Trinamool’s Vandalism in College Campus

 

Trinamool tramples campus promise

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Principal Dilip Dey Sarkar being dragged out of the college on Thursday.

Raiganj, Uttar Dinajpur; Jan. 5: A college principal was caught by his lapel and beaten repeatedly by prominent Trinamool leaders and activists here in the latest manifestation of the turf battle with ally Congress and a resurrection of the campus curse Mamata Banerjee had vowed to exorcise.

    The immediate flashpoint was the rejection of a demand made by Trinamool activists to scrap and reschedule students’ union elections in Raiganj College, saying their supporters were prevented from filing nomination papers by the Chhatra Parishad, the student wing of the Congress.

    But the underlying cause was the tussle for political space between the allies, now playing itself out in many parts of Bengal over issues as diverse as the renaming of Indira Bhawan and paddy prices.

    The assault at the government college coincided with a blunt Trinamool reminder to the Congress that the government in Delhi exists “because of us”, not the other way round.

    The location of today’s flare-up was significant because Raiganj is considered the backyard of Congress MP and Mamata-baiter Deepa Das Munshi. Having gained a foothold in north Bengal, long considered a Congress stronghold, in the last Assembly elections, Trinamool is trying to widen its presence there, which the Congress is resisting.

    The assault at the college, well known in North Dinajpur, also brought under stress the new government’s promise to free education from the grip of politics, a legacy of the Left, though today’s incident had little to do with the current Opposition.

    Education minister Bratya Basu renewed the pledge and ordered action irrespective of political affiliations. But till late this evening, the main accused — Trinamool’s acting district chief (Tilak Chowdhury) — had not been arrested.

    “The incident at the Raiganj college is deplorable. At a time the state government is trying to de-politicise education institutes, such incidents won’t be tolerated. We have told the administration to take action against the offenders, irrespective of their political affiliation. Thirty-four years of Left rule have developed a culture of political interference in education institutes,” Basu said.

    Yesterday afternoon, members of the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad had turned up at the Raigunj College to pick up nomination forms. But they were allegedly blocked by the Chhatra Parishad, which now runs the union.

    A fight broke out and each side lodged an FIR against the other at the local police station. By closing time, the Trinamool members could pick up only 16 forms for the 56 seats.

    A police picket was posted at the college but neither the force nor the officer-in-charge present there could foil the rampage that erupted this morning.

    Trinamool activists, led by the party’s district working president Tilak Chowdhury, held a protest march, following which a group kicked open the locked main gate and stormed the room of principal Dilip Dey Sarkar.

    Around 40 intruders burst into the first-floor room of Dey Sarkar, pushed aside the inspector in charge of Raiganj police station, Madhab Das, overturned the table on the principal and rained blows on him.

    Subrata Saha, a teacher who came to the principal’s rescue, was also beaten up, a teacher said. The vandals then caught Dey Sarkar by his lapel and dragged him down.

    The beating continued till some policemen posted near the gate rushed in and rescued Dey Sarkar. The principal filed an FIR stating that Chowdhury had led the attack.

    Dey Sarkar told the media persons: “The police should have stopped Chowdhury and the others from invading the college. When they were breaking down the college gate the police should have stopped them. I have resigned from my post in protest. I have also informed the vice-chancellor to keep the election process in suspension. The college will also be shut from tomorrow for a few days.”

    To save his face, Chowdhury alleged that the attack on the principal was the handiwork of the Chhatra Parishad.

    “We had marched to the college to register our protest with the principal for not being allowed to collect the nomination forms,” Chowdhury said. “But the principal refused to meet us. So, some of our supporters got agitated and tried to enter the principal’s office. Taking advantage of this, the Chhatra Parishad supporters mingled with us and beat up the principal to malign us.”

    Das Munshi said the incident was “shameful”. “Trinamool is getting involved in all kinds of vandalism and giving a bad name to the government. Let us see if any Trinamool supporters are arrested,” she said.

Courtesy: The Telegraph, Kolkata

Undermining Parliament

 

Human Rights and the March of Empire

 

Libya recolonised

Libya is the first country that the Euro-American consortium has invaded exclusively on the pretext of human rights violations.

On the outskirts of Tripoli, a residential building reduced to rubble in a NATO airstrike on June 19. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that the war in Libya has led to the loss of at least 50,000 lives, mostly at the hands of NATO’s bombers and local allies.

    FROM Kabul in October 2001 to Tripoli in October 2011, a decade of unremitting planetary warfare has seen countries devastated and capitals occupied over a vast swathe of territory from the Hindu Kush to the northern end of Africa’s Mediterranean coast. Within the Arab world, this ultra-imperialist offensive of Euro-American predators may yet move on to Syria as well – and beyond that to Iran at some future date. For now, in any case, the occupation of Libya by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) clients and corporations marks the vanquishing of the spirit of rebellion that was ignited in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year and has been under attack ever since. For much of Africa, though, this may yet be merely a beginning of a new conquest by the Euro-American consortium that may ravage the continent even more ferociously than did the famous “Scramble for Africa” that was sanctified in Berlin at the end of the 19th century.

Humanitarian interventionism

    Afghanistan was invaded in the name of “War on Terror” plus human rights. Iraq was invaded in the name of “War on Terror” plus nuclear non-proliferation plus human rights. Libya is the first country that has been invaded almost exclusively in the name of human rights. In the very early days of hostilities in Libya, President Barack Obama said dramatically that if NATO had waited “one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”. His senior aides claimed that the imminent “massacre” could have led to the death of one lakh people, and this is what got repeated ad nauseum on U.S. television channels as well as in all the halls of power where the option of human rights interventionism got discussed with a view to obtaining a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution. This was a bare-faced lie, very much in the mould of the lie about Iraq’s purported nuclear weapons that was brandished around by Obama’s predecessor, President George Bush Jr. It was on the basis of such disinformation that Resolutions 1970 and 1973 were passed in the Security Council, invoking the dubious principle of the “responsibility to protect”, which was inserted into the duties of the U.N. as late as 2005, after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were already afoot.

    This was the time when the Bush administration was openly claiming in international fora, including at the U.N. itself, that (a) in this Age of Terror the U.S. reserved the right of pre-emptive military attack against any state that the U.S. considered a threat to its national security, and that (b) in the conditions of the “War on Terror” many aspects of the Geneva Conventions were no longer applicable. This discourse of the right to pre-emptive invasion was then supplemented by the discourse of the benign nature of the empire itself, in the shape of human rights interventionism. The claim now was that the “international community” – as defined by Euro-American powers – had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any sovereign country if “massacre” or “genocide” was imminent. The NATO bombings in Libya that began in the third week of March were the first that had ever been authorised by the Security Council in its entire history on this dubious principle of human rights interventionism. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, was in his own way quite right when he asserted in the early hours of March 25: “It’s a historic moment… what is happening in Libya is creating jurisprudence… it is a major turning point in the foreign policy of France, Europe, and the world” (emphasis added).

    No credible evidence has ever emerged to support Obama’s claim that a massacre (of up to 100,000) was imminent in Benghazi, and no massacres ensued in the rebellious cities and towns that Qaddafi’s troops did occupy in the earlier stages of the fighting. On the contrary, there is incontrovertible evidence of massacres at the hands of NATO’s mercenaries. Neighbouring countries, such as Niger, Mali and Chad, have reported the eviction of some three lakh black African residents from Libya as NATO’s local allies and clients rolled on towards Tripoli under the devastating shield of NATO’s own 40,000-plus bombings over large parts of Libya. Together with these mass evictions of workers and refugees from neighbouring countries – whom the Qaddafi regime had welcomed to make up for labour shortages in an expanding economy – there are also credible reports of lynchings and massacres of black Libyans themselves.

    The scale of these depredations is yet undetermined but it is already clear that upwards of 50,000 have died as a result of the war unleashed by NATO with the collusion of the Security Council, and half a million or more have been rendered homeless, mostly at the hands of NATO-armed “rebels” who have now been appointed as the new government of the country. Neither the Security Council nor NATO commanders nor, indeed, President Obama – the first black President in the history of the U.S. and himself the son of a Kenyan father – has seen it fit to take up the “responsibility to protect” these hapless people, most of them black Africans, even though several heads of African states have protested, including the very pro-U.S. President of Nigeria.

