Albert Camus

This BBC talk on Albert Camus reminded me of my own enriching encounters with the writings of the Algerian born French existentialist many years ago.

Existentialism did not appeal to my primarily Marxist leanings, not even Sartre’s philosophical works and his attempts at synthesis of Marxism and existentialism had any long lasting impact, though the writings of Sartre, Beauvoir and Albert Camus instigated one to think critically. Even then, it was their literary works that held greater appeal. Some of the most influential works I was introduced to after having read the English and Russian classics, were those by these three writers. Camus, especially his novels The Outsider, The Fall and The Plague opened up a new landscape for me. In case of Sartre, I found his literary works like Nausea, very difficult to read. Funnily, his philosophical writings (like the supremely unreadable A Critique of Dialectical Reason) appealed more, despite their languid dreariness.

Sartre was a hero for us, mainly for his political stands and the fact that he continued to be a Marxist of sorts. Camus, on the other hand, despite his one time membership of the Communist Party (or perhaps because of it, some would aver) disowned Marxism, and was hence pretty much dismissed as a renegade. The only major philosophical work that I remember reading, with some trepidation, is The Myth of Sisyphus (of which my friend Rahul Banerjee is very fond of, incidentally.) The absurdity that the French existentialists spoke of did not strike a chord even then.

However, lately I found reading some of Camus’s philosophical works like The Rebel, Resistance, Rebellion and Death to be rather pleasant, which is perhaps a reflection both of the distance I have traveled since, and also the relative obscuring of ideological debates and dilemmas since Camus’s times.

It is still difficult to accept the ideological and philosophical positions of Camus, and as the talk on BBC radio indicates, Camus’ literary writings will rightfully outlive his philosophical works.

(Link to the BBC Talk via the excellent blog Ready Steady Book blog that I discovered today).

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Technorati Tags: Camus, Sartre, Existentialism, BBC, Talk

Nehru Lives

Nehru lives because he embodied the essential ethos of India’s long struggle against colonialism, including its shortcomings. He was criticized from both the Left and the Right during his own lifetime, and is now blamed by all those who believe that neo- liberalism is the answer to the problems that his statist model could not solve. Those that criticize him on these grounds forget that his perspective was rooted in an essentially economic critique of colonialism, whose early propounders were Dadabhai Naoroji and RC Dutt.

The Indian National Congress’s critique of British rule was rooted in a very economic understanding, and hence a justified suspicion, of colonialism and imperialism. This is something that the early nationalists arrived at independently of Marxism.

The funny thing is that all those who criticize Nehru today also display the same belief that he and many of his generation did- that economic development will do away with caste and class antagonism, though they overlook his more holistic views regarding the role of the state.

In their exuberance, the current propounders of globalization and neo- liberalism display the same economic determinism that a generation of Marxists once did. Part of the reason perhaps is that some of them are former Marxists or Nehruvians.

In that, and many other surreptitious ways, Nehru lives!

(Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth day falls on 14th November)

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Image Acknowledgement

Technorati Tags: Nehru, India

A Platonov Quote

A man doesn’t know himself, he must be discovered by the writer.

- Andrei Platonov, most well known for his novel The Foundation Pit

From the Notebooks of Andrei Platonov

Of Forks and Spoons, and the Devil in the Detail

Some reporters have a mesmerizing eye for detail. Sample these two reports, one regarding the swearing in ceremony of Mayawati’s cabinet and the other regarding Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Laloo Yadav at the dinner table on the 3rd anniversary of the UPA government.

This is a report from Akhilesh Kumar Singh in the ToI (When Brahmins did not touch Mayawati’s feet), italics mine:

While all the MLAs who took oath as ministers lined up to touch the BSP chief’s feet, some of them refrained from doing so. It wasn’t social engineering’s finest moment.

While nearly all Dalit ministers touched Mayawati’s feet, those belonging to upper castes simply bowed and took her aashirvad . Ministers, including Thakur Jaiveer Singh, Rangnath Mishra, Anant Mishra, Nakul Dubey and Daddan Mishra — none made the proverbial “dive”.

and this is by Sheela Bhatt in Rediff (UPA@3: Perfect evening, old tale)

The most talked about personality in the entire evening was inevitably Uttar Pardesh Chief Minister Mayawati. Though invited to the gathering, she did not attend the dinner. Nor did she send any representative from Lucknow.The ruling elite of India, at the high table, spoke softly and did not laugh much.

