Aditya NigamFiled under: caste, globalization, identity, marxism, new left | Tags: india, SEZ, politics, democracy
Published in International Socialist Journal, UK
India today
Issue: 118
Posted: 31 March 08
Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (Zed, 2007), £12.99
This book, written by two academics who are also campaigners, offers the best survey of recent Indian history that I have seen.
It begins with a chapter on the political expression of caste. The authors discuss controversial proposals for positive discrimination for low castes in public employment (the “Mandal report”) and how electoral politics have been colonised by caste. These dynamics can spread out in apparently peculiar directions. The “untouchable” (or Dalit) political party, the BSP, has entered state-level coalitions with the Brahmin dominated Hindu chauvinist BJP. This phenomenon illustrates one of the authors’ central themes—a crisis in what they call the “secular-nationalist Nehruvian consensus”, which dominated India after independence in 1947.
The key challenge to this is the “Hindutva” (Hinduness) concept of the BJP and its allied organisations. For the BJP, India is Hinduness. If this is true then the “Nehruvian” vision of secularism is nothing but anti-democratic pandering to (alien) minorities. The authors provide an effective tour of the network of organisations of the “Sangh Parivar” (Brotherhood of Organisations) allied to the BJP. They also show how the Sangh Parivar used a few key issues to build support and set the political agenda from 1985 onwards.
The mainstream “secular” left has attempted to manoeuvre around these issues by an Indian version of “triangulation” (ie adopting some of their opponents’ ideas). Unsurprisingly, the net effect has been to legitimise and build up the communalists of the Sangh Parivar.
Once the authors get onto the impact of globalisation they are in their element. They clearly demonstrate how the Indian bourgeoisie and judiciary have embraced a position of validating any project that can be portrayed as modernising or developmental. All mainstream parliamentary parties have embraced this perspective.
Most notably, in 2000 the Supreme Court made a judgment that allowed the development of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River in the state of Gujarat. A 1994 judgment reiterating the principle of eminent domain (the power of the state to acquire private property for public use) is being used to dispossess communities of common land for developmental use, or private land with below market value compensation. In other words, we have here an example of how part of the “superstructure” is operating to promote a strategy of the “base”—in this instance, the “globalising” section of the bourgeoisie.
This globalisation has had almost perverse consequences. In the late 1980s the emergence of large scale cassette production resulted in a huge demand for recordings of Pakistani TV soaps. One of their main selling points was their use of modern (non-Persianised) Urdu. The north Indian audience found this much more accessible than the formal and synthetic Sanskritised Hindi imposed on Indian productions. The subsequent emergence of satellite TV has expanded this “cultural pollution” so feared by the ultra-nationalists. There has been a proliferation of English and Urdu loan words into contemporary spoken Hindi of the under 40s.
It was not only the bourgeoisie who embraced globalisation. The authors track the journey of the Communist Party (Marxist) (CPM), the main left party. The CPM is a curious fusion of Stalinism and old fashioned social democracy, so perhaps the story of capitulation towards modernisation and development isn’t so much of a surprise. This reached its culmination in the suppression of a popular revolt at Nandigram in CPM-ruled West Bengal.
The CPM have run West Bengal since 1977, and initially consolidated their position with a radical land reform programme. Now 14,500 acres are being compulsorily purchased for a special economic zone. Inside this zone normal labour and environmental laws do not apply—all to aid development. The protesters have been attacked both by police and by CPM activists. The authors point out that the CPM chief minister justified this by invoking the mechanistic “laws of history” argument perfected by the first revisionist, Eduard Bernstein.
The CPM’s policy is reflected at national level by its support for the pro-globalisation Congress-led coalition. This has provoked huge dissent from the “non-party” left and an unlikely but limited resurgence in Maoist groups in the most backward forested areas of the country.
The authors include a good review of one of the less known aspects of modern India—the insurgencies in the north east. They ask whether this area is really part of “India”, given its incorporation into the imperial state by the frontier policy of the British (which might also be a useful way to look at the role of Wasiristan in Pakistan). This then patches into a discussion of the recent phases of the Kashmir conflict.
The final section deals with India’s position in the world. Here the authors’ problems of perspective become significant. By failing to comprehend how globalisation has transformed the Indian state into a “great power”, they misinterpret the US-Indian agreement on nuclear power as ensuring “that the US government will decide Indian foreign policy”. In reality, the Indian government intend to behave as all great powers do—they intend to cheat. The deal is in fact a way for the US government to save its face, being unable to admit that it cannot coerce the Indians on these matters. The Indians are doing the US government a favour by going along with this facade.
