Need for a broader dialogue : VIJAY PRATAP
An Indian note inspired by the Copenhagen Lexit and Plan-B meetings
[Vijay Pratap] In November 2016 I attended two important meetings in Copenhagen, Denmark. The first was an informal gathering of group called Lexit
that earlier in 2016 wrote a manifesto for leaving or dismantling the
common euro currency based on progressive analysis and arguments. The
second meeting was for the Plan B
initiative of European Left parties left of social democrats. Both can
be seen as responses to the Greek crisis and the capitulation of the
Syriza party's government lead by Tsípras to the troika of the EU, IMF
and European Central Bank in summer 2015.
The Lexit meeting was the first face to face meeting of a group of
Leftists who shared their progressive arguments - not the ‘Rightist and
Racist’ - to exit from monetary union and/or European Union. In this
meeting I found out that the sense of boundaries and even to an extent
cleavage between Democratic Socialists and Marxism inspired Left parties
existed in a big way. It was similar to what we have in India. In this
meeting also there were couple of isolated and feeble voices pointing
out the need to have a larger coalitional strategy to include social
democrats, trade unions and potential fellow travellers.
There seemed no real understanding of the two phenomenon of
terrorism and rightist nationalism. In India there is at least some
debate about the loss in the meaning of life as a contributing factor to
extremism. Such a situation gives the basis for action, which can even
be promoted by a conspiracy component of the Euro-American inspired
strategies or US establishment’s design which is held responsible for
contributing to the rise and strengthening of terrorism. Similarly,
there was no deep understanding about the jingoistic nationalist forces
or its social genesis. I strongly feel that there is need to deconstruct
the genesis and global emergence of ‘Right’ in terms of both global and
local causes.
In both the meetings I attended on 19th November, I found the usual
political economy approach in the critic of neo-liberal globalization.
There was some good analysis of global financial capitalism also. The
concern about emergence of the right and the need to fight it out was
also widely shared among the speakers. But, I didn’t get any insight
which will enhance our capacity to deconstruct the force and the
mind-set of the aggressive right nationalism with its content of
narrowing of identity boundaries. Is it something to do with the
inability of left to extricate itself from the neo-liberal globalization
processes? Has globalization on the planet at any place not excluded
majority of people, created new inequalities, new pockets of deprivation
and destitution? And we as leftist have not been able to explicate and
sustain an alternative politics to counter these negative outcomes of
globalization.
The trend of rightward drift is global. In South America, leftist
forces and regimes are on the defensive. In the US Barack Obama is
followed by Donald Trump.
In India there was the victory of 2004, when the first United
Progressive Alliance lead by the Indian National Congress Party won with
a significant leftist presence. After that we had significant decline
of leftist strength in 2009 and now in 2014 we have belligerent right in
power at the central level, attempting to institutionalize the
aggressive majoritarian socio-political order in place. We have to
explore the ‘why’ of our Himalayan failure in India.
What the transformative forces would require?
To reimagine the coalitional strategies for the transformative forces
would require that first we analyse reasons of our continuous
marginalization and emergence of belligerent nationalist forces
preparing the ground for institutionalizing a social-cultural order
which the leftists have no other word to describe other than fascist.
And we should be clear that this word closes the mind of large number of
people who today are on the other side. We have to search for a
language and the idiom to analyse the source of energy and motivation in
the ‘Enemy Camp’ why have the masses in large number have joined the
‘enemy camp’? How to win them back for a positive transformative agenda?
Is it to do with the 'dreams' dished out by the modern project of
creating universal inclusive consumer paradise without any concern for
ecology and community or is it to do with the subjective failure of the
progressive forces? I did not find any inkling of these questions in the
debates of Lexit and Plan B meeting. However, preliminary if we are
able to reconstruct the Indian debates in an inclusive fashion including
the conversations on the margins, I am sure we shall be able to provide
some insights into the future of coherent, comprehensive transformative
strivings in India. And reconstructing these debates will
simultaneously be our contribution to global debates among the
progressive circles. The debates of 19th November were quite Euro
centric, global trends hardly found any place in the debates. India and
China, figured two or three times only as villains stealing the European
jobs.
What would such observations mean for pursuing debates and
progressive politics in India? In my view the dissenting imagination
among movements, public intellectuals and ‘bold’ party ideologues in
India have something important to contribute in the global debates. In
my subjective understanding in a peculiar way some marginality from the
mainstream western debates will give us the advantage of being able to
reconstruct the entire gamut of debates in an inclusive fashion,
especially when not seen dogmatically bound to a particular stream of
ideological or political formation.
For one, the debates in Copenhagen did not show any understanding of
global ecological crisis, although couple of passing references did
come up. The understanding of ecological challenges is weak in the
Indian progressive political mainstream also. Our mainstream might not
have internalized the debates of environmental and ecological democracy
movements. But debates on these issues are quite critical and strategic
and need to be brought centrally into the mainstream discourses.
Second issue of global interest is the emergence of new young
leaders from the communities of marginalised majorities. The new
phenomenon in India of young political personalities, such as Kanhaiya,
Jignesh and Rohit Vemula, is significant. It can be a watershed in
understanding the possibilities of new composite and to an extent
organic leadership of the marginalised majorities for an epochal
transformation of this country. Close observation of such young thinking
leaders will give us the insight into the future of our emerging
movements. Small prerequisite for this will be that we come out of our
prejudice against young thinking leaders. After the Copenhagen meetings I
spent a week in Helsinki and was pleasantly shocked to find that the
widely appreciated, accepted and respected chair of the Left League
Party is a woman Li Anderson, only 29 years old. In Indian Socialist,
Communist and Sarvodaya-Gandhian circles you need to be at least 60
years old to be recognized as an adult.
Third, oppressive structures and processes in India are known to be
quite pervasive. But the dynamics of discrimination, exclusion and
oppression are quite specific among different social segments of
marginalised communities, such as ex-untouchable casts, religious
minorities, women, tribal, other backward and peasant communities are
extreme. Economic marginalization of the vast majority of un-organised
working class which is more than 90% of our work force needs to be
noted. Describing the specificity of this oppressive-exploitative
process in different segments of marginalized majority will hopefully
not distract us from re-imagining a comprehensive and inter-connected
view of fundamental transformation and struggles to achieve that!
Such multi-layered and diverse strivings for positive transformation
in India and South Asia are worth debating internationally. This will
inject certain new dimensions of debate for positive social change
globally.
Vijay Pratap, 17.1.2017
The author is a democratic socialist worker associated, among others, with South Asian Dialogues for Ecological Democracy (SADED) and Vasudhaiva Kutumbam Network. SADED is Siemenpuu's partner organization based in India and Nepal.
SOURCE;
http://siemenpuu.org/fi/blog/need-broader-dialogue
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