Why People of India are skeptical becoming a Nation

The problem

ANANYA VAJPEYI
(Seminar, Nov.2010)
Sixty years of constitutional democracy and the rule of law in India would seem, on the face of it, like an occasion for taking stock and for celebrating the great Indian political experiment. The founding fathers and mothers put a structure in place, enshrined a nation’s dreams in an impressively liberal text, and six decades later, it appears we still abide by that vision. All around us, there are polities in various kinds of malfunction – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar – and to our north, a prosperous but authoritarian China. India’s Constitution makes the country an oasis of rights, representation and justice in a desert of flailing, failing or otherwise flawed states.

If only. ‘Between the idea/And the reality…/Falls the shadow,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in his great poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. So much of India is in such deep crisis that the promise of the Constitution, our proudest possession, our charter and our pillar, is beginning to seem utterly hollow. For millions of Indian citizens, the mere existence of the Constitution does not alleviate poverty, dispense justice, provide security, guarantee rights or compensate for long-standing inequity. Tribals, religious minorities, Dalits, women, and the poorest of the poor, oftentimes overlapping categories, suffer so acutely that they may as well be living in a rudderless state, where no organ – electoral, legal, legislative, administrative or military – looks out for their welfare. In the border states of the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir, a state of exception to the rule of law, designated by the extraordinary dispensation, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), suspends the constitutional regime in any case, so that citizens may not even have the expectation, if only to be disappointed, that their rights will be protected.

It could be argued that the Constitution, as the textual blueprint of the republic, is not responsible for its own marginalization, violation, or suspension. That it was conceived in a certain era, written in a certain spirit, and promulgated in good faith by the best political and legal minds active in India around the time of independence. That a document first articulated and steered by the likes of B.R. Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Rajendra Prasad, K.M. Munshi and Constitutional Advisor B.K. Rau, continuously guarded and carefully interpreted by three generations of lawmakers since, is as good as it gets for an overly large, unremittingly poor, vexingly diverse and precariously free post-colony like India. That we may criticize the Constitution; we may lament its disrespect or point out its inefficacy in many parts of India, but without it, we would still be colonized, if not by the British then by undemocratic, militarist, communal or other sorts of nonprogressive strains within the Indian political spectrum.

Better to have an excellent constitution in the letter if not in practice, than no constitution at all, the objector says, and we should be grateful for the moral commitment and practical foresight of our founders. They took three years to draft the text and tried to correct for every problem that they could think of. They overcame tremendous disagreements to achieve consensus. Without that inaugural effort and investment we would be nowhere today, as a nation or even as an idea.

There is some merit to these objections. The Constitution provides a stable point of reference, so that we are able to describe egregious attempts to hijack state power, undermine democracy, disturb the peace and deprive citizens of their rights as ‘unconstitutional’. We may also amend the constitution to make it more responsive to present-day needs and to unanticipated developments in the polity, economy or society. The Indian Constitution has been amended a hundred times, a factor that arguably contributes to its survival. If there were no constitution, or if it did not look anything like it does, we would not be in a position to criticize, condemn or resist some of the gravest challenges the republic has faced thus far: the Emergency, Ayodhya, the over-extension of the AFSPA in Kashmir, to name just a few of many.

The Constitution is an orienting mechanism, a talisman, a symbol, an everunrealizable ideal and a permanent mirror held up to our nation. Governments may come and go, wars and insurrections may disrupt normal life, ideologies may wax and wane, the economy may ebb and flow. But in principle it’s always possible for India, as a nation with a democratic, pluralistic, flexible and durable Constitution, to perform a reality-check and pull itself up by the bootstraps. Survivors of the Holocaust like Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi used to say the worst thing about the Nazi regime was that anything was possible in that world without the law. The Constitution preserves the aspiration that in India at least, it is not the case that anything might be possible; that beyond a point, you cannot desecrate the rule of law and keep on getting away with it. The buck stops somewhere, even if only at a vanishing point, infinitely far from the here-and-now.

The Constitution of India, as an intellectual artefact, owed its inspiration and its form, in the first place, to its American, French, Canadian and Irish predecessors, to the legacy of English parliamentary democracy, to Anglo-Indian law, and to British jurisprudence. Indian liberals and modernists are quick to emphasize this genealogy of the Constitution. But this document did not come into being in an epistemological vacuum, as it were – and it hardly arrived in the mail, from overseas.

Rather, it was born into a culture with a long and complex history of legal and legislative discourse, one or more textual traditions dealing with the law, and protocols of argumentation, exegesis and interpretation that are among the most ancient, the most rigorous, the most exacting and the most continuous in any part of the literate world. Many of the members of the nationalist movement, of the Constituent Assembly and of the first legislature were formally trained as lawyers in England, but also conversant with Indic legal and political traditions, and with ideas of ethical sovereignty, righteous rule, and normative justice derived from Brahmin and Islamic codes of pre-colonial provenance.

To this mixed inheritance of the founders of the republic – modern and traditional, Western and Indic, Christian, Hindu and Muslim, imported and indigenous – should be added the lessons of the preceding thirty years of Gandhian politics. Gandhi’s harnessing and shepherding of disparate anti-colonial, radical and nationalist energies was successful in ousting the British Raj and establishing Indian sovereignty, but the Mahatma himself never thought in terms of translating swaraj into a Constitution. His assassination in early 1948 forever ended the possibility of any eventual compromise he might have made with the idea of a constitution. Others tried to theorize a so-called ‘Gandhian Constitution’, incorporating some ideas about village-level democracy and panchayati raj, without much uptake from the Constituent Assembly as a whole.

Ambedkar’s closing address to the Constituent Assembly at its penultimate session in November 1949 explicitly asks that ‘the bloody methods of revolution’ – in which he includes, somewhat incoherently, ‘civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha’ – be left behind in favour of ‘constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.’ The Chairman of the Drafting Committee went on to say: ‘These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.’1 In other words, he was closing the chapter on Gandhian struggle. In the same speech he chastises Socialist and Communist critics of the Indian Constitution, invokes the American Thomas Jefferson and the British John Stuart Mill, and reminds his colleagues of democratic tendencies in the long-ago Buddhist republics of the subcontinent.

The struggle over the genealogy of political thought in India is apparent even at the very moment that the Constitution is completed and presented to the nation. Hardly two years after independence and soon after Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar is making it clear how he wants to locate the Constitution in a longer history of state-building in India: a position that by no means goes uncontested by his colleagues both within and outside the Constituent Assembly. Tellingly, within another few months, Ambedkar had already resigned his position as Law Minister in Nehru’s cabinet.

Historians of decolonizing and post-colonial India, and of the republic’s foundation and subsequent fortunes, from Granville Austin to Ramachandra Guha, have pointed out the different strands in the Constitution’s DNA: the Government of India Act of 1935, which provides an element of ‘colonial continuity’; the examples and models of other constitutions belonging to modern democratic republics older than India; Gandhian swaraj, a dormant gene or a road not taken; a ‘national revolution’, whence the imperative of democracy, and a ‘social revolution’, whence the impetus for equality.

Yet Ambedkar is right to caution his fellow-founders that while liberty, recently achieved, is to be celebrated, neither equality nor fraternity have deep roots in Indian society. He even goes on to make a fine distinction between the idea of India being based on a ‘people’ versus a ‘nation’, and points out that mere political independence for India does not entail or guarantee Indians becoming a ‘nation’ in the true sense of that term. These notes of scepticism and criticism at the very dawn of the republic are jarring, but also indicative of how genuine Ambedkar’s engagement was with the problem of constructing a new political paradigm for India. He wasn’t going to pretend that simply writing a constitution was an answer to India’s long history of entrenched inequality and persistent injustice: and in this respect, we can do no better than follow in his footsteps today, on a significant anniversary of the Constitution.

