Islam from the world.

The irreparable damage that could not have resulted from the right wing political rhetoric alone, has now been done through their orchestration of Mumbai tensions. Following the blasts, most of even otherwise liberal people of India are now readily supporting the cause of Hindu fanatics in declaring war against Indian Muslims and Pakistan. This is grossly pathetic display of patriotism by any standard, and a sense of ingratitude towards a great, exemplary minority religious community of India that has actively helped save whatever is left of India’s grace.

Hindus who constitute an overwhelming majority in India have an obligation to display a great sense of responsibility at this time of national crisis. Let it be mentioned that Mumbai blasts is an international tragedy caused by global terrorists (we will soon go to who are the people that are the terrorists and who fund them, and for what cause etc). It is definitely not an occasion to play communal political opportunism. ALL words and actions and thoughts and indications, discriminations and prejudices against Muslim population MUST STOP in India. And blame games against Pakistan and Indian Muslims must end and the peace process must resume as scheduled. This is the least we can do to ensure that India has not yet turned a mad militarist (Although the reality is it is. Although since it’s not North Korea and since it is an ally of USA, India was not declared a terrorist country of the world even after its missile tests last week).

Muslim influence in making of modern India is one for great celebration. Indeed, if the British colonialists would not have forced their way to further gaps between the two communities and would not have manipulated their power structure to divide the country into two or three halves, we would have a different history today.

India’s History of Freedom Struggle against Hindu Fanatics:
The history would have been surely different, if Mahatma Gandhi or Netajee Subhas or Bhagat Singh (all three had radically different ways of approach towards freedom struggle, but convincingly similar goals in mind) would have had their ways. All three of them fought tooth and nail against Hindu fanatics and did not tolerate the ideology that was preached in name of Hinduism. Three of them were secular to the core and they believed that the country’s foundation must be built on Hindu-Muslim unity (not separation).

Whereas Bhagat Singh was assassinated by British imperialists, Subhas Bose’s ideals were massacred by homegrown reactionaries like Sardar Patel and Mahatma Gandhi was shot to death by well organized Hindu fanatics of India.

Whereas the freedom fighters wanted secularism at all costs, the reactionaries wanted communal tensions at all costs. Hence, India’s so-called glorious history has been nothing short of a shameful, casteist, communal history of religious hatred, incited, engaged in, and managed by Hindu supremacists.

This is true that Muslim League, despite having some great patriots of the era, was also religious in nature. But its impact waned after formation of Pakistan. But Hindu Mahasabha, despite having no freedom fighter worth a mention, went on ransacking the emotional wealth of the country even after independence from illegal British rulers.

The history of Hindu ransacking in a Hindu India has gone on unabated in India since British were forced to leave. Although the reality is that these fanatics never got any support from mainstream Indian population, (85% of whom are Hindus) despite their claims to be representing the Hindus!

In the early periods of India’s independent history, which can be truly claimed to be the only glorious period in India’s recent times, the country under Nehru emerged as highly respectable nation in the world, with an internationalist outlook, where India played global role in promoting peace, cooperation and non-violence. India was at its secular best, in curbing the forces of Hindu chauvinism and indeed acted heavily against Hindu fanatics to the extent that they had to go underground. Whereas forming the Non-Aligned Movement in order to refrain from entering a nuclear club (which a shamelessly communalist like Vajpayee or the agent of domestic businessmen like Singh marred by their show of inferiorities---declaration of India as a militarist country…sic!), Nehru stood in solidarity with socialist causes worldwide. India supported the Soviet policies of planning, programming and social welfare. Cooperation, not competition, cooperatives, not private companies, small scale industries, not multinational companies, advancement of scientific rational progressive thoughts, not superstitious religious and fanatic camps…India was the most enviable country as the great role model in the world then.

But just as supremacist Hindus (although a tiny minority, they are so well organized with half pants and lathis and reactionary mechanisms in place) assured the end of Gandhi, they ensured the end of Nehru by fielding Patel against him several times. Both of them had rivalry since few decades before freedom, and even before Nehru could act undemocratically (which was actually the need of the hour, as Netajee had suggested, to educate people about political empowerment), Patel had let the Indian Army loose on Kashmir.

Of course Nehru cannot be forgiven for having tolerated entry of Hindu fanatics in the group already. For example, people like Ambedkar or Aruna Ali were not given the power. Neither Dalits nor Muslims had any primary say in the state of the nation. It was reinstallation of a north Indian Brahmin supremacy in India, that went on playing a different ideology than what Nehru had envisaged (as found in his own writings about the need to curb communal elements in India).

Indian private businesses started to grow after the demise of Nehru and despite valiant efforts by the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India had inadvertently fallen into the cold war game. As can be seen from Nixon and Kissinger talks about Indira Gandhi, America started having great interest in India (strategically that’s the best bet to defeat China and USSR at the same time). To that end, as was the creation of Taliban or the Iraqi fascists, foreign aids came to Indian insurgents to organize acts of terror.

Who are the terrorists?
In the pre-independence era, when the British condemned Bhagat Singh as a terrorist, he was very clear on his response. He said he was a revolutionary, and not a terrorist.

We need to dwell on the coinage and definition of who is a terrorist. First off, this is a word founded and coined by the ruling class to portray the resisters negatively, which is why it becomes more logical to believe in their description of who fits the phrase.

For many of the resisters however, they would rather be called Revolutionaries. That’s because revolutionaries fight against the system. And terrorists are integral to the system. Hence, the police forces, military forces and the profiteering governments become the terrorists when they cause circumstances where innocent people are massacred.

