Destiny of a Decade

Stolen Spaces and Marching Ants !

Time is a tyrant! And a decade is a mere dust in the sands of history but it means much more in the life of a human being. In the mainstream media recap, we see a decade as a sequence of events and tale of newsmakers. Seldom does it lead to interpretation and introspections. In such an attempt, we can see that a decade means different for each strata of society. In the lives of upper class, technology and social media invaded personal experiences to the deepest.  Simulations stimulated their desires and plenitude of choices pampered their lives. The working class had to confront tightening labour laws and insecure way of life. Labour increasingly became a mobile commodity integrated to the supply chains and global delivery models. The poor were encircled by spiralling prices and weakening welfare state schemes. Rather than growth, poverty trickled down to the downtrodden. 

Under the pretext of globalization, world economy became an integrated financial market. World became flat in that sense. The poor were erased from the flash memories of the elite and the aspiring ones. On the other hand, because of digital divide and growing economic disparity, world became more and more opaque. Adding to the woes of the wretched, Mother Nature created havoc to the millions in the forms of thunderstorms, earth quakes, floods, Tsunami and cyclones. More than anything these calamities exposed the callousness of the governments and the micro-politic agenda of the donor agencies. India saw the massive earthquake in Gujarat (2001) which took more than 30,000 lives. 

Indian polity saw the resurgence of coalition governments in Centre adding a new dimension to federalism. The Tehelka expose took the political bureaucracy by storm. The Gujarat riot will always remain as a blot of this decade. The failure of Agra summit put Indian diplomacy in no man’s land. Indo – US nuclear deal generated much acrimony and put an end to the love –hate relationship between UPA and left. Maoists aided by the inflow of weapons from Bangladesh and Myanmar became the serious threat to Indian internal security. The political economy of Kashmir improved marginally and gave way to democratic process.  

The same decade saw the upsurge and retreat of globalization. The hype of Y2K puzzle disappeared in thin air. None bothered to count the millions lost in preparing precautionary steps. The alliance of Time Warner and America Online (2000) became the big hit of the millennium. The honeymoon of techies did not last longer. The Tech crunch (2001) and the dotcom bubble were the preludes for the recessions to come. In this sound and fury, all ignored that it was the collapse of minnows which led to the formation of monopolies in technology. 

Silicon Valley emerged as the hub of information technology. IT revolution was nothing but the use of existing computer communication platforms for financial and international trade networks. The wave of globalization of labour and capital was accelerated by internet technologies. In Doha round of negotiations of World Trade Organization (2001), it was USA, European Union and Japan which stood for agricultural subsidies retreating from their previous support for neo-liberalism. Though it exposes the hypocrisy of imperialism, more evident is their losing faith in the free market principles. The changing tides of world economy favoured the labour capitals like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and ASEAN nations. The fundamental importance of productive forces in a political economy was amplified by this. 

Corporate capitalism exposed its wilderness and chaos with the collapse of the American Energy sector giant ‘Enron’ in 2001. Sarbanes-Oxley laws tried to take grip on US corporate governance. The roller coaster ride of free market capitalism met an unexpected twist from the high heavens itself. American Hedge fund investment groups started collapsing. Mortgage giants like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailed out their prestige. None could save the fate of sinking Lehman Brothers, 150 years old Investment Bank. Entire financial market in the developed economies felt the tremors. The recent market updates reveal that US economy hasn’t yet circumvented the recession despite the massive government bailout. 

This decade witnessed the madness of American imperialism as they invaded fragile nation states using their military might. The aerial attacks on the twin towers of World Trade Centre in September 11, 2001 became the launch pad of American neo-colonial interests. Greed for Oil and urge to retain the dollar hegemony led them to cook up stories against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. When American Missiles bombarded the planning ministry in Iraq (2003), world conscience was a mute spectator. On the other hand, geopolitical interests in Central Asia and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden were the reasons for the Afghan invasions (2001). 

Almost ten years on, the war on terror is on going. Taliban and Opium trade in Afghanistan is on rise again. Incapable to curb this, US-NATO army is busy murdering civilians in the Af-Pak border. Abu Gharib jail tortures exposed the savage side of American civilization. The controversial Guantanamo prison opened by USA to detain the war prisoners (2002) is on the verge of closing down. 

Organized crime and terrorism were the perennial disturbances for the entire decade. Few realised these as the fruits of social anarchy spread by the proliferation of market economy world wide. The Somali young terrorist holding the American weapon exemplifies the dialectical relation between imperialism and terrorism. US shipped more than 40 tons of weapons into the ports of Somalia. The new decade will tell us who the recipients were.  We saw terrorism getting the religious tint everywhere from Indonesia to Colombia. The state of affairs rekindles the memories of crusades in history.  

The entire Islamic nations who were against the American oil greed were tainted as terrorists. Thus political Islam was equated with terrorism. By sabotaging the democratic governments in Islamic nation states Imperialism sowed the seeds of theocracy. Yet we failed to realize that terrorism was best exploited by Imperialism to fragment the opposing nation states. Baltic nations and South East Asia stands as the victim to these experiments. But world polity relishes in the convenience of forgetting. 

The world continues to be hot and simmering for the Palestinians with Israel breaching all the limits of atrocity. Palestine lost their iconic leader Yasser Arafat in the middle of this decade. All throughout this decade this West Asian strip of land was stripped of all the human rights. Goldstone commission appointed by UN (2009) was a mild solace to their concerns. 