Of course, it should also be immediately apparent that to an extent Ambedkar’s rejection of what he calls ‘the Grammar of Anarchy’ is premised on a misreading or misrepresentation of the Gandhian revolution, because it completely elides and ignores its core value: non-violence. But then again, perhaps this is understandable, given the fundamental differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar on a number of issues, including caste, religion and passive resistance – differences that were never reconciled to the very end of either man’s life, and have not been reconciled by their respective followers to date.

The late D.R. Nagaraj showed us in his brief but important career as a social theorist interested most of all in inequality and emancipation, that the disagreement between Gandhi and Ambedkar on caste was no minor quibble. Caste goes to the very heart of the people, the nation, the state and the Constitution of India. We could say that the Constitution was the most comprehensive attempt ever made to undo caste society and rebuild India on the basis of equal citizenship, fundamental rights, and compensatory social justice.

Six decades later, the goal of an egalitarian and just society still being elusive, this continues to be one of the Constitution’s main raisons d’être. While the Constitution seeks to create a flat community of citizens in place of an intricate hierarchy of caste-based groups, the historical complexity, the political potential, the religious meanings and the social practices associated with caste identities have in large measure remained intractable to the legal and administrative measures envisaged by the founders, principally Ambedkar. The alignment between the social teleology of the Constitution and Indian social reality has gone progressively awry.

Caste, after an initial recession in the Nehru years, has enjoyed a new lease of life in post-Mandal, globalizing India. Questions around caste-based political activity, electoral democracy, reservations in education and employment, and most recently around the idea of a caste census, continue to be central to Indian politics and legislation. If the Constitution, and especially Ambedkar among those responsible for its drafting, anticipated a withering away of caste identities as the republic evolved, this has not occurred – quite the opposite.

Besides caste, another area of public life in which the Constitution is at the very centre of attention, is at the margins of the Indian Union, i.e., in the eight states where the AFSPA is in effect, either because it was imposed sometime in the past and never removed, or because it is seen to be actively needed in an ongoing way. Arguably, if the government is inclined to suspend the rule of law and enforce what is effectively martial law, then it can hardly worry that the Constitution is not sufficiently respected in these parts of the country. Rationally, the state cannot both suspend constitutional rights and at the same time demand the citizens’ allegiance to the Constitution of India.

But this is precisely the situation in the Northeast and in Jammu and Kashmir these days, particularly in the latter. Except for the provision of periodic elections, the Constitution is not available to the people of these regions as their bulwark and their appeal against state excesses, especially military brutality. When these very people, beleaguered and cast into a state of exception, disavow their faith in the Constitution, they are characterized as antinational and secessionist. When they then go on to really demand separation from the Union, we wonder why they do not feel love and loyalty towards our splendidly liberal and democratic Constitution.

This cycle of exception and alienation has gone on for over 50 years in the Northeast and over 20 years in Kashmir. The breaking point may well be upon us, as far as Kashmir goes. The message is clear: a constitution in suspension is a recipe for rebellion, secession and the implosion of the Union so painstakingly and so tenuously constructed in the early years of the republic, by use of a combination of methods, fair and not-so-fair. The Indian state must rethink the purpose, the efficacy and the implementation of the AFSPA, as well as a host of other extraordinary laws that undermine, weaken and can ultimately destroy the writ of the Constitution or worse, engender in the public opinion a terminal aversion against it.

A priori, every single part of this country deserves to be governed by the representatives of the people, duly elected and installed in office, and authorized to administer the full panoply of institutions of the executive, the judiciary, the legislature and the armed forces. The sun of the Constitution ought to shine in every dark corner of India. Simply put, those who are left out for long, want out for good – rightly, if regrettably, so.

Tracts of India directly affected by Maoist insurgencies, inhabited by autochthonous populations, rich in mineral resources and potentially the most attractive to capitalist corporations, are also, increasingly, zones of constitutional crisis. Again, logic very similar to the inflamed borderlands can be seen unfolding before our very eyes in the tribal heartlands: people don’t want a constitution that fails to protect their interests or guarantee their basic rights, livelihood and security – not because it is hostile to them in and of itself, but because it is unavailable to them on account of some or other type of emergency.2

The mere holding of elections from time to time has not contained unrest nor reconciled disaffected populations to state power, in many parts of the Northeast, in J&K, and in Naxalite areas. State and non-state actors complain that separatist and insurgent leaders, whether Kashmiris or Nagas or Maoists, don’t want to come to the table for talks; refuse to contest elections and form elected governments; insist on using armed methods to spread their ideology and make their demands; counter policy with violence; invite deadly counter-insurgency operations upon themselves and hapless civilians and, in general, do not uphold constitutional norms of negotiation. Indeed.

Rebels against the idea of India have picked up the gun at every point since the very inception of the republic. But it has been the state’s prerogative to either follow suit and abandon the constitutional path, or hew close to the Constitution’s liberal vision and attempt to bring in estranged sections through a combination of persuasion and incentives. By enforcing extraordinary laws, by sending in armed forces, by granting impunity to soldiers and paramilitaries for their actions against armed or unarmed civilians, by denying citizens redress, justice or compensation, by creating a war-like situation for a population that has political, social, cultural and economic grievances possible to address without force, it is the state that sets aside the Constitution. The Indian state has done this too many times, in too many places, and for too long.

It is time for citizens in the so-called ‘normal’ parts of the country to consider how they want to defend their Constitution against such misuse and ill-treatment by the state, a procedure that leaves millions of people exposed to both everyday as well as excessive violence, and ultimately turns them against India. If the Indian Union sees any attrition to its territory in the coming years on account of separatism and civil strife (not such an unlikely scenario as hawkish policy-makers like to believe), this will have come to pass at least partly because the state allowed the cancer of exception to eat away at the body politic, and did not administer the medicine of constitutional reinstatement and restitution in time. It bears repeating that periodic exercises in the electoral process do not always prove to be a sufficient counterweight to the toxic effects of the AFSPA, even if elections are relatively free and fair (a tough challenge), and even if significant percentages of the relevant populations do turn out to vote.

The state’s reasoning for why military, paramilitary and police must replace civil agencies in the work of everyday governance, a step which can and does go horribly wrong, is that disruptive violence (from secessionist and insurgent groups) has to be met with restorative counter-violence (from the state) in order to ensure overall security for the population, and preserve the integrity of the Union of India. Defenders of the AFSPA insist that this is a sound rationale. But inevitably, questions arise: What are the limits of the immunity that such an extraordinary law grants to the armed forces, when does the justifiable control of terror become overkill, and when should a quantitative assessment about the necessary degree of force give way to a qualitative judgment about whether force is necessary at all, over and above alternative – peaceful – means of addressing the situation?

There appears to be a dire need for a system of checks-and-balances, perhaps also originating from the Constitution, to be instituted, so that the explicitly democratic mandate of the Indian republic may be strengthened against an always lurking authoritarian tendency (a legacy of the post-colonial state’s colonialist and imperialist predecessor).

It may be true that extremist and terrorist organizations have as little regard for civilian life and safety as do trigger-happy paramilitaries, and that both sides violate human rights and abuse their armed power. But because the state is by definition the stronger party, and the one authorized to govern, the responsibility of exercising restraint, minimizing collateral damage, and setting an example of honourable conduct lies first and foremost with the state. This is a responsibility that it cannot ever relinquish, no matter what the provocation, and no matter how difficult the conditions for negotiation and dialogue with enemies of the state. The Constitution is what can make the difference between India and centrifugal anarchy (Pakistan), India and soulless growth (China), India and exclusivist notions of citizenship (Israel), India and unchecked consumerism (the US), India and any form of power that might be unethical and inimical to human flourishing.