This is going on right now in India. The Hindu supremacists of India –the biggest blot in India’s secular image—are the ones who spread the venoms in early last decade by demolishing a national treasure called Babri Masjid. The terrorists who stoned the walls of the mosques and destroyed it with active collaboration of police forces (since they are all integral to the terrorizing network) that December 6, went on to incite the Mumbai bomb blasts—the biggest in India’s history. The riots went on unabated with an entirely unapologetic Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackerey calling the shots and giving hateful speeches against the Muslims of India. Shiv Sainiks who were aided by BJP in demolishing the mosque are the neo-nazi elements of India who should have been declared as state terrorists long back.

These were the people who came to power by killing extremely popular labor union leader of Maharashtra Krishna Desai, who was a communist leader of amazing popularity, already a MLA and was poised to rule the state. Desai’s murder was the first act of political murder in independent India. Shiva Sena hacked him to death, whereas the police and administration watched haplessly. The rise of political mafia in India has now surfaced to become the voice of the Hindu nationalists, and there cannot be any sadder development than this in India.

Journalist Praveen Swami of Frontline writes:
“Through the 1970s, Sena gangs repeatedly attacked leading Communist trade union leaders, and in 1973 were responsible for the murder of popular Parel MLA Krishna Desai. It was only in 1984, with the Sena discredited as a criminal mafia and in electoral decline, that Thackeray sought alliances with the Hindu Right, first forming the Hindu Mahasangh, and then allying with the BJP.
Violent riots, starting with the anti-Muslim pogroms in Bhiwandi, Kalyan and Thane, and through similar butchery at Panvel, Nashik, Nanded and Amravati, marked this new direction taken by the Sena.”

Activist Praful Bidwai writes:
“The Sena consciously fomented religious hatred and communalised Maharashtra politics. It manufactured chauvinist prejudice against non-Maharashtrians and instigated or committed hate-crimes. The Sena, with its disgusting demagoguery, represents pure, unadulterated evil, a political force that concentrates much that’s negative and deplorable in Indian society, including hierarchical authoritarianism, repression and addiction to the use of force and bullying.”

Ashok Dhawale writes:
“Many other communal decisions were taken by the SS-BJP regime. These were the abolition of the State Minorities Commission, the Urdu Academy and the Haj Committee; the bringing of a bill banning all forms of cow slaughter, including buffaloes, but which was defeated in the Council; a shrill campaign for the imposition of a uniform civil code; an attempt to drive out so-called Bangladeshi infiltrators, most of whom were bonafide citizens of India hailing from West Bengal but who happened to be Muslim; and so on. The claim that was made by the regime that there were no communal riots under its tenure was also false. Communal riots did take place at Pen in Raigad district, Junnar in Pune district, Khirwad in Jalgaon district, in Aurangabad city and other places. The decrease in intensity was simply because the rioters were themselves in state power!”

The riot-ridden India:
By focusing only on the here and now, we shall be basically imitating television reality shows. What is needed is to introspect with historical clarity about how things have shaped up with people.

The great journalist MJ Akbar writes in his book “Riot after Riot” (Roli 2003) that Ayodhya was developed as a case in communal “dispute” back in 1885. The history of it is interesting to be noted here:

“The Englishman who reported this incident more than 100 years ago, that left 75 Muslims dead over the Babri Masjid said that the police were present but merely looked on, being “under strict orders not to interfere”. However a secular judge Pandit Hari Kishan (echoing the voice of millions of Indians) did not award the rights to Hindu fanatics to construct a temple. “Awarding permission to construct the temple at this juncture is to lay the foundation of riot and murder”. A.F. Millett, the British officiating settlement officer even mentioned, “It is said that upto that time (the riot of 1885) the Hindus and Mohammedans alike used to worship in the mosque/temple. Since British rule a railing has been put up to prevent disputes, within which, in the mosque, the Mohammedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they can make their offerings.”

Akbar says, then in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the first propagators of modern communalism, the builders of a nation in the name of religion, first came into prominence. These ideologues sent out their missionaries—priests, politicians, novelists, historians---to color the mind of an emerging nation with blood rather than peace. The growing synthesis among the upper and middle classes and the creation of a common culture among the poor was the target. “Purification” became the key of separation, as the leaders indulged in dreams of Muslim and Hindu states…..

The Global Terrorists. Who are they?
The point is the purifiers are still present in one way or the other. Some times, at the helm of power, and at other times, in collaboration. And at all times, they are inciting violence on common people in name of religion. And these days, the local terrorism by dominant religions has been almost replaced by collaborated terrorism across the globe, which we call today as Global Terrorism.

Unfortunately, the global terrorists are this time enjoying power in big powerful countries. On closer look, one can notice the strategies adopted by Indian right-wingers as very akin to the tactics used by Israeli forces. In name of protecting the defense forces (ha!), in name of maintaining national boundaries, in name of safeguarding national interests, the militarist countries like India and Israel (you may please add United States and France and Germany as well&hellip stop nowhere in their quest to dominate the marginalized resisters.

But as is their wont, the ruling class uses every means possible to alienate people from the resisting forces. And when people themselves become resistors, they invent an opposition from the air, in order to project their indispensability. This has happened in every ages. In the most devastating period of economic instability that America has faced since the 1930’s, we are told that Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden are terrorists. Whereas this could be true, the reality is that both of them were creations of the American interventions. Taliban indeed is a logical consequence of American policy in Afghanistan in its attempt to enforce religious fundamentalism in that land.

