If you are in Kolkata between 27 June and 2 July, you may do well to visit the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata, for an exhibition of photographs of Singur. There will also be a panel discussion and a film festival.

This information comes to Kafila from Trina Banerji of the Citizens' Initiative which blogs at Development Dialogues.

Programme details:

Photo exhibition: The photographs will remain mounted for viewing everyday from 2 to 8 pm at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata.

Panel discussion and open forum
Friday 27 June, 4:30 pm: ‘On the Representation of Displacement and Development’

Speakers:
- Professor Samik Bandyopadhyay (Senior Film Critic and Scholar)
- Dr Kavita Panjabi (Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University)
- Dr Rajarshi Dasgupta (Fellow in Political Science, CSSSC)
- Dr Paromita Chakravarti (Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Jadavpur University)

Film festival

Saturday 28 June 2008

11.00 am: Bombay: Our City – Anand Patwardhan (India: 1985, 82 min)
2.00 pm: Mahua Memoirs – Vinod Raja (India: 2007, 80 min)
4.30 pm: Czech Dream – Vit Klusak and Felip Remunda (Czechoslovakia: 2004, 90 min)
6.00 pm: An Aura of Development – Shubhasree Bhattacharyya and Sumantra Roy (India: 2008, 65 min)
7.00 pm: Unnayan - Banduker Nole – Pramod Gupta (India: 2007, 44 min)

Sunday 29 July 2008

11.00 am: A Narmada Diary – Anand Patwardhan (India: 1996, 60 min)
2.00 pm: Still Life – Zhang ke Jia (Hong Kong: 2006, 111 min)
4.30 pm: Mahua Memoirs – Vinod Raja (India: 2007, 80 min)
6.00 pm: Teardrops of Karnaphuli – Tanvir Mokammel (Bangladesh: 2006, 60 min)

About Citizens' Initiative:

We at The Citizens’ Initiative are trying to organize a continuing open discussion on the paradigms of development and the relationship, in this context, between politics and ethics. These issues, we feel, are extremely important given the kind of state-sponsored violence that people are facing all over India and particularly in West Bengal.

The group of students, researchers, and teachers that is the CI started out in February 2007 to debate and question the cost of development and the growing schism between ethics and contemporary political culture. Questions have also begun to arise on the naive equation of the 'partisan' with the 'political', and the brushing aside of any non-partisan civil political action as not just irrelevant, but, as in some circles it is fashionable to say, 'anti-political.' The role of the civil society in a democracy is a subject of critical re-examination now, and it is the disregard for non-partisan opinion and the consequences of it that have led us to discuss and take more concrete actions.

We launched this initiative with a one-day seminar on 16 February 2008 on 'Development and Ethics', where the speakers were Dr Dilip Simeon and Dr Aseem Shrivastava. Dr Dilip Simeon taught history at Delhi University for several years and is currently a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. Dr Aseem Shrivastava has a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has taught Economics at various universities in the US and India, and Philosophy at Nordic College in Norway. He is an independent writer who writes on various contemporary themes like globalisation, human rights and US foreign policy. At the seminar, Dr Simeon spoke on ‘Ethics and Contemporary Political Culture’, and Dr Shrivastava’s talk was titled ‘SEZ and the Cost of Development’.

Our next event was a workshop on the legal possibilities of the common citizen’s redress of wrongs. Mr Sabir Ahamed of the RTI Mancha spoke on the Right to Information and Mr Sujato Bhadra of Association for Protection of Democratic Rights spoke on Public Interest Litigations.
We have visited Singur six times since February 2008. A full report of our findings is to be released shortly, and a brief interim report is now ready for dissemination. In the last few months, we have carried relief – in the form of clothes, rice and pulses – to Dobandi in Singur (in March 2008), and organized a medical camp there (on 18 May 2008) with the help of the Centre for Care of Torture Victims. But neither of these efforts reflects our primary objectives. Our most ardent wish is to everywhere induce long-term reflection on models – and ethics – of development, and to contribute to reconstructive thought and efforts in the areas already adversely affected by the present political take on development. We have extensively photographed life in Singur and how it has been affected by the fencing-off of the land for the Tata Motors factory. Very few people in Kolkata have any idea of what Singur looks like, and press photographs can perhaps tell only a minuscule portion of the story. Our photographs are aimed at covering this invisible distance between the affected village and the urban centre – to put it simply, to show what development looks like in reality.

However, we should stress that we have not been to Singur as unaffected photographers who are there to snatch images and leave. We wish to be able to propose/introduce alternative means of livelihood for people who have for generations been based in agriculture. Unhappily, the government’s promises that alternative training and employment shall be the norm rather than the exception among all peoples displaced from land and/or livelihood, have been resoundingly empty. In even our limited ways, we hope that we shall, in a few months, be able to organize in Singur training workshops on certain alternative means of livelihood like machine knitting, embroidery, machine embroidery, and even cultivation of mushrooms.

citizensinitiativecal@gmail.com

by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

In the wake of the development debates around the nation, one witnesses an interesting array of articles—polemical as well as academic—that takes on headlong issues of political intervention by developing the terms of negotiation and deliberation in a certain direction. And that is the story of growing up—that democracy is the story of pragma, of mature understanding of the contestatory space. These are reminders that politics of good intentions is benign self-deception. Worse: it is apolitical, prophetic, self-indulgent.

Indeed, who would deny the role of tactical moves and innovations in our everyday existence? David Runciman once noted that hypocrisy is a noble tribute that vice pays to virtue. It binds together the social contract. Besides, politics is also an ever-evolving domain and newness in ground reality must be complemented with newness in conceptual innovation. It is in such a context that Partha Chatterjee’s recent piece in EPW makes sense. He has indeed clarified to a large extent the role of his foundational idea of the political society in current conditions.

But surely political moves and contestations can take different directions; innovation and gaming evolve sometimes from another significant attribute in politics: vigilance—possibly another name for demokratia—originally the power of the people. The crucial notions of institutional violence, engaging with ethical apathy and consequent watchdog associational formations play an important role in such a concept of the vigilant society. Strategic usages of subjective concerns—simple indignation at the state of affairs, for instance, can also play a distinct part in democratic negotiations. So, in the context of Chatterjee’s piece I wish to address two issues that seem to beg for a larger framework of innovation than he allows: the idea of democracy itself and the issue of affect and solidarity formation in contemporary India.

Democracy as Principled Pragmatism

If we take the term democracy seriously, both as a form of government in India as well as a political principle, one would notice Chatterjee pitches his arguments at the level of what can be called moderate mainstream liberalism, but writing stylistically as a member of the critical left. He carries his legacy of working closely with the subaltern studies initiative ingenuously. There is a sleight of hand involved here. Consider for instance, the works of Joseph Schumpeter, who famously brought back the nihilist idea of creative destruction in order to make a case for corporatism. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he advocates a theory of democracy in which the idea of the rule of the people is undesirable and unrealistic. The competitive structure of representative democracy precludes participation in a deeper sense. Rather, sooner the people realize the strategies of democracy and enjoin the game, the better equipped they are for their well being. Chatterjee’s political society is Schumpeter’s dream come true: the use of violence in peasant agitation has “a calculative, almost utilitarian logic” and yet cannot be framed wholly within the structures of govermentality, Chatterjee informs us. The political society works in relative electoral strengths as opposed to majoritarian equations, critiques property and privilege and yet it is desirous of living in the non-corporate structures of capital, fundamentally glad to participate within the ethos of the poverty-removal programs and rehabilitation packages that the managerial class has to offer it. The crucial question is whether this double tendency of the political society is democratic, nay, political in the first place.

Let me address the question of democracy from three angles and view Chatterjee’s diagnosis of the contemporary Indian scenario. This is important also for the historicist argument that Chatterjee offers—that the readings of the demos in India today has to be different than what was offered 25 years ago. One, considering democracy to be coterminous with the evolution of modernity in the West, beginning sometime in the seventeenth century. Two, to bring into the table a more recent and politically influential term: radical democracy, especially while evaluating the idea of the political society. And finally, and more significantly, whether one can salvage and associate an innovative classical notion of the term with what we are witnessing today, in the arguments with the discourse of development from Nandigram to Raigad.

Suppose we take democracy to be coterminous with the story of modernity, we will come across two distinct strands. One begins in the universal rights theory of medieval Europe—one that reaches Thomas Hobbes via Vitoria, Molina, Bodin, Suarez, Grotius and Pufendorf—and which use that very idea as an excuse for building empire in the two Americas to begin with. Most of these apologists of rights are royalist sympathizers and use the idea of individual enterprise, not unlikely as a creative innovation, a la Schumpter. John Locke, famously the designer of The Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas in 1669 was at the same time a co-conspirator in the Rye House Plot, which planned to assassinate Charles II and future James II around 1682-83. Parliamentarians too have routinely played this double game of political innovation.

There is a different line of liberalism though—which has obvious material concerns, believes in political franchise and structures of representative democracy, and yet hark for associations and collectives. Concerns for individual liberty, material equality and communitarian ethics have been the cornerstone for many radical republicans, agnostics and sectarians. John Lilburne, the maverick early modern Leveller talked about democratic principles and property rights in tandem with Coke’s dictum on ancient laws in England. Ideas of common law got transferred into natural, participatory laws in Leveller demands. Significantly, subjective pietistic innovation (without being necessarily messianic) was a prime basis to such associational politics—and I’ll argue still is. But more on this later. In more recent times one recalls people centered governance councils. The Habitat Conservation planning under the US Endangered Species Act emphasizes the holders to evolve governance arrangements that will satisfy human relationship bonding as well as the protection of endangered species. The Participatory Budget of Porte Allegre, Brazil, likewise enables residents siphon off finance away from patronage payoffs to secure common goods that are actual problem centered.

