Click for the report on Calcutta High Court’s observation in a judgment that terms the March 14 firing by the police in Nandigram as “wholly unconstitutional”
No respite to turn still. The Times are shaking us hard, not the cyclone which has missed us.
Without sleep, a blogger types furiously, or grabs text from a webpage, grapples with Html codes and does not feel exhausted after he hits the publish button. Numerous times, he hits the ‘edit’ again and again and not always to fix a sloppy grammatical error or a wrong code.
This post is about a sort of pain which we bear in our hearts and no one but who feels the pain similarly should comment. Dear CM, can you escape sir? Also hinting towards your splitting headache.
I.
A senior blogger is in pains as is evident in this comment; I have no answers to dissuade him (that is painful to me) but I can say that we are suffering alike…not fighting with each other. I can feel the pain when it hurts that like-minded people are not thinking alike, especially in times of crisis, in times of trouble and turmoil. He asks that are we not risking being partial to truth when we are blaming only one party in the entire fiasco?
He says:
The only way there can be no us and them is if there does not exist two sides. So how come I can see two sides – BUPC and CPI(M) while you can only see on side? Why is it that I can see not only the BUPC indulging in violence, killing, raping, evicting people from their homes, burning houses but also the CPI(M) doing the same things but you can see only the CPI(M) doing all this killing, raping, burning houses, “genocide” but cannot see the BUPC doing anything? How is it that I can see two sides but you can see only one side? How is it that I can see “us” and “them” but you can see only “we” to demand that somehow seeing these two sides this “us” and”them” is condemnable and wrong and proves arrogance etc etc? How am I being arrogant because I can see two sides and there is no arrogance on your part to see only side and completely deny the existence of the side? How is it that there is no arrogance in completely ignoring the plight of 900 families and 2000 refugees including women and children and completely denying their existence but there is arrogance when these refugees struggle to regain their homes? Why is it arrogant for refugees to demand a return of their homes and hearth but there is absolutely no arrogance in forcibly evicting people and making them refugees?
Am I going mad and insane that I can always see two sides while you, the 60,000 enlightened citizens and the media can only see one side? Please help me!
Dear Arjunda,
The situation is really maddening. I don’t think you are going mad and insane alone. I also had a very bad evening and night yesterday regarding this event. I turned mad and insane; almost had a nervous breakdown shouting. Its high time we understand what is going inside us. Probably my future posts will be devoted to it: looking behind our passions, anger and anguish…
I have a community of friends; probably I am being faithful to them when I write, but am I being partial by being faithful to them?
I don’t think the BUPC were revolutionaries or bundles of struggling innocence, but I don’t think the CPI(M) were involved in class-struggle either. Taking resort to violence for revolutionary goals is perfectly okay for me under certain situations; but I don’t think that was the reality there.
I condemn all sorts of similar violence the BUPC were perpetrated.
But as I said it in my post…the other side of the paid coin is more condemnable to me because it was performed by the powerful in a way the powerful only can do using or suspending machineries of power.
Just this little extra is probably making the difference to me while both parties have similar blood in their hands.
And the powerspeak following…
Arjunda, it is still not clear why the party could not deal with the thing politically. I think this mess wouldn’t have happened if Anil Biswas had been alive. Not because he was an angel, but because he was a political thinker from-head-to-toe…this is what one of my friends, a Naxalite, says. I have tried to make a difference from being political and being powerful. I know that is a clumsy coinage, I am searching for a better one. I mean placing the entire thing in historical context and dealing with it as a part-and-parcel of the historical political process. But why couldn’t the party reveal all to the public and deal with it under broad daylight without taking resort to surreptitious violence? The “paying back with their coin” disturbs me more.
I understand your anguish. You are worried about a wave of anti-left rising in the excuse of these events…
I am always aware about the anti-left or to be more precise, commie-bashing strand in the 60,000. But I have also seen people who are die-hard communists, defeated in life, but clinging for something here. If the anti-lefts are using these issues, it is a historical defeat for us Leftists and we need to start from here to regain our holds…but believe me Arjunda, neither you nor me is to blame, if some body should shoulder the responsibility of this loss of face…it is the CPI(M), not ordinary people who believed in them.
In Nandigram issue they have failed to take ourselves in confidence; they did not even try it.
