By Saswat Pattanayak

Written for Radical Notes

"The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expressions of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance" (Marx and Engels).

The recent Supreme Court of India decision imposing a stay on the implementation of the 27 percent reservation for the "other backward classes" (OBCs) in elite institutions is a desperate attempt to secure a few public institutions exclusively for the 'meritorious' few, whose merit rests on accumulated wealth, connections and opportunities. This is also an attempt to draw a limit to the concessions that a neoliberal regime can admit (for the sake of public legitimacy) against capitalism's Malthusian values which it is supposed to protect. Already the ruling classes in India - the capitalists and their political and institutional henchmen have been troubled by the growing demand for affirmative action in the private sector. The SC decision comes as a relief for the executive and the legislature, who are formally bound to local interests and pressure. On the other hand, the judiciary is above and beyond every democratic and institutional binding, thus can be more consistent in its approach. Even if the Indian government's attempt to solicit the opinion of a constitutional bench to overrule the two judges bench decision result in the implementation of the reservations, the present judgment comes as a clear warning - this far and no further!

Here we will address the above issues from two disparate quarters: one, from the lens of the Supreme Court itself, since it appears like the judiciary might have acted here almost independently (considering all the criticisms it has been receiving from political parties), and two, from the perspective of the class society in India, at a more micro level.

Judicial Elitism

If we agree that despite all the technological progresses that should have made life for everyone way easier in the planet, the world is still in a despicable state suffering from unjust social order where majority of the human population is at the receiving end-afflicted by poverty, unemployment, homelessness-across countries, then something somewhere has gone really wrong. And perhaps to set things correct, to offer not mere sacred guidelines but forceful means to implement them, the societies have formed relatively autonomous judicial systems, which are considered essential for establishing the much-revered rule of law. Apparently the judiciary comprises the wiser of the lots deciding over how we are all going to lead lives, when there are disputes and conflicts.

However, the reality is that the revered judiciary for most comprises either people who are close to power structure (when they are selected by the government), or people who get there through sheer academic elitism (by virtue of their access to top law schools). In either case, the judiciary then does not necessarily, and very rarely comprise people, enriched by their varied experiences of social failures in life through which they understand the complexities of living conditions. Often times they are fed through to good schools and better jobs by utilizing their family's Old Boys Networks. Most often the judges then reflect the interests of the upper social strata of the society - becoming in themselves, the rich, creamy layer. Hence, even when they seem charitable, it is charity that is expected 'normally' from these strata.

The basic agenda before the judiciary is to deliberate on what is the best way of maintaining the status quo within a given legal and institutional framework. Revolution cannot be enacted by the judges - on the contrary, when a revolution or any grand change seems imminent, it rests upon the judiciary to make it jurisprudentially 'normal', legal and systemically palatable.

On the other hand, one of the basic elements in the conception of peoples' movements, howsoever moderate, is their challenge to the institutionalization and alienation of rules from popular scrutiny and control, even if they are not explicitly against them. This aspect puts them in conflict with the 'rulers', i.e. those who oversee the implementation of these rules. Naturally, every time the activists land at the court's door for justice, by this very act itself they fail their cause, upholding the 'sanctity' of the court or the jurisprudential policing. The court as the arbitrator appointed by the system to negotiate between the system and peoples can legitimately do anything. It has famously disgraced millions of people attached to their landless movements time and again. It is because of the court that displaced peoples (a la Narmada) do not receive any justice. It is because of the court that the high-rises are still allowed to exploit reservoirs worldwide. It is thanks to the court that no ruling has ever banned the police from attacking the workers when they stage a protest against the exploiting bosses. In fact, it is the court alone that has prevented the working class strikes from being legal.

If the society has made any headways in its civilizational history - if it has forced even a faint "sense" of equality among men and women, and among the races of people-it is because of the thousands of movements outside the courtroom-and, always against the prevailing social order. A court merely observes the situations outside to safeguard its own interests inside, because the court often consists of the same class of people that become the object of protests. As the agreements are reached outside, the rulings are made inside-which is why the court is always for months (or weeks) delayed in taking decisions. In the present case, let's wait till August, the judges have cautiously remarked.

Who's Afraid of the Class Society in India?

For, it is outside the courtroom, the realities are more apparent, as they are unmediated by the jurisprudential exactitude, which trims down the realities to fit them in the judges' learned sense. After all, most people do not pretend to be either wise or learned. In a country like India, where fifty percent of women and 35% of all people are sheer illiterate, people have been even instructed that they are not learned. And since wisdom in the age of information warfare is constituted of how much one succeeds in reading books and rulebooks, and not in reading people and situations, the large majority of Indian population is considered to be object, not subject of knowledge, of power.

How else can the country still be managing itself to be riding a racist power ladder since six decades of its "independence" now? How else can one rationalize why the judges could have ignored what the world could not any longer - that casteism in India is racist in nature. Just one week prior to a display of the Indian Supreme Court's learned ignorance, the United Nations had already recognized in no uncertain terms that India carried on a tradition of racism against the lower castes of people. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) voiced its feeble protests against India being a country that "systematically denies Dalit rights at home", even as the "learned" creamy smart bunch of Indian delegates at the UN debated over the difference between caste and race, confirming that they can be moral "pundits" over race matters, but will disown their roles in caste oppressions.

The seemingly unwise, ignorant fools of India - that comprises most of us who do not appreciate the fact that getting an entry into one of the elite institutions like an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) or Indian Institute of Management (IIM) has anything whatsoever to do with one's ability to showcase more merit than others - are obviously adopting a regressive path somewhere. How else can one justify the almost complete and continued monopolization of upper castes in India's power corridors, even as they constitute a tiny percentage of the population? Whose country did we wrest for when the struggle was against colonialism? A country that would have gone back to the elite bureaucrats of the Raj or a country that sought for social equality among classes of people - divided along the line of castes and religions by historical ruling elites?

A mantra of India's Independence has been well played now - and one can say enough played now - to evoke ringtones and create a thriving industry called Bollywood. But it sure is a sense of humor we could do well without. India continues to be oppressed by a small elite which is a mirror image of their counterparts during the colonial period - a group of people who believe that only a certain segment of population can be allowed to flourish. A group that thrives on a class society that makes impossible to bridge the gap between mental and manual labor. In fact, it thrives because it maintains a relationship of slavery - in which the manual workers are the slaves. In a land predominantly agricultural, India is in fact a sorry country of its slaves-where by its own official estimates, 111,000 peasants committed suicide last decade-even as the slave masters continued to climb corporate ladders in their age of "globalization". Definitely, this slavery is modernized today - with such a big number of slaves in reserve, you are not required to feed them continuously. The capitalist "hire and fire" machine is very convenient, indeed.

The official Republic of India is the country of slaves and untouchability - one in which discriminations used to be part of an unofficial public policy (until now - after the court decision, it is already official). That is, the Nehruvian dreams had drafted on its mammoth constitution certain sections along the line of abolishing untouchability. In doing so, the racists of India also smartly got rid of their age-old guilt trips arising out of their practice of untouchability. They created cultural images of untouchability existing only in the village lines of drawing water from the well. And silently they went on creating domestic slaves of the manual servants from the lower caste people in their high-rise buildings. They declared that in rural schools, now everyone was free to study and anyone who discriminates against others based on their caste will be penalized. Because they knew they would never enter those schools anyway-schools without blackboard, furniture and most of the times a teacher. Instead they created their own private English medium schools and created a reservation policy for students to enter into their elite technical institutes.

Who deserves reservations?

The progressive reservation policies - be it for SC/ST or OBCs; for the women, or for the people with disabilities-are of course different from the other form of reservations that exist without a debate - for the Non-Resident Rich Indians who call themselves "India Inc" and for the Indian Rich who are invited to buy the seats reserved only for those who can afford them.

The rest of the seats, they call comprises for the students with 'merit'. No surprises to be here, considering that among other grand narratives of India's entity (such as independence, liberalization, software giant, knowledge powerhouse, superpower for 2012 etc), this merit proposal fits rather beautifully. After all how can a country claim itself to be a "giant" without saying it has done so through merit!

India is indeed a giant-only one that has surged forward through perishing under its wheels of fortune, the millions of hungry and homeless it always chooses to ignore. After all, giants emerge only in this vicious manner - by gulping down anything that comes on their way. India has almost perfected that art by now, in refusing its people the land they deserve, by refusing its students the access they require, by eliminating its dissenters from its public and private press discourses.

The current discourse around reservations is quite interesting. Indeed no political party seems to be agreeing with the judiciary. So, suddenly have all the political parties gone progressive in India? What is at stake here?

In a simplistic fashion, possibly it is true that the political protests are in part to their apparently temporary loss of power. After all, even with legislative approvals, how could the court nullify the government decision? These protestors still have not got over the shock over this tacit powerlessness, far from realizing that it is they that hold the court to be a sacrosanct institution where they could run to every time they had a conflict over state water policies. Every time the government utilized the court to replace peoples' protests into policy matters. So whenever in India (or elsewhere in the world likewise) people took up a movement to destabilize the government system, the ruling party and the opposition together rushed to the court in the pretext of granting people justice, whereas all they do is to convert the revolutionary spirits into a "wait-n-watch" policy matter. They took away the issue from the people and gave it to the court. And here we have to realize that this "powerlessness" is actually as much a gimmick as any other power rationales are.

Remember how the Kings used to rule over their states in the bygone days. They would address their resenting masses that the Brahmins will decide the issue, and get absolved of the responsibilities thereon. The Brahmins of course were always in the King's favor. It would be quite unnatural otherwise-except in cases where the Brahmins themselves resolved to be the kings.

The high priests of those days have now occupied the IITs, IIMs, and National Law School at Bangalore. These are the ones now advising the Kings - the political parties. That is their assigned role (being part of the "three pillars") because they want the desired positions of security, money and power. It's true that we know what the priests want. The question, is what do the Kings want?

The political parties of Indian parliament are not in difference with each other. After all, with all the chair-flinging incidents they still are together under the same roof. This is because what brings them together is of a greater value than that, which could force them separate. What values does their unity bring? Why the political parties - despite their most fundamental differences in their agenda sheets-stay together along with their pillar partners - judiciary and the press - is because they can form their so-called "democracy" system only when they stick together. If the "executive", "legislature", "judiciary" and "the press" do not stay together who will each run to when they face peoples' wrath? Who will play the Brahmin when the time comes?

Officially, a prime minister of president or Supreme Court judge or mainstream media editor or any of their corporate investors are claimed to be different "check and balance" corridors of power. In fact at this mass deception too, they play out the acts very well. They have a question hour (get paid for asking questions on behalf of people), they have public interest litigation (what has public interest got to do with the court, anyway?), they have a letter to the editor (views that are of no consequences whatsoever), and they have corporate social responsibility (what's that?). These are conscious and deliberate efforts to normalize their operations in the interest of the ruling system of which they are a part. No matter if they change political parties or newspapers or corporate houses or departmental bureaucratic divisions - they are the cohorts of the same batch of rulers that must "swim together or sink together".

Of course they would prefer to swim together. And in this larger context of reservations, especially so.

What is important is not why the judges came up with such a decision (which is a natural class-alliance issue), but the more pressing question is how did they get away with making this decision? Were they not afraid of the people outside - that majority of people in whose favor a contrary decision was supposed to be taken? Were they not taking a chance with the Parliament-that sacred body of legislators who had already taken a decision? The answer is neither.

And in fact, quite the contrary. Judiciary has been once again used by the government to do what it always wanted to: to provide an illusion of equality while maintaining the status of inequality. The parliamentary decision last December had come with pressure to answer back to the constituencies of OBCs. Once the pressure was off, the government rushed to the judiciary with ill-filled papers of 1931 (as an excuse) to reverse the legislation. And the two-bench committee did exactly as per the governmental wish. Like the Brahmins of the royal era, the judicial priests knew that they were the last resort of blinded wisdom.

Such macabre dramas play out in our life everyday. One needs no reading of Arthashastra or of The Prince to learn the art of governance. We are acutely aware of the true faces of power accumulating politicians, corrupt judges, greedy business houses and the corporate press - and we are well aware how despite the façade of apparent disagreements, they all gel so well as to unite together against the majority of people by creating an elite commonsense.

The opposition to reservations in India is part of the elite commonsense. The judges got away with such decisions because they knew they would be protected only if they do so. The larger Indian media have been harping on the need to abolish reservations, so also the top administrators and corporate kingpins. From the editors, to bureaucrats to industrial leaders-majority of them do not just incidentally happen to be belonging to the higher castes, in fact they are there only because of their trampling over the hopes and aspirations of the lower caste peoples.

Just as economic classes developed the race paradigm, they also created the caste structures. Historical alliance between class and caste is no mystery today. What needs exploration is beyond the academic understanding of the alliance, and more of a social revolutionary movement towards destabilizing that alliance.

At this stage, the commonplace dominant narrative insists that the SC/STs were granted reservations by the well-meaning leaders of India. This is entirely false. The "backward" castes of India were not granted anything. They fought along the lines of demands and protests to earn the reservations-and by the sheer proportions of their success in relation to their historical dispossession-they proved worthy of every bit of that. It's entirely wrong to imagine that a government or its judiciary wing will donate anything in charity. Such a misplaced imagination can only lead one to the corridors of a court.

The fight to go on has to transcend its own limited imaginations. Knocking the door of judiciary is appealing to the hearts of the Brahmins. It is not the Brahmins who need to be blamed after all, considering that they have a share of power. What is important is to revitalize the movement taking place outside to make it entirely impossible for a regressive policy to be crafted either in the Parliament or in the Courts. And that is just the beginning. It's not a question of reservation issue. It's a question of revolution issue. The majority of people do not want nominal reservations. They deserve the entire institutes. They do not wish to work for the structures. They want the structures to work for them.

Ultimately reservation is not just a demand, but historical reparation obligation. And at its heart lies not the questions regarding the efficacy of reservations. At its heart lies the question of social order maintenance that thrives on discrimination. The sick medical students and arrogant doctors that went to strike last year are the questions to be solved. The reactionary right wing NGOs like Youth for Equality (who forever fail to understand that they are the root cause of inequality) are the questions to be solved. The judicial system that has no business with social justice is the question to be solved. The question to be solved is the question of our times: how long will people silently suffer at the hands of a political system that uses unofficial policies to maintain authority - pimping press, and a free market. The question to be solved is how to snatch the power from these sugar-coated, superpower-dreaming elites of one-nation Indians and replace the feel-good plutocracy with a truly working democracy driven by the will of the real majority, where the difference between the manual labor and mental labor would have subsided enough to make the issue of IITs/IIMs and their reservation policies quite irrelevant. And any wishful thinking, any pleading politics is not going to ensure that the striking doctors will accept the wage of their domestic servants - no matter if the servant cooks wonderfully to serve the rich master and the doctor lets hundreds of slaves die because he has to stick to the Apollo and the thriving corporate hospital industry.

To snatch the reactionary power of the ruling elites, the task is not to appeal to the rulers. In fact, quite the contrary. Let me end the passage that started this reflection, by quoting Marx and Engels again: "The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class."

That's the only task that needs to be done: to build the class that snatches its reparations by revolutionary means, not through appeals to courts and parliaments that ride on the waves of social injustice.


Appendix:

[The above article relates to the following decision by apex court of India:
(Case No: Writ Petition Civill No. 265 of 2006 (With WP Civil No. 269 & 598 of 2006, 35 & 29 of 2007))
Ashoka Kumar Thakur Petitioner versus Union of India and Ors Respondents
Date of Decision(mm/dd/yy): 3/29/2007.

The Subject Index reads:
OBC reservation policy -- prayer for grant of interim protection in the writ petition -- the policy of 27% reservation for the Other Backward Classes (in short the 'OBCs') contained in the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 is the subject matter of challenge. The primary ground of challenge is that the Union of India has failed in performing the constitutional and legal duties toward the citizenry and its resultant effect. Consequentially the Act shall have the effect and wide ramifications and ultimately it shall have the result in dividing the country on caste basis. It would lead to chaos, confusion, and anarchy which would have destructive impact on the peaceful atmosphere in the educational and other institutions and would seriously affect social and communal harmony -- concept of creamy layer cannot prima facie be considered to be irrelevant. It has also to be noted that nowhere else in the world do castes, classes or communities queue up for the sake of gaining backward status. Nowhere else in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to claim we are more backward than you -- the creamy layer rule is a necessary bargain between the competing ends of caste based reservations and the principle of secularism. It is a part of constitutional scheme. Therefore these cases have to be examined in detail as to whether the stand of Union of India that creamy layer rule is applicable to only Article 16(4) and not Article 15(5) is based on any sound foundation -- court not staying operation of the Statute, particularly, Section 6 so far as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes candidates are concerned.]

Tags: Saswat, Casteism, Racism, India, Capitalism, Law

By Saswat Pattanayak

AsianWeek controversy has been quite an upset. For one, it claims to be the voice of the Asian Americans, and then goes on to publish an article written by a racist bigot who has absolutely no knowledge of his own history, and then the paper goes on to apologize while refusing to single out editors.

If only Kenneth Eng would have been the problem of it, the problem would have been solved by now, considering that he has been fired and even his article has been withdrawn from the AsianWeek website. On the contrary, bloggers are highlighting how immensely published is Eng and how his arguments might have some merit or how disgusted they are at this character. Now we have his photographs appearing on several sites and discussions on his student days in a New York film school. For someone who loves limelight (and any PR charmer can tell you any publicity is good publicity), Eng is having a field day. Amidst all this diplomatic efforts to showcase how not-so-racists we are in comparison to Kenneth Eng, the question must be redirected at the holier of the factions.

The truth of the matter is Kenneth Eng is a product of our system, not a creator of it. Just as Michael Richards was. Has Richards’ apologies helped any bit more than would Eng’s? Or did Mel Gibson really lose out all that deal after his apologies? Such politics of apologies are aimed at individual ‘atonement’s, not at social remedies.

Eng/Gibson/Kramer are trying to say something. And so also those who bear with these bunch. And again those of us readers who comment at the end of the blog entries reinforcing their myopic views. Now, deleting their comments and their articles and apologizing for the same is not the solution. Far from it, such responses are what I would say constitute the “Crash” actions. Remember that movie which won Oscar last year and promised everything was fine on the racial front and that Dubois was inherently wrong.

No, Dubois was not wrong. In fact he is more relevant today than ever before. America, the metamorphosed country of illusions lulling its “diverse” people to sound amnesia by preaching “equality and liberty” is condemned to grapple with its color-lines. Any amount of diplomatic legerdemain by community “leaders” and public figures, college professors and filmmakers cannot hide this reality. The problem of 21st century America is the problem of Capitalism that thrives on inequalities based on several of its social locations. How else does one justify the continued consolidation of most wealth and power in the hands of a few white men in this country? How does one justify the saga of discriminations against people of color in the workplace? How does one justify the annual raise of bonuses to the tune of two hundred percent for the owning class while the workers beg for a five percent up?

Individualism leading to Community-ism
In hostile situations of cut throat capitalistic competitions, everyone is up for the battle of interests. In place of individual rights that this country so proudly enshrined in its constitution that merely focussed on the wealthy and powerful (only the truly free enjoyed the rights, not those they enslaved), the group rights started forming impressions following several reformist movements last century.

Group reformist movements, just like the individual rights movements, engage in competing to garner support from those from whom the rights flow. The ruling classes who devise and define individual rights to their interests (for example it is alright to be a Christian, but not alright to be a Communist; its your right to have family, but not to have it if you are not heterosexual) also describe the scope of group rights. However just as illusive are individual rights, so are the group rights, in a capitalistic setup where the romance of rights are not inherent, but gifted.

To preserve the gifts (‘scope of rights’ that come with charity, although rights themselves may have been fought for, within limits set by the capitalists), groups often tend to resort to squabble, mud-slings and outright racism. People like Kenneth Eng are products of such society divided into groups competing to attract favors from charity masters. Even as the Engs hate racism targeted against them, they rarely stop to find out the true reasons behind the same.

Its utter ignorance of some people about their own history that leads to culmination and growth of racism in our world. Are young students like Kenneth Eng taught in their school about the role of black people in shaping the free America? Are young black students taught about the systematic biases that continue circulating against Asian-Americans in mainstream entertainment industry? Are young south asian students told of the role of black Muslims in enlightening the conscience of this country when it was deep asleep in evil contentment? Are young white students taught of the role of Latino working class in wealth creation of the superpower at the cost of their own exploitation over debates surrounding minimum wage? Are the minority students taught about how majority of white workers indeed are at receiving end of en exploitative economic system?

Need of the hour:
What needs to be done at this juncture is not for black commentators attacking Asian press or South Asian commentators condemning Kenneth Eng. For all we know, Eng could well become a celebrity in a few months. The root cause of racism is not one bigoted mind. Its capitalism that we largely let go unchecked for in its practice. We must address the manner in which private capital creation safeguards specific group interests rather than working for the betterment of the world. The racial tensions in the US are economic in nature. There is no place for moral preachings here. No place for Crash finale!

Lets admit and accept that as long as we refrain from critiquing the capitalist causes (private monopolies) we will have to accept racism as part and parcel of the deal. Till now, people other than white are being called in their suffixes. American history is differently noted than African-American history! How will we expect Engs of the world to even feel grateful for immense sufferings of generations of black people that must be acknowledged at every mention of America even as an idea? How will we expect white people to understand that Columbus was not after all some hero and that this land was indeed “made for you and me”, and not just for the English speaking elites. Such expectations will bear fruit only if people are treated equally irrespective of race in this country and elsewhere. However that would mean perhaps to quote Paul Robeson, “adopting the nature and politics of Soviet Union where people are treated as people, not as black or white”. Even adopting one-tenth of former Soviet policies would entail the reversal of centuries-old capital accumulation policies that are in place in a flourishing capitalism. As long as a society is built on bedrock of money as the only thing that matters--to buy health insurance to higher education--people will always be treated as secondary subjects. And where people need to be treated as secondary subjects, to refrain those very people from fomenting a revolution against their secondary status, it becomes imperative for the capital masters to wage a divide and rule policy that keeps people ignorant about their collective struggles in everyday lives. While at it, the economic system goes unchecked in its biases against working class by deliberately playing one group against another when it comes to economic parity, share holding and accountability. No wonder, thousands of discrimination cases at the workplace are filed every week based on racial disparities.

We need to shed our racialisms and embrace the collective history of struggles of working class people of this country and the world against their class antagonists in our everyday observations. Careful and conscious efforts must be made towards deconstructing problems such as Eng’s while observing the need for such racism not to take place again.

One thing is to condemn racism, which is all good, but entirely useless. Since we know no one can feel unscathed from racist attacks under capitalism which bases itself on human inequality, today’s condemned group will become the condemner tomorrow. The other thing is to actually ensure that we do not produce a new generation of racists in our own households. There would be no end to this Ghettopoly-Tsunami saga, if we did not really address the issues critically. That some Blacks despise some Asians, some Asians despise some Blacks, and some Whites despise some immigrants and vice versa is a well known fact. How many Indian families actually encourage their doting daughters to make friends with Blacks and Muslims? How many of us actually stop thinking about people beyond their colors the moment we fail to receive our due share? How long will the “good” people refuse to acknowledge that? How long we will keep condemning Kenneth Eng?

We must make every efforts to acknowledge collective contributions to working class struggles. White people should be educated about Whiteness history that must detail not the struggle of black people alone, but also the struggle of good white people while dealing with slavery and racism. Neither slavery nor racism should be treated as subjects of the past, for both are going to remain in full function as long as there is an owning class of minority people--those that traditionally were slaveowners and who own us mentally now with their monopoly media misinformation tirades.

South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) which is composed of really nice people some of whom I have had the opportunity to have interacted with, must make every effort to include black people on its editorial board. No issues of journalism that pertains to people of South Asian origin precludes people of other races. Likewise good Asian folks at the AsianWeek should include Latino people on their boards. The black television programs that have been accused of making fun of some Asians should include some enlightened Asians in their team. And together all of them should include some white people in their efforts to understand and strengthen collective efforts to uproot racism from this country.

Although racism, like sexism, is a byproduct of capitalism, capitalism will not vanish as long as we do not treat these diseases on a preventive manner. If we really wish to eradicate racism, and not merely talk about it, we must look beyond our own group interests and then we shall be able to address racism among our own communities in a more informed manner. Accusing the ‘other’ becomes easier when we are refusing to look outside our ‘own’ comforted walls. It is perhaps more true when we are dealing with a subject such as race--one that will not go away, but one we must deal with.

Time has come to look beyond our own races, and look for commonalities with the others in order to find the links that have been deliberately kept missing. Until then, we will be demanding an apology, not the solidarity. Because until then we are perhaps intending to let capitalism succeed at any cost in enslaving us while giving us an illusion of freedom, because we refuse to look beyond the windows to understand why some of us out in the rain will continue to suffer at the hand of the same system that can turn us against each other. For racism to go, we need to embrace human beings, not private wealth monopolists. For that to happen, we need to address issues of capitalism at its systematic level, not at its symptomatic level.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, Immigrant, USA, Capitalism, Law, Korea

By Saswat Pattanayak







The legend of Sean Bell will forever ring a bell.

And it is in the interest of the larger humanity to remember this. His brutal murder by the “50 Shots” of state power is a grim reminder of the times we live in: of the democratic forces being reduced to serve the plutocratic interests.

Police force is not separable from state machinery. Indeed, the state power is as big as its police power. The more the state emerges powerful, the more it is so because of the cloak of brute power it wears on its sleeve.

Often times, on its grave.

Today’s massive demonstration in the heart of New York City by people from all quarters of life displaying their disgust at American police state will go down as irrelevant by the mainstream media. Indeed, it will not be quoted by the White House officials, not aired by FOX and CNN alike. It may not even find a place in the national dailies of China (as prominently as the New York Times decides to showcase arrests of Chinese prostitutes recently, to denounce its human rights records). But the cloak of power politics eventually leads the state to its demise. And people replace the power in the struggle. Even Kissinger ate his words. And Bush is no smarter.

