Here's another recently published piece, this time in Socialist Worker - it appeared in abbreviated form, so I thought I'd put the original up on the blog.

Freeing Land from the Tiller: Communist Experiments in Neo-Liberalism in West Bengal

Nandigram is a rural area in the East Midnapur district of West Bengal, a state governed for three decades by a Left Front dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Through the course of 2007, this agrarian belt has witnessed one of the most significant movements against global neo-liberalism and state power anywhere in the world. The issue was the acquisition of rural land for a Special Economic Zone, to be leased primarily to the Salim Group from Indonesia, close supporters of Suharto during his dictatorship. The MoU between the Indonesian corporate giant and the West Bengal government had been signed in July 2006. On 2 January 2007, an official notification informed the inhabitants that 25,000 acres of their land were to be acquired for the establishment of a chemical plant, as part of the proposed SEZ. None of the inhabitants had been consulted prior to this decision, and it had not gone through the authorized legal channels, the village and district representative bodies. A massive movement from below, seeking to defend rural land against corporate invasion, began at the beginning of 2007.

The countryside of southern West Bengal had already been convulsed for some months over a similar land takeover bid, backed by the Left Front government, by the Tatas, India’s biggest industrial house, for fertile agricultural land in Singur. By December, the resistance in Singur had largely been crushed. To prevent a similar loss of land in Nandigram, the villagers took to direct action. They responded to news of their dispossession by digging up roads and destroying bridges, making it impossible for the police or local CPI(M) cadres to enter. Violent clashes broke out between villagers and armed cadres at the beginning of January. The latter fired rounds of gunfire into the barricaded villages, hurled bombs and killed people, backed by muscle power from Lakshman Seth, the local M.P. The villagers retaliated in kind, killing a local party leader and burning down his house. The vast bulk of the villagers gathered under the stewardship of the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee or the B.U.P.C., the association set up to mobilize against the takeover of land, a loosely organized body of people from various political parties (including opposition Trinamul Congress members, far-left activists, Left Front supporters whose land was threatened, and ordinary villagers without political affiliations). There were expulsions of CPI(M) supporters who had participated in the attack on Nandigram.

Between January and March, there was something of a lull, as the movement in Nandigram consolidated its authority, the state remained blocked out of the villages, and Lakshman Seth and his allies made plans for a reprisal. Matters came to a head in March. On the 14th, a battalion of policemen and CPI(M) cadres disguised as policemen ripped through Nandigram, firing upon an unarmed crowd and hacking their way through the villages in an orgy of savagery that left at least 14 dead (according to official figures) and hundreds seriously injured, lying in hospitals that years of government neglect had left woefully unprepared for situations like this. Rape and sexual mutilation of the most horrific kinds were systematically used by party cadres as tools of retribution. The villagers managed to repulse the attack, in a heroic counter-mobilization, and drove out the ‘police-cadres’ (the term, used by the villagers, originated in the discovery that cadres of the ruling party had disguised themselves as policemen to participate in the blood-letting) on 16 and 17 March. The state and party had to withdraw, but carried on war by other means, including an attempted economic blockade of Nandigram, an attempt to starve out the resistance.

In the meantime, the West Bengal CPI(M), shamefully backed by the central party leadership, carried out a heavy but unconvincing propaganda campaign, pointing the finger at ‘the communal menace’, ‘the Maoist menace’, and any number of allegedly self-explanatory ‘menaces’ that would detract attention from what Nandigram’s peasants were actually, and obviously, engaged in: a grassroots popular movement to retain the land they lived and worked on. In a weak attempt to append the carrot to the stick, the chief minister made a couple of half-hearted pronouncements to the effect that land would not be acquired without consent. CPI(M) propaganda has consistently harped on this theme: why did the resistance continue despite the chief minister’s reassurances? The answer is quite simple. No party leaders had the gumption to visit Nandigram after the massacre. No serious relief measures were organized by the state, which instead sought to impose an economic embargo on the villagers. No compensation was offered to those who suffered from the violence in March. The enquiries of the judiciary and the Central Bureau of Investigation were consistently scuttled and delayed by the government, and none of the accused was brought to justice. There was little reason for Nandigram’s villagers to trust their chief minister, and every reason for them to consider him their enemy. Subsequent events were to bear this out tragically.

Between March and November, a low-level civil war raged in the villages of the area. CPI(M) workers encircled the resisting villages, and kept up a sustained barrage of gunfire, bombs, and threatening abuse across loudspeakers. There were further expulsions of party supporters from Nandigram; there was also, conversely, the flight of B.U.P.C activists and supporters terrorized by attacks by the ruling party’s cadres. There was armed violence on both sides, which was hardly a surprise, since the rural politics of West Bengal has for many years been characterized by the use of arms, which have been made plentifully available to villagers for use in inter-party conflicts, especially prior to local government elections. Reprisals and counter-reprisals ravaged Nandigram through the summer, though the forces and resources arrayed on the side of the state were infinitely greater, and the balance of violence was utterly lop-sided. Nevertheless, the government failed to secure re-entry into the villages of Nandigram. The barricades stayed up, the villagers on one side united in defence of their land, and party cadres on the other, wielding guns and waiting for their moment, to avenge the humiliation in March. So things stayed, for over seven months.

The latest instalment in this tragedy took place recently. On 30 October, the villages of Satengabadi and Ranichak were attacked by the police and by cadres in an attempt to regain the area. Between 5 and 10 November, cadres and local police stepped up efforts to ‘recapture’ Nandigram. A lightning raid on Satengabadi virtually destroyed the village, rendering over a thousand people homeless, their houses looted and burnt. On 10 November, the final capitulation occurred. Party cadres swooped down upon a demonstration by the BUPC, abducted 600 protestors, and used them as a human shield to secure re-entry into the villages. The state finally, after over eleven months of civil war, managed to re-enter the villages. Since then, there have been massive and spectacular acts of violent revenge, by party workers who’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. Rapes, killings, and torture characterized the re-establishment of ‘law and order’. At the present moment, there is a campaign of absolute terror and effective enslavement going on, as villagers are being forced to sign affidavits pledging complete obedience to the CPI(M)’s commands, and to join rallies organized by the party. Nandigram at present resembles nothing so much as a vast slave camp.

The spectacle of a professedly left-wing government first trying to secure land for a massive project of corporate expansion, then confronting a people’s movement with force and armed terror, has produced a politics of mass revulsion that all the attempts to stifle or deflect dissent have not subdued. This has been manifested in recent events in West Bengal that have rocked the stability of the ruling regime. Most dramatically, in September there were food riots against the hoarding and sale of food marked out for public rationing. These black-market practices are common in Bengal, and are usually organized through local party channels. A series of elections to students’ unions in colleges in West Bengal, in the wake of Nandigram, delivered decisive mandates against the Students’ Federation of India, the party’s student wing. An unexpected electoral reverse in elections to a local dock union supplemented this trend. A scandal over an inter-religious love affair in Calcutta, where the state government scotched an enquiry into the death of a Muslim boy allegedly brought about by the actions of the girl’s well-connected business family, affirmed suspicions that the Left Front was now consistently shielding vested propertied interests. The organized Left’s citadel is no longer secure, and social tensions that had simmered beneath the surface for many years are coming to the boil.

The epicentre of solidarity with Nandigram has been Kolkata, and here there has been a remarkable efflorescence of democratic disgust with the CPI(M): students, intellectuals, artists, lawyers, and doctors have, for the first time in decades, gathered together to protest, often in the face of brutal police attacks and arbitrary arrests. On 14 November, Kolkata saw a spontaneous demonstration of over 100,000 people, marching silently to protest the carnage in Nandigram. It was a red-letter day in a city where demonstrations for many years had meant nothing more than exercises in self-publicity conducted by political parties, usually the ruling Left Front combine, and where the memories of an earlier Kolkata, vibrant with political passion and engagement, had apparently long died. Poetry, discursive analysis, demonstrations, candlelit vigils, boycotts of government awards by intellectuals once close to the Party: every possible means is being used to shame the mighty. The enormous outpouring of solidarity in Kolkata has been immensely moving, especially since previous acts of state brutality and corporate invasion in the country had evoked nothing on this scale, and it had become passé among most educated middle-class Indians to turn a blind eye to the conditions of the country’s poor.