Would you disagree that being habituated in being powerful marks the end of a communist party? Doesn’t that mean that you start zealously guarding the recent achievements of the near past (the last election results and power) instead of striving towards future?
I am absolutely not well-read in leftist literature…but I think that was the lesson of Mao’s Cultural revolution: not being habituated…
I am sure that if there is a contradiction between you and me it is a contradiction between one body of people, one class…you are articulating one, me the other. I don’t think, as some of your commentators have remarked, that it is the powerspeak which you are voicing in your blog. I wouldn’t have linked to your posts then.
You are voicing ‘doubt’. But I am not voicing ‘conviction’ either; I am voicing a bitter loss of faith which appears like certainty.
We need to resolve this contradiction. But it is not our headache only;this contradiction within us will take a big toll on them too. It is their – the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s – headache primarily (though we suffer the pain), ’cause they have precipitated this situation for long. Ironically Arjunda, if they don’t resolve it we can’t resolve it too. Our resolution is entirely dependent on their; because it is a historical process, not a psychological or generational one. Till then we suffer their headaches.
I know I haven’t answered you satisfactorily…
- In Defense of Democracy & Thanks Occam’s Razor!!
- Nandigram Lies: Media Caught With Pants Down
- Nandigram: What Movement? Why?
- Nandigram & The Terrors of Tomorrow
- How Left Are We Leftists? How Left Is The Left Front?
Read Arjun Sen’s posts on Nandigram
II.
Another blogger-friend writes in an extremely haunting post titled New Walls for Old about a left-over leftist’s zombie-walk through the troubled times and in the city to come and city which is gone (reader, I am not quoting him entirely):
I had gone to a friend’s place somewhere in south Kolkata. It’s like any other, now referred to as close to one of those big apartment houses that have sprung up like visual obscenities— giant phallic shapes, or the towers of Mordor. It’s a narrow road, with traffic snarls, and there used to be colonies of left supporters on both sides of the road, people who used to fight over whether to have New Democratic Revolutions or People’s Democratic Revolutions and how to make that fast and sure. Now the things have changed, beyond comprehension, and are ever changing fast.
I remember there being a small roadside boundary wall, just three years back, of an abandoned factory, where the bearded gentleman’s eleventh thesis ‘gainst Feuerbach was painted in big, glittering letters of red:The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
…
I stared out of the bus’s window. I tried looking hard. And I realised all those closed factories, except one, with all their dimly-lit union rooms with pictures of Marx and Engels and Lenin, all those skinny workers who assembled there in the evenings and stared at their leaders’ faces without saying or expecting anything, all those assembly chains that were supposed to usher in change, have vanished within these few years.
Vanished into thin air. Vanished without a trace.
Perhaps except the sole haunted and broken glass factory that still stands there as an anachronism.
And I’ve wondered what was wrong with the tenth thesis? Why quote the eleventh when you can also quote the tenth:
The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.
…
Take a walk, gentle reader, down the narrow lane that encircles the glass factory and the memories, and there you find another graffiti on a similar broken wall. The bricks are all crumbling away. Bricks that try to hold onto them all the colours, all the lime, all the blood, all those unspoken words that went into the making of those words.
Revolution is not a conspiracy— this one’s from from Lenin— revolution is a declared war.
This is the prophesy that the friend made— this will also be metamorphosed into a phallus aimed at the sky, soon. Just wait, keep watch, be patient.
For “them”? Against “them”? For “us? Against “us”? And yes, gentle reader, I’m too learning that violence is infectious. I’m beginning to get violent and I’m very pissed off right now. Forgive me for what I’ve said right above, but let it remain there as further proof of my hypocrisy.
Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters, Rosa. But what can you do? About anything and everything here? Let there be darkness. Let there be light. Let there be 10,000 people in the ‘relief camps’ at Nandigram who have gone through a cyclonic night. And soon, there will be dawn, and everyone will start living the night again.
I’m very disturbed. And I’m really very disturbed. And we all need some sleep. And time to think. And reason. And think. And what did the cat say to the parrot? “Tit for tat!”
III.