The decade saw the transformation of culture industry from a mass media to hegemony over human capital. The decade began with the arrival of Survivor – the Reality show, first of its kind. It was an instant hit in USA. With ‘Idea Star Singer’ making waves all over Kerala just all in this decade we can sense the spread of a global mass culture. Social media became the second nature of netizens. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Orkut satisfied the tribal instinct of millions of people. Yet there are concerns of privacy and information security in these social networks. Identity of individual was lost somewhere in the networks. Wikipedia became the ultimate source of anything and everything on universe. The potentials of these sources take us also to the concerns on the authenticity and ideological intentions. The potentials of music were best explored by Apple Inc with their ‘iPod’.  

One cannot ignore the winning strides of science in this decade. And we salute in the memory of seven space scientists who shed their life with the burning Colombia Space shuttle (2003). The Genome project (completed first stage in 2003) and the Chandrayan moon mission (began in 2008) were crowing achievements of the decade. SARS and bird flu consumed many lives world wide. It revealed the vulnerability of the healthcare systems world wide. Climate change concerns became a political issue in no time. Development politics and environmental politics locked horns in various international forums.  Much hyped Copenhagen summit (2009) failed to deliver any progressive results though it created a coalition of developing nations. 

In this decade, imperial states, non-state actors, NGOs and the donor agencies were the key players in the world polity. Identity politics and micropolitics were their weapons for fragmentation of democracies world wide. They scan even the smallest space of every individual. On one side, they weakened the democracies by instigating ideologies of decentralization of power through micropolitics. On the other end, they created political anarchy by funding identity politics and exporting political terrorism. At the end of this drama, as a saviour of democracy, US imperialism marches to foreign soils to liberate the people and deliver them to the world market. Confrontation between democratic nation states and market forces happened to be the major current of this eventful decade. A society wandering in stolen spaces; it is the gift of this decade.

Gokul B.Alex

Random Thoughts

Intellect explorer begins to unwind the Episteme here: 

Capitalism and the Paradise lost

Economic Crisis! for whom?

An economic crisis is not made in a day; not in a month or not even in a year. It heaps up gradually; gaining momentum when everything else slows down. Once it is accepted as arrived, it will be a rather late confession. The recent economic crisis is also not different.  The 2008 economic crisis hunted down the once almighty financial institutions of United States of America. Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850 became its first famed victim. It was a primary dealer in the U.S. treasury market. Mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the next in the queue. This list includes the insurance giant AIG in the US, Northern Rock in the UK, and Fortis and Dexia in Belgium. 

After a lot of pandemonium, they were royally bailed out. But none gave any importance to the many voiceless who were out of their payrolls all of a sudden. The millions of jobless just became mere percentage numbers of little interest. The unemployment index in the US kept ticking up again and again. 

There is a line of thought that names the economic crisis as a result of credit crisis. They attribute the crisis to the sub-prime mortgage business. The subprime mortgages typically came with a low interest for the first few years, and then a drastic increase. The risks were usually not fully explained, and many borrowers were told they could easily refinance the mortgage in a few years to keep their interest rate low. But in 2005-2006, it came time to pay the piper. 

Interest rates on the subprime mortgages shot up. Many new home owners were unable to pay or refinance. The crisis should have been confined to the US home owners. Unfortunately the banks and lenders making these loans had sold the debt to investors. The debt assets had been diced up and sold to other investors and banks around the world, in complicated financial packages that few people seemed to fully understand.

During 2007, nearly 1.3 million US housing properties were subject to foreclosure activity, up 79% from 2006. Nobody seemed to have any ideas who owned these ‘worthless’ debts, spread out throughout the whole worldwide financial system. Suddenly banks weren’t willing to lend to each other any longer, resulting in a ‘credit crunch,’ a period where there is little liquidity (or money) in the system because nobody is lending. The losses started to roll in. By July 2008, major banks and financial institutions around the world reported losses of approximately $435 billion.

This simply means that U.S. banks were blindly giving away the loans to people with poor credit histories. But they don’t have any complaints at the gargantuan sum of money that fills up the bourses of the Wall Street hedge fund managers. Even after being bailed out, banking monoliths like Citigroup were paying their top echelons with hefty sums of money. 

Only a few analyse the pitfalls in the US risk management system based on the use of financial derivatives, which exacerbated the crisis. It demands a deeper enquiry in to this angle. 

The capitalist economists are trying hard to find out an intellectual remedy to the trouble that has engulfed the world economy at large. But they fail to acknowledge the inherent nature of objective contradictions in the capitalist system that breeds crisis and economic slumps time and again. 

The subprime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch aren’t the only factors in the 2008 economic crisis. Oil prices shot up to a record high, driven by the increasing energy needs of China and India and other emerging economies. This has dramatically affected consumers in North America and Europe in two ways. Consumers have been forced to pay much higher prices for fuel to fill their cars and heat their homes, and at the same time the increased food cost has driven up food prices dramatically, because it takes fuel to produce and transport food. Food has become so much more expensive in the developing world that it has resulted in food riots in some instances.

The current decade has seen a significant commodities boom, after a commodities depression in the 1980s and 1990s saw prices at extreme lows. By 2008, oil had reached a level that people could no longer afford, going above $100 a barrel for the first time in history in January 2008. But even this high seemed like nothing by the time July rolled around, when oil reached $147 a barrel. There has been a rapid slowdown in North American and European economies. On 30 September the UK revealed that it had zero growth for the past quarter. This analysis into the commodity boom explains the housing bubble-bust theory partly. 