Things are changing, and it is a time of possibilities, openings, and dangers. Some of the noise around Nandigram has come from political rivals of the CPI(M), just as compromised or more, without any of the CPI(M)’s earlier history of agitation for the downtrodden, who have jumped on to a convenient bandwagon. Some of it comes from the Indian far left, in its many guises, which faces internal strife, inner authoritarianism and dogmatism, and, most of all, the constant threat of repression, in a country where attempts to resist the writ of the state, no matter what their provenance, are labeled either terrorist or ‘Maoist’ and rendered fit for arbitrary, Patriot Act-style counter-mobilizations of terror. Some of the initiative comes from mobilizations loosely described as ‘people’s movements’, some of which command much popularity but are without the organization or coordination needed to mount an immediate political challenge. However, the messiness and internal contradictions of the present moment should not blind us to a key fact. Neo-liberalism in India has hit a road block. Projects for corporate expansion, economic restructuring and land seizure, backed by armed state force, have been announced across the length and breadth of the country: Maharashtra, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, the North-east, to pick random examples. Each project has become a site of prolonged resistance and conflict: Nandigram may be the most dramatic, but it is by no means the only one. There may be no blueprints at hand that tell us what ‘alternatives’ may look like, but the resistance to global neo-liberal capitalism has been near-universal, it has been uncompromising, and it has come from the bottom up. A movement of resistance, in other words, that a real Left would be proud to be part of.

Where does India’s ‘real’, which is to say officially designated Left, actually stand? The jury is still out, though the evidence continues to mount. The shameful silence of the central leadership of the CPM has destroyed the party’s credibility as a force that can claim political principle and commitment. An outright condemnation of the Nandigram violence from the party leadership would have saved the face of the official Left, though there is precious little they could actually have done: the tail wags the dog, and the actions of the West Bengal party unit clearly determine Politbureau stands, rather than the reverse. The CPI(M) clearly sees its continued hegemony in West Bengal – where most of its seats in Parliament come from – as necessary to its continued relevance in Indian politics. The price being paid, however, is the increasing absurdity of the party’s claims upon ‘left-hood’. The central leadership has to, therefore, resort to more and more ridiculous justifications and lies covering up what really happened in West Bengal. The agitation against the takeover of land is consistently depicted by Party propaganda as a machination of either the Trinamul Congress and the right-wing BJP, or as a Maoist conspiracy. There have been, however, muted and not-so-muted voices of dissent from within circles once considered close to or part of the official Left project in India: prominent party members have resigned and condemned the Left Front’s handling of Nandigram, others have spoken out against their Party’s official stands and had their voices muffled, and there appears to be churning within the official Left at various levels.

Whether there will ever be a credible, reformed CPI(M) freed of corruption and compromise is an open question: it is clear, however, that this is ruled out as long as the Party does as it pleases in West Bengal. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was recently praised by Henry Kissinger, who said the Communist chief minister reminded him of Deng Xiaoping. Not coincidentally, Bhattacharya has also been the darling of the corporate media in India, which was therefore faced with a crisis during Nandigram, not quite knowing which way to look while he executed the policies they wanted in a manner that didn’t quite smell of roses. Lakshman Seth and Benoy Konar, proven to be the chief masterminds and instigators of the attacks on Nandigram’s peasants, have neither been brought to justice, nor disciplined, nor even reprimanded by the Party leadership.

As a conclusion, let me present two contending claims about Nandigram and what it symbolizes for Indian politics. First, the view of the official Indian Left. Bengal, we hear, is a citadel of left-wing resistance to the politics of communalism that dominates Indian politics, the politics of imperialism that globally encircles it, and the economics of neo-liberalism that threatens its experiments in left-wing economic and social reform. The survival of the Left Front government in West Bengal is supposedly crucial to the continued relevance of the CPI(M) in national politics, and is thereby essential. The ‘law-and-order’ problem posed by the movement in Nandigram threatened the continued political and economic alternative held out by the Indian Left, and thus needed to be resolved by firm state action. It was necessary, therefore, to ‘recapture’ Nandigram.

Let me now put matters another way. There is, indeed, urgent need for global resistance to the politics of empire and neo-liberalism that seeks to swamp the world, and stamp out the possibility of any alternatives. But the Left Front Government in West Bengal – and by implication the official Indian Left – has long given up on that fight, beyond empty pieties that never actually threaten the hegemonic structures of the world. And now, with Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s embrace of global capitalism, West Bengal under CPI(M) rule represents one of the prime entry points of global capital with its neo-liberal strategies into India. The politics of Stalinism and the economics of neo-liberalism have given birth to a monster.

The experiences of the twentieth century have taught us that ‘the Left’ is always a complex noun. It cannot, however, possibly be complex enough to include the Party in West Bengal. A party that pushes for the introduction of Special Economic Zones, bypasses popular consultations of any kind in making its decisions, makes deals with the corporate group that bankrolled Suharto’s massacre of Indonesian Communists, and nourishes and protects thugs who shoot peasants and protestors, may be called all sorts of things, but ‘left-wing’ is not among them.

Nandigram’s peasants were not fired by such geo-political calculations as I have just outlined: they simply wanted to hold on to their land, and they refused to buy into the myth that they were being offered a better deal. But the meaning of their resistance has experienced the political transvaluation that turns immediate battles for survival into epochal acts of resistance. It has become one of the central nodes in the chain of global movements that seek to resist a neo-liberal hegemonic project that rests upon the intensified exploitation of labour, the arbitrary acquisition of resources, and the stifling of internal political dissent. To achieve the success of this project, it was necessary to destroy the movement. The CPI(M) in West Bengal, having decided to do so, has demonstrated its inherent similarity with the other forces on the Indian political spectrum: its common function with them as neoliberal capitalism’s slave, victim, and agent.

A working-class dream dies and is replaced by another.

The miners’ strike of 1984 is defeated. Coal miners and mining – an occupation, a community, a world and its meanings – disappear. Margaret Thatcher crushes the militant centre of British working-class life and politics, and changes the face of Northern England. The pits empty out; men are made redundant. The jobs will not come back. Something flowers, though, in the midst of this defeat. A boy from a family of striking miners begins to dance. He achieves his dream against his family, his community, the childhood he’s been given, and the boundaries within which he has been taught to leash his talent. He leaves the dying for the new; he becomes a professional ballet dancer. This is the story told by Stephen Daldry’s 1997 runaway blockbuster, Billy Elliot.

There is a plausible hard-left way of looking at this. Thatcherism ushers in a new world. The textures and horizons of working-class solidarity, and also of a whole way of life, are eliminated, and replaced by individual achievement. The boy in the film accomplishes his dream in a manner worthy of Hollywood. The space that once belonged to working-class solidarity is emptied out, and all that can replace it is the celebration of individual success. Millions fail, but there is a boy who succeeds, who dances, who wins against the odds. And this personal success redeems the bitter experiences of his community, personal and collective failure and defeat. Somehow things are put right. The miners lose the strike, their work and the shape of their lives, but it’s all right because a boy dances. This is how a hard, unblinkered leftist might well see the film.

And none of this is untrue. Billy Elliot does offer us such apparently mawkish consolations, and it sentimentalizes and softens defeat. As an evocation of a particular moment in recent British history, it is in many ways false. It is a fantasy of individual accomplishment ultimately redeeming collective defeat. But is this sentimental evocation of a lost working-class world, then, really a disguised celebration of the triumph of capitalism, an apologia for Thatcherism? There’s more depth to the film’s portrait of a changing Britain than this. The fable of a working-class boy who wants and manages to escape his world is more complex than it might appear at first. To understand this, we need to go back to an earlier film, made years before Thatcher murdered coal mining and miners, in an era when that working-class life was too real to be sentimentalized into fantasy.

In Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Billy, a boy from a mining family befriends a kestrel, masters it, teaches it to fly back to him and perch on his wrist. For a brief while, assisted by a caring schoolteacher, Billy’s pleasures in the bird take wing, he discovers there can be more to life than the mining pit he’s destined for. But soon his brother, brutal and brutalized, kills the bird to punish the boy for a small misdemeanour, and this destroys the dream. The oppressions of a mining town’s family and community life, which the boy’s relationship with the bird symbolized an escape from, return, reinforced and inescapable. Class persists, and people are fixed in it through the compulsion to labour, to know their place and stay there.

People in the village are not necessarily bad, but not necessarily good either. They have no time to love one another, to cherish one another’s dreams and desires. Work is too grinding, school prematurely hardens boys of Billy’s age into the men they must become. Softness is despised, and life has to go on but is rarely happy. One moves from tedium to tedium, frustration to frustration, defeat to defeat, and little moments of tenderness and hope – like Billy proudly bearing the kestrel on his wrist – are easily ground to dust, leaving no trace. The film ends with the boy sobbing, controlling his tears, and burying his beloved bird. ‘Not going down t’pit’, he yells defiantly at his brother at the start of the film, but he almost certainly will, and he’ll stay there through his life. This, of course, is the Ken Loach of Cathy Come Home, grimly social-realist, deliberately eschewing dramatic resolution and climaxes that square the circle. We are offered neither the dramatic consolations of hope, nor those of despair, and we are denied also the satisfaction of catharsis.