This problem of perspective—that India is following a standard path of “successful” capitalist development—leads to a weak conclusion. The book simply peters out into a brief summary of what the authors have said and then ends with a limp hope that “contestations” to capital and the state will continue. Such a readable and informative book could have used its material to identify how this “normal” capitalist path can lead to another “normal” feature of capitalism—rising struggles by the growing proletariat as it becomes more aware of its exploitation by capital and, more importantly, as it becomes aware of its own power.
Filed under: identity, marxism, religion | Tags: indonesia, mao tsetung, muzaffar ahmed, sarekat islam, third world
By Aditya Nigam
Introduction
This paper is as much about the postcolonial world as it is about marxism. More importantly, it is about the relationship about the two. I use the term ‘postcolonial’ here to refer to something more than a mere temporal marker - as more than something that comes after the end of colonialism. Rather, it refers to the entire region of the Three Continents (Abdel-Malik 1981) since the beginning of its encounter with colonialism, and through it, their encounter with modernity; it therefore points towards a whole range of conditions that mark it out as distinct from the first world - political, economic, psychological and cultural. If colonialism was the dominant agent of modernity in these societies, it was certainly no the only one. A certain marxism, particularly after the Russian revolution of 1917, became a potent force through which the emancipatory ideals of the secular-modern imagination entered this world. And yet there remains a continuous tension between the high discourse of modernity entailed in it and the existential situation of this world, which becomes complicated by the day.
The end of the twentieth century marks the end of a gigantic emancipatory project, probably the largest ever in history that was carried out in the name of that marxism, which met its end with the collapse of “actually existing socialism”. I will refer to this marxism as “canonical marxism” which rapidly degenerated from a vision of freedom into a massive project of social engineering, of trying to fit the whole world into One Past and One Future. In its entirely misplaced effort to efface all difference, it ended up, in the process, effacing itself.
The project of erasing difference began from within. In order to be able to cast the world in the single mould of the vision of the Third International and its inheritors, it was first necessary to erase difference from within its own ranks: its own ‘self’ had to be reconstituted, in a manner of speaking. What I call the “footnotes” to marxism are precisely those elements of its self, those currents of thought that comprised its rich variety before the onset of orthodoxy, that were waylaid and pushed to the margins. They are what Javeed Alam has, in the context of the philosophical traditions of modernity, called the “unembodied surplus” of the tradition (Alam 1999). The communist/marxist self that was expunged and thus pushed outside the text, as it were, has kept re-appearing in different ways in different times and places, occasionally, disguised in conventional modes of appearance. Even after the collapse, the idea of a communist future continues to survive in very different ways and continues to inspire struggles in large parts of the world, especially the Three Continents, including India – often outside the apparatuses of mainstream communist parties.
In this essay, I wish to open up the space for a reconstruction of a new emancipatory vision for the “Third world”, which cannot but draw heavily on marxism, even if it is marxism reincarnated for a postmarxist conjuncture. I am aware that the search for the “real” Marx is a futile one. For one thing, he is inaccessible. For another, the world that has traversed a century and a half since then demands much more than he can offer. After all, it was Marx who constantly reminded us that ideas can never have transhistorical validity; that they arise within given socio-historical contexts and become meaningful within them.
At one level, just like the “original Marx” is lost to us, so is the “pre-marx” era of human thought. The tradition of Marx permeates the very world we live in and the very air we breathe, to borrow an expression from Castoriadis (1987). Any new vision can only arise by passing through the multifarious practices of “actually existing marxism” – by way of a theoretical encounter with that legacy.
In this paper, I explore through an investigation of the fate of Marx’s doctrine, two inter-related sets of questions. The first set of questions relates to the problem of the specificity of the postcolonial world and the problems of simply “applying” theory born in the West to conditions so very different. This problem is further complicated, I will argue, because underlying the theory there was always the Eurocentric assumption of the invincibility of the West, thanks to its ‘higher level of development’/ ‘advanced mode of production’ and its being possessed of the magical wand of Science and Reason - that is History ( Future History?) embodied.
The second set of questions has to do with the ways in which marxism’s canonization itself led to the destruction of the emancipatory potential - both in its theory and in the organizational forms mediating its practice.
by Aditya Nigam
“If the socialist revolution in the ‘twenty Latin Americas’ cannot be unified, then neither can its timing. The national fragmentation of the Latin American revolution is matched by the way its political calendar is fragmented into quite unconnected rhythms and upheavals. In each country the process has its own time clock: whether armed or not, the class struggle will always be at a different moment in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and again different in Guatemala city. Vanguards can see far and wide: it is this that makes them the vanguard…Vanguards decide on their present action in view of the ‘far-off socialist ideals’ with which, by theoretical anticipation, they become contemporary. But it is pointless for them to set their watch to Caracas time in Buenos Aires (or Hanoi time in San Francisco for that matter). The people who make history are living by the time not of a continental, or world, revolution, but of the material living conditions of the area, the town or the country, which their horizon is bounded by. ” Regis Debray
“In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy there are examples of all the economic forms to be found in Europe, including Turkey…What exists in the International as a chronological development – the socialism of artisans, journeymen, workers in manufacture, factory workers, and agricultural workers, which undergoes alterations, with the political, social or the intellectual aspect of the movement predominating at any given moment – takes place contemporaneously in Austria.” Otto Bauer.