Now here is the irony. While Sonia ate with her hands, Lalu chose to eat with fork and spoon.

While one agrees, more or less, with the inferences in the first report, it is difficult to do so with the second one- there is no irony in Lalu using a fork and Mrs Gandhi using her hands, on the contrary this  underlines of the inclusiveness exhibited by both.

Eating- and the manner of eating is, more often than not, a symbol of identity than about the food itself.  Nothing can be more comforting, or touching, than a rustic Laloo using fork and spoon and the Italian born Mrs Gandhi employing her hands, in a very Indian way.

Technorati Tags: India

Antonio Gramsci and India

(on the 70th death anniversary of Antonio Gramsci, who died on April 27, 1937 in Mussolini’s prison)

Antonio Gramsci’s position in history of ideas cannot be underestimated. Given its overarching strength and universalist ambitions, it is very difficult to be original from within the Marxist framework- something that Gramsci managed to do in his short life. Despite the spread of Marxist ideas in India and his own reputation as a great Marxist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci has remained relatively distant in India.

This is not to say that there has been no influence of Gramsci. In fact, both India and Gramsci have influenced each other.

Much before India reached out to Antonio Gramsci after his writings became available in English translations in the late 1960s (though it was reviewed by Bhabhani Sen soon after it came out in 1957), Gramsci had reached India in the 1930s- indeed his key theoretical contribution to the theorization of revolutionary advance was illustrated with the strategy of the Indian freedom struggle.

While imprisoned in Mussolini’s prisons during the fascist purge of communists in Italy, he saw Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of alternating active political movement and withdrawal as what he termed as the ‘war of movement’ and ‘war of position.’

The Indian communist leadership in the 1930s, under the awe of the ‘living Lenin’- Stalin, at that time had characterized the Indian freedom struggle as a bourgeois movement. But then, it will be incorrect to wholly blame Stalin for this. Much before he became a key figure within the CPSU, the brilliant, but mistaken, Indian revolutionary MN Roy had characterized the Indian struggle for freedom as a bourgeois one, something that Rajni Palme Dutt would make a central tenet in his book India Today, for a long time the Bible of Indian communists.

It turned out that both MN Roy, and much of the Indian communist leadership, excluding, but only to a certain extent, P.C. Joshi (who despite his rather inclusive and sympathetic look at the Indian freedom struggle, was an admirer of Stalin), were mistaken. In terms of a theoretical understanding, neither the CPI, nor the CPM, to speak nothing of the blatantly mistaken Maoists, have made any attempt to learn from Antonio Gramsci’s writings of the 1930s. The only attempt from within the establishment Left was made by the former CPI theoretician, the late Mohit Sen, who had incorporated Gramsci’s theoretical concepts in his understanding of the Indian Revolution, in the book published under that name in 1970.

Even Mohit Sen treated him from within Leninist glasses, writing a tract called the Leninism of Gramsci. Whether Gramsci went beyond Leninism or not may be a conclusive debate as yet, what is certain is that Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, and the need to build organic intellectuals are more pertinent than Lenin’s (contrast Lenin’s ideas about the ‘professional revolutionaries with that of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’.) A reading from his essay on the Intellectuals from Selections from The Prison Notebooks confirms how closer he is to contemporary capitalist society:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. It should be noted that the entrepreneur himself represents a higher level of social elaboration, already characterised by a certain directive [dirigente]and technical (i.e. intellectual) capacity: he must have a certain technical capacity, not only in the limited sphere of his activity and initiative but in other spheres as well, at least in those which are closest to economic production. He must be an organiser of masses of men; he must be an organiser of the “confidence” of investors in his business, of the customers for his product, etc. (Link)

He fundamentally changed the understanding of the base- superstructure as envisaged in the binary model outlined by Marx in his The Critique of Political Economy that remained popular because of its great conceptual breakthrough and the simplicity of the concept. He rescued the Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire from the mechanistic reductionism in the former work.

Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works. Particularly important from this point of view are The Eighteenth Brumaire and the writings on the Eastern Question, but also other writings (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, The Civil War in France and lesser works). An analysis of these works allows one to establish better the Marxist historical methodology, integrating, illuminating and interpreting the theoretical affirmations scattered throughout his works.(Link )

Above all, Gramsci remains relevant because he tried to explain the nature of political power (much before the meaning of power was investigated, somewhat tangentially by Michel Foucault and Derrida), from the perspective of what he called the ’subaltern’ perspective. The usage of the word ’subaltern itself is interesting- it establishes a historical relationship between various, otherwise disparate classes. The short lived Indian school of historiography initiated by Ranajit Guha- the subaltern school of historians took off from Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern, employing it almost interchangeably and therefore restrictively with the ‘peasant.’