That a police force, serving the “most democratic”, “free” country of the world, the famed glamorized NYPD, will kill an entirely innocent black youth and pull in 50 shots to get rid of an unarmed person and his unarmed friends, should not surprise us. That, subsequently the Mayor of the city who has an eye on White House will stand by the action, should not surprise us either. And naturally enough, the mass protests today in New York City amidst the otherwise times of religious festivities, were not conducted to express surprises.

And the media, as we know, love to cover only the surprises. Alas, today was a march for justice. And that’s almost a part of daily life for the average American. The means to seek justice possibly may be disputed. Marches and demonstrations are after all the tools of hopelessness. Yet, no denying the fact that the world can ill ignore this huge gathering of thousands of people against the most powerful forces in the world. And it’s a matter of time for the tools of hopelessness to turn themselves into rage machines of power reversals. At least, if we go by what the “first world” people of the world have to say in the following footages.

(All pictures and videos by Saswat Blog. Feel free to distribute.)

Tags: Saswat, Black Power, Racism, USA, Capitalism

By Saswat Pattanayak




Click on the video above to watch Michael “Kramer” Richards speak on last Friday, as the audience enjoys a hearty laugh. In fact they were so enjoying that Richards was not stoned or kicked out. He went on to get exclusive interviews on television channels, entirely unharmed. No, the interviews were not conducted in some dingy prison cells, but atop celebrity couches for CNN consumption. The great mainstream media melting pot even aired him as he went on continuing with his racist unapologetic mode: “I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this.”

What had he said at the first place that he found those objecting to him were actually the insane people?

"Shut up! "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass."

"You can talk, you can talk, you're brave now motherfucker. Throw his ass out. He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger, look, there's a nigger!"

Politics of apology is a prerogative of the privileged. After all, the essentially underlying presumption is normalization of situation. In fact, apologies are the soothing weapons of the smooth criminals.

Michael Richards aka Kramer of the “Seinfeld” is another one in the line, following the horrible footsteps of Mel Gibson. No, I am not outraged that these celebrities became honest about how utterly inhumanely and disgustingly racists they were. But certainly outraged that these bigots are still at large in the society hogging the fancy of thousands of their young fans clearly as misguided missiles as are the Aryan sisters called “Prussian Blue”, about whom I wrote last year.

I am clearly outraged that the white supremacist society has yet not found a solution to teach itself some decent lesson in human dignity even after its long evolution as it claims, other than letting some liberal middlemen hosting quick subsequent apology shows to forgive evil intentions as some form of accidental lip-slips.

Was I hoping any better than this? Are we all hoping that the Congressmen will suddenly behave better than corrupt jerks preaching moralist pronouncements of the sexist church order? Are we hoping that the Hollywood will eventually make better movies than pathetically dumb discourse called Crash and the television stars will become any better than this sick, deafeningly sick, Michael Richards? Or that our educational institutes will finally stop bullshitting us about how World War II ended with bombing of Japan and that Ronald Reagan “apologized” a bit too late. Or that we shall be treated to some charming Oprah any better than announcing that “Dreamgirls” is the movie she loves because its made for all people irrespective of their economic class! Aha!

No, I am not expecting miracles here. For the most, the way the television culture has depraved us, a movie or a performer only remains to be graded in terms of recognition and awards. Will she win Oscars? An entirely uncritical society resting on laurels of backdoor promotional competitions to shape its yardsticks of appreciation will only be able to reflect in its churned out “talents”, its own true self.

Michael Richards is not some self-made TV star. He is not some celebrity on his own merit. He is just one of us. He is there at that stage, because we put him there to entertain us. Because most of us actually laughed like sick saddists without applying our critical minds to the television culture. Every evening, this country (and following it, most in the rest of the world) telecasts stupid comedy shows that runs late into the late night with special comedy shows, apparently by liberal by names of Stewarts and Lopezs too. There are dedicated channels and prominent companies producing “stand-up comedies” 24/7. The culture of humor in capitalistic marketplace is the most potent ingredient to normalize the otherwise actual tension that prevails in the society.

Humor as capitalistic agent of illusive consensus:

Racial tensions are not some exaggerated fictionalized accounts of hyped media reports. They are for real. In fact, in every racist country from Britain to France, they are the only things that’re real. Denial of privilege and race-blindness is the prerogative of the few elites representing the historically oppressing racial category that manufactures the divisions to distinguish humans on basis of color skin. One would have wished the Apartheid ended. One would have perhaps also imagined that the black issues were resolved following desegregation. But wishes and hopes do not make a society run.

The reality is that the racial tensions are necessary consequence of free trade capitalism. It is capitalism that’s the creator of racism through its patriarchal control of private property by means of subjugating human beings as slaves to further the profit consolidation of the masters class. In fact, for capitalism to grow and further its own interests, racism needs to be furthered too. New forms of racism will take place of old forms of racism, just as credit cards are replacing old cash circulation. But the essential implementation of divide and rule will forever remain the cornerstone for the wealth-grabbers to stay in power over those that earlier used to remain as slaves, and now as freemarket consumers. Earlier they were house slaves, today they are software slaves. Difference is in the degrees.

Likewise, earlier the subjugation of society used to take place through sheer brutal force. As the levels of sophistication increased, the territorial conquests were replaced by imperialistic expansions. And these days, via more implicitly sophisticated means such as words defined by the masters’ dictionaries as soothing: words such as liberty, democracy, family, happiness, elections, television, comedies and organic food.

So what we have is the culture of comedies in the most obnoxious of places. In the most inappropriate settings. During the most pathetic times. Never in the history of humanity, so many people of the world felt so very helpless at their inability to prevent wars of mass destructions launched by the most unqualified of people to assume leaderships. And yet during days like these, the television shows and comedy films are making the biggest of business. During a time when the entertainment industry should have been focusing on agitating the people through critical education about their role in reversing world order, we have all the world television channels owned by five old men and the film industries run by people like Tarantinos (another N-word hyperactivist). And all of them have readymade shows to make people stay relaxed. How will we know if we need to be relaxed? The celebrities tell us when is the time to relax and how to feel relaxed after undergoing body jobs. How we shall know this is the time to laugh? The background clap sequences on comedies will ask us to laugh along the scenes. Such perversity of underestimation of collective human intelligence is a compelling tale of how far have we regressed in our movements.

What to do with Michael Richards?

Nothing. Ideally he should be jailed for "fifty years with a fork up on his ass". That’s the minimum verdict that he deserves. But that’s not even a portion of what we must all undergo if we envisage our future as active agents of humanity, and not some remote controlled passive recipients of messages and bullets.

All of us must daily observe a couple of hours introspecting about our own inactions, apathy, indifference, involvement and withdrawal from the largely racist world that has been a direct creation as a result of our collective indecisiveness. While at it, we must realize that we need to be as honest with ourselves as Richards and Gibson were with themselves, not just when we are angry, but throughout the 24 hours everyday. If overcoming the deep love for our own dominant supremacist race at the cost of degrading those we oppressed becomes too difficult, we must be prepared to die the way that abominable creature and our racist epitome called Hitler ended his life. We don’t need another television show which the neo-nazis like Michael Richards pay to apologize. We need Richards and his likes to be forced to introspect and change. And if they do not “amend”…..Well, they better amend.

I wish I could say all that I wanted to. But unlike some elite white folks in this country and their counterparts in much of Europe, I certainly do not enjoy "Hate Speech" privilege anyway. And neither do I want to enjoy any of this. Good for them.

Tags: Saswat, Media, Racism, USA, Technology, Capitalism

Got this from Dr TSB of the media blog Drums in the Global Village.


Hey, Folks -

Yup, the first 6 hours of EYES ON THE PRIZE will, finally, be re-broadcast nationally on PBS’ “The American Experience” on the first three Mondays in October (Oct. 2, 9, 16) at 9:00 pm (check local listings). They’ll air 2 hours each Monday.

Hour 1 - “Awakenings” (1954-1965) — Emmett Till and Montgomery Bus Boycott

Hour 2 - “Fighting Back” (1957-62) — School Desegregation, including Little Rock and ‘Ol Miss.

Hour 3 - “Ain’t Scared of Your Jails” (1960-61) — Sit-ins and Freedom Rides

Hour 4 - “No Easy Walk” (1961-63) — Albany, Ga; March on Wash.; Birmingham

Hour 5 - “Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-64) — Medgar Evers and Miss. Freed. Summer

Hour 6 - “Bridge to Freedom” ( 1965) - Selma March

**Important - PBS is waiting to see the audience response to the first series before it commits to air the 2nd EYES series(8 hours). Though the first series is really inspirational, it is the 2nd series that is most relevant to the issues we’re dealing with today: the war; growing gap between rich and poor, etc. (It’s in the 2nd series that you see footage of the Dr. King speech in which he calls for “a radical redistribution of economic power.&rdquo It’s also in the 2nd series that you get the murder of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, the establishment of COINTELPRO, and the Attica Rebellion.

So, it would be great if folks would call their PBS station and let them know you: a) appreciate seeing the first series again and b) hope they’ll also air the second series.

Both the first AND second series will be available on VHS and DVD through PBS Video — but ONLY as institutional sales — no home video.

Thanks!
- judy
(Judy Richardson)

Tags: Saswat, History, Black Power, Racism, USA, Media

By Saswat Pattanayak

Finally, the fraud is over. The conmen have been caught on camera. Two teams sans any genuine emotions of either tears or laughter came together to celebrate the end of month-long television opera that promised them millions of dollars for putting up several Acts and Scenes that would have put Shakespearian drama to shame.

If there ever was a match-fixing ever caught on camera so boldly, it was the World Cup Soccer 2006. The final match between France and Italy just basked in it. Amidst the earlier charges of match-fixing scandals that the Italian team has been caught with, this was the only logical result the world would have seen. It’s a dirty white fascist trick that the Europeans exhibited with charm and carried on with élan. Yet again.

A pathetically mediocre player by the name of Zinedine Zidane who has been hogging media highlights since many years now proved his mettle in this tournament as well. Not just by playing horrendous, but also highly prepared, as certain to make Italy (not France) win!

As a player who performs good only on penalty shots (possibly also because of misuse of his position) he knew that Italy was supposed to win this final. Perhaps he was told, and perhaps he was part of this act all along. After all, tomorrow was going to be a day when the world would have watched one after the other card fall in the recent history of soccer match-fixing scandal, since the day after the world up (July 10) was about to discuss the charges, that involved top football clubs of the world. Resultantly, in a Hansie Cronje (South African White Cricket Team Captain) act, Zidane committed a career suicide deliberately just when his penalty skills would have led to opening of Pandora’s Mafia Box the day after.

And just before he headbutted Marco Materazzi in the chest, he made sure that the best French player in its history, Thierry Henry was sent away from the field. The only players in French team who were genuinely giving their best shots have been incidentally black players. The only ones who made every attempt to make France lose in this championship were the only non-black players in the team: one, the goalkeeper Fabien Barthez who was so easily a loser that the Italian bullshitters at penalty were not even looking at the net while kicking the ball—they were certain that their French accomplish was anyway going to miss the ball. Remember this guy was with Olympique Marseille club and faced match fixing charges in 2000. The second non-black was the French immigrant to Argentina-back-to-France David Trezeguet. This guy obviously knew what he was doing. The racist French crowd which tolerated slurs against Henry was the people who always favored Trezeguet over Henry all along. And third, their crown prince, the so-called “master-of-the-game” Zidane who knew well that Henry was absolutely the best one in the game against Italy and could spring a surprise during overtime. And so the best football player of the tournament was asked to leave long before the game was over.

After that little nasty white trick to make sure that Italy wins the world cup and saves the faces of frauds, Zidane knew the world believed him to be the best penalty shootout player. This image had helped him emerge as one of the richest skippers (Zidane was signed by Real Madrid for a world record €73m). But now if he had to continue in the game and score the penalty, he could be out of the deal.

So what was at stake?
If France would have won, professional soccer would have lost. By professional, I mean the profiteering industry of corporate sponsorships that insures legs and runs campaigns in the name of football. By professional, I mean a racist sports hierarchy that prevents Asians and Africans to play in the best possible circumstances, or even allow them to be fair competitors. By professional, I mean a game that celebrates match-fixing, racist slurs, anti-black monkey chants as part of sports ethics. This neo-nazi professional sports is headquartered in Europe, and currently being bossed by Italian merchants who fix the referees, and the rules. The players are betted upon, and the clubs are pitted against aggressively. After the Germans admitted of match fixing last year and the Italian top clubs were caught on telephonic communication of fixing matches this year, the world was awaiting decisions. The decisions would have affected majority of Italian players and countless other players whose names would have been disclosed in the process. It would have all exposed the mafia involvement in soccer. And that’s not what FIFA is supposed to stand for. So the only way it could have been averted was through the victory of Italy. This is the only way to ensure that people celebrate Italian team than deride it or accuse it any more. And the Italian prosecutors who have asked the clubs to face courts tomorrow would be forced to lose face.

Zidane: World Champion! The Golden Boy of Italy

Trzeguet (right): The Chosen One

Barthez: Future of Football

The mafia swim and sink together. As usual, they decided they will swim together this time.

And France lost. What an irony. After some of the magnificent performance by the team (all except three, are formidable black players who have not erred for once), the team’s captain, without any provocation and certainly not any compulsion, and obviously not while the ball was being chased, turned back on a walking Italian player and went and hit him on his chest. Deliberately so that he would be declared out. So that he would not have to shoot penalty kick.

This is ridiculous. Such things are not done even by school kids. Not done in a village tournament in eastern India. Certainly never imagined to be done by the captain of a fabulous team in the world cup final match!

Aftermath of World Cup Shame!
A few white men again have conned the world by practicing downright racism, unfair game tactics and scandalous match-fixings. Strict action must be taken against Zidane for violating the basic spirits of the game: respect for the audience. None of us must be taken for a ride for a month in the name of euphoria if the matches were all along been fixed. Since it has proven to have happened now, Zidane must face the music. He knew he was retiring rich, and he messed up with his career. But the gains that he has amassed by making certain that Italy win this world cup are things he has to be made responsible for.

One knew Italy is one of the worst playing teams that has ever reached the final of a world cup. But the dirty match-fixers as they are (with 13 out of 23 players in tainted clubs), now they have even bought the French captain in the world cup final. But amidst all media created enthusiasm, people should remember that its no Hobson’s choice for soccer audience. The choice is clear. The “qualified teams” in this mess called World Cup must be banned from playing professional football until the rules of the game are changed to become more inclusive and less monopolistic; and the Italian team (and their frontrunner friend Zidane) are thoroughly investigated on grounds for match-fixings.

Tags: Saswat, Sports, France, Italy, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

4th of July was celebrated as Italian Victory day here with red, white and green all around in big honking cars, loaded with obscene shouting fans. NYPD police watched in silence by the road sides as long chain of cars went on breaking all possible traffic rules one after the other. Some people on the sidewalks might have cursed them for forgetting the 4th of July as an American day. Yet most anyway thought they were more Europeans that day than European-Americans. So the whistling continued; the sloganeering and even blocking the streets.

One would guess it was celebration time. But somehow deep inside, I was terrified by the look of it. What would have happened if as many Asians people would have blocked the road like this and shouted ‘Dil Dil Pakistan” for its Cricket match victory over India? Or blacks of America would have protested by blocking roads for one reason or the other, among so many? Would they not have been all locked up for traffic violations? Or for criminal misconduct? I am sure either of these would have been the fate. But for thousands of unruly Italians or pseudo-Italians on the rampage, not even their licenses were checked that day! Heads popping out of the windows of vans, most standing atop roofless trucks. Groups of people ecstatic to the point of sheer madness. After hours of honking and endless noises, I don’t know when the fans must have retreated. White Power?

To me, it seemed as cheap and as outlandish as the whole drama of Football world cup. Like most games today, Football in the age of globalization has become just another get-rich game involving criminal frauds, and outright racism. These need to be visited for serious appraisal, lest we all merely end up chanting yet another corporate theme song for football hooligans.

The famed frauds:
The Italian football federation prosecutor has finally called for the relegation of Italian clubs AC Milan, Juventus, Lazio and Fiorentina for their involvement in the match-fixing scandal.

This is the country that has now gone to the finals, possibly to win! Hosting all major football clubs in the world, Italy sits pretty at the Mafia position of world soccer. The only difference is this time, even bigger crimes are being conducted. Prosecutor Stefano Palazzi has already charged a total of 30 “subjects” for a range of illegalities. Thirty? Yes.

It started in May this year when Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi was heard telling referees chief Pierluigi Pairetto over phone about which match officials he wanted assigned to certain games! Yeah it stinks as bad as this. And the worst?

Thirteen of Italy's 23-man World Cup squad play for the four clubs that are under scrutiny. That’s more than half of Italian world cup team! So now we know how they won? Well, let’s ask the Germans. No better than their Italian frauds, earlier last year, German referee Robert Hoyzer had already admitted to match-fixing charges.

So one fixes the win, and the other fixes the loss. And the audience worldover are thrilled to television reality shows on the stadium!

In shame, Italian football federation (FIGC) president Franco Carraro and vice-president Innocenzo Mazzini had already resigned in May because they along with Juventus chairman Antonio Giraudo, are among those under formal investigation. And only last week, on June 23rd, Italian football league president Adriano Galliani, the vice president of AC Milan, has finally tendered his resignation.

In a conversation in May this year, with Italian sport journalist Giancarlo Galavotti, BBC Sport had interesting findings. Galavotti compared Italian soccer regime with Fascism, and said “People would not admit to being fascist, but they were concealing or pretending that they never were, switching sides with alarming ease. There are plenty who are saying that nothing has been proven and nobody has been indicted of anything yet. But the gut feeling among the vast majority of Italians is that this is scandal the likes of which there hasn't been before, at least in European football.”

Fascists? Oh yeah, you realize when you hear their slogans in uptown New York. But what does the Italian coach think?

Following the 2-0 triumph over the hosts, Italian coach Marcello Lippi said the match fixing scandal had actually helped bring the team together! “Certainly, initially, all the confusion that came out two or three months ago created a desire and a determination to respond and show that Italian football is effective, real and strong on a technical and moral level. It helped to create a tight group.” said Lippi. The critical question here is if technical and moral level ever lacked in the team back then?

Not only committing frauds, but also justifying them comes easy to Lippi. Why the trial of the conmen have been scheduled to be held only after the world cup final is over: they do not want to upset the playing team while the tournament is on. But it is also not a very bad guess to presume that the accused will be let go scot-free once Italy wins the fixed world cup too. If Italians can behave in a foreign land like insane hooligans on the loose, one can imagine how the final results will have them, resulting in complete chaos around the judgments! Amidst all apprehensions, what should not escape our attention at this point or future is that match fixings (referee assignments!) are being done by club managers who own half of Italian playing team squad… Someone has to take responsibility? How about first finishing investigations and then only let the millionaires play with each other, if anyone is still left?

The Racists:
In some specific games, while clearing the football fields after the euphoria, one finds banana skins and peanuts all over. Why? Because some or at least one player in the teams were black. Monkey noises are all the time reported in European stadium among audience to deride the black people as monkeys who need bananas and peanuts.

These cheering crowds are the mainstay of professional football. They bring in the moolah, they sport the jerseys, they bring in the rallies and pamper the players with corporate sponsors by making them popular. The quid pro quo relations between racist audience and their role models have promoted football to emerge as not only the largest played game in human history, but also the most racist.

Only recently, Cameroonian FC Barcelona star Samuel Eto'o almost walked off the pitch after being showered by “fans” with monkey chants and peanuts. Last November, Messina’s Marc Zoro picked up the ball and threatened a walk out if racist chants continued from Inter Milan fans.

In November 2002 monkey chants were hurled at Manchester United's Dwight Yorke by Sunderland fans during their Worthington Cup tie at the Stadium of Light. In the same month, Leicester City’s British-born Turkish star Muzzy Izzet was loudly booed by Leeds United fans each time he touched the ball during their Premier League clash. In September that year, fans watching England’s friendly match against France in Paris racially abused Andy Cole and chanted “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk”.

Few selected recent racist incidents that Football Unites, Racism Divides mentions include how in 2004, Ron Atkinson resigned from his job with ITV after being heard on television describing Chelsea’s Marcel Desailly as “what is known in some schools as a f*****g lazy, thick n****r”.

These are continuance of shameful legacies. A decade ago, in the wake of Deptford Fire where 13 black youths were burnt to death, a chant in soccer stadium that could be heard at Millwall was: “We all agree, Niggers burn better than petrol”.

Similar chants used by national soccer teams include:
“Stand by the Union Jack
Send those niggers back
If you're white, you're alright
If you're black, send 'em back”

Although racist chanting is considered unlawful only since the 1991 Football (Offences) Act, the law is actually a big loophole. Chanting is merely defined as the "repeated uttering of any words or sounds in concert with one or more others". Hence, an individual shouting racist abuse can only be charged under the 1986 Public Order Act for using "obscene and foul language at football grounds".

More creative racist slurs have also helped in letting the crowd overcome legal boundaries. In 1994, Holland audience were chanting
"Get back on your jam jar
Get back on your jam jar
La,la,la,la, La,la,la,la."



New Age Racism-The Neo-Nazis:
Since last two years, scores of neo-nazi tactics have been displayed with audacities that would put human beings to shame. Not to these fans! Four British fans were fined and banned from matches for 4 and 5 years for racially abusing Birmingham’s Dwight Yorke. Emile Heskey and Andy Cole were racially abused by Slovakia fans. Black players were racially abused by Macedonia fans. Motherwell’s Steven Hammel was prosecuted for racist insults towards St Johnstone’s Mohammed Sylla. Asian referee Gurnam Singh successfully sued the FA for racial discrimination. FA was fined £70,000 for pitch invasion and racist abuse by England fans at Euro 2004 qualifier v Turkey.

Last August, ten men were jailed for upto 18 months for conducting violent attack on a Portuguese-run pub after England's defeat to Portugal in Euro 2004 on 24th June. They were part of a mob which shouted racial abuse and hurled missiles smashing 37 windows at the pub in Thetford, Norfolk, leaving eight people injured and staff and customers forced to barricade themselves inside. Last November, Anderlecht’s Nenad Jestrovic was sent off for racially abusing Liverpool’s Momo Sissoko in a Champions League match at Anfield.

This year itself, Peterborough manager Mark Wright was suspended, and then sacked, for gross misconduct after a dispute stemming from the alleged racial abuse of defender Sean St Leger. He had resigned as manager of Oxford United after being fined and given a 4-match ban by the FA for making allegedly racist remarks at black referee Joe Ross.

In March this year, 39 people were charged following disorder and racist chanting at an FA Cup tie in Stoke between Stoke City and Birmingham City in February.
Kick it Out says fans, ethnic minority communities and players are still racially abused, particularly at the grassroots level where racist abuse is common in amateur football on our parks at the weekend.

What now:
Nothing has changed over last few months either. In fact, the inaugural edition of the Streetfootballworld festival has kicked off in Berlin. But the teams of Nigeria and Ghana have been refused entry visa!
The Streetfootballworld festival 06 is an official element of the Artistic and cultural program to the 2006 FIFA World Cup and is funded under FIFA’s Football for Hope-Program and the German Federal Ministry for Youth. Basically, even in July 2006, the European conglomerates are practicing widespread racism.

The silver lining is that there have been few campaigns to end racism in football. But they have come a cropper since institutional support obviously leans towards the cash rich sponsors, who do not give two hoots. The Campaign for Racial Equality (CRE), the Football Supporters Association (FSA) and the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) have all launched initiatives to try and rid football grounds of racism and encourage more people from ethnic minorities to attend matches.

Chairman of Kick It Out, Herman Ouseley has opined that more black players should rise up and protest, now that they are at a better league at least as members of national teams. “Why do you think the incident with Spanish fans happened at Bernabeu last month? Was it because of Aragones' earlier comment about Thierry Henry [being 'a Black s**t']? Or why now?
The Black players of Arsenal should have insisted that they would not play in Europe till they got a full apology to Henry from Aragones and until the Spanish FA reprimanded him. Black players in national sides (in England and France) and in the Premier League are in a very strong position now to say that there is no way this kind of racism can continue, that they won't take it any more.” If not many, at least Ronaldhino has come out speaking against current racism in the game, and that could be a saving grace for a world cup that is witnessing duels between racist giants.

French: The other finalists
Just as Italy is infamous for its fraudulent acts by any means, its contender France is a cruel joke indeed. All the while highlighting Zidane as its star and skipper, France would actually not have been in the finals if not for its black stars!

This is important to understand especially given the recent official apathy that French have taken towards French black youths that caused widespread protests last year.

Check this BBC report for example. In the entire story, there is not much mention of the player who actually made the victory goal. Only at the last paragraph the reporter writes “Goalscorer Henry”, not even attributing him with his full name Thierry Henry. By contrast, Zidane is very respectfully written about, his photograph splashed and he is called the man of the match. He is quoted in the headline! He is written about in the intro.


Yes it’s the same Thierry whom the Spanish players derided as black s**t. And the French never made a condition that unless the Spanish apologize they would not play their team. As for Henry, he is actually the brightest of all French players. With his fifth world cup goal he is ranked joint second with Michael Platini on the all time scorers list for France. And in the present world cup, out of total 7 goals scored by France so far, Henry has scored the highest: 3. One of the greatest living footballers in the world, he was also the top scorer in 1998 World Cup which France had bagged.

And yet it’s Zidane who takes the cup. Why? At times answers are really simple. There is no need to beat around the bush here.

A look at French team would show why there was not much jubilation when it entered the Finals. But then that’s a story for another day. It’s a story of granting favor, making laws, prohibiting opportunities, and minting big money. Which is why one feels tempted to ask one last race-based question for the world’s largest played game: Where are the players from world’s largest continent? Asia?