Kolkata marches to a new song
Ajoy Das, Daily News and Analysis, Nov 16
Whether you look back in anger down Kolkata’s memory lanes or expectantly ahead along the information superhighways of Sector V in the newer parts of this old city, processions and protests dot both past and present. Over the years, content and context went missing along the route map of marchers and protestors — a cycle from idealism to cynicism.
But in the past few weeks, from the mysterious Rizwanur death to Nandigram, the cycle has broken. Content is back in Kolkata’s interminable, inevitable life of protest and procession, collectively the 2Ps.
Whatever the shortages of electricity, milk or opportunity in Kolkata, the 2Ps were never in short supply. Over the years, you scanned for them in the morning papers, rescheduled your life, let out a mutter to clear frustration. Chances were you would have to sweat it out stoically. Kolkata’s climate most of the year is not kind to people stuck among snarling, intimidating, screaming processionists.
In the early days, when involvement and engagement ran high, the Calcutta of old did not always feel it was stuck without a choice. My salad days passed trying to figure why some of the brightest minds of the previous generation would want China’s chairman as their chairman. Before I could do so, Reds of a different hue stormed to power through bourgeoisie ballots. The 2Ps had slogans of “Break the black hand and burn it”. The hand presumably was true-blue capitalist.
If not inclined to be ‘Red rather than dead’, for the hip and the cool, there was always the option of being gratefully dead —you could join up with the anti-Vietnam crowds or Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or whatever to the strains of Dylan, Baez, Country Joe & Fish and Ritchie Havens. And after a day’s hectic protests in tie-n-dye, you could lose yourself in tobacco variants and cleanse the doors of perception with Kerouac or Ginsberg. I opted out.
But when the child has grown and the dream has gone, the confusion remains. One fine morn, the capitalists’ dirty hands had been cleansed by the comrades, computers and broadband laid out in a frenzy, land and villages grabbed for power and the magic wand of industrialisation waved frantically to change the decay. No talk of how the decay came about in the first place and who was responsible. No more 2Ps then — they were so yesterday.
But then it takes just one spark to set off a bush fire. Now there are two such sparks — Rizwanur and Nandigram. Kolkata changed again on November 14 when thousands spontaneously hit the streets and marched silently to protest the killings. No slogans, no political banners, no politicians. Just people. And many questions about the presence of celebs and intellectuals. Why their sudden arousal of conscience? What had they done earlier to change what they did not like? A rediscovery of Kolkata’s much trampled on soul?
From the faceless individual signing a ‘Justice for Rizwanur’ poster on the upmarket Park Street where the ‘murdered’ man had once been to college to the celeb lighting a candle asking for an investigation into his death, Kolkata’s conscience has woken up to change. Some hit the streets, some stand in balconies in support of some marching below, some silently put their impression on vinyl posters, some light just one candle… the aggregate of the some is rising all the time.
So too is the music. Dylan and the Dead are back on Park Street, once the cradle of jam sessions. Revolution — industrial, velvet, orange or green — of any variety except one passed this city by.
No more. The candle is burning. Only, Big Brother and his army are not only glaring, but firing too.
And some usual news…no, his splitting headaches!
-
Hammered and Sickled by Barkha Dutt
…[T]he West Bengal Chief Minister gave away the game himself. With the transparent aggression that marks a man with a guilty conscience, he flared up in rare anger and told journalists that the protestors in Nandigram been “paid back in their own coin.”
…
There wasn’t even a feeble attempt to deny that CPM cadres had been permitted by the party to storm their way back into Nandigram. If they had to shoot, kill and rape to make their way back in, so be it. No explanations were provided for why central paramilitary forces were sent in only after the Left’s militia was firmly back at home base. No apologies were offered for why a state government in democratic India should need to wage an extra-constitutional war. Other than contempt and criticism, there was no response at all to the high-minded public lament by Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi. As far as the Chief Minister was concerned his party’s private army had “retaliated in desperation”. -
Buddha finds Nandigram too hot to handle
The CPI(M) may have “recaptured” Nandigram through its own ‘Operation shock and awe’, but West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee appears to be paying the heaviest price, in consequence.
These days, the CM’s actions, especially his belligerent stand justifying the CPI(M)’s recent cadre operation in Nandigram, are being decried by nearly everyone, from stalwarts in the state political Opposition to prominent intellectuals and even key Left Front constituents.