    One of the most pernicious aspects of the liberal discourse of human rights in our time is that this doctrine is utilised in country after country to justify imperialist interventionism in the affairs of the sovereign countries of the tricontinent in direct violation not only of the United Nations Charter and the Westphalian order of nation-states as such but, even more fundamentally, of the very spirit and practices of the anti-colonial movements that fought to dismantle the colonial empires of yesteryear. The right to independent nationhood is inseparable from the right to choose one’s own government without foreign interference. In virtually every country of Latin America over the past half a century, peoples have fought against the most brutal kinds of dictatorship but without ever asking for a foreign intervention. For three simple reasons: (1) it is only the people themselves, in their collectivity, who have the right to change their government; (2) it would be hard to find a dictator, including Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, who has not colluded with imperialism at one point or another; and (3) a military intervention is always, without exception, the intervention of the strong against the weak – always, without exception, in pursuit of the interests of those who intervene.

    Given this basic principle, the issue of Qaddafi’s dictatorial rule is just as irrelevant today as was the nature of Saddam Hussein’s rule in the past; and as irrelevant as would be the dictatorial temper of Bashar al-Asad in Syria or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran in case of invasions yet to come. We shall come to the paradoxical character of the Qaddafi regime, and it cannot be anyone’s case that Qaddafi was some sort of liberal democrat. It needs to be said, though, that he was no more dictatorial than most rulers of Africa and the Arab world, most notably the friends of the West in Saudi Arabia and the whole complex of various emirates in the Gulf. His authoritarianism was indeed ferocious.

    However, if matters are viewed from the perspective of the well-being of the Libyan people, we shall also have to concede that Qaddafi built the most advanced welfare state in Africa – just as Iraq was the most advanced welfare state in the Arab East, Saddam’s authoritarianism notwithstanding. Dismantling of the welfare state – and privatisation and corporatisation of the national assets – is in fact the filthy underbelly of this human rights imperialism. If human rights were even remotely the issue in such interventionism, Saudi Arabia would be the logical first target. And, why should there not be a NATO occupation of Israel, immediately, for protecting the human rights of the Palestinian people and the implementation of numerous Security Council resolutions?

    In reality, the great crusade for human rights and democracy in Libya was conducted by NATO with the aid of, among others, personnel from Qatar and the Emirates, just as NATO’s own Islamists in Turkey have joined hands with Saudi Arabia in providing weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in Syria against the Assad regime in the name of democracy and human rights.

Empire goes where oil is

    The Security Council resolution that authorised NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was well reflected in a secret proposal to the French government by the National Transitional Council (NTC) in the early days of the “rebellion”, which offered to France 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange”, in the words of the proposal, for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. The French government, of course, denied it when the French newspaper Liberation published the communication. This coyness of the conspirators was not to last long. On October 21, less than 24 hours after the announcement of Qaddafi’s assassination, Britain’s new Defence Minister, Philip Hammond, announced that the United Kingdom had presented to the NTC a “request” for a licence to drill for oil. He then added:

    “Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya…. I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, [to be] packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they can.”

    As the U.S. Ambassador, Gene Cretz, unfurled the flag over the American Embassy in Tripoli, at its reopening ceremony on September 22, he was equally upbeat:

    “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources, but even in Qaddafi’s time they were starting from A to Z in terms of building infrastructure and other things. If we can get American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”

    Referring to the Italian oil company, the Foreign Minister of Italy, Franco Frattini, added his own gleeful chime to this triumphalist chorus: “Eni will play a No.1 role in the future.” Qatar, whose overt and covert contribution to the NATO offensive was very considerable indeed, is already handing oil sales in eastern Libya and will also be entering the distribution of the spoils of war from a position of strength. The New York Times noted: “Libya’s provisional government has already said it is eager to welcome Western businesses (and)… would even give its Western backers some ‘priority’ in access to Libyan business.” That was accurate. “We don’t have a problem with Western countries like Italians, French and U.K. companies,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, a spokesman for the NTC-controlled oil company, Agogco, was quoted by Reuters as saying, “but we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

    Libya’s 46 billion barrels of oil make it home to Africa’s largest proven deposit of conventional crude, though Nigeria and Angola dispute this Libyan pre-eminence. Before the civil war began in earnest in February, Libya was pumping about 1.6 million barrels a day, most of which went to southern Europe, whose refineries were tailored to refine Libya’s light, high-quality crude. By contrast, Saudi crude is heavier and unsuitable for many of those refineries, while Libya’s geographical proximity also makes it much more attractive. Almost 70 per cent of Libya’s oil went to four countries, Spain, Germany, France and Italy, even before the NATO war, and oil-producing regions were of course the first to be secured as NATO started bombing its way to victory. The oil industry’s biggest players, meanwhile, are ready to reclaim their old concessions and get new ones. The vast Ghadames and Sirte basins, largely off limits to foreign oil companies since Qaddafi came to power 42 years ago, are now expected to be privatised and opened to foreign corporations. The same applies to Libya’s offshore oil and gas resources.

    The loss of political sovereignty thus leads necessarily to great curtailment of economic sovereignty as well.

THE PRODUCTION FACILITIES of a German oil firm in the Libyan desert near the oasis of Jakhira, which was shut in February following the violence. Almost 70 per cent of Libya’s oil went to four countries – Spain, Germany, France and Italy – even before the NATO bombings, during which the oil-producing regions were the first to be secured.

African Union vs “The international Community”

    At a meeting between the two parties on June 15 this year, some three months after NATO initiated its aerial bombings of Libya, the High Level Ad hoc Committee of the African Union (A.U.) handed over to the Security Council a letter spelling out the A.U. position on the Libyan crisis. Now, even after the fall of Tripoli and the assassination of Qaddafi, the contents of that communication are worth re-visiting if we wish to assess the great gap of perceptions and prescriptions, on issues of interventionism, between nation-states of the tricontinent on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those institutions of “the international community” whose task it is to justify Euro-American interventionism. We shall first offer a series of quotations from that key document:

1. “Whatever the genesis of the intervention by NATO in Libya, the A.U. called for dialogue before the U.N. Resolutions 1970 and 1973 and after those resolutions. Ignoring the A.U. for three months and going on with the bombings of the sacred land of Africa has been high-handed, arrogant and provocative.”
2. “An attack on Libya or any other member of the African Union without express agreement by the A.U. is a dangerous provocation… sovereignty has been a tool of emancipation of the peoples of Africa who are beginning to chart transformational paths for most of the African countries after centuries of predation by the slave trade, colonialism and neocolonialism. Careless assaults on the sovereignty of African countries are, therefore, tantamount to inflicting fresh wounds on the destiny of the African peoples.”
3. “Fighting between government troops and armed insurrectionists is not genocide. It is civil war…. It is wrong to characterise every violence as genocide or imminent genocide so as to use it as a pretext for the undermining of the sovereignty of states.”
4. “The U.N. should not take sides in a civil war. The U.N. should promote dialogue…. The demand by some countries that Col. Muammar Qaddafi must go first before the dialogue is incorrect. Whether Qaddafi goes or stays is a matter for the Libyan people to decide. It is particularly wrong when the demand for Gaddafi’s departure is made by outsiders…. Qaddafi accepted dialogue when the A.U. mediation committee visited Tripoli on April 10, 2011. Any war activities after that have been provocation for Africa. It is an unnecessary war. It must stop…. The story that the rebels cannot engage in dialogue unless Qaddafi goes away does not convince us. If they do not want dialogue, then, let them fight their war with Qaddafi without NATO bombing…. The externally sponsored groups neglect dialogue and building internal consensus and, instead, concentrate on winning external patrons.”

    It goes without saying that the A.U. is by no means a conglomeration of radicals; it is a conservative grouping of state governments, most of whom are, in one way or another, allied with the West; many of the heads of states participating in A.U. proceedings at any given time are venal, corrupt, authoritarian or worse. That is, however, no more relevant than the personal venality of Sarkozy or Silvio Berlusconi or any other Western leader. The point, rather, is that the A.U.’s is the only united voice through which African states speak and that the principles and points of fact raised here are unexceptionable.

    The very first point is that the Security Council, NATO or any other conglomeration of states and institutions simply have no right to represent themselves as “the international community” when what they say and do is opposed by the united voice of the African state system. The second point is that the issue of state sovereignty is posed in Africa and Asia not only in European, Westphalian terms, but, far more sensitively and explosively, in the perspective of the recently won and still very fragile independence of states after a long history of colonial predation. Further, the A.U. letter rejects the position – enunciated by Obama, his NATO allies and the Security Council – that there was any genocide or imminent genocide in Libya. Rather, it speaks strictly of a “civil war” between “government troops and armed insurrectionists”, calls upon the U.N. not to take sides in the “civil war” and goes on then to contemptuously dismiss the “externally sponsored groups” and their “demands” that are designed for “winning external patrons”.