The role of the international finance capital (its peculiar and speculative nature) and the vicious cycles of dollar hegemony in this mayhem cannot be minimised. The finance capital in US economy got upper edge over the industrial capital even as early as 1960s. We can trace the seeds of the present economic crisis there itself. US industrial giants transferred their capital into the risky streams of investment banking. The giants like General Electric and Citibank entered the finance capital arena with their full throttle. Apparently, the US money economy expanded by leaps and bounds though the real economy was lagging way behind. The consumption in the economy also risen sharply reaching 70% of the US GDP. Out of this amount, a large sum was credit money in nature. Thus the credit economy dwarfed the real economy by many orders of magnitude. 

The contradiction between the international finance capital and the national sovereignty is worth mention here. The dollar hegemony over other currencies was a need for the international market forces too. The US imperialism and its proxies like International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank tweaked and twisted the national governments to facilitate this spread of dollar umbrella. Thanks to this, the US finance capital with all its infectious diseases penetrated into the world economy. 

The rest is history, full of sound and fury and panic in the golden corridors of wealth. The further grim side of this event was that the very same crisis was used by the wealthy to exploit the downtrodden masses. Trillions of money was pumped into the bourses of the rich, all out of the shrinking pockets of the millions of poor. 

Imperial Ethnography & the Indian Public Sphere

The Story of Indian national siege

Every discussion on modern society touches the important modes of public opinion and civil society. While the discussions on civil society are largely influenced by the Gramscian theoretical framework, public opinion is riveted to the discourses on public sphere, a Hebarmasian notion. Public sphere in India or elsewhere is a dynamic social entity susceptible to the changes in the super structure ( consist of state and other institutional apparatus of hegemony such as religious apparatus ) as well as the organic formations in the base ( consist of family and private groups ). Base- superstructure is the integral component of Marxian social science. But there is an erratic tendency to perceive public sphere as a static entity. 

We can see this in contemporary articulations on public sphere. Some like K.N.Panicker says that religion has grown in influence in the realms of public sphere. What we see as a religious public sphere is a manufactured discourse which creates the effect of public sphere. The actual public sphere is a democratic polity consisting of rational discourse and egalitarian participation. Thus actual public sphere fuels the systems of modernity ranging from ideology to aesthetics.

The actual public sphere blossomed during the period of enlightenment and possibly as a reflection of the creative urge from the bourgeois class ( capitalist ) and liberal market economy. This was driven by the changes in the relations of production and the forces of production. ( These are two paradigms of Marxian Political economy) It was accelerated by the break up in the feudal hierarchy of knowledge and social fabric. But gradually capitalists ascended to the ruling hierarchy replacing the feudal landlords and the religious apparatus. Thus capitalist state power structure emerged and with it a monopolistic capitalism. When capitalism moved up to the state hierarchy, social organizations took shape of trade unions and other primitive forms of political society. Gradually with the emergence of political society, the public sphere began moving towards the polity. That is why we have the notion of press as the fourth estate of power structure. Along with the public sphere, even civil society moved towards the political society. 

As a sequel, political society started acquiring the characteristics of the public sphere.This was a dialectical process ( bi-directional ) whereby both the political society as well as public sphere underwent structural transformation. All this happened in a period when nation states where emerging in the world order. But the conventional public sphere started to lose its characteristics with the resurgence of market economy. Then the same capitalist began restricting the freedom of expression that was once their characteristic. But the forms of public sphere created by capitalist such as newspapers remained in circulation in the public domain. And this cocoon of public sphere became encapsulated within the walls of market economy. This process varied from country to country and region to region. 

Wherever market economy gained predominance over nation state this process was rapid. In Briain, America and similar countries, thus Press became embedded within the market economy, detached from the state. The actual public sphere can be traced in the democratic institutions like Parliamentary democracy, Judiciary and so on. But as it is institutionalized it became static and rhetoric. Thus on one side we have institutionalized static public sphere in polity and on the other end, we see market driven degenerated cocoon of public sphere in the civil society. Thus the resultant public sphere can be said to be permeated between the political society and the civil society. 

This society is described by Hebarmas as 'welfare state capitalism and mass democracy'. This historical transformation is grounded, as noted, in Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, in which giant corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a sphere of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from rational consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. Rational debate and consensus has thus been replaced by managed discussion and manipulation by the machinations of advertising and political consulting agencies: "Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing but only by identifying with them".

For Habermas, the function of the media have thus been transformed from facilitating rational discourse and debate within the public sphere into shaping, constructing, and limiting public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations. Hence, the interconnection between a sphere of public debate and individual participation has been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of political information and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and absorb passively entertainment and information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of media presentations and discourse which mold public opinion, reducing consumer/citizens to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas's words: "Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed

But in countries like India, this process was never uniform. In the colonial India, using laws British regency tried to control the press and the public opinion. The anti-colonial movements resisted this and press became a political weapon. Thus the Indian public sphere in the pre-independence era was largely part of the political society. And Indian political society comprised of Indian bourgeoisie too. Hence the mix contained public sphere, political society and the national bourgeoisie. This mix began to separate with the process of decolonization. And the resultant public sphere retained the flavors of both the political society and the national bourgeoisie. This process and the ingredients varied from state to state. 

