Stiglitz and Sen profit and pain

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2008/08/2301

ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA/ Hardnews/ DELHI

An economic transaction is a solved political problem. Economics has gained the title of queen of the social sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain - Abba Lerner

NOBEL ECONOMIST JOSEPH Stiglitz has recently expressed his views on the ongoing food crisis around the world. Given his pre-eminence in the profession and his vast experience as an advisor to governments, his views deserve to be scrutinised carefully.

The Stiglitz diagnosis
Stiglitz traces the problem of inflation in food and energy prices around the world to the policies that have been enacted in the US and elsewhere during the past few decades. He finds fault with the massive financial deregulation and generous tax cuts for the rich in the Anglo-Saxon world since the Thatcher-Reagan years, attributing to them rightly the "huge increase in inequalities in most countries," the dramatic fall in household savings rate in the US, significant declines in employment prospects for most people everywhere and most worryingly, threats to nutrition standards even in the so-called developed world. A less flattering catalogue of global failures would be hard to summon.
The proliferation of opaque financial products in the wake of deregulation didn't so much manage risk as enhance it, converting the world economy into a gambler's paradise (since most countries were made to choose similar policies of deregulation - by the IMF and the World Bank), which has been systematically transferring wealth and real income from the poor to the rich globally, relying on the unerring precision of market forces.
Additionally, Stiglitz points to two significant policies of the Bush administration that have exacerbated food and energy crises in recent years. He points to Washington's war on Iraq. Bush's foolish policies have made the connection between food and energy markets tight, thanks to a misguided biofuels programme during the past few years.
Stiglitz makes it a point to underscore how Third World agriculture has been put in severe jeopardy not just because of benign neglect by governments, international financial institutions and aid agencies, but also because of unfair competition from a systematically and heavily susbsidised agriculture in the rich world. This last is a criminal hypocrisy (the West being at the forefront of the messianic crusade for ‘free' markets) too banal to belabour. The powerful World Bank is once again waking up slowly to the resilient truth that there is simply no way to reduce (let alone eliminate) poverty in the world without paying special attention to agriculture.

The Stiglitz remedy
What according to Stiglitz is the solution?
"Rich countries must reduce, if not eliminate, distortional agriculture and energy policies, and help those in the poorest countries improve their capacity to produce food. But this is just a start: we have treated our most precious resources - clean air and water - as if they were free. Only new patterns of consumption and production - a new economic model - can address that most fundamental resource problem."
Other than a euphemistc argot all too familiar in Orwellian times and the habit-bound economist's search for the universally right ‘model' to implement everywhere, a technocratically enlightened formula for guaranteed success, the above words could have come from Jesus Christ himself.
So where does Stiglitz fall short?
Stiglitz wants rich countries to "reduce, if not eliminate distortional agriculture and energy policies". But don't we already know they will never do this? Stiglitz keeps appealing to a constituency he already knows has long been morally deaf. For someone sacked by the US Treasury from his plum position near the top of the World Bank not so long ago, Stiglitz certainly knows this. Under the revolving door system the Americans have between their highest public and corporate offices, it is a sure wager that it was precisely the annoyance at Stiglitz on the part of the global investor class that prompted his sacking. Then why does he pretend otherwise?
"The world" he appeals to for merciful economic policies in the future is in actual fact the world's tiny and shrinking class of corporate captains, precisely the bunch which sponsors the lobbies and policy elites which have led the relentless, decades-long campaign for financial deregulation, the very phenomenon Stiglitz holds responsible for the mess around us. This band of global corporate czars lives better than the royalty of other ages of humanity. It takes a dozen flights on private jets every week and dines every evening on wine and caviar which have been flown half way around the world especially for their banquets. Why should they listen to mad men like Stiglitz?
For at least half a generation many have been trying to persuade the governments of the rich nations to remove the unjust agricultural subsidies that harm Third World agriculture. Why have the governments of the rich nations not followed this morally impeccable advice? Is it not because they are influenced by transnational businesses maximising profits globally? Is it not because they are cynically Machiavellian?

The real world
The latter hypotheses can hardly be dismissed. Consider what US Senator Hubert Humphrey said 50 years ago: "I have heard that people may become dependent on us for food. To me that is good news because before people can do anything, they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and be dependent on you, in terms of their own cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific."
So the idea, far from helping "those in the poorest countries improve their capacities to produce food" (as Stiglitz continues to wish in vain) is to keep them permanently locked into a state of fundamental economic dependence on the West. (Did we ever get done with colonialism?) If Stiglitz and his panglossian followers think that times have changed (and the West is more civilised after all these decades of folly upon culpable folly), they should listen to President Richard Nixon's chilling words from a more recent decade: "Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves."
More recently, in 1986, John Block, the US Agriculture Secretary said: "The push by some developing countries to become more self-sufficient in food may be reminiscent of a bygone era. These countries could save money by importing more food from the US."
If Stiglitz thinks such an opinion is unusual, he might ask himself if it is fundamentally different from the following view: "Food self-sufficiency is a peculiarly obtuse way of thinking about food security. There is no particular problem, even without self-sufficiency, in achieving nutritional security through the elimination of poverty (so that people can buy food) and through the availability of food in the world market (so that countries can import food if there is not an adequate stock at home)...The focus has to be on income and entitlement, and the ability to command food rather than on any fetishist concern about food self-sufficiency..."
The words belong to Stiglitz's illustrious colleague and fellow-Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He gave an interview on the topic of world hunger to The Guardian in 2002.
Sen writes as though trade, income and entitlement were there just for the asking! He surely knows enough history to know that food has always been a weapon of warfare. He writes: "There are situations in which self-sufficiency is important, such as during wars. At one stage in the Second World War, there was a real danger of Britain not being able to get enough food into the country. But that is a very peculiar situation, and we are not in one like that now, nor are we likely to be in the near future."
Iraq was invaded by Washington, London and Canberra within a year of Sen's interview.
Sen's "trade fetish" is symptomatic of a global pandemic among academic economists. It only indicates his deep-seated conditioning by the economics profession as it has been shaped by a decadent intellectual culture in the western world after World War II. The intellectuals of the ex-colonies have never considered decolonising their minds. Sen is the leading example. They might do well to read Tagore and Gandhi once more.