Is India a democracy without association? It would seem that the twin pressures of party politics on one hand and religious and caste affiliations on the other, have paid put to any meaningful democratic associationism in India. But such claims have been discredited at least since the late nineteenth century when voluntary associations worked towards community and public end, and not always pragmatically. Consider especially the associations that sprung forth around JP, taking a cue from the Sarvodaya principles in the seventies. The Navanirman Yuvak Samiti in Gujarat and Chattra Sangharsh Samitis and Janta Sarkars in Bihar in early seventies are sites that remind us of deeply democratic associations in India that worked on principles not congruent with Chatterjee’s political society. One crucial difference, of course, is in the key area of demand of popular control over collective decisions. The political society clearly will be more interested in self-aggrandizement and only secondarily and pragmatically on collective bargaining. Chatterjee’s arguments and examples are historical and contemporary though and he does assert his conclusions on the basis of field study. The groundswell of solidarity, sometimes surely and astutely strategic, in Bengal at least on both sides of the divide, in and around the Nandigram massacre since October last year eludes him, because the interpretive burden of such an analyses will destabilize the neat applecart of the political society. The vigilant society, as I refer to the groups of local organizers, bloggers, community bodies, civic networks that mobilized (and is still working on) itself cautiously and gradually operates, did always operate, via hidden and sometimes not so hidden transcripts. Regardless of the recent panchayat electoral fallout, that has not been too flattering for the strategic political society anyway, the vigilant society carries on crying hoarse over exploitation, and not merely discrimination.

One has to also mark some key points here about a schism that bothers Chatterjee in his formulation of the political society. And that schism has to do with state violence and ethical apathy—attributes that are not part of his imaginative terrain in the transformed democratic India. I am referring to the difference in political gradient between peasant mentalite and formations of the urban lower class. While Chatterjee is almost certain that non-corporate capital in the cities and middling towns are gravitating towards civil society in matters economic, he is less certain about peasants in rural India, what with the spiraling suicide rates and their skepticism about market mechanisms in general.

The idea of civility is also crucial. Partha Chatterjee’s civil society is already sold to acquisitive and possessive incentives and hence is out of bounds for political intervention. This is narrowing down the democratic possibilities from the other end of the spectrum. If one buys to a modern urbane Hegelian notion of the civil society, or to the notion of the patrician or to a purely utilitarian variety of it, Chatterjee’s formulation does make sense. But there is an older definition of the civic that is participatory and other regarding, relying on the principle of vita activa civilis. It relies on messiness and discord in building up political decisions around issues.

This leads us to a more classical notion of democracy, something that has always conceptually eluded Chatterjee. I am thinking of Leo Strauss, Eric Havelock or Josiah Ober’s works on ancient liberalism. I also recall John Pocock on Florentine political ideals, especially the associations around the minor guilds and the subsequent Ciompi (wool carders) revolt n 1378 when republicanism truly took a radical shape. The civic overlapped with the ludic, as it were. A brooding sense of politics, which unites the demos with chaos and cosmos is one reigning concern in such a political imagination. It provides political actors with a sense of humility. Political change is highlighted time and again in conceiving sovereignty. The stakes lie with the polis, not with the purse. Trust is an important notion: not sentimental balderdash but a certain judicious judgment, a state of constant public hope, shall we say, prevail among citoyens. Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is a good example that highlights such optimism. This sense of buoyancy, paradoxically aligned to forces beyond the immediate, is alien to Chatterjee’s middlebrow political society.

I am not for a moment suggesting a telos around virtue or implying that Bengal has suddenly transformed into such a world. That would be absurd and culturally meaningless. It is the structural reverberations that I refer to rather. What is unmistakable after Nandigram is that there is a momentous realization in certain key sections of the much-vilified middle class that there is more to politics than the usual metaphors of merit or equality. The story from denationalization to the emergence of civil society has not been uniform in India. An altered notion of the civic is in the air for sure. Part of the civil society, I’d argue, is getting radically vigilant; not romantically but at the level of political programmes too. Undoubtedly, such a swing in mood has to do with strategies and maneuverings within existing possibilities, but the intentions and incentives are not always managerial.

Affect and Solidarity

The first end note to the piece narrates an interesting story of the razing of entire village of Gobindapur in 1758 by the British in order to erect Fort William in Calcutta and the surrounding ground called the Maidan, now often revered by radical environmentalist as a gift of Gaia or mother earth to the city. Chatterjee relativizes the issue of violence by harking on to the notion of forgetting: “Forgetfulness is a necessary attribute not only of modernizers but also of its critics,” he ruminates.

It’s a valid point. The division is stark though. There exist a lot of intermediate positions between a deep ecologist and an instrumental rationalist. Some stand outside of that spectrum. Most classically oriented modernizers hardly envisage peppering the city with foliage, nor with doing away with the quotidian humdrum that a city provides. Thus, in poet and litterateur Buddhadeb Bose’s writings we find an intense imagination of the urban soundscape: factory siren taking off, an odd generator whizzing, drone of a steamer plying over Ganga and so forth. Or take Mihir Sengupta, whose literary oeuvre has a direct bearing upon the politics of the subcontinent. He has imagined the experience of a pre-partition Barisal district by evoking the metaphor of a backyard canal— pichharar khaal—in his work Bishadbrikkho. This tour de force is no celebration of unsullied, pristine nature and yet gives us wider ontological connection to our surrounding. Relationships are formed and nurtured within diverse elements, the canal facilitating the ups and downs in the narrative. Forgetfulness is as much a human attribute as memory and belonging, Sengupta reminds us. It is a layered appreciation.

To appreciate this relational structure between diversity is essential if we are to understand the idea of land or property acquisition by some entity that is outside of such structures. I would tend to think that land grabbing has a strong ethical component associated with it, something that primitive accumulation approach does not address fully, in two related senses—one philosophical and the other sociological. Primitive accumulation in its pristine sense is the means of divorcing the producer from the means of production, right? The robbery of the common lands and usurpation of clan property into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism is directly connected to enclosure movement in early modern Europe, a variation of what we are seeing in changed global circumstances today in India. I would think primitive accumulation itself is constitutive of an ethical move: from an ethics of community to that of austere self-discipline. Hindu rate of growth and local ties and affinities must give way to a Weberian ethics of possessive individualism. It surely is impersonal and yet the ethical shift is not lost upon us. Certainly, the welfare entitlements to labour law provisions to provisions for community review of land use decisions that the state now shuns has a collective dimension embedded to it, and hence a particular ethos of living associated to it. This is changing in the era of primitive globalisation and subnational mercantilism, if I may borrow a term from sociology, to denote what has been happening in India of late. There is no sense of concomitant international economic integration. Such state fragmentation inevitably fails to suggest sustainable forms of social action and hence thwart innovative modes of governance. But there is an ethical loss in this shift too, in the sense that severs cross-class, cross-race, cross regional and intergenerational social exchanges that stand in the way of short-term economic activity.

Affect is an elusive entity in Chatterjee. He begins by writing off Gandhi, Gramsci, Mao and Ranajit Guha and effectively doing away with solidarity based on moral economy owing to the deepening reach of the developmental state under conditions of electoral democracy. The state has now solved this existential crisis of rural life and hence romanticism for a pre-capitalist society is useless. But on the other hand, we learn from him towards the end that the political society is not all anaemic and lifeless, even as it functions within the terrain of govermentality. He turns cautious lest his political society looks utterly indifferent and mechanical. Hence, while discussing the rural peasant axis of his political community, he expects from time to time some emotive responses and militant action from them. Emotion is almost a safety valve that legitimizes political society and its negotiations with the state. This fails to take seriously a deluge of events and concomitant critical literature that has burgeoned in the last two decades dealing with the notion of the political in a deeply subjective fashion. The dialectic of enlightenment goes both ways.

Indeed, mutuality of relations based on justice and fairness does not always address relationality in its fullness. Those who function within the moral economy framework may not have delved deep enough in excavating relational entities. Charles Taylor cautions us in The Secular Age that a relational political condition cannot be understood in terms of mere human flourishing but must be located in the interspace between subjectivities. If we are to make sense at all of political passion, one has to give in to a deeply ringing world where relationships happen independently of us. Objects and agents impose themselves upon the members of the vigilant society, bringing them into their field of force. And such agnosticism does function within the material register, within the everyday.

However, there is something to be learnt from Chatterjee in this context. His piece can be effective as a timely reminder that sheer anti-privilege, anti-prerogative prophetic pamphleteering fails to get the broad middle rally along with the margin against the developmental schemes. We cannot afford to go back to varieties Fabianism or cultural conservatism. Nor is it always useful in the long run to form alliances of convenience as is the trend is some places in Bengal today. The deluge of broadsheets and blogs that deal with the subjectivity issue marking it as a bulwark against the economism that marks the liberal state is astonishing, and yet people are not sufficiently enamoured by such purity, such righteousness. In fact, there is a thin line between existential left and emotive right.

In his memoir Rajani Kothari talked about democracy as a powerful myth, the belief in which cannot be questioned. Neither the Liberal nor the Marxist nor even the Gandhian or the still deeper spiritual ideological conceptions provides us with a workable entry point in the emancipator logic of democracy, was his conclusion. Effective dictatorships require great leaders; effective democracies needed great citizens, Kothari said, and such citizens need to dwell deep into their own psychic, cultural and existential areans of striving in order to conceive a throbbing polity. Such grandeur of imagination has been rarely matched in the political imagination of the subcontinent. A political philosophy of principled pragmatism can only aspire to look soulfully at such classicality.

]]> http://beacononline.wordpress.com/?p=2966 Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:07:19 +0000 barunroy http://beacononline.wordpress.com/?p=2966 Kolkata, June 14 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee today asked West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee to tread the path required to be followed in participatory democracy. [Inset: Pranab Mukherjee. Source : Indian Parliament Database Sys]

Stating that factories and roads could not be built in the skies, Mukherjee said that land was required for this, for which the state government should share the roadmap prepared by the industry and commerce department with all responsible members of society.

