6 Comments

1. Stan:

   The current situation is more volatile, in part, because of the delusional pretensions of much of the Indian dominant class. They play incessantly at India being a “great power” — a notion that has led to the muscular Indian-male chauvinism that identifies itself with the successful test of a nuclear weapon in 1998.

   Vandana Shiva wrote in April 2006:

   When the nuclear tests were carried out by India in Pokhran on May 11, 1998, the tests were described as “explosions of self-esteem” and “megatonnes of prestige”. The major media dubbed the bomb a “Hindu bomb”.

   By May 30, Pakistan had announced six nuclear tests at Chagai.

   This is from page 161 of Energy War. When we get settled back in Grecia (tomorrow, we’re in Nicaragua right now), I want to look more closely at AR’s article, the go back and see what was going on in India then (when I was writing the Inida piece for FTW), and try to figure out what has changed, as well as how much I got wrong a few years ago. This intervention into Pakistan by the Obama administration is every bit as loony as the Bush quagmire in Iraq, and maybe far more dangerous.

   PS: from AR’s article, the gender dynamic, which is the war dynamic, the enemizing dynamic, and the administrative dynamic. How can anyone still deny that gender – more than any other division of labor in human society – turns the worlds of men into little shops of horror for everyone.

   We pass Kanker, famous for its Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College run by Brigadier B.K. Ponwar, Rumpelstiltskin of this war, charged with the task of turning corrupt, sloppy policemen (straw) into jungle commandos (gold). “Fight a guerrilla like a guerrilla”, the motto of the warfare training school, is painted on the rocks. The men are taught to run, slither, jump on and off air-borne helicopters, ride horses (for some reason), eat snakes and live off the jungle. The brigadier takes great pride in training street dogs to fight ‘terrorists’. Eight hundred policemen graduate from the warfare training school every six weeks. Twenty similar schools are being planned all over India. The police force is gradually being turned into an army. (In Kashmir, it’s the other way around. The army is being turned into a bloated, administrative police force.) Upside down. Inside out. Either way, the Enemy is the People.

   PPS: And here’s the expropriation of the subsisters:

   The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.

   25 March 2010, 10:17 am

2. Robert Karaffa:

   D’accord to the above.
   Need to read much more about Charu Majumdar. When the author writes “Could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?” And makes comments about so many other movements; I get a parallel feeling (for now, in my uneducated and only experiential state of memory) about Ho Chi Minh in regards to conversations I had a few years ago in Tra Vinh and other parts of the Mekong Delta. (You can still pick up shrapnel easily when you toss shrimp nets off the little boats in the channels.)The intellectual construction of a revolution put into action by those so far removed from the spheres where the ideas are constructed. Great article. What a great writer and a true journalist. I will dream of Indian forests with petals falling off of trees for a few nights…oh and crickets! And Stars. And Stan, so right again about gender. My brain started to sour when reading about gender issues in the movement. It is the absolute. You can’t walk two steps through any town anywhere in any country and not see it/feel it. And it hurts.

   25 March 2010, 6:57 pm

3. Jangi Kedi:

   Here is a very interesting article “In defense of the bitch…”
   http://www.countercurrents.org/selvam280310.htm
   By Trevor Selvam
   28 March, 2010
   Countercurrents.org
   From the article, Arundhati Roy is “… a bitch, a cunt, a Muslim arse-licker and so much more. Who are these people who have such wonderful things to say about her?”
   “They mirror the incredible mental descent and cultural depravity of a post-Bollywood, web-savvy class, cut off from historical precedent, unaware of India’s socio-economic past, unaware of rational, sensible discourse and debate, ignorant about India’s own philosophical traditions, let alone world history– about colonization and the genocide against aboriginal people. What vitriol, filth and misogyny runs through the veins of these Indians! When Sarojini Naidu, Aruna Asaf Ali, Mridula Sarabhai and other women spoke and wrote essays about their feelings about the people of India not a single misogynist invective was hurled at them. Today, when Medha Patkar, Vandana Shiva, Arundhuti Roy, Nandini Haksar and even Sania Mirza reflect on their experiences, Indian men of the above variety unleash their religious, sexual, tribal, super-nationalist, obscurantist prejudices immediately.”