The Constitution of the Republic of India, in a country that has produced more texts in more languages for more centuries than any other nation in the world, is a singular text. It is comparable to no other text: not the Bhagavad Gita or the Qur’an, not the Holy Bible or the Guru Granth Sahib, not the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, not Manu’s Dharmashastra or Kautilya’s Arthashastra, not the edicts of Ashoka or the diaries of Babur, not the inscriptions of Samudragupta or the poems of Bahadur Shah Zafar, not Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Nehru’s Discovery of India, not Tagore’s national anthem or Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma. It is completely unique and unprecedented in the history of India, crowded as that history is with innumerable texts.

For those who ask, ‘What can a mere text do?’ we need only turn to places where this text has been suspended, neglected, ignored or transgressed, and we find injustices and atrocities of every kind rampant. A text like the Constitution can do exactly what such a text is supposed to do: nothing more, and nothing less, than upholding the world. After 250 years of colonial rule, nearly a century of imperialism, incessant soul-searching, and the most profound political and intellectual effort undertaken by hundreds of thousands of individuals across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, India finally became an independent nation-state on 15 August 1947. After three years of Constituent Assembly debates, on 26 January 1950 India gifted itself the chance to unlock its society and set itself free.

Given a very old and civilized culture, the Indian nation, protected by its founding ideals, served by resilient institutions, and fired by new economic opportunities, ought to be able to find a way to allow its people to live with dignity, in peace, and with the means and the prospects to better their lot. If 60 years after the founding of the republic millions of citizens still remain deprived of their liberty, then somewhere along the way India has forgotten that the key to its emancipation lies in its own priceless, peerless Constitution.

* Thanks to Ramachandra Guha, Dilip Simeon and Sanjib Baruah for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this essay. D.R. Nagaraj’s classic The Flaming Feet has just been reissued from Permanent Black (2010), together with his previously unpublished writings and a critical introduction by Ashis Nandy, edited by Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. The complete text of the Indian Constitution is accessible at: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html

Footnotes:

1. Constituent Assembly, Friday, 25 November 1949.

2. If anything, the 5th Schedule of the Constitution specifically addresses Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Areas, but are ruling parties implementing it in the states affected by Maoism?

Beyond Violence And Non-Violence

Resistance As A Culture

By Ramzy Baroud

Resistance is not a band of armed men hell-bent on wreaking havoc. It is not a cell of terrorists scheming ways to detonate buildings.

True resistance is a culture.

It is a collective retort to oppression.

Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence. 

The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts.

Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly ‘strategic' discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept and culture.

Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the ‘alternative' defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance.

By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant.

If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past experiences, but it is very much an internal process. 

It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza:

"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)

Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many ‘third world' nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives.

In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word ‘martyr', and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word ‘victory' is persistently used.

When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. 

From : Countercurrents.org

Tribes and Skies

 by Zygmunt Bauman

The 'tribe' focused on by Calvino, a tribe of coconut gatherers, is - as the title of the story suggests - addicted to 'watching the sky'. The sky it watches obsessively and intensely happens to be a sight that is genuinely fascinating and truly rewarding to watch: it is full of 'new celestial bodies', like jet planes, flying saucers, rockets, and guided missiles . . . While the tribe watches, the tribal witch doctors feel obliged to explain, authoritatively, to their fellow tribesmen the meaning of what they are seeing. They tell the tribesmen that what is currently happening in the sky is a sure sign that the day is fast approaching when the slavery and poverty which has tormented the tribe for centuries will come to an end. Soon 'the barren savannah will bring forth millet and maize', so the tribe will no longer be doomed to feeding itself and surviving, day in, day out, by picking coconuts. And so - here comes the crunch - 'it is hardly worth us racking our brains over new ways of emerging from our present situation; we should trust in the Great Prophecy, rally around its only rightful interpreters, without asking to know more . . .'

Meanwhile, on earth, in that valley where the tribe had built their huts of straw and mud, from which they wandered out daily in search of coconuts and to which they returned, day in, day out, things were also changing. Previously, merchants occasionally arrived in the valley to buy coconuts from the gatherers; the merchants cheated on price, but the clever tribesmen managed to outsmart and fool them time and again, avenging their cheating for good measure. Now, however, the merchants had stopped coming. Instead, an outpost had been opened in the valley by a brand new establishment called Nicer Nut Corporation, whose agents purchased, wholesale, the totality of the coconut crop. The corporation, unlike the old-style travelling traders, allowed no haggling and no opportunities for trickery: prices were fixed in advance, take it or leave it. But, of course, if you 'leave it', you might as well forget your chances of survival until the next batch of coconuts is brought into the valley from picking escapades. On one point, however, the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation wholeheartedly agree with the tribal witch doctors (and vice versa). They all talk about missiles in the sky and about the news they augur. And the agents, just like the witch doctors, insist that beyond all reasonable doubt 'it is in the power of these shooting stars that our entire destiny lies'.

The teller of the story shares in the destinies and habits of his tribe. Like the rest of the tribe, he spends his evenings at the entrance of his straw and mud hut, closely watching the sky. Like the other tribesmen, he attentively listens to the witch doctors and takes to heart and memorizes what they, and the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation, keep saying. But he also thinks for himself (or, more precisely, his thoughts think themselves in his mind, without having asked his permission: an idea occurs to him which, he confesses, 'I can't get out of my head'). He thinks that 'a tribe that relies entirely on the will of shooting stars, whatever fortune they may bring, will always sell off its coconuts cheap'.

In another short story, Beheading the Heads, Italo Calvino points out that television (here he goes straight to the point, skipping the allegory of a sky filled with shooting stars, 'television' itself being a potent metaphor for so many aspects of our liquid modern life) 'changed a lot of things' - though not necessarily the things which our own, new and improved, technologically sophisticated witch doctors (now renamed 'spin doctors') privately like to pride themselves on having craftily and stealthily changed, while praising television for those changes.

Among things that TV did indeed change, Calvino suggests, is the way we view our leaders (here, 'our leaders' stands for much a larger collection of people who were previously distant and whom we used to hear without seeing, let alone watching: idols, stars, celebrities, all those people we now watch daily, and closely, expecting entertainment, fun and all the illumination and guidance worth getting, and to whom television accords the same treatment as it does to 'our leaders'). Once they were remote figures somewhere high up on the platform, or shown in portraits 'assuming expressions of conventional pride'. Now however, thanks to TV 'everybody can pore over the slightest movements of the features, the irritated twitch of the eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and another'. In a nutshell, once they arrived so close to us, indeed inside our sitting rooms and bedrooms, our leaders came to appear terribly banal, like the rest of us. And mortal, like the rest of us - that is, arriving only to go away again. Appearing in order to disappear. Clinging to power only to lose it. The sole advantage they seem to have over us, ordinary mortals, is that they are destined for a public, not a private death - 'the death we are sure to be there for, all together' ...

Tongue in cheek, though not entirely, Calvino goes as far as suggesting that it is our new awareness of this which explains why, so long as a politician lives, she or he 'will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern'.

And finally come words so poignant that they deserve to be quoted verbatim and in full:

For us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period.

All that, Calvino concludes, is 'watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent circles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it'.

It is, it seems, a custom of more than one tribe, and not necessarily tribes who are remote in space or time, to keep their eyes fixed 'on stars shooting in the sky'. And the reasons why eyes are fixed on stars do not change much from one tribe to another. The consequences of eyes being fixed there do not change much: it is only the equipment serving that activity/passivity that changes. As well as the names of the tribes and of the stars they watch, and the stories told by tribal witch doctors about the meaning of all those shooting stars on which those eyes happen to be fixed. Though not the message of those stories, nor the intentions and purposes of their tellers.