    The most important practical point in any case is that Qaddafi had accepted the principle of negotiation and arbitration by the A.U. as early as April 10, after which the A.U. quite rightly demanded that NATO stop its military mission and the U.N. concentrate on facilitating negotiations under A.U. auspices. A significant section of the letter laid out an elaborate plan for negotiations, for policing of violence inside Libya by an A.U. brigade as had been done in Burundi, and for conflict resolution processes using the principles of “provisional immunity” during the peace negotiations, and for the establishment of truth and reconciliation bodies for reconciliation after peace has been re-established.

   None of it was heeded, precisely because the voice of reason had come from the weak, while the will for intervention and regime change had come from self-appointed masters of the universe.

Civilisation and the ecstasy of conquest

    In the moment of victory, President Obama was relatively more measured in his words than many other Western leaders. The fall of Libya to 40,000-plus NATO bombings was proof, he said, that “we are seeing the strength of the American leadership across the world”. And he was not entirely mistaken in taking the credit. The Security Council resolution that authorised NATO operations would have been inconceivable without the coercive powers of the U.S. Obama’s cavalier condoning of assassination and extra-judicial execution, as displayed to the world in the cases of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki among others, was part of the implicit licence to kill the unarmed Qaddafi as well. Less than 48 hours before Qaddafi was actually assassinated, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, was on a triumphant visit to Tripoli, the Libyan capital now occupied by NATO and its local clients, and said unambiguously: “We hope he [Qaddafi] can be captured or killed soon.” Incitement to murder could hardly be couched in words more stark.

    This issue of an authorised assassination should detain us somewhat, for it does impinge upon the imperial duplicity of the human rights discourse. Details of Qaddafi’s death and burial are still unclear. We do know that the town of Sirte, to which he had retreated during the siege of Tripoli, was devastated by hundreds of aerial bombings by NATO with the single-minded intent to kill him and those close to him. We also know that he was leaving Sirte in a convoy when the convoy too was bombed; the French claimed that it was their Rafale fighter jet that disabled his vehicle; the Americans claimed that it was the work of one of their Predators.

    The main point is that he was captured alive and unarmed by NATO’s mercenaries on the ground, kicked around, beaten and killed. Considering how many American, French, British, Qatari and other special forces have been there, commanding the Libyan “rebels”, it is significant that the body of the dead man was never taken away from the milling “rebels”. Christof Heyns, the U.N. Special Rapporteur, seems to be clear on this point: “The Geneva Conventions are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed wilfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war crime, something that should be tried.”

    The complication, however, is that the Western alliance had previously announced an award of $20 million to anyone who kills (or helps kill/capture) Qaddafi. So, here is a test for Western values: should the man who killed Qaddafi be tried in a court of law? Should he be awarded $20 million and celebrated as a hero? Or should he be allowed to slip out of the grip of the law, history and public memory – and settled, with a handsome settlement, in Miami, southern California or a villa on the Rhine?

    Qaddafi’s own tribe issued this statement: “We call on the U.N., the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International to force the [National] Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs’ bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules.” But there was no such luck! NATO’s mercenaries displayed Qaddafi’s body, along with that of his son Mutassim, naked to the waist, in freezers in a meat store in Misrata, inviting souvenir photographs.

    Human rights imperialism seems to be inventing a brand new entertainment industry: that of necrophilic tourism.

    Be that as it may. President Obama is right in claiming that the event proved “the strength of American leadership”. U.S. Special Forces and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) teams were on the ground since before the beginning of the rebellion and made sure that those who were destined to be NATO’s mercenary army on the ground were armed from the start; they were then joined by their French and British counterparts and backed by armed groups from Qatar, the Emirates and the like. Bombings were left largely to the Franco-British component of NATO but much of the high electronics and infrastructural nitty-gritty was handled by the U.S. forces: collecting electronic intelligence and smashing the Libyan anti-aircraft systems, for example, and blockading the coast. NATO warplanes used U.S. bases for refuelling and these bases supplied munitions when their European counterparts ran low. In an important sense, the military operation in Libya was a highly successful experiment in an assault coordinated between AFRICOM – the U.S. Command for the control of Africa – and its European partners.

    If President Obama was cryptic, his icy Vice President, Joe Biden, was precise: “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past.” By “life”, Biden obviously means American life, considering that even the most conservative estimates suggest that the war in Libya has led to the loss of at least 50,000 lives, mostly at the hands of NATO bombers and their local allies.

    More broadly, what is at issue is a U.S. objective, first conceived during the Vietnam War, to develop an “automated battlefield” with technologies so advanced that wars may be won and entire countries conquered without any significant ground deployment. Across the Atlantic, that same idea was invoked by people like Paddy Ashdown, who once served for four years as E.U. High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who said that from now on the West should adopt the “Libyan model” of intervention rather than the “Iraqi model” of massive invasion.

    This kind of hard-boiled Anglo-Saxon pragmatism can easily be translated by an ambitious politician like Nicolas Sarkozy, the current French President, into the sophistries of a high-minded Gallic discourse on history and civilisation. Pierre Lévy, a former editor of L’Humanité, recently recalled a passage from a speech Sarkozy delivered in 2007 in which he glorified “the shattered dream of Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the great schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, the fallen glory of Louis XIV and Napoleon…” and then went on to declare that “Europe is today the only force capable of carrying forward a project of civilisation.” This claim to a unique civilisational mission then led quickly to an ambition to conquer: “I want to be the President of a France which will bring the Mediterranean into the process of its reunification after 12 centuries of division and painful conflicts…. America and China have already begun the conquest of Africa. How long will Europe wait to build the Africa of tomorrow? While Europe hesitates, others advance.”

    Lévy then goes on to quote Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a senior leader of the Socialist Party (much in the news recently for alleged sexual misdemeanours), who matched Sarkozy’s bombast with his own desire for a Europe stretching “from the cold ice of the Arctic in the North to the hot sands of the Sahara in the South (…) and that Europe, I believe, if it continues to exist, will have reconstituted the Mediterranean as an internal sea, and will have re-conquered the space that the Romans, or Napoleon more recently, attempted to consolidate.”

    In this world view, then, NATO is seen as having inherited a mission from the Roman Empire and the Napoleonic conquests, which then involves the “re-conquest” of North Africa. It was, after all, only about 50 years ago that France finally relinquished its claim that Algeria was not a foreign colony but an “outlying province” of France itself. What is very striking in any case is how closely the rhetoric of “civilisation” is woven into the rhetoric of “conquest” and even “re-conquest.”

Obama, Africa and the Imperial Project

    Poor little “Olde Europe”! Even in its wildest civilisational ravings, all it can imagine is the re-conquest of its colonial empire in North Africa. By contrast, the U.S. knows how to get directly to the point. In the second week of October, when the war against Libya had been won but Qaddafi yet not assassinated, President Obama announced: “I have authorised a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces…. On October 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy…. These forces will act as advisers to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]…. Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

    So, in the wake of the Libyan conquest, U.S. troops are to be immediately deployed to countries across the middle of Africa, in four countries and in cooperation with regimes that have hideous records of dictatorship and human rights abuses, not the least on the part of Uganda’s “President-for-life”, Yoweri Museveni. Obama justified this newly minted “humanitarian mission” in Uganda in the name of eliminating the LRA. This is odd. The LRA has actually been around for almost a quarter century and has never been weaker than it is today. Why, suddenly, such an operation across a huge part of Africa? Paul Craig Roberts, a former Under Secretary of State for Treasury under President Ronald Reagan (and thus not a left-winger by a long shot), put the matter succinctly: “With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments…. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases.”

    Even this recent deployment may be just the tip of an oncoming iceberg. For many years now, the U.S. has been building up a special Command for Africa, the AFRICOM, in tandem with CENTCOM that is responsible for operations in the Middle East (West Asia). As part of this imperial mission in Africa, the U.S. is actively engaged in training the militaries of Mali, Chad, Niger, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zambia, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana, Malawi and Mauritania. Together with other NATO countries, the U.S. has staged numerous military exercises in Africa with the ostensible purpose of preparing contingency plans for “protecting energy supplies” in the Niger delta and the Gulf of Guinea. Aside from Libya, major oil producers in the region include Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Mauritania. All these, and many others besides, are to be “protected” – pretty much on the “Libyan model” if need be.