Kerala polity can be seen as the most important example for the formation of the actual public sphere and the secular polity. This was rooted in the atheistic and rationalistic discourses of Sree Narayana Movement, and the social activism of Sahodaran Ayyappan and Ayyan Kali. The 1960 elections show this formation in the limelight. When the entire religious groups and institutions like church and NSS rallied against the leftists, the Communists were able to win the elections, despite the fact that the majority of the Keralites were non-atheists and believers of some faith. This shows the rational decision that people placed religion and politics in different quadrants of life. And that is an important reflection of how actual public sphere can exist in India. The same were reflected to some extent in the polities of Maharashtra and West Bengal.

Yet the south Indian newspapers inherited the common ingredients. The newspapers like The Hindu, Malayala Manorama comes in the category of the bourgeoisie newspapers with quasi-nationalistic outlook. Malayala Manorama gradually moved towards the market forces and the imperial interests as reflected in the 'Vimochana Samaram'. Nevertheless both of them retained their intentions to be part of the political discourses, influenced by the interests of the regional bourgeoisie. Indian national as well as regional bourgeoisie never stagged its religious inheritance. But the Indian state retained the characteristics of public sphere within the ambit of the constitution. When secularism was added in the constitution of India, it reflected in the Indian politics as well. Congress and the main opposition of left parties practiced this form of secular polity till the 1970s. The Indian media followed the same lines in this period.

But gradually it became weak with the growing clout of Imperialism in the Indian polity. The emergency period is the marked event in this regard. All the opposition parties in India were united against Indira Congress and it was under the aegis of imperial USA. With the growing presence of Imperialism in the Indian polity, religion and caste became dominant. Thus ethnic polity began subjugating the secular polity. This was driven by the imperial agenda to proliferate the ethnographic divisions within the Indian nation state. By rejuvenating the ethnic ( caste, religion, language, gender ) divisions, Imperialism aimed to fragment the Indian nation state. This process continued without a check from 1970s to the 1990s as a silent volcano. And it reflected in the Indian press as well. They followed the apple cart. 

This arena saw the crystallization with the end of cold war and with the collapse of Soviet union. The world economy saw the surge of finance capital and perturbation into the national sovereign boundaries. It energized the Indian bourgeoisie as well as the religious fanatics. But the south Indian press retained its secular credentials only to the extent that they had shown almost equal appeasement towards each religion.In this backdrop, we can see that Indian capitalists viewed the Babri Masjid attack as an attack on the secular polity. In fact secularism in the actual public sphere means the placing politics over the dictum of god, the quasi-public sphere in Indian reality showed equal appeasement of all the religions promoted by different bourgeoisie. This process accentuated with the winds of liberalization, privatization and globalization ( LPG ). The Babri Masjid attack must be read out in this context. The quasi-public sphere in India exploded seeing the the tendencies of religious extremism in its peripheries. But the Hindutva movement as well as the Islamic terrorism was funded from the same source. This was conveniently ignored by the so called secular academicians and the Indian media. 

The Indian media criticized the Babri Masjid attack. But that critique was never aimed at retaining the actual public sphere. It was just a realization that the Indian quasi-public sphere is perturbed. The equilibrium created by the secular polity was long lost with the formation of BJP and the casteist political parties like Samaj Vadi Party and BSP. Mandal commission report was an attempt by the Indian state to appease the communities along the ethnic lines. It helped only to worsen the situation. 

Thus growing communalism in India and the Babri Masjid attack were the byproduct of the growing ethnic polity in India. Indian mainstream media which forms the quasi-public sphere or the split public was a mute witness to this brazen attack on the Indian secular polity. It could not come out of the veils of ethnic polity to call the spade a spade. There begins the story of accession of BJP into the portals of Indian state. And that marks the beginning of a new era of fragmentation of Indian public sphere across the ethnic lines. Even the secular political parties were forced to follow the ethnic lines along the same lines. The same trend can be seen in the media as well. 

വനിത സംവരണ ബില്ലും ഇന്ത്യന്‍ രാഷ്ട്രിയ പരിപ്രേക്ഷ്യവും

കാര്യം നിസ്സാരം, പ്രശ്നം ഗുരുതരം

ഇന്ത്യയിലെ പാരലമെന്ടിലും ( ലോകസഭയില്‍ മാത്രം ) വിധാന്‍ സഭകളിലും വനിത പ്രാതിനിധ്യം 33 ശതമാനം ഉറപ്പു വരുത്തുന്ന ബില്‍ 15 വര്‍ഷമായി രംഗത്തുണ്ട്. ഇന്ത്യയിലെ വരേണ്യ വര്‍ഗത്തിന്‍റെ ജിഹ്വയായ ബി.ജെ.പിക്ക് ഈ ബില്‍ സ്വീകാര്യമാണ്. ഒപ്പം കോണ്‍ഗ്രസ്സും സമ്മതം മൂളുന്നു. ഇടതു പക്ഷം എന്നും സ്ത്രീ പക്ഷത്ത് നിന്നുകൊണ്ട് ഈ ബില്ലിനെ പിന്തുണച്ചിരുന്നു. അങ്ങനെ രാജ്യ സഭയില്‍ വനിത സംവരണ ബില്‍ പാസായി ; രണ്ടു ദിവസം നീണ്ടു നിന്ന ഒച്ചപാടുകള്‍ക്കും കയ്യാങ്കളികള്‍ക്കും ശേഷം ആണിത്. അംഗങ്ങള്‍ക്കിടയില്‍ അഭിപ്രായ വ്യതാസം ഉണ്ടെങ്കിലും ബി.ജെ.പിയും കോണ്‍ഗ്രസ്സും ബില്ലിനെ  പിന്തുണച്ചു. എതിര് നിന്നത് ബീഹാറിലെയും, ഉത്തര്പ്രടെസിലെയും 'അധസ്ഥിത വര്‍ഗങ്ങളെ' പ്രതിനിധാനം ചെയ്യുന്ന രാഷ്ട്രിയ കക്ഷികളാണ്.