Truthout, Sunday, 11th April, 2010

Beyond Multiculturalism

Robert Jensen talks about Love in Action and Love in Dreams, Identities of Race, Gender and Class, Injuries coming out of Hierarchical Systems in today's world...Politics to grab Power vs Politics to Distribute Power.....And on many more topics...
Click here : Thinking a New world

Nobel for Promises and Promises?

by Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize. But then I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates and for its susceptibility to rhetoric and empty gestures, while ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations - that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he also bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War - surely, among stupid and deadly wars, at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains around that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel Prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the Committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, was given a peace prize!

People should not be given a peace prize on the basis of promises they have made (as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises) but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war. Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel Peace Committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

--------

Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist, and has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for "A People's History of the United States."

Gandhi Today

Oct 03, 2009

By Ted Glick

"Somewhere there's a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time here and around the world."
- Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

140 years today Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn't learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn't learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.

I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi's relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I've spent the last few days reflecting on this question.

When I was asked this question directly at yesterday's forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn't just a great, if imperfect, leader of India's successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.

Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.

The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: "Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer." I've used them as I've learned their truth, as I've learned about prayer, during long fasts that I've undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.

There's another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast (http://www.climatejusticefast.org). This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world's governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.

Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that "the world has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." She went on to "share another great Gandhi quote: 'Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.' In just over a month, on the last day of the Barcelona[climate] talks [November 6], I and other activists around the world will be beginning the Climate Justice Fast and continuing until Copenhagen [over 40 days, on water only].

"While the concept of the fast may shock some, it will be a non-violent, morally forceful and peaceful action, and is perhaps one of the few types of action that we have available to us that is capable of deeply communicating the gravity of the situation that we now find ourselves in, both in terms of the profound disaster of unchecked climate change and the profound opportunity provided by the Copenhagen summit."

I know that there are many climate and progressive activists who have problems with the idea of fasting. It's too bad this is the case, because I have learned that fasting isn't just one of a number of tactics that we need to keep in our quiver to use as we struggle for a world based on love and compassion. Fasting is a form of action that is very valuable in building the internal discipline and the deeply-felt understanding of what's really important in this world that we individually need to stay true to our best ideals.

When you fast for more than a few days, especially on a water-only fast, you are forced to think about the reasons for your fasting, why you are putting yourself through this. You spend time thinking about all of the people all over the world who "fast" involuntarily because of an unjust world order which is dominated by a relative handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires. When on a fast related to the issue of climate, you think about the almost-certain catastrophic droughts, famines and other disasters affecting not millions but billions later in this century if we don't rapidly make a shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and earth-destroying practices.

It is difficult not to feel helpless in the face of the timidity and resistance of far too many of the world's government leaders to doing what clearly must be done. It's maddening knowing that a serious commitment to the enactment of a clean energy revolution can be the decisive shift that opens up all kinds of possibilities for a very different future as the nations of the world work together to clean up the environmental mess capitalism has created.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed because of his leadership in the anti-Nazi German resistance movement, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Yes. Yes. Now and always.


Ted Glick is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a long-time progressive activist.

The Politics of Lying and Culture of Deceit

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.

Hannah Arendt

By Henry A. Giroux

In the current American political landscape, truth is not merely misrepresented or falsified; it is overtly mocked. As is well known, the Bush administration repeatedly lied to the American public, furthering a legacy of government mistrust while carrying the practice of distortion to new and almost unimaginable heights. Even now, almost a year after Bush left office, it is difficult to forget the lies and government-sponsored deceits in which it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was making deals with al-Qaeda and, perhaps the most infamous of all, the United States did not engage in torture. Unlike many former administrations, the Bush administration was engaged in pure political theater,[2] giving new meaning to Hannah Arendt's claim that "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."[3] For instance, when the government wasn't lying to promote dangerous policies, it willfully produced and circulated fake news reports in order to provide the illusion that the lies and the policies that flowed from them were supported by selective members of the media and the larger public. The Bush deceits and lies were almost never challenged by right-wing media "patriots," who were too busy denouncing as un-American anyone who questioned Bush's official stream of deception and deceit. Ironically, some of these pundits were actually on the government payroll for spreading the intellectual equivalent of junk food. And some of them were actually being paid by the Bush government to make such claims.

In such circumstances, language loses any viable sense of referentiality, while lying, misrepresentation and the deliberate denial of truth become acceptable practices firmly entrenched in the wild West of talk radio, cable television and the dominant media. Fact finding, arguments bolstered by evidence and informed analysis have always been fragile entities, but they risk annihilation in a culture in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between an opinion and an argument. Knowledge is increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations and public relations firms and is systemically cleansed of any complexity. Lying and deceitfulness are all too often viewed as just another acceptable tactic in what has become most visibly the pathology of politics and a theater of cruelty dominated by a growing chorus of media hatemongers inflaming an authoritarian populist rage laced with a not too subtle bigotry.[4] Truth increasingly becomes the enemy of democracy because it does not support the spectacle and the reduction of citizens either to mere dupes of power or commodities. Ignorance is no longer a liability in a culture in which lying, deceit and misinformation blur the boundaries between informed judgments and the histrionics of a shouting individual or mob. Talk radio and television talk show screamers, in particular, seem to delight in repeating claims that have been discredited in the public arena, demonstrating a barely disguised contempt for both the truth and any viable vestige of journalism. These lies and deceits go beyond the classic political gambit, beyond the Watergate-style cover up, beyond the comic "I did not have sex with that woman." The lies and deceptions that are spewed out everyday from the right-wing teaching machines - from newspapers and radio shows to broadcast media and the Internet - capitalize on both the mobilizing power of the spectacle, the increasing impatience with reason and an obsession with what Susan J. Douglas describes as the use of the "provocative sound bites over investigative reporting, misinformation over fact."[5] Lying and deception have become so commonplace in the dominant press that such practices appear to have no moral significance and provoke few misgivings, even when they have important political consequences. In the age of public relations managers and talk show experts, we are witnessing the demise of public life. At a time when education is reduced to training workers and is stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the public to think critically. Rather than intelligence uniting us, a collective ignorance of politics, culture, the arts, history and important social issues, as Mark Slouka points out, "gives us a sense of community, it confers citizenship."[6] Our political passivity is underscored by a paucity of intellectual engagement, just as the need for discrete judgment and informed analysis fall prey to a culture of watching, a culture of illusion and circus tricks. Shame over the lying and ignorance that now shape our cultural politics has become a source of national pride - witness the pathetic response to Joe Wilson's outburst against President Obama. Or, for that matter, the celebrated and populist response to Sarah Palin's lies about death panels, which are seized upon not because they distort the truth and reveal the dishonesty and vileness of political opportunism - while also undermining a viable health care bill - but because they tap into a sea of growing anger and hyped-up ignorance and ratchet up poll ratings. Lying and deceit have become the stuff of spectacle and are on full display in a society where gossip and celebrity culture rule. In this instance, the consequences of lying are reduced to a matter of prurience rather than public concern, becoming a source of private injury on the part of a Hollywood star or producing the individual humiliation of public figure such as John Edwards.