    This is not the place to go into details. Suffice it to say that the fall of Libya is likely to serve as the first major step in the offensive to capture Africa’s plentiful natural resources. In the fullness of time, as multiple insurgencies and bloodlettings are let loose across the continent, we are likely to see the erection of many new bases for the AFRICOM-NATO combine, very much on the model of Iraq and Afghanistan. The objective is not only to reserve African resources for the Euro-American imperium as much as possible but also to deny those resources to China, which gets about one third of its oil from Africa – Angola and Sudan in particular – in addition to important materials like platinum, copper, timber and iron ore. Some 75 Chinese companies were working in Libya with 36,000 personnel, not so much in the oil sector as in infrastructural development projects; and China accounted for about 11 per cent of Libya’s pre-war exports. It evacuated its personnel and complained that NATO had unilaterally changed the U.N. resolution from protecting civilians to regime change.

    The U.S. would like to see this eviction of China from Libya to become permanent and for such evictions to be repeated across Africa. Will that happen? Too soon to tell. The U.S. has the military might and the impatient arrogance of a declining superpower, but China is the one that has the cash and the almost glacial patience of a rising economic power. A confrontation is on, and it will take decades to settle.

Conclusion

    Major issues pertaining to the significance of the Libya war have not been addressed here: the meaning of all this for the so-called “Arab Spring”; the nature of the fallen Qaddafi regime; the likely composition of the emerging dispensation; the social disintegration and multiple internal conflicts that are now likely to ensue; the destabilisation and the prospect of multiple civil wars across the Sahel region caused by the war on Libya; and so on. Other contributors to this issue of Frontline may clarify these issues, or this author may return to them in a future contribution.

    So, let me conclude this piece by noting that Qaddafi did leave a brief will, and it is important that we recall some of his last words:

    “Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personally secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour. Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise.”

    That is true. Friendly African countries had offered him safe sanctuaries, while some European countries would have preferred to have him as a neutralised client rather than a celebrated martyr in (at least parts of) Libya. Offers were indeed made. Given the choices, he preferred to die. In that brief will, he also expressed a simple wish:

    “Should I be killed, I would like to be buried, according to Muslim rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and relatives. I would like that my family, especially women and children, be treated well after my death.”

    In Islamic custom, the stipulation that the body be washed and wrapped in a fresh shroud is lifted in the case of martyrs. Right or wrong, Qaddafi did think of his own impending death as martyrdom. We may not think so, but many others probably will. Qaddafi was quite largely a buffoon, in many ways brutish, more so as he grew older and more egomaniacal, but not everyone is going to forget that he also had a visionary side to him and built for his people the most advanced welfare state on the continent. His is a contradictory legacy. We have described earlier in this piece what the winners did to his corpse. Not just the members of his own family or his tribesmen, but many, many others might not so easily forget all that.

Courtesy: FRONTLINE

‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ PROTESTS

 

Growing Anger Against Capitalist Crisis

Sitaram Yechury

    AT the recently-concluded summit of India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) held at Johannesburg, South Africa, prime minister Manmohan Singh has called upon the developed countries to “take steps to avoid hard landing of global economy”. This call comes a fortnight before the leaders of G-20 are to meet at Cannes, France.

    Before departing for the summit, the prime minister held high level consultations with the managers and advisors of the Indian economy expressing deep anxiety on tackling Indian economy’s twin problems of soaring inflation and sharply declining industrial growth rate.

    Both the PM’s call to the developed nations and the prescription to be adopted for the Indian economy reflect the fact that India under the leadership of the UPA-II government continues to look for solutions within the framework of neo-liberal economic reforms. These, as we shall see later, will only deepen the misery of the vast mass of the Indian people.

    Importantly, these expressions of the Indian prime minister show that he is completely oblivious, as many leaders of the global economy have ‘chosen’ to be, of the growing global anti-‘Wall Street’ protests. These are sweeping across the world from Australia through Asia, Europe and, of course, to the Americas. Over 1500 protest actions took place all over the world on the ‘global day of action’ in 82 countries. The `Occupy Wall Street’ movement began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in New York Manhattan’s financial district and has now spread to over 100 cities in the USA. The rallying point of all these actions was the focus against `corporate greed’ as the cause of the current global capitalist crisis that is threatening to slide into a double-dip recession.

    While, on the one hand, protestors in Boston outside the Bank of America building carried screaming headlines declaring `class war’, the rightwing Republican Party has raised the alarm that these protests are, indeed, a `class war’.

    Since the global recession began, reportedly the sale of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital have soared. Even the venerable Pope, reports suggest, has ordered copies for the Vatican. During the anti-Vietnam war protests, in the same city of Boston, university campuses had posters saying: “if you want to make the grade, then you have to be good at Mar(x)ks”.

    Those falling back on Karl Marx’s seminal work Das Kapital to understand the functioning of the capitalist system and the genesis of its crises will do well to read the concluding chapter of Volume I. “Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. He buttresses this with a quote, in a footnote, from a worker T J Dunning: “With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”

    It is this pathological drive to maximise profits at any cost, the inherent character of the capitalist system and not the individual greed of some or weakness of regulatory mechanisms that is the root cause for the present crisis.

    Greed is but a euphemism, one amongst many others, for profit maximisation, the raison d’etre of the capitalist system. The myth that greed is something alien to capitalism and, hence, can be kept under check is, once again, exploded. Capitalism has greed as its inseparable companion. It is the system and not the avaricious attributes of individual capitalists that is the culprit.

    Another consciously engendered myth that the State under capitalism is a benign neutral entity has been shattered. True to its character, the capitalist State intervened to bailout those very financial giants who, in the first place, caused the current crisis. The Special Inspector General for the US government’s financial bailout programmes says, “Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2007, the federal government, through many agencies, has implemented dozens of programmes that are broadly designed to support the economy and the financial system. The total potential federal government support could reach up to $ 23.7 trillion.” Compare this with USA’s GDP which is just over $ 14 trillion. The US treasury spokesman, however, denies the veracity of this figure.

    Similarly, there have been large-scale borrowings by the governments of several developed countries to finance such bailouts. Corporate insolvencies have thus been converted into sovereign insolvencies. In order to meet this debt burden, the EU is today in convulsions with governments like Greece, now Spain more likely to follow, adopting severe `austerity’ measures, meaning, drastic cuts in social benefits and expenditures for the working people. General strikes and protests have become the order of the day.

    The impact of the crisis has been severe. One in six US citizens are living in poverty, according to new census data. The US Census Bureau reported that average household incomes dropped and the poverty rate increased for the third year in a row. The official unemployment rate is currently 9.1 per cent, meaning 14 million US citizens are out of work. And the overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 per cent in 2010, or 46.2 million, up from 14.3 per cent in 2009. The poverty line is set at an annual income of $22,300 for a family of four. Real median household income declined by 6.4 per cent to $49,445 between 2007 and 2010.

    The income drop for black people was a  whopping 15 per cent compared with a 7.1 per cent average. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is currently 16.7 per cent. Reflecting the impact of the recession, the US poverty rate from 2007-10 rose faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis and neoliberal government cuts contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and soaring unemployment. The total number of people living in poverty — over 46 million — is the highest in numerical terms since the census began tracking it in 1959. As a proportion of the population it ties with the 1993 poverty level for the highest since 1983. The income share of the country’s top 1 per cent is hovering around 20 per cent, up from about 8 per cent in the 1970s.

    Further, new US census data analysed by the Pew Research Centre shows that the recession wreaked havoc on the wealth of all Americans but that whites lost the least amount as a percentage of their holdings. Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of Hispanic households dropped by 66 per cent and that of black households fell by 53 per cent. In contrast, the median net worth of white households dropped by only 16 per cent. The median net worth of a white family now stands at 20 times that of a black family and 18 times that of a Hispanic family — roughly twice the gap that existed before the recession and the biggest gap since data began being collected in 1984.