Tags: Saswat, Sports, Racism, France, Capitalism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
--Jean-Paul Sartre


I apologize for the delay in posting this entry, but I guess I had to wait till the mainstream media no more confused readers with the “hot topic” any longer. I had to wait until after they would have well done away with the headlines and sensations and the matter were allowed to be relegated to backburner. And I realize now is such a time when suddenly the matter of “Reservation” is not being brought about any longer. Its no more being contextualized, as yet again a socio-economic defeat on part of the lower class struggle of India.

However, I will begin with the comment of a long standing reader of this blog. In my last post, Friend Sanjay has kindly posted a comment worth introspecting over. I will do it here.

While thanking him for his continuous critical appraisals for posts here, let it be stated that despite staunch opposition to some of his views, I have always held them with utmost respect. Many a times I have felt like some views that are reactionary to the point of resulting in further ambiguity in progressive views must be discouraged. But truthfully, I have never “censored” a single view so far.

There are certain difficulties in indulging in intellectual discourses when one relates to the self. While walking down the less taken roads, one always feels tempted to stop by more often, and ask the critical questions, “Could I have been wrong throughout the trip? How come the journey is so lonesome? Is it because this road is not going to provide any solution? Am I merely dreaming that things would take place, whereas in reality the road that most people have already taken is the one which is fulfilling dreams every passing moment? People are making records, breaking records, appearing on prime time shows, winning applauds, gold medals and Hollywood breaks. And I am here philosophizing against the notion of success and dream of a society sans “individual successes”. But then how is it logical to state that “their” dreams are any inferior to my own? Am I the sole custodian of notion of what constitutes “societal good”? Where do I intersect, accept, and carry on, because if the struggle is for all, at least majority needs to approve me at some point.”

I am not indifferent towards these series of questions which challenge the roots of my thoughts, opinions, views, and actions. I have known all the while, that in fact, views that are opposing one’s own are the only views that have any intrinsic values worth cherishing. Only through opposing tooth and nail most existing views, have I learnt anything in life. And now why the resistance to be opposed, when it comes to my own worldviews?

Sanjay provides the answer already: He says, “As you are not part of the society which is opposing reservation, I too refuse to belong to a society which develops selective amnesia in attributing traits.” It merely implies that in the nature and process of forming views, we choose sides. At times we are flexible in the face of new facts to change our views. At times we are not. Personally for me, I have changed many of my views (on God, on Salman Khan or on Indian Cricket team) several times in life basing on newer facts or facets. I am sure all of us do the same too.

Then is the struggle to impose (or you may say, influence) views a struggle to win non-members into one’s side? For a professional politician it is a desirable thing to do (hence I have problems with people who think ‘vote bank politics’ is a bad thing. I mean that’s the whole point of politics in a democracy). But for those, including myself, who do not aspire to be political candidates, what sort of struggle would that be? A struggle, which Sanjay refuses to be with me in?

This is a struggle to ‘understand’ opposing viewpoints. Now the word ‘understanding’ is more complex than it looks like. We need to give time to, contextualize, empathize, agree with reason, disagree with justification—all of these and more, in order to merely understand someone or someone’s views.

On a public forum like this, the purpose is just this: to understand each other and each other’s views depending on where we come from.

Sanjay’s concerns are obviously genuine. Are reservations going to be the solution?

A right-wing political solution?

The answer is, I do not know. But the only alternative which nays the reservations has at least proven that it would mean further systematic marginalization of the dispossessed. When reservation proposal was being discussed, I was not exulted either. I knew for certain that it is a move to pacify, not to agitate. It was a step to bow down to reactionaries, not to give vent to the oppressed. It was actually so reactionary a step that all we found out after the bill being tabled was an unforeseen unity among the upper castes, a unanimous media support to their causes, a never-before-seen coverage of their strikes, and most importantly an organized efforts by the opportunistic elites in such an organized fashion, that it must have put the neo-nazis to shame. Reservations debates, if at all helped the elites to recognize each others’ needs all the more and made them get united so much that right wing parties gaped. What BJP could never achieve in terms of uniting the upper castes (since half of them did not want any of Advani yatras anyway), the Congress at the center had achieved: notwithstanding their party affiliations, in fact notwithstanding their political standpoints or lack thereof, irrespective of the states they came from (not Gujarat or UP, but entire India, South and the North, East and the West), upper caste peoples showed solidarity with each other that must have prided the supremacists. Clearly BJP is going to win the next poll. Thank the communists for that this time!

(Racists of India, Unite?)


Whose Identity?

It is important to understand that the contemporary history of India is not that of a struggle for Individual rights or liberty. It is struggle for group rights. This is a slightly different scenario than ever in the past. The group identity struggle that the SC/ST/OBCs are going through is because of their conferred identity. They are being discriminated against, not because they are merely poor, not because they are merely uneducated, not merely because they overwhelmingly reside in states of India which are sidelined, BUT because of their caste status. It’s an identity struggle. It’s going on not just in India today, but all over the world. Indigenous people are fighting to reclaim their lands. To reclaim their lost dignity. There is a heartening gesture here, though. The demand to ‘reclaim’ is a demand that should have been logically bloody. Simply because their loss of land at the first place was done at the cost of bloody dominations of oppressors. But unlike the oppressor classes, the indigenous people are not predisposed to violence (else they would win hands down any day in organizing efforts at dethroning the minority upper castes). Secondly, they have proved to be more law-abiding than the oppressor classes themselves. Let me elucidate.

Its only natural for the society ruled by oppressor class, to already frame certain laws to rule out any bloody struggle as ‘illegal’ because the ‘evolution’ of the oppressor classes have metamorphosed into a consensual class. Consequently, this society to garner its position of power, takes onto itself the mammoth sense of generosity to either ‘grant’ or ‘dispel’ the need to let its prisoners-0f-wars a chance to compete with itself. When it finds, as in areas of agriculture that the lower class people cannot stake claim to superiority in face of industrial society, it makes no issues. When it finds, as in areas of primary education or adult education, where the lower class can learn how to get empowered, (but in reality are never so…its like knowing how to draw rockets does not land one in the moon…one needs to be part of a multi-billion dollar industry for that actualization), there is no problem either. Only when the matter is evaluated at par with elite positions (medical or physical science as education or administrator and priest as profession), that there seems to be unwavering difficulties.



All’s well that ends well?

Reservation will never be the solution. But it is a definite challenge to the status quo thought process of taking the majority of people for granted. And that is why it’s important to revisit the issue of reservation. At the core of it, some of my friends are absolutely right about the upper-caste students. Sure, they do not think like the politicians. They do not think in terms of castes. Students in the classroom today do not consider any group as untouchables. Quite accurate in some cities of India.

But the grim reality is that it breeds something more dangerous. At least where untouchability is practiced, there is a caste consciousness that translates into class struggles or similar identity struggles. As we know from experience that opposite of love is not hate, but indifference; what happens among the highbrows is that they profess a caste-blindness that’s so indifferent to caste issues that it glorifies the oppressor class as the egalitarian tolerant group!

While practicing the caste-blindness, the issue of historical oppression is bid goodbye. Essentially whole generations of students are going to graduate (and their children in future) from schools and colleges without an iota of knowledge in field of caste struggles in India (except those who are interested in studying Sociology or History as subjects—that too if the Saffronites don’t take over NCERT). Rest of the students are not going to be studying the unique tribal history, the unique Dravidian struggle, the unique struggles of the OBCs, who are at times depicted as part of the Dalitbahujans. The struggle that is not religious, but caste-based. A history where people still do not think they are Hindus, only that they think they are Kurumaas, and Chakaali in the South India or Bhandari, and Goudaa in East India.


Caste-denial: In whose interest?

Although Hindus would love to include all these peoples as belonging to the most “ancient” religion, and although the Brahmins and upper caste people do not go around talking about their castes, there is need for a complex understanding here. Upper caste people of India need to realize that the caste-structure had been shaped by the upper castes themselves for “their” own convenience. And hence they take it quite for granted without having to feel burdened by the weight of caste on them. By actually not talking about their castes, they absolve themselves of their well-deserved “guilt”. For the Dalitbahujans, however, it’s quite a different type of struggle. This struggle for caste assertion is one of an identity, not one that they can take for granted. This is one that’s not going to make them live easily. It’s a painful daily reminder, and they have no other course except to assert their snatched rights. The surnames are their characters. They have to live upto them, and yet surpass them. It’s not a privilege, but a burden. Like a wealthy person taking money for granted, the upper caste people carry their surnames without having to think about it twice. But like a poor person valuing the small thatched cottage, the lower caste people even will look at universal wind as enemy to their rooftops.

In India or elsewhere, there needs to be more studies of caste and race, precisely because the oppressor classes have almost taken it for granted. In America, Critical Whiteness Studies need to take place more vigorously to make most white students realize the invisible burden they have imposed on the people of color by means of color discrimination. In India, the Critical Brahmin Studies need to be institutionalized for the upper caste people to understand complexities of caste and socio-economic well being that are influenced by their stoic silences, if not outright display of prejudices. Minority studies are fine to “understand” a differential culture (Asian-American Studies, or Black Cultural Studies), but what we need also is the Brahmin Studies or White Studies, just to “teach” the history of their oppressive culture.

Currently to the powerful White males of the world, there is just a big fuss about need for affirmative action or of assertion of rights of colored people, because according to them, most of the issues have been resolved, now that “marginalized” people have attained “success” already in many spheres. Likewise the Brahmins or upper castes of India think there is no need for reservation because so many Dalit and OBC people are becoming successful. They cite the incidents of chief ministers, sportspersons and plain rich men among “lower castes” who have rode the ladder as examples to justify doing away with any proactive reservation policy.

What, then, is the picture? Have these traditionally marginalized people not attained success enough so as not to need any more reservation or affirmative policies in place? The mainstream answer is yes. Alternative cries are no. What’s the deal?



Part II


The anti-reservation lobby cites success of lower caste people as examples to denounce reservations. If the progress is being done anyway, what is the need of further reservation? The initial period when lower caste people should have been given a chance, has passed already. So there should be no more extension of such scope, let alone any proliferation of further reservations. Such run few arguments on the right.

On the left front, some even justify reservation as means to attain more success just as a form of ripple effect. Some arguments favor reservations because it will alone let the lower caste people to become successful in life, because the competition is indeed tough otherwise. We must build more access to the people with disabilities, after all.

Although I would still support the Left mainstream argument, I tend to think both core arguments primarily are dealing with the same question. And once the question is pre-determined, we are not going to find a radical solution to that. After all, as Audre Lorde had so rightly said, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

I think the question needs to be reassessed entirely. The alternative question I pose about this whole issue (and thereby my peripheral arguments) is about the concept of “Success” itself. As we know already, success in capitalistic society is not just determined, or competed for, but also ‘defined’ by owners of means of production. This is because Capitalism is that phase of human history which aims to suit the least number of people. Prior to capitalism, there were phases of history, possibly more draconic: that of kings and slaveowners and feudal lords. But there were constant competitions, and rivalry among them. Some kind of ‘balance of power’ was always being maintained. There was no clear cut class division on a world scale. The working class and the ruling class were ill-defined.

But with Capitalism, arrived Monopoly. Only a few hundreds of people in the entire world ruled over the rest of us. They own not just wealth, but also own the yardstick to value the wealth. They not just own the knowledge economy, they also own the yardstick to value what passes on as knowledge. They don’t just own managers, they own the philosophy behind creating managers. Not just doctors, but also the rationale behind entrance tests to medical profession.

Capitalism, unlike every other previous stages of human societal development established the yardsticks, which we shall call here as Standards. Earlier there were hundreds of Emperors. With Capitalism, it had to be just one! Earlier there were hundreds of kingdoms. With Capitalism, it was reduced to just a G-7. Earlier there were skilled people respected in every corner of the world. With Capitalism, they began to be respected only in certain professions at certain corners while working for certain sectors. Earlier phases of history were horribly bad. Capitalism became merely grotesquely inhuman.


What are the Standards?

Let’s begin with Gods. After all, Capitalism thrives on the belief that God created the universe and made it a standard assumption. The biggest testimony of that can be found on every dollar bill. “In God We Trust” is the single most famous used slogan in everyday exchanges of capitalism. But with thousands of tribal gods, nature gods and no gods, there used to appear quite a competition. And with majority of people either not believing in a single God or believing in their personal Gods, it had invariably become difficult to conquer the lands populated by such unrestricted folks. God needed to be standardized. In name of spiritualism or in name of organized religions, godmen and gods had to be proclaimed on ranks. Consequently what happened were multi-fold. One Christianity spread throughout the globe as it had been hijacked into becoming the religion of the oppressing White man. “Missionaries” were established in most parts of the world to propagate this religion. Based on Biblical myths, a religion which had absolutely no cultural commonality with indigenous peoples (in terms of names of characters or nature of redemption), this soon emerged as the standard religion. Two, basing on it, other oppressive religions (according to geographical peculiarities) also took charge in their lands to standardize beliefs. Hence for example, in India, when it’s about Gods, the standardized Gods stand out everywhere. They are themes for mythological television programs. They are Gods after whom national holidays are observed. They are the designated Gods. Brahma, Vishnu, Laxmi, Parvati, Shiv, Ganesh: these dominant Hindu Gods were used in the process to kill the Other or Lesser Gods. Gods worshipped by lower caste people in India (who the Census includes as Hindus) are entirely different, unwept, unsung and almost condemned by the general society (that make up the law, media, schools and parliament).

Kancha Ilaiah, a Dalitbahujan activist says in his book “Why I am not a Hindu” (Samya, 1996),

“Even a Brahmin family might talk about Pochamma, Maisamma or Ellemma, but not with the same respect as they would about Brahma, Vishnu, Maheswara. For them Pochamma and Maisamma are ‘Sudra’ Goddesses and supposed to be powerful but in bad, negative ways. A Pochamma according to them does not demand the respect that Lakshmi or Saraswathi do, because Lakshmi and Saraswathi are supposed to be ideal wives of ideal husbands, whereas no one knows who Pochamma’s husband is, any more than they can name Maisamma’s husband. This is the reason why no Brahmin or Baniya child bears the name of Pochamma, Maisamma or Ellamma, whereas in our families these are revered names and we name our children after these Goddesses…. It does not strike an average Dalitbahujan consciousness that these Goddesses do not have husbands and hence need not be spoken of derogatorily. This is because there are many widows in our villages who are highly respected whose stature is based on their skills at work and their approach towards fellow human beings…”

After establishing a standard in religion, and the icons representing the ‘legitimate’ religions (the history of Native-American experience should not be lost on us either, where they were on gun points forced to convert to Christianity, in their very own lands), the religious principles themselves are standardized. The hierarchy of families, the sanctity of marriage, the importance on child-bearing might all seem as comfortable as the essence of any religion or God. But just like the religions, these “value systems” help perpetuate the male dominance of women, in which male property ownership becomes the key. Single or divorced women, unwed mothers, and people of alternative sexual orientations are systematically exploited on economic grounds and the laws to that effect are set on the justice walls even to this day. Conservation of traditional hierarchy, male supremacy, Christian ‘family values’ etc continue to dictate the value system.

In such conservation movement, God (or the justices or president’s addresses) becomes pretty much irrefutable. A former president of Harvard (who stepped down recently) University whose tenure saw the reactionary findings on affirmative action, and whose personal understanding of causes behind women’s underrepresentation in Math and Sciences echoed that of many elite professors of India who attribute similar causes behind lower caste peoples’ ‘failure’ in technical field, also found need to conserve the conservative thoughts around the issues. Lawrence H Summers said to his defense, “My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization.”

“Intrinsic human nature”? Summers thinks it was a recent scientific discovery. Perhaps true. But it is so recent because the community of those elite scientists themselves could have been driven by agendas, their research funding agencies more so, and people like Summers for believing in them and citing these studies, even more so. The agenda is simple: to not diversify the field of science and engineering in order for women to come and shake the male hardcore foundation. Similar cases exist exactly in India where upper castes have had problems with lower caste people rising up from shining shoes to claim that given better climate to make up for their social loss, they can challenge the ‘scientists’ off their mindsets.

Capitalism while working on the superstructure of culture, politics and society takes help of first ‘Standardizing’ even before influencing. Standardization helps in dispelling any authoritarian tactics. It works smoothly and creates necessary illusions that are comforting and numbing at the same time.

Hence when the standards of beauty are envisaged, Capitalism dictates the norms of blue-eyes, 36-24-36 vitals, the designer clothes. So much so that the terms it devises to further normalize thought process are “Fashion”, “Model” etc. Model is a term that goes unquestioned. I mean in a way, everyone wants to be a Model to others. Or for that matter no one wants to be “unfashionable”. Standards of ‘good’ and ‘desirable’ are carefully orchestrated, pretty much like the way the term “Black” connotes everything negative (Black days, Black march, Black-out, Blackmail, Dark Age) etc., as opposed to White which denotes ‘fair’ness.

In terms of country, it’s the Western Europe and the US which become the Standards. From Greenwich Mean Time where world begins at London, to the ‘Super Power’ of the US, the notion so pervades minds that they become a standard. It becomes difficult to pursue the US as a country having poverty or illiteracy or exploitation. Hence more often than not, it’s the people who are brought to task for being ill-informed than the system of governance which has somewhat made a mark at keeping people ill-informed.

And this system of governance, the western Democracy model which is infamous for promoting ignorance by emphasizing on monoculture, single language, single god, unitary value system, disproportionately high ownership of things by a single race, religion and gender, a citizen privilege syndrome etc has also been made a standard in governance. Based on ballot box competition, driven by high fund-raising efforts by the old Men networks, so-called democracy rules. to the extent that any country that does not practice western democracy, is offered strange looks and armed intrusions.

Capitalism, which works as the seed for corporate sector to prosper, demands that human labor be mindlessly replaced by machines and turn both against each other. It thrives on breeding alienation, creating divisions among workers by refusing unions any intrinsic power to organize and call off work. It promotes certain brands of education that supports its machinery. Professionals from technical background become the only ones who are needed to run capitalism, since labor force becomes the most dispensable factor. Efficiency becomes the key word and it merely goes unquestioned since it basically means that the bosses need to get most out of the workers by making them work for as less as possible so as to make higher profits. In such a setup, the workers tend to think of the welfare of the company bosses (‘we should work even harder because if the company goes on loss then boss will fire us&rsquo. The bosses accordingly do not give any two hoots to workers’ welfare. Because apparently, the workers are less educated and hence they are dispensable. Education becomes a promoter of class society, not an instrument to bridge the access and control gap.

Class society in turn preaches the idol god, but in reality worships only one God, universally seen. The Money God. Success is calculated in terms of money. Achievements in life are translated in terms of recognition by money (after all, what is Nobel Prize, if not a committee of Trust money?), parameters of in-group and out-group status are financially drawn. Money determines who will be in politics, who will hog limelights, who will be on television, who will have luxury to watch television. That’s the reason why Indian reactionaries cite Dalits are successful when they become politicians, or corrupt bureaucrats, because they understand their own language of what constitutes success. Success then means one’s access to money, one’s ability to worship money and one’s capacity to overcome monetary needs. Being rich becomes being successful becomes worthy of being emulated. Being a celebrity, a politician, a TV star. “Hot Happenin n Rockin”.

This entire discourse rests on economic systems of capitalism where capital, not community, becomes paramount to judge standards of society, culture and politics. And that’s why everytime we indulge in “Merit”, and “Success”, and “Achievement”, and “Ability”, we are basically using the words that help the capitalism’s arguments stronger.

For one, let’s change the question. Rather, let’s turn it upside down. And we will see the need to revisit our privileges and celebrate the “failures” as treasures that keep the world from getting reduced to a competitive turf of mindless warfare. And when it comes to give back to them for their great tolerance and display of peaceful silence, Reservation needs to be just a primary offering.

Tags: Saswat, Philosophy, Capitalism, Academic, Atheism, Casteism, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

I will call this the Princess Diana Syndrome. Remember that poor adorable princess who met an untimely death? The whole world just seemed to have lost this great soul who was so beautiful and could have changed everyone’s lives by posing alongside the orphans. Media everywhere from global to national to regional to local got hooked onto the image of Diana as the savior who was a victim (even if that meant that she was victim of media themselves!) To some extent the media houses blamed each other, the paparazzis and even the evil cash-rich boyfriend who was also some kind of a prince.

The fairy tale ended with Diana. Or as much I thought.

Until I started following the medical students in India. A country that recently underwent a historic blunder with a nuclear treaty, whose prime minister went on the stage to hail the colonial powers, whose farmers were reportedly committing suicides every passing day off unpaid debts, whose tribal people were being shot at by police brutally for absolutely no legal reason, whose fortunes had been so unevenly distributed that the gap between the rich and the poor had only been doubling periodically if not more, whose healthcare system, education system, and corruption system were all continuing to be elitist in every phase of reincarnations.

Suddenly someone dropped a cup of tea. Reservation bill for the other backward castes. I thought it was teacup indeed because I read from school civics book about the directive principles of state policies in Section IV of Indian constitution. And if I never would have read those books, then also I could have understood the need for such reservations for a country like India. In my recent trip to India this last December I could feel that Bangalore needed some reservations for working class people to stay there, lest the city be taken over by cash-rich tech-savvy tenants. In Hyderabad, I felt like in Charminar area, there needed to be some reservations for the Muslim preachers so that the Hindu temple created alongside the monument does not continue intentionally blowing its bhajans on loudspeakers. In Bhubaneswar, I felt like the Orissa tribals needed some reservations at Kalinga Nagar lest the lands all get to money hungry arms dealers aka government. But hardly I realized that the teacup would become a storm, possibly the worst storm to have hit India in recent times.

I always thought reservations for backward caste people in India are not some proposal or imaginings. It is a necessity. It’s a historical necessity! But instead what I found as I kept flapping emails and newspapers and blog comments were some grounds of objection which were gaining mammoth popularity. I have dealt with many issues, including Merit, elsewhere in this blog. But I will lay out other popular domains here.

1) Is Reservation a Favor?
One, the ground that the backward caste people have made quite some progress, and so they do not need reservation anymore.

Of course this is valid observation to say that they have made quite some progress. But to say that they don’t need reservation any more is to defeat the crux of the observation itself. Precisely because they have made progress, it’s logical to conclude that the reservation policies in India have worked positively in improving the lots of some people who include people that we historically called untouchables. Now the reality though is their improvement has taken place only marginally so far, and is on a constant progression. They are growing in the social ladders, but are yet to attain the power structures. Quite similar to the black people of America where through affirmative actions, many of the minority people rose to stardom, yet we know that not many of them have become influential so far in many elite areas. Even today more than 90% or more of the deans of colleges all over are White. Even today there is only one Senator who is a black. But some progress is being made nevertheless. I have a quicker solution (to which I will allude in a while), but I am also ready to go with the tide!

Likewise in India, the progress in order to continue demands that we increase the reservation quotas even more so that we can see more substantial improvement in the lives of the historically dispossessed. There is also a moral question here, which often goes unnoticed. That answers the question of ‘Why should we care’ types. These people are lower caste, because they were declared so by the ‘higher’ castes. They suffered so that the higher ones would enjoy the privilege. And hence, if not for any other legal and rational reasons (which are aplenty), for this moral reason itself, India needs to resurrect itself and let the lower caste people have greater shares of the cake now on. We owe it to them. To our domestic servants, and to the farmer-slaves. And to those students whose seats we not only refused them to have, but also refused them to dream of having.

2) Who Divides the Society?
Second line of reasoning that I see common to my readers’ resentments is pertaining to the division of society on basis of caste. To this, my answer is one of amazement. Caste politics have always continued to thrive in India. All the while, the lower caste people were subjugated and there was not a sign of remorse and guilt (and no demonstrations by upper castes against their fellow oppressors. When Gandhi offered his token fasts, he was also killed by the Hindu fundamentalists). Even to this day, all classified marriage ads would stress on marriages within castes. Even today domestic slaves are continuing to flock households of higher classes. Division of labor is indeed a casteist prerogative. Medical students who are polishing shoes to demonstrate their anger are clearly suggesting that they consider the work of cobbler as below their dignity! Even to this day! In other words the children of Brahmin caste would not allow their children to become cobblers in India. No matter how poor, the Brahmin families would stress on wearing the sacred thread to distinguish them from lower caste families. These active forms of caste discriminations are being practiced in India for as long as we know. And now only since the structure of Brahminical dominance bastion (the education) is being challenged, the country is noticing havoc. Suddenly politicians are being blamed for caste-based politics now. All along when the politicians themselves practiced Brahminism and the people did so religiously (everytime they invited only the Brahmin priests to solemnize a marriage) then no one questioned the caste divisions of India. Only when there is a valid demand for legitimate share in higher education, there is the hue and cry. Some of the more progressive minds agree that it’s fine to “improve the quality of primary education by granting even 80% seats to backward castes”, but its not OK to have reservations in Higher Education! I mean, the answer to that is, of course there are 80% of people in India who are backward castes anyway. So all of them will be in primary education, which is free and compulsory! It is the lack of resources and access to elite medical school coachings and preparations for them that deprive these 80% people! Hence the need for reservations.

The point is regarding losing the power. The well-meaning friends know it too well that primary schools do not change power equations. Throw them to schools, when their parents will force them to work in fields or have them sold to ragpickers, they will anyway drop-out. Plus they know that there is no chance in hell for the backward castes people to fund their medical preparations or other elite education at all. So it’s easier to give those 80% away to primary education! The ruling class knows the rules of wishful thinkings. Saying let them have primary education is like saying, let the wives do the household works only! When it comes to decision making and when it comes to budgeting money, the Men are there! Young students of India are actually thinking that higher education needs merit, and let the primary education go to the lower castes. The transition and the factors in between, the vertical structure of class society, the money factor, the debt factor, the social mobility factor, the factor of having one surname in place of another---are completely lost on the blue-eyed youngsters!

3) The Infatuation with Exotic Exceptions:
Third, is the question of the poor Brahmins. The poor Brahmins are aplenty in India. No denying that. But how come again, the minority poor Brahmins are now becoming the issue when the majority poor backward castes never were catered to?!

