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Mainstream, Vol XLVIII, No 44, October 23, 2010

Activist in Search of an Alternative: Reflections on Contemporary People’s Movements in West Bengal

Sunday 24 October 2010

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by Sumit Chowdhury

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness... we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...

—Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

Reflecting on the historic people’s movements in West Bengal in recent years, my mind harks back over and over again to those immortal lines from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Indeed, for someone who has been involved with Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh in body and spirit, some ways in both, it’s only natural to be overcome with mixed feelings or contradictory emotions in attempting a look back. A great deal of turbulence does stir up in the mind in such tumultuous times.

Such is always the case with independent participants in people’s movements. The interplay between an individual’s way of thinking and multiple mindsets and approaches inevitably creates a condition in which tugs and pulls in various directions are bound to occur. The stand-alone activist, without an anchoring hook, is its foremost casualty. One is caught in the crosscurrents and left to drift one way or the other. The alternative path and practice one seeks, the reason why one joined the movement in the first place, stays suspended in air, out of one’s reach. In the end, one usually drowns.

The pathetic finale, nonetheless, does not terminate one’s quest for a brave new world. The self-guided activist may not belong to an ideological drift but is committed to changing the established order. Even in the easy comfort of post-movement passivity, the whirlwind days of activism lives on in one’s memories, rallying round to reminisce on the course of events and draw lessons from what went before. The activist always hopes and waits for a rebirth.

Consensual and Plural

Any snapshot of a people’s movement will produce an intermingled dual image, like midway to a cinematic dissolve. The fore-frame may affirm the light: of coming together, arm-in-arm, setting up barricades as one. But lurking behind, there is the shade: of fragmentation, distancing among fellow-travellers, parting of ways. The former shows itself up when the movement is on the ascent, the latter comes to the fore when the movement is on the slide downhill. Since people’s movements flow in endless tides, getting to both highs and lows, there is no final assault to reach the peak nor is there a final landing. This up-down duality is the guarantee that the picture will be open-ended.

Open-ended but, looked at in a holistic manner, not unresolved. The activist, if one is looking closely and with an open mind, may find the inspired resonance of Rembrandt in such a frame. The tension between convergence and divergence, accord and discord, concurrence and difference lends it a beauty and a power the beholder with dialectical eyes cannot but admire. There is a realisation that the union of opposites is the foundation from which the people’s movement gathers its strength to grow and flourish. Unity-struggle-unity is the lifeblood that sustains a mass upsurge.

Accepted politics, though, regards this dichotomy as a bane rather than a virtue. During the Singur and Nandigram upheavals, many activist friends had no qualms about whom they aligned with as long as these were opposed to the ruling party. This section was inclined to sweep the tussles within under the carpet. Instead of nurturing an atmosphere in which views are aired freely and without fear, they discouraged debate, discussion or dialogue. The show of unity was preferred to unity through struggle. Criticism of the movements’ political leadership from public platforms was frowned upon; critical voices were hurriedly censured. The argument was—people should not be treated to confusion; cracks within the movements should not be brought to public gaze. As if people are morons having little sense to sift through the heap of opinions and choose for themselves.

Lenin, a real practitioner of polemics, had a different take on this question, at least in the days prior to his Revolution. You should not hide anything from people even if it reveals our weaknesses, exposes the chinks in the struggle, he had advised his fellow revolutionaries in Russia. The activist friends, more often than they will concede, never tried to follow this ethical yet practicable principle. Giving political beliefs and values the go-by, they enrolled themselves in the electoral fortune-hunters’ bandwagon, all in the name of putting up a united face to drum up mass support. Instead of standing by people’s issues, defeating the common enemy at the polls at any cost was the sole aim. Eventually, they were gobbled up by the bandwagon.

Another section of activists, the so-called radicals, took up dogmatic positions. They were far less accommodating than was required by the issue at hand. To them, the political stand was more important than the movement. The peasant struggles in Singur and Nandigram were to defend land and livelihood from corporate invasion. But these radicals, overlooking their immense potential and lamenting the absence of class struggles, stayed away from the mainstreams; even though poor, ordinary peasants, landless and would-be land-losers constituted the movements’ foremost ranks. Because the movements were being led by or had affinity to a group of self-seeking politicians flocking around a charismatic persona, whom they considered a populist power-seeker, they cold-shouldered the peasant masses and charted a lone course for themselves. In the process, they got cut off from the people and squandered a golden opportunity to take the masses along their own chosen path. At the end of the day, this section became more irrelevant in the State’s politics than they were ever before.