Likewise, Indian leadership, pathetically criminal in their words and deeds (stealing poor peoples’ thatched roofs to hand them over to industries is one of the recent examples), are detested for rising prices of essential commodities and escalating housing and healthcare costs. In face of real crisis, the country has only its structural governance to blame (BJP or Congress, in the so-called political democracy being run by private businesses, everything is the same after the polls end&hellip. And to avoid these, the creation of external elements as the disrupters is a natural political gameplan. From Hitler to Bush to Singh, everyone has applied this tactic of state control in implicit fashion.

Alright, but who are the terrorists then?
Terrorists are people who cause terror. From our experience, we know that terrors can be imaginary (as in dreams or in political speech) or real (as in price-rise, homelessness, death due to cold wave). So the answer is not very complicated. The real terrorists are the military-industrial complex of politicians who rule through the produces: militia to enforce and money to allure.

But if we need further critical appraisal, here it is: The terrorists make plans. They define territories. They decide on allegiance. They talk of countries and boundaries. They think of their own nationalities, and regionalism. They do not think of world’s working class, they are concerned about domestic business class. They enforce different privileges for citizens and immigrants and aliens. They terrorize people through enforcement of draconian legislations like POTA, TADA or Patriot Act. They use police force and military to perpetrate crime on women and children by declaring war. They use tanks and guns to suppress people who use stones and slogans. They get international support from all terrorists, thus making terrorism not a sectarian act any longer, but a global business.

These terrorists terrorize people by talking sweet and killing their aspirations, or by planting bombs and blaming imaginations. Scolding each other (look how Manmohan Singh scolded Pakistan today for Mumbai blasts!) while failing to apologize and resign because of inability to maintain law and order. In fact they are so involved in creating riots that they make a profession out of it and enjoy allegiance of people.

Today’s India is a result of the Communal Politicians like Bal Thackerey whose party went on rampage merely because of his wife’s statue getting defaced and who has threatened several times to eliminate Pakistan from world map. It is the Communal Politicians like Manmohan Singh who instead of acting on the right wing fanatics are blaming Pakistan for every single law and order disaster in India. New York Times reports Singh saying “I have explained it to the government of Pakistan at the highest level that if the acts of terrorism are not controlled, it is exceedingly difficult for any government to carry forward what may be called a normalization and peace process.”

The same article quotes Tasnim Aslam, the Foreign Office spokeswoman for Pakistan as saying, “In the past two days, India has not given us anything in writing or talked of any evidence.” Sumit Ganguly, a professor of politics at Indiana University in Bloomington says to NYT: It (Mumbai blasts) cannot but help India’s cause in Kashmir.”

Indeed, the goal is to help India’s cause in Kashmir. India’s cause in Kashmir has been one of repression, oppression and violent acquisition of the state’s population. Anyone who resists the Indian Army could be termed as someone backed by Pakistan. Or perhaps some of us might even say backed by America. Things will not change by the proclaimed associations or phrases such as “terrorists”. The power which has been ruling over Kashmir for six decades now need to recognize its need to let the people take back the state. Let there be referendums in Kashmir. Indeed, let there be referendum in India.

Different questions beg different answers. Just like during Mumbai blasts, in recent (as always) Israel attack on Palestine, different questions are being asked too. Some are engaged in finding out who is behind the attacks. I am trying to figure out who benefits in the long run from these attacks.

The people who ask questions like “who will then rule Kashmir” or “who is behind Mumbai blasts” might be asking possibly candid and urgent questions. But my question is altogether different. Mine is “whose interest do these serve”. Occupation of Kashmir or Mumbai blasts serve the political elites of India and Pakistan who are aided in their so-called peace-process (a conversation that takes place entirely without considering the resisting people, who are conveniently always dismissed as “terrorists&rdquo by the US of A. My question then does not seek any answers. Definitely not on this blog. It facilitates further questions.

For example, I am still wondering why the attacks were carried out, why the police without investigations said it was Pakistani backed terrorist groups, why the prime minister before investigations were over, said it was just a few terrorists, why did the Shiv Sainiks go on rampage two days before blasts with its president threatening major repercussions (more violent than the cartoon controversy), why was it that despite its hand in the biggest blast in Mumbai (1993 march) in inciting mass scale murders, and despite right wing roles in genocide in Gujarat---interestingly the media do not touch these communal violence at all as antecedents--no investigations are being done against the parties which have been involved. Even judicial commissions that find Shiv Sena guilty are dismissed (Srikrishna Commission for example). My question also is why has law and order completely failed to take up responsibilities and although we cannot expect the Army (or Indian military) to come help people in crisis, why is it not at least contemplating over the past so many decades of massacres that have been leading to such escalating tensions.

Someone needs to take responsibility. Surely none of the current crop of leaders can take stands like Lal Bahadur Shastri, but its time media stopped quoting a failed and feeble and ashamed agent of global capitalism called Manmohan Singh, and indeed demanded his resignation for failing to act upon the communal elements.

In conclusion:
Every act of terrorism must be condemned. The more pressing need is to understand who are the terrorists. Only a few months back, when the Naveen PatnaiK Government of Orissa in its zealous bid to sell the land to some profiteers ordered mass murder of tribal people without any provocation or need, that was an act of terrorism, which went unnoticed. The Kalinga Nagar incident escaped attention of world media, because it did not involve Muslims. Or when the American firm United Carbide plant killed more than 20,000 people of Bhopal, it was not considered terrorism because it was not a reaction from Muslims. Or when Gujarat Genocide took place under right wingers of India, it was not global terrorism, because Muslims became the worst sufferers.