If total population of Brahmins in India are mere 5% and of them one percent would be actually poor, or comparatively poor with the landless Dalits and Adivasis we need to make policy decisions here. No I do not agree with the alternative proposals of economic parity argument. I am sure that’s not going to work in a simple way. From Vivekananda to Aurobindo, Hindu preachers knew to what extent caste is a socio-economically complex concept. The poor Brahmins are NOT the same as the poor Dalits. Period.

We all know it just too well. When the poor Brahmin begs in India, it’s considered a blessing to serve him/her. When the poor Dalit begs, the person is treated like a cursed cur. Who are we kidding? It’s actually regressive to even equate both categories. To begin with, Brahmins were not supposed to be wealth accumulators. I hardly know many Brahmins who are super rich. As I have stated earlier it’s the Kshyatriyas and Vaisyas who were the rich and powerful. All that the Brahmins had was the monopoly on knowledge, and that to a great extent translated power for them. Because of that so-called ‘knowledge’, the Brahmins have always survived the otherwise economic onslaughts. Using that today, most of them have become Pandits, Vedis, Dwivedis, Trivedis and Chaturvedis! They are the traditional scholars building up the ivory towers of education. They have defined the syllabus where students don’t read history of Dalit plights in independent India. They have demarcated the superiority of engineering and medicine as subjects that only they have ensured as more worthy by creating a demand-supply ratio that increases market pressure for those jobs. The Brahmins have relegated farming as a lowly activity although India is supposed to be an agricultural country. In Brahminical India, the farmers commit suicides and engineers fly first class! They have not just conceptualized their brand of education and forced its validity down on us, they have also created a market for their education (reason why students of literature and art history do not get jobs and find hardly any takers for marriage even for a dowry!), and they have earmarked the status tags.

In that whole process, their monopoly has not got lost on us—and which we see every passing day, the disproportionately high beggars on Indian streets, the prostitutes in cheap brothels and the large unemployed crime-prone youth groups. What it has also done is let a few cracks fall here and there, where there have been some Brahmin victims as well. But the victims in these cases are victimized because of a Brahminical structure itself, not because they are Brahmins. It’s like the White homeless people of America are victim of a White structure that thrives on market capitalism.

The question is where to start the reform process. As I have said earlier, I have quicker ways to address these issues. I guess many are working towards that in Nepal, in Orissa, and in Jharkhand now. But since the governments, that are more interested to guard the Indian Hindu Constitution than to empower the people in reality want a reform process, I think they know the answer now.

Part of the reason why even a rightwing BJP is supporting the Communists in this case (whoa!) is because it understands that the opportunistic Communist members in the UPA do not want radical replacement of the power structure. They want to maintain the ‘sanctity’ of the unity factor which enables the ruling class to rule.

The reason why different nations of India are not yet separate countries is because Nehru passed a bill in early 60’s that made it illegal to cede from the country. Likewise, every ruling coalition guards its interests. That’s the reason why all political parties want this reservation to go on, not as a revolutionary step—but as a conservative step to prevent the alternative.

Is there a Quicker Alternative?

The young inspired idiots who think they are some medical scholars should get the political maturity to understand that there cannot be a better government for them than the current UPA. At least Manmohan Singh can use his so-called leftist pimps to silence the Dalit resentments in India. In the other case, if they fail to do that (and Lord Ram forbid, Advani must be chanting) a massive revolution of the landless against the landlords in India could result not only in abolition of those medical coaching centers, but also in revamping of the healthcare system completely.

Five decades ago, the US thought Cubans were no good other than being sex slaves and sugarcane farmers. Fidel Castro got the support of his revolutionary people to change the country into one of the best healthcare haven known in the world history (even better than the US itself)! It’s because Cuba did not have an elite medical education, nor did it distinguish between people of different jobs. Yes, the media reports have denounced Cuba because the doctors get less pay there than the peons get paid in Indian government offices. But what the heck, doctors in Cuba have demonstrated highest human concerns (even to a Katrina crisis that US could not handle), whereas for all we know, India has one of the worst healthcare systems in the recorded world history that ignore the poor people systematically who cannot pay their fees.

If the medicos do not heed to their politically powerful friends in both ruling and opposition (as if there is a difference between Manmohan Singh and LK Advani!), they will soon be unable to withstand the abolition of elitist structure of higher education. Once higher education will be massified, and will be available for free to all (deservedly so), they can no longer monopolize over the professions and they can no longer demand French wines from Pharmaceutical companies to prescribe illicit drugs! My friends who are Pharma sales representatives have given me rides to clinics of doctors in big cities of India, where they demand for gifts ranging from liquor to flight tickets to call girls! Oh those merit-based established Brahmin doctors of India!

The Taboo Question: Do Doctors deserve the Hype?

With all these talks of merit and education, the medical practitioners in India are impaired by skills. Engineering and medical colleges in India are institutes of big fraudulent activities. Seats are blocked, sold and malpractices in examinations are so rampant that even the college principals have to call off the examinations. Why “Munnabhai MBBS” movie became such approved despite being an unoriginal flick is because people have lost trust on the doctors as a whole. Visit any medical and one finds unattended patients rolling down on the floor for days. Only those who have money or power are lucky enough to procure a bed inside the hospital. People die on the hospital corridors every passing day because doctors simply refuse to look at them. The AIIMS, where one protestor was allegedly killed (another media hype which could turn out to be false) is a place where thousands of critical patients are without beds, where to get a doctor appointment one needs to wait for weeks, and where dozens of people die on daily basis because of inefficient care even before being admitted! The private hospitals like Apollo are so expensive that even Americans would prefer the state hospital of Baltimore county.

India, the country to second largest population in the world is mired by healthcare issues from the beginning. Brahminical stress on female infanticide and the expensive screening of unborn gender are a regular inhuman practice. Historically “merit”-orious doctors have history of neglect that have no known parallels, in terms of sheer magnitude.

The myth of merit being attached to doctors is one which also needs to be shattered. Democratization (proper representation of backward castes which form the majority) and not professionalization (elitism) holds the key if we want any change for the good.

In the meantime, I am saddened to notice that many well-meaning people have actually found their Princess Diana in the medical students’ strikes. It’s glamorous. Pretty faces holding slogans any day get more prominence in media than black-faced coal mine workers. Or the landless tribals who get killed for defending their rights, or even the students who demand reservations because they are discriminated on grounds of merit. After all, just like caste, Merit is also a human construct.

Caste and Merit: Two sides of the same Coin?

What’s interesting is that both caste and merit were devised by the upper class Brahmins. When it suited them to rule over others, they used ‘Caste’ and aided the Kings in exploiting the masses. Those were the days when even the ‘poor’ Brahmins were comfortable being poor, because they gained respect ONLY by renouncing their wealth. People from villages to royal palace would continuously garland them with gifts and foods, and those poor Brahmins would not have to toil on fields and even if they did not own a palace they had unrestricted access to any house they wanted to visit, to rape lower caste virgins or to ‘banish’ lower caste rebels.

When the feudal society was “replaced” by capitalistic one (not entirely though as we learn more) by the same ruling class, the terms changed slightly. The moving money started ruling, instead of the concrete lands. At this juncture also, the ruling class (including the Brahmins) started monopolizing over the money since modern money economy also germinated from Gold (their traditional ownership) than crops (the farmers’ produce, although that also took place in lands owned by the landlords).

But with the revolution of the landless once again to cause imbalance of ruling structure, money found itself in slightly more democratic structure (just as the historic progression of everything else). Here is where some Brahmins and members of other ruling classes fell prey to competition. Before all the palaces and the institutions were about to be conquered by the hitherto landless class, the ruling coalition devised the Class Society.

The sustenance of Class Society:

Class Society in Democratic systems work in a hegemonist way, to facilitate power consolidation in the society on basis of “Knowledge”, another traditional weapon of the ruling class. Here also, the only ones who benefited were the small elites. But when the most accessible ones (the applications or the Arts) could be understood by the majority, the ruling elites raised the bar for the most inaccessible ones –only with the aim to exclude people, not include—(the principles or the Sciences).

At this juncture, the traditionally landless people are now rising up to demand their share in the inaccessible sciences, to stop further gaps between them and the knowledge, not just in terms of economic costs, but also in terms of social costs of understanding. In the past, we have seen how physical sciences were hijacked by the ruling elites also by practice. Indian bomb needed to be called a Hindu Bomb for that reason! The nuclear physics that earmarked the class society helped the traditional Pandits. What has a tribal society got to do with nuclear weapons? Even if it has some constructive uses, why should the traditionally landless village dwellers bother about this when they can live peacefully with their Mother River, without disturbing “geopolitics” of “Indian subcontinent?.

But as the class society progressed in its greed, the divisions became more apparent. The modern landless of India got most affected in the whole process. Bereft of traditional education, and threatened by industrial displacements, the majority of the poor have been organizing at several places of India at several levels. But at the same time, irrespective of the local area developments, and the cooperatives, there has been such an exoticization of the backward caste people that an imagery of them becoming engineers and doctors are inviting wraths from the traditional bastion holders.

Just like the “White Men’s Burdens”, the Brahminical burden to civilize Indian population has expressed itself in bad to worse forums. One comment on a blog read, “How can you let a SC/ST doctor conduct operation”? Its not unfortunate, its actually criminal to think that someone from a lower caste who get, lets say 40 marks less than the higher caste (for various reasons spanning from absence of English heritage, to lack of malpractice, to no proximity with the professor who rather wants to give away his daughter’s hand to a fellow Brahmin aspirant doctor) will become an inferior doctor.

With the current healthcare records of India as an indicator, if nothing else, the candidates getting lower marks (which is anyway improbable) must be allowed to replace the candidates with higher marks. For the practice of medicine is not meant to be proven in its elitism of institution or certificate rankings, but in the everyday dealings with suffering people. Established doctors and enrolled medical students who have clearly demonstrated that they do not feel for the fellow suffering aspirant students, are clearly also sending out a message that they are highly insincere, insensitive and criminal when it comes to dealing with suffering patients. We do not need high-scoring candidates now, all that India needs now is skilled people with human values that champions the causes of the dispossessed. We have the majority of such well meaning people (clearly evident by the way they have been tolerating a minor Hindu supremacist rule in India since decades now) in the country. What we need is to merely train them in the elite fields to make the skills accessible to most people. Since there are a handful of opportunist professionals (like airline pilots) blackmailing the country, Indian people perhaps should request doctors from fellow third world countries for a short duration and in the meantime, fix these irresponsible doctors behind bars, and completely overhaul the current healthcare system, where they must allow no more than 5% of upper caste people to get into the profession (they will be needed for short time, since the indifferent socialites will need some counseling from those so-called doctors who can actually empathize with their midlife crises).

No more Princess Diana tears, please. What we need is addressing of the real issues that affect THE MAJORITY, not the minority. When Bolsheviks came to power they had to overlook the pains caused to beautiful daughters of the royal families. When peasant revolutionaries of India chased the Kings down the streets, they did not spare the innocent children of the palace either. When a revolution takes place or almost takes shape (as in Nepal) one does not have time nor patience to attend the cute royal Dianas' pleas.

At least 80% to 95% reservations of seats in medical institutes (merely to reflect the proportion of backward caste people), if not outright revolutionary takeover of the medical colleges, is a necessity at this critical juncture. If a small minority of 5% of people could rule over the country through complete control over elite institutions (and promote divisive oppressions), then 80% of people taking over every hospital to take care of their own lot through complete control over elite institutions (to make them mass institutes, and promote majority rule) is definitely going to be a welcome relief in India.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, India, Casteism, Academic, History, Capitalism, Indigenous

Fellow readers and activists Satya and Rajesh have sent me via an email a response they had, to the issue of reservation, at the UMass., Amherst mailing list "Indian Manifesto". I simply love everything they have to say here. And especially the way they end the note with:

"One CANNOT reverse the arrow of time. In the last two decades, the lower castes are on the move and have been more influential than ever before, in determining national politics, distribution of power and resources, redefining culture, and the very texture of everyday life. That's the greatest thing that has happened to India in the recent past. In fact, it is a more significant event in the history of Indian than even the independence struggle."

Absolutely a must-read!

Tags: Saswat, Racism, Casteism, India

By Saswat Pattanayak

Fellow reader Open to Discussion asks me some valid questions following my earlier post on the topic . I have decided to publish my answers here as well for more general readership.

OD asks:
1. why so much of poison my dear friend?
2. no where in india were the rulers were brahmins
entire UP and bihar had been ruled by Yadavs(OBC), rajasthan by jats (OBC), in tamil nadu all except Brahmins come under reserved cat, so some body amongst them must be ruler.
3. algebra questions are never asked in medical entrance!!
u set any syllabus, it does not matter, toppers will remain toppers.
for indigenous med, we have separate ayurvedic collages. there is no need to include it in allopathy

I respond:
Dear Open to Discussion:
The reason behind my relatively long posts is that I explore the forest, not stick to trees. If you will read the entire post, it merely says that it’s a wrong thing for elite students to protest against possibility of equal opportunity for students who have been historically denied the privilege, owing to their socio-economic class.

To further this humble opinion, I have cited examples to show how the ruling classes guard their interests and growth by NOT sacrificing their privilege.

I do not wish to influence you into believing one way or the other, but I do not wish to find your words in my mouth either. Hence, my quick responses to your questions:

1. There is no poison. But yes, lots of anger. Because I possess a privileged ‘caste’ background myself, and I would not wish to support such protests being done by people coming from my social locations. Therefore I feel something in me is at stake too. Coming from Orissa, I have witnessed firsthand the violence against the so-called lower-caste and untouchable people. By not denying my privilege, I have understood to what extent I am a part of the oppressive sphere. And by seeing that the cycle is not being allowed to change, again by the ruling classes in Orissa, the Brahmin Bureaucracy and the Patnaik governance, I would be naïve not to see the role of my social class in perpetuating the crisis. For all I know, if I took my resume to a place of work in Orissa, (or anywhere in India), I will not have to feel conscious of my surname and no one will make assumption that by family name, such as, ‘you are good only to mend shoes’. And you know what, I am born with this great privilege. Hence it’s not a poison. Its an understanding of being privileged and expressing resentments when such privilege is mis-utilized, as at the current juncture by some fellow medicos.

2. I do not like to be dragged into this, because I personally think some of the Indian rulers I will name now are my favorites too. However, my point was not to say that Brahmin rulers should not be there, but to say that we must reserve seats for rulers of other caste varieties too (and overwhelmingly so, since they represent a much wider people). However my friend, to refute your supposition, following are few exemplars:

Historically, yes Brahmins were never the rulers. In fact, Hardly ever! But they surely collaborated with the local kings to help the caste division take place according to their sacred texts. We are well aware of the Brahmin sponsored Mauryan coup against the Nandas. Or several such dynasties. Since my post is mostly about current India, we will focus on the here and now (the India which began in 1947).

First, there needs to be a distinction between who are the actual rulers. As you know, there are thousands of people in the power structure but only a few really implement the policies. There are very many different Nations inside India. Only a few govern them through federal laws. I will refer to them here; (note, not all of them are Brahmin supremacists at all…quite the contrary, many are very progressive indeed. But this was beyond the point…since you need the statistics..)

The prime ministers: Nehru, Indira, Rajiv (one family that actually ruled..!), P.V. Narasimha Rao, Morarji Desai and Atal Bihar Vajpayee… (did I leave out any other name…Shastriji?)…Whoa…that’s called real power.
Being the prime minister of India, being able to change national languages, being able to divide Tamil Nadu, being able to annex Tripura, being able to destroy Babri Masjid, being able to cause Bofors ….

Looking at the huge majority of PMs and all the Prime Minister’s Men (ministers, bureaucrats), India has been ruled ALWAYS by the Brahmin caste, if that answers your curiosity. It’s the prime ministers alone who decide over the fate of this country, alongwith their clouts of bureaucrats. Unless you want to include presidents, and we can talk of V.V. Giri, Shankar Dayal Sharma etc.

You bring up the question of Bihar and UP and cite OBC rulers. Clearly OBCs may not be equally disadvantaged. But partly also because they are more than 60% of population in those states. On a closer look, even as they are majority in UP, what do we see? Time after time, “Presidents Rule”. Don’t forget Romesh Bhandari’s weapon to destabilize UP! Or creation of Jharkhand and the perpetual poverty that plagues Bihar, once the most treasured state of India. To even think that Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party or Rashtriya Janata Dal have ever ruled the country is a lie. Not even DMK or AIADMK. Although I will come to Tamil Nadu now.
Her Highness Jayalalitha is also a Brahmin. Not just that, she is a loyal ally of the BJP! So when you say “in tamil nadu all except Brahmins come under reserved cat, so some body amongst them must be ruler”, you need do more research.

Kushwant Singh had given a statistical interface to suggest Brahminical hegemony in India long back. Those were the days when the right wing had not even seized India. Now situation is far worse. But here is a pointer to some of his findings:
The Brahmins control over 70% of the top decision-making posts in the political system, administration, judiciary, army, police, press, media and academics (Statistics on composition from 1935 and 1985)
For example, in 1935, during the Anglo-Brahmin Colonial Era, the 5% Brahmin caste group held most of the gazetted positions among Indians in the upper echelons of the administrative machinery. In 1985 one finds that out of 3,300 Indian Administrative Officers (IAS), 2,376 are Brahmins; from the rank of deputy secretaries upwards, out of 500, 310 are Brahmins; of the 26 state chief secretaries, 19 are Brahmins; of the 16 Supreme Court judges, 9 are Brahmins; of 438 district magistrates, 250 are Brahmins; and so on in other circles of power and policy in the Indian state. If we also include the “twice born” Brahmanical castes, mainly comprising the Banias and Kayasths, the combined state power of theirs jumps from 70% to almost 95%.

Now that says clearly something! We can look at all chief secretaries of India and confirm the statistics even in 2006. Lets not forget Romesh Sharma either! These are again instances of not Brahminism so much, as they are instances of an absence of lower castes and tribes in the actual power structure of India.

And what is the percentage of Brahmin population in India? Five %

3. As regards, Algebra in entrance tests, again we miss the point when we look at certain question papers in some states than looking at the entire philosophy. First off, only students who have science backgrounds are usually eligible to sit for these tests. Which essentially demands knowledge of mathematics. And yes, when I said Algebra, it also meant Formulae and Values in Physics, which are integral to the examinations. The point I was making is that many complicated concepts make up for the entrance test, and most are foreign to students of minority community, ESSENTIALLY because they cannot afford a two-year coaching preparation education to know these concepts!

Since a ‘good’ education that can help someone fit into the system’s demands requires Money with a big M, its not so simple to say that “Toppers will be Toppers”. Toppers are those people who have access to the best of resources in their fields of studies and have incentives good enough to motivate them to secure that position. Please take it from me, as I have topped in many exams (state level, university level etc) myself, and I have to feel humbled to say that it was nothing so extraordinary to have achieved what I did, which others with similar environment could not have. Its only a systematic deprivation of sections of society from availing the resources that undernourishes them. Even to get loans for coaching, one needs to have a rich men network, to begin with. Unless we block the desired number of seats for the backward people and coach them for free (while continuing to charge the rich for their kids’ education), we will be only part of the same oppressive ancestors who subjugated the country, territorially, and now as we realize more and more, mentally too.

Regarding Ayurveda, the point of reference was that the respect traditionally attached to Allopathic medicine science is because of the exclusivity and professionalism attached with Medical profession (reason why seats are always limited to begin with). And what I was offering was basic assertion that all of the medicinal practices (Allopathy, Ayurvedic and what we have&hellip need not gear towards becoming ‘elitist’. Since health is the most common factor for survival, the attitude of practitioners should be to “massify” their skills, not “classify”.

I am open to discussion as well. But more open to an understanding AND empathetic discussion geared towards social justice for people who are most marginal in our society; than towards justice for students who hold banners in their hands to shamelessly protest against equal opportunity (yes social equality needs sacrifice of individual liberty at many junctures). I can understand why the elites need to guard their class interests, but can never support their stands.
Greetings,
Saswat

Tags: Saswat, Racism, India, Capitalism, Indigenous, Casteism, History, Academic

By Saswat Pattanayak

It should not be surprising to notice that just as the Indian economy is getting liberalized day after day, Indian society is growing regressive quite at the same pace.

As an instance, we allowed private broadcasters to dominate television primetime. Once what used to be an instructional medium for a nascent republic, Doordarshan soon gave way to a television culture that heralded an era of perverse family-centric, monolithic, stereotyped middle-class squabbles. On another instance, India let go of its mission-centric national healthcare focus and allowed doctors to practice in private, for the rich, and to get paid by business trusts. In its latest instance, we allowed private education sphere to dictate the nation’s future, and the publicly funded institutions of learning that once strived to provide equal opportunity to all, soon succumbed to corporate norms of cut-throat competition and insecurity.

It is possibly a combination of all three (and many more such) making a simultaneous movement ahead, that is making sure that the gap between the privileged and the dispossessed is maintained and fostered.

At the same breath, as a consequence, it should not be surprising either to notice the recent demonstrations of the medical students against the proposal for reservation of seats. Not only does this movement sing to the tune of the global media hegemonists who thrive on “individualistic interests” of instant gratifications (by means of a dominating television culture), it also promotes the business sense of private concerns who place money above everything else even in basic needs such as healthcare; and nourishes the merit-myths of an unequal society in order to perpetuate exploitation of historically unprivileged people.

The ongoing medical students’ demonstrations bring out simply the worst, the most disgraceful and most selfish core that can occupy human hearts. It’s not that this is something unique to Indian medical practitioners. Such pathetic stance of elitist bias can exhibit itself on the streets any given day at any place in the world.

But these are the times when rest of the world is slowly waking up to realize the need for “affirmative actions”, and “equal opportunity policies” to not only allow the ruling class an occasion to atone for causing historical injustices to discriminated sections of society, but also to understand that the society would not progress without those whose interests have been sacrificed at its alter. And ironically, these are the times when on the roads of India, privileged students are organizing efforts to prevent historically “forced” backward class of people from joining ranks!

Basically the dichotomy is this. The indigenous, tribals and “backward” castes peoples have been systematically exploited in the land of India since ancient times. Since the days of Aryan Invasion (which is basically an Indo-Iranian phase), a section of elites who formed the ruling class (Kshyatriya) always faced unsuccessful challenges from the people who originally inhabited the vast land from Himalayas to Kanyakumari. Unfortunately, as elsewhere, these indigenous people were never known to be violent or reactionary (a horrendous Tyrant Asoka realized this when he was massacring millions of Oriya tribals in 261 Before Common Era). They had already developed their own models of collective living (so-called ancient civilizations were already in place before “Aryan” invasions, just like America was already a people of inhabited land before Columbus “discovered” it). And for the ruling class invaders that ‘settled’ in India, conquering lands were easy, but to silent the egalitarian mass of tribal people from putting up resistance was the most arduous task. Not that the ruling elites were incapable of winning small wars against the tribal people, but the reality is they needed them to build roads, clean palaces and become sex slaves. (Just as today, the state and central governments of India would much rather do without the tribal people and their naxalite inspirations, but then, who would sweep the floors and clean the kitchen and become domestic slaves of the Babus?)

The elite minorities always need the presence of the larger majority of hapless people. Now not everyone in the elite minority section may be actually ruling. And not everyone from the larger majority may be suffering. But when it comes to guard interests of their respective historical classes, they know who to stick to (barring an extremely few exceptions…and those, we shall leave to Hindi filmmakers for sensationally outlandish cinemas). On a general rule of thumb, the elite minorities to remain guilt-free have chosen two principal methods to rule over: one, to divide people and ruthlessly suppress popular resentments, and two, to create a more inclusive basis for their governance to project themselves as representative of the majority.

One may argue that “divide and rule” has been the most potent weapon in the hands of the ruling class. From Mohandas Gandhi to Malcolm X, great freedom fighters have expressed this several times that some elite White men have always divided the world in order for them to rule. Whereas this is an accurate assessment of colonial history, in my view, there have been greater and far more effective tools of oppression in the hands of the ruling elites. And this one comes from more ancient times and has been lasting to more recent days! This one, I will call, “inclusive rule”.

To demonstrate validity, let’s go back to the days of Aryan/Columbus/White invasions. After discovering that annihilation of indigenous people creates more problems than its worth, and also realizing that the ruling class had lost all moral authority to rule in an ancient world where people were not only egalitarian, but highly spiritual (worshippers of river, sun, earth), the militarist ruling class sought an alternative solution. Why not to create a class of people who would come from within the masses, will possibly stay as the masses themselves, but yet serve the cause of the ruling class by NOT positing a division, but a coalition.

Thus the movement aimed at converting of spiritual into religious began by the ruling militarists who took definitive help of a group of “learned” people who in different religions are called differently (in Hindu India, they were declared the Brahmins). The innately spiritual tribal people were assured that it is in their own good to accept the Brahmins as the higher forms of human beings since they have attained from birth already what masses of people have been striving to attain throughout life. To a society that was unaware and absolutely seeking no God (since it found the Eternal in every element of nature anyway), such a Brahmin striving was named ‘God’. The people of the mountains and rivers were told that they did not know what they sought for, if they did not seek for that one God, who the Brahmins had a way to communicate with.

Simultaneous world history shows similar activities taking place everywhere else. The Americans (I mean, the real original ones) were forcibly converted into Christianity by invading Europeans. Bible was forced down the throats of the indigenous people who hitherto had only worshipped the elements of nature. In every continent, the Aryan/Columbus/White mix in its overtly ambitious project of conquering (count Napoleon to Asoka within this bracket) the world followed this method. NOT of divide and conquer. But of being Inclusive Rulers. From Chanakya to Machiavelli, all political treatise involved diplomatic ways to rule lands, not by causing outright divisions among people.

So, once the society was comprised of different caste structures (or liberal Hindus may say “division-of-labor” structure—as if it helps any bit), the ruling coalitions (of Kshyatriyas and Brahmins….or ….landlords and priests) continued their ruling legacies for centuries hence on, putting forth the simple proposition: “we are the mandated rulers, blessed and permitted by God to create rules of legal living”.