ഇത് വെളിച്ചതുകൊണ്ട് വരുന്നത് സ്വത രാഷ്ട്രിയത്തിന്റെ പരിമിതികളാണ്. സ്ത്രീ സംവരണത്തിന്റെ ഉള്ളിലും ജാതിയുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിലുള്ള സംവരണം വേണമെന്നുള്ള ആവശ്യം ഇവര്‍ ഉന്നയിക്കുന്നു.  സ്ത്രീക്ക് പ്രത്യേകം സംവരണം വേണമെന്നുള്ള സ്വത്വ വാദത്തിനു എതിര് നില്‍ക്കുന്നത് ദളിത്‌ സ്വത്വത്തിന്റെ സംരക്ഷകരാണ്. സ്വത്വ വാദങ്ങള്‍ പരസ്പര പൂരകങ്ങള്‍ ആയി നില്‍ക്കുന്ന സ്ഥിതി വിശേഷം! അപ്പോള്‍ സ്ത്രീ സംവരണത്തിനെ അനുകൂലിക്കുന്നവരുടെ താല്പര്യം എന്താണ്? 

സ്ത്രീ ശാക്തീകരണം എന്ന അജെണ്ടയില്‍ വരുന്ന ഒരു രാഷ്ട്രിയ പരിപ്രേക്ഷ്യം ആണ് വനിത സംവരണ ബില്‍. സ്ത്രീ പുരുഷ സമത്വ വാദത്തില്‍ നിന്നും അത് വേറിട്ടു നില്‍ക്കുന്നു. ഇന്നത്തെ രാഷ്ട്രിയ പരിതസ്ഥിതിയില്‍ സ്ത്രീ സംവരണത്തിലൂടെ സ്ത്രീകളുടെ പ്രശ്നങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് പരിഹാരം കാണാനുള്ള സാദ്ധ്യതകള്‍ പരിമിതമാണ്. രാഷ്ട്രിയ കക്ഷികള്‍ സ്ത്രീകളെ മരപ്പാവകലാക്കി ഉപയോഗിക്കുവാന്‍ സാധ്യതകളുണ്ട്. അത്തരം സാദ്ധ്യതകള്‍ ഇല്ലാതെയാക്കുന്നതിനു സംവരണം രാഷ്ട്രിയ കക്ഷികാളില്‍ തന്നെ നടപ്പിലാകീണ്ടിയിരിക്കുന്നു. സ്ത്രീയുടെ പ്രശ്നങ്ങള്‍ പരിഹരിക്കുവാന്‍ പുരുഷന്മാരും ബാധ്യസ്ഥരാണ്. അതുകൊണ്ട് സ്ത്രീശാക്തീകരണം സംവരണത്തിലൂടെ മാത്രം നെടവുന്നതല്ല എന്ന് മനസിലാക്കണം. തൊഴില്‍ മേഖലയിലും കുടുംബത്തിലും സ്ത്രീയെ സാക്തികരിക്കുന്നതിലൂടെ മാത്രമേ അത് സാധ്യമാവുകയുള്ളൂ. 

ഇന്ന് സ്ത്രീയെ ചൂഷണം ചെയ്യുന്നതില്‍ ഒന്നാം സ്ഥാനം പുരുഷനല്ല, മറിച്ചു നിലനില്‍ക്കുന്ന കമ്പോള മുതലാളിത വ്യവസ്ഥയാണ്‌. സ്ത്രീയെ കമ്പോള ചരക്കാക്കിയും കമ്പോളത്തിന് പെട്ടെന്ന് സ്വാധിനിക്കാന്‍ കഴിയുന്ന വിഭാഗമായും കാണുന്നു. ഇതേ പോലെ നിലനില്‍ക്കുന്ന അധികാര വ്യവസ്ഥയ്ക്കും സ്ത്രീയെ പെട്ടെന്ന് സ്വാധിനിക്കാന്‍ കഴിയുന്നു. സ്ത്രീയെ ഒരു നല്ല തൊഴിലാളിയും വ്യക്തിയും ആയി സാക്തീകരിച്ചതിനു ശേഷം മാത്രമേ നല്ലൊരു രാഷ്ട്രിയ നേതാവാകാന്‍ കഴിയുള്ളൂ. ഇന്നത്തെ പ്രശസ്തരായുള്ള എല്ലാ സ്ത്രീകളുടെയും ജീവചരിത്രം ഇതിനു സാക്ഷ്യമാണ്. ഇന്ന് ഇന്ത്യയിലെ ജനാധിപത്യ രാഷ്ട്രിയം അമേരിക്കന്‍ സാമ്രാജ്യത്തിന്‍റെ നീരാളി പിടുത്തതിലാണ്. ഈ സാഹചര്യത്തില്‍ സ്ത്രീ സംവരണം രംഗം വശലാക്കുവാന്‍ സാധ്യതയുണ്ട്. ഏതായാലും സ്വത്വ രാഷ്ട്രിയ വാദികളുടെ കയ്യിലാണ് കാര്യങ്ങള്‍. 