Speaking at the annual general meeting of Merchants' Chamber of Commerce here, Mukherjee said, "We must follow this path." Mukherjee's statements assume significance in the light of recent setbacks received by the CPI(M) in panchayat polls in Nandigram and Singur where land acquisition has emerged as a burning issue.

"After our experience in Singur and Nandigram, we must be careful and come out with a proper rehabilitation package," Bhattacharjee said. PTI

The CPRM is a party formed in 1996 by CPM dissidents, including the likes of former MPs Tamang Dawa Lama and R.B. Rai.

The CPRM delegation to the administrative headquarters of the Bengal government in Calcutta was led by Arun Dattani, a central committee member of the party’s youth wing — the Democratic Revolutionary Youth Federation (DRYF).

The CPRM endorsed the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s demand for Gorkhaland and demanded the immediate release of their leader Chhatrey Subba.

Subba was arrested eight years ago for an alleged murder attempt on GNLF chief and former administrator of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, Subash Ghisingh.

“Yes, we fully support the Gorkhaland cause, and we want a separate state without further delay. Subba must also be released. The authorities have framed him. He has been behind bars without trial for many years. This should not happen in a democracy,” Dattani said after the meeting.

The CPRM also put forth their demand for Rs 5-lakh — on the lines of the Nandigram package — for the next of kin of 1,200 people who died during the Gorkhaland agitation of the eighties.

“Over two decades ago, 1,200 people were murdered. Relatives of the dead were granted just Rs 8,000 as compensation by the hill council. If the next of kin of those killed in Nandigram can get Rs 5 lakh, why should the families of our martyrs be discriminated against,” asked the DRYF leader.

The CPRM is a part of the People’s Democratic Front, opposed to the GNLF in the hills, together with the ABGL, the Congress, the GNLF(C) and the BJP.

The party has been backing the Morcha from the time it was formed last year.

Economic & Political Weekly
April 19, 2008 [Download PDF]

Democracy and Economic Transformation in India

With the changes in India over the past 25 years, there is now a new dynamic logic that ties the operations of “political society” (comprising the peasantry, artisans and petty producers in the informal sector) with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in “civil society”. This logic is provided by the requirement of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation of capital with activities like anti-poverty programmes. This is a necessary political condition for the continued rapid growth of corporate capital. The state, with its mechanisms of electoral democracy, becomes the field for the political negotiation of demands for the transfer of resources, through fiscal and other means, from the accumulation economy to programmes aimed at providing the livelihood needs of the poor. Electoral democracy makes it unacceptable for the government to leave the marginalised groups without the means of labour and to fend for themselves, since this carries the risk of turning them into the “dangerous classes”.

Partha Chatterjee

The first volume of Subaltern Studies was published in 1982. I was part of the editorial group 25 years ago that launched, under the leadership of Ranajit Guha, this critical engagement with Indian modernity from the standpoint of the subaltern classes, especially the peasantry. In the quarter of a century that has passed since then, there has been, I believe, a fundamental change in the situation prevailing in postcolonial India. The new conditions under which global flows of capital, commodities, information and people are now regulated – a complex set of phenomena generally clubbed under the category of globalisation – have created both new opportunities and new obstacles for the Indian ruling classes. The old idea of a third world, sharing a common history of colonial oppression and backwardness, is no longer as persuasive as it was in the 1960s. The trajectory of economic growth taken by the countries of Asia has diverged radically from that of most African countries. The phenomenal growth of China and India in recent years, involving two of the most populous agrarian countries of the world, has set in motion a process of social change that, in its scale and speed, is unprecedented in human history.

1 Peasant Society Today

In this context, I believe it has become important to revisit the question of the basic structures of power in Indian society, especially the position of the peasantry. This is not because I think that the advance of capitalist industrial growth is inevitably breaking down peasant communities and turning peasants into proletarian workers, as has been predicted innumerable times in the last century and a half. On the contrary, I will argue that the forms of capitalist industrial growth now under way in India will make room for the preservation of the peasantry, but under completely altered conditions. The analysis of these emergent forms of postcolonial capitalism in India under conditions of electoral democracy requires new conceptual work.

Let me begin by referring to the recent incidents of violent agitation in different regions of India, especially in West Bengal and Orissa, against the acquisition of agricultural land for industry. There have also been agitations in several states against the entry of corporate capital into the retail market for food and vegetables. The most talked about incidents occurred in Nandigram in West Bengal, on which much has been written

If these incidents had taken place 25 years ago, we would have seen in them the classic signs of peasant insurgency. Here were the long familiar features of a peasantry, tied to the land and small-scale agriculture, united by the cultural and moral bonds of a local rural community, resisting the agents of an external state and of city-based commercial institutions by using both peaceful and violent means. Our analysis then could have drawn on a long tradition of anthropological studies of peasant societies, focusing on the characteristic forms of dependence of peasant economies on external institutions such as the state and dominant classes such as landlords, moneylenders and traders, but also of the forms of autonomy of peasant cultures based on the solidarity of a local moral community.

We could have also linked our discussion to a long tradition of political debates over the historical role of the peasantry under conditions of capitalist growth, beginning with the Marxist analysis in western Europe of the inevitable dissolution of the peasantry as a result of the process of primitive accumulation of capital, Lenin’s debates in Russia with the Narodniks, Mao Zedong’s analysis of the role of the peasantry in the Chinese Revolution, and the continuing debates over Gandhi’s vision of a free India where a mobilised peasantry in the villages would successfully resist the spread of industrial capitalism and the violence of the modern state. Moreover, using the insights drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s writings, we could have talked about the contradictory consciousness of the peasantry in which it was both dominated by the forms of the elite culture of the ruling classes and, at the same time, resistant to them. Twenty-five years ago, we would have seen these rural agitations in terms of the analysis provided by Ranajit Guha in his classic 1983 work Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.

I believe that analysis would be inappropriate today. I say this for the following reasons. First, the spread of governmental technologies in India in the last three decades, as a result of the deepening reach of the developmental state under conditions of electoral democracy, has meant that the state is no longer an external entity to the peasant community. Governmental agencies distributing education, health services, food, roadways, water, electricity, agricultural technology, emergency relief and dozens of other welfare services have penetrated deep into the interior of everyday peasant life. Not only are peasants dependent on state agencies for these services, they have also acquired considerable skill, albeit to a different degree in different regions, in manipulating and pressurising these agencies to deliver these benefits. Institutions of the state, or at least governmental agencies (whether state or non-state), have become internal aspects of the peasant community.

Second, the reforms since the 1950s in the structure of agrarian property, even though gradual and piecemeal, have meant that except in isolated areas, for the first time in centuries, small peasants possessing land no longer directly confront an exploiting class within the village, as under feudal or semi-feudal conditions. This has had consequences that are completely new for the range of strategies of peasant politics.

Third, since the tax on land or agricultural produce is no longer a significant source of revenue for the government, as in colonial or pre-colonial times, the relation of the state to the peasantry is no longer directly extractive, as it often was in the past.

Fourth, with the rapid growth of cities and industrial regions, the possibility of peasants making a shift to urban and nonagricultural occupations is no longer a function of their pauperisation and forcible separation from the land, but is often a voluntary choice, shaped by the perception of new opportunities and new desires.

Fifth, with the spread of school education and widespread exposure to modern communications media such as the cinema, television and advertising, there is a strong and widespread desire among younger members, both male and female, of peasant families not to live the life of a peasant in the village and instead to move to the town or the city, with all its hardships and uncertainties, because of its lure of anonymity and upward mobility. This is particularly significant for India where the life of poor peasants in rural society is marked not only by the disadvantage of class but also by the discriminations of caste, compared to which the sheer anonymity of life in the city is often seen as liberating. For agricultural labourers, of whom vast numbers are from the dalit communities, the desired future is to move out of the traditional servitude of rural labour into urban non-agricultural occupations.

2 A New Conceptual Framework

I may have emphasised the novelty of the present situation too sharply; in actual fact, the changes have undoubtedly come more gradually over time. But I do believe that the novelty needs to be stressed at this time in order to ask: how do these new features of peasant life affect our received theories of the place of the peasantry in postcolonial India? Kalyan Sanyal, an economist teaching in Kolkata, has attempted a fundamental revision of these theories in his recent (2007) book Rethinking Capitalist Development. In the following discussion, I will use some of his formulations in order to present my own arguments on this subject.

The key concept in Sanyal’s analysis is the primitive accumulation of capital – sometimes called primary or original accumulation of capital. Like Sanyal, I too prefer to use this term in Marx’s sense to mean the dissociation of the labourer from the means of labour. There is no doubt that this is the key historical process that brings peasant societies into crisis with the rise of capitalist production. Marx’s analysis in the last chapters of volume one of Capital shows that the emergence of modern capitalist industrial production is invariably associated with the parallel process of the loss of the means of production on the part of primary producers such as peasants and artisans. The unity of labour with the means of labour, which is the basis of most pre-capitalist modes of production, is destroyed and a mass of labourers emerge who do not any more possess the means of production. Needless to say, the unity of labour with the means of labour is the conceptual counterpart in political economy of the organic unity of most pre-capitalist rural societies by virtue of which peasants and rural artisans are said to live in close bonds of solidarity in a local rural community. This is the familiar anthropological description of peasant societies as well as the source of inspiration for many romantic writers and artists portraying rural life. This is also the unity that is destroyed in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, throwing peasant societies into crisis.

The analysis of this crisis has produced, as I have already indicated, a variety of historical narratives ranging from the inevitable dissolution of peasant societies to slogans of worker-peasant unity in the building of a future socialist society. Despite their differences, the common feature in all these narratives is the idea of transition. Peasants and peasant societies under conditions of capitalist development are always in a state of transition – whether from feudalism to capitalism or from pre-capitalist backwardness to socialist modernity.

A central argument made by Sanyal in his book is that under present conditions of postcolonial development within a globalised economy, the narrative of transition is no longer valid. That is to say, although capitalist growth in a postcolonial society such as India is inevitably accompanied by the primitive accumulation of capital, the social changes that are brought about cannot be understood as a transition. How is that possible?