It is interesting to recall that one of the reasons that Gramsci came up with new nomenclature was because of the restrictions that he faced while writing in a fascist jail- anything that was ‘evidently Marxist’ could not have passed through the jail censorship.

Much later, in the mid- 1980s, Bipan Chandra and some of his associates employed Antonio Gramsci’s concepts to understand the Indian struggle for freedom and concluded that the Indian struggle for freedom was a revolution. This understanding remains fundamentally at variance with that of the mainstream communist Left, that still does not recognize the changed nature of political power in the backdrop of the establishment of popular democracy. It is, for them, still ‘bourgeois’ democracy, as if ‘proletarian democracy’ is a qualitatively different category.

This is not the place to go in why that is so- it sufficient is to mention that even the mainstream Left makes no pretense at theoretically advancing their understanding of India- categories like proletariat and what constitutes the revolutionary class(es) in the age of post- industrial capitalism. Among other works, Manuel Castells’ rather revisionist work The Rise of the Network Society (a work of ‘Hegelian dimensions’ nonetheless) and Anthony Giddens’ The Third Way remain un- debated.

It is among the Indian academics that Gramsci has proved to be more popular. Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, in their seminal study of the CPI, in the first two volumes of Struggle for Hegemony in India employed Gramsci’s path breaking work to indicate that the original intent of the Workers’ and Peasants Party which became part of the CPI (and to which P.C. Joshi also traced his political roots) was closer to the conclusions of Gramsci than those of the MN Roy/ Comintern line.

His death at the age of 46 was premature, and brutal coming as it did at the end of 10 years of solitary confinement.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of “Exceptional Laws” enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.(Link )

***

A brief overview of the treatment of Gramsci’s ideas in India by Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta.

Writings of Antonio Gramsci at Marxists.org archives

International Socialist has an issue devoted to Antonio Gramsci (link via Histomatist )

A google search reveals an article Reading Gramsci in the time of Hindutva by Imtiaz Aijaz Ahmed. I haven’t read it though and could not find the online version either.

On a more personal side of his life, read this article from Guardian about the touching letters to his son and wife.

Image acknowledgement

Technorati Tags: Marxism, Socialism, Political Theory, antonio Gramsci, Theory, Hegemony

Hobsbawm in Conversation with Jacques Attali

Nearly fifteen years after the collapse of ‘existing socialism’ and over a decade after Derrida warned of the return of specters of Marx, there certainly is a new found respect for Marx, even though he is now seen as a champion of globalization and free trade.The pitamah of Marxist historiography, Eric Hobsbawm in conversation with international banker Jacques Attali, whose recent biography of Marx, the second one after the collapse of Soviet Union, is selling like hot cakes in France.

If you look at the history of mankind in the past two centuries, this is the fourth attempt at globalisation. The first came at the end of the 18th century, collapsing with the Napoleonic wars. The second came at the end of the 19th century and collapsed with the First World War. The globalisation of the 1920s collapsed with the Second World War. We are in the fourth attempt at globalisation in two centuries and the most probable outcome is that this attempt will go the same way as the previous, leading to isolationism and protectionism.

Technorati Tags: Marx, Hobsbawm, Socialism, Globalization

Ashok Mitra- Two Economic Theories

Former West Bengal Finance Minister, the acerbic Ashok Mitra contrasts two economic theories of development- one articulated by Wassily Leontief in the fifties based on the input- output model and another one, now less remembered, that of unbalanced growth laid down by Albert O. Hirschman.While the Leontief theory led to planned economic growth, the latter is closer to the model popular in India today- Hirschman envisaged that if agricultural growth is stimulated by directing the funds in that area, everything else will work out. The resurrected version of this theory is that if international corporations are allowed to invest in the services sector, it would somehow lead the country towards manufacturing and industrialization.