   29 March 2010, 3:34 am

4. Stan:

   Thank you, Jengi.

   The final point is important. A Roy was not doing a hagiogrpahy of the Naxalites. She is unmasking the fact that civil institutions for the prime directive of conflict resolution (redistribution of power) no longer eixst. If the Naxalites are responding to this fact in their own way, so will everyone else. In their own way. Maoist formations seem to have a niche, with peasantry at a certain zone along a developmental continuum, where they can be amazingly effective using appeals that are quasi-religious and an almost monastic discipline among cadres. Be that as it may, there are a lot of social sectors in India that have been placed far out on the cracking limb of neo-liberalism. There will be a lot of dislocation. Fertile ground for rebellions, but also for reaction (of the Hindutva kind).

   And the poisonous misogyny of the attacks speaks volumes about gender.

   29 March 2010, 6:44 am

5. Michaael Anderson:

   Here is an interesting development in India:

   http://www.alternet.org/story/147031/saving_water,_the_(really)_old-fashioned_way

   Saving Water, the (Really) Old-Fashioned Way
   By Adam Davidson-Harden and Jay Walljasper, OnTheCommons.org
   Posted on May 29, 2010, Printed on May 29, 2010

   Rajendra Singh, founder of Tarun Bharat Sangh, (TBS, or Young India Association), always wanted to be a farmer. Bowing to family pressure, he studied to be a doctor of traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine and after school moved to the Alwyn district in the arid state of Rajasthan. Singh was not simply practicing medicine, he wanted to test some ideas about healing ecosystems.

   The local Arvari River had dried up during the 1940s when the surrounding hills were stripped of trees. It flowed only during the monsoon season. Since that time most people fled local villages to seek a livelihood elsewhere. When Singh arrived in 1985, he noticed that only the oldest and poorest people were left in the area.

   Drawing on indigenous Indian knowledge of geology, hydrology and ecology, he began building tiny dams with johads (reservoirs) on streams flowing to the river in the hopes of reviving the natural water flow of both surface and underground water in the region. The local elders chuckled as they watched him do backbreaking labor with very little results for two years. Only then, he remembers with a chuckle, did they decide he was sincere in trying to help them and began offering tips on the right spots to place dams and johads.

   It worked. The water captured in the johads during monsoon season slowly rejuvenated vegetation, which helped refill the aquifers (used for local drinking water) and restore the water retaining capacity of the hillsides.

   The Arvari River came back to life and now runs all year as do four other once-dry rivers in the region. Groundwater levels have risen by an estimated 20 feet, and crucial forest cover, which helps to maintain the water-retaining capacity of the soil, has increased by 33 percent. People who abandoned the district are now moving back to farm and start businesses, Singh says.

   In addition, The Young India Association challenged plans to privatize and deplete freshwater resources. In the Alwar area, where Singh began his work, activsts have prevented 40 water-intensive industrial companies (including bottled water and soft drink makers) from setting up factories. Villagers are creating their own “river parliaments” to sustain the water commons; each is governed by two leaders?“one who is responsible to the community, and one who is responsible solely to the water and nature.

   “Water is a very emotional, spiritual thing,” Singh explains, noting that the once-lost river is now once again sacred to local people. He says that many of the older residents now ask that when they die that their ashes be sprinkled into the Arvari rather than the Ganges.

   Jay Walljasper is editor of OnTheCommons.org, a news and culture website devoted to recognizing the importance of the commons — those things that belong to all of us — in modern life.

   29 May 2010, 4:00 am

6. Stan:

   “River parliaments.” I love it.

   29 May 2010, 8:52 am

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