The explanation has to do with the transformations in the last two decades in the globally dispersed understanding about the minimum functions as well as the available technologies of government. There is a growing sense now that certain basic conditions of life must be provided to people everywhere and that if the national or local governments do not provide them, someone else must, whether it is other states or international agencies or non-governmental organisations. Thus, while there is a dominant discourse about the importance of growth, which in recent times has come to mean almost exclusively capitalist growth, it is, at the same time, considered unacceptable that those who are dispossessed of their means of labour because of the primitive accumulation of capital should have no means of subsistence. This produces, says Sanyal, a curious process in which, on the one side, primary producers such as peasants, craftspeople and petty manufacturers lose their land and other means of production, but, on the other, are also provided by governmental agencies with the conditions for meeting their basic needs of livelihood. There is, says Sanyal, primitive accumulation as well as a parallel process of the reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation.

Examples of Processes

It would be useful to illustrate this process with some examples. Historically, the process of industrialisation in all agrarian countries has meant the eviction of peasants from the land, either because the land was taken over for urban or industrial development or because the peasant no longer had the means to cultivate the land. Market forces were usually strong enough to force peasants to give up the land, but often direct coercion was used by means of the legal and fiscal powers of the state. From colonial times, government authorities in India have used the right of eminent domain to acquire lands to be used for “public purposes”, offering only a token compensation, if any.1 The idea that peasants losing land must be resettled somewhere else and rehabilitated into a new livelihood was rarely acknowledged. Historically, it has been said that the opportunities of migration of the surplus population from Europe to the settler colonies in the Americas and elsewhere made it possible to politically manage the consequences of primitive accumulation in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. No such opportunities exist today for India. More importantly, the technological conditions of early industrialisation which created the demand for a substantial mass of industrial labour have long passed. Capitalist growth today is far more capital-intensive and technology-dependent than it was even some decades ago. Large sections of peasants who are today the victims of the primitive accumulation of capital are completely unlikely to be absorbed into the new capitalist sectors of growth. Therefore, without a specific government policy of resettlement, the peasants losing their land face the possibility of the complete loss of their means of livelihood. Under present globally prevailing normative ideas, this is considered unacceptable. Hence, the old-fashioned methods of putting down peasant resistance by armed repression have little chance of gaining legitimacy. The result is the widespread demand today for the rehabilitation of displaced people who lose their means of subsistence because of industrial and urban development. It is not, says Sanyal, as though primitive accumulation is halted or even slowed down, for primitive accumulation is the inevitable companion to capitalist growth. Rather, governmental agencies have to find the resources to, as it were, reverse the consequences of primitive accumulation by providing alternative means of livelihood to those who have lost them.

We know that it is not uncommon for developmental states to protect certain sectors of production that are currently the domain of peasants, artisans and small manufacturers against competition from large corporate firms. But this may be interpreted as an attempt to forestall primitive accumulation itself by preventing corporate capital from entering into areas such as food crop or vegetable production or handicraft manufacture. However, there are many examples in many countries, including India, of governments and non-government agencies offering easy loans to enable those without the means of sustenance to find some gainful employment. Such loans are often advanced without serious concern for profitability or the prospect of the loan being repaid, since the money advanced here is not driven by the motive of further accumulation of capital but rather by that of providing the livelihood needs of the debtors – that is to say, by the motive of reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation. In recent years, these efforts have acquired the status of a globally circulating technology of poverty management: a notable instance is the microcredit movement initiated by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and its founder, the Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus. Most of us are familiar now with stories of peasant women in rural Bangladesh forming groups to take loans from the Grameen Bank to undertake small activities to supplement their livelihood and putting pressure on one another to repay the loan so that they can qualify for another round of credit. Similar activities have been introduced quite extensively in India in recent years.

Finally, as in other countries, government agencies in India provide some direct benefits to people who, because of poverty or other reasons, are unable to meet their basic consumption needs. This could be in the form of special poverty-removal programmes, or schemes of guaranteed employment in public works, or even direct delivery of subsidised or free food. Thus, there are programmes of supplying subsidised foodgrains to those designated as “below the poverty line”, guaranteed employment for up to 100 days in a year for those who need it, and free meals to children in primary schools. All of these may be regarded, in terms of our analysis, as direct interventions to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation.

It is important to point out that except for the last example of direct provision of consumption needs, most of the other mechanisms of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation involve the intervention of the market. This is the other significant difference in the present conditions of peasant life from the traditional models we have known. Except in certain marginal pockets, peasant and craft production in India today is fully integrated into a market economy. Unlike a few decades ago, there is almost no sector of household production that can be described as intended wholly for self-consumption or non-monetised exchange within a local community. Virtually all peasant and artisan production is for sale in the market and all consumption needs are purchased from the market. This, as we shall see, has an important bearing on recent changes in the conditions of peasant politics.

It is also necessary to point out that “livelihood needs” do not indicate a fixed quantum of goods determined by biological or other ahistorical criteria. It is a contextually determined, socially produced, sense of what is necessary to lead a decent life of some worth and self-respect. The composition of the set of elements that constitute “livelihood needs” will, therefore, vary with social location, cultural context and time. Thus, the expected minimum standards of healthcare for the family or minimum levels of education for one’s children will vary, as will the specific composition of the commodities of consumption such as food, clothes or domestic appliances. What is important here is a culturally determined sense of what is minimally necessary for a decent life, one that is neither unacceptably impoverished nor excessive and luxurious.

3 Transformed Structures of Political Power

To place these changes within a structural frame that describes how political power is held and exercised in postcolonial India, I also need to provide an outline of the transformation that, I believe, has taken place in that structure in recent years. Twentyfive years ago, the structure of state power in India was usually described in terms of a coalition of dominant class interests.
Pranab Bardhan (1984) identified the capitalists, the rich farmers and the bureaucracy as the three dominant classes, competing and aligning with one another within a political space supervised by a relatively autonomous state. Achin Vanaik (1990) also endorsed the dominant coalition model, emphasising in particular the relative political strength of the agrarian bourgeoisie which, he stressed, was far greater than its economic importance. He also insisted that even though India had never had a classical bourgeois revolution, its political system was nevertheless a bourgeois democracy that enjoyed a considerable degree of legitimacy
not only with the dominant classes but also with the mass of the people. Several scholars writing in the 1980s, such as for instance, Ashutosh Varshney (1995) and Lloyd and Rudolph (1987), emphasised the growing political clout of the rich farmers or agrarian capitalists within the dominant coalition.

The dominant class coalition model was given a robust theoretical shape in a classic essay by Sudipta Kaviraj (1989) in which, by using Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “passive revolution” as a blocked dialectic, he was able to ascribe to the process of class domination in postcolonial India its own dynamic. Power had to be shared between the dominant classes because no one class
had the ability to exercise hegemony on its own. But “sharing” was a process of ceaseless push and pull, with one class gaining a relative ascendancy at one point, only to lose it at another. Kaviraj provided us with a synoptic political history of the relative dominance and decline of the industrial capitalists, the rural elites and the bureaucratic-managerial elite within the
framework of the passive revolution of capital. In my early work, I too adopted the idea of the passive revolution of capital in my account of the emergence of the postcolonial state in India [Chatterjee 1986, 1998 and Chatterjee and Malik 1975].