    The recession also has slashed the wealth of Asian American households, which in 2005 had higher median wealth than white families but by 2009 had less. Their median wealth figure dropped by 54 per cent. Between 2005 and 2009, the share of wealth owned by the wealthiest 10 per cent of all households rose to 56 per cent from 49 per cent. The share of Americans with no wealth at all rose sharply during the recession. A third of Hispanics had zero or negative net worth in 2009, up from 23 per cent in 2005. For blacks, the portion rose to 35 per cent from 29 per cent, and for whites, it rose to 15 per cent from 11 per cent. For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression.

    On the other hand, what is the situation of the financial giants on the Wall Street that in the first place triggered this crisis? The Bank of America, having then acquired the ‘bankrupt’ Merrill Lynch has earned $ 3.7 billion in the first half of 2011. Goldman Sachs set aside $ 5.23 billion as bonuses to its executives. The bank reported net additional revenues of $ 11.89 billion and net earnings of $ 2.7 billion for the first quarter.

    In this context, the PM’s concerns noted above, indeed, appear natural. But what are the prescriptions that are being offered to us in India? While headline inflation stood at 9.72 per cent in September, food, fuel and consumer goods grew costlier than this. On the other hand, the index of industrial production fell to a dismal 4.1 per cent. Global recession has seen exports falling from 82 to 36 per cent between July-September. Imports fell likewise indicating a sluggish domestic demand. This has widened our trade deficit to an unprecedented $ 73.5 billion.

    Investors are complaining that the RBI’s measures to control inflation has pushed the cost of credit, leading, in turn, to declining investment. The presumption is that if cost of capital is cheap, then investment will rise leading to higher growth.

    The fallacy lies in the fact that what is produced through higher investments needs to be sold which requires purchasing power in the hands of the people. With this drastically declining globally and in our country, the neo-liberal prescription simply cannot work. It is only a veil to camouflage the earning of higher speculative profits utilising cheap credit. This is reflected in the global trends where the same financial corporates that triggered this recession increased speculative trading by increasing the amount of derivatives on their books by $ 11.3 trillion in the third quarter from the first quarter. The main culprits of the current recession, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs account for about 90 per cent of the activity in derivatives or speculative trading.

    Keynesian State intervention was one possible way in which such naked pursuit of profit maximisation could have been muted. Keynesianism far from being the palliative to provide relief to the people was structurally designed to stabilise the capitalist system from its inherent tendencies of plunging into recurrent crises. Under the neo-liberal dispensation, however, State intervention comes to the rescue of corporates at the expense of the people, further destabilising the system.

    In the Indian context, as noted repeatedly in these columns, our economic fundamentals can only be strengthened and stabilised when interventions are designed to expand the purchasing power of our people, thus, enlarging aggregate domestic demand. This, in turn, would set in motion a trajectory of sustainable growth.

    The PM and his advisors could do well to reconsider and reverse the trend of providing over Rs 5 lakh crores as tax concessions to the rich, as revealed in the last two budget documents.

    These monies, if instead, were invested in public work projects, this would have built the much-needed infrastructure while generating large-scale employment and, thus, vastly enlarging people’s purchasing power.

    The choice can still be made. The UPA-II government must be made to make this choice through mounting popular pressures backed by mighty protest actions.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, who died on October 5 aged 56, was the visionary co-founder, and later chief executive, of Apple, makers of the Macintosh computer, the iMac, the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, and the man behind the astonishing success of the computer animation firm Pixar, makers of Toy Story and Finding Nemo; in consequence he did more to determine what films we watch, how we listen to music, and how we work and play than any other person on the planet.

Jobs never designed a computer in his life, but it was because of him that Apple products, even when they do largely what other products do, are perceived to be different and infinitely more cool. The Macintosh introduced the world to the computer mouse; the iPod became famous for its click wheel, and the iPhone for its "user-interface" – a sophisticated touch-screen that responds to the flick of a finger.

Jobs emphasised the difference between Macs and the PCs that ran Microsoft software, managing to preserve Apple’s image as a plucky, creative, insurgent against the bland Microsoft behemoth even as Apple itself became the biggest company on the planet. "I wish Bill Gates well," he once claimed. "I only wish that at some time in his life he had dropped acid or spent time at an ashram."

It was a marketing trick that Jobs worked on consumers too, convincing them that purchasing Apple products somehow conferred membership of an exclusive and visionary club, even when it was transparently obvious that the company’s devices were utterly ubiquitous. This corporate reputation for seer-like trailblazing lay completely with Jobs. "I skate to where the puck is going to be," he explained, using an ice hockey metaphor, "not where it has been."

This inspired almost evangelical devotion among techno-geeks. Jobs was not just the brains behind Apple, he was high-priest of the "Mac" religion. His eagerly anticipated "MacWorld" shows were adulatory affairs akin to revivalist rallies, with Jobs, in black turtleneck, jeans and trainers, preaching the message that salvation lay in Apple’s latest gadget.

The Jobs story – humble birth, rise and fall, miraculous comeback – was even likened by Apple fanatics to the life of Christ. For the less blasphemously-inclined it proved that the American Dream is alive and well.

He was born on February 24 1955 to an Syrian Arab father and an American mother, who had travelled to San Francisco to put him up for adoption. Soon afterwards a blue-collar California couple, Paul and Clara Jobs, claimed him and named him Steven Paul.

After completing high school in Cupertino, northern California, Jobs went north to study at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after a term. Returning to California, he took a job at Atari, the video games manufacturer, in order to save money for a "spiritual quest" to India. There he was converted to Zen Buddhism and vegetarianism and dabbled in hallucinogenic drugs.

On his return to America Jobs resumed his work with Atari and was given the task of creating a more compact circuit board for the game Breakout. He had little interest in the intricacies of circuit board design and persuaded his 16-year old friend, Steve Wozniak, to do the job for him, offering to split any bonus fifty-fifty. Jobs was given $5,000 by a delighted Atari, but Wozniak only got $300, under the impression the payout was $600.

In 1976 Wozniak showed Jobs a computer he had designed for his own use. Jobs was impressed and suggested marketing it. They had no capital, but Jobs had a brilliant idea. By persuading a local store to order 50 of the computers, then asking an electrical store for 30 days credit on the parts to build them, they set up business without a single investor. They called it Apple Computers (which would lead to protracted legal battles with the company behind the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps) and launched their first product, the Apple 1. A year later the more sophisticated Apple 2 hit the jackpot, and by 1980, when the company went public, the pair were multimillionaires.

The success of Apple launched Jobs into the celebrity circuit. He dated Joan Baez and became a personal friend of California Governor Jerry Brown. But his ruthless streak became apparent aged 23 when his then girlfriend gave birth to his daughter. For two years, though already wealthy, he denied paternity while the baby’s mother went on welfare. At one point he even swore an affidavit to the effect that he was "sterile and infertile", so could not be the father.

The strain of running a successful company soon began to tell. Employees complained of Jobs’s "Management By Walking Around Frightening Everyone" technique and even he realised that more seasoned business experience was required. In 1983 he lured John Sculley, president of PepsiCo, to serve as Apple’s chief executive, saying: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Two years later the company launched the Macintosh, the first commercially successful small computer with a mouse-driven "graphical user interface".

But the clash of business cultures proved irreconcilable, and in 1985 Jobs (whom Sculley likened to Leon Trotsky) was forced out by his own board. It was 12 years before he returned.

During those years Jobs started Next Computing and bought what became Pixar from George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. Next was a techie’s dream – Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software for the web on a Next computer – but a business failure. Pixar struggled for years until 1995, when it contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated feature films. The first of these, Toy Story, broke box-office records and Pixar’s flotation in 1996 made Jobs a billionaire. Over the next 10 years the studio went on to produce a string of hits including A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003) and The Incredibles (2004).

In 2006 Disney bought the company in a $7.4 billion deal under which Jobs became Disney’s largest single shareholder with approximately 7 per cent of the company’s stock.

Jobs’s triumph at Pixar reminded people of his ability to divine the technological future, and in 1997 he persuaded Apple to buy Next – to acquire its forward-looking operating system Nextstep, and, more importantly, Jobs himself.

In his memoirs, published in 1987, John Sculley dismissed Jobs’s vision for Apple to become a high tech consumer products company as a "lunatic plan".

But by rejecting this vision, Apple, by 1997, had become a basket case, losing $736 million in one quarter. Management by committee had blunted its innovative flair and the corporate atmosphere was more that of a student bar than a thrusting business in a highly competitive market.

Jobs’s instinctive feel for the consumer zeitgeist soon turned things around. Within a year the company was once more posting handsome profits.