Today, as mandated rulers, the politicians appoint their favored people too. The judges in India still pass judgments from over a table that shows a mythological figurehead from Hindu Epic. Judges in the West still have Biblical inscriptions on the walls of courtrooms (or just outside). The ruling class since those days of brutal conquests have been parroting the same lines of “God Bless Our Land”, “God’s Own Land” etc to position their seats of power as clearly invincible and definitely indestructible. When God, in their projection is the creator, and when God wills their rules, how can their seats be overthrown?

Fortunately, these opportunistic alliances have never succeeded at ruling for long at a stretch. Despite the masterminded intelligence plans of including people in their ruling coalitions, they have only given vent to a dictum created by themselves: Power corrupts. Neither power instrument nor corruption mechanism ever existed in the communitarian ways of living in the beginning (a funny quip I have to invent here: … “In the beginning..there were peoples”!). These were the contributions of these ruling classes. And they kept felling victims to their own trap almost all the time. In name of monarchy, they fought with each other for power. Princes killed their father Emperors for power. Second queen poisoned the food of the King so that her son will fight and win battle with son of the first queen. All kinds of perverse self-centric conquests permeated this culture.

All along, in the historical stages of progress, peoples’ revolutions, although never highlighted, made kingdoms fall, resulted in several wars where people came on the verge of eliminating power addiction among the ruling classes. But using all kinds of manipulative methods to rule was never the prerogative of the oppressed masses. Perhaps in the daily slavery, they did not have time to devise plans. Or perhaps they had grown conditioned into defeatist mindsets (these are the only two reasons why people today don’t fight the militarists either). When the coalition rules did not succeed, and indeed their inability to contain popular resentments caused them to kill each other inside kingdoms, people grew more conscious of their need to eliminate these class structures. Although, deeply uprooted from their rationalist thought processes, and perhaps blinded by religious fervors too, people still have always wanted to punish the ruling class. From Sepoy Mutiny of 19th century to Grandmother Against War of 21st, people have always fantasized about teaching a lesson or two to the ruling class combines. But ask them if they would like to rule then? The answer always invariably been: “Not interested in politics. Thank you!”. I always despised those answers, because they smack of indifference. But ask me, and I will answer very similarly too. Why? Because people refuse to play into the game of the ruling class. It’s not just for Marie Antoinette to say ‘let them have cake’. Its also peoples’ prerogative to say “let them fight and squabble and rule and die”.

Such a people have always existed. In fact, many from these people (and count me in that) accidentally or deliberately, simply do not believe that power games are necessarily a good thing. These people never believed that Kings were doing any good to the society. They provided the backbone for popular resentments and a wish to establish a form of society that existed in the beginning, lacking competition, thriving on cooperation and understanding.

Once the ruling coalition of militarists and priests came to the realization that like them, not everybody is a pig and not everyone wants to get dirty, not everyone cares about their harems and their crowns and their glories, and actually most of them are so fed up with the elite culture of writing history that they would rather revolt and take away their thrones and dump them into obscurity, the ruling class changed its strategies. Of course, the indigenous people along with their other working class counterparts forced the kings to flee. And they refused to work as bonded laborers to landlords, and work as slaves to masters. But of course before things could get really out of control, and more radical elements among the resisters could actually behead all of the ruling class folks (not out of their love for violence…but out of their love for tolerance for a peaceful society which could be established only without lecherous treacherous emperors), the ruling class left the kingdoms and created the parliaments or Houses.

The transition of ruling class from slaveowners to “elected” presidents has been extremely smooth. The transition of Royals to “elected” members of parliament has been equally smooth. The transition of feudal lords to market capitalists has been definitely smooth. The transition of priests and Brahmins to educators and scholars has been exceedingly smooth. The conversations of transitions left out the indigenous and working class peoples entirely! So much so, in fact, the transitions needed to take place without their consent.

The so-called democratic institutions everywhere in the world were founded on the well-laid out plans charted by the ruling class, which changed colors (from White British imperialists to Brown Indian capitalists) but the transfers of powers took place between the parties that agreed upon with each other whereby the dominance cycle would have to continue, with direct or indirect benefits to the ruling elites, only.

So for instance, in India, there was a transfer of power quickly done, just when the British realized that freedom movement among peasant revolutionaries were possible—people who didn’t seek power and were not affiliated to any political parties that would agree to future British terms. They came to this conclusion after several times imprisoning Indian leaders, just to test if Indian people could lead a struggle without these leaders. And spontaneous peasant uprisings everywhere suggested they bloody well could and shall. Before things could turn ugly for the ruling class (landlords, kings of princely states, Indian opportunistic leaders, Hindu fanatics, and British rulers), the (potential) ruling coalition comprising all these aforesaid categories made quick compromises. Everyone’s interests were taken care of. Landlords who had enslaved hundreds of indigenous people were let go without penalty (even their lands remained with themselves, until after Indira Gandhi was pressured by Soviet Bloc to act on these pests). Kings of princely states anyway had left their palaces fearing murders, but they were all provided security and even parliamentary tickets to fight elections. Opportunistic political leaders quickly agreed with any and every terms so that they could also enjoy the seats of power, no matter if it meant division of the country and separated families from each other and caused millions of deaths. Hindu fanatics had a field day in keeping the huge majority of country with them, to the greediest extent that they refused to even let go of a Muslim state of Kashmir. British rulers of course after tea parties and tiresome map drawings, left to a wealthier exploiter Britain most comfortably, without being tried and hung in public even for once in an Indian court for all the millions of lives they had taken (although today, Indian ruling class is very interested in Saddam Hussein’s trial)!

The winners took it all, and loser people stood small. These small people were soon called names in the free India. The dominant argument went that India would progress quickly if the government would not spend money on these low class people. The elite Brahmins who had declared the indigenous and tribal people as ‘Untouchables’ shivered at the idea of allowing them a place in the Indian mainstream. ‘They were good only for the jungles, after all!’ So in every possible fields, attempts were made to keep the ‘backward’ castes (whoever devised that term clearly thought of ‘his’ caste as a ‘forward’..sic! because its not meant in just the economic sense) out of focus. When they could not stop Ambedkar, they projected Nehru. Although Nehru was actually progressive, he was since 1930’s dominated by Ballavbhai Patel in Indian politics. So even as Nehru sat on the throne, Patel ran the show after doing the country a favor by integrating the princely states (whose kings were anyway thrown out by the revolutionary masses) with Union of India. When Communists came to Kerala, they together dismissed its legitimacy. When Dravidian languages raised their heads, they installed a first president of India who was a Hindi fanatic and Hindi-fied the country. The Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan slogan went hand in hand with the ruling combines.

The structure changed, but the coalition never changed. Although the BJP might be cribbing about not tasting power for three decades, it should take heart that greater Hindu representatives were always ruling over India in the garb of Congress. S Radhakrishnan, the first vice president was an authority on why Hinduism was the best religion in the world. Religious, casteist perverts continued the same rampage directly in the ‘free’ India which they used to carry out on behalf of British imperialists in the days of colonial India. The structure had just been changed. Not replaced.

The history of this so-called Independent India is now nearing 60 years. And the original inhabitants of India, the indigenous peoples even to this day are being sacrificed at the alter of ‘development’. Be it the great redundant Dam on Narmada or be it the shining McDonalds at nook and corners, the tribal people have no place in India’s landscape to go to. They are being denied rivers they have worshipped for generations. They are being charged the same taxes (or more) that they paid to the landlords earlier, now in more sophisticated manner. They are being displaced and sent to the city outskirts to live in inhuman slums. Forced to sell their own children in want of food. If their child has a talent, (like Buddhia) its being targeted to be killed. They have no ways and means to compete with the city-dweller upper caste coalitions who know how to order a ‘Maharaja Mac’. They end up becoming rag pickers, sex workers, and domestic slaves.

All this, not because we never did not have policies in place to reserve seats for these oppressed people. In fact, Indian policies for reservations (thanks to the only backward caste guy in the entire constituent assembly—BR Ambedkar) were in place long before the US opted for Affirmative Actions to benefit the Black population at education and workplaces. But the fact remains, the “Inclusive Politics” diplomacy works to put up an illusive front, and whereas it says the law is there, it does not guarantee that it’s implemented. Just as the law is harsh on rapists, but rapists get away anyway. We have reservation policies in place, its just that it does not get implemented.

For instance, let’s begin from the latest scenario. With growing privatization, the law for reservations will not hold good. Private concerns do not give a damn to government regulations (partly explains why they are called private, and not public). Of course, they do encourage workplace diversity and end up recruiting many women candidates. In effect, these candidates are chosen not on basis of caste, but on gender alone. And whereas that’s a good beginning, it’s still like the second wave feminism where white women got equal rights as white men! The backward caste women never stand a chance to get employed in this case. That’s the reason why I have always opposed the Women’s Reservation Bill in Indian Parliament, because it will eventually lead to wives and daughters of royal families ruling the country. It’s another story they are already in such a large population in parliament. The Indian mainstream media acting as their pimp, keep criticizing lower caste Rabri Devi, but puts Her Highness Rajmata Vijayraje Scindia of BJP on Page 3.

Educational institutions are increasingly becoming private, hiring teachers by providing them higher scales and better facilities to groom students. They are interviewing parents before admitting children and finding out if the parents are rich and ‘English’ enough first! (Sic!)

Healthcare industry likewise is hiring doctors and grooming them to be the best, funding their researches, sending them abroad, installs sophisticated machineries, and caters to elite clients alone. Basically the best doctors are today affiliated with private practice, flatly refusing to treat the poor, who need the treatments the most owing to their circumstantial disadvantages and lack of access to other healthy platforms.

Privatization of Indian economy is not an accidental phenomenon. It’s a very well envisaged part of the ruling combine that has historically ruled. The land-grabbing, convent educated, wealthy, upper-caste social bulls and butterflies of India find it extremely convenient to maintain their own class status. To that extent, they are willing to go to any end. They are the ones who created the class society on basis of language (Sanskrit vs Pali or Hindi vs Assamese/Oriya), religion (Hindu vs Islam), caste (Brahmin vs scheduled castes/tribes), education (Engineering/technology vs Humanities), economics (landowners vs landless), geographical location (North vs the rest), employment (bureaucrats vs ragpickers/constables) etc.

And now they want to make sure of few more things in order to secure their seat belts all the better. They have orchestrated an extremely elitist demonstration which is causing havoc in daily lives of millions of people in India. They are blackmailing the entire country to decide once and for all, on the issue of reservations for backward caste people. And with the convenient middle class mentality that they have been able to create now, the decision will soon be against reservations. And that will be yet another victory in their history books. And yet another struggle of the oppressed against the mighty, that will never be taught at classrooms. For the time being, if you need a chapter, draw a leaf from SCP’s simply outstanding analysis about the need of reservations and the criminally redundant positions taken up by the elite students. Click here to read this excellent post.


Reminds to me, if the country had given equal support to the Tribal people who came on the streets to protest against police state’s organized killing of 14 innocent people and the subsequent mutilation of their body parts to evade post-mortem charges at Kalinganagar, we would not have seen these elite medical students on the streets. They should have been by now serving the villages of the same indigenous peoples who need medical assistance, and bloody well deserve it.

These medical professionals are examples of the most ungrateful humans. Before their conscience pricks, they should realize few things: that they are not smart from the womb, that they are being groomed to be doctors, and that a certain number of seats does not mean that that’s the number of people who are talented in the country. They should also not confuse talent for a skill, with merit to qualify for the skill. They should realize that indigenous people have a lot to bring into the medical profession through their crude understanding just as some elites have introduced convoluted Ayurveda as an alternative form or just as someone like a Deepak Chopra introduces Hindu ways to healthy living. The world should know of the elementary nature cures, which can be introduced by people from the rural areas only. For this of course, we must ensure the so-called medical entrance tests to be reconfigured to include questions pertaining to tribal and Other Backward castes’ history and their history of struggles with medical facilities and seek their judgments on how to improve healthcare system in India, and stop asking frivolously complicated European algebra questions…

The police will surely not kill 14 of these students (since they are children of bloodsucking bureaucrats and tax evading businessmen, and because their lives are not worth just fifty thousand rupees like the Orissa Chief Minister estimated as the cost of tribal lives he took away). But the police must put all these disturbing people behind bars and the Supreme Court of India must act immediately to forbid these people from practicing ever in their life as doctors. In my humble opinion, they should start working as janitors on the roadside as they are good to take to streets so often, and for that they need to sit for national entrance tests too. For the rest, who do not qualify, I am sure some of them will ‘attempt’ (and of course never commit!!!) self-immolation acts already enacted by the dramatist par excellence Rajiv Goswami during Mandal issue.

It’s a shameful chapter that the history of India has to go through, and down six generations, children reading history books will know how grossly pathetic Indian civilization actually has been, evaluated from the lens of mainstream culture—a thoroughly racist, casteist, sexist, patriarchal, elitist country based on systematic discrimination, state sponsored fraud, and oppressive regimes. And where the oppressed are killed by police bullets and sympathies go for the reactionary elites.

Tags: Saswat, India, Racism, Capitalism, Academic, History, Casteism, Indigenous

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

The following article is authored by two of my dearest comrades.

In the quest for What Needs to be Done!

Read More...

Tags: Saswat, Media, Capitalism, Racism, USA

By Saswat Pattanayak

Feel the power even of the anarchic online media? Let’s remind ourselves of the Pepsi-Kanye West chain mail. It claimed that the relationship had gone sour following his political rant and Pepsi had fired him. After a few weeks of online activisms, Pepsi declared that it was not the case at all. That Kanye West and the people of color should continue the support to Pepsi.

Recently the Oprah Winfrey and Tommy Hilfiger mail has started doing the rounds again. So once again, I received a mail that carries a subject line hailing Oprah in order to condemn racism. To substantiate it, there is a chain email which narrates her “interview” with Tommy Hilfiger.

But this time, it was from a friend in India. Clearly people in the Other World also got affected by racism. The accompanying text to condemn racism was the same: that a black man was discriminated against on a BA flight. Popularly known as “BA Flight anti racism” mail, you can read the entire content here:
And here. This piece has become sort of a joke to be appearing on even the humor sites! In fact the same narrative is offered on another page where it says it was not a black man, but a Hispanic man…

Since such attempts to “stop racism” has become so fashionable online, I wanted to offer a perspective. Also to correct bloggers like Adorable, who think Oprah said the same statements in a recent show (December 2005) although Oprah had denied it way back in 1999 (a fact which is never discussed since such emails are meant to be forever relevant…!)

Here follows the email conversation, slightly abridged.

“Let me offer an explanation. First off, you have not quoted the point of reference, as to where did you get this mail from. That way, the readers could have investigated the source for themselves. Secondly you should have yourself investigated the source too before sending such mails out, lest they end up misinforming.

Tommy Hilfiger is no social activist. He is in fact an elite designer serving only the capitalistic cause of wealth celebration. But clearly he never had such a show with Oprah and he has never given any such comments, let alone such blatantly racist ones. Oprah has in fact never met with him and had never him on her show.

This is part of the same junk mail chain letters that you receive increasingly about almost everything (from refinancing your house, to pay off credits, to get Viagra for cheap). It is well evidenced by Oprah’s own refutation of the incident. On a live "The Oprah Winfrey Show" taped on January 11, 1999, she had already clarified the same:
"So I want to just set the record straight once and for all. The rumor claims that clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger came on this show and made racist remarks, and that I then kicked him out. I just want to say that is not true because it just never happened.
Tommy Hilfiger has never appeared on this show. READ MY LIPS, TOMMY HILFIGER HAS NEVER APPEARED ON THIS SHOW. And all of [the] people who claim that they saw it, they heard it -- it never happened. I've never even met Tommy Hilfiger." Her own magazine cites this show.

And for the knowledge, Oprah is a big loyal fan of Tommy. She adores Hilfiger and personally gives testimonials to the public so that they can go buy them. There are countless examples.

On the online front, there have been disclaimers to reinstate Tommy’s lost image too:

So now that we know that Tommy is actually innocent and a “poor victim”, what do we learn from this recurring mail (which was already refuted way back in 1999!). Surely someone like me would have quite easily read between the obvious lines and sent proofs to the contrary, as they have done. Just like I read the exchange among the people on a BA flight. Was it 1934? Was it 1962? Or was it 2005? No one knows. But that chain mail about British Airways incident is also very unlikely. And no airhostess would make such comments: “However, given the circumstances, that it would be scandalous to make someone sit next to someone so disgusting.” At least not in today’s world as we know it. Not because the white airhostesses are not racists. Then why not? I am explaining.

If those two chain emails are so grossly wrong, what good do they achieve? What is the motive of the people who are originating such mails? To fight racism? Nah…actually to perpetuate it. You see, after the Tommy incident was deconstructed, people started celebrating his designer lines. “Oh you see, he is not a racist. He never said. So we folks should buy his clothes.” The negative publicity actually did quite good to Tommy. Tommy was known to be making white clothes, but was in need of the black market (just like Kellogg’s needs an Indian market for its corn flakes). It did quite good to Oprah too in promoting her television show (in 1999, more people were watching dumb Disney shows than they were watching her). Today, both Tommy and Oprah are big superstars without any merit. They have used numerous cheap publicity stunts like this to become the symbols of success.

Likewise everyone who lives in the US or western world (since these mails were primarily meant for the first world—not many in the Other World actually buy original Tommy lines in India and flies first class of BA) know that no one makes such racist comments and get away with it. So there is a celebration also to the point that we are not a racist world any more. If someone asks “Do you hear such racist thing anymore?” The honest answer is “Of course not. You must be kidding. Look at all those black people in the first class. They have bought those tickets. Look at the diamonds on the hip hop stars. They are not rented. Blacks are successes.” Even look at Oprah Winfrey.

Precisely, that is the whole point. A first class seat need not be considered so dignified as to create a class barrier among people. Quite the contrary folks should not feel happy or lobby for a black man to get into the first class. Or should not cheer for Oprah Winfrey for any matter. The reason is both smack of downright celebration of undeserved opulence. Oprah is no different from Tommy Hilfiger, in that she wears million dollars jewelries herself and walks with pride on those red carpets of elite Hollywood. Top line designers are her close buddies and the club of suckers make pathetic acting sessions on those shows on how people should have freedom to do what they want to do. They even offer personal examples of their past lives and how gloriously they have left them behind (in other words, left behind the poverty and the poor people).

You know the reason why they chose Tommy to be the point of scandal with Oprah? Precisely because both of them had never met (Oprah had other designers to her show before….). So they knew this myth will be broken and the public will sympathize with both businesses well. This is what the spin makers do for the capitalists.

Racism is not frivolous. It’s not counted in terms of who gave what slurs. Most black ignorant people sing “nigger” today and call their women “bitch”. That does not make them racists/sexists. But if the white racist folks will say the same terms, they will be sent to jails. That’s because the white supremacists have created a yardstick to judge what racism should constitute. They claim it has to be ‘uttered’ by the privileged class. Now there is a popular argument that if the blacks can say nigger (and that’s because they have been conditioned to speak like black folks—in order to star in a movie you should talk like “black people” using an accent), then the whites should be allowed to. But yet it finds no taker. They are no fools. They will not utter such words in public. Because they don’t talk. The white privilege is acted out. They practice racism in the way it was meant to be.

Part of the reason why racism has become so implicit. It’s very subtle in nature. How many people in India will come out and say that because they are Brahmins, they are superior than the “lower castes” (sic) or they believe in untouchability? Yet the Brahmins in India will make friend circle largely with Brahmins, they will protest against reservations (not in terms of caste, but in terms of ‘merit’—a word whose parameters they themselves define), they will certainly not invite a non-brahmin person to preside their religious functions. Are all non-brahmins actually uneducated about citation of Vedic hymns? Think of our own discriminations and how it works in India to understand the basic nature of racism.

Racism has to be so subtle, so illusory that it has to be normalized. It has to be normalized into our fabric without revulsions. Just like the ‘majority’ democracy or the ‘free’ market economy. Do you really think majority governs or the market is free? No, just like their social counterpart, racism also does not become visible.

If it becomes pronounced, racism becomes easy to be checked. All of us will get really angry if Tommy actually said that! Or if a tribal girl is actually raped. After taking action to an ‘event’ we are lulled to silence. And then we thank ourselves that “lo! We imprisoned that guy. Now, don’t call me a racist”!

What we don’t recognize is that we often lend our help to the racism that prevails by implicitly supporting it. Race is a social construct. A construct that emerged out of a class society. A construct just like religion, became instrumental in helping the wealth usurper class to subjugate people throughout the ages. India’s Hindu kings, Mughal rulers, Brahmin Prime Ministers—all used the same class/caste dynamic to continue the rule to their favor. They integrated in us a need to adhere to their laws, which were based on dominant religion of the time which were in turn, founded on clear superstitions aimed at keeping the mass helpless/predestined/oppressed.

Today’s universal companion to all religious power is capitalism. Just like it was feudalism or monarchism in the past. It was easy to revolt against the kings and the landlords because their exploitations were so obviously apparent. Very shocking. But the bourgeois capitalist ruling class partners which actually led many of such anti-feudal and anti-colonial and anti-monarchy battles (by claiming leadership and sacrificing poor peasants in the struggles) emerged as the power holder this time in the most sophisticated fashion. Indian mainstream (and thus the power hungry) freedom struggle shows the clear direction too. It was led by industrialists (like Birla’s money), Hindu supremacists (like Patel’s crusades) and Hindi Aryans (like Rajendra Prasad). Of course they were all so well mannered that we engage in a north Indian dominant culture without even questioning it (the respect for capital, power and fame in line with Mumbai and Delhi, as opposed to respect for communities, matriarchy and indigenous cultures of Orissa and Kerala).

The progress of humankind has always been in this direction. From crude to sophistication (not uncivilized to civilized). For another example, the ruling class had women in harems, then in brothels and now they have them objectified on peep shows and webcams. And this has a lot to do with the calm, compassionate, sympathetic approach that we have been imbibed to learn through religious discourses of the ruling agents. Because of which we clearly overlook the negativities of Oprah’s billion plus undeserved wealth, and pick on an uneducated poor street youth who robs a wallet for survival, and send him/her to jail and subsequently for ‘spiritual rehabilitation’. Because the white privilege structure has put a “model minority” section to legitimize its supremacy by claiming that everyone can become like Oprah if they went to church and believed in the power of religion (and hence the God blesses America, just like in the east the politicians have godmen frauds like Sai Baba and Chandraswami, if not a thousand other symbols of faith systems).

Clearly, we know that not everyone can become a billionaire. We don’t even have that kind of wealth in the world! And this elite club hardly changes much over the period to let others have a share. They control more than 95% of world’s resources…and they are a club of less than 200 people.

It’s a shame that we have to cheer for Oprah instead of questioning her for the privileges she enjoys by towing the white power line which has just succeeded in making her loyal to the free market economic structure, maybe to oppose it at times so that democracy can contain with a proxy pepsi vs coke war. But never to challenge its orders, for if she did that she would have had to let go of her expensive wardrobes and tickets to the elite fame.

This is a just crash course on racism. For more, we should question our own privileges and check if we were having more in life (and hence can check out internet deals), not because some God gifted us the favors, not because we are inherently superior, or “more intelligent” (sic), but because we supported our families in everything they did to convince us that there is nothing wrong with the privileges we had. The privileges we enjoyed while walking the streets when no one judged us because we were Brahmins, but definitely a “lower caste”(sic) person was judged because she or he was one.

The first step is then, to educate our own families to get rid of their “holier than thou” beliefs. If the basic units of our everyday interactions such as families do not recognize their unjustified privileges, we need to get rid of them from our worldviews; instead of passing those racist heritages to subsequent generations to perpetuate racism for longer periods.
Yes, what appears to be a political decision is actually always result of a personal struggle.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Technology, Capitalism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Where would one read all this at one point?
1. Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, JF Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Freedom & Unity, You!, and Me!
2. Chicano Power!
3. We did not cross your borders—The border crossed US!
4. Dignidad!
5. Bush is the real criminal. Not us!
6. Bush & Fox Build a North America with Open Borders! Reform USA, Mexico, Canada.
7. All Americans are immigrants to this country—USA! Increase peace and love to all people of color
8. Arnold—Back to Hollywood
9. We are the People
10. My Hands built America Each Day. I am not a Criminal. We are not terrorists
11. You say Immigrants, like it’s a bad thing!

At today’s rally where more than a half a million people took to streets to denounce the HR 4437 (aimed at amending the Immigration and Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance border security, and for other purposes).

What the president says on Thursday as "I urge people who like to comment on this issue to make sure the rhetoric is in accord with our traditions” is being interpreted on Saturday as violating the real American tradition of being a country of immigrants. What’s the real issue then?

Well the issue is actually beyond the rhetoric. The President in 2004 had proposed a change to the existing immigration laws. And this was even way before the polls. He said: “If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job… We should not give unfair rewards to illegal immigrants in the citizenship process or disadvantage those who came here lawfully, or hope to do so.” He proposed then that the workers should be asked to leave. Not as an entirely ungrateful gesture, the workers should be given incentives. For example, retirement benefits in their land of births.

The heartening thing here is that the highest officials in America realize that there are certain jobs that “American citizens are not willing to take”. Like cleaning the dishes, standing by the fast food counters, handing gas stations, working at 7-Elevens, selling goods to immigrants speaking their language, road constructions, building repairs, or even installing cables for telecom giants.

And yet, these are the strenuous jobs that build any country. Without these works being done by the “illegals” and “aliens” that provide food, clothing and shelter to “American citizens”, this country would not be imaginable. The image of America worldwide is synonymous with huge roads, big buildings, and trendy people. This image would have changed long back if not for the ablest helps coming from the immigrants—legal and otherwise.

Of course, the country is not unequivocal about it. As the post 9/11 experience clearly showed, America was no more the country of the immigrants. It was suddenly a country blessed by God meant for Americans. Large scale distrusts were permitted to flow towards people who did not affix that bumper sticker with “God Bless America” despite the fact that people had to shave their beards so as not to look like followers of different types of Gods.