The characteristic features of the passive revolution in India were the relative autonomy of the state as a whole from the bourgeoisie and the landed elites; the supervision of the state by an elected political leadership, a permanent bureaucracy and an independent judiciary; the negotiation of class interests through a multi-party electoral system; a protectionist regime discouraging
the entry of foreign capital and promoting import substitution; the leading role of the state sector in heavy industry, infrastructure, transport, telecommunications; mining, banking and insurance; state control over the private manufacturing sector through a regime of licensing; and the relatively greater influence of industrial capitalists over the central government and that of the landed elites on the state governments. Passive revolution was a form that was marked by its difference from classical bourgeois democracy. But to the extent that capitalist democracy as established in western Europe or north America served as the normative standard of bourgeois revolution, discussions of passive revolution in India carried with them the sense of a transitional system – from pre-colonial and colonial regimes to some yet-to-be-defined authentic modernity. The changes introduced since the 1990s have, I believe, transformed this framework of class dominance. The crucial difference now is the dismantling of the licence regime, greater entry of foreign capital and foreign consumer goods; and the opening up of sectors such as telecommunications, transport, infrastructure, mining, banking, insurance, etc, to private capital. This has led to a change in the very composition of the capitalist class. Instead of the earlier dominance of a few “monopoly” houses drawn from
traditional merchant backgrounds and protected by the licence and import substitution regime, there are now many more entrants into the capitalist class at all levels and much greater mobility within its formation. Unlike the earlier fear of foreign competition, there appears to be much greater confidence among Indian capitalists to make use of the opportunities opened up by global flows of capital, goods and services, including, in recent times, significant exports of capital. The most dramatic event has been the rise of the Indian information technology industry. But domestic manufacturing and services have also received a major spurt, leading to annual growth rates of 8 or 9 per cent for the economy as a whole in the last few years. There have been several political changes as a result. Let me list a few that are relevant for our present discussion. First, there is a distinct ascendancy in the relative power of the corporate capitalist class as compared to the landed elites. The political means by which this recent dominance has been achieved needs to be investigated more carefully, because it was not achieved through the mechanism of electoral mobilisation (which used to be the source of the political power of the landed elites). Second, the dismantling of the licence regime has opened up a new field of competition between state governments to woo capitalist
investment, both domestic and foreign. This has resulted in the involvement of state-level political parties and leaders with the interests of national and international corporate capital in unprecedented ways. Third, although the state continues to be the most important mediating apparatus in negotiating between conflicting class interests, the autonomy of the state in relation to
the dominant classes appears to have been redefined. Crucially, the earlier role of the bureaucratic-managerial class, or more generally of the urban middle classes, in leading and operating, both socially and ideologically, the autonomous interventionist activities of the developmental state has significantly weakened. There is a strong ideological tendency among the urban middle classes today to view the state apparatus as ridden with corruption, inefficiency and populist political venality and a much greater social acceptance of the professionalism and commitment to growth and efficiency of the corporate capitalist sector. The urban middle class, which once played such a crucial role in producing and running the autonomous developmental state of the passive revolution, appears now to have largely come under the moral-political sway of the bourgeoisie. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the result is a convergence of the Indian political system with the classical models of capitalist democracy. The critical difference, as I have pointed out elsewhere, has been produced by a split in the field of the political between a domain of properly constituted civil society and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of
political society [Chatterjee 2004]. Civil society in India today, peopled largely by the urban middle classes, is the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society and represents the domain of capitalist hegemony. If this were the only relevant political domain, then India today would probably be indistinguishable from other western capitalist democracies. But there is the other domain of what I have called political society which includes large sections of the rural population
and the urban poor. These people do, of course, have the formal status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of political bargaining. But they do not relate to the organs of the state in the same way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations. The latter domain, which represents the vast bulk of democratic politics in India, is not under the moral-political leadership of the capitalist class. Hence, my argument is that the framework of passive revolution is still valid for India. But its structure and dynamic have undergone a change. The capitalist class has come to acquire a position of moral-political hegemony over civil society, consisting principally of the urban middle classes. It exercises its considerable influence over both the central and the state governments not through electoral mobilisation of political parties and movements but largely through the bureaucratic-managerial class, the increasingly influential print and visual media, and the judiciary and other independent regulatory bodies. The dominance of the capitalist class within the state structure as a whole can be
inferred from the virtual consensus among all major political parties about the priorities of rapid economic growth led by private investment, both domestic and foreign. It is striking that even the CPI(M) in West Bengal, and slightly more ambiguously in Kerala, have, in practice if not in theory, joined this consensus. This means that as far as the party system is concerned, it does not matter which particular combination of parties comes to power
at the centre or even in most of the states; state support for rapid economic growth is guaranteed to continue. This is evidence of the current success of the passive revolution. However, the practices of the state also include the large range of governmental activities in political society. Here there are
locally dominant interests, such as those of landed elites, small producers and local traders, who are able to exercise political influence through their powers of electoral mobilisation. In the old understanding of the passive revolution, these interests would have been seen as potentially opposed to those of the industrial bourgeoisie; the conflicts would have been temporarily resolved through a compromise worked out within the party system and the autonomous apparatus of the state. Now, I believe, there is a
new dynamic logic that ties the operations of political society with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in civil society and its dominance over the state structure as a whole. This logic is supplied by the requirement, explained earlier, of reversing the effects of primitive accumulation of capital. To describe how this logic serves to integrate civil and political society into a new structure of the passive revolution, let me return to the subject of the peasantry.

4 Management of Non-Corporate Capital

The integration with the market has meant that large sections of what used to be called the subsistence economy, which was once the classic description of small peasant agriculture, have now come fully under the sway of capital. This is a key development that must crucially affect our understanding of peasant society in India today. There is now a degree of connectedness between peasant cultivation, trade and credit networks in agricultural commodities, transport networks, petty manufacturing and
services in rural markets and small towns, etc, that makes it necessary for us to categorise all of them as part of a single, but stratified, complex. A common description of this is the unorganised or informal sector. Usually, a unit belonging to the informal sector is identified in terms of the small size of the enterprise, the small number of labourers employed, or the relatively unregulated nature of the business. In terms of the analytical framework I have presented here, I will propose a distinction between the formal and the informal sectors of today’s economy in terms of a difference between corporate and noncorporate forms of capital.

My argument is that the characteristics I have described of peasant societies today are best understood as the marks of non-corporate capital. To the extent that peasant production is deeply embedded within market structures, investments and returns are conditioned by forces emanating from the operations of capital. In this sense, peasant production shares many connections with informal units in manufacturing, trade and services
operating in rural markets, small towns and even in large cities. We can draw many refined distinctions between corporate and non-corporate forms of capital. But the key distinction I wish to emphasise is the following. The fundamental logic that underlies the operations of corporate capital is further accumulation of capital, usually signified by the maximisation of profit. For noncorporate organisations of capital, while profit is not irrelevant, it is dominated by another logic – that of providing the livelihood
needs of those working in the units. This difference is crucial for the understanding of the so-called informal economy and, by extension, as I will argue, of peasant society. Let me illustrate with a couple of familiar examples from the non-agricultural informal sector and then return to the subject of peasants. Most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of street
vendors in Indian cities. They occupy street space, usually violating municipal laws; they often erect permanent stalls, use municipal services such as water and electricity, and do not pay taxes. To carry on their trade under these conditions, they usually organise themselves into associations to deal with the municipal authorities, the police, credit agencies such as banks and corporate firms that manufacture and distribute the commodities they sell on the streets. These associations are often large and the volume of business they encompass can be quite considerable. Obviously, operating within a public and anonymous market situation, the vendors are subject to the standard conditions of profitability of their businesses. But to ensure that everyone is able to meet their livelihood needs, the association will usually try to limit the number of vendors who can operate in a given area and prevent the entry of newcomers. On the other hand, there are many examples where, if the businesses are doing particularly well, the vendors do not, like corporate capitalists, continue to accumulate on an expanded scale, but rather agree to extend their membership and allow new entrants. To cite another example, in most cities and towns of India, the transport system
depends heavily on private operators who run buses and autorickshaws.
Here too there is frequent violation of regulations such as licences, safety standards and pollution norms – violations that allow these units to survive economically. Although most operators own only one or two vehicles each, they form associations to negotiate with transport authorities and the police over fares and routes, and control the frequency of services and entry of new
operators to ensure that a minimum income, and not much more than a minimum income, is guaranteed to all. In my book The Politics of the Governed, I have described the form of governmental regulation of population groups such as street vendors, illegal squatters and others, whose habitation or livelihood verge on the margins of legality, as political society. In political society, I have argued, people are not regarded by the
state as proper citizens possessing rights and belonging to the properly constituted civil society. Rather, they are seen to belong to particular population groups, with specific empirically established and statistically described characteristics, which are targets of particular governmental policies. Since dealing with many of these groups imply the tacit acknowledgement of various illegal practices, governmental agencies will often treat such cases as exceptions, justified by very specific and special circumstances, so that the structure of general rules and principles is not compromised. Thus, illegal squatters may be given water supply or
electricity connections but on exceptional grounds so as not to club them with regular customers having secure legal title to their property, or street vendors may be allowed to trade under specific conditions that distinguish them from regular shops and businesses which comply with the laws and pay taxes. All of this makes the claims of people in political society a matter of constant political negotiation and the results are never secure or permanent. Their entitlements, even when recognised, never quite become rights. To connect the question of political society with my earlier
discussion on the process of primitive accumulation of capital, I now wish to advance the following proposition: Civil society is where corporate capital is hegemonic, whereas political society is the space of management of non-corporate capital. I have argued above that since the 1990s, corporate capital, and along with it the class of corporate capitalists, have achieved a hegemonic position over civil society in India. This means that the logic of accumulation, expressed at this time in the demand that national economic growth be maintained at a very high rate and that the requirements of corporate capital be given priority, holds sway over civil society – that is to say, over the urban middle classes. It also means that the educational, professional and social aspirations of the middle classes have become tied with the fortunes of corporate capital. There is now a powerful tendency to insist on the legal rights of proper citizens, to impose civic order in public
places and institutions and to treat the messy world of the informal sector and political society with a degree of intolerance. A vague but powerful feeling seems to prevail among the urban middle classes that rapid growth will solve all problems of poverty and unequal opportunities.

Organisation of Informal Sector

The informal sector, which does not have a corporate structure and does not function principally according to the logic of accumulation, does not, however, lack organisation. As I have indicated in my examples, those who function in the informal sector often have large, and in many cases quite powerful and effective, organisations. They need to organise precisely to function in the modern market and governmental spaces. Traditional
organisations of peasant and artisan societies are not adequate for the task. I believe this organisation is as much of a political activity as it is an economic one. Given the logic of non-corporate capital that I have described above, the function of these organisations is precisely to successfully operate within the rules of the market and of governmental regulations in order to ensure the livelihood needs of its members. Most of those who provide leadership in organising people, both owners and workers, operating in the informal sector are actually or potentially political leaders. Many such leaders are prominent local politicians and many such organisations are directly or indirectly affiliated to political parties. Thus, it is not incorrect to say that the management of non-corporate capital under such conditions is a political function that is carried out by political leaders. The existence and
survival of the vast assemblage of so-called informal units of production in India today, including peasant production, is directly dependent on the successful operation of certain political functions. That is what is facilitated by the process of democracy. The organisations that can carry out these political functions have to be innovative – necessarily so, because neither the history of the cooperative movement nor that of socialist collective
organisation provides any model that can be copied by these noncorporate
organisations of capital in India. What is noticeable here is a strong sense of attachment to small-scale private property and, at the same time, a willingness to organise and cooperate in order to protect the fragile basis of livelihood that is constantly under threat from the advancing forces of corporate capital. However, it appears that these organisations of non-corporate capital are stronger, at least at this time, in the non-agricultural informal sectors in cities and towns and less so among the rural peasantry. This means that while the organisation of non-corporate
capital in urban areas has developed relatively stable and effective forms and is able, by mobilising governmental support through the activities of political society, to sustain the livelihood needs of the urban poor in the informal sector, the rural poor, consisting of small peasants and rural labourers, are still dependent on direct governmental support for their basic needs and are less able to make effective organised use of the market in agricultural commodities. This challenge lies at the heart of the recent
controversies over “farmer suicides” as well as the ongoing debates over acquisition of agricultural land for industry. It is clear that in the face of rapid changes in agricultural production in the near future, Indian democracy will soon have to invent new forms of organisation to ensure the survival of a vast rural population increasingly dependent on the operations of
non-corporate forms of capital. What I have said here about the characteristics of non-corporate capital are, of course, true only in the gross or average sense. It is admittedly an umbrella category, hiding many important variations within it. Informal or non-corporate units, even when they involve significant amounts of fixed capital and employ several hired workers, are, by my description, primarily intended to meet the livelihood needs of those involved in the business. Often, the owner is himself or herself also a worker. But this does not mean that there do not exist any informal units in which the owner strives to turn the business toward the route of accumulation, seeking to leave the grey zones of informality and enter the hallowed portals of corporate capitalism. This too might be a
tendency that would indicate upward mobility as well as change in the overall social structure of capital.