The extremists among the radicals took a crack at but could make no breakthrough in Singur or Nandigram. So, they tried their luck in the jungles where they had been having a quiet presence for about a decade, broken only by occasional bursts of violence. In forest-laden Lalgarh, a path-breaking people’s movement began dramatically about a couple of years ago and is still going strong despite some insoluble reverses. The battle here has not been to protect land and livelihood but against inhuman police atrocities. In effect, it has thrown up a direct challenge to the coercive arm of the state. The extremists, looking to overthrow the state machinery through guerrilla warfare, found in this struggle the great prospect of rolling out their own political agenda. They pulled in their best resources and, through clever manipulations, have taken over the movement’s reins. With guns doing most of their talking, all other voices have since been silenced. The consequences have been disastrous for both the movement and the extremists. The movement has been robbed of its declared aims and uniquely democratic fabric even as the extremists are fast losing whatever they claimed to be their support base. Worse still, their actions have created conditions for the state to strike back as hard as it wants to, heaping untold misery on the poor peace-loving people in the region.

The activists’ dilemma, then, can be traced back to both opportunism and orthodoxy. Free floating and one-track persuasions are the two sides of the same coin. Both are zero-tolerant towards dissimilar points of view. Both are, in that sense, moulded in a totalitarian psyche.

Because it involves all sections of the population with wide-ranging interests, people’s movements have to have democratic arrangements in order to develop the collective spirit. Common understanding can be achieved only if every voice is listened to, every strand of thinking gets equal prominence. There will surely be contradictions: clash of ideals or struggle between means of struggle. They will only fire up the movement, not put it out. Consensus, it may be emphasised, is built upon the foundations of plurality.

Pity, words like ‘consensual’ and ‘plural’ are missing in the vocabulary of contemporary people’s movements in West Bengal.

Party and Power

Even a casual glance at history will show that all major popular uprisings came about through spontaneous mass action. The storming of the Bastille in the French summer of 1789 and that of the Winter Palace in the Russian October of 1917 are evidences of such spurs-of-the-moment. Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, Haripur and other recent mass resistances to forcible land acquisition have gone along with that habit of history. Even the protests around the Rizwanur Rahman episode or the violent manifestations of people’s anger in several rural pockets over ration dealers’ fraudulent ways were continuation of that same legacy.

This is something the bulk of the activists in the recent people’s movements in West Bengal cannot appreciate or accept. They cannot, for that reason, comprehend or explain the sudden burst of a succession of momentous mass movements in the State since mid-2006. Their vision is constricted by conventional political ideas that they have been professing and practising for years. Denying spontaneity is the inevitable outcome.

Tethered as they are to political parties or their mass organisations, these activists place all their faith in organised struggles. People are to be led and the idea of people leading them is an outrage. They’re the vanguard, imbued with radical consciousness. Only they can awaken the masses from deep slumber. How can ordinary folk rise up by themselves?

The reality, of course, did not conform to theory. The ordinary folk, when they rose, did organise themselves but in what was essentially their own. In Singur, simple village women put up a barricade when a convoy of Tata officials came to inspect the fertile paddy and potato fields the State Government had put up on sale to set up the small car factory; the Krishijami Raksha Samiti (Committee to Save Agricultural Land), the organisation of the farming community spearheading the peasant struggle in its initial phase, materialised from this impulsive action. In Nandigram, too, the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Resist Eviction from Land) came into being in the wake of mass protests that erupted following the land acquisition notice put up by the Haldia Development Authority: thousands of men and women came out of their homes and within a few hours cut up roads and culverts to deny the police and ruling party goons access to their villages; the dig-in lasted all of eleven months.

Political parties could not let such an opportunity slip by. They were not even waiting in the wings when things unfolded unexpectedly. Now they rushed in to fish in troubled waters. Those who were better-equipped took centre-stage and in a short time turned the people’s battles into electoral campaigns. The results were there to be seen at the last Panchayat, Lok Sabha and municipal elections.