In the late 1960s, when Loach made the film, there was virtually no other life imaginable for a young boy brought up in that time, in that community, despite the contemporary, and anodyne, reassurances of general social dynamism and class mobility. The working class that Loach loves and feels for as a socialist can also be, as he recognizes and shows us, a space of immense cruelty, heartlessness and humdrum routine. Contra left-wing certitudes, it is not a necessary space of revolutionary upheaval and transformation. It is, rather, a world where people in working-class communities subdue their dreams and transgressions, perform and repeat the social roles ascribed to them. The thankless, repetitive chores of their labouring existence circumscribe, limit, and brutalize them. Loach’s late-sixties style is founded on a political aesthetic where cinema performs the function of social criticism with sober senses, and precludes the illusory completeness – and nobility – of drama.

Death confers the finitude that casts life into a whole, unchangeable pattern, and memory transforms lived life into the structures of drama. Three decades on, Stephen Daldry makes Billy Elliot, and the times have changed. Nostalgia is the founding aesthetic now, and the light of a generous, but resigned, posterity glows upon the working class that once eked out its existence in the pits. Daldry quite evidently glances backward at Loach; his eponymous hero shares a name with the older director’s creation. Very little remains of the world of the heavy-drinking, unionized male miner that Loach castigated. It was a life that Thatcher snuffed out in 1984. On the other hand, the dream of escape has been realized – ironically for most, in the form of a total destruction of livelihood and community; happily for a few, in the form of the individual talents and slices of good fortune that pull them into a new existence. As a consequence, both – the world of the mining community and the world of the dreaming boy – can be retrospectively romanticized. The miners are reasonably gentrified, clean and well dressed and well fed. Their poverty and despair are invoked but never convincingly shown, their need is never shown, and nothing ever leads to real dehumanization. People are basically tender towards one another. They sacrifice themselves for their loved ones, but the sacrifice is never truly made, for no one is truly destroyed. Scabs are chastised, but not ostracized or cruelly humiliated, by their striking workmates. And then there’s the boy who wants to dance, who pursues his dream and fulfils it, and in some measure redeems the failed strike. This redemption is conveyed poetically in the film: the last, soaring moment, the aging father, once so hard and proud, now soft and wobbling with joy as his son leaps into the stage’s shimmer, to the notes of Swan Lake.

The misery and the suffering have been real, but art is ultimately redemptive. The workers are dead, they are redundant, society has no use for them – they live through their children, the generation that redeems their failure, not through the accomplishment of the collective dream that they once shared, but through its displacement on to the terrain of individual talent and genius. There is no such thing as society, as Thatcher once famously declared.

But there’s more depth to the film. Its sympathy with the striking miners is serious. If the movie describes, at some level, the success of Thatcherism, it nevertheless celebrates, and pays homage in a number of ways, to the struggle against it. And there is a tension between the two motifs in the film – the boy’s struggle to break free of his world and that world’s struggle against its annihilator, capitalism.

In one scene, the boy reads out a letter from his mother, written to him while she way dying, to his ballet teacher. It says, in brief: Billy, I’m proud of you, be what you are, live your dream, remember that this is what I want for you. It is, for me, a deeply unsatisfying scene. It’s an effective tearjerker – my eyes filled up – but it’s too easy, kitsch, Hollywoodish, it takes too little effort to produce a scene like that. It’s been done all too many times before, if usually with much less sensitivity. But it does effectively describe the boy’s dream, the content of it, its relationship to his life, his family, his world. He wants a way out of the certainties and limits of a coal miner’s life. When forbidden to dance by his father, he kicks strike posters in anger (while in the background T. Rex’s Children of the Revolution blares). He lashes out at the chains that bind him to his class and prevent him from moving away – and up. And in the process, he lashes out at the solidarity that gives working-class identity political meaning, because this is an identity and a politics that belittles and excludes his desires and dreams.

Another moment describes this working-class existence in different terms. Billy’s father decides to scab to pay for his son’s dance education. Here the choice is a bitter one, between his duty to his comrades and to shared working-class life, and on the other hand to his son and to the future. Once again the resolution is perhaps too easy: he leaves off scabbing, and is welcomed back into the fold, sobbing in his elder son’s arms. Workers accepting a strayed comrade back so easily? No blood spilt? This is far too easy. A strike can be just but unkind, and the miners’ strike was brutal on all sides. And Billy’s future is nevertheless financed; the whole mining village pitches in for his benefit, which, again, is less than plausible. But it’s a moving moment all the same – the father cannot scab, even for his son – but his decision is not a tragic and hopeless one, he doesn’t have to compromise the principles he has lived by all his life to help his son up the ladder. When push comes to shove, he finds a way of saving his son from the bleakness of his own future, and does this without betraying his comrades.

And then, of course, redemption happens – Billy makes it to the Royal Ballet School, and becomes a great dancer. This is rose-tinted fantasy. But it is also moving, and it works. It’s fantasy, but a fantasy worthy of the history it explores. And after all, it explores only one human possibility within the historical tragedy of the miners’ strike, which may be softened but is never belittled or diminished in scale. The film ends, of course, on the crescendo thrill of Billy dancing to Swan Lake, a triumphant affirmation of the worth he wrested in defiance of his upbringing. But it is preceded by a juxtaposition, in successive frames, of images that sit more ambiguously beside this celebratory finale. Billy’s bus, headed to London, tearing him away from the dying world of the miners. Billy’s brother yelling to the boy that he loves him, words lost to Billy, who cannot hear them through the windowpane his nose is pressed against. And finally, a joyless and dark return to work – the strikers, Billy’s father and brother among them – are pressed against each other like sardines in a tin, their headlamps knocking against each other, as the cage they’re locked in pushes them down, once again, into the heart of the earth, a mine that will soon be closed.

Billy realizes his dream, and asserts his claim upon the world in a way his father could never have done. But the horizons of his talent are not all that change in the course of the film. Much more changes, in at least one major life-world. Pre-adolescent boys tentatively explore sexualities that are not straight, and enter professions that their straight male worlds forbid. Billy is not a ‘poof’, but his closest friend, Michael, is. Michael eventually ends up in London, a miner’s child with a lover who is both black and gay, and they sit, at the movie’s close, beside the quintessentially male militant working-class father and son to watch Billy perform on stage. During their childhood, Michael briefly, embarrassedly kisses Billy, and is rebuffed, but not cruelly. And Billy comes to accept Michael for what he is, and – briefly, embarrassedly - returns the kiss towards the end of the movie, as he leaves for London. Men and their sons wear women’s clothes in private. Through ballet, a boy who’s being pressed into boxing discovers a new body and a new way of taking pleasure in it. Billy becomes androgynous through his dance, and his father and brother, contemptuous of poofs and wankers and ballet-dancing men, come to not only accept but also respect him for what he is. Lives, identities and relationships change as an old order ends.

The strike ended in tragedy, in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods, in despair and the apparently permanent victory of Thatcher and the social injustice she embodied and celebrated. Nothing can possibly redeem all this. But still, flowers did bloom in the desert. Within a year, miners were doing the unthinkable, and leading gay parades. At the May Day demonstration in London this year, I personally witnessed the wider historical meaning of this: a rally for workers was led and punctuated by troupes of gay and lesbian activists. And as same-sex couples held hands and kissed and danced, an old working-class man, bent and wizened, grinned toothlessly at me and made a V-sign. Poofs and dykes were no longer the object of militant workers’ hatred. And in the world of cinematic fantasy, Billy danced on stage, and Michael took a gay lover. These redemptions do not outweigh or even balance the tragedy of the strike’s defeat. But neither are they unreal or unworthy.

Billy in Kes reminds those of us who value the rights and hopes of labour that the world of the worker is not pretty or fair or kind, that it is also a world where the weak, marginalized and dissident get screwed over and are thrust into unwanted lives and roles. Billy in Billy Elliot reminds us that a miner’s son can live his dream, and if doing so means copping out of a worker’s existence, it also means work, it also means pain, and it can produce beauty. The final moments of the film can move one to tears. The father, now older and weaker, stumbles through London – an unfamiliar, dizzying world to one who’s never left Durham in his life. Bemused by it all, dragged on by an impatient elder son, he stumbles to an aisle seat at the ballet, and his old head nods and his old eyes shine with tears and rapture as, on stage, his son explodes into music, motion and magic. Kes offers us a vocabulary of grim realism, Billy Elliot one of redemptive fantasy. Both films are recognizably enough made from the Left, though in different registers. Both films challenge some of the Left’s holy cows. That is reason enough to value them both.