Today, many immigrants of the earlier generations have been convinced by a rhetoric of “what constitutes an American” that they—who form a majority among the minorities, more than 41 million people—are believing that they are now more Americans than the prospective immigrants. Simply because they have been recognized as thus, and are being rewarded for being thus. In an entire movement which should be directed at understanding the underprivileged 11 million “illegals”, today even their own counterparts are prompt to condemn them. These benefited immigrants now do not consider the issues of the illegals as an “American issue”. For them, it’s just an “immigration issue” which they have overcome already in their life! The common shared struggles of all people of color in this country is now being deliberately wiped off the collective memory by categorizing them into different resident status, thus weakening the already weak further. This divides not just a movement to reclaim what’s due to them, considering the arduous hourly jobs they have done with honesty and in return paid paltry sums, of which 40 per cent goes to unknown quarters, it also defeats any amount of potential discourse that can be held regarding the sensitive issue.

“Guest Worker” is the real rhetoric, and the country should have an understanding of it. If the president wants people to believe that being American is a lifelong experience, not a process of legal naturalization (“An understanding of what it means to be an American is not a formality in the naturalization process, it is essential to full participation in our democracy&rdquo, then it is obvious that living in America to tirelessly labor and serve is part of that lifelong experience. 11 million people residing in this country are being considered as illegal, which also means they have been living in a state of despair (low wage, no work benefits). The proposed law merely aims at “legalizing” them, not “Americanizing” them. Years of their cheap labor have always been perpetrated by the employers who have been full American citizens. The onus must not lie so much on the disadvantaged $6/hr worker as it should be on the billion dollars/year profiteering multinationals that have hired them at that. Agreed that’s little more than the minimum wage, but the minimum wage standards in this country have not been revised at par with the profit scales of the monopolists.

There are just two ways of working at it. One, to grant citizenship to the people who are willing to stay in this country and continue to work laboriously--of course after their minimum wages are increased. Or, two, to let them stay and work in their present status quo—where they have at least a liberty of social mobility without being discriminated against by a system that distrusts immigrants to begin with. (How many more Law and Order episodes will show immigrant hookers and how many more awards will Crash movie receive for stereotyping Chinese as “human smugglers”?)

The middle ground, which is being proposed now, is quite fishy. Maybe by documenting the illegals now, it is easy for the administration to keep a track of them. But at the same time, since they are not going to get privileged by their “participation in American democracy” (of casting a vote, basically---many of which as we know were not even counted at crucial juncture that would have saved all these posts today), they are clearly going to be discriminated against--‘systematically’ this time. Once someone is branded as an entity that’s not going to evolve into higher stages of humanly dignified life of being acknowledged in the country of work, the employers sure know how to throw their weights around. Not that the case is any different now. Now the undocumented ones are clearly facing wrath. The politicians who do not come out of the Hill should take a public transport sometimes just to see the state of those people—standing in a queue for daily wage works at Langley Park squares—15 minutes from the Downtown DC! But if the undocumented ones are allowed to work undocumented, the only difference would be that they keep their money in their own pockets, and not in a bank for direct withdrawals.

Apart from the emotions involved in this issue (which is why it is so sensitive)—and the emotions must be considered while dealing with deprived human beings (oh come on, I know capital, not society that takes precedence here, but with all the talks about God, at least it should be a good ethical try)—there are direct economic issues at stake here. There are no guarantees that once these people go back to their countries, they will receive their ‘incentives’. I mean, not only are there no previous examples of this kind, but there are ample evidence to suggest that not all regimes everywhere in the world actually are friendly with the current Bush administration to agree to its proposal. And certainly not the opposition parties in those countries, who after coming to power will stop recognizing any such deals. Thirdly, if those countries were wealthy and willing enough to accommodate these people, the people would not land up here. Fourthly, and the most basic one, is the rightful claim of the workers. They have so far toiled hard in bettering this country, by managing, repairing, amending this country. They have always tried to learn how to make sense of different accents of American English spoken with variety of tones, often laced with racial slurs, slangs and sexual overtones. The least claim they can make is to get a parity. A full participation in the democratic process of the country, as the President said. The question is if they are made devoid of eventual citizenship, their legal claims to grey areas will still remain inaccessible. Without citizenship, any of their claims can land them in a way that may still lead to their deportation. And now, all the baseball and basketball fans of the land know, that is not fair. Heads they lose, tails they lose?

The movement of more than 500,000 people at LA is a symbolic protest against the long line of unfair treatment. However, it’s not such a Catch22 as it is made out to be. The choice is clear in this case. People, who are already citizens, who are otherwise legal immigrants, and the clearly privileged yet sensitized Americans must realize that the accrued benefits do not need to be at the cost of inflicted injustice. At that point, silence becomes unethical.

A flyer on my table top reads: “We put food on the table and clothing on people’s backs and do the work most Americans don’t want to do for less money than many Americans will work for; and now they want me to say I’m thankful because they’re giving me amnesty, even though most of the people I know won’t get it. Just because I am legal all of a sudden doesn’t mean I’ll forget those who aren’t.”

This should wake the fellow immigrants to make it a 41-million legalized support for another 11 million illegals. And the rest of over 250 million people who realize that we all are immigrants to the country at one point or another (and in not so distant past!) should lend a strong support to either completely naturalize the unfortunates, or let them not pay as taxpayers to prolonged hawkish causes.

And for the fellow jubilated privileged immigrants who every now and then feel they deserved to get the ticket to the polling booths, they should realize it’s merely incidental. So incidental that they cannot even “fully” participate in democracy to challenge a presidential candidate simply on the grounds that they were not born in this land. Now if that’s incidental, why can’t the “illegalities” of the “aliens”? Because it’s written on the wall of a system?

No Worker can be Illegal. Its the ones who do not work and instead live off the labor of others who need be put to test. "First they came for the illegals, but we were not one!...?" Look out!

Tags: Saswat, Immigrant, Racism, USA, Activism, Capitalism, Law

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. This is a large scale Class war, and it can happen anywhere in today's world!

The so-called democratic state will obviously not wake up. It has proven what a zilch it cares for labor laws when it proclaims that young people can be fired anytime without any reason! The Union-bias of French administration sounds as shallow as the Liberal-bias of American media. The lip-service has been done for way too long now. The reality is that no law in the world has ever been passed in favor of the working people anywhere until and unless the people have taken to mass demonstration to demand for fair treatment. The French students, just like the American students in the times of Dylan in the 60’s, are demanding for social justice, anti-war stances, pro-minority treatments, and secured pro-labor laws. France is reeling under huge unemployment rates, starting from 10% for the Whites to 50% for the minorities. 80% of all education institutes are under-funded and in even worse shape than the equally less-talked about public schools in Washington DC. Only a small elite population, just like in the days of the royals (not that it has withered away anywhere from the enlightened Europe), keep enjoying the privileges of secured life.

Vilgot Sjöman had created I am Curious-Blue and Yellow, to showcase the class society of Sweden even at the prime of its so-called claim to petty bourgeois socialism. And the film revealed in multi-layers the utter hypocrisy that exists among Swedish society that claims to have socialist pro-labor stances and yet thrives only upon a class society assumption. People everywhere in Swedent were shown justifying why manual workers need to get paid much less than the thinking elites.

In France of today, the situation is no different. All these underfed schools are producing students in an atmosphere that does not respect manual labor works. French government not only projects its elitist biases in promoting the cultures of France as that of a monolithic sophistication, it even looks at the societal unrest issues from that very lens (of elitism). Unfortunately, the governments in such hoax democracies that do not give two hoots even to its future (the young insecure students) will always be run by the elites, for the elites.

Race war, it could have avoided despite Algerian crisis, but the class war is one the whole of Europe will need to watch out for; for the crisis rests not in Africa, its actually nearer home. Right outside the windows.

Tags: Saswat, France, EU, Capitalism, Colonialism, Racism, Communism

Please click here for an abridged version of this article, published by New American Media.

By Saswat Pattanayak

(This was written long before Crash won the Oscars. I am so happy I was right. It was important for Crash to win, because the system looked from the privileged views needed to prevail over the experiences of the unheard immigrants, because thats the only way the system needs to justify its (in)justice...And for the rest of us, we all know what's Oscars all about! )


“We made a choice to deal directly with race. We just kept digging at the truth and just did not care what it sounded like. We knew it was ugly. But if it’s truthful, if it’s real, if it’s right, if it serves the story we could do it. We just didn’t allow ourselves to be put off by its ugliness. Race is nothing if it’s not ugly, and no one is going to pay any attention to the storytelling if we try to get round that.”

--Bobby Moresco, Writer, “Crash” (In an interview from the DVD).

Crash is indeed ugly, feel some members of the immigrant families and I agree. Over last few months, I have been talking to people who watched the bootlegged versions before the DVD was out, to the administrators who are promoting diversity at workplace, to students who are assigned to write a paper after the campus screenings get done. Unequivocally, no movie in recent history has affected people like this one. Wondering if it was for better or worse, I juxtaposed my own perspectives to the narrative below.

The first clue came from a South Asian friend, and software engineer based in Virginia: “I think it tells us that we are all capable of our prejudices. But should we all profess them? Should we just laugh at bigotry and then forget conveniently?”

A good point for an unforgettable movie. If mainstream cinema educate and entertain at the same time, what did Crash have to say? What did it teach the immigrants about their shared histories of conflicts, and their unique backgrounds of confrontations? About their levels of assimilation, acculturation and adaptations? Regarding the identity crisis in a pluralistic society?

A scholar from the Middle East was apparently infuriated after screening of the movie was done at University of Maryland last week. “This movie misleads. There was considerable shock at the way Iranians were mistaken for Arabs. Why should the anti-Arab sentiments be flared up without any defense?”

Not only the affirmations of identities have become quintessential for the movie, but they have been achieved through replays of pigeonholes. There is a psychological numbing of the rebellious, and an uncanny triumph of the conformists. For example, Anthony is the rebel, the only potential revolutionary in the movie. He epitomizes the angry black youths, who are disenchanted by the existing system. The director even gets him to name the top Black Panthers to justify his sentiments. He talks issues around white supremacy. He talks about black stereotypes. Quite right.

But when it comes to life, what does he do throughout the movie? He steals cars. He abandons a “Chinaman” after running a stolen car over him. Quite paradoxical till this point in the movie, considering that he had been shown having a concern over how the poor are relegated to large windows of public buses for humiliation sake.

And then this same character who talks about Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton becomes the fallen guy of Crash. A successful black television producer who makes every attempt to fit well within the system says Anthony that he “embarrasses” his own self. Not only has he been portrayed in a stereotyped manner to represent the young rebel who mends his ways for the better even while he talks about the Panthers, he focuses on all things abjectly wrong.

The moral of the story for Anthony is that it’s better to fit well within the framework than to protest. Not out of any defeat, but from realization that he had been plain wrong. To prove that point, the director has Anthony displaying his mended ways by freeing the Thai/Cambodian people and by enjoying a bus ride in the end.

First, Paul Haggis gets away with a gross portrayal of the ideals that Black Panthers stood for. He gets Anthony to cite the black radicals of the 70’s to justify his earlier vents. But omits the actual argument. The Panthers were not fighting to reclaim respect in a racist society. They were demanding a just society based first on economic emancipation. As Fred Hampton, one of Anthony’s heroes in this movie, said in 1968: “We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, and then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that.”

The film gave away an impression that the Panthers must have been wrong somehow even without exploring the theme of capitalism. Nowhere in the movie, is any of the anger ever directed at capitalism. The intersection between socio-economic class and race has simply not been explored. Crash implied we just need more Anthonies, who will behave well and mend their ways and liberate the new tortured immigrants by offering them soups (and not fight the power that enslaved them in the first place).

Events are crucial to a process. So the crimes in the movie (consequently, the stolen car and damaged store) are important. But the understanding of process is even more necessary to contextualize the events. And the film leaves the audience guessing on the process (the root causes of racial tensions, the factors leading to everyday crime). We know that the store of the Persian business family gets ransacked. What we don’t know is why were they being perceived as Arabs. And why was it so wrong to be Arabs in America? Who sows the seeds of hatred and promotes the system. What was the law and order system doing to protect the small businessman’s store? If the district attorney addresses the press over his stolen car, why does the Iranian man not go challenge the police for negligence of security? Why instead he has to go shoot at a working class man? And then feel pacified at his failure to find an answer to the motives behind the crime that affected his entire lot.

The damaged store was portrayed as an act by minority groups who are infuriated by Arabs, not as a negligence of the security forces, nor as an act of terrorism by the power structure that fuels such suspicions. This is a deliberate underestimation of working class intelligence. Immigrants in the US do raise voices against the system every now and then. We just don’t get the message, because comfortable filmmakers continue projecting them as vulnerable, docile subjects incapable of raising class-consciousness.

Several attempts at making the movie comical has made it all the more pathetic. There is no macabre humor. There is just stereotypical mockery. Anthony argues that black waitresses don’t attend to black folks in restaurant much, because they assume there won’t be tips. His friend Peter then asks him “How much did you leave?” Anthony: “You expect me to pay for that service?” Peter roars into laughter along with the audience. Sure, now we are convinced.

Likewise, to push the issue of individual perceptions further, there are two white cops. Between them, one is a proclaimed racist (Officer Ryan, who has apparently spent 11 of his 17 years under a black officer). But he turns out to be the life-savior of the grateful black woman he once molested. And the cop who is aghast at his racism actually is the one to pull his trigger at an innocent black man out of suspicion. So what do we get in the end? Two human beings with “normal” prejudices. And both are “good cops”, by incidence or intent. It’s not the system of law and order that’s purposely biased against the minorities-- the movie says-- it’s just the individuals with different nuances, like any other.

Crash deals with issues, but addresses them through individuals alienated from the larger gamut of systematic circumstances. It deals with serious stereotypes, but normalizes them by ignoring the causes of disparities. In an attempt to portray the “real thing”, it overtly exaggerates the conventional (even a reformed Anthony says in the end with relief: “dopey fuckin chinamen&rdquo.

Indeed, part of the reason why different immigrant groups do not relate to their shared common history of struggles is because they have been portrayed as being antagonistic with each other to begin with. So the only element they need to show allegiance to then becomes the power structure that permits their existence as individual blocks. Rejoicing the diverse cultures make the task all the more difficult for the ethnic minorities to perceive their oneness. Prof. Vijay Prashad says in “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting” (2001): “To respect the fetish of culture assumes that one wants to enshrine it in the museum of humankind rather than find within it the potential for liberation or for change.” He talks of the need of a “horizontal assimilation” among the immigrant groups. “Consider the rebel Africans, who fled the slave plantations in the Americas and took refuge among the Amerindians to create communities such as the Seminoles; the South Asian workers who jumped ship in eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, to enter the black community; Frederick Douglass’ defense of Chinese “coolie” laborers in the nineteenth century; the interactions of the Black Panther Party with the Red Guard and the Brown Berets in the mid-twentieth century; and finally the multiethnic working-class gathering in the new century.”

If Prashad was finding links for liberation, then Paul Haggis, director of Crash, was finding the lineages amidst the same multiethnic working class of new century. And Haggis perfected the art of stereotyping the lineages of hopelessness in Crash.

Tags: Saswat, Film, Racism, Immigrant, USA

By Saswat Pattanayak

With February being declared and celebrated as the African-American Month in this country, it is only apt that we need to reflect upon the history a bit and evaluate for ourselves where we are up until now, and if this actually tantamount to celebration.

A couple of years ago, on my journey to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, I did a small survey of the personalities, events and processes that are given due recognition and the tones attached to them. Specific to my interest was the reception to the most brilliant African-American by any yardstick: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.

Since a couple of weeks now, I have been again approaching few students to get an idea of what they know of Du Bois and how they came to know of it. The students I interacted with came from different races, they studied various subjects and are well-educated in American schools.

The findings are predictable: there is an official version of telling history. We know it when we have the flawed historical account of Columbus (that he was a great sailor who discovered America!) or of Helen Keller (that she was a blind girl who lived the American Dream of demonstrating how anyone can do anything if one sets her mind at it). In case of Du Bois, it is no different at all. So the acclaimed Museum or the educated youths have the official history: that Du Bois was a great African American leader (some also hesitatingly add, “Pan-African” leader who founded NAACP and edited The Crisis).

What the official version never gets into is the roots. In case of Columbus, the history books don’t tell us that he was a greedy, inhuman oppressor who took pleasure in leading the murder trials and silencing thousands of indigenous peoples who had discovered America long before he even chanced upon it. In case of Helen Keller, the history books don’t tell us about her life spent amidst trade unions, calling for socialist revolution and standing up for the working class, and actually challenging American Dream by saying that it’s not an individual’s talent, but the overarching socio-political structure that creates standards of living.

Likewise, what most scholars today do not mention, let alone describe, is Du Bois’ firm rejection of the American capitalism (including the Black Capitalism) and how very emphatically he has proposed alternatives to the same. Most young people are clearly not aware of his political standpoints. And the text book biographies, when I was going through, never mentioned Du Bois’ politics either.

As though to celebrate him as a Black success in America, the extractions applied relate to his undeniable founding of an organization that encouraged people of every color and races to join force. That sounded to the mainstream historians as one cause of celebration that might have dawned upon the man in his American dream. Indeed, one book taught at the graduate level in the universities declares that Du Bois was in fact recipient of privileged education because of absence of racism in his school! (It conveniently misses out the discriminations he faced in Fisk University.) The books also take much pleasure in describing in detail the differences he had with Booker T Washington. The texts are full of grander narrative of a biographical sketch which is at its best, little informative, and in its worst, plain misleadingly boring.

Du Bois’ lifelong quest to improve the lot of humankind through active resistance to war-discrimination-capitalistic greed, to educate majority of people of their own shared histories of oppression by minority rulers, to enlighten us of our abject ignorance of social complexities, to encourage the pursuit of scientific outlook at understanding historical inequalities have all been omitted.

Omitted from essential readings are his indictment under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (where due to lack of evidence, he was subsequently released)! Omitted are refusals of the US Govt to grant him his passport when he was abroad, and so omitted are how he and his wife renounced the citizenships and became citizens of Ghana. After all, to create a legend, to put him on postage stamp (30 years after his death) demands that certain pages of his life be publicly censored. Unfortunately, the leaves of his life that have been trampled over contain the essence of all that he stood for. For social justice everywhere. None of the students I talked to could even guess that Du Bois had anything to do with the Left. And for them, and also because today marks his birthday, I reproduce the letter he wrote to CPUSA justifying why he must choose his side. His dreams may have been unfinished. But the reminders sure buzz:

The letter appeared in "The Worker" on Nov. 26, 1961:

“On the first day of October, 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled.

In college I heard the name Karl Marx, but read none of his works, nor heard them explained. At the University of Berlin, I heard much of those thinkers who had definitively answered the theories of Marx, but again, we did not study what Marx himself had said. Nevertheless, I attended the meetings of the Socialist Party and considered myself a Socialist.

On my return to America, I taught and studied for sixteen years. I explored the theory of Socialism and studied the organized social life of American Negroes; but still I neither read or heard much of Marxism. Then I came to New York as a official of the new NAACP and editor of the Crisis Magazine. The NAACP was capitalist oriented and expected support from rich philanthropists.

But it had a strong Socialist element in its leadership in persons like Mary Ovington, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell. Following their advice, I joined the Socialist Party in 1911. I knew then nothing of practical socialist politics and in the campaign of 1912, I found myself unwilling to vote the Socialist ticket, but advised Negroes to vote for Wilson. This was contrary to Socialist Party rules and consequently I resigned from the Socialist Party.

For the next twenty years I tried to develop a political way of life for myself and my people. I attacked the Democrats and Republicans for monopoly and disenfranchisement of Negroes; I attacked the Socialists for trying to segregate Southern Negro members; I praised the racial attitudes of the Communists, but opposed their tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of a Negro state. At the same time I began to study Karl Marx and the Communists; I read Das Kapital and other Communist literature; I hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917, but was puzzled at the contradictory news from Russia.

Finally in 1926, I began a new effort; I visited Communist lands. I went to the Soviet Union in 1926, 1936, 1949, and 1959; I saw the nation develop. I visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I spent ten weeks in China, traveling all over the land. Then this summer, I rested a month in Romania.

I was early convinced that Socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods. For Russia, I was convinced she had chosen the only path open to her at the time. I saw Scandinavia choosing a different method, half-way between Socialism and Capitalism. In the United States I saw Consumers Cooperation as a path from Capitalism to Socialism, while England, France, and Germany developed in the same direction in their own way. After the depression and the Second World War, I was disillusioned. The Progressive movement in the United States failed. The Cold War started. Capitalism called Communism a crime.

Today I have reached a firm conclusion:

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

Communism--the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute--it has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.

The path of the American Communist Party is clear: It will provide the United States with a real Third Party and thus restore democracy to this land. It will call for:

1. Public ownership of natural resources and of all capital.
2. Public control of transportation and communications.
3. Abolition of poverty and limitation of personal income.
4. No exploitation of labor.
5. Social medicine, with hospitalization and care of the old.
6. Free education for all.
7. Training for jobs and jobs for all.
8. Discipline for growth and reform.
9. Freedom under law.
10. No dogmatic religion.

These aims are not crimes. They are practiced increasingly over the world. No nation can call itself free which does not allow its citizens to work for these ends.”

Tags: Saswat, Communism, Black Power, Racism, USA, Capitalism, History

By Saswat Pattanayak

It was a perfect tribute to Malcolm X. The country almost forgot to recollect or celebrate him on the day he was assassinated 41 years ago. It was perfect because he would have loved it this way.

He would not have loved to be idolized, by the system of exploitation he gave up his life struggling against. Neither would he have liked to be converted into a heritage site or a street name or a public controversial holiday. He would not have liked to be eulogized by the presidents nor discussed over in a relaxed talk show. He would not have wanted us to remember his face on the postage stamp nor to have him imprinted on colorful tees that could be worn in rallies.

In every way, the silence of betrayal that spirals the country’s knee-jerking responses to his death anniversary was the befitting tribute to Malcolm X. The betrayal is deafening at the point when God is being called upon every so often to bless America, as though the destiny of this good country were being authored by the people who inhabit it. Malcolm would have greatly differed today as he differed back in 1964 (April 3, in Cleveland, Ohio; “The Ballot or the Bullet&rdquo :

“Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner. You must be eating some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.”

Malcolm would have hated us to glorify him in this age of war-mongers and indifferent citizens voting the same military-industrial complex back to power time and again. He would have opined similarly as he did back in 1963, while speaking in New York City:

“If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”

Malcolm would have chided us for our naiveties. For the misplaced faith of the collective whole on reactionary forces. For mistaking hunger-for-power as democracy. For lack of conviction as successful personality. Just as he never minced his words while criticizing the most beloved president this country has seen, back on the Valentine’s Day of 1965:

“John F. Kennedy also saw that it was necessary for a new approach among the American Negroes. And during his entire term in office, he specialized in how to psycho the American Negro. Now, a lot of you all don't like my saying that, but I wouldn't ever take a stand on that if I didn't know what I was talking about. And I don't -- by living in this kind of society, pretty much around them -- and you know what I mean when I say "them" -- I learned to study them. You can think that they mean you some good ofttimes, but if you look at it a little closer you'll see that they don't mean you any good. That doesn't mean there aren't some of them who mean good. But it does mean that most of them don't mean good.

Kennedy's new approach was pretending to go along with us in our struggle for civil rights and different other forms of rights. But I remember the expose that Look magazine did on Meredith's situation in Mississippi. Look magazine did an expose showing that Robert Kennedy and Governor Wallace -- not Governor Wallace, Governor Barnett -- had made a deal, wherein the attorney general was going to come down and try and force Meredith into school, and Barnett was going to stand at the door, you know, and say, ‘No, you can't come in.’ He was going to get in anyway. But it was all arranged in advance. And then Barnett was supposed to keep the support of the white racists, because that's who he was holding up, and Kennedy would keep the support of the Negroes, because that's who he'd be holding up. That's -- it was a cut-and-dried deal. And it's not a secret; it was written, they write about it. But if that's a deal and that's a deal, how many other deals do you think go down? What you think is on the level is crookeder, brothers and sisters, than a pretzel, which is most crooked.”

Malcolm would have ridiculed the deep fascination of our present times with the minority celebrities, the well-meaning billionaires, the filthy rich colored sports and music successes. If he would not have brought the analogies of field and house slaves, he would have perhaps talked about tokenism, just as he did four decades back:

“I would like to point out that the approach that was used by the administration right on up until today -- see, even the present generation -- was designed skillfully to make it appear that they were trying to solve the problem when they actually weren't. They would deal with the conditions, but never the cause. They only gave us tokenism. Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses, and the masses are the ones who have the problem, not the few. That one who benefits from tokenism, he doesn't want to be around us anyway -- that's why he picks up on the token.”

Or he would have really felt sad witnessing the current false pride among most of us, because we identify our entity and bask in glory, with the miniscule minority of us, assuming that since the ‘few’ among us made it, the onus lies on all of us to emulate (to pick up the tokens frantically and join the system unquestionably). He would have become infuriated at the repetition of the “dream” (which according to him, led to nothing other than the Black people marching from one dead president’s statue to another dead president’s statue) He would have felt exactly the way he did the year he was killed when he was 39:

“Whenever you see a Negro bragging about "he's the only one in his neighborhood," he's bragging. He's telling you in essence, "I'm surrounded by white folks," you know. "I love them, and they love me." Oh yes. And on his job "I'm the only one on my job." I've been listening to that stuff all my life, and the generation that's coming up, they're not going to be saying that. The generation that's coming up, everybody is going to look like an Uncle Tom to them. And you and I have to learn that in time, so that we don't pose that image when our people, when our young generation come up and begin to look at us.

The masses of our people still have bad housing, bad schooling, and inferior jobs, jobs that don't compensate with sufficient salary for them to carry on their life in this world. So that the problem for the masses has gone absolutely unsolved. The only ones for whom it has been solved are people like Whitney Young, who's supposed to be placed in the cabinet, so the rumors say. He'll be one of the first Black cabinet men. And that answers where he's at. And others who have been given jobs -- Carl Rowan, who was put over the USIA, who is very skillfully trying to make Africans think that the problem of Black men in this country is all solved.”