State of the dismal science
This sums up the professional consensus within "the dismal science". The real world for most hungry people (we know for sure after recent food price inflation) is very different from what economists imagine it to be. In the latter's world, poor nations, on the verge of industrial breakthroughs and massive transfers
of labour away from agriculture to more "productive" and lucrative occupations (events which have not transpired yet in countries like India and China), can feed themselves much like Belgium or the Netherlands do - by importing food from abroad (from rich countries which do not even have to have a comparative advantage in the production of food, but have profligate treasuries and ignorant, gullible taxpayers to fund the subsidies and can thus let their agribusinesses sell cheaper than anyone else in the world market).
From the real world where the poor and the powerless live under hegemonies of forced production and consumption along lines dictated by the megcorps, the latter's ‘international' financial institutions, and also their State patrons, things couldn't look more different. Global markets could never seem so innocent to hungry, suicide-prone farmers in India or Africa, as they do to technocratic dreamers in the seminar rooms of Columbia or Cambridge.

Why economists perpetuate misunderstanding
In times as transparently and confidently unjust as ours, it's either dim-witted naivete or outright knavery for economists to continue to keep their technocratic heads buried in the "innocent" sands of social "science". They keep pretending that economics and politics belong to different planets.
Economists are dispassionate thinkers practising disinterested science. Economics is on its way to becoming a pure science. Society and human communities are irrelevant. In any case, "there is no such thing as society". Governments are a nuisance. They ought to stay away from markets. Markets are omniscient. They know everything that needs to be known (and not just about prices). Markets are free of politics. (What have they got to do with corporate power and influence?) They are the repositories of the best virtues in human nature. Therein rules liberal utopia.
Thou shalt not doubt these time-tested verities.
These are the kernels of truth that adorn the seminar rooms of the economics profession around the world today. America's imperial conquests are more obvious in the ‘intellectual' realm than in any other, with an obviously unscientific bubble economics (suitably insulated from facts) always leading the charge. Give or take a little here, some there, and you get the spectrum of opinions within the economics profession. They all must have not human communities --but the ‘free' market at the heart of their conformist meditations.
Every economist - and Stiglitz and Sen are iconic iconoclasts within the tribe - is career-habit-and-hide-bound to pay his homage to the wisdom of market forces, even when he is critical of them (as both Sen and Stiglitz are in measurable degree). Such are the touchstones of the theology that today provides the primary justification for the widespread ecological and social ruin being precipitated by globalised growth around the planet.
The world has been "liberalised, privatised and globalised" with a messianic passion over the past few decades in the name of this putatively omniscient economics. It teaches the ancient virtue of patience. A little pain for some now, so that everyone can gain more tomorrow. As long as the masters of the universe are allowed a free hand to invest anywhere from the Mariana Trench to the moon. Trickle-down truths. Stale air. They all have faith in it, even if they are Sen or Stiglitz.
But as always, the cash-strapped housewife or the woman slaving at the construction site (or the one waiting in queue for one of those employed to break an arm) knows better than the pundits.
Time was when writers lampooned economists for "knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing". Today, they seem to be unaware even of the price of things! They are desperate to rescue their fading conscience after having long back traded it away for professional success and career advancement. Moral failure was always on the cards. Now the writing is all over the wall for anyone with eyes to read.

The writer is an economist and independent researcher

See Also:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/15/economics.food

What’s wrong with the CPM?

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/12/1857

Left Front allies should withdraw from the council of ministers in West Bengal. Such a drastic step alone can trigger serious rethinking within the CPM

Praful Bidwai Delhi

As West Bengal's Left Front leaders continue to attract unprecedented flak and get politically mauled for the Nandigram crisis and their terrible handling of it, they would do well to recall what veteran communist BT Ranadive used to say about communist parties: “There is nothing more dangerously self-destructive than a communist party which has lost its way, which is on a wrong political course.”

Ranadive should have known. Just after Independence, he declared “yeh azaadi jhooti hai” (this freedom is false), and led the undivided CPI into the Telengana armed struggle, which it had to withdraw — at an enormous political expense and after a lot of bloodshed.

However, for all the mistakes he made, Ranadive was acutely aware, like all able political leaders, of the limitations of his/her own politics — in the CPI's case, ideological rigidity and organisational inflexibility, and a culture which stifles free debate. Together, these make an honest review of party strategies and their rectification extremely difficult.

This limitation has again become starkly obvious in the case of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in West Bengal after the carnage in Nandigram in the first half of November. Although today's CPM is politically a different animal from the undivided CPI of the 1940s — and has accepted, and genuinely internalised, the need to work within a democratic framework — it organisationally retains continuity with the old bureaucratic culture and is uncomfortable with free, open debate (as, of course, are Right-wing and Centrist parties too).

The CPM carries two additional burdens. First, in West Bengal, it is pursuing a neo-liberal economic policy course and squandering away the gains it made from the 'Operation Barga' land reform programme of the 1970s and 1980s and other progressive programmes. The Left Front government, which the CPM leads in West Bengal, is increasingly unable to create a model of inclusive, egalitarian democracy and participatory growth. Rather, its policies are becoming predatory upon the underprivileged. The Nandigram and Singur crises are examples of this.

The CPM's second burden is the cult of 'cadre power', which obsessively seeks to establish the party's unquestioned supremacy in every area it dominates. So powerful is this cult, especially in West Bengal, that the leadership unthinkingly caves in to it. After all, the CPM was built in Bengal by its dedicated cadres from scratch during the 1960s and 1970s, when it had to face the Congress, which relied on muscle power and the repressive State apparatus to deal with its opponents.