All is not Green here !

The Valley that never was silent

This year is marked by United Nations as the year for Biodiversity conservation. And it is the right time to retrospect into the undercurrents of the Silent Valley movement which is one of the most-heard efforts that took place in India to conserve the diverse natural resources. 

The site of struggle

Silent Valley was never silent. The 830 hectare long tropical rain forest carries the legendary myths of Mahabharata in its streams. The legend goes like this. Known otherwise as ‘Sairandhri’, Silent Valley was the area visited by the Pandavas in exile. It was a solace for their woeful heart. They bathed in the river that bubbled through this lush green forest. In memory of their mother’s absence, they named this river as ‘Kuntipuzha’. ‘Kunti’ was their mother and ‘Puzha’ is the Malayalam word for river. This valley is located in the area of Nilgiri hills in Palakkad District in Kerala.

The entire area with all its multitude of flora and fauna remained unknown to the mainstream life until 1847. Located in the Kundali Hills of the Western Ghats, Silent Valley in Kerala also holds rare plants and herbs in its virgin tropical evergreen forests interspersed with rivers. This tourist site in Kerala is surrounded with Attappadi Reserve Forests in the east, and vested forests of the Palghat and Nilambur divisions in the west and south. This forest is the abode of the bewildering variety of species including the lion-tailed macaque. Scientists have found many varieties of wild pepper here. Several plants have medicinal value. The evergreen forest tree- Hydnocarpus, whose seeds contain the oil used to treat leprosy, and the herb-like shrub Rauvolfia serpentine used for treating high blood pressure are two examples.  

Robert Bright, a British botanist was behind this landmark exploration that unveiled the Silent Valley. Once in the not-so-distant past he ventured into the area. He discovered an uninhabited, barely penetrable forest, where after nightfall there was silence- unlike other forests, the Cicadas comforting call could not be heard here after dusk. Thus Sairandhri, the unpronounceable was rechristened as Silent Valley. 

Thereafter British government proposed building a dam on the Kunti River and to create a reservoir in the Silent valley. The dam which would be 130 Metres high would be built between two hillocks in a natural gorge through which the river runs. That however was dropped by the British. In Independent India the Kerala Electricity Board (KSEB) had started work on it in 1973, but shortage of funds delayed things till 1976. The time when the government decided to resume the hydro electric project coincided with the period when international NGOs began concentrating on the developmental discourses in third world nation states.  

Manufacturing a Movement

In the work ‘Third Force: the rise of transnational civil society, Ann Florini proclaims that civil society opposition to big dam building in India was mounted during the 1970s and 1980s. She writes: “The campaign against the Silent Valley hydroelectric project in Kerala, one of the first to eventually draw support from the international NGOs, was a harbinger of trends to come. Grass root mobilization against the project emerged in 1976 when a group of local teachers began assisting villagers who feared the loss of their livelihoods from the destruction of forest resources. At the same time, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature began to highlight internationally the project’s negative environmental consequences on the pristine Silent Valley Forests and the endangered lion-tailed monkey. The Silent Valley campaign grew in size and strength over the subsequent decade. Domestic and foreign critics and opponents wrote letters, staged protests, lobbied officials and filed court cases to halt the project. During the same time, environmental issues increased in prominence domestically in India and internationally in the aftermath of the United Nations Conference on Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. As a result of the sustained opposition, the silent valley project was halted in 1984.” The government eventually abandoned the project in 1983 and declared Silent Valley as a national park in 1984.

UN Chronicle mentions the same conference as the first earth summit: “Held in Stockholm, Sweden from 5 to 16 June 1972, the UN Scientific Conference, also known as the First Earth Summit, adopted a declaration that set out principles for the preservation and enhancement of the human environment, and an action plan containing recommendations for international environmental action.”

This new paradigm thus became a devise for international NGOs to intrude into the non-political society (Otherwise known as civil society) in India. In their discourses, environment was conceived as something to be conserved and development was a sustainable practice. This notion confronted the Industrial planning envisaged by Socialist and decolonized states around the world. 

Revisiting the Environmental Paradigm

Environment is not a monolithic entity to be conserved. It is a dynamic form comprising of natural habitat, human habitat, inhabitation formed by the interaction of man and nature and finally the ideology. Natural habitat cannot be left untouched by human beings in their life process. It will be modified and becomes human habitat. The further social development by human society in a given human habitat will become an inhabitation. 

                               

Decolonized governments in India and elsewhere were formed by capitalists and hence followed the Industrialization without heeding to the genuine concerns of displaced local people. This apolitical space was utilized by NGOs to promote the ideology of eco-conservation. In disguise this was an attempt to sabotage the Industrial initiatives in third world.

Why NGOs want to stall big dams? It is precisely because they are funded by donor agencies promoting the interests of US Imperialism. A market economy like US can thrive only when production of goods elsewhere is stopped or frozen. For seamless production across a nation, a reliable energy source is indispensable. And water is the most eco-friendly source of large energy potential with least amount of pollution and least chances of environmental and man made disasters. 