‘Staging’ a Revolt
A little over forty years ago, in May 1967, the extraordinary event called ‘Naxalbari’ took place in a northern Bengal village (whose it name it bears), ante-dating the May 1968 upsurge in Europe by a full year. A peasants armed struggle to begin with, Naxalbari represented a utopian burst of revolutionary energy as rebels from within the CPI(M) challenged the cautious pragmatism of the party leadership that has, ironically, increasingly come to mark radical political practice since then. Formally, the main plank of the movement was its complete rejection of all parliamentary politics and a call for armed seizure of power. Located within the global conjuncture of the rise of Left-wing radicalism of the 1960s, the revolt was formally inspired by Maoism and the ongoing Cultural Revolution in China.
Maoism of course, has had a longer history in India and has presented an attractive alternative to sections within the Indian communist movement ever since the days of the Telengana peasants armed struggle. A section of the communist party had, ever since, remained sympathetic to Mao Tsetung and the “Chinese Path” – the path of protracted peasants warfare as opposed to the short sharp, “Ten days that shook the world” model of the Bolshevik revolution type, based primarily on the working class insurrection in the cities. The disagreements never really died down but took on a different shape in the years after the withdrawal of the Telengana struggle. The differences had international coordinates no doubt but it would be completely ahistorical to reduce the emergence of a powerful movement such as that simply to Chinese influence. In the conjuncture of the 1960s, the great attraction of Maoism was its relentless drive against the grey, formalist bureaucracy that had come to mark the Soviet model of socialism. The Maoist slogan ‘bombard the headquarters’ was seen and felt by many in the Left as a call to arms against party bureaucracies. But more importantly, it was the disillusionment of the youth in different parts of India, with the promise of independence and the corrupt nexuses of power that had come to mark the institutional structures of parliamentary democracy. Peaceful social transformation in India’s villages and towns seemed like an impossible pipedream.
In the years preceding the emergence of Naxalism, the internal differences within the CPI had reached a point of no return. After Independence, the CPI had actually emerged as a significant electoral-political force in some states, and within a decade was able to form the first elected communist government anywhere in the world, namely the EMS Namboodiripad government in Kerala in 1957. While these experiences strengthened a parliamentary perspective within the party, they were also leading to increasing restlessness among sections who were beginning to see these moves as abdication of the revolutionary path. The debate within the CPI, which eventually led to the split and the formation of the CPI(M) in 1964 involved thus a whole range of issues connected with the understanding of Indian state and society, the nature of its democracy, the strategic perspectives of the Indian revolution and such other matters. That the CPI(M) leadership, following the split failed to discuss and take a position on many of the issues concerned, certainly helped the more youthful and restless sections to gradually move away from the leadership. It was in such a situation that once again the newly formed ‘revolutionary’ party, namely the CPI(M), was presented with the opportunity to form coalition governments in the two states of West Bengal and Kerala. Once again, the unresolved questions came to the fore. The party decided to go ahead with the task of forming governments in these two states. It was at this juncture that the rebels decided to strike. In fact, it was on the very day that the new government was taking oath, in 1967, that the first ‘incident’ was reported from Naxalbari. Thereafter, the matter simply escalated. That the Chinese Communist Party hailed the struggle as the “burst of spring thunder” over India and lent its support to the rebels, only added to the escalation.
Very soon, what had begun as a bye-product of an internal debate within the CPI(M), became a public Event of major significance. It unleashed a debate in society at large about matters that might have had little to do with the “path of India’s revolution”. In a sense, the Naxalbari revolt was literally ‘staged’, intended to serve as an aid, more powerful than words and treatises, in the inner-party struggle. However, as happens with most such matters, the protagonists of the revolutionary message/line had also really started believing what they were saying. Nothing was said for mere effect. The rebels really believed that the Indian revolution was round the corner, that the people were ready but it was the ‘revisionist’ and reformist leadership of the CPs that was holding them back. The Maoist dictum “a single spark can start a prairie fire” was understood to be valid for the India of the late 1960s and 1970s, to the extent that Charu Mazumdar could exhort – and most Naxalite rebels would believe and follow him – to make 1970s the decade of liberation.
It seems in retrospect, however, that the real significance of Naxalbari was not in the doctrinal stances of its leaders and the endless esoteric debates that followed them, it was rather in the fact that Maoism and Naxalbari became a powerful political and moral critique of the dominant institutions of Indian democracy as well as of existing forms of radical political practice.
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