Without getting lost in the web of words, one must act on the root causes of today’s mishaps. When one does that, it can be unquestionably found that the far-right wing factions of world religions are the perpetrators. And so far at least, in India or America, the Hindus and Christians in their fundamentalist form have been holding power mechanism to their favor to declare war on Islam (American administration has not atoned for its post 9/11 crimes of religious discrimination nature nor is Indian government likely to for its post 7/11 outbursts against Pakistan and Indian Muslims).

The people in Mumbai did not die because they were innocent. They did not die because they were protesting Islam religion. They did not die because they were Hindus. They did not die because they were Mumbaiites.
They were massacred in systematic, organized fashion because the Indian administration failed to arrest the perpetrators even after they had sent clear warnings. And because even after the blasts, the Indian administration failed to carry out investigations into the cause of the blasts. People who planted the bombs could be unemployed, misguided missiles, either Hindus or Muslims. But the ones who used them to further their goals are still in power and they are fighting one religion against another. It is these communal politicians who need to be declared as terrorists. We should not use terrorist word only because the present American president (who has been declared by people as the real International Terrorist on the streets of New York) thinks the war is against Islam.
The war on global terror is actually a war on global poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, a war against war mongers and militarists.

However, terror is not an illusion. The real terrorists are very much present before us. They are the politicians and bureaucrats and blood sucking industrialists who own every means of mental production so much that they make us believe in the unreal terrorism. They do so by generating conditions of violence and then declaring the violence itself as terror, whereas they thrive on the conditions.

We need to ask different questions. Presently, we must force the communal politicians to introspect, if not be forced out by the same people it claims to be “terrorists”. People resisting against the communal politicians actually fight for their own human rights, and I am quoting a great singer from Goa, Remo Fernandes in his album “Politicians Don’t know to Rock ‘n’ Roll”, who represented a profoundly secular majority, thanks due to which the world still is surviving. The minority ruling classes of the world will soon be forced to withdraw from their communal tactics. The world without religions is the one dream…of Lennon to Sahir, and hopefully, to some readers of this blog.

Here’s Remo:

How do you feel?

This song is dedicated
To a species most hated
The curse of the Indian nation
The Communal Politician.

How do you feel? How do you feel?
You who have taught us to kill?
How do you feel? How do you feel?
Are you happy that blood has been spilled?

Do you have sweet dreams at night
Or do the sounds of fright
Come gurgling from your victims
As they feel the knife?
Do you have wet dreams in bed
About the throne you wish you had
Or do you hear the rattling skeletons in your head?

How do you sleep? How do you sleep?
With a dead body lying beside you
How do you sleep? How do you sleep?
Can you smell the rotting heart inside you?

Are you happy inside, or do you try to hide
From the graves you’ve been filling far and wide?
If you can’t have your cake
You’d rather poison the world!

How do you feel? How do you feel?

Tags: Saswat, India, Hinduism, Islam, Pakistan, History, Literature, Colonialism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Gandhism and Leninism surely intersect at interesting crossroads. And they could be more pivotal than merely interesting. At the macro level they intersect at their common abhorrence towards militarism. At the micro level, they are one with the advocacy for community cooperatives. At both stages though, interests are similar: promote peace, for it is at this situation alone that cooperatives can exist. In every conceivable way, Gandhism and Leninism stressed on peace and cooperation because of their stress on workers’ welfare.

The question which naturally arises then is, if Gandhi believed in social emancipation of working class who worked in cooperatives. The answer is clearly yes, but the methods he would have employed would be different, some of the arguments follow. But I feel, relating Gandhi to working class struggle is as moot a question as relating need of violence to further state’s interest in Stalinist Russia.

I have always believed that Gandhi and Stalin (or you may say Lenin) both used the long-term goals of revolution as primary objective and immediate concerns as secondary. Gandhi’s call for tolerance in face of brutal murders of thousands of Indians was as stoically violent, as was the communist path to emancipation of working class in face of gory class wars.

How then were the goals in liberating Indian masses and emancipating Russian working class similar? The answer is, by the yardstick of labor. By the recognition of working tools. This is where the weapons of the masses come to focus. And Gandhi intersects with the Left.

Gandhian philosophy: From Hindu-centric to Workers-centric:
The critical question here, then is not to the extent that Gandhi respected working peoples’ tools, but how did he acquire this knowledge of need. Whereas Gandhi’s relation with the Left could be an inferred one, in oblivion to his own knowledge (although he has admired Lenin several times in his life and he had only great words to describe the revolutionary), his understanding of working peoples’ aspirations to self assertions is clearly an acquired knowledge.

The educated and well-off Gandhi upon his entry into India saw things similar to South Africa in terms of racism, but not in terms of economic class of peoples. This is important to understand because in South Africa, Gandhi stood for the interests of Indian trading class, not the most poorest economic class (who incidentally were the Blacks of Africa, not so much the browns of India). The only way he could get away with that slant of social justice was to claim to his nationalistic role, and his subsequent inevitable arrival in India to pursue that cause to his death.

What then, led to the transformation in Gandhi from being a Hindu nationalist, to craft a radical talisman; his core belief that he had to work for the ‘poorest of the poor’? What led to his famous declaration that every step that we make must be made towards welfare of only the Poorest of the Poor (the proletariat)? Obviously, his exposure to Gujarat did not do Gandhi any enlightenment. His association with industrialists and trading class of India (just like in South Africa) would have again led him astray into supporting the Indian bourgeois cause of petitioning in the Indian National Congress than walking across all villages to mobilize the greatest mass movement in the world history. What brought him the change, the new worldview?

It was Orissa, a state of India, that continues to be the poorest and most underdeveloped state of the vast country. And the chief architect of Orissa’s struggle for independence, Utkal Gaurav Madhusudan Das, whose birth anniversary was celebrated last week.