The CPM too absorbed that muscle power culture (as did the Trinamool Congress). That culture has now become a huge liability. In Nandigram, this came into play twice: in March, and again, in November this year. To put it simply, the Nandigram crisis was precipitated when the CPM decided to forcibly 'capture' two of the area's three blocks, over which it had lost control earlier this year.

The bulk of Nandigram's people — including many CPM supporters — got disenchanted with the party because it tried to impose a Special Economic Zone on them. The 25,000-acre SEZ was to be created by acquiring land for a 'chemical hub' for Indonesia's Salem group — a front for the super-corrupt family of dictator and kleptocrat General Suharto.

The SEZ plan was tentatively abandoned under popular resistance, led (but not exclusively) by the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), formed by the Trianmool Congress and Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), among others. But the CPM just couldn't accept, indeed, even imagine, that it would not be the people's sole representative or lose some of its influence in Nandigram. To regain control over the area and all its economic transactions, CPM cadres started a campaign of intimidation and harassment of ordinary people, turning thousands into refugees.

On March 14, 2007, with police collaboration, armed cadres mounted a murderous attack on several villages, accompanied by arson, loot and rape. Numerous independent inquiries by citizens' groups established that pro-CPM thugs led the punitive expedition. The violence was planned. As was the cover-up that followed, including failure to examine allegations of rape and doctoring of the medical records of many victims.

A People's Tribunal, consisting of retired High Court Chief Justice SN Bhargava, veteran editor Prabhash Joshi, and reputed social activists, documented the relevant events, based on 39 oral and 135 written depositions by the victims. Its conclusions are chilling. They show close police-CPM collusion in intimidating, beating and killing people. The motive was to 'teach' SEZ opponents 'a lesson' and re-establish the party's supremacy in village after village.

The March 14 attempt failed. But CPM-BUPC clashes continued in recent months, and pressure grew to call in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). To pre-empt the CRPF's intervention, CPM cadres launched their second bid to 'capture' Nandigram. This turned Nandigram into what Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi called a “war zone”.

On November 1, say credible reports, state CPM bosses, including Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and party secretary Biman Bose, decided that they would ask party cadres to launch a major offensive to capture the area, using brute force, while withdrawing the police. Accordingly, senior local-level cadres met that night in Khejuri, a CPM stronghold next to Nandigram, and drew up a detailed plan to attack 13 villages. The attackers, well-trained in the use of firearms, were mobilised from four different districts.

A multi-pronged offensive was launched on November 5-8 after ensuring the police would be absent. A second wave of November 10 pushed BUPC supporters from Maheshpur into Khejuri, taking 600 of them 'prisoners'. The final assault began the next day, using the prisoners as a 'human shield'. Within hours, the entire area was 'liberated'.

The CPM leadership, especially Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, has presented the violence as a spontaneous clash between two organisations, in which the BUPC was “paid back in the same coin”. In reality, this was a clear case of partisan abuse of the State machinery, and its subordination to the CPM-in complete violation of all democratic norms. There could be no weightier instance of the State's abdication of its fundamental responsibility to protect the life and limb of all its citizens.

The CPM-led government treated political adversaries as another country's enemy population and allowed party cadres to wage war against them using firearms. Besides, the charge ignores the fact that ordinary people unaffiliated to the BUPC had also turned against the CPM and were victimised by it through coercion.

This does not mean that the BUPC does not have goons and musclemen in its ranks. It certainly does. But their power could not have possibly matched the clout of well-entrenched CPM’s armed cadres who control the State machinery.

The CPM claims that Maoists had penetrated the area and were in league with the BUPC — a charge for which the police and the state home secretary (even the CRPF, as reports prove) find no hard evidence, and which is reminiscent of the US allegations about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even assuming the charge is true, that can't justify a military-style attack on ordinary people, hostage-taking and vengeful violence, including rape, loot and arson. Even less does it justify the use of people as 'prisoners' and 'human shield' while attacking unarmed farmers and other working people.

At any rate, the growing spread of Naxalism, especially in the tribal districts of West Bengal, which are some distance away from Nandigram, is itself related to the neo-liberal policies that the CPM-led government is pursuing, with increasing deprivation and poverty in the poorest districts of the state.

Nandigram has eroded the CPM's moral authority, political capital and its ability to influence the UPA. It exposes the deep rot that has set in its West Bengal unit in the form of criminalisation, corruption, obsession with pro-rich neo-liberal policies, and arrogant contempt towards its own allies — the CPI, Forward Bloc and Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP). They now say the CPM alone bears “responsibility” for the “killings and violence” and for ignoring their pleas for reconciliation.

This dire warning to the CPM will become more effective if these parties remain in the Left Front, but withdraw from the council of ministers. Such a drastic step alone can trigger serious rethinking within the CPM on its policies, organisational methods, and relations with the rest of the Left.

Without such rethinking, the CPM is unlikely to reform itself and the Left Front retain its base. A special responsibility devolves on Left-leaning intellectuals, especially those belonging to the CPM. They must boldly point out the party's mistakes and demand urgent course correction.

Such correction must include a solemn commitment that no SEZ or chemical hub will be built at Nandigram, and a sincere effort would be launched at reconciliation and peace, with a guarantee that the thousands of displaced people can return home safe without recrimination or harassment. A radical reorientation of economic policy must follow.

In the absence of course correction, the CPM - which represents a progressive force that has made a positive contribution to Indian democracy — will suffer a terrible decline and degenerate into a status-quoist conservative party, which has lost its way, in keeping with Ranadive's dire warning. That does not bode well for Indian democracy. The Left is among the few currents in our politics fired by idealism and a commitment to principle, and a strongly pro-poor orientation. We cannot afford to lose this asset.