The iMac computer was launched in 1998, followed in 2001 by the iPod, a digital music player of strikingly minimalist design. Then came iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes online digital music Store. In 2007, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the iPhone, a clever and expensive product combining cell phone, iPod, and internet device in one streamlined casing. It was followed by the iPad, a tablet device without a physical keyboard. Some wondered if there was really demand for the iPad in a crowded marketplace that was being buffeted by the severest economic downturn in decades; once again Jobs showed his ability to confound the sceptics, and it became a bestseller too.

But Jobs was not a universally popular figure. He oozed arrogance, was vicious about business rivals, and in contrast to, say, Bill Gates, refused to have any truck with notions of corporate responsibility. He habitually parked his Mercedes in the disabled parking slot at Apple headquarters and one of his first acts on returning to the company in 1997 was to terminate all of its corporate philanthropy programmes.

Jobs’s management style owed less to Zen Buddhism than to George Orwell. No aspect of corporate life was immune from his authority and he was almost pathologically controlling when it came to dealing with the press.

Journalists found that he would try to stifle even anodyne stories if they had not received his blessing. One described getting an interview with Jobs as about as easy as getting an interview with Saddam Hussein, "except Saddam would probably be more helpful and certainly more polite".

He ruled Apple with a combination of foul-mouthed tantrums and charm, withering scorn and carefully judged flattery. People were either geniuses or "bozos", and those in his regular orbit found that they could flip with no warning from one category to the other, in what became known as the "hero-shithead roller coaster". Employees worried about getting trapped with Jobs in a lift, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened.

One senior executive admitted that before heading into a meeting with Jobs, she embraced the mindset of a bullfighter entering the ring: "I pretend I’m already dead."

Yet members of Jobs’s inner circle, many of whom came with him from Next, found working with him an exhilarating experience. To keep them on board, Jobs eliminated most cash bonuses from executive compensation and started handing out stock options instead. But here as elsewhere Jobs played by his own rules.

In 2001 he was granted stock options amounting to 7.5 million Apple shares, allegedly without the required authorisation from the company’s board of directors. Furthermore, the option came with an exercise price of $18.30.

But this price allegedly should have been $21.10, thereby incurring a taxable charge of $20 million that Jobs did not report as income.

In 2006 an internal company inquiry found that this grant was "improperly recorded" as having been made at a special board meeting that never took place, but largely exonerated Jobs over the matter, saying that the options had been returned without being exercised and that he was "unaware of the accounting implications". In 2007 the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it would not file charges against Apple, but had filed charges against two former executives for their alleged roles in backdating Apple options.

The inquiry did not stall Apple’s extraordinary ascent. By 2006 the company had a market value of $108 billion – more than Goldman Sachs. By August 2011, after it reported yet another quarter of record breaking profits, it had become the biggest company in the world, with a market value of $337 billion.

Within days of reaching that corporate milestone, however, Jobs announced his resignation on health grounds. Few were surprised. In 2004 he disclosed that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer that had been "cured" by surgery. Questions about his health resurfaced in December 2008 when it was announced that, for the first time in 12 years, he was pulling out of delivering his annual address at Macworld.

Feverish speculation over his well-being was only fuelled by Apple’s fanatical devotion to secrecy. When Jobs went on medical leave in January 2009, the company would not say why. Inevitably, suspicions arose that the cancer had returned. In fact in June that year the Wall Street Journal revealed that he had undergone a liver transplant. Even when the news broke Apple remained tight-lipped: "Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there’s nothing further to say," noted a spokeswoman tersely.

His devoted fans began to scrutinise every public appearance for clues to Jobs’s physical fitness. On the stock markets, which considered his presence vital to Apple’s own health, the company’s shares fell if he looked particularly gaunt. In the first half of 2011 he was seen only a handful of times. Then, on August 24, he announced he was stepping down, to be replaced as CEO by Tim Cook, who had run the company during Jobs’s previous absences.

Apple’s shares immediately dropped 5 per cent.

Steve Jobs married Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony in 1991. They had three children who survive him along with the daughter by his early girlfriend, whose paternity he eventually acknowledged.

India’s Food Crisis Has Many Ingredients

India’s government is drafting a food security bill, but there are other areas it must address if it is to halt rising hunger levels

Nilajana Bhowmick

Indian vegetable vendors at a street side stall in Kolkata

    Gurwa Ahirwar, of Akona village in Chhatarpur district in Bundelkhand, is in his late 60s. He lives with his wife and his three grandsons. The rest of his family, his two sons and daughter-in-law, migrated to Delhi to work. Most families in Akona are left with only the elderly and the children. The young have left in search of work in the cities after continuous drought in the last few years caused crops to fail.

    Bundelkhand lies mainly in Madhya Pradesh, the second largest state in India and the one that contains the greatest concentration of hungry people in the country. The Indian State Hunger Index released in 2008 placed Madhya Pradesh in the "extremely alarming" hunger category. The state is a glaring example of everything that is wrong with India’s poverty elimination efforts.

    Of the 118 countries on the global hunger index, India ranks 98th, with 214 million people going hungry. Millennium development goal 1, which looks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and provide food security by 2015, is miles off.

    In 1993-94, 44.6% of people were living at below the poverty line in Madhya Pradesh. If MDG targets are to be met, that figure must go down to 22.3% by 2015. Yet, according to new poverty estimates produced by a government fact-finding commission, poverty in the state has increased by 4% to 48.6%. A survey by a local NGO revealed 83% of children are undernourished and most families go to bed on an empty stomach.

    The extent of India’s hunger problem is perhaps most evident in its children. Biraj Patnaik, national adviser to the Right to Food campaign, says: "India has the highest burden of child malnutrition in the world. You find that almost a third of Indian babies are born with low birth weight and this is a very high number. Lack of access to food, no access to drinking water, lack of sanitation facilities and gender inequity – these all contribute to child malnutrition, which again stems from hunger and poverty."

    According to the development economist Jean Dreze, the most serious nutrition challenge in India is to reach out to children under three. "It is well known that if a child is undernourished by age three, it is very difficult to repair the damage after that," says Dreze. "Yet most infants and young children continue to be exposed to undernutrition and remain beyond the reach of public intervention."

    However, the way in which public intervention is managed – and the attitudes that shape it – are themselves sometimes blamed for the worsening of the problem.

Agriculture spending

    A key factor in India’s plight has been the government’s espousal of development at the cost of agriculture – the mainstay of people in the rural areas. Nationally, agriculture provides 67% of employment. In the last financial year, the Indian government provided around 500,000 crores (US$112bn) of subsidies and exemptions to the industrial and corporate sector, which contributes just 22% to the employment sector, while government expenditure on agriculture declined by 4.3%.

    India’s hunger problem has also been compounded by the high price of food over the last couple of years. A report on consumption patterns in rural India by the National Sample Survey Organisation shows a decline of 1.97%. In 2005-06, an average of 11.9kg of food grain was consumed per month, per family member, at a cost of 106 rupees ($2.38). In 2006-07, that figure came down to 11.69kg, with the cost of food increasing to 115 rupees ($2.58).

    Some blame rise in food prices on hoarding by the government. To give one example, India produces around 600 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables out of which 25% to 30% is wasted due to inadequate logistical support. While inflation has clearly played a part, the food crisis is part of a wider failure of the government to ensure people’s entitlements to food. Many welfare schemes have failed to reach the poorest because of corruption, for example, and some policies have simply failed to take account of local needs.

Welfare to work

    One such scheme is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), which came into being in 2005. The scheme ensures rural people livelihood security by guaranteeing them 100 days of work every year. Under the terms of NREGA, every rural Indian has the right to work within 15 days of requesting it and without having to travel more than three miles outside their village.

    Dreze, one of the chief architects of the programme, says that it provides employment to 50 million poor people every year, but he admits that the implementation has been faulty.

    "NREGA is a pro-worker law implemented by an anti-worker system," he says. "One manifestation of this is the systematic resistance of the administration to any sort of accountability. All the accountability provisions – unemployment allowance, compensation for delayed payments, penalty clauses – have been sidelined. This defeats the purpose of the act."

    Under pressure from civil society, the Indian government is formulating a food security bill, which will make access to food a legally enforceable constitutional right, like the right to life.

    Contained in the bill, which is being drafted by the National Advisory Council and backed by the chairwoman of the ruling UPA, Sonia Gandhi, is making access to food a legally enforceable constitutional right. In the first phase, the draft proposal outlines subsidised food for 72% of the population by 2011-12.