Teachings of Madhusudan Das:
Gandhi came to learn from Madhusudan Das that two things afflicted India the most: poverty and superstitions. Basically, the lack of class consciousness and adoption of religious practices. (Interestingly, those days, these two were also the primary motivations for the Bolsheviks to cause revolution in Russia.)

And the real life enactor of those struggles in India was Madhusudan Das. Gandhi knew of two postulates: that India was not poor historically, and its Gods were not discriminatory historically either. The ancient rich state of Orissa, and the most universally worshipped Lord Jagannath were the biggest riddles for Gandhi to solve. And in doing so, Gandhi would change his entire course of action, from representing the Congress (his initial interests in presiding it) to representing the people (his growing attachment to causes of peoples in daily lives). Gandhi wanted an end to religious chauvinism, to Hindu supremacists, to Brahminical casteists and to economic exploitators. For him, the role model was an Oriya of great eminence, Madhusudan Das.

Talking of how he started his struggle for freedom of his self and others, Gandhi pointed at both Jagannath culture and Orissan poverty as the eye-opening experiences. He said, “You know that in the whole of our country the land of Orissa is the dearest to me. As soon as I returned to India I began to hear of Orissa’s poverty and famine. We raised an amount and sent over Thakkar Bapa in the capacity of a servant of this afflicted province and organized famine relief.”

Those were the days when Orissa was really afflicted. Her Lord Jagannath was hijacked by the conquerors of the land who spoke different languages, pretended to be representative of Orissan people and instead forced opium addiction on the poor peasants, and the non-Oriya traders used their lobby to force brahminical supremacy over a large indigenous population of Orissa that were either highlanders or just forest dwellers. In a way, the poverty of mineral rich Orissa was brought on it by the ruling classes of adjoining states who also blackmailed some native Kings into forcing cultural seclusion (attempts to make Hindi a state language in Sambalpur, Bangali as language in rest of the state etc), religious dogmatism (project the Lord Jagannath from a universal goddess of peasant class, a black god representing the working class aspirations and the most secular one, for some of whose greatest followers came from religion of Islam too—the most famous being Bhakta Salabega, to a male god who banned entry of non-hindus and the oppressed), and enforced poverty (the spread of opium—literally in Orissa to keep it economically weak).

Few Oriya leaders who were educated and exposed to international working class movements took up the challenge to fight these three pronged reactionary overbearings of language-religion-economics issue. The primary of them was Utkal Gaurav Madhusudan Das, who went on to inspire Gandhi to lead national struggle against religious dogmatism.

Gandhi's struggle against the Hindu Conservatives & Reformists:
Gandhi said he could not give up his struggles against the Sanatanists (the hindu practitioners). Indeed, he went on to say, “I also realized that if I could serve Orissa somewhat I would by so doing serve India. Thus Orissa became for me a place of pilgrimage—not because the temple of Lord Jagannath was there—for it was not open to me, as it was not open to the Harijans—but because I thought of a novel way of touring the country for the sacred mission of the abolition of untouchability. I had heard that the so-called sanatanists were enraged at my mission of removing untouchability and would even try to frustrate it with violence. If they were really so minded, I said to myself, I should make their work easy by discarding the railway train and motor-car and trekking through the country. Moreover, people don’t go on a pilgrimage in cars and trains.

And if there was trouble in Puri because of the anger of the sanatanists, we could not flee from their wrath. It does not behove a satyagrahi to run away. We must face it. I could not do all this in a car or a railway train, and so I decided to perform the rest of the Harijan pilgrimage on foot. The temple of Lord Jagannath has the reputation of being the most famous in India, for there all human distinctions are supposed to vanish, and all sorts of people, Brahmin and pariah, brush shoulders with one another vying for the darshan of the Lord and even eat His prasad out of one another’s hands. But evidently it had outlived that reputation and the description had become a fiction, for the priests would not admit Harijans, but throw them out of the doors of the Lord of the World. I said to myself that so long as these distinctions of high and low endured before the very eyes of the Lord of the World, that Lord was not my Lord, that He was the Lord of the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas who exploited his name and kept Harijans out, but certainly not the Lord of the World. My ambition of restoring its old reputation to the temple is yet unfulfilled, and you have to help me in fulfilling it. So long as the doors of the Jagannath temple are closed to the Harijans, they are closed to me as well.”

This struggle of Gandhi against the Sanatan Dharmi or the Hindus, was inspired by Madhusudan Das of Orissa, who had himself, out of sheer disgust at Hindu supremacists had adopted Christianity, even if just to demonstrate that untouchability was not going to be practiced by him at any level and nor be tolerated.

Madhubabu's progressive roots:
If Gandhi learnt the lessons in racism at South Africa, he learnt the ways to deal with it, from Madhubabu (fondly so called). Madhubabu had set before Gandhi an example, which the latter would continuously refer to, while defining essence of what a human being should aspire for. Madhubabu, despite his high qualifications as a lawyer, not only opened a tannery in Cuttack, Orissa, but also worked there himself. He invested his own money, worked by his own hands and exemplified at least few core virtues that were to guide Gandhian philosophy in future: self-reliance, non-discrimination (since until then, only the “untouchables” were relegated the work of tanning), and relentless perseverance.

Gandhi was so moved by this living example that he wrote to industrialist GD Birla on September 27, 1925 (during his first series of struggles itself), to lend a helping hand to Madhubabu in his loss-making venture.
“Shri Madhusudan Das owns a tannery at Cuttack which he has developed into a limited company. I feel like acquiring a majority of its shares…. The tannery’s liabilities amount to Rs. 1,20,000. It is necessary to rescue it from this dead weight. The tannery uses only the hides of dead animals….; I would also like you to undertake its management. If that is not practicable, I shall find someone else who can manage it. The tannery has a few acres of land which I have seen myself. Shri Madhusudan Das has spent a considerable amount on it out of his own pocket.”