LAL SALEM and MODITVA!

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/12/1851

Amit Sengupta Delhi

Diehard cynics are pushing the threshold. The rumours doing the political rounds in Kolkata and Delhi are uncanny and diabolical. That the spontaneous protests against Taslima Nasrin in Kolkata were stage-managed by those who wanted the nation's attention to shift from the shame of Nandigram. That the Centre and state government played footsie as they twiddled their thumbs while Taslima is shunted from here to there. Is it possible that the mighty Indian nuclear State can't protect one lone woman? And that too in a CPM bastion? It's fishy, and it stinks.

So how come suddenly, from nowhere, unknown, fringe fundamentalist groups with no identity or strength, started calling the shots on the streets of big bully's Kolkata and the big brothers at Alimuddin Street chose to watch the show on the idiot box? How come suddenly Taslima became a hate-figure in a city and state where the 'secularists' call the shots? And why was the army called so desperately and in such quick notice and curfew declared etc, even when the party's bloody party went on non-stop at Nandigram under siege while Writer's Building washed its hands off. So who has the blood of the peasants on their hands, in March, and in November, so that Lal Salem can resonate on the recaptured village bylanes by armed thugs and motorcycle gangsters?

This blood won't wash and the communal twist won't work now as it did not work after the March 14 massacre. It is a peasant struggle and it's not the fault of the poor Dalit and Muslim farmers if they constitute the majority in Nandigram. Besides, Muslims in Bengal have never voted for Muslim fundamentalists — they have voted for the Left, the Congress or Trinamool Congress. The Nandigram MLA belongs to the CPI and it does not matter if he is a Muslim.

Those who forcibly decided to 'deport' Taslima to BJP-ruled Jaipur, have obviously lost not only their ideology, but also their sanity and integrity. This communal insanity, combined with rapes and killings in Nandigram by their cadre, is so transparently crass that even the belligerent and foul-tongued troika of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Biman Bose and Benoy Konar seemed to have lost their tongues. If anybody who needs to be deported from Kolkata, it is this cosy muscle-flexing threesome. And if this is not utter degeneration and ideological bankruptcy, then what is?

And look who is celebrating? Narendra Modi and the Hindutva rabble-rousers. They will protect Taslima — so send her to Gujarat. Modi can then take her on a guided tourist package to Naroda Patiya, Ehsan Jaffrey's Gulberga Society, Kalupur, Juhapura, the Shah Alam refugee camp where thousands of survivors were dumped, and of course, the ravaged Best Bakery of Zaheera Sheikh in Vododra where they were all burnt alive. And enlightened 'Buddha' can call up 'vikas purush' Modi and promise to show him his pet, infatuated obsession: the chemical hub of Salem, notorious for backing the murder and disappearances of 2 million dissidents and communists by dictator Suharto in Indonesia.

Indeed, if money has no ideology or colour, as Buddha so proudly claims, then why not deport Halliburton and Bechtel from 'occupied Iraq' to Bengal. Blood for oil in Iraq. Chemical hub for blood in Nandigram. And if Henry Kissinger can be an honoured guest of Buddha, why not George Bush and Dick Cheney?

No wonder, a Rightwing Hindutva columnist is glorifying Modi and Buddha — as great role models of development. The Gujarat genocide celebrated communal fascism. And the Nandigram massacre — capitalist fascism. So why not?

So between the Left and Right, what happens to Indian citizens in the twilight zone of a failed democracy when the State turns predator against its own people? Ask that Muslim woman in Nandigram, surrounded by a CPM mob, gangraped by known CPM criminals, her daughters too gangraped and still missing. Does’t it all remind you of Gujarat, 2002?

Who is the Left?

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/12/1860

We salute the magnificent spirit in which secular-democratic and genuinely socialist forces in Bengal express their dissent. Maybe, a Left politics will emerge out of this churning. It cannot possibly come out of the morally bankrupt official Left

Sumit Sarkar/Tanika Sarkar Delhi

Nandigram, the CPM tells us, has been brought back into the Left fold. Once a secure Left base, it had dared to defy the party's handover of its land and livelihood to a dubious foreign corporate group. Worse, it defended its land with peoples' lives. That defiance — lasting, unbelievably, for 11 months, despite massacres, rapes, infliction of disability and trauma — is at last over. Villagers sign undertakings, promising total submission. Surely, we should celebrate the Left victory?

What do those who call themselves Leftist have to say when they condemn party action? Can one be a Leftist and yet be against the party? Let us dare to reverse the question. Must a party, by virtue of calling itself communist, by definition be Leftist? Is socialism a matter of labels, words and signs alone?

The CPM handed over, without information and consent, agricultural land to multinational companies at Singur and Nandigram. Its factsheets on Singur lied about the quality of land and the party's claims of securing agreements from peasants have been contested at the high court. When asked about the nature of the deal — where the government spent huge amounts to practically gift away land to the Tatas — the queries under the Right to Information Act were returned unanswered. Peaceful peasant resistance was met with brutal repression by the police and cadres.

With this precedent before them, Nandigram peasants feared the worst when an official notification informed them that 35 mouzas would be given away to the Salem group on the advice of an American market survey company. When the local party failed to give any concrete information, villagers — all of them CPM supporters — fortified Block 1 of Nandigram to keep the police and the party out, to preserve their land and their lives.

The party replied with shootouts and killings and peasants retaliated with one killing in return. Henceforth, their fear of reprisals became acute, enhancing their determination to resist. The bloody events of March 14 are well known. Cases pending at the Kolkata High Court continued to languish there, the CBI enquiries were folded up after two days, no party leader visited the area and not a scrap of relief or compensation came from the state government to the battered victims. This was not a climate conducive to placing any faith in Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's belated assurance that there would be no chemical hub if peasants do not want it. Villagers were convinced that once the party forced its way into Nandigram, they would make the peasants 'want ' the hub.