Hirschman’s theory was biased against the concept of material balancing in the planning of growth. He would pour all available investible funds into the farm and manufacturing sectors; services could take care of themselves… Once you have produced enough of rice and wheat and cotton and sugarcane, once you have produced enough of textiles and footwear and other such essential consumer goods, please do not have a care, transport somehow will become available to reach the products where they are in demand……What is taking place is, ironically, a different kind of manifestation of unbalanced development. Hirschman would have frowned on it. The service sectors are getting all the investment funds, industry and agriculture are being banished to a corner. The local authorities are handing over, with alacrity, farm land at throwaway prices to rich foreigners in the honest belief that the good Samaritans from overseas will usher in rapid industrialization. All that the country will actually get in return is at best a string of call centres, at worst rows and rows of massage parlours passing as a health park.

Hirschman’s theory is dead. But a few plucky ones are trying to let it come alive again in an extraordinarily perverse manner.

This interestingly enough, appears in the backdrop of the news that FII investments, despite all the hype and aura surrounding them, are half of the foreign remittances (also see here).

technorati tags:
Economics, India

Kurt Vonnegut : Guessing Game in Washington

Kurt Vonnegut, author of the major 20th century anti- war novel Slaughterhouse Fifty Five, writes In These Times:

Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting.

They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want standards, and it isn’t the gold standard. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

…

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition and raid the Treasury in case they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

And so on.

If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcomed in Washington, D.C.

technorati tags:
Left, US, Politics, Vonnegut

Noam Chomsky on Venezuela

Noam Chomsky delves deeper into the news about CITGO volunteering to provide low cost heating oil for low income communities in some of the US cities. CITGO is owned by a subsidiary of the Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

 

From Venezuela to Argentina, the hemisphere is getting completely out of control, with left-centre governments all the way through. Even in Central America, still suffering the aftereffects of President Reagan’s “war on terror,” the lid is barely on.

In the southern cone, the indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, both major energy producers, where they either oppose production of oil and gas or want it to be domestically controlled. Some are even calling for an “Indian nation” in South America.

Meanwhile internal economic integration is strengthening, reversing relative isolation that dates back to the Spanish conquests. Furthermore, South-South interaction is growing, with major powers (Brazil, South Africa, India) in the lead, particularly on economic issues.

Latin America as a whole is increasing trade and other relations with the European Union and China, with some setbacks, but likely expansion, especially for raw materials exporters like Brazil and Chile.

technorati tags:
Left, Chavez, Venezuela

Ruminations on December 6, 1992

December 6, 1992 happened in the backdrop of the anti- Mandal Commission upper caste upsurge,the liberalization of Indian economy and the fall of ‘existing’ socialism in Eastern Europe. It was followed by the capture of the Indian political center stage by the Right wing Hindutva family.The Bombay blasts, formation of the BJP led NDA government, nuclearization of the sub- continent and the Gujarat pogrom are some of the other major events that impromptu come to mind.

Thirteen years after that day of ignominy, the rising graph of the Hindutva’s political arm the BJP, has been brought to a grinding halt. The backward caste mobilization is subdued but still strong in the Hindi heartland and the Left is back in the Parliament with its highest ever number of MPs. Internationally, the wiping out of ‘existing’ socialism is complete for all practical purpose, China’s swing to state led capitalism accelerating and only Castro miraculously continuing to survive. The rise of the ‘New Socialism’ represented by Hugo Chavez is exciting for those who wear a patch of the red in their hearts.

The Indian Left parties, despite the derision of the neo- rich and the middle class that is increasingly benefiting from the FDI inflow and the flight of the manufacturing and the services industry to India, is probably the only consistent and conscious voice of the poor. The Dalit and various OBC formations are clearly personality based and open to hijack, the “Samajwadi” Party’s leading light being Amar Singh for example.

December 06, 1992 represented the raw revolt of the emerging middle classes as well as the broad spectrum of the Hindu youth against an imagined enemy. 13 years later, and one year after the BJP- NDA lost elections- less because of its anti- secular stand and more because of its economic policies, the perceived threat of Islam seems to have subsided. But then as Pramod Dasgupta it was I think who commented that scratch the skin of a middle class Hindu, and he will turn out to be an RSS sympathiser.

December 6 continues to be alive though not roaring at the moment. With the Congress- Left alliance at the Center continuing with its right wing slant the situation is not any less despairing than it has been in the intervening years. The Left is not able to shift the priorities of the government to where it matters- the poor. Their anger may yet bring the BJP and the Hindutva parties back to power, despite the recent stirrings in both the BJP and the Shiv Sena.