    However, with the World Bank recently warning that 60% of the country’s food subsidies do not reach the poor, it is high time the government made some fundamental changes. Reforming the faltering public distribution system, which it plans to universalise under the new bill, enhancing support for farmers, and improving storage and transport may go some way to reduce wastage and pave the way for long-term food security.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

In India The Granaries Are Full, But The Poor Are Hungry

Julien Bouissou    (Guardian Weekly)

Bureaucracy and corruption in India’s distribution system mean that subsidised stocks of grain have been left to rot instead of reaching families suffering from malnutrition

A wholesale shop displays cereals and pulses in gunny bags at the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Yard in Bangalore, India. Photograph: EPA

   India‘s grain warehouses are bursting at the seams and sacks of rice and wheat lie rotting in the open for lack of storage space. These government-managed stocks are for offsetting a fall in agricultural production in the event of drought or floods, but are also meant for sale to the poorest segment of the population at subsidised prices.

    But because the public distribution system (PDS) is undermined by bureaucracy and corruption, 60m tonnes of grain is lying in warehouses or under plastic sheeting, and, according to the Hindustan Times, 11m tonnes of it has been destroyed by the monsoons.

    A committee of experts appointed by the supreme court has claimed that this is nothing short of "genocide", and last month the court ordered the free distribution of the grain to the poor rather than have it eaten by rats.

    Since the 1970s green revolution, agricultural production has continued to rise, but not to benefit the hungry. Half of India’s children aged under five suffer from malnutrition, and the rate remained stable between 1999 and 2006 despite the economic growth in those years. India is the world’s 11th largest economic power but still has more people in poverty than sub-Saharan Africa, even though it has not suffered from civil wars and political crises. TV images of a nation of empty stomachs and overflowing granaries have generated considerable anger.

    In his column in the Mint, the economist Himanshu asked: "Why did the government not offload the stocks last year when most of the country was suffering from drought, and the food price inflation was close to 20%? And what was the need to procure more grain when stocks were rotting in its godowns?"

    The problems of stock management and warehousing are exacerbated by the inefficiency and corruption of the PDS . According to a 2008 report by the National Advisory Council, some government "fair price" shops only open two or three days a month, and very few Indians can afford to buy their entire 25-30 kg monthly ration in one go, on wages that barely allow them to survive from day-to-day.

    The report stated that many of the most vulnerable people were not benefiting from the government food programme or were not getting enough out of it. Indeed, the rich benefit more from it than the poor. Forged ration cards can be bought from corrupt officials. A 2005 audit by the National Advisory Council found that only 42% of the subsidised grain was reaching those who were suffering from malnutrition. Families living below the poverty line often hand over their ration cards to moneylenders as collateral for loans when they have to pay for a child’s wedding – or to pay back other debts.

    The yellow "BPL" ration cards distributed to families below the poverty line are the most sought after, since they allow holders to re-sell the rice they obtain at the subsidised price of just 5-6 cents a kilo.

    With corruption and management costs taking up between 40% and 70% of the PDS’s annual budget, how can the system be changed? After introducing the right to information, and the right to education, the Indian government is preparing a new law that will guarantee every citizen the right to food.

    In 1971 Indira Gandhi was elected on her slogan "eradicate poverty" (Garibi Hatao). Now 38 years later, her daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, won the election to head the Congress party on a similar promise, that of "shared growth". For in the intervening years India has grown richer but still has 651 million poor people, according to the Asian Development Bank.

    The Right to Food movement is currently campaigning for a universal distribution system, rather than a targeted one, because the "poverty accounting" criteria in India are very controversial and the lists are frequently manipulated – and therefore unreliable.

    According to a poll carried out in 2005 and 2006, only 56% of BPL households were actually registered as such by the government. And any household can be thrown into poverty from one day to the next by natural disaster, or the death or illness of a family member.

    "A universal public distribution system would be a life-saver for the hungry, while for the others it would be a form of financial support and social security," explained Jean Drèze, an economist and member of the Right to Food movement. But he estimates the cost of the reform to be more than $21.8 billion. Is the country prepared to devote 1.5% of its GDP for the fight against hunger? The answer will lie in the government’s Right to Food Act, which should be revealed before the end of the year.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Arundhati Roy’s Embedded Essay

Sudhanva Deshpande

Sudhanva Deshpande comments on the "embedded journalism" of Arundhati Roy in Maoist territory. A shorter version of the article has appeared in the Outlook Magazine.

‘Embedded journalism refers to news reporters being attached to military units involved in armed conflicts. . . . Gina Cavallaro, a reporter for the Army Times, said, “They’re [the journalists] relying more on the military to get them where they want to go, and as a result, the military is getting smarter about getting its own story told.”’                – Wikipedia

    It was early morning, about 5, and I was waiting at the station for the train to arrive. As the book stall opened, I dove into the Hindi pulp fiction section. Surendra Mohan Pathak’s first two Vimal thrillers, in a single volume, beckoned me. As I paid for the book, Arundhati Roy’s name leapt out at me from the cover of Outlook. It was her long essay on the Maoists.

    Whether we agree with Roy or not we read her because she surprises us. There is always some statistic, some quotation, some ironic observation, that makes one say, ‘Hey, I hadn’t thought of that before’. This time though, I found myself being disappointed by her. It is almost a cliché of such reportage (of a writer’s encounter with an underground group) to begin with the rendezvous and end on a note of wistful longing. Roy does both. Come on Arundhati, I wanted to say, surprise us – for clichés I can read Surendra Mohan Pathak.

    One is of course glad that voices like hers exist, and that she commands enough star value for Outlook to bill their issue a ‘collector’s item’. Roy writes with feeling, and she is superb at catching irony – e.g., the description of Dantewada as a border town smack in the centre of India, or the Indian rulers’ adoption of China’s path as their own path. Her writing is poetic, it seduces. Even when you are not persuaded by the argument, you want to side with her.

    In this essay, she introduces us to a veritable cast of characters: Comrade Maase, who ‘seems to have to swim through a layer of pain to enter the conversation’; the senior Comrade Venu (Sushil, Sonu, Murali) who ‘looks for all the world like a frail village schoolteacher’; Comrade Sukhdev, ‘a crazy workaholic’; Comrade Kamla, who prefers watching ‘ambush videos’ to Hindi movies.

    Er . . . ambush videos? Roy describes one, which starts with ‘shots of Dandakaranya, rivers, waterfalls, the close-up of a bare branch of a tree, a brainfever bird calling. Then suddenly a comrade is wiring up an IED, concealing it with dry leaves. A cavalcade of motorcycles is blown up. There are mutilated bodies and burning bikes. The weapons are being snatched. Three policemen, looking shell-shocked, have been tied up.’ Roy was outraged and shocked, as all of us were, when Hindutva goons reportedly videographed violence against Muslims in Gujarat and these videos then did the rounds of lending libraries. Comrade Kamla, who only likes watching ‘ambush videos’ of ‘mutilated bodies and burning bikes’, is marching, Roy wants to persuade us, ‘to keep hope alive for us all’. Some ironies escape the best writers, it seems.

    Consider the joke she recounts at the end of the essay. Sukhdev asks her if she knows what to do if they come under fire. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘immediately declare an indefinite hunger strike.’ Sukhdev laughs so hard he has to sit.

    So what is Sukhdev laughing at? At Roy’s writerly wit? Or at her scorn for ‘indefinite hunger strikes’? In an earlier day and age, Roy helped focus the world’s attention on a massive, peaceful, neo-Gandhian protest against destruction in the name of development. On countless occasions, hundreds of thousands of people took part in ‘indefinite hunger strikes’ and other forms of non-violent and moral resistance. One may or may not have agreed with every aspect of their, and Roy’s, critique. But the moral force of their argument was unquestioned. By recounting her joke without irony, however, Roy mocks her own past, her commitment to a movement she was (and is?) so passionate about.