In Lalgarh, parties faced a big hurdle from the people themselves. When thousands thronged at Dalilpur Chowk to protest police terror after the mine blast on the Chief Minister’s motorcade, they not only formed their own Poolishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharoner Committee (People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities) but also put up a ‘No Entry’ sign for all parties and organisations. A leaflet handed out at the congregation said it all: ‘Ke kon party kore, dekhar dorkar nei, ashun, amra aikkobaddho hoi (Who does which party, let’s not bother, let us come together).’

Parties had never faced a situation like this. They had no clue how to handle this unfamiliar stance and took up contradictory positions. The main Opposition party in the State supported the movement at the outset in the hope that it would, as in Singur and Nandigram, reap huge electoral dividends. But when that did not happen, they cried foul. The radical extremists, of course, were not interested in the parliamentary game but they also had a political agenda to fulfil. From the very beginning, they got busy hijacking the movement by claiming it to be their handiwork. Going by the direction the Lalgarh movement took eventually, there can be no doubt that they succeeded to quite an extent. When it comes to using people’s movements for achieving political ends, there is barely a hazy line that separates the extremists from the opportunists.

Political organisations act as is their wont and they’ve the right to do so. What’s repugnant is that they deceive the people. In the name of serving people, these actually serve themselves. There can be no misgiving that it’s power these are hankering for; even a child will tell you that. When these go into the people’s movement, their real intent is to use it as the stepping-stone to the portals of power.

It is amazing that activist friends owing allegiance to political set-ups cannot see through this manipulative pursuit. They are blind to the fact that through their meddling, political groups deny the people’s movement its autonomy as well as its sovereignty. These activists do make the right noises about people’s issues but in their heart of heart, they work for the party. Party-building, not movement-building, is what they put their body and soul into. Instead of empowering the people, they seek to empower the party.

Perhaps, they, too, are lured by the bitter apple of power: who knows?

Democracy and Development

At the core of it, a combination of anger and survival instinct acts as the trigger which sets a people’s movement in motion. One is aggressive in its intent; the other takes the form of self-defence. One may be prompted by abstract and long-standing grievances like tyranny or repression; the other surely is the response to more real and immediate threats like displacement or loss of livelihood. One is a fight against coercion, the other for justice. Whatever be the cause, the people’s movement is in essence a struggle for human dignity and is invariably directed against the power of authority. The system and the state are equally targeted. Rocking one automatically rocks the other.

Through the hard grind of daily life and rigours of field combat, people come to equate the two. If the system is responsible for their poverty, the state comes to its rescue when people try to change it. If the system charts out a displacing, dispossessing path of development, the state sheds its democratic garb to come down heavily on those who come in the way. In Singur and Nandigram, when the peasants opposed the move to impose the will of the system, the state put aside all its democratic pretensions to unleash brutal violence. In Lalgarh and surrounding Jangalmahal, the state came in first to clear the barriers on the passageway of development, compelling the forest communities to engage in fierce confrontation; people had to fight it out with the omnipotent state to prevent the system from rolling in.

While ordinary people through their struggles could log on to the straightforward interface between the two, a great deal of confusion prevailed in the ranks of the on-the-ball activists. A large section was enraged by the vicious state or state-sponsored onslaught on the rural poor and yet they felt that industrialisation should not be held back. They were traumatised when they saw (on television) the merciless thrashing the cops let loose on poor farmers of Singur who refused to part with their land but still thought the Tata car factory was a good idea. They continue to say even today that industry should come up in rocky, infertile areas or on unused land within industrial premises. They also support mechanisation and contract farming to boost agricultural production and productivity. Industrialisation, they have no doubt, is the answer to the country’s backwardness; only the state should not be inhuman or undemocratic in pushing it through. Development should at least have a human face.