We are asked why our criticism is selective, what about CPM loyalists ousted from the villages? This is precisely what the BJP asks secularists; why don't you talk that much about Kashmiri refugees? The answer is the same: while all intimidation is reprehensible, a swollen, huge party machinery and State apparatus exist to care for the latter. For rebellious Nandigram peasants, there was no support, except from civil society groups.

We also believe that there could have been no more unequal combat. There is no terror like State terror, though the use of terror by any one should not be supported. This is a state whose leading party has been continuously in power for 30 years and, at present, the central government depends on it for its survival.

We do not accept that any Left strategy should destroy a viable small peasant economy and environment in the interests of giant corporate companies. We believe that a harsh and ruthless neo-liberal power has been installed only by destroying even bourgeois legal constitutional norms — which is how Nandigram was won back. The peasant movement has been crushed by means that the Kolkata High Court considers illegal; that, in the process, civil and democratic rights of protests have been mauled.

The recent rural upsurges in the poorest districts against the non-availability of rationed foodstuff, and the urban upsurge against the corrupt party-business-police nexus that achieved the death of a Muslim youth who had married a Hindu girl, made it essential for the discredited party to make Nandigram an example of how far its repression can reach. We believe that a combination of Stalinist terror and neo-liberal economics is not a valid form of Leftism. On the contrary, all Leftists are committed to protest and resist injustice, inequality and repression wherever it exists — in Czechoslovakia, at Tiananmen Square, at Kampuchea, in Nandigram.

We challenge the defenders of the parties to identify any communist, socialist or even welfarist elements in West Bengal today — or a modicum of democratic right to dissent. We protest that because some anti-Left newspapers have been unfairly critical of the Left parties' foreign policy, no one else has the right to criticise anything else that the Left does.

We salute the magnificent spirit in which secular-democratic and genuinely socialist forces in Bengal express their dissent. Maybe, a Left politics will emerge out of this churning. It cannot possibly come out of the morally bankrupt official Left.

The writers are eminent historians based in delhi

Dictatorship of the ‘Proletariat?’

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/12/1854

'Operation Recapture' shows the ruthlessness of a victorious army subjugating the conquered land. However, for how long can the CPM dominate Nandigram by brute force? A graphic account of what really happened

Rajat Roy Nandigram/Kolkata

It seems all quiet in Nandigram now. Around 1,200 CPM supporters, who were driven out of their homes, have returned. The West Bengal police, who were unable to enter the villages since March 14, 2007, after the first 'police-CPM-engineered' massacre of villagers and farmers in which 14 were 'officially' killed, are pumping their chests. Paramilitary forces are conducting flag marches to reassure the people. Relief workers, medical teams and media are being allowed access. The roads and street-corners are adorned with red flags of the CPM. Young, aggressive men in motorbikes are patrolling the area — often operating as armed cadre of the ruling party.

The defeated and demoralised leaders of the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) have fled to the neighbouring districts. Some of them are still around, but they have taken shelter in a relief camp. When things were at its peak, there were at least six to seven relief camps sheltering over 15,000 people. Now, only one relief camp is functioning at the BMT High School in Nandigram Bazaar, where about 600-700 people are still waiting for their turn to return home. Nandigram has been truly recaptured by the CPM.

According to official estimates, the toll of 'Operation Recapture' is pegged at four dead and 10 injured, while a few rape cases were reportedly recorded with the administration. But unofficial estimates put the death toll at 20 or more and BUPC claims that at least 32 people are still missing. In the prevailing atmosphere of several disappearances, eliminations, mistrust and fear, where the state administration's role is not above suspicion, it is still difficult to come to a realistic estimate.

The arrest of Tapan Ghosh (CPM's West Midnapur district committee member) and Sukur Ali (CPM's Garbeta zonal committee secretary), while smuggling out three people with bullet injuries, gives strength to the BUPC allegation that the CPM might have kidnapped a number of injured people, later, killed them, and destroyed all evidence. The criminal history of Ghosh and Ali is widely known. They were arrested at Egra near Nandigram on November 10, when the local TMC people gheraoed a convoy of four cars and found out that injured people were being abducted.

Since the CBI chargesheeted them as main culprits of the Chute Angora murder case, they have been evading the law. On January 4, 2001, at Chute Angora, five Trinamool Congress (TMC) supporters were murdered allegedly by CPM activists. The CBI investigation found Ghosh and Ali as the masterminds of those killings and they were chargesheeted along with 13 others. But the police, incidentally, declared them 'absconders' — although they have been prominently seen in many party programmes. Despite the court declaring them proclaimed offenders and ordering their property to be attached, nothing has been done to that effect. Indeed, even now, after their arrest, CPM leaders like Benoy Konar (who has been rather belligerent and crude recently) and Deepak Sarkar have proclaimed that these two are “assets” of the party.

That CPM had mobilised forces from other districts to 'Liberate Nandigram'. This was initially proved by Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi's public utterances: “Large number of armed persons from outside the district have, it is undeniable, forced themselves into villages in Nandigram Block 1 and 2 for territorial assertions.” Sukur Ali and Tapan Ghosh were among those outsiders. A few days after the arrest of Ghosh and Ali, the CID arrested Selim Laskar, a hardened criminal, from a guest house in nearby Geonkhali, an hour's drive from Nandigram, and recovered a number of sophisticated firearms from him. Selim is from South 24 Parganas and has close ties with some senior leaders of the CPM there. Now, some district party leaders are admitting that the CPM did mobilise cadres and musclemen from West Midnapur, South and North 24 Parganas and Hoogly.

The CPM 'recaptured' these villages between November 5 and 12. A meticulous plan was drawn by the CPM leaders. According to party sources, state secretariat member Shyamal Chakrabarty was entrusted with overseeing 'Operation Recapture' by the state party leadership. The state administration was kept in the loop, and accordingly, on November 2, just when the CPM musclemen were warming up for their final assault on Nandigram, the police were moved out from all bunkers and camps around Nandigram. The only police picket in Tekhali Bridge, the dividing line between the CPM and BUPC, was withdrawn.