The Left has to manage the contradictions inherent in the current coalition and direct the policies to where the Left gets support from- the poor and the deprived. It continues to be more articulate as a defender of the salaried classes rather that the poor. Socialist theory too has not been able to come to terms with the notion of FDI and export led growth.

Why Dalrymple is right

Pankaj Mishra has commented somewhat tersely to Dalrymple’s prognosis of Indian writing in English. However, he has merely alluded to certain facts and representations in Dalrymple’s essay- and while Mishra is by and large right in this, he seems to miss Dalrymple’s point. Despite Mishra’s attempt to list other writers writing in English who live in India, it is worth noticing that a significant number of those who are currently living in India have for varying lengths of time lived abroad as well.I suppose that the other critics of Dalrymple’s prognosis miss the point as well. Dalrymple’s reasoning is incomplete too, while he is correct in his central argument.

Indian writing in English is by its nature diasporic today and is likely to be more and more so in the future. The reason is not only because English is historically a colonial language and also an international language despite its increasing claim to be an Indian language- which I suppose is justifiably so at least for a significant and articulate section of the Indian middle class today. Any Indian who can write fiction in English today has much more opportunities of travelling abroad, for durations long or short. And abroad in this post, as it does elsewhere, refer mainly to the countries at the core of the world capitalist system. It rarely refers to anything outside this. There are occasional exceptions of course, most significantly that of Amitava Ghosh- his excursions to Egypt and Burma come quickly to mind.

There has been a sea- change in the last decade in terms of travelling abroad for this section of the middle class. Young Indian in their twenties and thirties dot the length and breadth of countries like United States but also England, Germany, Australia and New Zealand and even South Africa and South America. Not only has the cost of travel come down over the last three decades but the opportunities to travel have increased and not only for software programmers.

It is not incidental that Pankaj Mishra’s letter to The Guardian bears a London address. Arundhati Roy travels frequently to the United States. Both were good examples of writers who had never been exposed to the West before their major literary works were published. Travelling for short durations is not exactly like living abroad, but the fact is that travelling outside India, specially to the West, does force one to look at the world differenly. It expands , mutates one’s horizons- as any travelling does. Walking on The Golden Bridge in San Francisco or standing athe Opera House in Sydney is different from just reading about them or seeing their pictures.

This is bound to bring elements of what may be called a diasporic viewpoint into the writings of these individuals.

Similarly, and Dalrymple has noted this point well- many expatriate Indian writers do travel to India and some of them even live across countries including India for a significant time of the year.

The point I am trying to make is that most Indian writing in English is diasporic in nature and will increasingly be so. The class of people writing in English is increasingly diasporic. Even if one has not been to the West before being published, the writer is bound to get sucked in to the global or at least the English speaking world.

And Dalrymple is right in noting that a writer with an address in London or New York is more likely to have better and immediate access to the markets for their wares.

And this linkage of writing to the markets is a very relevant point- literature today, as writing in general, is increasingly linked to market dynamics of the capitalist nature. The nature of writing is no longer, say, social realism, that defined the writings of Mulk Raj Anand and many those linked with the Progressive Writers’ Movement. And the world markets today are intrinsically (and not only just) internationally linked via globalization.

I am not sure if there is a pattern in Arundhati Roy moving away from fiction to increasingly political and activist writing. Is that Arundhanti Roy, the writer, or is it Arundhati Roy, the sensitive person reacting to the heart wrenching impact of globalization and environmental destruction? One differs from her sometimes shrill and sometimes neo- Narodnik bursts of angst, but it is very important to ask the reasons for her silence as far as fiction is concerned.

And the reason to ask this question is underlined by the fact that undoubtedly Arundhati Roy is different from her contemporaries- as Dalrymple has noted. However, Dalrymple’s reason that she is not a public school and Yale/Oxbridge educated is only one of the aspects. Another is that she is perhaps one of the very few non- Brahmins or high- caste Hindus that dominate “pack”. Well, there is Rushdie too, but he too comes from a “high- caste” Muslim lineage. The “caste system” among Muslims and even Christians (not to say Sikhs) is well noted in contemporary sociological literature and need not be repeated here.