You know, the problem of the Black people in this country is still not solved. And therefore, you reside in our minds, brother, and your words reverberate.

Tags: Saswat, History, Black Power, Racism, USA

By Saswat Pattanayak

Once again, let’s stop making the individual an issue. Let’s not become patrons of decency by crying foul at one old politician.

Maryland Comptroller 84-year old William Donald Schaefer did ogle at a 24-yr old female aide to Governor Ehrlich. He even called her back at Wednesday’s Board of Public Works Meeting and asked her to walk again in front of everyone so that he could watch her. And the entire country now is being fed with the video for endless times.

Going by the way the video is playing into the headlines of television channels, it appears that the whole of America is shocked. Clearly highlighting the moral standards of a capitalistic hypocritical fiber, Schaefer has become the safest bet. He is eliciting reactions like “what a shame!” to “how can this be?”

A channel like Fox has gone on exhibiting the video to public on the streets and telecasting their responses. No one is feeling any sense of déjà vu. The entire country is shown to be appalled. All the while, making Elizabeth Krum a familiar face for everyone, producing a mordant series of reproduction of the scene where a bunch of old white men are making lewd gesture in a public meeting that’s funded with money that we taxpayers pay every fortnight, the media are turning into a derisive leaf of being loath accomplice in the crime. The media say, “we are shocked beyond belief: Let’s watch it one more time”.

When I was watching this clip being discussed as the main headline everywhere in the country, even as the seasoned journalists were scratching their beards to wonder how did this happen, even as the seasoned legislators were saying it was most unfortunate, as the seasoned feminists were saying actions must be taken against Schaefer and the general beat of the moment was that his romance with the voters may now be over, I was wondering where is the news.

Just like the media being necrophilous is not something new, rich, powerful capitalists at higher seats of privilege transforming the alive into the unalive is no news. William Donald Schaefer, who is one of the most seasoned politicians in the national capital territory of Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia area has served in public office since 1955 including as a mayor, councilman and finally as Governor of Maryland. As twice elected to the office of Comptroller of the state, Schaefer has won peoples’ trust in this country in rejuvenated manner.

Despite being what he has been all the times. Indeed he was in news for his attitudes which are of supposedly bigger repercussions. In May 2004, after his interaction with a McDonald employee, he opined that the immigrants are liabilities. “I don't want to adjust to another language. This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us.”

It is the same man who since years now has been ignorant of the federal privacy laws which prohibit an individual’s medical records. Being at the helm of affairs of fiscal sector, being in charge of collecting more than $13 billion dollars per year as state and local tax revenues, which also covers health sector, here is a man who has said people with HIV/AIDS are “bad people”. Two years back, at yet another Board of Public Works meeting he called for a public registry listing HIV-positive individuals! Schaefer said, “As far as I'm concerned, people who have AIDS are a danger. They're a danger to spread AIDS. People should be able to know who has AIDS. It costs an awful lot of money to treat them.” And this reelected representative of our people gave us a slice of his wisdom: “They bring it on themselves, they don't get it by sitting on the toilet seat. ... A person who gives AIDS, who spreads AIDS, they're bad people.”

Wow! Again, this should not surprise us. I mean, if there needed to have been an authentic demand for this man to withdraw, this need not be on the ground that he was ogling at a young female. He should have been culled with more serious charges.

We know that a system exists in our democracy that allows people like this to get away with anything they have to say. Come on, without any pretensions, we know the human rights issues in the US are in shambles. Domestic violences against women are on increase. Sensitivity towards the LGBT community is abysmal. Respect for women and concern for children can be reflected through the unabashed show of commodified women and violent video games. One that does not let women rule the country nor children to organize as communities.

The question is, do we have a system in place which can effectively challenge these? A system that can challenge the status quo. As to why since 1851, the year the comptroller’s office was founded, all of the comptrollers have been old white men? We know well that the people who control the finances are the most powerful. The question is why all of them have to be men.

The question is under the circumstances, what happens to the governor of the state? Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr.’s aide was clearly harassed as we all noticed on the television screen. Will he bear responsibility and condemn Schaefer? Ha! Did he do it when Schaefer bad-mouthed immigrants who were not well versed with English? Well here is what Ehrlich said: “Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, that some folks are teaching in our college campuses and other places, you run into a problem….There is no such thing as a multicultural society that can sustain itself, in my view, and I think history teaches us this lesson.”

Sure, his history teaches him different lessons! Publicly advocating supremacist societies which does not tolerate ethnic identities of diverse population, here is a governor, alright.

Baltimore Sun quotes Steven L. Kreseski, Ehrlich’s chief of staff, saying that the governor has spent time thinking about the concept as a congressman. 'Ehrlich believes that different ethnic groups should embrace American values such as capitalism and the celebration of Thanksgiving.'

Sure, why is it that I am not surprised? How fast, how effortlessly we have moved from issues of Schaefer to issues concerning Ehrlich. Because the issues concern them similarly, because they share the common platform, power and agenda. This is the only truth. There is no news value in this. People deserve the kind of government they elect. And in a god-fearing America, this may be the fate and we are all destiny’s children.

There have been strong critics of the current comptroller. Just like there were critics of McCarthy. Just like there were critics of Clinton. Or there are today critics of Bush. The pressing issue however is not to recognize that there are some odd ones out there who we need to recognize as bad when they target “our own” people. Remember as long as McCarthy was blaming the Soviets for everything, he was a darling. After he harassed a few good men of America, he had to become a ghost. Remember that as long as Clinton was bombing Kosovo and killing civilians in the process, it was fine. When we got the moral yardstick of one white female, the world went upside down.

Regarding our current president, the lesser said the better. War on Iraq is a good thing, American troops dying is a bad thing. Not that President Bush ever said anything different from President Clinton.
It’s just that he has not yet found time from dealing with issues of same-sex marriages, right to abortions and mothers against war. And guess what, he has been reelected too! With all the moral stories and preachings of good over the evil, our good better than theirs, he better be.

Well meaning critics of the comptroller have opposed the way the media have projected Schaefer as acting like his own. Intellectuals have condemned (they said the same thing in 2004 too in this brilliant article) this boys-will-be-boys excuse. The mainline argument is that he has to pay for his attitude. No one wants to buy the cliché that ‘Schaefer will be Schaefer’. After all, we are supposed to be God’s Blessed Land. We are to be upholders of moral standards.

But guess what, I think clichés are words of wisdom at times. And yes, the boys will be boys. Especially, the rich capitalist powerful men will behave like rich capitalist powerful men. Because its not they who are at fault. It’s their system they have carefully structured that’s capable of retaining them no matter what and changing the headlines every flickering moment so that people forget the crimes in the annals of reality TV shows, standardized female bodies, and hopeless comedies of modern times.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Economics, Capitalism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Just thought of penning down some afterthoughts. My tribute to Tookie....

They finally killed Tookie.
After all, he needed to die.
To perpetuate the system
To uphold the mayhem
To continue the mental slavery
Since it’s our collective mockery.

Of course, Tookie had to be killed
He posed to empower the reviled
How long more would they let him write
How much more they could let him fight
Sinners don’t preach, its privilege of the saint
Tookie’s pen had to justify every word he meant

We live in days of certainty, of high conformance
Of how to demarcate thin lines of adherence
Fast answers to many a riddles of our times
Between social constructs, judgments worth a few dimes
Of course Tookie was absolutely the criminal
Agitating children against gangs can be fatally banal

Tookie did not watch Fox TV to be enlightened
Or learnt of Law and Order from episodes televised
He spoke of ways he was turned towards the evil strait
During the times they would not let the blacks integrate
The system then produced petty thieves and killed their colors
Oh now, the system is itself the criminal, creating unjust wars

Some harmless lies over cocktail parties lead thousands astray
Vulnerable youths today then go kill few Iraqis and join the fray
National gangs are now validated everywhere across countries
Members sans convictions, nor any notions of their sanctities
Military industrial complexes abound with transnational spreads
They make the resistance gangs look like unwoven threads

Tookie said, my children, don’t join the gangs of the privileged
Times have changed for worse, and yet we are now educated
Let’s differentiate, take a stand, and make the most of our talent
Gone are the days when I had to survive, over them you don’t have to lament
I will sing the redemption song, and prove we now got better systems
Which educates street urchins, that rehabilitates the prejudiced dictums

I never made any money off the gangs to escape the charges
Never even made a revolution of sorts to replace the mental agonies
I played into the rich white man’s hands to continue the aberrations
And he could pass all bills to keep me under subjugations
Lack of identity, any education, no sense of my heritage
All I had was a dirty pond to beat the torrents of sabotage

Every move I made to get over, I had the moves monitored
Any time I did a narrating, I never felt quite absolved
Everyone wanted a sensational story, and I was almost stale
Just when I reflected at roots, and I thought I had to go tell
How the system bred me, sustained me, and had me uprooted
Just then they came at me, projected me as the most hated.

Tookie needs to die so that we can continue defocusing
We can have an easier life with the thought of some goons dying
Of course God will continue blessing America no matter what
Through the periods of slavery, colonies or civil rights cast
God has his favored children who get heard with more sympathies
Even as they commit thousands murders at their sadistic victories

But Tookie needed to die so that the system could teach
That nay, howsoever low you are, you ain’t above the preach
Poor, black, homeless, uneducated, misled, without a job
Be destined not to aim like Malcolm, not a lawyer, not a cop
Stick to your guns, your drugs and the poor church congregation
End up in our system, so that we can continue to impose segregation

Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Capitalism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Hyderabad is always as good as one could get. Hustle bustle of a rural life felt across the atomized civic livelihoods, Hyderabad is the classic paradox in many senses. The celluloid dreams of the star-struck ones come into virtual slides through the millions of auto-rickshaws; the amazement of the erected few buildings get diluted via the hundreds of human scavengers amidst rubbles of abandoned dust bowls.

In my last visit to the city, under the dynamic leadership of a leader bent upon to convert the ancient city to Cyberabad, CM Naidu was busy ordering for the evacuation of street beggars from the city. Garibi Hatao (‘eradicate poverty&rsquo had started sounding stale. Maybe ‘Garib Hatao’ (eliminate the poor) sounded more promising since Mr Gates was scheduled to arrive!

Four years had passed in between and this time when I went to attend an international conference on technology and society, the whole gamut of social dimensions of technology could find no better platform of continued contradictions. The detachment of society from technology is never a natural outgrowth. It’s on the contrary a manufactured disconnect. Just like the life-saving drugs exuberantly priced, the IT avenues are also kept elitistically above reach. The technology is used to produce more technology. One program leads to another, one language needs the other. The whole spectrum of IT then becomes conditional upon success of IT itself. And with the growth of IT outpacing itself, as a self-serving panacea, focus on the usability of IT to further human causes gets diminished.

Amidst the angst that characterizes the world of capitalism today, I found two amazing friends with unbridled hopes—Vivek and Shaheen. Whereas Vivek could well teach the geek squads a few things or two as a software professional, Shaheen is a liberal arts student hoping to educate the needy someday soon. What struck me the most was their unequivocal pledges for social responsibility—neither of them adhering to the standards of neo-fascist order of selfish well-being nor growing ambitions of the individualistic Roarks.

After my brief stays in Delhi and Hyderabad, this is Bhubaneswar, my hometown. In many ways, the trip to India this winter will show some lights throughout the tunnel and I will shed some of that here.

Now, over to Tookie’s murder. Subseqent to some comments in the previous post, I got this message from a female reader:

Well I guess both David and Miguel are white guys….if not it is surprising and not a good surprise.

Tookie Williams was murdered by a system democratically elected by less than 25% of the country’s population. He had asked for forgiveness for the crimes he admitted to have committed and had turned his life around and given back to the society more than most law abiding citizens have (including David and Miguel I am sure). Correction facilities are meant for repentance and becoming a good citizen and Williams was a blazing example of that. And when it came to the matter of life and death don’t you think he would have accepted the alleged crime of killing four men, since that is what Governor Schwarzenegger wanted in order to grant him clemency?

If the four men had not been white, Williams would have had some chance of getting clemency……..just a thought. His defiance to admit to the alleged crime till the end proves that he was wrongly convicted. Conscientious citizens and young people around the world will suffer his loss.

Capital punishment, a.k.a. state sponsored murder, seems so fair when people in designer suits and professional attire decide that someone needs to be killed, it’s so class. Then we have well dressed people being witnesses to an execution and coming on live TV to express their feelings about an unfortunate yet just event. And then we have those people who enjoy the twisted vicarious pleasure of murdering people, who worship capital punishment.

Most poeple in the civilized world, the ones with the resources to live life as planned by the system have the liberty to judge others, who are less fortunate, for the crimes they do (or allegedly commit). Such people do not once take into consideration the prevailing conditions, sustained by the socio-politico-economic system of a given country, which foster youths to join gangs, do drugs, or commit so called crimes. If anyone is to be blamed for most of the crimes it is the system; a system that is unable to provide its youth the resources, opportunities, and hope in abundance to ensure they become responsible and productive individuals.

And please don't talk about Gandhi, King and Mandela...it does not suit guys who are in favor of capital punishment to use icons of peace to prove their despicable view points. And moreover no one is born great, prevailing conditions trigger the passion of some people to do things extraordinarily and then some gain the support of the masses in order to be revered as great.

Despite the fact that US has the largest prison system and highest number of inmates (mostly people of color), it still has a competitive crime rate compared to any other country. David and Miguel like people can best explain this situation I guess…….and I will not be surprised again if one reason they might give is the increase in the number of minorities and poor people in the country.

It is not always about ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time’, because most often even if one does the time and turn his/her life around, one has a minimal chances of living a normal life if he/she is not white, rich and politically ignorant/right.

When we read history and call people in the bygone ears barbaric for the way they treated the culprits or fought war. Hopefully things will change for better in the next 200 or so years and our forthcoming generations will learn what opinions guys like David and Miguel held regarding capital punishment. Oh! Won’t they be proud of you guys?

For the rest of us who are experiencing the loss of Williams and likes will have little parts of us executed for the rest of our lives until things don’t change for better, socially, politically, and economically.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, Media, USA, Capitalism, India

By Saswat Pattanayak

All we keep hearing is the Tiananmen Square.

Only yesterday, a North Carolina man has become the 1,000th person to be executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court upheld states' rights to order the death penalty in 1976.

1000 people killed by the States through hurling capital punishment alone in less than 30 years! What a shame...!

What’s always underscored is a system’s failure to contain crimes and often the system’s vulnerabilities leading to crimes. That, the crime is a social phenomenon is well known, what is not brought to discourse, is that crime is led by events, not by a mentality. Even if someone ascribes a mentality, there is ample evidence to prove that just like an alcoholic addict can get rid of the habit, a once-been “criminal” can get rid of the temptations, through proper rehabilitation.

Moreover, it has also been seen that in most cases, the people on death row have actually been innocent. Just the way recently Illinois Governor George Ryan found out what he should do to decide the fate of 167 death row inmates. When he found out in a very short period of time that many of them were completely innocent (yes completely innocent), he acted on his conscience and pardoned all 167 inmates.

The question is whether such an astonishingly flawed criminal justice system should be for most parts pardoned yet. What exactly leads to certain cops, and certain judges to act the way they do. We have studies enough about what leads to a person committing a crime. It’s also time to understand what leads judges to order injections to kill a person who almost always have realized his/her flaws and has apologized through the realizations.

If we keep pardoning the judicial system for ordering execution of so many innocent men in just one of the fifty states, and it becomes such a shame that even a Republican Governor uses his discretionary power to pardon, one can only expect that the capital punishment clause be revisited.

Not only that the crime is a social problem that can be cured, and that the legal system is equally flawed, but also to be considered is the case of the individuals who are executed versus individuals who are either let go or awarded less harsh punishment. Almost always the overwhelming majority of prison population has been black, whereas blacks constitute a significant minority in the country. Apart from the race, other traits include illiteracy, ignorance, poor socioeconomic backgrounds. If these are the majority traits, then surely enough, there is more to the crime than being just an individual. After all someone having access to most of the things in the world can say, ‘hello I am John, just an average guy, you know’ and someone who does not have the privilege is like: ‘how’s life been treating you my man, I am Kwazi, and as you can see I am black, unemployed, looking to live that guy there in the nearby street—yeah right there. Look at that BMW, man. Yeah man, yeah that’s what I want.’

However the disparity between the wants of the poor people and the well-to-do people can only be understood in contexts. It’s easier to say, even by the enlightened masses from the Black community, that anyone can lead a comfortable life if s/he gives it a try. Its far more difficult to appreciate several other factors: someone’s social condition (of isolation or integration) at a given time, the family crisis (coherence between members), the history of incarceration (past trysts of any family member to the police station), the lack of education (owing to geographical reason) or good motivating educators (considering the peanuts that teachers receive in community colleges), the unofficial segregation of education (the public schools are almost always black—more than 90%, leading students to realize of course they must be different from the whites).

As long as a system does not enforce (yes, even if it works much to the anger of some liberal white folks who crib about individual liberties) equal conditions of living (even if that irks all the conservative folks who don’t want to let go of their goddamned unjustified properties), crime will continue to prevail. Because its not a matter of ethics, where we find that some people are just so unethical, but it’s a matter of compulsion, where we find that some people are just so in want of basic standards of decent living (the decent living that keeps appearing on every tv show and the hip hop song manufactured by the white video makers for the black audience).

Tookie Williams has apologized long back (even for crimes he has not committed). He has even written inspiring books about it. He has been telling people to concentrate on their education, knowledge of politics and improve skills to harness technology. A movie about his life has been screened internationally at several film festivals. His redemption has led to his nomination for Nobel Peace Prize. Yes he used to be a co-founder of a street gang, but those were radically different days. And these are different days. During then, most minority youths did not have access to education, even to discover who they were apart from being born in a family of slaves. These days, after years of struggle, they have snatched their rights to education where they can know that the greatest of all human cultures prevailed in Africa first, their ancestral birthplace, and that the world needs no longer learn from every European white figureheads on print, but from cultural activists like DuBois and Robeson (who were, those days, dismissed as communist and anti-American, leading the youths to hardly know about their own heritage). These days, America is observing Black History Month (even if it’s a token) and pays homage to civil rights leaders.

As the times have been forced to change quite a bit by the struggling people, the political leaders, judiciary and corporate houses have been forced to accept the new realities—they have been forced to realize the historical flaws they always had, and they have almost amended the blind belief in their own so-called superiorities. Now the country just needs to apologize (like recently it apologized for lynching or respected Rosa Parks in such grand manner). So we need to give the United States of America yet another chance to rehabilitate itself.

And in times like these, Tookie has also realized that street violence is not the way to achieve any goal. Now that we can read, we must educate ourselves and our children to be empowered. Now that we can access technology, we must work to utilize it well. The blind belief that the Blacks had in their so-called inferiority has almost been reversed now. And now the prisoners need to apologize and move on to improve everyone’s lot (like many black people have grown up to become fine educators, excellent sports persons, outstanding musicians—all from a scratch, and brought glory to the US). So we need to give Tookie Williams another chance to rehabilitate himself.

We must realize that it’s always a system giving birth to an individual crime, and not an individual crime that leads to a system. Just the way, it was not that American people (as they are always blamed) were any more interested in Iraq war as they were in sending their children to good schools. It was a war mongering system that declared the war. And the war that’s causing havoc in the US (with thousands of its promising youths—none of them a child of a ruling class elite--dead on the field) or Iraq (with scores of thousands of their completely innocent civilians murdered by the war), is so because of the system that prevails, not because of an individual wish. We need to stop blaming Bush and figure out what kind of system gives birth to leaders such as him. Only by changing that reality (of the grander socio-economic, cultural, political nature) can we understand the complications and change the country for good. We achieved that partially in the 60’s, and it works even till now. We can do it again, as well and achieve the goal fully.

In other words, there is no country that will afford to be racist or classist for all the time, just as there is no person who will be a criminal or a violator all lifetime. By all possible means, just like several presidents have apologized to their people for sins and crimes, we already have Tookie declaring his apology, and in the process of course teaching us so many beautiful thing about our human lives—words of his has soothed children on how to lead better lives, have critically forced adults to examine the realities perpetuated through our professed indifferences, and shall certainly question God if s/he is around to know that its so ironic and unjust that the system is going to take Tookie’s life on December 13th this year.

Stop his execution. If it’s a real democracy, people should be able to stop it, by appealing. If its not, people must change the phony system.

(Thanks, Malik Russell, for sending me a link to the political poster).

Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Capitalism

Rolling Stone remains the leading magazine worth quoting. This is one that never ceases to provide food for critical thought. One of finest pieces of journalism that is there today. Or there was ever.
This week, Matt Taibbi writes about Kashmiri earthquake and says:

Even the most godless among us has to tremble before the biblical scale of the past twelve months' headlines: the tsunami that swallowed south Asia, the deadly lady named Katrina (also known as America Not Immune) and now this. We do not seem to be going forward very much, but every few months we lose, somewhere, a big piece of the world map, a mysterious and enervating process that is becoming like an ominously steady drip that can be heard all over the planet.

And this, the massive earthquake that rocked Kashmir on October 8th, is the worst by far of the troika. It is a calamity the dimensions of which the world so far has completely failed to appreciate or understand. Coupled with the geopolitical nature of the misfortune -- testing the nerve of two antsy nuclear antagonists and the political health of a somewhat notorious but also critically important American ally regime -- the continuing disaster known as the Kashmiri earthquake threatens to be a world-shaping event as important as the Iraq War itself.”

A very humanist, and a very critical examination of the disaster, not stopping at the 80,000 toll, but actually predicating the aftermath of it as the bigger cataclysm yet to appear. This winter, he knows Pakistan will bleed. And the world, like in the past, may remain largely indifferent. An ally of the United States not since Bin Laden, but since well before the Bangaldesh War, Pakistan stands to count on the world leaders’ contributions to rehabilitate its people. Pakistan government and its people have done all that they could in times of adversity. Now is the time for the world to respond. Albeit lately. Taibbi says:

It just so happens that this process is taking place at a time when, in the wake of the tsunami and Katrina, giving from the West is unusually phlegmatic; to date, only about $131 million of a U.N. target $550 million has been raised, an embarrassment that has prompted U.N. officials to issue statements actually chiding tight-fisted Western donors.

The U.S. Army was active in Muzaffarabad and other places, making nearly thirty helicopters available. But while it gives aid with a grunt at the end of a stick, or out the bay door of a chopper, fundamentalist Muslim organizations and Pakistani political parties are traveling high in the mountains by foot to give it by hand, with a kind word and a few more in the mother tongue.”

Matt Taibbi, often compared with the Gonzo, is a phenomenon all by himself. Hunter S. Thompson indeed had a different style of writing than Matt. But where they intersect well are the level of honesty, the uncanny sense of dark humor and vivid critical imagination. Just as an example of his well meaning cultural locations, Taibbi in an interview said recently why he would not be called a journalist anymore (he said this referring to his editorial position in a paper in Russia). Why the demise had to be there, and why mainstream media is so fucked up:

I really loved Russia and I thought it was a great place. Unspoiled and different from America in such a great way, it’s so different. Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia everywhere you go is completely insane. In Russia, if you wake up in the morning to go do something you’re supposed to do for your job and end up 100 miles away stone drunk with a bunch of strangers it’s totally OK. In America we’re so efficient. When the Americans came into Russia en masse in the mid 90’s they all had this crusading missionary attitude – like we have to change this place and turn it more into America. We have to take all these dingy old buildings and replace them with our gleaming corporate storefronts. We have to replace all these interesting idiosyncratic people and replace them with middle class managers who all want to buy IKEA furniture and go on vacations in Ibiza. They had a real missionary zeal about it.

And the reporters were worse than everybody. A lot of them didn’t speak Russian too, and that infuriated me. They would hang out with each other. They would go only to Western-style bars, live in their compounds and write all these stories. That the plot of the story was always the same: If this politician spoke English and was pro-American than he was the good guy and whoever the Russian guy was the bad guy. And they were really ruthless about it. I got really upset about it.”

• Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Media, News

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And just to follow up on the previous post:

Organized students of the University of Maryland did not protest against any police department.
Students instead protested against systematic institutions of prejudices, bias and excessive violence. The three-points approach involved students to bring awareness about racial injustice within power structure of the school; to expose underlying racial tensions existing among community, student bodies and the country; to prevent future incidents of police brutality and further abuse of power and authority.

Listen to student protests live— and to the funkinest journalist Jared Ball sensitizing minds about what people should do when they are approached by the police. What are your rights? What are your stakes?

From the streets of College Park, the FreeMix Radio – out there to cover the systematic racism and violence at nation’s one of the top research institutions. Listen to it here, for the CNN will never bother.

Tags: Saswat, Media, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

The history of my campus is replete with racism. Most of the presidents of the university were decisively racists. Segregation of students based on whiteness/color had been a constant. In a timeline I helped prepare for my office, we discovered even more startling facts, some too gory to carry online.

Well, what’s new, one would say, when ‘everyone was doing it basically the same’ way up until 70’s. You know, folks actually get away with that loose canon. Of course it absolves the guilt of the guilt. The blacks, the asians, the hispanics had no place in white colleges back then, after all.

Back then sounds like a clichéd history. Except that we oftentimes fail to recognize how hysterically historical our contemporary society even is. The majority of population surrounding my campus are Blacks and Hispanics. Indeed, there are scores of communities of Latino population just outside the campus area (less than 100 meters away). Miles of stretches of apartments are inhabited by Latinos and Blacks. It’s like the invisible America of the national Capital.

After all, the visible are the big cities, not their population. The buildings, not the workers. Powerful sites like Washington DC, New York City or Las Vegas. Invisible are their makers: the cheap labor force. Behind all the glory of the Capitol streets, all glitz of the Times Square and glamour of Nevada casinos are the footmarks of the Blacks and Latinos. ‘They’ construct the roads and buildings and yes keep them darn clean.