Here's a piece by me that appeared in the last issue of International Socialism (www.isj.org). The version in the journal was edited quite a bit, and in the online version they managed to consistently misprint the CPI (M) as the CPI, so I'm posting the original, full version here.

Nandigram and the Deformations of the Indian Left

The Battle Lines

On 14 March this year, the state government of West Bengal, headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) sent several thousand police troops into the rural district of Nandigram in East Midnapur, the scene of a three-month old movement by peasants against the establishment of a Special Economic Zone on their land. The land in question was to be turned over the Indonesian-based Salim group[1] for the establishment of a multi-purpose SEZ comprising chemical and pharmaceutical units, shipbuilding, and real estate. Over 19,000 acres of peasant land in its various forms – cropped land, homestead, schools, mosques and temples – were to be acquired. Peasant resistance ushered in the New Year – at the beginning of January, villagers began digging up and barricading roads, blocking the entry of the police and generally of the state and party apparatus into their land. Clashes between party cadres and villagers broke out several times between January and March, culminating in the decision of the Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, to send in the police on March 14. Whether the Left Front government actually orchestrated the massacre of villagers (official estimates tolled 14 dead, the unofficial count ran into hundreds) or not, it certainly stood by and watched while policemen, CPI(M) cadres, and cadres disguised as policemen ran amok among the villagers, in an orgy of killing, torture and rape. Since March, Nandigram has witnessed further confrontations between party and peasants, the fraying of the livelihoods and networks that held the local economy together, and the slow strangulation of protest by the state government.

Nandigram exposed the horrific possibilities at the heart of the Bengal Left’s embrace of global, ‘neo-liberal’ capital, but this was not unprecedented. The uprising and repression in Nandigram had been foreshadowed at Singur, one of the most fertile and prosperous tracts of agricultural land in the state and in the country. Here the West Bengal government had turned over a thousand acres of cultivated land to the Tatas, India’s biggest industrial house, for the establishment of a motor factory, a takeover that entailed the loss of over 20,000 livelihoods. This had galvanized a movement that had its roots in the villages of Singur, but also sparked off solidarity campaigns in Calcutta, attempts by the chief opposition party, the Trinamul Congress, to climb aboard the bandwagon, initiatives by far-left Naxalite groupings, and protests by left-leaning cultural activists and intellectuals across the country, disgusted by the prolonged deformations of a party and government many of them had once identified with. Singur brought the issue of Special Economic Zones, with their conjoined logics of mass displacement, the right of companies to administer their territory largely independently of state law, the abrogation of constitutionally guaranteed labour rights, and the violation of environmental standards, to the forefront of national politics. During and after the mayhem at Nandigram, these themes were repeated and amplified, and the battle continues.

The paradox of an apparently left-wing administration embracing the most brutal and intrusive contemporary regime of global capitalist expansion threw into relief the antagonism between India’s chosen path of economic development and the livelihoods and aspirations of the majority of its citizens. But this tension was not, it hardly needs to be said, new in itself. SEZs are the flashpoint of this tension, but not its only expression, since land can be grabbed for many purposes – real estate hubs, factories, townships – that may or may not take the form of SEZs. Land grabs have been the source of major confrontations and struggles between local communities, big business and the state in Jharkhand, in Orissa, in Punjab, in Maharashtra, in Gurgaon, in Gujarat, and various other places. Nandigram and Singur, however, catapulted the issue into the national media, and produced a range of publicly visible protest initiatives.

The most important sites of resistance to state-sponsored corporate invasions, though, remain the land and people affected by them. At Kalinganagar in Orissa, where a bauxite plant is planned, fierce resistance continues despite the charming decision of the national government to install anti-personnel landmines against the incursions of resisting tribals. (India, in keeping with its general attitude towards global human rights regulation, is not a signatory to international anti-landmine agreements). At Jagatsinghpur, also in Orissa, the South Korean steel company POSCO has been allotted land for an SEZ, and here the local resistance has taken the form of kidnappings of company officials, who are unharmed but held captive in order to induce the government to take account of the demands of those affected by the project. In Jharkhand, dozens of SEZ projects hang in the balance, unable to get off the ground because of fierce mobilizations against them. At Singur, where the controversy first erupted, villagers still regularly breach the wall separating them from the Tata factory site, despite the heavy presence of punitive state mechanisms. At Haripur, not far from Nandigram, the central government had planned a nuclear power plant. Here, as at Nandigram, local inhabitants have blockaded their villages off from the entry of the state and the police, and set up something akin to an autonomous zone.

The pattern is obvious: in each case, powerful companies and a mammoth state apparatus have negotiated agreements on massive land grabs, but in each case actual construction work has been indefinitely stalled by the strength of local mobilizations. In this sense, the expansion of neo-liberal capitalism in India has finally hit a genuine road-block, and confronts, in its own way, as intense a crisis as the populations affected by its projects do. Given the utter lack of consent, the state and the companies involved have at present only two options. First, to back off entirely. Second, to violently repress resistance. The first option jeopardizes investor confidence, the kickbacks doubtless enjoyed from these agreements by implicated ministers and bureaucrats, and, in more general terms, the future of the strategy of unmandated land acquisition. The second option produces instant crisis, as at Nandigram, where, despite the scale of state and party brutality and the annihilation of an entire local economy, the CPI(M) has been forced to suspend, for the moment, the planned SEZ. In a way, this clear ‘no’ sent out to current economic policy in India parallels the resistance to NAFTA and FTAA in Latin America, though perhaps without the depth of ideological ferment visible in the latter instance. In both cases, the dominant trajectory of capitalist growth has run up against the obstacle of utter, uncompromising popular refusal, and the political actualization of this refusal in acts of resistance. The cosy myth of a consensus around a particular model of economic growth, apparently ‘value-neutral’ but actually deeply ideologically constituted, has been shattered. Nationally and globally, this is a crucial moment in the history of capital.

The new battle lines that are beginning to take shape around land acquisition in India cross and blur the antagonisms of official party politics. Increasingly, the major political formations in India seem united over the legitimacy both of the currently hegemonic national economic policy, and of state repression to enforce this policy. West Bengal, a state run by the organized Left, is at the helm of the SEZ drive. In Maharashtra, the Congress is in charge of actualizing comparably brutal drives of local displacement for the establishment of these zones. In Orissa, a coalition of the Biju Janata Dal and the BJP, India’s major right-wing formation, have been administering, with the aid of the Army, a similar assault upon tribal communities for the purposes of land acquisition, an assault that puts even Bengal in the shade. In Gujarat and Jharkhand, the state-level BJP administrations are the initiators and executors of this drive. In each of these cases, land is acquired for the purposes of corporate takeover without any consultation of local populations and their representative institutions, let alone any democratic mandate for this policy. This is at the heart of the new consensus – the takeover of land that sustains thousands of people, and its transfer to companies that are accountable only to their shareholders, is presented as a fait accompli, something the state has the right to do, regardless of the wishes not only of local populations, but also of their democratically elected local representative bodies, the panchayats, gram sabhas, and district committees. In this matter, the divisions between Left, Right, and centre, real and bitter as they are in other arenas of national politics, have virtually ceased to matter. Conversely, the opposition to this does not run along the lines of party politics either. The CPI(M)’s propaganda machines have been working overtime to convince us that the resistance to the Nandigram and Singur land grabs were machinations of the Trinamul Congress, on the one hand, and the revolutionary left-wing Naxalites, on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth: the uprisings in these places stemmed from the extremely rational desire of local agrarian populations to hold on to their land, and the resistance organized by them cut across party lines, and in Nandigram consisted overwhelmingly of people who had been supporters or even members of the CPI(M).