The widespread acceptance of lying and deceit is not merely suggestive of a commodified and ubiquitous corporate-driven electronic culture that displays an utter contempt for morality and social needs: It is also registers the existence of a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization. Lying as common sense and deceit as politics-as-usual joins the embrace of provocation in a coupling that empties politics and agency of any substance and feeds into a corporate state and militarized culture in which matters of judgment, thoughtfulness, morality and compassion seem to disappear from public view. What is the social cost of such flight from reality, if not the death of democratic politics, critical thought and civic agency? When a society loses sight of the distinction between fact and fiction, truth-telling and lying, what happens is that truth, critical thought and fact finding as conditions of democracy are rendered trivial and reduced to a collection of mere platitudes, which in turn reinforces moral indifference and political impotence. Under such circumstances, language actually becomes the mechanism for promoting political powerlessness. Lying and deceit are no longer limited to merely substituting falsehoods for the truth; they now performatively constitute their own truth, promoting celebrity culture, right-wing paranoia and modes of government and corporate power freed from any sense of accountability.

While all governments resort to misrepresentations and lies, we appear to have entered a brave new world in which lies, distortions and exaggerations have become so commonplace that when something is said by a politician, it is often meant to suggest its opposite, and without either irony or apology. As lies and deceit become a matter of policy, language loses its grip on reality, and the resulting indeterminacy of meaning is often used by politicians and others to embrace positions that change from one moment to the next. Witness Dick Cheney, who once referred to torture as "enhanced interrogation" so as to sugarcoat its brutality, and then appeared on national television in 2009 only to defend torture by arguing that if such practices work, they are perfectly justified, even if they violate the law. This is the same Cheney who, appearing on the May 31, 2005, "Larry King Live" show, attempted to repudiate charges of government torture by claiming, without irony, that the detainees "have been well treated, treated humanely and decently." This type of discourse recalls George Orwell's dystopian world of "1984" in which the Ministry of Truth produces lies and the Ministry of Love tortures people. Remember when the Bush administration used the "Healthy Forest Initiative" to give loggers access to protected wilderness areas or the "Clear Skies Initiative" to enable greater industrial air pollution? President Obama also indulges in this kind of semantic dishonesty when he substitutes "prolonged detention" for the much maligned "preventive detention" policies he inherited from the Bush-Cheney regime. While Obama is not Bush, the use of this type of duplicitous language calls to mind the Orwellian nightmare in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities now mobilize angry mobs and gun-toting imbeciles, who are praised as "real" Americans. Fear bolstered by lies and manufactured deceptions makes us immune to even the most obvious moral indecencies, such as the use of taser guns on kids in schools. Nobody notices or cares - and one cause and casualty of all of this moral indifference is that language has been emptied of its critical content just as the public spaces that make it possible are disappearing into the arms of corporations, advertisers and other powerful institutions that show nothing but contempt for either the public sphere or the kind of critical literacy that gives it meaning.

Obama's presence on the national political scene gave literacy, language and critical thought a newfound sense of dignity, interlaced as they were with a vision of hope, justice and possibility - and reasonable arguments about the varied crises America faced and civilized. Such practices as Obama compromised, if not surrendered, some of his principles to those individuals and groups that live in the vocabulary of duplicity, the idealism that shaped his language began to look like just another falsehood when measured against his continuation of a number of Bush-like policies. In this case, the politics of distortions and misrepresentations that Obama's lack of integrity has produced may prove to be even more dangerous than what we got under Bush because it wraps itself in a moralism that seems uplifting and hopeful while it supports policies that reward the rich, reduce schools to testing centers and continue to waste lives and money on wars that should have ended when Obama assumed his presidency. Obama claims he is for peace, and yet the United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. He claims he wants to reduce the deficit, but spends billions on the defense industry and wars abroad. He says he wants everyone to have access to decent health care, but makes backroom deals with powerful pharmaceutical companies. Orwell's ghost haunts this new president and the country at large. Reducing the critical power of language has been crucial to this effort. Under such circumstances, democracy as either a moral referent or a political ideal appears to have lost any vestige of credibility. The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are inextricably related to a theater of cruelty and modes of corrupt power in which politics is reduced to a ritualized incantation, just as matters of governance are removed from real struggles over meaning and power.

Beyond disinformation and disguise, the politics of lying and the culture of deceit trade in and abet the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into a state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panic not only create a rhetorical umbrella to promote right-wing ideological agendas (increased military spending, tax relief for the financial and corporate elite, privatization, market-driven reforms and religious intolerance), but also contribute to a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. The collapse of any vestige of critical literacy, reason and sustained debate gives way to falsehoods and forms of ignorance that find expression in the often racist discourse of what Bob Herbert calls "the moronic maestros of right wing radio and TV,"[7] endlessly haranguing the public to resist any vestige of reason. How else to explain the actions of parents who refuse to let their children listen to a speech on education by - Should I say it? - an African-American President? How else to fathom the dominant media repeating uncritically the views of right-wing groups that portray Obama as Hitler or Lenin, or consistently making references that compare him to a gorilla or indulge in other crude racist references - in recent days, these groups have been given ample media attention, as if their opinions are not simply ventriloquizing the worst species of ignorance and racism.

The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are wrapped in the logic of absolute certainty, an ominous harbinger of a kind of illiteracy in which one no longer has to be accountable for justifying opinions, claims or alleged arguments. Stripped of accountability, language finds its final resting place in a culture of deceit in which lying either is accepted as a political strategy or is viewed as simply another normalized aspect of everyday life. The lack of criticism surrounding both government practices and corporations that now exercise unparalleled forms of power is more than shameful; it is an utter capitulation to an Orwellian rhetoric that only thinly veils an egregious form of authoritarianism and racism. In the face of such events, we must develop a critical discourse to address the gap between rhetoric and deeds of those who hold economic, political and social power. As Hannah Arendt has argued, debate is central to a democratic politics, along with the public space in which individuals can argue, exercise critical judgment and clarify their relationship to democratic values and public commitments. Critical consciousness and autonomy are, after all, not merely the stuff of political awareness, but what makes democratic accountability possible in the first place. They are also the foundation and precondition for individuals, parents, community groups and social movements to mobilize against such political and moral corruptions. Democracy is fragile, and its fate is always uncertain, but during the last decade we have witnessed those in commanding political and corporate positions exhibit an utter disregard for the truth, morality and critical debate. The Enron template of lying and deception has turned an ethos of dialogue and persuasion into its opposite: dogmatism and propaganda. In doing so, the American public has been bombarded by a discourse of fear, hate and racism, coupled with a politics of lying that undermines any viable vestige of a democratic ethos. We now find ourselves living in a society in which right-wing extremists not only wage a war against the truth, but also seek to render human beings less than fully human by taking away their desire for justice, spiritual meaning, freedom and individuality.