Gandhi acknowledged that there was a need for the country to be sensitized in the direction of thought that was pursued by Madhubabu. Indeed, he thought Madhusudan Das was showing light in the direction of future that India must strive towards: use of hands and feet to abolish class society (yet another Marxist principle) and establish an industrial climate based on vocation (a Soviet measure during that period). In “Navajivan” of September 23, 1928, Gandhi wrote an editorial, “This country needs an industrial climate. In the education of this country, the vocational aspect should constitute its dominant part. When this takes place, the students who will go on learning a craft will support their schools through it. Shri Madhusudan Das had conceived such a plan with regard to his tannery in Cuttack. The plan was a fine one. But it did not materialize as the prevailing atmosphere in the country provided no encouragement to vocational training or a tannery. Why should not carpentry be an indispensable part of our higher education? Education without a knowledge of weaving would be comparable to the solar system without the sun. Where such trades are being properly learnt, the students should be able to meet the expenses of their own schools. For this scheme to succeed, the students should have physical strength, will-power and a favorable atmosphere created by the teachers. If a weaver could become a Kabir, why cannot other weavers become, if not Kabirs, at any rate, Gidwanis, Kripalanis or Kalelkars? If a cobbler could become a Shakespeare, why cannot other cobblers become, if not great poets, at any rate, experts in the fields of chemistry, economics and such other subjects?”

Not just blatant untochability, but also the reformist Hindu argument (some quote Swami Vivekananda to substantiate it) that caste division is a necessity to maintain division of labor was completely quashed by Madhusudan Das in his own trade and by Gandhi in his following Madhubabu’s examples.


Need for Public Sector:
Madhusudan Das was not only the greatest fighter against caste and class society, he also enlightened Gandhi about the need to preserve the ethnic living arts of the peoples by welcoming industrialization on national terms (public sector industries). In the editorial on “Swedeshi vs Foreign” in Navajivan on June 19, 1927, Gandhi paid glowing tribute to Madhubabu for his works in words and deeds: “Raw materials worth crores of rupees are produced in this country and, thanks to our ignorance, lethargy and lack of invention, exported to foreign countries; the result is, as Shri Madhusudan Das has pointed out, that we remain ignorant like animals, our hands do not get the training which they ought to and our intellects do not develop as they should. As a consequence, living art has disappeared from our land and we are content to imitate the West. As long as we cannot make the machines required for utilizing the hide of dead cattle, worth nine crores, available in our country, I would be ready to import them from any part of the world and would still believe that I was scrupulously keeping of the world and would still believe that I scrupulously keeping the vow of swadeshi. I would believe that I would be only discrediting that vow by refusing, out of obstinacy, to import those machines. Similarly our country produces a great many things with medicinal properties, and those come back to us in the form of a variety of drugs or other articles. It is our duty to import any machines, and obtain any help, which will enable us to utilize these things in our own country. Swadeshi is an eternal religious duty. The manner of following it may, and ought to, change from age to age. The principle of swadeshi is the soul and khadi is its body in this age and in this country.”

Talking of “Deadly march of Civilization”, Gandhi said in Young India dated May 10, 1928, that “Under the guise of the civilizing influence of commerce the innocent people of Burma are being impoverished and reduced to the condition of cattle. As Sjt. Madhusudan Das has pointed out, people who merely work with cattle and forget the cunning of the hand by giving up handicrafts are impoverished not only in body but also in mind.”

Tolstoy and Madhusudan Das:
In support of workers’ unique contributions, and the needs for intellectuals to stand in solidarity and their participation in workers’ movements, Gandhi compared Madhusudan Das to Lev Tolstoy: “The late Madhusudan Das was a lawyer, but he was convinced that without the use of our hands and feet our brain would be atrophied, and even if it worked it would be the home of Satan. Tolstoy had taught the same lesson through many of his tales.” (Speech at a Marwari Shiksha Mandal on October 22, 1937)

Even as the British were busy creating the class society of high-paying bureaucrats and “lowly” peasants, Gandhi remained unruffled because he always had Madhubabu as the example to follow. At Birbol, in a village industries exhibition on March 25, 1938, Gandhi stressed again, “Man differs from the beast in several ways. As the late Madhusudan Das used to say, one of the distinctions is the differing anatomy of both. Man has feet and hands with fingers that he can use intelligently and artistically. If man therefore depended wholly and solely on agriculture, he would not be using the fingers that God has specially endowed him with. We will be worthy of being called human beings if we utilize our fingers. Moreover, mere agriculture cannot support us, unless it is supplemented by the work of the hands and the fingers.”

Khadi and genesis of the Mahatma:
Likewise, Gandhi’s core realization for stress on Khadi as a village industry came from Madhubabu’s legacy that he left behind. In a speech at a public meeting in Nagpur, Gandhi said on March 1, 1935, “It was during my walk in Orissa, in the course of my Harijan tour, that it was clearly brought home to me that the village industries must be revived if khadi is to be universal.
I could not have realized this in any tour by rail or car. As the late Madhusudan Das had said, our villagers were fast being reduced to the state of the brutes with whom they worked and lived as a result of the forced idleness in which they passed their days. If they continued in that state, not even independence would improve the state of India. I, therefore, decided that I must, even in the evening of my life, make a heroic effort to end this idleness, this inertia.
……..We have to employ all these crores of human machines that are idle, we have to make them intelligent machines, and unless cities decide to depend for the necessaries of life and for most of their other needs on the villages, this can never happen. We are guilty of a grievous wrong against the villagers, and the only way in which we can expiate it is by encouraging them to revive their lost industries and arts by assuring them of a ready market.”