The real battle being fought here, then, is not principally between rival ideologies, between capitalism and socialism or between Left and Right, though of course we can and usually do assign ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ valences to the objective positions taken up in this struggle. It is, rather, a direct confrontation between democracy and capital, which are increasingly incommensurate with one another. If democratic accountability is to be taken seriously by those who govern, the policy of corporate land acquisition cannot be conceived of as an inevitable outcome, a matter for policy makers and administrators to formulate and implement as a matter of right: it must, since it entails the disruption of mammoth numbers of lives and livelihoods, pass through established democratic structures and channels, and secure a mandate. But this is plainly impossible, given the consequences such policies have for the people they affect. If this form of capitalist penetration runs up against the road-block of absolute refusal, as it has done, then pushing it through, on the part of the state, necessarily involves the curtailment of democratic procedures and entitlements. But the use of coercion to push such an agenda through invites further, and increasingly more militant, forms of resistance, and the impasse, far from being resolved, grows. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

Losing the Left

For most people in West Bengal, the spectacle of the organized Left’s recourse to bloody massacre and authoritarian repression is nothing new. The CPI(M) in this state wins election after election, partly on the strength of land reforms it undertook in the 1980s (and is now abandoning), but also partly on the strength of sustained electoral rigging and intimidation. It cushions corrupt and venal bureaucracies, a trade union culture stripped of its once legendary vitality by utter subservience to party dictates, a politics of patronage and nepotism at all levels, and, across vast parts of the countryside, local networks of party authority that function as armed fiefdoms, with their local bosses. Lakshman Seth, the CPI(M) MP from Tamluk, the constituency in which Nandigram is located, and in many ways the architect of the March 14 massacre, is only one of many cases in point. Thirty years of unbroken Left Front power prove that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and while many on the global Left celebrate the CPI(M)’s achievement as an example of democratically mandated Communist success, they would do well to remember that they speak of a state-level administration that subverts democracy at every point, and is in the process of reinventing itself as a party driven by corporate interests and the aspirations of the upper middle class. The enormous leeway given to real estate speculation[2], the abysmal state of primary education and health services, and the eagerness with which the government has embraced global capital, are all indicators of this. A poster at a recent demonstration against the massacre gave us an effective, if hysteric, evaluation of the West Bengal government – ‘CPI(M) = Capitalist Party of India (Murderer)’.

This is an evaluation that many on the far Left in India would extend to the organized Left in toto, not only as it operates in West Bengal but also in its larger dimension as a not insignificant force in national politics. They would point out, with truth and reason on their side, that there is a long history of violence, intimidation, and bullying here – that the official Communist movement in India has both blood and compromise on its hands. They would point out, unassailably, that the Party has never repudiated Stalinism – indeed, its annual conferences still contain accolades to the Soviet Union that sound like 1956 never happened. They would point out that the Left Front government in West Bengal was party to the massacre of Bangladeshi settlers in the Sunderbans in 1979, and also that Jyoti Basu, chief minister of the state from 1977 to the end of the twentieth century, superintended the brutal eviction of hawkers (‘Operation Sunshine’) from the pavements of Calcutta in 1994 to make the city look pretty for John Major’s visit. They would point to the organized Left’s assaults upon revolutionary Naxalite and Maoist groups in West Bengal, and perhaps also claim that these latter formations represent the only true, authentic face of left-wing politics in India.

For its part, the CPI(M), nationally, has done more than its fair share of work in giving weight to these accusations. The central party leadership lied through its teeth while citing figures of consensual land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, it has consistently refused to issue a condemnation of the West Bengal state unit’s repression of popular protest, it has refused to acknowledge the resistance to the SEZ as anything but a conjuration of its political rivals, and it has, unforgivably, done absolutely nothing to restrain the excesses and brutalities of party cadres in Nandigram, which continue today, three months after the massacre, as a matter of course. A large part of this has to do with the nature of political compulsions on the organized Left – the Party is utterly dependent on the units in West Bengal and Kerala, the only major states where it is powerful, for its clout in national politics, and indeed for its continued existence as a serious force. In effect, whatever the compulsions that drive the central leadership’s endorsement, this constitutes a break, perhaps irrevocable, with radical and progressive politics, and more generally with anticapitalism.

At this conjuncture in Indian politics, these failures and betrayals are fatal. There are social movements across the country, most of which share left-wing values and perspectives, that have organized bravely against big dams, corporate takeovers of land, the exploitation of labouring people, the ecological consequences of industrial capitalism, and the continuing erosion and marginalization of the livelihoods of millions as a result of national economic policies. Till Nandigram happened, it was possible for the Left to share a common platform with these movements, as for instance during the World Social Forum and its offshoot, the Indian Social Forum. After Nandigram, it is difficult to see where this shared space is. The organized Left, it is true, has taken up significant issues in Parliament: for instance, in its protests against airline privatization and pension reform. It is true, though also bitter and ironical, that it was this Left that provided a public space for arguments against the course of national economic policy, and in particular – here the ironies grow hideous – the establishment of SEZs. Countless numbers of party loyalists have been shaken to the core by the events in West Bengal, and there are major inner-party struggles within the CPI(M). In Kerala, the Communist Chief Minister, V.S. Achyutanandan, follows a policy trajectory radically at odds with his counterpart in West Bengal (though there have been significant moves within his state unit to oust him and move rightwards). But the dogma of party line, the compulsions of loyalty towards comrades (however erring) and the need not to break rank hold back these tensions, and refuse them meaningful public space. Officially, the CPI(M) is opposed to the current economic policy of the Indian Government, and the track it has been on for over a decade. Equally officially, the CPI(M) nationally endorses the policies and chosen trajectory of its West Bengal unit. These are irreconcilable positions. Perhaps these are dialectical contradictions that will be resolved through some miraculous Aufhebung. But if we are reduced to praying for magic to save the organized Indian Left from itself, we must at least acknowledge how grim things are.

So at a time when the struggles against global capitalism in India are more urgent and relevant than they have ever been, the Left has apparently deserted the battleground. At any rate, after Nandigram the CPI(M) has lost any claim it had upon the trust of movements and mobilizations that actually do the work of resisting the invasions of capital. But it would be a serious mistake to see this, as many on the far Left do, as something inevitably written into the script of the organized Left decades ago, or to see these betrayals as anything but tragic. The official Left in India, for all its Stalinism and all its compromises and blunders, was historically at the forefront of massive mobilizations of workers and peasants, and nowhere more powerfully than in West Bengal, where generations of Communists worked tirelessly for the rights of workers, sharecroppers and poor peasants, and against brutal social inequalities. This was a Left whose power, both in West Bengal and Kerala, was founded on its responsiveness to agrarian discontent, its ability to mobilize politically around it, and its responsibility in leading land and labour struggles. This was the Left that led one of the largest labour movements in history, in Bombay; this was the Left that organized incredibly important peasant movements in Bengal and Telengana in the 40s and 50s; this was the Left that put India’s most progressive land reforms into place in the states it governed. If this Left has been lost, then mourning, rather than celebration or vindication, is the response most appropriate to left-minded people.

More may have been lost, however, than a legacy and a memory of historic struggles, which were fought, after all, by other – and better – men and women, in other times. There is and has been, after all, an active – though far from powerful – official Left outside its regional centres of accumulated power. In Delhi and across North India, in large parts of the south, in Maharashtra, and in various other parts of the country, organizations of women, teachers, students, workers, and social activists affiliated to or allied with the CPI(M) have worked, and continue to work, against the kinds of policies that drive the poor and the marginalized to the wall and embed social injustice within the governing political ethic. As a left-wing student who grew up in Delhi, I have always experienced the official Left, in meetings, in campaigns, and on demonstrations, as a space one could turn to for succour and comfort, for political solidarity, despite the frustrations and differences one may have had with the official line of the Party. The mobilizations against the Hindu Right at the time of BJP rule, mobilizations which many of us either supported or took part in, would have been unthinkable without the presence – indeed, the protective umbrella – of the organized Left. I believe this is also the relationship that many of India’s most serious social movements – the Narmada Bachao Andolan, for instance – have had with the Left: a relationship of simultaneous irritation and gratitude, disappointment and solidarity. At any rate, a shared space used to exist. That may have disappeared after Nandigram, as the political paths of a party that calls itself left-wing, and movements that follow some of the best values of the Left, increasingly diverge, and traverse antagonistic paths. Medha Patkar, India’s most important social activist and arguably the leader of the global movement against big dams, was the most prominent public face of the protests around Nandigram. This is symptomatic of the necessary but deeply tragic constellation of oppositions and fissures within progressive circles after the massacre.

The Tensions of Resistance

The Left’s greatest failure of imagination and nerve comes at a time when the battle against neoliberal capitalism in India is intensely alive and vocal. To make the difficult, but necessary, choice against India’s present economic policies, would have involved more than the airing of platitudes in Parliament and party mouthpieces; it would have involved the serious, responsible attempt to construct alternative paths of development, based on ecological sustainability and social justice. It would have involved the prioritization of human welfare over profit, the deepening of democratic participation as a bulwark against capital, and the formulation of innovative and dynamic models of socio-economic growth and redistribution. This was the choice the organized Left in India failed to make, and Nandigram, horrifically, metamorphosed that failure into an unpardonable crime. But the loss of the organized Left throws the choices and pitfalls of the resistance to global capitalism actually happening in India into sharp relief. It is necessary, then, to briefly consider the forms of this emergent resistance.