Politics must become more attentive to those everyday conditions that have allowed the American public to remain complicitous with such barbaric policies and practices. Exposing the underlying conditions and symptoms of a culture of lying and deceit is both a political and a pedagogical task that demands that people speak out and break through the haze of official discourse, media-induced amnesia and the fear-producing lies of corrupt politicians and the swelling ranks of hatemongers. The politics of lying and deceit at the current historical moment offers up the specter of not just government abuse, mob hysteria and potential violence, but also an incipient authoritarianism, one that avidly seeks to eliminate intelligent deliberation, informed public discussion, engaged criticism and the very possibility of freedom and a vital democratic politics. The spirit of critique is meaningless without literacy and an informed public. For such a public to flourish, it must be supported with public debate and informed agents capable of becoming both a witness to injustice and a force for transforming those political, economic and institutional conditions that impose silence and perpetuate human suffering. The distortions, misrepresentations and lies that have become an integral part of American culture present a serious threat to an aspiring democracy because they further what John Dewey called the "eclipse of the public," just as they empty politics of its democratic values, meanings and possibilities. The hate, extremism and pathology that have come to define our national political and popular landscapes - heard repeatedly in the prattle of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to name only two of the most popular examples - are legitimated by an appeal to absolute certainty, which becomes the backdrop against which a politics of lying and a culture of deceit, fear, cruelty and repression flourish. We are witnessing in the politics of lying and the culture of deceit a disconnection between language and social responsibility, politics and critical education, market interests and democratic values, and privately felt pain and joys and larger public considerations. And this undermining of the value of human dignity, truth, dialogue and critical thought is the offspring of a debate over much more than simply meaning and language, or even the widespread legitimacy of individual and institutional ignorance and corruption. At its core, it is a debate about power and those corporate and political interests that create the conditions in which lying becomes acceptable and deceit commonplace - those forces that have the power to frame in increasingly narrow ways the conventions, norms, language and relations through which we relate to ourselves and others. How we define ourselves as a nation cannot be separated from the language we value, inhabit and use to shape our understanding of others and the world in which we want to live. As the language of critique, civic responsibility, political courage and democracy disappears along with sustained investments in schools, media, and other elements of a formative culture that keeps an aspiring democracy alive, we lose the spaces and capacities to imagine a future in which language, literacy and hope are on the side of justice, rather than on the side of hate, willful ignorance and widespread injustice.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," in "Crisis of the Republic" (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1969), p. 6

2. Frank Rich, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (New York: Penguin, 2007).

3. Ibid., Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," p. 4.

4. See Bob Herbert's courageous article, "The Scourge Persists," New York Times (September 19, 2009), p. A17.

5. Susan J. Douglas, "Killing Granny with the Laziness Bias," In These Times (September 17, 2009). Online at: www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/4897.

6. Mark Slouka, "A Quibble," Harper's Magazine (February 2009), p. 9.

7. Ibid., Herbert, "The Scourge Persists," p. 17.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Uday Prakash Comments:

Wed, 09/23/2009 - 06:11 — Uday Prakash (not verified)

Straight, honest, insightful, critical....and certainly not confined only to American state of reality. It's a global situation. Democracies have now turned in to huge power tombs of lies, violence and amorous monstrous anti-human machines... It's a most holly and provocative piece. It perturbs and motivates us all to think about all...

The current Gender Discourse in India and in Hindu Intellectuals

After yesterday's verdict of Delhi High Court on the issue of Homosexuality I found this article interesting. However, it does not support my views at any level.

by Devdutt Pattanaik

In his Navagraha Kirti, the great 19th century Carnatic music composer, Muthuswami Dikshitar describes Budh (the planet mercury) as Napumsakam or
one who is not quite male or female. He alludes to a story in the Puranas where Brihaspati (the planet Jupiter) discovers that his wife Tara (the goddess of stars) is pregnant with the child of her lover, Chandra (the Moon-god). He curses the love child to be born neuter. Budh later marries Ila, a man who becomes a woman when he accidentally trespasses an enchanted grove. From that union springs the Chandra-vamsa, or the lunar dynasty of kings. So says the Mahabharata.
As in the story of Ila, Indian lore is full of tales where men turn into women and women turn into men. Narada falls into a pond, becomes a woman, discovers the meaning of worldly delusion or maya. Shiva bathes in the Yamuna, becomes a gopi, a milkmaid, so that he can dance the raas-leela with Krishna — an idea that has inspired the temple of Gopeshwarji in Vrindavan. At a short distance from Ahmedabad, is the temple of Bahucharji, the rooster-riding goddess, once where it is said there was a pond that turned a woman into a man, a mare into a horse and a bitch into a dog. The pond has dried up, but women still visit this shrine seeking a male child. They seek the blessings of bhagats (some call them hijras) who though men believe they are women and choose to live their life wearing a sari.
Near Pondicherry, in the village of Koovagam, every year the transgendered alis dance and sing in memory of an event that took place during mythic times. Aravan, the son of Arjuna and his serpent wife, Ulupi, had to be sacrificed to ensure victory of the Pandavas at Kurukshetra. But he refused to die without a taste of marriage. As no woman was willing to marry a man doomed to die, Krishna took a female form, Mohini, became Aravan’s wife, spent a night with him and then wailed for him as widow when he was beheaded.
In the Valmiki Ramayana, there are descriptions of Rakshasa women who kiss women on Ravana’s bed on whose lips lingers the taste of their master. Krittivasa Ramayana is the story of two widows who drink a magic potion and, in the absence of their husband, make love to each other and end up bearing a child without bones (traditionally believed to be the contribution of semen).
How does one interpret these stories? Are they gay stories? They certainly shatter the conventional confines of gender and sexuality. Ancient Indian authors and poets without doubt imagined a state where the lines separating masculinity and femininity often blurred and even collapsed. Though awkward, these were not stray references. Such tales were consistent and recurring, narrated matter-of-factly, without guilt or shame. Such outpouring has its roots in Indian metaphysics.
As the wheel of rebirth turns, Indians have always believed, the soul keeps casting off old flesh and wrapping itself anew. Depending on one’s karma, one can be reborn as a tree, as a rock, as a bird, a beast, a man, a woman, a man with a woman’s heart, a woman with a man’s heart, even as a god or demon...endless possibilities exist in the infinite cosmos. The wise see masculinity and femininity as ephemeral robes that wrap the sexless genderless soul. The point is not to get attached to the flesh, but to celebrate its capabilities, discover its limitations, and finally transcend it.
The question before us is: does the human mind have the empathy to include gender and sexual ambiguity in civil human society? It does. In every Yuga new rules come into being that redefine world order. Mahabharata mentions a Yuga when there was no marriage — women were free to go with any man they chose. This changed when Shvetaketu instituted the marriage laws. We have lived through a Yuga where we left unchallenged laws of old imperial masters that dehumanised and invalidated sexual minorities. This has to change —hopefully now.

in Times of India, 3rd July, 2009

(The writer is the author of The Book of Ram, Seven Secrets of Hindu Calendar Art and other books on sacred lore.)

English in postcolonial India is a language of liberation and modernity

(This article appeared in an abridged version in Economic Times of India under Face off column, a few days before)

‘Hindi hain ham vatan hai Hindostaan hamaaraa’, when Mohd Iqbal wrote in his most popular, accepted nearly as the third national anthem ‘Saare jahaan se acchhaa …’ before independence and much before the partition in 1947, Hindi had entirely a different implication and its connotation. Hindi at that time, in colonial India, suggested more about a civilization well spread from Indus valley to doaba. It certainly not evoked any specific language, race or religion in the minds at the time. Hindavi was a zubaan of ordinary people who formed second largest linguistic community on earth.

How the same Hindi was transformed in to a ‘raaj-bhaashaa’ and ‘raashtra-bhaashaa’ and made to get associated with a distinct religious community dominated by a couple of Hindu castes, is not that cryptic process. Anyone aware about the politics of last 60 plus years understands it even if chooses to remain quiet.

In 2007, it was the first time ever; I was invited to become part of the government delegation sent to take part in ‘Vishva Hindi Sammelan’ at New York. Hundreds of Hindi writers were provided with business class air tickets and were put up in 5-7 star hotels like Hotel Radisson, Hotel Pennsylvania and Inter Continental etc. Courtesy to Ministry of HRD. Millions of money was spent to project Hindi as ‘Vishva Bhaashaa’ (World Language). Five days long function was held in UN building. Even the Secretary General of the UN was there to attend inaugural ceremony and was applauded when he disclosed that his son in law speaks Hindi. He also mumbled a few sentences in Hindi. Needless to say, a demand was raised by the organizers, led by the AICC General Secretary, Anand Shrma, that UN should accept Hindi as its working language like English, French and other languages.