    Reading Roy, one is struck by her refusal to debate. She sees nothing wrong in the Maoists becoming a handmaiden of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal to exterminate cadres of the CPI (M), mostly tribals, Muslims, and other rural poor. Well, ok. But what about the critics of the CPI (M) who are also the critics of the Maoists? Recently, several articles in the Economic and Political Weekly posed probing questions about whether we have reached the limits of bourgeois democracy in India, about the Maoists’ belief in violence as the only instrument of change, the sheer brutality of their violence, their penchant of taking over peaceful resistance, their intolerance of dissent and debate, their programmatic understanding of the Indian revolution, etc. Aditya Nigam wrote a thoughtful essay, and Sumanta Banerjee had a fascinating exchange with a spokesperson of the CPI (Maoist). These are criticisms from the left – not by Gandhian pacifists. All that is water off Roy’s back. In rubbishing powerful critiques by cocking a rhetorical snook at them Roy demeans herself.

    On every criticism of Maoist tactics and methods, she responds with rhetoric, not reason. Charu Mazumdar fetishises violence and gore – but, says Roy, look at the beautiful dancing tribals. The Maoists believe in protracted war – naturally, counters Roy, because the really protracted war is being waged by the Indian state. The Maoists do not take part in non-violent protest and mass politics – why should they, asks Roy, what did non-violence win the Narmada Bachao Andolan? The Maoists dish out summary justice in kangaroo courts – but they don’t kill everybody, Roy tells us earnestly, and in any case we all know how skewed our judicial system is. And so on.

    In the end, though, the problem with Roy’s essay is that it is a piece of embedded journalism. Trekking day and night with gun-wielding rebels is doubtless a reporter’s fantasy. We need to get more such accounts, which give us a sense of the dreams and desperations that drive young women and men to the gun. What she does not do is question the Maoists’ conceptual framework.

    Reading her essay, one is struck by the binary oppositions that frame it – brutal state repression versus ruthless armed rebellion; mining corporations versus innocent tribals; rampaging industrialism versus primitive communism. There is no middle ground, there are no other players. There is no conception of militant mass protest and resistance that does not take the shape of armed insurrection. I am not coy about the necessity to resort to violence, especially when you are under attack. The Maoists, however, are a different kettle of fish – they resort to bloodshed at the first instance, not the last, and the nature of their violence is also particularly gruesome.

    The Maoists and the tribals, according to Roy, are one entity. If you have any sympathy for tribals and other poor, you must, ipso facto, support the Maoists. This is the terrain where the interests of the Indian ruling classes and the Maoists converge perfectly. In this framework, the only alternative to the violence of the state is the violence of the Maoists. Either you are with the one or you are with the other.

    It is in the nature of embedded journalism to get close enough to the ‘action’ to give us an authentic sense of the smells and the sights. Roy does that. It is also in the nature of embedded journalism that it remains prisoner to the conceptual framework of the embedder. A truly critical intelligence would cut through it and assert itself. Roy, however, chooses to be smitten.

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, Delhi. He works as editor at LeftWord Books.

Courtesy: pragoti.com

‘Yes, I was completely nude’

 

Path-breaker PAOLI on why she can do anything for cinema

Paoli Dam has done it — gone nude on screen. The film in question is Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara’s controversial Chhatrak (Mushroom in English), which had a red carpet screening at the 64th Cannes International Film Festival.

The ‘inhibition-free’ actress spoke to us over phone from Mumbai where she is now busy with Vikram Bhatt’s erotic drama Hate Story…

Congrats! You’ve raised the bar for Indian actresses with nudity and oral sex in Chhatrak…

(Laughs out loud.) It’s nothing new. I mean it may be a new thing in Bengal but then I have always been a trendsetter! I was the first one to declare that I am completely inhibition-free. Later, of course, many other actresses repeated that line! But I have actually done it. Inhibition-free, to me, doesn’t only mean talking about it or sporting a bikini. I have actually dared to do it.

Can you take us through the sequence?

See, it’s a full nude scene and I have done it because I was convinced that the scene is required to take the story forward. It isn’t there just to titillate. Incidentally my character’s name too is Paoli in the film! Now Paoli’s boyfriend (Sudip Mukherjee) lives far away and to fill the vacuum she gets physically involved with a young guy (Anubrata)… and indulges in oral sex!

Were you nude?

Yes, I was completely nude. So was my co-star and in the scene the girl is getting all the pleasure! The scene involves love, sex and pleasure. But I must admit that it was difficult for me.

In what way?

Well, the fact that nobody from Tollywood or Bollywood has ever done something like this and I had no reference point. I didn’t know how to prepare for the scene.

So how did you prepare for it?

I wasn’t confused for too long because I had complete faith in my director. I spent a lot of time with him and we discussed a lot of things, not just the scene but the film as a whole. See, the film is much more than the oral sex scene. It has a political, romantic and social angle. And honestly, I’ve done it only for Vimukthi. If you watch his The Forsaken Land, you will see how well he has blended the bold scenes into the film. That’s the reason why I opted out of Italo Spinelli’s Choli Ke Peechhe because the sex scene there was forced and I was not convinced.

So you are totally comfortable with your body in front of the camera?

Not body, everything is in the mind, you know. Mentally I am very comfortable, because cinema isn’t just a profession for me. It’s a passion. I live cinema. Over the years I have educated myself by watching films of Gong Li, Juliette Binoche, Michael Winterbottom, and I’ve seen how comfortable they (the actresses) are in sex scenes. We don’t wear clothes and make love, do we? Then why should we do that in cinema? Ei nyakamogulo aar koto din (How long will we carry on like this)? Besides, I have always done something distinctive. Being a very traditional girl who grew up in a joint family and had a very good academic record, I could have pursued academics. But it was my mother who encouraged me to take up acting.

Have your parents seen the four-minute video on YouTube?

No, the video was banned on Thursday evening. But I know they wouldn’t mind because they are far more liberal than I am! We live together but each of us in the family— Ma, Baba and Bhai— are very independent. They know my struggles. Being a dusky actress I had to struggle hard because Tollywood still prefers fair-skinned actresses.

And I think it’s high time that the Bengali cine goers mature and learn to behave normally about such scenes because when the same people watch foreign films they are cool with it. If they can accept Kate Winslet nude in the bathtub scene in The Reader then why can’t they accept Paoli Dam nude? I am different and I will always do things differently.

But your core Tolly audience won’t get to see the scene…

That’s because the censor board will not allow it. This particular scene will be available only on DVD. The scene wasn’t there in the Cannes screening either. But like people have seen it on YouTube, I am sure people will see it on DVD. The point is not just watching the scene. It’s not porn, it’s a classic. Down the line, Chhatrak will be considered a cult film.

Will you go nude again for a film?

Depends on who the director is, why the scene is important and whether I am convinced but like I have always said, anything for cinema.

Courtesy: t2

CITU Protests Against Petro Price Hike

 

CITU Charges Govt Of Factual Dishonesty

The following is the press statement issued by the CITU on September 16, 2011

    THE Centre of Indian Trade Unions charges the government not only of insensitivity to people’s woes because of relentless price rise, but also of factual dishonesty to justify price rise of Rs 3.14 per litre of petrol under the pretext of international crude oil price and rupee devaluation.

    The CITU points out that on May 15 this year when the price of petrol was increased by Rs 5 per litre, the global crude oil price was hovering around 110-115 dollar/barrel. In between monthly average price was 109 dollar/barrel in June, 112 dollar/barrel in July and 106 dollar/barrel in August. Today it is 115 dollar/barrel. There is no justification of Rs 2.61/ litre hike on this account when crude price is more or less the same as in the month of May and there was no reduction in price when crude price came down to 84 dollar/barrel.

    Similarly, the government’s plea that the price hike was necessary as rupee has weakened from Rs 45 to Rs 47.84 versus the dollar in last 15 days, is also hollow. In the first six months of 2008, rupee was Rs 39 to 40 versus the dollar. But petrol price was not decreased. The CITU strongly flays such factual dishonesty as a sign of intellectual disintegrity of the policy makers of the day.

    The CITU urges upon the government to put an immediate halt to such jugglery of figures to justify price hike as well as its hidden agenda to deregulate the pricing of petroleum products like petrol, diesel, LPG and kerosene for the benefit of the private oil companies.

    The CITU demands immediate withdrawal of petrol price hike and restoration of transparent administrative pricing system, which takes into account actual cost of production, transportation and marketing of petroleum products instead of depending on speculative market price.

    The CITU calls upon the government to reduce the taxes / duties instead of increasing the burden on the common man through price rise of petrol and other petroleum products which will have a cascading impact on inflation that is already reaching double digits.

    The CITU calls upon the working class to mobilise and vociferously protest against the central government’s anti-people and anti-worker step of price hike in petrol.