First, and most importantly, there are the resistance movements launched from the grassroots, involving those affected directly by the contemporary Indian model of capitalism. The corporate takeover of basic human and natural resources produces, at each step, more or less complete refusal on the part of the local communities who stand to lose. This refusal may or may not crystallize into powerfully organized resistance. Over the issue of land grabs for SEZs, it seems, more often than not, that it does. Political parties and outfits may or may not join in the resistance. If they do, it ensures a certain amount of headline-grabbing mileage for the movements in question, important in itself. But even where the resistance is much less related to party political divisions, as it is in most cases, the threat experienced by communities from the state and from capital produces, inevitably, its own strategies of mobilization and organization, its own internal structures of solidarity and dissent, its own debates and ferment. At Singur, at Nandigram, at Haripur, at Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur, and in Maharashtra and Punjab, the immediate, automatic act of refusal has been clarified into structures of resistance, through the formation of committees, the election of representatives, the planning of short-term and long-term strategy. These structural solidifications of resistance, however, need to be situated in their immediate social contexts, which often enough have the shape of deeply divided and hierarchical local community relations, fissured by class, caste and gender. Does the process of resistance to corporate projects, and the partial unity it necessarily engenders, disturb older and deep-rooted patterns of local injustice and exploitation? The answer is still open and unresolved. The incredibly vocal and militant participation of Nandigram’s women in the resistance points in one direction, but the persistence of certain caste divisions and the reluctance of some of the lowest groups in the caste hierarchies to join the movement in Singur points in another. There is no automatic logic that weds the opposition to big capital to a ‘progressive’ political consciousness that calls all sources of injustice and hierarchy into question. But equally, there is no guarantee, in a time of uprising, ferment, and the need to create a consensus around resistance, the existing social orders will maintain their stability and not undergo a process of internal churning. The question that time alone will answer is this: what forms of political consciousness, what attempts to link the immediate struggle to wider and related socio-political tensions, will the experience of resistance produce?

Second, there has been, since Singur and Nandigram, an efflorescence of largely uncoordinated citizens’ initiatives, loosely seen in terms of ‘civil society’. The sudden outburst of protest in Calcutta in the wake of the West Bengal government’s land acquisition policies exemplifies this. Calcutta, a city that for decades has seen virtually no serious progressive oppositional politics, and where the staleness of both the ruling administration and the official opposition (the Trinamul Congress) has produced a crippling sense of cynicism and jadedness, woke up to a frenzy of mobilization and activism that testified both to the residual strength of Bengali nationalism and a deeply entrenched left-wing structure of feeling, a sympathy for the disprivileged that, ironically, the organized Left had in earlier times done much to produce and disseminate. Students’ associations organized protest and relief campaigns, medical teams who visited Nandigram galvanized a sense of active disgust among doctors and nurses, who took to the streets in large numbers, and associations of lawyers, journalists, and artists also joined in the campaigns of solidarity with the resistance. Similar initiatives were set in motion in Delhi, and the symbolic effect of protests in the capital city were, as always, in excess of their immediate practical value – they helped force the issue of land grabs into national media headlines. These citizens’ mobilizations are enormously important, for, while the real battle continues to be fought in villages, tribal belts and local communities affected by the takeover of their land, publicly visible manifestations of solidarity in high-profile metropolitan spaces help sustain the mood of opposition and demonstrate the mythic nature of the neo-liberal policy ‘consensus’. On the other hand, many of these campaigns emanate from an immediate feeling of disgust and betrayal, and it remains to be seen whether they will be able to reproduce the resilience of committed activism, through coordination and organization, over a sustained period of time.

Third, there are the social movements that have been campaigning for social justice and ecological sustainability. Many of these – the campaign against the Narmada dam, the fishworkers’ movement in Madurai, various organizations working for the rights of Dalit, women’s groups, and associations set up to fight for unorganized labour – are clustered under the umbrella of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), which held a month-long protest sit-in in central Delhi shortly after Nandigram. These are groups that vary immensely in size and importance, but demonstrate the range and plurality of progressive initiatives in India. Most of them have no direct links with any political parties, though some of them are on good terms with the movements of the far Left, and others have worked closely with state administrations where they’ve been responsive. There is a continuum between some of the more progressive NGOs and these organizations: the lines often blur, but the tensions between social-welfarist drives and more radical, political forms of mobilization are felt at various levels. SEZs are an issue that a range of social movements and initiatives can unite around, and there are encouraging signs of this unity being forged. But it is too early to say whether these organizations can produce a plausible challenge to the agenda of the Indian state and big business, and whether these largely single-issue campaigns can coalesce around a coherent political platform that seriously disturbs the governing consensus.

Finally, there is the revolutionary far Left, in its various factions and forms. To many, the Naxalites and Maoists represent the authentic vanguard of popular resistance, as the only politically organized and ideologically coherent movements that are genuinely committed simultaneously to fighting against big capital, and to mounting a radical offensive against the state. But this is far too roseate a picture. The far-left in India is a patchwork of deeply divided organizations, all loosely committed to the legitimacy of armed resistance to the state, but some more open to the question of parliamentary participation than others. One of the most disturbing features of their history has been their unwillingness to rethink the need for armed revolutionary violence of the most savage sort. In the context of prolonged state repression of an order of savagery that far exceeds their own, the decision to keep the option of armed resistance open is in a sense understandable. In Nandigram, the counter-violence of villagers against the CPI(M) was clearly produced by a sense that it was either kill or be killed: in such a situation, it is not easy to stand back and pre-judge ‘Naxal’ strategies of resistance. It is possible, however, to ask whether such violence, which breeds its own vicious-cyclical logic, can actually be politically productive. In various parts of India – Bihar, Chattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh, for instance – the cycle of state repression, exploitation by big landholders, and revolutionary violence has bred situations where we are often left with little more than the machinations, brutality, and terror wreaked by rival mafias. This is not the only form of ‘resistance’ practised by far-left outfits, but it would be fair to say that it has been a dominant trajectory, ever since the tragic foundational episode of Naxalbari, where revolutionary left-wing idealism soon gave way to internecine warfare and bloodshed. Those who celebrate the revolutionary drive of the Maoists and Naxalites against the corruption and degeneration of the organized Left tend to forget something very important. For the longest period of its existence, this organized Left occupied the very ground that the ‘far’ Left does today: it took up issues of deprivation and injustice at levels where none of the mainstream political formations had anything to say, and it drew its legitimacy from that. It was always crippled by its internal authoritarianism, by the blind dogmas of party line, and by its slavishness to the shifts and turns of Soviet policy. But the revolutionary Left today, for all its principled opposition to capital, is usually equally authoritarian in its internal structures (equally committed to ‘democratic centralism’), equally defined by party line, and as blindly worshipful of Mao as Communists used to be of Stalin.

It is difficult to see a progressive and genuinely democratic left-wing politics emerging from such locations, though the real and often heroic resistance offered to capital and the state by many far-left groupings should not be undermined. It is also true that the ‘far’ Left is a complex animal, not only divided into a range of legitimate or underground parties split over tactics, strategies and ideology, but also spread across other spaces – civil and democratic rights campaigns, citizens’ mobilizations against state terror, independent radical trade unions, and social movements of various kinds, where one can usually find both conservative and revolutionary factions. One is left, once again, to hope for internal transformations, or for the emergence within the far Left of strands that valorize not only revolutionary zeal and consistency, but also work towards achieving cross-regional, democratic mandates for their politics. This would, however, mean eschewing both the violent excesses and the righteous vanguardism that permeates so much of their politics today.

It is, in the final analysis, the question of democratic mandate that defines most sharply the dilemmas confronting the resistance to corporate capital in India today. The state, for all practical purposes, is accountable only to itself. The ‘legitimate’ political parties, from Left to Right, are rapidly coming to share a neo-liberal consensus with no foundations in popular consent, and are accountable, increasingly, only to top-down structures of leadership. The corporate companies who have staked out such a powerful claim to the land and the resources of the country are accountable, of course, only to their shareholders. And the various movements and mobilizations that have risen to resist them are accountable mainly to their adherents, and have not been able to formulate a coherent politics that can be called into question democratically: if this is true of the Naxalites, it is also true of the far less ethically problematic rainbow coalition of social movements, which usually organize around limited issues, and have trouble widening their horizons into a politics that can command generalized consent, and establish a real hegemony.

It is here that the loss of the ‘organized’ Left pinches most sharply, for it means the loss of a space, however limited, of constitutionally protected and ‘legitimate’ political opposition, forced to justify its tactics and practices by appealing to more than either revolutionary purism or vague moods of discontent. This is the impasse in which the opposition between capital and progressive resistance finds itself today. There is no democratically accountable location within the ‘legitimate’ political spectrum from which attacks upon the embrace of state and capital, with its disastrous consequences for the whole country, can be mounted. At the same time, the discontent with the chosen paths of national development has never been more sharply pronounced and more visible than it is today, and this has produced a rich harvest of oppositional mobilizations, engaged in the search for a definite political space to anchor themselves to. It is the kind of situation where one finds oneself feeling that something has to give. India is crying out for a real democratic Left, stripped of old dogmas, and able to face up to its role with responsibility, accountability and humility. For that, however, significantly new forms of political radicalism and left-wing practice, a break from the dead past and the stifling present, are needed. Perhaps the clamour of democratic protest in the wake of Nandigram signals a new beginning, a signal towards new directions. Perhaps global capital and the powers of the state simply remain too strong, too resilient, to allow a dent to be made. It is a moment of political impasse that we live through at present, even as tensions mount and boil and break to the surface of our times.