This is not to state that the origin or social class of the writer necessarily determines the quality of his writing. The ontological does not necessarily translate into the epistomological. However, it is a sad fact that even after nearly six decades of independence, the leading writers who are being discussed in the context of this debate happen to come from the same social and caste grouping. One cannot but help wondering if there indeed is a correlation between the two. Indeed, and predictably in the words of Ramachandra Guha,

For it is how a writer tackles his subject that is important, not where he studied or lives. Orwell went to Eton yet wrote with insight about the British working class; was an Indian police officer yet exposed the underbelly of imperialism. Birth in Brahmin homes didn’t prevent Mahasweta Devi or Shivarama Karanth from writing with searing honesty about the iniquities of caste.

While one does not differ from Guha, one wonders why he does not ask why even after six decades it “so happens” that the same social class/caste continues to determine the agenda for “mainstream” debate and why he fails to notice or comment on the glaring correlation.

However, Roy’s exception to this rule gives her a particularly unique vantage point, and distinguishes her from even other women writers writing in English today. It is possibly the reason, too, for her more acerbic observations.

Dalrymple certainly needs to fill in the gaps in his essay as Mishra has noted. This Reader too pointed to Dalrymple’s glossing over of certain facts. But he is right in his overall prognosis of Indian writing in English.

The fact that this may not be a desirable future is a different question may need a different treatment altogether.

Why Arundhati Roy should, and should not be taken seriously

Arundhanthi Roy lashes out at practically everything, from Enron to “Shiekh” Bush and Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambram. While one admires her for taking the bull by the horn on most issues, she tends to become sterotyped and shrill in her criticism. She does make a few good points though:

• Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P.Chidambaram have fused into the Holy Trinity of neo-liberalism.Their vision of the New India has been fashioned at the altar of the world’s cathedrals: Oxford, Harvard Business School, the World Bank and the imf….Right now, for example, there’s a lot in the news about the scandalous Enron contract being “re-negotiated” for the third time—the contract that resulted in MSEB having to pay Enron millions of dollars not to produce electricity. The renegotiation is all very secret (like the initial Enron negotiation).
• (On Manmohan Singh’s speech at Oxford) The only people who might have a valid reason to view the British Empire with less anger than the rest of us are Dalits. Since to the white man all of us were just natives, Dalits were not especially singled out for the bestial treatment meted out to them by caste Hindus.But somehow, I can’t imagine Manmohan Singh bringing a Dalit perspective to colonialism while receiving an honorary PhD in Oxford.
• Power concedes nothing unless it is forced to. No one knew that better than Ambedkar. It was at the centre of his brilliant demolition of Gandhi’s argument in ‘Annihilation of Caste’. Right now, the Dalits have no leverage. Today, the Dalit movement is fractured and scattered. We need a strong Dalit movement
• (On Kashmir) And so India stands morally isolated—it has completely lost the confidence of ordinary people.According to the Indian army, there are never at any time more than 3,000-4,000 militants operating in the Valley. But there are between 5,00,000-8,00,000 Indian soldiers there.An armed soldier for every 10-15 people. By way of comparison, there are 1,60,000 US soldiers in Iraq.Clearly, the Indian army is not in Kashmir to control militants, it is there only to control the Kashmiri people.

It is, however, in the final parting comment that she seems to really reveal the dark side of her reasoning:

Any positive thoughts to end this dark conversation?
Let me share a sweet little thing. I saw a news report about two Adivasi girls getting married to each other. And the whole village was saying: if that’s what they want, it’s fine. They had this ceremony, with all the rituals and customs, and they let them get married. That’s a moment of magic. It reveals their level of modernity, of their sophistication.Of their beauty.

Those familiar with Lenin’s criticism of the Russian Narodniks can clearly see the connection here. While many of her observations come close to the Left position, and need to be taken seriously, the Narodnik overtones in her rhetoric cautions us on where she should not be taken seriously.

There is clearly a Narodnik admiration of the “beauty”, “modernity” and “sophistication” of “the people” in her last comment.

Family’s retreat in the time of Conservative triumph

In his conversations with Antonio Polito, published five years ago as “On the Edge of the New Century“,Eric Hobsbawm made the startling observation that the central emblemic figure of the 20th century is not the worker or the peasant, but the mother:

As a reversal of a centuries long process, the long historical wave which moved toward the construction and gradual strengthening of territorial states or nation- states comes to an end (the end itself starting around 1960s and deeply accelerating after 1989), Hobsbawm notes that it has become increasingly difficult to mobilize people on collective lines specially in the West. This underlines the crisis of class based action today and also the reason why Hobsbawm considers the most appropriate symbol for the 20^th century not to be the working class or the peasantry but a mother with her children.