5 Peasant Culture and Politics

In a recent lecture, the sociologist Dipankar Gupta has taken note of many of these features of changing peasant life to argue that we need a new theoretical framework for understanding contemporary rural society [Gupta 2005]. One of the features he has emphasised is the sharp rise in non-agricultural employment among those who live in villages. In almost half of the states of India, more than 40 per cent of the rural population is engaged in non-agricultural occupations today and the number is rising rapidly. A substantial part of this population consists of rural labourers who do not own land but do not find enough opportunity for agricultural work. But more significantly, even peasant families that own land will often have some members engaged in non-agricultural employment. In part, this reflects precisely the pressure of market forces that makes small peasant cultivation unviable over time because it is unable to increase productivity. As the small peasant property is handed down from one generation to the next, the holdings get subdivided even further. I have seen in the course of my own field work in West Bengal in the last two years that there is a distinct reluctance among younger members of rural landowning peasant families – both men and women – to continue with the life of a peasant. There is, they say, no future in small peasant agriculture and they would prefer to try their luck in town, even if it means a period of hardship. Needless to say, this feeling is particularly strong among those who have had some school education. It reflects not just a response to the effects of primitive accumulation, because many of these young men and women come from landowning families that are able to provide for their basic livelihood needs. Rather, it reflects the sense of a looming threat, the ever present danger that small peasant agriculture will, sooner or later, have to succumb to the larger forces of capital. If this feeling becomes a general feature among the next generation of rural families, it would call for a radical transformation in our understanding of peasant culture. The very idea of a peasant society whose fundamental dynamic is to reproduce itself, accommodating only small and slow changes, would have to be given up altogether. Here we find a generation of peasants whose principal motivation seems to be to stop being peasants. Based on findings of this type that are now accumulating rapidly, Dipankar Gupta has spoken of the “vanishing village”: “Agriculture is an economic residue that generously accommodates non-achievers resigned to a life of sad satisfaction. The villager is as bloodless as the rural economy is lifeless. From rich to poor, the trend is to leave the village…” [Gupta 2005: 757]. I think Gupta is too hasty in this conclusion. He has noticed only one side of the process which is the inevitable story of primitive accumulation. He has not, I think, considered the other side which is the field of governmental policies aimed at reversing the effects of primitive accumulation. It is in that field that the relation between peasants and the state has been, and is still being, redefined. I have mentioned before that state agencies, or governmental agencies generally, including NGOs that carry out governmental functions, are no longer an external entity in relation to peasant society. This has had several implications. First, because various welfare and developmental functions are now widely recognised to be necessary tasks for government in relation to the poor, which includes large sections of peasants, these functions in the fields of health, education, basic inputs for agricultural production and the provision of basic necessities of life are now demanded from governmental agencies as a matter of legitimate claims by peasants. This means that government officials and political representatives in rural areas are constantly besieged by demands for various welfare and developmental benefits. It also means that peasants learn to operate the levers of the governmental system, to apply pressure at the right places or negotiate for better terms. This is where the everyday operations of democratic politics, organisation and leadership come into play. Second, the response of governmental agencies to such demands is usually flexible, based on calculations of costs and returns. In most cases, the strategy is to break up the benefit-seekers into smaller groups, defined by specific demographic or social characteristics, so that there can be a flexible policy that does not regard the entire rural population as a single homogeneous mass but rather breaks it up into smaller target populations. The intention is precisely to fragment the benefit-seekers and hence divide the potential opposition to the state. One of the most remarkable features of the recent agitations in India over the acquisition of land for industry is that despite the continued use of the old rhetoric of peasant solidarity, there are clearly significant sections of the people of these villages that do not join these agitations because they feel they stand to gain from the government policy. Third, this field of negotiations opened up by flexible policies of seeking and delivering benefits creates a new competitive spirit among benefit-seekers. Since peasants now confront, not landlords or traders as direct exploiters, but rather governmental agencies from whom they expect benefits, the state is blamed for perceived inequalities in the distribution of benefits. Thus, peasants will accuse officials and political representatives of favouring cities at the cost of the countryside, or particular sections of peasants will complain of having been deprived while other sections belonging to other regions or ethnic groups or castes or political loyalties have been allegedly favoured. The charge against state agencies is not one of exploitation but discrimination. This has given a completely new quality to peasant politics, one that was missing in the classical understandings of peasant society. Fourth, unlike the old forms of peasant insurgency which characterised much of the history of peasant society for centuries, there is, I believe, a quite different quality in the role of violence in contemporary peasant politics. While subaltern peasant revolts of the old kind had their own notions of strategy and tactics, they were characterised, as Ranajit Guha showed in his classic work, by strong community solidarity on the one side and negative opposition to the perceived exploiters on the other. Today, the use of violence in peasant agitations seems to have a far more calculative, almost utilitarian logic, designed to draw attention to specific grievances with a view to seeking appropriate governmental benefits. A range of deliberate tactics are followed to elicit the right responses from officials, political leaders and especially the media. This is probably the most significant change in the nature of peasant politics in the last two or three decades. As far as peasant agriculture is concerned, however, things are much less clearly developed. Small peasant agriculture, even though it is thoroughly enmeshed in market connections, also feels threatened by the market. There is, in particular, an unfamiliarity with, and deep suspicion of, corporate organisations. Peasants appear to be far less able to deal with the uncertainties of the market than they are able to secure governmental benefits. In the last few years, there have been hundreds of reported suicides of peasants who suddenly fell into huge debts because they were unable to realise the expected price from their agricultural products, such as tobacco and cotton. Peasants feel that the markets for these commercial crops are manipulated by large mysterious forces that are entirely beyond their control. Unlike many organisations in the informal non-agricultural sector in urban areas that can effectively deal with corporate firms for the supply of inputs or the sale of their products, peasants have been unable thus far to build similar organisations. This is the large area of the management of peasant agriculture, not as subsistence production for self-consumption, but as the field of non-corporate capital, that remains a challenge. It is the political response to this challenge that will determine whether the rural poor will remain vulnerable to the manipulative strategies of capital and the state or whether they might use the terrain of governmental activities to assert their own claims to a life of worth and dignity. It is important to emphasise that contrary to what is suggested by the depoliticised idea of governmentality, the quality of politics in the domain of political society is by no means a mechanical transaction of benefits and services. Even as state agencies try, by constantly adjusting their flexible policies, to break up large combinations of claimants, the organisation of demands in political society can adopt highly emotive resources of solidarity and militant action. Democratic politics in India is daily marked by passionate and often violent agitations to protest discrimination and to secure claims. The fact that the objectives of such agitations are framed by the conditions of governmentality is no reason to think that they cannot arouse considerable passion and affective energy. Collective actions in political society cannot be depoliticised by framing them within the grid of governmentality because the activities of governmentality affect the very conditions of livelihood and social existence of the groups they target. At least that part of Indian democracy that falls within the domain of political society is definitely not anaemic and lifeless. Interestingly, even though the claims made by different groups in political society are for governmental benefits, these cannot often be met by the standard application of rules and frequently require the declaration of an exception. Thus, when a group of people living or cultivating on illegally occupied land or selling goods on the street claim the right to continue with their activities, or demand compensation for moving somewhere else, they are in fact inviting the state to declare their case as an exception to the universally applicable rule. They do not demand that the right to private property in land be abolished or that the regulations on trade licences and sales taxes be set aside. Rather, they demand that their cases be treated as exceptions. When the state acknowledges these demands, it too must do so not by the simple application of administrative rules but rather by a political decision to declare an exception. The governmental response to demands in political society is also, therefore, irreducibly political rather than merely administrative.

I must point out one other significant characteristic of the modalities of democratic practice in political society. This has to do with the relevance of numbers. Ever since Tocqueville in the early 19th century, it is a common argument that electoral democracies foster the tyranny of the majority. However, mobilisations in political society are often premised on the strategic manipulation of relative electoral strengths rather than on the expectation of commanding a majority. Indeed, the frequently spectacular quality of actions in political society, including the resort to violence, is a sign of the ability of relatively small groups of people to make their voices heard and to register their claims with governmental agencies. As a matter of fact, it could even be said that the activities of political society represent a continuing critique of the paradoxical reality in all capitalist democracies of equal citizenship and majority rule, on the one hand, and the dominance of property and privilege, on the other.

Marginal Groups

But the underside of political society is the utter marginalisation of those groups that do not even have the strategic leverage of electoral mobilisation. In every region of India, there exist marginal groups of people who are unable to gain access to the mechanisms of political society. They are often marked by their exclusion from peasant society, such as low-caste groups who do not participate in agriculture or tribal peoples who depend more on forest products or pastoral occupations than on agriculture. Political society and electoral democracy have not given these groups the means to make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, these marginalised groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political society. The important difference represented by activities in political society, when compared to the movements of democratic mobilisation familiar to us from 20th-century Indian history, is its lack of a perspective of transition. While there is much passion aroused over ending the discriminations of caste or ethnicity or asserting the rightful claims of marginal groups, there is little conscious effort to view these agitations as directed towards a fundamental transformation of the structures of political power, as they were in the days of nationalist and socialist mobilisations. On the contrary, if anything, it is the bourgeoisie, hegemonic in civil society and dominant within the state structure as a whole, which appears to have a narrative of transition – from stagnation to rapid growth, from backwardness and poverty to modernity and prosperity, from third world insignificance to major worldpower status. Perhaps this is not surprising if one remembers the class formation of the passive revolution: with the landed elites pushed to a subordinate position and the bureaucratic-managerial class won over by the bourgeoisie, it is the capitalist class that has now acquired a position to set the terms to which other political formations can only respond.