Similarly at another public speech at Ramgarh on March 14, 1940, Gandhi said, “The true Indian civilization is in the Indian villages. The modern city civilization you find in Europe and America, and in a handful of our cities which are copies of the Western cities and which were built for the foreigner, and by him. But they cannot last. It is only the handicraft civilization that will endure and stand the test of time. But it can do so only if we can correlate the intellect with the hand. The late Madhusudan Das used to say that our peasants and workers had, by reason of working with bullocks, become like bullocks; and he was right. We have to lift them from the estate of the brute to the estate of man, and that we can do only by correlating the intellect with the hand. Not until they learn to work intelligently and make something new every day, not until they are taught to know the joy of work, can we raise them from their low estate.”

Workers' tools of freedom:
Workers’ self-reliance, their pride in their own hands and feet, their resistance to superstitious deviance, their need for correlation of intellect with the hand—Gandhi followed Madhu Sudan Das in his footsteps throughout in the struggle for peoples’ freedom.

The tools of the oppressed, according to Madhubabu were their own hands and feet. The tools of the oppressors were the opiums—religious and otherwise. Gandhi understood these basic tenets of human service from his great teacher-Madhusudan Das.

Today, in an increasingly sophisticated machinery world, as we inch more toward monopolistic corporate societies, lessons of Madhusudan Das should not be lost on us. And the dignity of each work, as Madhubabu used to preach and practice, should remain a hallmark in our collective thinking. For, only when we have learnt to appreciate the workers, can we distinguish the seeds of exploitations. Only when we acknowledge the contributions of the working class of the entire world, can we differentiate the ruling class of the unipolar world. Only by realizing that the part-time workers are exploited in the name of non-exemptness, in the name of disguised employment, in the name of unauthorized working permits etc, can we acknowledge that without these so-called low class workers, we would not even exist today as a human race. Workers deserve the rights they demand, in every parts of the world, and we must acknowledge that they deserve equal pay for equal works, no matter the nature of the work, as long as the hours are the same. For a change, like Madhubabu, we must prepare ourselves to undertake any kinds of works, just to be in solidarity with the working class interests, without any discriminations!

Tags: Saswat, Orissa, India, Communism, Colonialism, Capitalism, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Vikram Buddhi could be anyone. He could be the mindful mathematician, eloquently solving world riddles. He could be the calculative genius on behalf of pacifist Einstein. He could have been framed as his family is pleading . He could have himself posted the messages as he is admitting.

I see two dimensions to it: one, the action itself (online participation) and two, the ideology, if any (the politics of it).

The question is what are the circumstances that might have led to his erratic and clearly unjustified postings? As an example, in a chatroom, any frequent visitor will notice the oh-so-frequent postings of hate lines all the time. Clueless people on both sides of political spectrum spit venoms at each other, initially beginning with racist comments like “you Indians always smell curry” or nationalist comments like “why do you all land up in my country” to personal assaults like “get the hell out of here, else we’ll bomb you like we do”.

None of the lines above are manufactured. As a researcher in digital media interactions, I frequent public chatrooms to sense the happenings and all the time face such ballistics. Considering my lifetime trysts with misdirected wraths from the conservatives and casteists, Hindu fanatics and average theists in India, I never ‘confront’ or ‘counter’ such irrational and outlandish racist comments. I fully empathize that the atomized people living in secluded apartment houses as individualistic wholes, without any interaction with neighbors, whom they do not know incidentally (since they speak different languages) or intentionally (since many are immigrants); where behaviors from both issues of immigration and language have been made suspect (how many television shows or films are produced to depict normal behavior from foreign language immigrants?), people then turn to online interactions as a good outlet. There, isolated individuals find others in a community. In America, the community that should be existing in the real neighborhoods actually exists in virtual world.

As an oasis in human society, people flock into bulletin boards to at least find people who can ‘talk’ to them, and not merely put up smileys on the roads. The chatrooms and bulletin boards are of course all moderated. And moderated by people who are political beings themselves. Where it’s the machine, there are words which are censored. Of course the words that are censored are themselves a limited list, and that list consists only of some English words that are recognized as offensive to one culture and omits all the hundreds of words that could be otherwise offensive to other cultures. Cultures here mean, not just countries, but also religions, non-religions, sexual orientation, gender issues in foreign countries, and political philosophies etc. Although everyone is allowed free entry into the boards, their freedom is clearly demarcated.

This is what makes the case of online interactions less interesting. A hegemonic set of rules determine what’s called a hate speech. Where ACLU might have got it right and the pro-rule advocates wrong is this fine line. Incidentally today’s world is not one singular nation. With several different cultural codes and the freedom for interaction among all cultures (anyone from Finland can be part of a chatroom of Seattle), that’s been provided by online forums, it’s virtually impossible to deconstruct every insults. And the rules will only help suppress the voices of the minorities whose words and intentions are more susceptible for charges.

Free speech has always worked in favor of those who are free to exercise them. That said, it has also been used to preclude the minority voices. Preclude them on several grounds. And there are several minorities in this country. This case pertains to political diversity.