The CPM brought in their musclemen from adjacent districts and supplied them with firearms and local guides. All the entry points were closed and supply lines of the BUPC cut off.

Then the final assault began.

When the entire state was busy celebrating the festival of 'Kalipuja', the CPM cadres and musclemen with the tacit support of the state police were preparing for a different kind of Diwali in Nandigram. This time the CPM leaders and vigilant groups were well-prepared: they were better armed and they used that to their advantage. Realising that the BUPC strength was more concentrated in Sonachura and Garchkaraberia, the CPM 'force' diverted its attack on Satengabari, Takapura, Gokulnagar, Bhangabera and Kalicharanpur. Once those villages fell to the CPM, they took a number of villagers hostage and using them as a human shield entered Sonachura and Garchakraberia.

It is true that in the initial stage the BUPC tried to put up a fight, but they were overpowered by superior firepower and armed strength. On November 7, when the CPM forces broke through their resistance and started entering into the heart of Nandigram, local BUPC supporters sought police intervention. The officer-in-charge of the Nandigram police station pleaded helplessness: “I have been instructed by the SP not to send forces till five in the evening, no matter how bad the situation is.” Later, in Kolkata, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya would justify this inaction of his police forces by saying that after the March 14 incident it was a conscious decision not to send the police there.

On November 10, the final blow was dealt when the BUPC brought out a number of unarmed processions in areas which were still under their control to regain their moral and political ground and also to draw attention of the outside world to their plight. According to the villagers who participated in one procession, it was at least 15,000 strong. The procession came under fire and they saw several people falling on the ground or seriously injured after being hit by bullets. This was, locals say, another massacre of unarmed protestors, the details of which are still fuzzy.

The last resistance of the BUPC was broken. The CPM cadres started entering into villages. First came the motorbikes, then people came on foot in processions and CPM's red flags started fluttering from house tops, trees, lamp-posts — everywhere. Then it was time for retribution.

It is true that when the CPM cadres were forced to leave their homes between January 3 and March 14, some of their houses were looted and burnt by angry mobs. Now, the CPM started looting and torching the houses of BUPC members. Paying them back in the same coin, as Buddhadeb Bhattacharya would say, publicly defending extra-constitutional violence by the CPM cadre.

Finally, after the houses burnt, hundreds turned homeless, the reported killings, rapes, abductions, human shields and mass beating, the CPM leaders in Kolkata announced with a tone of finality that peace has been restored in Nandigram. The chief minister echoed this moment of truth by asking the people who fled their villages to return home without any fear.

This is not mere coincidence that the state administration announced compensation for the victims of the March 14 police firing at the same time when a largescale attack had already been launched by CPM musclemen to recapture Nandigram. On hindsight, it could be seen as a clever ploy to deflect attention from ground zero to bureaucratic nitty-gritties.

Indeed, only the governor of West Bengal was not misled by any such move. On November 9, while the operation was going on, Gandhi issued a statement castigating the state government for its inaction and said in no uncertain terms that the forcible recapture of Nandigram by outsiders was completely unlawful and unacceptable. The state administration kept quiet but the CPM leadership blew its top. A belligerent Biman Bose, the state secretary, alleged that the governor was transgressing on his constitutional jurisdictions. He uncannily reminded Gandhi that some of his predecessors could not complete their term in West Bengal.

While the civil society in Kolkata, West Bengal and across India protested in outrage at this brazen violation of constitutional norms and the State-sponsored violence in Nandigram, the CPM cadres continued their organised, nasty and brutish operation. New Delhi sent paramilitary forces at the behest of the state government, but the CRPF was not allowed entry till 'Operation Recapture Nandigram' was over.

Even when the CRPF was deployed at Nandigram, the state police, instead of assisting them, started putting up one obstacle after another. Reports of friction between the state police and CRPF are now widespread. With the entry of CRPF jawans as peacekeepers, the people expected they would get protection from the continuous intimidation and harassment unleashed by the CPM activists there. Since the law permits the CRPF to operate only under the state administration, they are dependent on the police on crucial matters — restoring peace and the rule of law, locating troubled spots and identifying known criminals, etc. To their dismay, the CRPF discovered that the state police are not only uncooperative, but they are often actively moving to subvert the process.

When CRPF jawans arrested some CPM goons for intimidating villagers, the state police came to their rescue. Some of those arrested by the CRPF were released by the police. So much so that the exasperated DIG, Alok Raj, complained against the police for obstructing them in performing their duty. A CRPF officer said, “We nabbed four persons on motorbikes and handed them over to the police. They were released. We arrested a notorious criminal, Anup Mondal, who has several criminal cases against him. He was released by the police as well. We were told to bring about peace in the area, yet, if we cannot instill confidence among the villagers, the morale of our personnel will go down.”

Nandigram is calm now, though the sound of occasional firing can be heard from Khejuri, the CPM stronghold. There are spontaneous celebrations of the 'victorious CPM', who wants to hammer it into the people's mind that CPM is and will remain the 'master and lord' of that area. Locals are afraid of talking to outsiders. A number of 'freshly burnt' houses standing along the ruins of the houses burnt earlier stand as witness to the relentless violence and the people's struggle against the SEZs.

The CPM is now busy establishing its control here. Punitive taxes or fines are being imposed on BUPC sympathisers. The local CPM has issued diktats to the helpless people to fall in line. Simply put, they will have to join the CPM, their processions and conform to the rules set by the local party honchos. Those who were activists, for them more brutal trials are awaited — their houses have been looted and torched. In some cases, they were reportedly subjected to physical harassment and torture forcing them to return to the relief camp again.