The unity of the state system as a whole is now maintained by relating civil society to political society through the logic of reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation. Once this logic is recognised by the bourgeoisie as a necessary political condition for the continued rapid growth of corporate capital, the state, with its mechanisms of electoral democracy, becomes the field for the political negotiation of demands for the transfer of resources, through fiscal and other means, from the accumulation economy to governmental programmes aimed at providing the livelihood needs of the poor and the marginalised. The autonomy of the state, and that of the bureaucracy, now lies in their power to adjudicate the quantum and form of transfer of resources to the so-called “social sector of expenditure”. Ideological differences, such as those between the Right and the Left, for instance, are largely about the amount and modalities of social sector expenditure, such as poverty removal programmes. These differences do not question the dynamic logic that binds civil society to political society under the dominance of capital.

Let me summarise my main argument. With the continuing rapid growth of the Indian economy, the hegemonic hold of corporate capital over the domain of civil society is likely to continue. This will inevitably mean continued primitive accumulation. That is to say, there will be more and more primary producers, i e, peasants, artisans and petty manufacturers, who will lose their means of production. But most of these victims of primitive accumulation are unlikely to be absorbed in the new growth sectors of the economy. They will be marginalised and rendered useless as far as the sectors dominated by corporate capital are concerned. But the passive revolution under conditions of electoral democracy makes it unacceptable and illegitimate for the government to leave these marginalised populations without the means of labour to simply fend for themselves. That carries the risk of turning them into the “dangerous classes”. Hence, a whole series of governmental policies are being, and will be, devised to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation. This is the field in which peasant societies are having to redefine their relations with both the state and with capital. Thus far, it appears that whereas many new practices have been developed by peasants, using the mechanisms of democratic politics, to claim and negotiate benefits from the state, their ability to deal with the world of capital is still unsure and inadequate. This is where the further development of peasant activities as non-corporate capital, seeking to ensure the livelihood needs of peasants while operating within the circuits of capital, will define the future of peasant society in India. As far as I can see, peasant society will certainly survive in India in the 21st century, but only by accommodating a substantial non-agricultural component within the village. Further, I think there will be major overlaps and continuities in emerging cultural practices between rural villages and small towns and urban areas, with the urban elements gaining predominance.

I have also suggested that the distinction between corporate and non-corporate capital appears to be coinciding with the divide between civil society and political society. This could have some ominous consequences. We have seen in several Asian countries what may be called a revolt of “proper citizens” against the unruliness and corruption of systems of popular political representation. In Thailand, there was in 2006 an army-led coup that ousted a popularly elected government. The action seemed to draw support from the urban middle classes that expressed their disapproval of what they considered wasteful and corrupt populist expenditure aimed at gaining the support of the rural population. In 2007, there was a similar army-backed coup in Bangladesh where plans for parliamentary elections have been indefinitely postponed while an interim government takes emergency measures to clean the system of supposedly “corrupt” politicians. Reports suggest that that move was initially welcomed by the urban middle classes. In India, a significant feature in recent years has been the withdrawal of the urban middle classes from political activities altogether: There is widespread resentment in the cities of the populism and corruption of all political parties which, it is said, are driven principally by the motive of gaining votes at the cost of ensuring the conditions of rapid economic growth. There is no doubt that this reflects the hegemony of the logic of corporate capital among the urban middle classes. The fact, however, is that the bulk of the population in India lives outside the orderly zones of proper civil society. It is in political society that they have to be fed and clothed and given work, if only to ensure the long-term and relatively peaceful well-being of civil society. That is the difficult and innovative process of politics on which the future of the passive revolution under conditions of democracy depends.

Note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Emory University, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, and Delhi School of Economics. I am grateful to all who participated in those discussions. I am particularly grateful to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ayca Cubukcu, Satish Deshpande, Ranajit Guha, Sudipta Kaviraj, Atul Kohli, Aditya Nigam, Kalyan Sanyal, Asok Sen, K Sivaramakrishnan and Ashutosh Varshney for their comments.

Partha Chatterjee (partha@cssscal.org) is with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and also with the Columbia University, United States.

Note

1 There is a great story to be told of what I believe is the first such project undertaken by the British authorities in India – the building of the new Fort William in Calcutta by razing to the ground the entire village of Gobindapur in 1758. Property owners were compensated (out of the massive moneys extracted out of the puppet nawab Mir Jafar as compensation for Siraj-ud-daulah’s
attack on Calcutta). The result was the new fort, which still functions as the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Indian Army, and the surrounding grounds called the Maidan, the focus of much anxious attention of environmentalists who treat it as a pristine patch of grass gifted to the city by Mother Earth. That the Maidan was a densely populated village 250 years ago has been wholly forgotten. Forgetfulness is a necessary attribute not only of modernisers but also of its critics.

References

Bardhan, Pranab (1990): The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Chatterjee, Partha (1986): Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Zed Books, London.
– (1998): ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’ in T J Byres (ed), The State Development Planning and Liberalisation in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, pp 82-103.
– (2004): The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Political Society in Most of the World, Columbia University Press, New York.

Chatterjee, Partha and Arup Mallik (1975): ‘Bharatiya ganatantra o bourgeois pratikriya’, Anya Artha, May, translated in Chatterjee, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997, pp 35-57.

Gupta, Dipankar (2005): ‘Whither the Indian Village: Culture and Agriculture in Rural India’, Economic & Political Weekly, February 19, pp 751-58.

Guha, Ranajit (1983): Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Kaviraj, Sudipta (1989): ‘A Critique of the Passive Revolution’, Economic & Political Weekly, 23, 45-47, pp 2429-44.

Lloyd, I and Susanne H Rudolph (1987): In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.

Vanaik, Achin (1990): The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India, Verso, London.

Varshney, Ashutosh (1995): Democracy, Development and the Countryside:Urban-Rural Struggles in India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

"People connected to the Communist government of West Bengal have been guilty of some extremely vile actions, including rape and murder, toward dissident peasants, in a struggle over land acquisition, and the government has done nothing to prevent these terrible things. This struggle has split the Indian left, between those who think that people on the left must maintain solidarity in the face of right-wing threats and those who insist on calling murder murder no matter who does it....

"Is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end?

"The latter vision is that of left-liberalism, which has always held that the purpose of a politics of human welfare is to improve the lives of individual human beings, and that each human being counts as equally worthy of respect.

"By contrast, “solidarity,” both on the communitarian right and on the antiliberal left, has suggested to many that the lives of individuals may and often must be sacrificed in the pursuit of class or group goals, and that worries about the justice of such sacrifices are irritatingly bourgeois.

"That’s really what the split in India is about, and it corresponds to a split between the Nehruvian/ Gandhian founding of the nation and its long-standing communist tradition. Nehru and Gandhi knew that people come first and that each and every person is precious. Gandhi had an extremely rare ability to feel and express compassion not for “the masses” or “the proletariat,” but for each person who suffered. (He said that his goal was to “wipe every tear from every eye,” thus reminding his audience that suffering and death are uncompromisingly personal. Classes may be useful analytical categories, but it is individual people who weep.) In consequence, Gandhi eschewed violence against persons as a political tool, and he showed vividly what it was to treat the human body as a mere means, and what it was to treat it as an end.

"This politics of personhood survives in West Bengal, in the stance of Gopal Gandhi; in the protests of many artists and writers; and, also, in the courageous work of many individual members of the CPI(M). It appears to have been forgotten (if it was ever accepted) by the government’s central leadership."

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“Our objective is to find out whether our government has been able to provide them with basic amenities such as health, primary education, proper roads and electricity,” minority affairs minister Abdus Sattar said today.

The Left Front lost large swathes of minority-dominated areas in the polls. According to the CPM’s assessment, farmers’ fear of land acquisition for industry and the lack of development of the community brought forth by the Sachar Committee report triggered the sudden slide.

The party could not retain its grip on Nandigram-scarred East Midnapore and South-24-Parganas, where Muslims have a significant presence. The combined effect of the land row and lack of minority development also took a heavy toll in Singur. Pockets of North-24 Parganas, Nadia and Howrah with a significant Muslim presence also gave a blow to the CPM.

“The land war and the Sachar report forced the government to order the survey,’’ an official of the minority affairs department said.

The study will cover 12 districts with a minority population of over 20 per cent. The district magistrates of two of them — Murshidabad and Malda — were at Writers’ Buildings today to review the “gaps in the state government’s work’’ for minority development.

The minister said: “We have collected preliminary data on certain parameters but we have to conduct a full-fledged survey.”

Minority affairs department secretary Pawan Agarwal held the meeting with the district magistrates today in the presence of the Union minority welfare ministry joint secretary, Ameising Luikham.

A joint secretary attached to the chief minister’s secretariat later took down details of what transpired at the meeting. Sources said he would have to send a report to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

Asked about today’s meeting, Sattar said: “There are certain development deficits and these need to be detected. We will keep the Centre posted about our findings.”

The Sachar report had pointed out the very low representation of Muslims in government jobs in the state and their lack of access to education, health and nutrition. [The Telegraph]

So inconsolable was the 28-year-old woman that she refused a sari proffered by a police party, following which she was again beaten up in front of the law-enforcers by the political mob, the witnesses added.

The CPM denied such an incident had taken place, and the police said no one was beaten in their presence.

Wild charges do fly when elections are round the corner — the panchayat polls begin on May 11 — but the woman and several people who spoke provided graphic details and a doctor said her body was covered with bruises.

According to the witnesses, around 8am on Monday, about 50 CPM supporters came to Keyakhali village, which houses many people who back the Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee that was at the forefront of the campaign against land acquisition in Nandigram.