NGO ideology is against big dams because only such meta-narratives can induce a national production harnessing electricity. Water achieves its sublime utilization potential when it is converted to electricity, which is nothing but a matter to energy conversion. A big dam is not only a generator of energy but an integrator for a nation of diverse cultures. It can integrate various productive sectors through irrigation and electricity. We know that Aswan dam in Egypt became the site of a national identity. Thus big dams are the inhabitation that humans can create in a country or state having rivers and large coastlines. Thus big dams suits India, especially Kerala where we are bestowed with aplenty of rivers. 

Similarly, biodiversity is not a quality of nature devoid of human intervention. By human labour, nature becomes more diverse and agriculture is the most advanced form of biodiversity where a second productive nature is created on the fertile earth using maximum potential of soil and ground water. Keeping natural habitat untouched by indigenous population is always in the interest of the foreign market. 

NGOs shed tears for the trees cut, ignoring the plight of millions of Indians with dry throat and empty stomach. Dollars were funnelled to their intestines. The NGOs ravaging against the use of Kunti River for irrigation are muted when it comes to the consumption of bottled water in a land of 44 rivers.  Reading through the subsequent periods, we can see that the NGO ideology was a prelude to the civil society organizations that promoted Religious extremism, Dalitism, Feminism, Gay-lesbian rights and Naxalism. These ideologies were taken as the surrogates to intrude into nation states with the agenda of the imperium to fragment the nation states. 

Thus Silent Valley is an evergreen victim to the Imperial agenda to freeze the industrial and agricultural initiatives with a national perspective. And Environmental NGOs have replaced the national perspective with the localization agenda which is the product of globalization itself. This ideology continue to ripe more sites of fissure in Indian state through purchasing more and more marginalized lives using foreign funds and donor agencies. 

Pen is more expensive than the Sword !

Paid News Syndrome :

The Rot lies at the Root

News is defined to be the concoction of contemporary events and truth. But it seems to be an aging one in the new domains of public sphere. Editors Guild of India has observed that political parties are victims of 'paid news syndrome' during elections, and the opposition parties are favouring amendments in the Representation of the People Act to declare such news as an electoral malpractice. The facts demand much wider attention. It has taken many years for this malaise to come to the centre stage of media criticism. The syndrome is no more the apt word. It has become cancerous now.

The issue is now acting from both the sides of media and politics. The Political icons keenly ready to pay for an inflated image whereas media tycoons are double ready with their rate charts. This vicious circle (Money – Media – Politics) needs cure from political action as well as media conscience. When Congress CM of Haryana, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, revealed with such an ease that he paid a media establishment for painting his ‘proper’ image it shows the depth of the disease. 

First it was a meet of South Asia Free Media Association (India chapter) in Mumbai during the first week of December last year, where the issue of paid news was officially discussed with serious concern. Then came the annual general meeting of the Editors' Guild of India during the fourth week of December, where most of the members expressed concern at the growing tendency of a section of media groups (both print and electronic) to receive money for some 'non-advertorial' items in their media space. 

Media, by and large, is the generator of public opinion and reflector of social discourses. It is the same function that the vested invested groups want to exploit. Media exercises the legitimizing function with the definite ideological bent. This complicates the situation further. The entire cluster of all this is the media business of our day. By this very existence as a profit making and profit craving entity, contemporary media is loosing all the credibility in the public sphere. 

But unfazed by this trend of history, media barons are showing arrogance just to attract the honeycomb they hold –even the ‘editorial space’ for sale. Just to note here, political masters are not innocent either. It is their clumsy politics and the way they are detached from public that make them afraid of ‘paid news’ black mailing. Now the ‘good, bad and the ugly’ have come out in the public to reveal the devastating extent of this malaise. And that can make a different twist to this story. 

Every eyes and nerves of press loving people are tuned to watch out what the recently formed ethics committee of Editors Guild will do in this scenario. It can engage media in a monitoring and regulating exercise for sure. But the problem does not end there, nor it is rooted there. It lies at the core of the Business model centred on sheer profiteering. And it is striking chords now only because it has started to intrude into the sheaths of political society. 

In Parliament, BJP leader Arun Jaitley has described paid news phenomenon as ‘Bribery of the media’. “It interdicts the process of free and fair elections. It violates the limits set out by the Election Commission for expenditure in elections. Black money, in consideration of ‘paid news’ violates provisions of the income tax act.” He said. Jaitley argued that “paid news” was not free speech and, therefore, not protected by Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution — which guarantees the right. It can, he said, be restricted by enacting a law that empowers the Election Commission to refer “paid news” matters to a tribunal headed by a serving judge, and provides for exemplary punishment.

The CPM’s Sitaram Yechury wanted government ads stopped to those purveying “paid news”. The press council has set up a sub-committee to look into the issue, and its report is expected soon. After that, the government is expected to draw up rules giving the council more powers to tackle the problem.

Conceding these measures to be partially effective, we should march ahead extra miles to think beyond the issues it has created to the electoral system. Beyond the consternation of politicians, ‘paid news’ is a far departure from the duties that the press owes to this country and the right for information. In this context the argument by N.Bhaskara Rao, the founder chairman of CMS Academy of Communication & Convergence studies is worth noting. He is arguing for bringing Media under the purview of RTI. In addition to this he has advocated that Government media campaigns, other than on specific occasions, be discouraged six months before elections. 

The paid news phenomenon or otherwise known as ‘packaged journalism’ is not form of corruption practiced by a few journalists, says renowned journalist P.Sainath. He accuses that it has become a media-run game worth hundreds of millions of rupees. And it has grinded axe at the very foundation of our democratic process. For taking cure of this, the ongoing structural changes in media should be regulated immediately. If not, rather than supporting the three pillars of the state, media will transplant or supplant the entire state with its own market propaganda. Let’s keep eyes on nerves. 