The operation shows all signs of the ruthlessness of a victorious army trying to subjugate the conquered land. There is hardly any attempt to win the hearts of the poor people who, till the other day, were mostly with the CPM. Of the 17 gram panchayats, 10 are with the CPM and rest with the TMC. The assembly seat of Nandigram is with Left Front partner CPI. Till the time the government came out with a notification for acquisition of land for setting up of a chemical hub here, the people of Nandigram were not really in a mood to rebel or resist. But, as members of the BUPC pointed out, the fear of losing their land and livelihood forced the people to unite in resisting the ruling establishment. Thus, among the top ranking leaders of BUPC one finds Md. Sufian, sabhapati of the Panchayat Samiti, and Abu Taher, both of them were once important CPM leaders of the area.

It won't be out of place if we compare the Keshpur experiment with the current scenario. Around 2000-2001, CPM and TMC fought a pitched battle in Keshpur and Garbeta in West Midnapur. The TMC, with initial support from the locals, drove out CPM activists and established control over a vast terrain with the help of musclemen and smuggled arms. Hence, they won the Pashkura Lok Sabha by-election. The CPM took some time to regroup and then hit back with full backing of the state government.

Led by Sushanta Ghosh, a minister in the Left Front government and assisted by Tapan Ghosh, Sukur Ali and others, they recaptured the area by mustering a bigger force. While the bloody turf war between the ruling party and the opposition was going on, there was not a single voice of protest from the civil society in West Bengal or elsewhere.

Unlike Keshpur, this time, the fear of losing their land and livelihood to the proposed chemical hub has united CPM and TMC supporters of Nandigram, among other, ordinary farmers, women, Dalits and Muslims, who constitute the majority here. The BUPC leadership comprises the TMC, CPM dissidents, Congress, SUCI and other groups and individuals. Initially, the BUPC decided to act together irrespective of their individual party colours. But after March 14, when the Bhattacharya government announced that it won't be pushing the chemical hub in Nandigram, it tasted its first major success. And with that a new turf war started within the BUPC.

Ignoring their earlier commitment, TMC leaders began to control the movement under the party with an eye on panchayat elections scheduled in May, 2008. Around that time, Kanu Sanyal, veteran Naxalite leader, noticed with shock that overnight Nandigram had been turned into a TMC bastion, with TMC flags fluttering from every visible corner. Later, TMC leader Shubhendu Adhikari reportedly announced that no political party other than the TMC would be allowed to function here.

Reportedly, the BUPC was started collecting money from the locals for buying guns and ammunitions. Not all of these were voluntary donations. Rather, it is being said that people of doubtful allegiance were levied with punitive taxes. By resorting to these tactics, the BUPC leadership gradually turned this once popular movement into a factional one. Hence, when the CPM started their onslaught in a planned manner, the BUPC resistance crumbled rapidly.

However, for how long can the CPM dominate Nandigram by brute force? The numbers of the dead and raped are still unfolding. Fact-finding teams are slowly disclosing names and details of the dead and wounded. Nandigram has become an epitome of resistance all over India and across the world — resistance against big corporate globalisation at the expense of poor farmers. And one thing is certain, Nandigram can't be turned into a Keshpur.

Earlier, the CPM used to enjoy a kind of moral authority; they were accepted as the main arbitrator on behalf of the poor in West Bengal. Now, that image has come under a cynical scanner. Though under siege, Nandigram will always remain a symbol of people's rebellion and resistance.

LONG MARCH FROM COLLEGE SQUARE

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/11/1815

The organised brutality by the CPM in Nandigram has yet again brought out the best among the people of Bengal and Kolkata. In the days to come, one only hopes that the civil society will continue to move from strength to strength, from dissent to resistance, from despair to hope, writes Rajat Roy, Hardnews in Kolkata

The CPM has recaptured Nandigram. But in the process the party has lost its support base among the urban middle class. A huge silent march was led by Kolkata’s artists, intellectuals, students and ordinary citizens, outside all political affiliations, banners or slogans, in the heart of the city. The march was in protest against the State-endorsed operation of organised brutality unleashed by the CPM cadres and musclemen in Nandigram leading to killings, while thousands of villagers were rendered homeless, with many homes burnt.

The protest march was led by filmmakers Mrinal Sen, Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh and Goutam Ghosh, poet Sankho Ghosh, Jay Goswami and Utpal Kumar Basu, writer Mahasweta Devi, stage personalities Saoli Mitra, Bibhas Chakrabarty and playwright Badal Sarkar, painters Jogen Choudhury and Shubhaprasanno and others. The unique feature of the march was that political leaders were asked not to take part in it. Hence, bowing to public pressure, the leaders of Trinamul Congress (TMC), Congress, the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) and even Left Front partner Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), though initially keen to join it, kept away from it. Indeed, the space vacated by the political parties was eagerly filled up by the civil society and a spectrum of individuals and icons from across Bengal’s mainstream intelligentsia and cultural scene.

Scientists from the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and other scientific establishments, social
scientist Partha Chattopadhyay, historian Gautam Bhadra and others from Calcutta's prestigious Centre for Social Science and Research, academicians and students from Calcutta and Jadavpur University, students from various colleges, NGO workers and ordinary citizens came forward in tens of thousands. They recorded their intense anger, disapproval and disgust at the way the ruling party's vigilante cadres, openly flaunting brutality on unarmed men and women, including reported sexual assaults and rape, as they muscled their way into Nandigram while the State administration and political establishment remained a silent and patronising accomplice.

This revolting ‘operation recapture’, which Governor Gopal Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had only a few days back condemned publicly as "totally unlawful and
unacceptable", has generated similar resonance from across the civil society. Kolkata had not witnessed this kind of mass upsurge against the CPM regime for almost three decades.