The group entered the house of Debashish Jana, 35, a farm labourer, and forced him and his eight-year-old son Sanjoy to join a CPM procession. The woman — Jana’s wife —protested, following which the intruders pounced on her and ripped off her sari, blouse and petticoat. Then they rained blows on her.

“I was stripped. My only fault was protesting against the manner in which my husband and son were forced to join the procession,” said the woman, now in Nandigram block hospital. Her husband and son could not be traced after they were dragged to the procession.

While being beaten, the woman rushed out of the house naked and started running towards Brindabanchowk, around 500 metres away. The intruders then chased her in a throwback to last year’s outrage in Guwahati where an adivasi girl was stripped and assaulted. The witnesses said the pursuers kept hurling bombs to keep the villagers at bay.

As the woman approached Brindabanchowk, a police patrol halted in front of her, Shankar Das, a 30-year-old farmer, said.

“The policemen asked for a sari from a house and gave it to the woman. But she was angry and cried inconsolably, refusing to accept the sari. By this time, the CPM workers had caught up with her. In front of the policemen, she was slapped and beaten with lathis,” Shankar said.

Ashutosh Das, 38, a neighbour who had followed the woman, was assaulted.

Eventually, some women supporters of the CPM intervened. “The women came out from houses belonging to CPM supporters and asked the party workers to leave. I had by then hidden behind a bush. They took me to a house and gave me some clothes,” the woman said.

The women then told the police to take the victim to hospital. “The police took me and Ashutosh Das into the jeep. But they ordered us to get down at Tekhali bridge (about 3km away). From there we took a trekker to the hospital,” the woman added.

The doctor on duty, Susmita Pal, said: “The woman has injuries all over her body. We are treating her.” The block medical officer of Nandigram, Subhabrata Maity, added: “The bruises and swellings indicate she was beaten.”

Paritosh Das, 30, a helper in a bus; Motehar Ali, 25, a farm labourer from adjoining Jambari who was passing through Keyakhali; and Meghnad Mondal, 35, a farm labourer from Brindabanchowk, corroborated the woman’s account.

The police confirmed that a complaint of stripping had been “received”. “We have received a complaint that a woman was stripped and beaten up. We are investigating the matter,” the superintendent of police, S.S. Panda, said.

But he denied any police patrol was at Brindabanchowk when the alleged attack took place.

An East Midnapore district secretariat member of the CPM, Ashok Guria, said such an incident did not occur. “The Trinamul Congress had earlier brought charges of rape against CPM workers but nothing has been proved. Now they have started a new trick. The woman might have had a fall.”

CPM state secretariat member Benoy Konar, too, denied party activists’ involvement. [The Telegraph]

The hunger strike is being observed in Darjeeling, Kurseong, Mirik, Bijanbari, Gorubathan and Kalimpong at the CPRM's women and youth wings.

Apart from the main demand of Gorkhaland, the other two demands include a fair trial of Chattrey Subba and five others in Jalpaiguri jail, arrested in connection with the assassination attempt on GNLF chief Mr Subash Ghisingh in 2001 near Kurseong and an increase in the compensation of the martyrs of the Gorkhaland agitation of 1986.  Condemning the “step-motherly” attitude of the state government towards
the Gorkha martyrs of the 1986 agitation, the CPRM leadership compared the agitation to the carnage of Nandigram. “The agitation was similar to the violence at Nandigram. Yet while the victims of Nandigram received Rs 5 lakh each, the families of the Gorkhaland martyrs received a paltry sum of Rs 8,000 each,” Ms Dukpa said. [The Statesman]

He also dared the CPM to create a Nandigram-like situation, but said his party would not budge from its democratic form of struggle.

“Many adivasis and Nepalese work in the gardens of the Dooars. They are leading miserable lives because of the pathetic condition of the tea industry here, which is again a result of sustained neglect of the minorities by the state government. But in the new state of Gorkhaland, all these people will get a better deal, besides freedom from an oppressive government,” he said. [Inset: Gurung addresses the crowd at Bagrakote on Sunday. Picture by Kundan Yolmo]

Gurung said the Morcha would intensify its campaigns in the Dooars. “Our journey has begun here,” he said. “It will end only at Sunkosh (the river Sankosh on the Assam border),” he added. The Morcha wants the Dooars up to the Sankosh and the Terai areas of Siliguri, along with the Darjeeling hills, to be made a part of Gorkhaland that it is demanding.

Having struck a chord with the 25,000 odd people who had gathered at Bhanu Maidan in Bagrakote, 30 km from here, Gurung used the opportunity to come down heavily on the government, police and, more specifically, Asok Bhattacharya, the CPM MLA from Siliguri and the state urban development minister.

Stressing that the Morcha struggle was democratic and peaceful, Gurung said the government was trying the patience of the hills people by not allowing them to stage demonstrations in Siliguri. “But we will continue with our democratic struggle,” he said. “Let them do whatever they want to, we will do whatever is required of us in a democratic manner to fight for our rights. Some day or the other, they have to relent,” he added.

Taking a swipe at the CPM, the Morcha chief said: “Even if they want to create another Nandigram here, we will not leave our path of non-violence…The people of the hills will give them an answer.” His praise was, however, reserved for only one person in the government: chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. “He is a very nice man and listens to what we have to say,” he said.

Sudesh Mahato, a leader of the All Jharkhand Students’ Union, was present with four of his party members at the meeting. He said his party would extend all support to the Morcha in its fight for Gorkhaland. Mahato is regarded as a popular tribal leader in the neighbouring state.

Atul Roy, the leader of Kamtapur Progressive Party, today led a rally of about 150 supporters of the Morcha and the KPP from near North Bengal Medical College till Shivmandir to raise the demand for Gorkhaland. [The Telegraph]

The state poll panel today extended by a day the last date for withdrawal of nomination papers for the first two phases of the panchayat elections on May 11 and 14, removing a roadblock before Mamata Banerjee’s 12-hour shutdown on April 21.

The Trinamul Congress was in two minds whether to go ahead with the Monday shutdown against price rise as it would have stood in the way of the poll process. The last day for withdrawing nominations assumes significance because of an undeclared reason: this is when deals are struck and some candidates drop out to ensure votes are not split.

However, with the Election Commission thoughtfully giving more time, Mamata is now certain to press ahead with the bandh.

But the Election Commission said it had its own reasons to defer the deadline. April 21 was also scheduled for scrutiny of nomination papers for the third phase of polls on May 18.

“If you please, you may call it the poll panel’s support to the bandh. It’s your way of looking at things. But it is our duty to ensure that candidates of political parties can withdraw their nomination papers without any trouble,” state election commissioner Ashok Gupta said.

“Besides, I must see to it that my officials can carry out the scrutiny of nomination papers for the third phase of the polls. As both the withdrawal of nomination papers and the scrutiny of nomination papers for the third phase fall on April 21, the day on which a Bangla bandh has been called, I was left with no option other than to extend the date by a day,” he added.

However, in its zeal to help candidates, the Election Commission seems to have unwittingly given Trinamul a chance to crow and credit the panel with an accomplishment that is not part of its job.

Trinamul president Subrata Bakshi said: “It’s good that the poll panel has risen to the occasion by judging people’s support behind the April 21 bandh.”

If Trinamul is celebrating the survival of the bandh, the CPM is not complaining either. CPM state secretariat member Benoy Konar said: “We are against the bandh and we will oppose it. But what will the Election Commission do if a bus carrying candidates in Nandigram is attacked by bandh supporters?”

The Election Commission virtually pleaded helplessness and echoed Konar. “If transport is not allowed to ply on the bandh day, how can the candidates travel to block development offices for withdrawal of their nomination papers?” Gupta asked.

Former poll panel chief Ajoy Sinha said a shutdown in the run-up to the panchayat polls was unheard of. “I can’t recall a single instance of a bandh being called while the election process is on,” Sinha said. [The Telegraph]

A police team escorting the marchers bundled them into vehicles and took them back to Rangpo on the Bengal border. Around 500 Lepchas, including some from Rangpo, were on their way to Dzongu, ostensibly on a pilgrimage to their holy land, although their real aim was to protest against the mega hydel power projects being set up there.

“We were marching to our holy land but the Sikkim government hoodwinked us into returning,” said Dorjee T. Lepcha, the president of the Kalimpong Lepcha Youth Association.

Dorjee admitted that they returned to avoid clashes with “Lepcha brothers” in Sikkim. He said bottles were thrown at the marchers and shops downed shutters along their route to prevent them from buying refreshments. “The people also used provocative and filthy language.”

According to police, hundreds of Lepchas from Dzongu were camping at Namprikdang, the entry point to the Lepcha reserve, to stop the marchers. Fearing more violence, the police convinced the marchers to abort their mission.

The deputy inspector-general of police (range) of Sikkim, Akshay Sachdeva, said Dzongu was a protected area and permits are needed from the North Sikkim district collectorate to go there. “The marchers had no permits and there was the possibility of clashes. So we took them back to Rangpo,” Sachdeva said.

At a news conference in Gangtok, K.T. Gyaltsen, the spokesperson for the ruling Sikkim Democratic Front, termed the march a plot by the Opposition. “By bringing people from outside and interfering with the internal matters of the state, the opposition parties are trying to obstruct the development process,” Gyaltsen said.

Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), whose members are on a relay hunger strike at B.L. House here to protest against the hydel power projects, got a shot in the arm today when activist Medha Patkar paid them a visit.

Patkar also visited the four who have been on an indefinite fast for the past 30 days and have been admitted to Sir Thutob Namgyal Memorial Hospital.

“It is a matter of pain and anguish to see how members of the Lepcha community from the hills are struggling for months,” Patkar said. “We are ready to hear what chief minister Pawan Chamling has to say, but unfortunately he is not saying anything.

“On the way, I met the marchers who were turned back. We were stopped at Nandigram (in Bengal) too, but we ultimately won there,” Patkar added.

Trouble had erupted in Nandigram after the Bengal government went on an acquisition drive to set up a petrochemical hub there. The proposed hub has been since shifted to the island of Nayachar. [The Telegraph]