The same evening, My US friend and translator, who teach Hindi in Chicago University, had some official work with one Mr. Pandey, the office bearer of Nagari Pracharini Sabha, one of the oldest and prime Hindi institute located in Benares. We came to know that Mr. Pandey has been put in Hotel Pennsylvania. When he reached there and asked for Mr. Pandey at the reception counter of the hotel, the counter girl started laughing. She said, ‘Please tell me the first name because there are more than a dozen Pandeys staying over here.’

It was not a joke. It was a factual statement about ‘Vishva Bhaashaa Hindi.’ I realized soon that more than 85% of the participants and more than 98% of the apex body of the organizers of VHS belonged to one Hindu caste and its sub castes.

According to one survey in TV, electronic and print media, one single caste has more than 78% monopoly over Hindi. In literature and academics situation is more precarious. If you find this statement dubious and vague, I request you to go and check about the people occupying all the places related to Hindi in capital. You’d stand before your findings terrified.

I was a young student of school when Dr. Lohiya raised the slogan of ‘Hindi hataao’. I also took part in wall writing and blackening English hoardings and sign panels with passion. But now, when Mulayam singh has raised this slogan again, I desist in saying it a farce of Lohiya’s tragedy. I stand against it. In my opinion, there might have been reasons before independence for great politicians like Mahatma Gandhi, C. Rajgopalachari, Chittaranjan Das and others coming from non Hindi states supporting Hindi as a ‘Raashtra Bhaashaa’. They might have felt about the necessity of a common unifying language in a multi-linguistic and multi cultural subcontinent to consolidate their struggle against British. English at that time would have logically been perceived as the language of colonial rulers.

But after these many post colonial years, situation has entirely changed. Hindi is now the language of ‘sarkaar, bazaar and sanchaar’ (government, market and media) and it has been monopolized by the dominant caste and religious group. Official Hindi has become a vehicle of obscurantism, communalism, blind nationalism and to top all casteism. You can watch TV channels or can leaf through any newspaper, you will see pooja, tyohars, superstitions, obscene pictures and all imaginable inferior stuff to form your opinion.

English, in post colonial India, has become a language of modernity and empowerment. Poor and low caste people and minorities as well know that Hindi will make them ‘naukar’ and English will escort them to the seat of the Master. Even kaamwali baai and dhobi have learnt this mantra. Obviously this is the reason they are enrolling their kids in English medium schools in spite they have to go through a harsh, stingy ascetic life.

If you ask me to give a slogan now, it would be like this: ’angrezi laao, desh bachao.’

Uday prakash

International Seminar in South Korea

Literature in the Age of Internationalism
Uday Prakash
(This paper was read in the recently held International Byeong ju Lee memorial Literature Festival, 2008 in Republic of Korea)
‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.*1