It was a silent march. There were no slogans which is otherwise typical of a political procession in the city. People who participated in the march wore black badges, others sang songs, many of them carried placards and caricatures criticising the CPM and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who has acquired an image which triggers mass repulsion. The massive rally began from College Square in front of the old campus of Calcutta University and ended at Esplanade East, where Medha Patkar and others welcomed the marchers. As the people silently walked through the famous College Street, SN Banerjee Road and Rani Rasmoni Road, thousands of people thronged on both sides in solidarity. The solemn expression on the faces of the onlookers indicated the truth: they were witnessing something which they have not seen for years.

Yes, this protest march is unique in many ways. Kolkata has witness several political demonstrations in the last 60 years. But most of that were organised by political parties. Many senior citizens who took part in this historic march could not recall a similar occasion where ordinary people from across the city gathered so spontaneously and in such big numbers to protest against the political establishment.

It is true that the ostensive purpose of the rally was to record the civil society's protest against the ruling party's brazenly undemocratic use of organised violence and brutality backed by the state administration. But by debarring the (ever-willing) opposition parties like the TMC and Congress, the civil society has served its judgment against the entire political stablishment. The political world just cannot afford to ignore this.

Many participants admitted that they happily joined the march because of this abhorrence of mainstream politics and politicians. They have reasons for that. Most people here have inherited a Left legacy. They have always constituted the progressive and traditional support base of the Left in the urban middle class. Many former naxalites were seen in the rally. Young students from elite colleges like St. Xavier's, Presidency, Jadavpur University and Shibpur Engineering College marched hand in hand in the procession with members of pop Bangla bands and singer Usha Uthup.

Ask them, and you would realise that their first baptism in social and political action was done during the case of Rizwanur death. The ‘indifferent’ generation X, considered as totally apolitical, totally sold out on the ‘neo-liberal’ shopping mall and inox culture, actually proved to be deeply sensitive and concerned. It is also an eye-opener for political observers.

Indeed, after seeing the CPM-led Left Front entrenched in power for the last 30 years in the
state, many of us looked at the Bengali society as a bipolar one, divided between the Left and the Right.

It was always held that Bengal's society is highly politicised and there is hardly any space left for
the civil society to assert. The inert and sustained presence of the civil society over the years and until the recent past had also strengthened that observation. But from March 14 to November 14 this year, in just about eight months, the civil society of Bengal has reasserted itself and started claiming back its legitimate space in the socio-political sphere, hitherto completely dominated by the creative stagnation and political muscle power of the CPM, without an iota of dissent.

Off course, the mass rupture and upsurge started with the resistance in Nandigram and the massacre which followed, when on March 14 the police and CPM goons fired upon the villagers in an attempt to evict them from their villages to set up a chemical hub for the notorious Indonesian multinational Salem. Then came the Rizwanur death, when the young and the old fought and forced a completely thick-skinned government to bow to their demands and act against the police top brass, patronised by the chief minister. Now, the organised brutality by the CPM in Nandigram has yet again brought out the best among the people of Bengal and Kolkata. In the days to come, one only hopes that the civil society will continue to move from strength to strength, from dissent to resistance, from despair to hope.

Nandigram can stop big corporations' muscle power'

Hardnews

http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/portal/2007/12/1859

Eminent economist and Professor Emeritus in JNU, Delhi, Amit Bhaduri has just returned from Kolkata and Mumbai where both Nandigram and the struggle against SEZs was part of his academic and political involvement. He participated in the massive rally of intellectuals and artists in Kolkata against the siege of Nandigram. A veteran teacher and academic, his essays on globalisation, among other subjects, are marked by meticulous insight and rigour. In conversation with Amit Sengupta.

What is your take on the joint letter by Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and intellectuals on Left unity in the wake of the Nandigram recapture?

Ideally, Left unity is desirable, provided your objective is clear. When a party gets sold completely to the industrial corporates, it grabs land from the peasants at any cost for private capital and continues to make big mistakes, Left unity is not possible. How can there be Left unity when the Left is totally hooked by the pro-corporate and pro-capitalist logic?

Why is the CPM pushing this current economic policy?

The fact is that the CPM has failed completely after 30 years of dominating rule in West Bengal. After Operation Barga as land reforms, it has failed to do anything for the productive sector. For instance, take NREGA: the CPM's performance is miserable — worse than the worst states. I will give you one example. In Purulia district, till the end of October 2007, 16 per cent of the money allocated for the NREGA was not used. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has no idea or intention to increase productivity in agriculture or augment the livelihood of the people. He is driven by narrow middle-class notions of industrialisation. There is an abject lack of imagination.

So what is the difference between the Manmohan Singh-Montek Singh economic paradigm of growth and the Buddhadeb-Biman Bose model?

Why not add Prakash Karat also? The CPM's official line on growth and the Congress's line on growth have no difference except in terms of rhetoric. For instance when it comes to trade unionism, the CPM will raise the provident fund issue. These are marginal issues. As for things which are basic, the CPM is totally toeing the Manmohan Singh line on industrialisation, pandering to corporates, acquiring land of farmers and tribals which belongs to them for centuries — basically colonising. It seems very strange. They talk of American colonialism and imperialism but choose to ignore internal colonialism as integral to this global process. They seem completely confused and then they adopt a two-faced approach on the question of colonisation.

So are they communists or are they like the Christian Democrats in Germany?

In Europe I have seen the Christian Democrats closely: they have completely degenerated. The CPM is communist in the most negative sense. They completely follow the compulsory notion of a Leninist party in terms of structure such as having politburo, cadre etc, but in reality they function like a non-communist party. Their content therefore is that of a bourgeois party while the technology of the party is Leninist. A communist party stands for revolutionary principles, for revolution, not free market democracy and corporations.

Do you think Nandigram will mark a rupture in this new era of relentless globalisation?

If we are successful in Nandigram, it will help in stopping the big corporations' muscle power which is propelling globalisation. Then we can defeat this process. And that will be great for the social, economic and political future of the ordinary people.