“The people who have most in common are mothers, wherever they live on the face of the earth and inspite of their different cultures, civilizations and languages. In some ways, a mother’s experience reflects what has happened to a large part of humanity in the 20^th century”.

In his recent review on a new book, Hobsbawm returns to the theme of the family and points to the contradiction between the ‘triumphant’ post- 1990s capitalism and its inability to carry forward, and actually reverse, the libertarian and egalitarian trends in the Western family that were unleased during the 1960s:

In my view it also underestimates the relationship between effects on the family of the Western cultural revolution of the last third of the 20th century and its economic equivalent, the belief in a theoretically libertarian capitalism which thinks it can function without the heritage that gave it much strength in the past, the rules of obligation and loyalty inside and outside the traditional family, and other proclivities which had no intrinsic connection with the pursuit of the individual advantage that fuelled its engine. As neo-liberalism triumphed in economics its inadequacy could no longer be concealed. In the light of the contents of this book, it may be suggested that we are also reaching this point in the ideology of cultural libertarianism.

A Doctor’s Diagnosis

Manmohan Singh’s speech at Oxford is probably the first statesman-like speech to come out of the economist Prime Minister. It is rather sober, and sombre reflecting both the man and the immediate background of the speech. There are also no shrill noises on globalization and the glorification of the magic wand of a free market economy.What one finds interesting are his observations on the ‘un- British’ rule of the colonial power:

India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in the year 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, “the brightest jewel in the British Crown” was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income.”Though he quickly goes on to state in the same breath:

However, what is significant about the Indo-British relationship is the fact that despite the economic impact of colonial rule, the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, even at the time of our Independence, was relaxed and, I may even say, benign.

The benign part of the sentence is surely far- fetched by any standards, but in the light of his previous observation, actually sounds graceful.

Sumanta Banerjee comments on the debate on the Prime Minister’s speech, and while acknowledging the dual character of British rule in India, points to the selective nature of Singh’s comments:

Independent India inherited and adopted lock, stock, and barrel this model of governance. To quote Manmohan Singh’s Oxford speech again: “Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration, and they have served the country well”… Some of the honourable gentlemen presiding over the judicial system have reduced it to a state where justice can be vaporised with bribes. During the much-arraigned British rule, one never heard of senior bureaucrats like district magistrates or excise commissioners getting away with charges of corruption. Institutions like universities and hospitals which were once reputed for the best of services have been turned into dens of improbity and inefficiency – what with daily reports of leakage of question papers and adulteration of medicines. Even an institution like the Archaeological Society of India, which was set up by the colonial rulers to preserve old monuments, is today reduced to a mute spectator to acts of vandalism carried out by religious bigots on ancient monuments like the Babri masjid. Inhuman superstitious practices like ‘sati’ which were banned by the British rulers, are reborn with a vengeance.

and he concludes impressively with the following words:

“The fault, dear Brutus”, as Julius Caesar said (to quote the Shakespeare who happened to come from the same ruling colonial race, and yet moulded the thoughts and literary tastes of generations of Indian intellectuals), “is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings”.

‘The Fake Magician’

Here are a few links that I found for Slavoj Zizek:

Welcome to the Desert of the Real

An Index to the articles contributed by Zizek in the LRB

Bibliography and perhaps most useful of them all, his profile on Wikipedia

Finally, a quote from an interview with Slavoj Zizek:

We should summon our courage and ask the fundamental question – `what is democracy today?’ What are we really deciding? You in Israel, perhaps you are lucky in that on some level you still have a real choice to make. Perhaps a more radical version of a solution for the Palestinian problem would have meaning [as an expression of choice]. But in Europe?

Let’s put it this way. The most important event of the past 20 or 30 years is the transition to a global economy, along with the dismantling of the social welfare state. People forget that when Communism collapsed, social democracy was dismantled in the West. What disappeared with these [systems] is the idea that social process isn’t blind fate. Humanity, or a people, can somehow guide the process, and influence it. The sad result of this collapse is that we have returned to the concept of history as fate. Globalization is fate.

You join it, or you’re out of the game. In any event, there’s no way to influence it.

So what do you propose as an alternative?

There’s the puzzle. I would say, a new version of what was once called socialism. I think about this in modest terms. I like to portray myself as a fake magician – I have the hat, but I still don’t have the rabbit.

I’m not saying that there are answers – I’m just saying there will be huge problems. And then maybe we’ll find the answers. Or we won’t.