These activists have observably raised a strong voice against forcible acquisition of agricultural land for industry. The key word here is ‘forcible’, which implies that they are not opposed to acquisition per se but to the use of ‘force’ in carrying it out. They have overlooked history. The acquisition of huge tracts of Church estate lands and commons in 18th century England was not without considerable bloodshed. Marx described it rather poignantly in Das Kapital. Force was the midwife of every pre-industrial European society pregnant with the one brought about by James Watt’s invention. Capitalist development, by its very disposition, must follow the most inhuman, aggressive and violent course. It doesn’t give a damn whether or not it can offer a humane profile.

Another set within the activist fraternity did see through the veil of people’s welfare that development wears but pinned all its hopes on the cloak of democracy the Indian state has put on. They failed to recognise that the paradigm of capitalist development works best through the bourgeois institution of parliamentary democracy; a liberal political arrangement is the paramount channel through which the neoliberal economic prescription can be put into effect. In the heat and dust of people’s struggles, they might have forgotten that the ruling government in West Bengal launched its industrialisation overdrive after it was legitimised through a landslide electoral mandate.

The battle of the ballot, accordingly, became the decisive factor to this group of activists. The life-trampling wheels of development, they believed, could be stopped by means of the five- yearly ritual that goes by the name of General Elections. In West Bengal, they have to wait till 2011.

The question is: will the wait bring the spring of happiness? The long winter of discontent and despair will surely end; the party ensconced in the seat of power for over three decades will have to go; but will it put a halt to the triumphant march of ‘development’? Going by the proclivity of those almost at the gates of that much-coveted red building in BBD Bag, it’s highly unlikely. On the contrary, they may outshine their predecessors in rolling out the red carpet for global capital. They’re now an integral part of the centre of power and have formed a strong alliance with those who have steamrolled capitalist development on the country since independence.

The activists, both pro-industry and hopeful of democracy, are not thinking hard enough. They have failed to grasp the real meaning of whatever is peddled as ‘development’. They accept the word at its face value, rarely raising fundamental paradigmatic questions. Instead, they have been wasting energy arguing over the issue of transition from agriculture to industry, whether or not such a crossover was inevitable and constituted ‘progress’. The debate, they pretend not to see, has been provoked by repeated assertions from the party in power that agriculture is uneconomical and backward whereas industry generates employment and symbolises the modern way of life.

‘Development’, in this argument, is seen through the prism of capitalist commonsense. The reasoning may seem to be faultless to the ruling coalition in our State since it has been unashamedly sold on the World Bank prescrip-tions, as spelt out in its New Industrial Policy (1994). But how does our well-regarded activists fall short of seeing through this logic of the market?

The basic issue is not agriculture versus industry, for both agriculture and industry are being developed in a crony-capitalistic way. Like industry, the World Bank has also laid down instruments of developing our agriculture which sets up the rule of capital in that sector; and its honourable agents holding the reins of power in the State are doing everything they can to implement those in full, with great alacrity. The question, therefore, is not whether industry is preferable to agriculture but to what end they be developed: reaping super-profits for corporate houses or meeting people’s needs; establishing the hegemony of capital or building a better life for the people? West Bengal’s policy-makers have openly gone for the former. It means devastation of people’s life and livelihood as well as the ecology that sustains them. Development or destruction: that’s the question we’ve to ask.

It’s time all the activists shouted in one voice: ‘Development’ is a cruel war on our people; and in this war, the most powerful (also the most deceitful) resistance-breaking missile is ‘democracy’.

War and Peace

Green Hunt is an appropriate name for the war the Indian state has launched on our people in the name of internal security. Hounds are on the rampage in the forests to smash the resistance of those who will be dispossessed so that multi-national merchants can plunder the enormous riches in peace. If the empire of capital can spread its accumulative tentacles across India’s vast greens, the falling rate of profits worldwide can be somewhat immobilised. After all, history, to go with Fukuyama, has to end at some point of time, the sooner the better.

In Lalgarh, the war began over a year and quarter ago when the Central and State security forces moved in hand-in-hand to crush the people’s rebellion. Since then, whatever an occupation army does the security forces are doing there. Village after village has been set on fire, hundreds killed or maimed, women raped, crops looted, young and old, even children mercilessly thrashed, abducted or put in jail. Schools, hospitals, banks, administrative offices are shut for months. Transport and communications have completely collapsed. There is neither food nor work; and thousands have fled the soil their forebears had lived on for centuries. The situation has worsened in recent months as heavily-armed mercenaries of the ruling party have set up frontline camps all over Jangalmahal in a bid to reinstate their hegemony. This Bengal brand of the Salwa Judum makes even the butchery of the security forces look trivial in comparison.