[1] Mohammed Salim, the Indonesian businessman to whom the land in Nandigram was to be turned over, helped bankroll Suharto’s genocide of Indonesian Communists. The Communist-led government of West Bengal is eager to do business with him. If ever proof was needed of the irony of the current conjuncture of the Indian Left, or of the way capital swallows up and transcends ideological animosities in its expansionary drives, it is here.
[2] Real estate is at the heart of the new model of development in various parts of India. The township of New Rajarhat in Calcutta, a recently constructed urban space that was built upon the displacement of an agrarian community, is a testament to the physical excision of poor and underprivileged communities for the establishment of luxury apartments, malls and enclaves of leisure, residence and work for the upper middle classes. This logic permeates urban planning in most of India’s major metropolitan cities, most visibly in Bombay, and in Gurgaon near Delhi.

The bullets have flown and found their mark. The blood of children has flowed, as Neruda once wrote, without fuss, like children's blood. The dust has not yet settled, as Nandigram seethes, but an uneasy truce prevails. The villagers, as they promised to do, have given up their lives but not their land, and have driven out CPM cadres and policemen (or 'police-cadres', as they call them there) from their villages. The SEZ has been scrapped for the moment, but the local hostilities in Nandigram continue unabated. Rumours abound. Will more bodies be found, will the trail of blood the papers spoke of be traced to its source? Will the chopped limbs of children be found buried, will we uncover mass graves? Is Lakshman Seth gearing up for another offensive? Are local cadres regrouping to avenge their expulsion from their villages by the resistance movement? The Left Front partners are divided, but have reluctantly crept to Buddhadeb's side. The Politbureau and many affiliated intellectuals have, against the conscience of some within their ranks, thrown their lot in with the Bengal unit. The tail wags the dog. Real political confrontations have broken out again on the streets of Calcutta, after over two decades of dormancy. Things have fallen apart, the centre has ceased to hold, the state government has lost what legitimacy it had amongst the poor of West Bengal and, yes, among all leftists of any integrity. It's still difficult to write with balance, but the time's come, perhaps, for some colder stocktaking, to apprehend the political dimensions of what happened last week.

Nandigram was a Pyrrhic political victory for the resistance to the Salim plant. The blood and trauma - both of which are unredeemable - should not allow us to forget that, for the first time in the country, neoliberal economic strategy has suffered a defeat at the hands of a popular movement. It is absurd to attribute this to the machinations of the Trinamul and the Naxals, as the Politbureau has done. They were there, but only as a part - and by no means the major part - of a grassroots movement as spontaneous as any mobilization can possibly be. An ideological principle, which asserts the right of capital and state to conspire, without accountability or check, to take over land, destroy livelihoods, and displace and disperse people in their thousands, has been handed a moral and political defeat by a massive uprising of peasants. In its nature, if not in form or substance, this resembles similar successful backlashes against neoliberalism elsewhere in the world - the defeat of the coup in Venezuela, the rout of water privatization in Cochabamba in Bolivia, the resistance of French students to legislation endorsing repressive employment contracts. An SEZ in Nandigram would have meant the establishment of a regime of extraterritorial sovereignty for a company accountable to no one but its shareholders, not subject to the compulsions of national law, unhampered by legally enshrined labour rights. There will be other SEZ projects, on other sites, accomplished with force and coercion by the state in the service of global capital. But Nandigram, it seems, may preserve its freedom from such despotism. The Salim group - run by the man who financed Suharto's genocide of the Indonesian Left - will probably lose a major profitmaking opportunity.

What is hard to get one's head around is that this singular defeat of capital by a peasant uprising is also a defeat of the organized Left in India. This happens to be the very kind of movement the central party leadership, and the Party's affiliated intellectuals, have been eager to celebrate elsewhere in the world, and the SEZ policy, as initially formulated by the Indian government, found its bitterest political opponent in the Left. In its rhetoric and at least some of its practice, the national CPM and its junior allies stood at a sharply divergent angle to India's current economic policy of keep-the-rich-happy neoliberalism. How could this have happened, then?

In the first place, the tail is clearly wagging the dog - the central party leadership does not control the West Bengal unit, but is actually hopelessly dependent on the latter's continued electoral success for its presence as a significant force in Indian politics. And once we wade into the muck of the West Bengal CPM, a party that at national level still seems to stand for political principle becomes transformed into a gross inversion of itself. In Bengal, the culture of the organized left is defined by cronyism, corruption, local-level thuggery, intimidation of political opponents and dissidents, and electoral rigging. Further, the state has witnessed, in the last decade or more of Left rule, a total collapse of many basic social services - public health, for instance, is absolutely abysmal. Since the state-level New Industrial Policy in 1994, the CPM has lurched dramatically to the right. The Governor recently said that just one primary health centre has been opened in West Bengal in the last ten years, and it is clear that medical services are being thoroughly privatized. Hawkers have been brutally cleared off Calcutta roads to prepare the city for the visit of a right-wing British politician - this was in 1994. Buddhadeb's ascension coincided with a massive attempt by the party to court middle-class popularity, in the form of new luxury apartments and malls, amusement and water parks, housing enclaves for the super-rich on agricultural land, and - as in other metropolitan cities - the tying of the economy to the drives of real estate speculation. Buddhadeb's SEZ policy, in common with that of other states, sought to introduce industrial capitalism into West Bengal on the most unfavourable terms imaginable for labour, local livelihoods, and the environment.

Inside West Bengal, then, the CPM had almost completed the journey towards becoming an objectively right-wing party, devoted to neoliberal capitalism, some time before last week's carnage. The very term 'Brand Buddha', touted by a press which learnt in degrees to love the new-look CPM, is enough to demonstrate that. So is the slogan Tata Buddha Lal Salaam, routinely chanted by party cadres during the Singur land acquisition. The Left could boast a long history of goodwill among the Bengal poor, a goodwill earned by years of brave political struggle prior to the assumption of power and the enactment of radical land reforms in the 1980s, but all this had begun to change some time back. Effective power inside the party was no longer wielded by committed Communists - however dogmatic - and political activists, but by local musclemen and ganglords, who ran their electoral domains like fiefdoms. Lakshman Seth, the local MLA from Tamluk and probably the chief architect of the massacre on the 14th, exemplifies this degeneration of a party of principle into a party of semi-criminal bosses and contractors. People like Lakshman Seth and his subordinates mobilize CPM voters in their thousands, intimidate political opponents and their sympathizers, run networks of patronage and corruption, and this, more than the strength of the government's record, keeps the wheels of the Left Front electoral winning machine oiled. And it is through these networks, principally, that the CPM cadre in the state reproduces itself. The rot is not solely or even chiefly in the leadership. It is in the rank and file.

In Nandigram, not only last week but over the last few months, these two elements of Left Front rule - the shift to the right in economic and social policy, and the stabilization of uncontested power at local levels through the deployment of patronage, violence and intimidation - came together. And equally seriously, it demonstrated the accumulation of arrogance that three decades of uninterrupted power has bred in the Left. Did Buddha really believe that his SEZ policy could be passed by fiat, on the strength of his massive majority in the Bengal Assembly? Did he really believe that peasant smallholders, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers would give up their homes and livelihoods without a fuss? Had he really forgotten the sense of a right to the land in rural Bengal, shared by rich peasants and poor labourers alike? Did he expect no resistance? And when resistance did happen, and he was forced to withdraw from the SEZ policy, did he really believe that Nandigram could be retaken by the state authorities without violent confrontation? Had he, above all, forgotten the long political heritage of the Left in West Bengal, which outlasts the actual demise of radical or democratic principles and practices within the government? Unbelievably, the answer to all these questions seems to be yes.