Same goes with the giant ivory tower of the University of Maryland. The College Park campus alone is located on 1,250 acres of rolling land. The communities surrounding the campus are predominantly Latino. At least 80 percent of them are! Eighty freakin percent! The PG County which houses the College Park university is predominantly black. About 63% of population in PG County are Black (whereas only 27% are White). Likewise, the adjoining Washington DC –the state that houses the most powerful maniacs in political history—has a population of 60% blacks and only 30% whites.

Now let’s look at the largest campus of the area, the flagship public university and how diverse it is—which basically means how much does the university attempt at recruiting from the population that is represented in the area. How reflective is it of the reality and how contrasting are the statistics when we compare between the people who make up the area and the ones who get the elite tickets to higher education. We are not even talking of the rates of retention which is pathetically lower when it comes to students of color. For the purpose, we are to talk only of the recruitment (colored students who at least showed up—no matter if they left the place owing to the great mismatch between lived reality in their living neighborhood and the classroom incongruence).

Here it is, among the undergraduates: White students: 68%! Asians: 14%. Blacks: 12%. Latino: 5.7%.
And among the graduate students: White students: 83%! Blacks: 7%. Rest: 10%

So what we have here is a complete contradictory picture of what is real outside and what’s reflected inside. This is true of all major universities of the US. All big cities are predominantly inhabited by people of color. Just look at the statistics, from the US census: Latinos comprise 27% of New York City, 46% of Los Angeles, 26% of Chicago, 37% of Houston, 36% of Dallas, 30% of San Jose, 59% of San Antonio, 77% of El Paso, 25% of San Diego, and 34% of Phoenix.

Likewise, Blacks comprise, 28% of New York, 44% of Philadelphia, 37% of Chicago, 26% of Houston, 27% of Dallas, 82% of Detroit, 65% of Baltimore, 62% of Memphis, 61% of Washington DC, and 68% of New Orleans.

Now add these figures for all the major cities of the America. Even if we don’t count the Asians, these numbers alone are staggeringly so high that the reality is, the great big cities of the world are actually great because of the contributions of the hard-working people of color who comprise the majority here.

So where are the 77% of Whites of American population?
Well, a small minority of them are in the big cities, alright. And they clout the elite institutions –courts, universities, business empires in major proportions. They don’t deal with the slum problems since they have got people to build huge buildings for them already. They don’t have communities or neighborhoods. Only towers shrouded by private forests where paparazzi have to make a living of. The majority among the rest of them also take a break and don’t have to deal with the problems of the colored people—leading eventually to real segregation of the great contemporary America—one of the lesser pondered truths of modern times.

Huge majority of whites do not reside in the working class population that constructs the modern monuments. The one that is the invisible America in the Hollywood movies (again an example of mismatch—between who appear on screen and who live in Los Angeles), and the invisible America amidst the homeless millions of New York and DC.

In the cities that control the rest of the country, the ones who control the cities are a small minority White population. And that is the grim reality even to this date. And control they do, remotely. Living luxuriously in posh bungalows in richest counties which either exist side by side the largest slums (consider the fact that the country’s 10 richest communities are in the Washington metropolitan area only—where even as less than one-third are White!) or completely are way off in less dense states, demarcating the lines of segregation.

This is called the classic contradiction of capitalism in the political economy. The majority work hard to make the civilizations, for the minority to rule. The class society reinforces a social divide, uses overpowering instruments—dominant religions, mainstream education, standard work ethics, negotiable law and order—to normalize the illusions. It feels good to assume its one country, one America blessed by a Christian God, one culture where we have reduced the indigenous to less than 2 percent, one power fighting one war of terror outside the country and one superpower solving the world’s problems since we are not supposed to have any.

And it certainly makes most of us also forget –to choose sides in the exceedingly polarized two worlds of modern America—the Haves America, and the Have-nots America.

Tags: Saswat, Academic, Racism, Economics, USA, Immigrant

Discrimination may after all, not be the news, considering it could well be the norm of the day.

Even when it involves business concerns in corporate America of contemporary times.

If the irony hits, read this article by Doris Lester:
(also used here, with permission)
Read More...

Tags: Saswat, Racism, Capitalism, USA

Looks all cute! 13-year old twins. Some popular music band too.

…fast forward:

“When the man who plows the fields is driven from his lands.
When the carpenter must give away what he's built with his own hands.
When a mother's only children belong to her no more.
And black masked men with guns come bashing down the doors.
Where freedom exists for only those with darker skin.
Where lies and propaganda will never let you win.
Where symbols of your heritage are held with such contempt,
and benefits of country 'cept tax are you exempt .

Aryan man awake,
How much more will you take,
Turn that fear to hate,
Aryan man awake!” ( Words by Lamb and April)


….And then.


“I see you all around me.
I see the apathy in your eyes,
knowing not what it means to be free,
watching as the White flame dies.
It means nothing to you,
Pride is an unknown trait.
Tell me what are you gonna do run
and hide or face the hate?

Hang your head in shame.
Have you no pride in your heritage,
and no pride in your name?
I'm glad that I'm not like you.
I know my children are proud of me.
While yours still suffer too,
mine I know will always stay free.” (words: McLellan)


Well these are songs by a band called “Prussian Blue” who describe themselves as “Lynx and Lamb, twin girls from California, with great musical talents, who are not just talented girls—they are also charming and loving sisters.”


Whats the most pressing concern for the duo?
“Not having enough white babies born to replace ourselves and generally not having good-quality white people being born. It seems like smart white girls who have good eugenics are more interested in making money in a career or partying than getting married and having a family. And yes, we are working on some new songs about this issue.”


Media have discovered them full blast. White supremacist, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke uses them to gain support. The girls sing in praise of late white separatist leader Robert Mathews, proclaiming him as someone whose flag will forever fly and in whose memory the land will stand up one day.

And their music is mayhem. Or great promise for the future. Depending on where you come from.

Tags: Saswat, Racism, USA, Music

By Saswat Pattanayak

The French with the burden of ‘civilizing the savages’ have displayed their mammoth colonialist, racist and classist traits once again, yet again.

The recent Paris urban riots just indicate the systematic exploitative regimes called Western Democracies. The illusions that go with such democracies overwhelm the vast reality of gross injustices to the extent that folks talk about such regimes only after popular outbreak of resentments (that is, the culmination brings attention than the process itself). It’s such a matter of shame that the gory history of French colonialism is never the point of international condemnation and the phony democracies thrive with such examples. These myopists defenders of liberal democracy claim that France is the most diverse country in the whole of Europe. What they forget to mention is that it is the most racist nation as well.

What is again lost on the pundits is that the immigrants are not the ‘problem’. Far from it, France occupied territories and was in dire need of immigrants so that it could catch up with other industrialized nations after World War II. When the immigrant workforce of Italy and Spain could not achieve its goals, it thrived on the immigrant workers from Africa and Asia. While the European immigrants easily were incorporated into the upper class, the non-European immigrants from Africa and Asia were forced to work at the lowest wages (which continues to this day of 2005). Not only is the systematic exploitation so prevalent, but the minority cultures are forced to give up their ethos and assimilate to the France mainland on conditions of sustenance. Practice of different religions and use of languages are not permitted.

Race statistics are not kept in France so that forced assimilation of Muslim population can be made possible. Law forbids Muslim women from wearing headscarfs! Laws are in place to forbid Muslim practices, whereas Christian norms are forced upon immigrants.


When the government and its pseudo-socialist (capitalist reformers) opposition itself resorts to such human rights violations forcing people to give up their cultural identities just so they will be entirely French (and become what—colonialist of the 21st century?), what to speak of “the failure of the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy”?

The recent riots in France are result of a sustained cultural domination of the Whites over the immigrant population who were exploited systematically since occupation of Algeria in 1830’s to reconstruct France from time to time. And yet the African, Arab and Asian workers who lent their lot to make France such a shining fashion nation of the globalized age, are the least benefited lot. They are concentrated in slums, impoverished, segregated, policed and brutally attacked by the government with racist slurs.

When the lawmakers of France are so slanted by their bias against the black and Muslim population, it will be wishful thinking to assume that law will grant any equal rights to anyone. The reality is France is at least 40 years behind United States in realizing that salad bowl and not melting pot is the need of the hour. No matter of coercion will allow people to sit quiet and take orders of repressive phony democracies. The current riots are manifestation of century old frustrations, at times expressed by the oppressed.

At least Belgium and Netherlands have displayed a better sense of respect for their immigration population, from which France needs to learn. And even in those countries, riots have become common phenomenon owing to systematic apathy.

Indeed the savage France must learn civilization codes from the Arab European League which states as its mission : “We believe in a multicultural society as a social and political model where different cultures coexist with equal rights under the law. We do not want to assimilate and we do not want to be stuck somewhere in the middle. We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live. In order to achieve that it is imperative for us to teach our children the Arabic language and history and the Islamic faith. We will resist any attempt to strip us of our right to our own cultural and religious identity, as we believe it is one of the most fundamental human rights.”

Its founder Dyab Abou Jahjah, who was himself arrested in November 2002 and charged with inciting Muslims in Antwerp to riot (Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said that the AEL was “trying to terrorize the city&rdquo, has declared: “Assimilation is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others.” He complains that in Europe “I could still eat certain dishes from the Middle East, but I cannot have certain thoughts that are based on ideologies and ideas from the Middle East.”

Even the careful mainstream media have come down heavily against inequalities prevailing in France today.
“The unrest has highlighted the division between France's big cities and their poor suburbs, with frustration simmering in the housing projects in areas marked by high unemployment, crime and poverty.” (AP) Reuters agree with AP’s attribution of all the unrest to economic injustice, and adds a suggestion of racism: “The unrest in the northern and eastern suburbs, heavily populated by North African and black African minorities, have been fuelled by frustration among youths in the area over their failure to get jobs and recognition in French society.” Deutsche Presse Agentur called the high-rise public housing in the Paris suburbs “a long-time flashpoint of unemployment, crime and other social problems.”
“The areas hardest hit by the riots are home to North African and black African minorities that feel excluded from French society” (Reuters). “The violence also cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community -- its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest -- by playing down differences between ethnic groups. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities” (AP).
Le Monde suggests in an editorial that the Interior Minister was deliberately stirring up tensions to divide France. “The minister believes in the existence of a clear separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’,” the newspaper said.

This is simply gross in an era of multi-culture co-existences. But the French elites are hell bent upon against any protests of any sort in that country. Labor unions (even championed by the white workers) are suppressed, workers are laid off whenever they go on strike. Paris has become the citadel of capitalistic contradictions. With high society of mannerisms, the French elites have continuously exhibited disdain for the working class. History is replete with examples every passing week as France evolves to supersede its competitive rogue nations that practice dangerous democracies. Sartre, the philosopher of our age, had drawn a similar parallel when he wrote the following:

“I will not go so far as to say that we were as cynical as in that southern state of the USA where a law, maintained until the beginning of the nineteenth century, prohibited people from teaching black slaves to read—offenders would be fined. But we did want to make our ‘Muslim brothers’ a population of illiterates. Still today 80 per cent of Algerians are illiterate. It would not be so bad if we had just forbidden them the use of our own language. But a necessary aspect of the colonial system is that it attempts to bar the colonized people from the road of history; as nationalist claims, in Europe, have always been founded on linguistic unity, the Muslims were denied the use of their own language. Since 1830, the Arabic language has been considered as a foreign language in Algeria; it is still spoken, but it hardly survives as a written language. And that is not all: to keep the Arabs fragmented, the French administration confiscated their religion; it recruited leaders of the Islamic religion among creatures in its pay. It has maintained the most base superstitions, because they disunite.

The French republic maintains the cultural ignorance and the beliefs of the feudal system, but suppresses the structures and customs which permit a living feudal system to be, despite everything, a human society; it imposes an individualistic and liberal legal code in order to ruin the frameworks and development of the Algerian community, but it maintains kinglets who derive their power solely from it and who govern on its behalf.

In a word, it fabricates ‘natives’ by a double movement which separates them from their archaic community by giving them or maintaining in them, in the solitude of liberal individualism, a mentality whose archaism can only be perpetuated in relation to the archaism of the society. It creates masses but prevent them from becoming a conscious proletariat by mystifying them with the caricature of their own ideology.” (p 41, Colonialism and Neocolonialism. Jean-Paul Sartre)

Even as most of the world is learning to grow, the French are trying to go back to cave ages created by them as though colonialism were their core identity by forcefully trying to assimilate cultures into one whole European sad saga. If the world bodies such as the UN have any shame, its time to “teach the French a lesson”. How can I not end with the Clash’s London Burning? This time, Paris is burning again!

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

The funny thing is the French elites do not feel any difference. No riots ever affect them. Their children do not get electrocuted while escaping police brutalities. Their socio-economic class does not get adversely affected by misery of urban slum-dwellers who have been systematically segregated (a popular solution approach in whole of Europe today). French governments show concern over increasing poverty and crime rate, but they don’t necessarily relate those two, do not speak of the origin and growth of them and the government’s roles to perpetuate those gaps by creating unequal laws, by undermining the racial factors, by refusing to acknowledge that different races exist in huge number in the country thrived on exploitation of minority immigrants. Such a shame!

Tags: Saswat, Indigenous, France, Racism, Colonialism, Islam

I had a period of silence. And it was deafening.

The so-called natural disasters are no more within the control of the nature anymore. Not just do disasters of such scale continue to persist (despite the fact that there should be none, considering the “progress” we have made in terms of our understanding of nature) because of human interference in ecological balance (what with the high-rises, the nuclear underground/water tests, the unusual warming), but even the aftermaths of the disasters continue to ravage human lives (which are logically most extremely avoidable).

So the most recent (in)human disaster has a name: Katrina. In the few subsequent blog posts, I shall publish in entirety some reactions, responses and revolutionary stances that few people are taking everyday of their lives and which need to be emulated.

Personally speaking, I have few reservations about the donation-charity society. By going this way, we are absolving the government we elect of its role: which is to conduct itself in accordance to the demands of the social situation. I would be far better to see the anger than the gratitude in the face of victims. And my heart does not go out to them because they are in a state of dismay. My whole self goes, because they are angry. Agitated. This is the wake-up call.

Tags: Saswat, Environment, USA, Black Power, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

I celebrated the independence day fine.

Well that’s the India’s freedom from the British Raj, I am referring to. August 15th midnight hours were the times of the “trysts with destiny” as Nehru proclaimed. And I am just going to reflect on the layers of destinies in store now.

Switched on the television set to find if there was any anti-colonial flavor, any celebration of a multi-cultural society willing to adopt welfare socialist economy or a people nostalgic of huge dreams, broader visions.

Of course it was a disaster. Instead all I could notice was the running advertorials on grand marshals of Indian freedom: Anil Kapoor, Karisma Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor, Babita Kapoor etc are the chief guests to celebrate India’s day of freedom in New York about to be organized on August 20 instead (why? Ask Karisma what courtroom drama she is into these days, that’s why).

Its better to be off to office, I thought. Took the entire office folks to the Tiffin, an Indian restaurant.

Thought there would be fanfare inside the restaurant. Some special smiles. Some warmer greetings. Some big balloons.

Well there was nothing of that nature anywhere. Business as usual. My colleagues and I ended up sharing some unique heritages of freedom struggles in our respective lands. And wished more power to Indian people on the day.

Could not blame the restaurant much. You see, although the owners may be of India origin, almost all people who work there are from Nepal. And I don’t think there is any special reason for Nepalese workers to celebrate independence of their Indian bosses.

Caught a cab to take my new friend and her papa to dinner where we were all invited. The driver was from Pakistan. “Happy belated Independence Day”, I said. He was quick to wish me the same back. And then, said “today is yours”. I said, “but of course we are not such different people that we have to rival each other in celebrating. Remember we both together ousted the British from our land.” He also agreed that while it was true, the fact is the partition was the most painful byproduct anyway. That was true. But does he feel anyway proud?

“What rubbish? I am hiding in the US from being prosecuted in Pakistan. Hence driving cab. Otherwise I used to be a Catholic priest in Pak.”

Had excellent dinner, a very memorable one. I called it the Independence Day dinner. Only that we did not recall the sacrifices of people without whom the day would not have come to such a pass.

Depending on where one comes from, the day will be perceived. For the cab guy, the day was not just bitter, but it never leaves his shadows. No amount of talk would convince him that all religious leaders have used gullible people to further their politics of hatred. “But there is nothing called Christian fundamentalism”, he retorted. I explained for an hour and gave up. But he was sure we were not going to celebrate anything. No matter what.

The fault is not with him. Indeed the way we have crafted the history of struggles with the British domination and how we have carried forth the heritage is the cause of distress. Instead of correctly looking back at the freedom struggle as a secular one where people of all color/religions/castes had taken part to eliminate the oppressive rulers, we are looking back at it as a Hindu struggle to create Hindustan and Muslim struggle to create Pakistan. What we have been taught to forget is the contributions of the peasant class, the industrial workers, the lower rungs in the military, the naval strike, the secular nature of Indian National Army, the atheism of Bhagat Singh and revolutionaries. The Maulana Azad, the Kaifi Azmi. The Progressive Writers Movements, the Indian Peoples’ Theatres (IPTA), the Aruna Asaf Alis and the Quit India Movement which in 1942 was led by no leader, but orchestrated by the entire masses of people who boycotted the British and challenged them to “Quit” India. Never before and never after has such a call been so pronouncedly made. Just when we were to win, the British had a map ready. We lost big time.

We have now been reduced to religious symbols in the world. Far from being hailed as the founders of the anti-colonial peoples’ struggles, we are today a Muslim poverty called Pakistan and a Hindu bomb called India. And we are the cheapest tech-slaves of the 21st century. The biggest consumer market, the largest slum-dwellers, the saddest communal fanatics.

And we don’t have heroes. Not one in real life. Why blame the cab guy?

Tags: Saswat, Immigrant, USA, Racism, Colonialism

Complexities within the South Asian communities are generously explored, Dinesh D’Souza and Deepak Chopra are loudly bashed, and the “model minority suicide” is critically examined. I am yet to come across anyone who is anywhere close to Vijay Prashad in terms of analyzing the “Brown Folk”.

The Karma of Brown Folk is masterly narrated, well researched, originally argues and mustly recommended.

And Vijay Prashad who teaches International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, has indeed produced this classic to challenge classical myths. More power!

Tags: Saswat, Literature, Communism, Racism, Black Power

By Saswat Pattanayak

Histories can be telling. Especially when they are told by the mainstream American media.

The country of concentrated wealth also has the knowledge distribution centralized and no wonder from John Stewart to Michael Moore, the public humorists often cite how many Americans think Canada is another Hawaii (but now since they are required to carry passports to Niagara Falls, some among them have started believing Canada is a separate country)! Indeed, in a recent chat conversation, a woman from California asked me where I was chatting from? “Maryland”, I said. “You are funny. Mary-land? Ok now, tell me which state?” She of course took offence when I asked if she knew where Washington DC was. She knew where DC was….so ok, now gotcha.

Next incident may sound even more incredible. While buying fresh fish at Whole Foods in Silver Spring, our man at the counter asked me, “So are you from Argentina?” No, I said. I am from India. “Yeah but where are you originally from?” I wondered about that, since from experience I knew it’s difficult for some Americans to believe “immigrant-looking” people to be Americans. Hence I did not say him that I was from a nearby city called Adelphi, but that I had actually come from India to do the shopping. “You know although I stay in Maryland, I am originally from India,” I reiterated. He was not buying that. “Oh, Indiana! You look so much different”. No, not Indiana. I am from India—India as in a country. In Asia. India—the computers, the elephants.

He was looking at me puzzled. He had never heard of India (luckily, he had heard of Indiana State.) I was accompanied by my office boss. She did not believe this. “Where has he been hiding all these years, for not to know about India?” I nodded.

Often times one encounters ignorance of mass proportions in the country of concentrated wealth. People still believe that Columbus actually discovered America, that Russians were a bunch of murderers out there to kill every American and that Bush did not lie about Iraq and the WMD.

This week, yet another of the great lies have been incorporated by the most read, most cited mainstream media. Another leaf from the American history-telling. In the next blog.

Tags: Saswat, Media, Immigrant, USA, Racism

By Saswat Pattanayak

Why is only a penny brown and got Lincoln on it?
Is that why they leave it on the ground.
-Amiri Baraka

The update about Baraka, the poet of the oppressed, is that he is not much talked about anymore. The sudden silence around him is a tragedy of our times. But it should come as no surprise. Going by a trend of how the system engulfs the same talents who once adorn its progressive horizons as cultural icons (albeit, countercultural icons, but icons nevertheless) it should come as no surprise that Baraka, the once emulated and idolized hero of the revolutionary times is not even reduced to a legend any longer.

LeRoi Jones, as he was known during the Beat period of early 1960’s, Baraka was companion to Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. After the death of Malcolm X, Baraka became the Black cultural nationalist founding the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem. Till 1975, Baraka was well adored as the forerunner of black nationalism and culture.

Pause.

Lets get back to Paul Robeson. Or farther down the times to WEB Du Bois. As these brilliant minds served the interest of the groups that believed in the binaries of race stratification, they were hero-worshipped. Du Bois was looked at as the epitome of black intellect. Robeson was perceived as the epitome of black vigor. Towards the end of their lives, both of them had famously joined the world revolutionary struggles to condemn any form of global imperialistic designs. They reported that peoples of the world, if worked in unison, would change the face of the world, given the shared oppressed history of the colonized and the enslaved. That peoples of the world wanted peace at any cost and that was to come only by combating the world capitalism. As the world was becoming more visibly devoid of territorially encroached and was emerging as economically subjugated by interest groups, no narrow agenda of nationalistic fervor was going to do the trick. On the contrary, narrow racial agendas were going to be played up well by the ruling class to fight one against another by showering favoritism and encouraging suspicions among the oppressed groups.


As Du Bois, the greatest of all Black scholars ever, formally joined the Communist Party and Robeson, the greatest of all Black athletes ever, supported the cause of international communism, all hell broke loose. The avowed religious Blacks, the comfortable leaders of the civil rights movement who wanted to work with the system (and not against it) and the politically correct ones belonging to the minorities whose families started reaping benefits (however silly that might be the case) started distancing themselves from these erstwhile heroes, even as they were still alive. Du Bois died tragically in Ghana, his revolutionary writings hardly honored and remained a literary icon in library corners of diversity loving campuses. Robeson died unwept, unknown and unsung.

Amiri Baraka after 1975 shunned the nationalistic struggles, called it fascist in nature, called for world unity of oppressed people in identifying and combating the class enemies. He became a pronounced Third World exponent, cried freedom for the majority of the world who suffered under tyrannical rules disguising as democracies. Once the focus shifted, like it happened with both Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X during their last few years of life, there was concern from three different quarters: the black nationalists who were not willing to budge from their agenda, the white racists who oh-so-hated Communism and the politically correct mix of different races who felt offended by such shifts that did not further their interests in their stronghold of media, military and state machinery. Baraka said, "I see art as a weapon of revolution. I define revolution in Marxist terms. Once I defined revolution in Nationalist terms. But I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned and had to reach out for the communist ideology."

As the poet laureate of New Jersey, when Baraka recited his poetry “Somebody Blew Up America” (reproduced here), he was accused of anti-Semitism. Of course he was asked to relinquish his position. Not just the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), but even many black so-called leaders came forward to ridicule him. Such is the irony of the times that the beat poet, the radical free voice who lent his creative voice to all peoples of color of the world had to come down with an explanation to prove his authenticity. http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html After that period of gloom, I saw him on an interview at a Sundance documentary called “The First Amendment Project” and noticed that his works are being sold on his own site for $5 onwards!

The entire poem written by the revolutionary poet Amiri Baraka is reproduced below. If allowed to add, I would only suggest an additional line: “Who are these ungrateful peoples of a contented era? Who forgot their own poet, the fearless poet who called a spade a spade, a violence a violence, a revolution a revolution?” Read More...

Tags: Saswat, Black Power, Literature, Racism, Communism, USA

By Saswat Pattanayak

Well, do minorities in the US think they have a shared history?

Logically no, if they intend to continue remaining minorities. Else they would be the majority of people (just by the sheer volume of their class structure and solidarity with their White working class counterparts). But the amazing thing is there is a dearth of education regarding a subconscious that there could be anything shared among them.

It grows out of a feeling of selfish endeavor of human being to stay inhumanely competitive. A society such as American (by which I mean an individualistic society where education, healthcare, social security—are all based on individualistic formulae of secret numbers that the State asks folks not to share, than social commitments to welfare where people could organize themselves on basis of their shared knowledge of mutual discontents) teaches people to first take care of their own selves, than anyone else. In some crude form of defining family, the roles are assigned individually among spouses, the children are encouraged to stay separate as different units, and when the parents turn old, they have no constant family support since independent children have not been taking care of much of anyone else anyway (remember they are busy letting their own family become nuclearer).

In such a fragmented society, its ridiculous on my part to assume that people will think beyond their four walls (of course when it gets boring, you have got Oprah and Jerry Springer on the television within the four walls), let alone think of the different races, cultures, nations, languages and you name it, and you don’t have it.

Well, during times when individuals have suffered depending on their race status, they have got united, so that the struggle benefits them individually. And once economically few have benefited for having played the rules of the ruling game, the same members of the oppressed race, show their backs to the other members of the race and hence the wide disparity then becomes apparent between them and the majority members of their race which overwhelmingly remain dispossessed. So the “house slaves” as Malcolm X called these people, who loved playing the rules of the masters and who wept when their master wept saying “oh master, we are sick” when the master alone was sick, then become the torchbearers of the fruits of freedom. A freedom largely unknown to the 35 million homeless and hungry of this country.

In such a self-centered society which does not encourage people to look beyond their own self, in a classically disgusting Ayn Rand fashion, its stupid for me to assume that marginal classes of people will ever think themselves to be belonging to the same rank.

Its not fault of any individual as I see it, but it’s the mistake of the individuality that people flout today. This