Clearly, Buddhi is not a liberal or a guy on the left. His views have no consonance with the progressives. No person of any amount of critical thinking skill can even lend support to his words. Basic elementary understanding of the left is that sporadic violence does not lead to any solution. Elected presidents of any country or their party people are truly innocent. The guilty in an electoral democracy where ignorance about general knowledge of cultural history and political geography of the world is rife, are the larger gamut of voters who vote without slightest knowledge of their role in perpetuating an unjust political environment. What Buddhi announced on bulletin board shows either he was provoked into doing so (considering that he had apparently no criminal background), or he was having being completely naïve, stupid, and perhaps idiotic. People may also consider him anything else, and I shall not stand in the way.

However, I have been asked by some friends to take a stand on him. And I shall take one. Clearly I am not in favor of anything that he has said. If his act be considered political, then this is my view. People who want to change the world for the better do the basic minimum homeworks: they need to know a lot of history of all kinds of peoples, they need to organize people on common progressive causes, they need to educate others who could not afford to spend all that time on understanding differences. These steps need not be guided by principles of violence or non-violence. They need to be guided by purposes. And the purpose needs to be for overall betterment of the world, starting with the world’s poorest, the ones who have been historically deprived, the working class and the hungry mass. None of these involve any thoughts around mindless postings of a privileged nutcracker.

All that being said, I could be reading too much into Buddhi’s politics. He may not be a political guy at all. As Mahablog responds to a right-winger, “Hey, buddy, welcome to my world! Do you really think “your” side doesn’t send threats and obscenities to us?” The point is Buddhi episode is an excuse for the folks on the right to make merry and rejoice, by unnecessarily pulling the left into the discourse.

I do not agree that he had anything to do with politics, let alone American party politics. Buddhi has neither done anything which amounts to online political activism, or grassroots political activism or anything that’s worth considering when one looks at what political activism denotes. So I cannot support him on any political ground.

On principle, however, I will support ACLU if freedom of an individual to express something is concerned. This is a shady area, I know. There are all these people who are using homophobic languages and indeed murdering people merely based on their sexual orientations. When ACLU defends the gay activists, it is branded as supporting hate crimes (where speaking in favor of LGBT is considered as hate-speech…ouch!). The fine line between who propagates hate is just that: a fine line. Especially after 9/11, it is more so. And I am not sure if we can tolerate all hate-speeches and protect them under first amendment. Buddhi's talks are cheap and hateful. He must face consequences. But let him not be singled out because he is a foreign national. For, before him, in recent many times, scores of hate speakers have been getting standing ovations. One in a responsible position of authority even went ahead to call for assassination of another elected leader. Many neo-nazi websites are daily preaching hates. And they are fine and running and getting great google ranks! On educational campuses including University of Maryland, one can see preachers all over. I have been stopped by in the campus and my apartment, where preachers come in fake identities to proclaim love and then soon say how all other religions are evil and there is no such thing as a God from other religion.

Buddhi is not an exception in the pool of hate-preachers. Indeed, he is only the most recent (well...almost). And possibly the most inconsequential. And possibly, the most rightist among them.

Tags: Saswat, Capitalism, India, Colonialism, Media, Technology

By Saswat Pattanayak

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
(Bob Dylan (1963). His anthem for the American Freedom Movement of the 60's!)

Class societies thrive on racial discriminations. And Europe provides the recent most glaring example.

In November 2005, when a huge number of young people from the minority communities protested in France, it was being called a riot. The race-blindness that afflicts the privileged French exhibited its true color when the Blacks and the Muslims were being systematically deprived of what has been their overdue.

Of course the skepticism was thus because the protestors were immigrant youths who took to the street to register their discomfort against mass-scale discriminations. Although it continued for weeks, there were no signs of organized violence or even sporadic assaults. They could not yet be termed as the so-called “terrorists” for acts they never committed. But they were treated as just short of it. The French government did not care a franc for their demands. The elite people of the mainland France turned their cheeks to the “Other France”—the France which we rarely read about, the France that is suppressed beneath the sleaze and neon of perfumes and Eiffel Tower.

In November, the official statements coming from France dismissed the protests as riots that needed to be controlled by the police state. And control they did. Towing the democratic norms, the country went back to business as normally as possible. The resisting voices were silenced. The media changed headlines and the protestors were detained mass-scale.

I talked to some of my friends from Europe who professed complete ignorance regarding consequences of such vandalism. They claimed it was just a minority work and is probably a race thing, but since the government says France has no race issues, then it must be just some kind of agitation. It will be over very soon, just like the strikes at Charles de Gaulle.

Well, undermining the race factor came easy for the administration the last time. But the embarrassing fact is that Muslims still constitute the largest proportion of unemployed youth in that color-blind country.

This time, more than a million French youths are on the streets! They have actively and vociferously supported the just demands of the “immigrant youths” who took to the streets last November. Not only that, a huge majority of French youths, of all colors have decided to follow the examples of the minority protestors. This must be really awkward for the administrators to know, but historically, every race based conflict has culminated into a larger class warfare where majority of working class people have always lent their support to the discriminated social minorities.

The elites, who are elites both in terms of their inherited race privileges and acquired class privileges must be on guard now, because they are now going to combat not just some small group of disciplined protestors who are too scared to harm anyone, but a huge majority of disenchanted, alienated organized youths who are not scared to topple the power structure.

Hundreds of youths have already been involved in violence that saw bottles and rocks hurled at the police and journalists and left at least two cars burned, three others overturned and dozens damaged. Railways have been blockaded, airports disrupted, and up to two thirds of France's universities and schools have been occupied or disrupted. Clashes with police have been occurring throughout the country.
Some of the Indymedia pics demonstrate the facets that the mainstream media is gleefully ignoring: That it is a united effort by people of all races who are affected economically. Th