The extremists have retaliated with almost as much ferocity. Whatever the security forces and ruling party goons are doing, they are doing in no uncertain measure. Hundreds have been gruesomely slain on the mere suspicion of being police informers or for being supporters of the ruling party; the victims, including the jawans killed in gun-battle or during raids on police camps, are mostly average folk, if not the poorest of the poor. An atmosphere of fear, rather than resoluteness of mass resistance, has been instilled in the minds of the ordinary villagers. The extremists’ approach is so purely militaristic that political judgments have lost all meaning and debates or deliberations, even exchange of views, come to a full-stop. Only the credo of violence to counter-violence reigns supreme.

The air is, thus, rent with the smell of the gunpowder. Blood is flowing in gushes along the Kangsabati. Sanity and humanity are lost forever. Will this madness ever end?

The state and the extremists have turned Jangalmahal into a veritable war zone. The ground is at present searing up for the imminent turf war between a desperate ruling party’s private army, backed by the security forces, and the extremist guerrilla squads. The Opposition is waiting in the wings to fill in the vacuum the moment the warring groups finish each other off. Peace may thereby return but it’ll be peace of the graveyard. More crucially for activists, will the dream people there dreamt be fulfilled? Will people be the masters of their own lives and destiny? What possibly will happen to the heroic struggle people had launched and led themselves? The seeds of a new politics this extraordinary movement planted, had already been squandered by gun-toting extremists; those will now reap a bumper harvest for the usual electoral gamblers.

Some activist friends are working overtime towards restoring peace and normal life in Jangalmahal. One cannot but have admiration for their earnest efforts. Scepticism, nevertheless, creeps in. These well-meaning activists have taken the peace overtures of the Indian state or the initiatives of state-employed apostles a lot more seriously than those really deserve. They are also harping on talks between such adversaries—the state and the extremists—whose declared goals are, so to say, ‘non-negotiable’. one is the apparatus of power itself, the other aims to overthrow that very apparatus and replace it with its own. These peaceniks overlook the critical fact that there is hardly any meeting ground between the two positions. Why is anyone not emphasising talks with represen-tatives of the people’s movement instead? Real peace, it must be recognised, cannot be purchased across (or under) the table. It can be achieved only through powerful, passionate people’s struggle. Peace without struggle is plain fairytale.

The Indian state, the activists’ memories have perhaps elapsed, had signed several peace treaties with insurgent groups in the past; but peace had been as elusive as ever. Because peace is never the real intention; it is peddled to blunt the razor edges of popular struggles; and it also comes in handy at election time. In the case of Green Hunt, peace was bandied about no sooner than the operations started. Those managing the affairs of the Indian state have repeatedly pronounced that a ‘twin strategy’ is at work in the war against the extremist menace. The twins, no doubt, are ‘war’ and ‘peace’. It is like a double-barrelled gun in which both ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are cogs in the firing machine. The target for each is the same. The state wants peace, its own kind of peace, to prevail so that the mining marauders can go about their business without hitch. Our peace-lovers will do well to steer clear of such state-sponsored peace projects.

What will people do then, when the state closes each and every door of democratic protest and comes down on them with horribly sophisticated weaponry? How will they confront the repressive might of the state? Activists are divided on this issue. They have faced the dilemma in Singur and Nandigram too. The rising fury of Green Hunt and the increasingly violent extremist response have taken their predicament to a new high.

It is catch-22. If people take up arms in self-defence, it will be grossly unfair to ask them to stick to the Gandhian path. It will be no less unfair to ignore non-violent forms of resistance and let people be caught in a blood-spattered affair. Let the people decide. n

[This is a revised version of a paper presented by the
author at a UGC-sponsored national-level seminar on
‘Alternative Politics: Another World, Other Voices’, organised by the Department of Political Science, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandir, Belur in collaboration with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,

Kolkata, on February 19-20, 2010)

Sumit Chowdhury is a film-maker, writer and activist in people’s movements.

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