If literature is a verbal art form and if we accept it as an objet d'art of creating infinite possible architectures and structures in speech by an author, this quote coming from one of the most significant philosopher investigating the cryptic logic of language and mind, is of great help to understand the role and fate of literature in the age of globalizing or almost globalized (Internationalizing or almost Internationalized, we may call) world we live in.
From another point of view, what Wittgenstein had said, stands true to all works of language, from the time of epics and novels to newspaper stories and advertising copies, from poetry to a political party’s manifesto, a corporate media campaign and to a scripture. However, there is always a very thin line of ‘ethics’,’ aesthetics’ and ‘concerns’ which often separates literature from other constructs of the language. This we can feel if we look back to Wittgenstein’s time again, when he wrote these sentences. In a tormented and traumatized soul after the First World War’s catastrophes, his ascetic deviation from a turbulent power-capital centric world towards an exiled space of ‘abstinence,’ ethics’ and ‘religion’, he wrote his masterpiece ‘Philosophical Investigations’ and attempted to explore and discover a ‘logic’ under it. And while doing so, in my opinion, Wittgenstein was not working as a philosopher of language, but he was exerting himself in the language as an author because ‘author is the last philosopher of the book’ as said by Derida. Literature succeeds in providing an alternative world, a different space and time because: ‘Writing requires a break, with thought when thought ascribes to itself immediate proximity, a break with all empirical experience of the world. In this sense, writing is also a rupture with all present consciousness, being always already involved in the experience of the non-manifest or the unknown…’ *2
This ‘point of rupture’ with the ‘empirical experience’ and ‘present consciousness’ empowers literature, an objet d'art of language, to play its own role with its own power, in a world dominated and occupied by the other powers with their other roles. In a way, writing is ‘returning to a time before world and reaching to a time after the world’. It is speaking in language already spoken in elsewhere but with words, which reveal nothing, or something else. Writing is creating ‘signs’ which confront all other ‘signs’ manufactured and perpetuated by other powers through all possible technologies and affluence in world.
And it is here that literature attains its autonomy, emancipates itself to a privileged-private place. From here it might know about its own role, which only words can play. But then there is another crisis. As a famous proverb says –‘there is no inside whale to hide’ from the catastrophe and onslaughts of violent powers of greed and destruction. After all language is a product of world of reality. Therefore ‘word’ itself can never remain unscathed. Words are used, abused and exploited by the powers of reality. Words are wounded and contaminated. Recently in my trip to US, I bought a new collection of poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz, my most favorite Polish poet and was astounded to understand about another sphere where global forces might inflict injuries, the sphere of words:
‘Words have been used up
Chewed up like gum
By lovely young mouths
Have been turned into white
Ballon bubbles
Diminished by politicians
They are used for whitening teeth
and for rinsing out of mouths
in my childhood
words could be
applied to a wound
could be given to the one
you loved..’ *3
This poem’s concern about the basic nuclear component of poetry itself, in a lamenting spirit, reveals about the encroachment and invasion of techno-market-centric powers on language through everyday renewed technology. It consumes and exploits all verbal structures and manipulates and moulds them for its own tasks. The industrialized, commercialized capitalist world has become an outside world with invincible material connections and associations, and the individual (here poet) is living in the midst of that world.
If we probe this new world, it is ‘post industrial’ or ‘post-modern’ as it is generally defined and explained by sociologists and scholars. There are few who name it ‘post-colonial’ and there are others who term it as ‘neo-colonial’ or ‘late-capitalist’. There are few younger journalists and activists, who admit that now we all, irrespective of our nation and profession, have become ‘Citizen of Empire’. *4. The poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, I have quoted above talks about the fate of word in context of this specific time which has arrived since the last couple of decades of twentieth century.
And indisputably this is the era of ‘globalization’ (or internationalization, as per topic of this seminar paper). It is typically defined as a time in which the sovereignty of nation states has declined and modes of exchange operate with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries, producing configurations of power that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. It is said to have been ‘born’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of USSR as socialist super power and end of the Cold War. It is now a world of reality and virtual reality where an individual breaths and survives alienated from it and from himself. Most of the writers of the peripheral nation states or the third world countries or the developing countries witness this new ‘disni-fied’,‘Mcdonaldized’ or ‘pizzahutted’ *4 world on one hand and a world with ‘carpet bombing’ and bio-genetic terminator seeds and WMDs on the other hand, with instinctual skepticisms. The familiar world, they used to know, has become estranged and altered.
‘A reality belonging to the day before yesterday, a reality that long ago became its own ghost, is being conserved in rigid framework of phrases, prejudices, and hypocrisy. The end product of a vast machinery of research, investigations, analyses, statistics, conferences, reports and headlines is the comic strip, the embodiment of an illusory world of Everyman and No-man. Illusion displaces contradiction. The outcome of a multitude of ‘point of views’ is a hideous ‘uniformity’ of minds.’*5
This perception now appears a bit stale. Scenario now is much more changed and complex. As a result of multiplication and advancement of media and telecommunication technologies including cybernetics what Walter Benjamin had said in his most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ or what Karl Kraus wrote about the printing press or Bertolt Brecht wrote about Radio, now appears stale, clichéd and sometimes juvenile. No other civilization in the past, had used and produced language itself in such a mammoth quantum. Just look around, it’s a big noise. Every channel and every electronic gadget, small or huge, is churning out language and converting it in to ‘chatter’ where words don’t posses any meaning. A language is reproducing itself, a language without truth, an endless meaningless chatter.
Language used and consumed for lies, biggest in it is the global industry of advertising. This is not merely the language of ‘Double Speak’ as George Orwell had thought in his dystopic prophecy of a totalitarian state. Liars of the past, Big Brothers and Goebbels appear tiny and dwarf when we witness colossal lies televised, screened, shown, thrown on masses, because the mind of the masses has to be manipulated through the power of ‘words’ and ‘images’.
In Samskrit, ‘pada’(word)has been conceived as Lord ‘Shiva’ and ‘artha’ (meaning) as Goddess ‘Parvati’ or ’shakti’. They were thought to be inseparable; any act of splitting them apart would have been a blasphemy. Everyone living on earth, which uses ‘pada’ (words) for his interest, is warned to have a restrain over using it excessively. Restrain and control in consuming and producing speech (Vaak samyam). It was thought that this universe has been born from the explosion of ‘nada’ (boom/ sound) which is the base component of speech or language. Poem is also born in the same manner like an universe. Through the explosion (sphota) of word (pada) meaning (artha) is produced which in a serial explosions of following words, form a sentence (vaakya) and through this process a poem (kavya) is born. This is what Bhartrihari had said in his treatise. It appears now, on the face level, an enigmatic, irrational, pre-scientific and obscure theory of genesis of a poem or an universe. But Derida in his Grammatology tells similar things in a little different style.
Now, if we look back again to the poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, where we see that the ‘words have been used up like chewing gum’ by ‘lovely young mouths’ (of tv news anchors) and ‘diminished by politicians’ for ‘whitening their teeth’, then is it really possible now to compose a poem using same ‘used up’, ‘diminished’ words?
What after all a poet should do when a huge, demonic global commercial-political industry is using and manufacturing mammoth quantum of words every fraction of second? And that all for nothing but in advertising its product or lying to consolidate its power?
But, there is a hope. I now quote the last remaining lines of the poem:
‘Now diminished
Wrapped in newspaper
They still contaminate
Still reek
They still hurt
Hidden in heads
Hidden in hearts
Hidden under the gowns
Of young women
Hidden in holy books
They burst out
They kill.’ *6
And here is a hope for a writer or for literature to perform its role in a world where spaces for individual object de-art is shrinking every day. Word can still play a role. Word is ‘power inscribed in language’ so it holds a power, where all outside powers cease to exist.
But there is another plane where the process of internationalism is more concrete and physical. A strong storm of homogenization of cultures on international scale is on since the incoming of this ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-cold-war’ era. Peripheral countries and developing societies do not have any other option except adopting and accepting the economic policies and model of ‘development’ dictated by the rich countries of west, led by US and laid down by international organizations like IMF and the World Bank. India too is a country, with its multiple cultural-ethnic societies and sub-nationalities, which are undergoing through a complex and turbulent, process off late. In India, particularly, we witness a fierce resurgence and re-assertion of micro ethnic identities on rise and conflict since last few years. What Samuel Huntington had prophesied in his infamous book, contrary is the present scenario. These are not the ‘civilizations’ which are clashing against each other, these are much smaller cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious identities which are indulging in violent conflicts every day. Homogenization through mass consumer culture, riding on the multiplied media campaign and dumping of luxury products in the indigenous market, from cars and bikes to fast food and fashion, is consequently developing in to balkanization of a post-colonial nation-state than homogenizing and integrating it.
Recently, I have read a paper by Girish Mishra, a noted Indian scholar, I quote a portion below to elaborate my point of view:
‘Fukuyama rejects the view that globalization is leading to cultural homogeneity. There may be homogenization of certain aspects of the economy and the society, but, at the same time, there will be an affirmation of distinctive cultural identities. If the process of cultural homogenization takes place, it will be too slow to discern. “Many people think that because we have advanced communications technology, and are able to project global television culture worldwide, this will lead to homogenization on a deeper cultural level. I think that, in a way, it’s done just the opposite.
“For example, there is probably less mutual liking, more distrust and greater emphasis on the difference between the cultures of the United States and Asia today than there was
40 years ago. In the 1950s and’60s, Asia looked up to the United States as a model of modernization. Now, Asians look at American urban decay and the decline of the family and they feel that America is not a very attractive model. Communications technology has allowed both Asians and Americans to see each other more clearly, and it turns out they have very different value systems.’*7
One need not agree with this geo-cultural estimation of growing distrust between Asia and the West or the US, here does come a perturbing question about the state of minor, lesser developed, poorer and deprived human groups in this process of global homogenization. Accumulation of wealth in a small section of people where more than 40 percent of population lives much below poverty line and 60 percent of it does not have access to health, education, sanitation and towards basic civil amenities, any such ‘modernization’ stands fake and farcical.
Literature again becomes an arena, where the voices of the diminishing cultural identities and suffering subjugated masses can be heard. Literature, if resist to get itself commoditized by the alluring offers from the market, can unambiguously play a significant role in these testing times.
In my opinion in the age of end of all adolescence, in the age of dystopia and chattering ideologies, it is literature alone, which through its murmur of words and fragile sentences, can act as a vanguard of suppressed identities and individuals. Because literature has an ability to create a critique and a comic versus any hegemonic power, out to dominate and subjugate smaller beings on planet. Words are the Gods of small things. They remain immortal and defy their death. Words can laugh, cry, ridicule, mimic and dance against all forms of violence of powers, anywhere.
‘Writing is the beginning of a mass gesture: against all discourses (modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols, social symbolic), writing alone today, even if still in form of luxury, makes of language something
a-topical, without place.’*8
Therefore, it is literature, which is finally ‘Internationalist’, not the market and never the politics.
Words remain eternal even after the world.
I request you to recall the beginning of this paper, where I had put a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, to explain about the role of an individual writer and poet in the ancient city of language named literature, now I end this paper with a few words from Mahatma Gandhi, the father of post colonial independent India:
‘I do want that the winds from other cultures should enter in to my house, and I have let my doors and windows open to receive it, but I do not want that my foot gets uprooted, lose my balance and I get blown away with the winds. No way I want to go to the other’s house begging as a slave and no way I want to live like a emulator..!’*9


*1 - Ludwig Wittgenstine, Philosophical Investigation,’ Post-Modernism-Philosophy and the Arts, Edited by Hugh J. Silverman, Chapter 5, ‘In Situ: Beyond the Architechture of the Modern’, Stephen H. Watson p.p. 83, Published by Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York-10001.
*2 - Mark C. Taylor, ‘Back to the Future’. Ibid. p.p.15
*3 – Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*4 – Robert Jenson, ‘Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our Humanity’, City Light Books, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, 2004.
*5 – Ernst Fishcher, ‘The Necessity of Art’,Translated by Anna Bostock, Penguin Books,625 Madison Avenue, New York – 10022, p.p. 203
*6 - Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*7 - Girish Mishra,’Globalization and Culture,’ yet to be published, 2008.
*8 – Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, Selected Writings, Edited by Susan Sontag,Fontana Paper backs, p.p. 401, 1983.
*9- P.C.Joshi,’Parivartan aur Vikas ke Sanskritik Aayaam’,Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi,p.p.67, 1987