Creative Marxist Conceptions

Bakhtin: 
In Context of Literary Revolutions

Many of the biographical sketches about the prominent literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975 ) are branding him as a neo-Kantian philosopher . His friendship with Matvei Kagan who later joined the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, is sited as a reason for this analysis. Hermann Cohen later formed the Marburg school and focused on the problems of epistemology and logic. We can see that neo-Kantians could never resolve the issues of idealist notions on Knowledge and empirical perspectives on the social activity of humans. They never went beyond the idealist architecture of Kantian system. 

Worse to say, neo-Kantianism became a inflated rhetoric over the universal human phenomenology posited by Kant. This sort of ideological position was a reflection of the continuing crisis in the bourgeoisie idealism in the times of World war. It reflected the desperate attempt by bourgeois ideologies to encapsulate the horizons of enlightenment. And many a times neo-Kantians reduced their 'philosophical positions' to mere personal allegations and quarrels. This inevitable locus of events made young George Lukcas to desert his early Kantian notions on the theory of knowledge which is reflected in his early works ( 'Theory of a Novel' ).

Regarding Bakhtinian studies, none of these analysts are showing any interest in seeing the semiotic trajectory of his materialist discourse which traverses the literary works and epistemological structures, toppling the monolithic hierarchies ( and underlying class positions ) and idealist narratives. In Bakhtin's positions, we can see the evolution of a language subsystem with semiotic value system based on the underlying process of historical materialism. He tried to explore the multitude of dimensions of signs and its historic semiotics. 

For him, 'Sign was never arbitrary'. He tried to create new pathways in semiotics by widening the domains of semiosis. Bakhtin was always analytical of the parody in literary works. For him, it was a site of the dialogic imagination. This is the major focus in his doctoral thesis 'Rabelais and his world'. It was a work on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais. Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in this thesis. His semiotic orientation is reflected in selecting a work of Parody as a site of textual analysis. 

A work of Parody and satire with dialogic potential will be imminent in the creation of new cultural signs. This can be attributed in his choice of Rabelais. Bakhtin identifies a rare unity of contradicting discourses in the Political satire of Rabelais, which communicated well with the people of his times. It was rich in folk spectacle, carnival atmosphere and festivity of images. But interestingly this aesthetics was too cryptic for the critics of next two centuries. For them, it was too heterogeneous and in eighteenth century it became too incompatible. 

All these can be traced in the works of his imitators (Des Periers , Noel du Fail) itself. Grotesque was used to convey the contradictory and double faced fullness of life in the works of Rabelais. This became a mere shadow in the works of imitators. Bakhtin identifies the elements of dialectics in the composition of grotesque when he invokes the process of negation of negation to describe the organic birth of anew life from the destruction happening in grotesque.

"Negation and destruction ( death of the old ) are included in the essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image ( food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, increase." 

(Page 62, Rabelais and his world By Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin )

Here we can see Bakhtinian prism traversing through the layers of grotesque image. We have seen similar analysis of archetypal symbols in the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung. But this is evidently more near to the processes of historical materialism. And he identifies the embedded but distorted positivity of primitive life in the compositions and ideological strata of myths. To be more precise, grotesque is materialistic and repellent towards the ideological forces. Always it shows its primitiveness and innate dynamics, even towards much forceful and static lattice of ideology.

If we turn to his notion of 'quoted speech', it throws light on the otherwise cryptic space of our inner speech and on the dynamics involved in the verbal communication. This framework runs through his analysis of the multiplicity of styles involved the discourse of novel. He says that all our communicative acts are reuse or use of quoted speech of others. Thus he locates the dialectic elements of 'I /Other' in the space - time conjecture of speech. 'I /Other ' compound is termed as a dual sign by many Bakhtin analysts. This notion 

is an omission of the historical process behind the dynamics of 'I / Other'. The meanings of the 'I /Other' are positioned with respect to the common material system of language. Hence 'I/Other' cannot exist as independent duals.

Another aspect of debate is about Bakhtin's interest on the folk culture. Linguistic carnival is an essential element in his studies on the culture of the so called lower strata of society. This notion is a negation of the class hierarchies as represented in many of the art works ( Edgar Allan Poe, Doestovsky etc ). And he writes about the carnival atmosphere in the medieval plays. It is deep rooted in primordial order and primordial thinking of man. But he stresses that it is not a literary phenomenon. He annotates it as a syncretic paegentry of ritualistic sort. [Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics ]. He is always careful to say that it can only be transposed into the realms of literature. Here we see Bakhtin traversing beyond the limits of verbal language itself. 

It is also to be noted that Bakhtin's notions about the organics of lower strata of life is quite different from the postmodern notion of subalterns. Bakhtin says that in carnival there are no divisions of performers and spectators. It is not contemplated ; not even performed. In Bakhtin's varied investigations , thus we can see the revolutionary trajectory of a Marxian radiance through the obscure most and primordial terrains of human civilization. Still , a lot to unearth from his theory of discourse and language that spans more than 6 decades of explorations .

Beloved Nature

I must be amused at the corner of happenings and eventualities of memories. Cognition and its immanency is quite potent enough to attract meanings and its inner relations. Breaking all the barriers and intermittent deficiencies conflicts should attain their self imposed exiles .... Vibrant weather to follow!