In the second place, beyond the politics of West Bengal, the Indian Left as a whole may be undergoing a major, and cancerous, rightward shift. Many of us on the left had lost faith in the CPM in West Bengal, if indeed we ever had that faith in the first place. (Enough has happened since the initial assumption of Left Front power to shake any such naivete to its roots, beginning with the massacre of settlers in Morichjhapi in 1979 by the first LF government - and that was 'back in the good old days'.) But we managed to optimistically drive a logical wedge in our minds between the 'good CPM' - the party at national level, and in states other than West Bengal - and the 'bad CPM' - in a word, West Bengal. This was not without foundation. Who, after all, did we instinctively turn to as the Babri Masjid came down and Gujarat burned? Who did we take refuge behind when the BJP was in power, and Hindu Rashtra, at times, seemed like a real possibility? Who did we trust to take a consistently anti-neoliberal line in Parliament, in the days of the NDA, but also from within the UPA, as a progressive force of pressure? Who did I march with on every march for democracy in Delhi, even as I mentally cursed their authoritarianism and easy assumption of the high moral ground? Which intellectuals did I turn to to explain the implications of India's economic and foreign policy in our times? Who led the unorganized workers of the capital on their successful struggle for minimum wages? Who organized concerted public campaigns against the police attacks on workers in Gurgaon? Who embodied a clutch of memories and histories, a gesture towards a brighter horizon, despite the present, and despite itself? Who did we - did I - ultimately feel grateful for, in a sense politically indebted to, despite frequent feelings of disappointment and impatience? Who, though always, always disappointing, also represented possibility? Always, and alone, the Left.

I do not believe that we were - that I was - wrong in believing some, or even all, of this. There are many on the far Left who would disagree violently with this, but I do not believe these democratic, fruitful strands within the organized Left were wishfully imagined by us, that we were fooled and misled on every occasion. But there are signs that those hopes may be disappearing from us, that we may no longer have any kind of a claim on what we were habituated to see as 'the Left'. As an acquaintance on a recent demonstration against the Nandigram massacre sensitively remarked, 'I cursed this Party for so long, but always, in some sense, as my Party, in some form as internal criticism.' We shared something with this Left. Always officially committed - shamefully - to Stalinism, always so ready to trot out the party line, always so apparently rigid and full of certitudes that didn't match up to reality, this Left remained our Left, to rail against but to hope for the renewal of, to reject but to clutch on to desperately and fiercely, to mull over, to obsess about beyond what was good for our health, into the small hours of the morning. But 'to-day the present.' And what is that present? Where do we go, now?

Nandigram opened a wound in us that has not stopped and will not stop bleeding. To watch a Left in whose history and future you still feel complicit, organize gangs of cadres and policemen to mount an armed attack on a popular resistance movement, to watch them seal off a district and do whatever they bloody please - it does something to you. Turns you inside out. Hollows you out. And at this moment, silence - even consent - from the Politbureau? From intellectuals one trusted and respected? Many within the organized Left no doubt feel torn and anguished, angry with what happened. But party line overrides inner doubt, and all their private anguish comes to nothing. It feels like a guilty silence, but the fact of conscience does not absolve them of responsibility. And there is a bigger question at stake here. Rural populations are fighting, with their lives on their line, against the invasion of big capital, for their very right to exist, all across West Bengal, and across India. For any party or formation that considers itself in any sense committed to left-wing principles, there is clearly only one stand available. But the organized Left in India, bound by the compulsions of political expediency to the West Bengal line, is standing on the other side. You cannot support neoliberalism in Bengal and credibly oppose it in Gujarat. You cannot fight state brutality in Orissa and claim it as your prerogative in Bengal. You cannot resist SEZs in Maharashtra and embrace them in Bengal. What are you claiming, anyway - that you have the capacity to mould capital to your will, make it dance to your tune? The choice is stark.

And to not make that choice against this developmental strategy, this neoliberalization that takes away livelihoods and rights and irreversibly damages local ecologies, represents a failure of nerve. It signals that the party has given up, decided to play the game of capitalism on the enemy's terms, to not even think of constructing terms of its own. A failure of nerve, and of imagination. And it's particularly striking at this moment in history, when, after years of apparently living in 'the end of history', radical social movements and politics have resurfaced elsewhere in the world, trying in messy and contingent, but democratic, ways to formulate alternatives. Could conditions for a left-wing effloresence have been less propitious anywhere in the world than Latin America, the empire's backyard, multinational capital's favourite destination, the land of brutal right-wing dictatorships, civil wars, American military incursions and coups, and banana republics? But it is precisely there, and at this moment in time, that a wonderful patchwork of experiments in left-wing democracy have emerged, many of them romping to electoral success last year. Contrast this with the Indian Left.

And, darker still, is the possibility that this signals not just a lack of vision or courage on the part of the Left, but also a discernible rightward, neoliberal shift in its very heart. If we stand aside and assume an illusory objectivity for a moment, do we not see the patterns of a sort of political convergence, not irreversible, but nevertheless powerful? The patterns tell us a story. The enthusiastic adoption of a neoliberal strategy and the repression of any oppositional voices? Look to the Congress in Maharashtra, the BJP/BJD in Orissa, the BJP in Gujarat - and the Left in Bengal. The open use of state power to wreak terror and trauma upon the state's own citizens? The Congress - Delhi, 1984. The Right - Bombay, 1993, and Gujarat, 2002. The Left - Nandigram, 2007. The point is not that Buddha is comparable to Modi - he obviously isn't. The point is that basic forms of political choice and practice now seem shared across party lines, signalling an unprecedented political convergence.

In Kerala, where Achyutanandan is pushing from within the CPM for a very different kind of politics and economic strategy to the practices of the West Bengal government, there seems to be an open schism, and significant pressure from within the central party leadership for the adoption of Vijayan's line of conformity to neoliberal capital. It is clear, then, that the national Left's effective endorsement of what happened in Nandigram is spurred by more than political expediency. There seem to be strong pressures, at the heart and through the body of the official Left, towards another version of the world with no alternatives, where capital holds all the cards and the state is its policeman. What does this do to the many, many Communists working with courage and commitment, in states other than West Bengal, against the most destructive invasions of capital? What does it do to social movements that believed, for a while, that the Left could be a genuine ally in their struggles? What does it do to those of us who constitute, in our ideas or our practices, an independent left, who still haven't entirely stopped clutching at the shattered pieces of the clay image of 'the Left' we'd built up? I was treated to a poignant example of this recently at Delhi University, at a public meeting, when one of the most committed and eloquent left-wing teachers on campus virtually implored some SFI cadres sitting there: 'As Communists, you should commit yourselves to labour. You can't be spokespersons of capital. Capital will look after itself. Defending it is not your job.' It was a moving affirmation, in many ways, of the Left so many of us desired and desire, that we may have imagined into a spectral being that we loved, 'well but not wisely'. In any case, the appeal was answered in no uncertain terms. The cadres sat there implacably, and then one of them spoke. 'So the company is supposed to suffer, and not make any money? What will happen to the company?' Listen, everyone, hush. That's the Communist speaking.

For many who have opposed the CPM from the left for years, Naxals, sympathizers, and others, all of this may come, not unjustifiably, as a vindication of the radical claim that the official Left had 'always been like this', and that in a sense it's all for the better, 'because now they have been exposed for what they are.' And even if there was a time when things may have been different, when the CPM may have genuinely represented a force for the disempowered, that time is gone, and Nandigram has sealed its departure. As I write this, I can find no reason, here and now, to argue with those claims. But that produces a feeling not of vindication, but of sadness, and a great weight. For if we have lost that Left irrevocably, what do we have? Giving up on the Left means giving up on the entire legitimate political spectrum for any hope of meaningful change, for initiatives that will reverse our slide into political, economic and ecological disaster. If those initiatives will not come from the Left, they will not come from any other political party either. The intensity and range of our social movements are considerable, but where is the democratically accountable and representative political force that will take them on board and give them succour? If the Left continues on this trajectory, it will lose, for once and for all, its position as a force that could disturb and destabilize the complacent consensus politics of neoliberalism, and effectively question capital.

If there is despair, it came from Bengal. If there is hope, it also lies there, in the initial shuffling, and then the sudden vibrant explosion, of oppositional civil society. This remains largely limited to Calcutta, though elections in colleges in the Hooghly belt have recently dealt a blow to reigning CPM hegemony. Calcutta, the last time I visited it, as every time, seemed to me to embody a strange theatrical performance of politics, as a spectre. The forms - the husks - of once meaningful political rituals pervaded the city, sprang out at you through torchlit marches, blaring loudspeakers, street-corner meetings, walls bathed in political graffiti. But none of it meant anything, every ritualized gesture was held securely in place by the weight of three decades of virtual single-party rule, and the protagonists of each streetside political drama were clearly hired performers, doing what they had to do. In the last week, everything has changed. There has been a low-level simmering for a while, but it seems evident that now the city is a riot of political mobilization and commitment, and each demonstration - each bandh, even, in this bandh-infested city - is in its messy way a festival of democracy. Students driving the police back. Lawyers taking to the street. Doctors demonstrating against police and state brutality. Peaceful demonstrations of thousands being teargassed and then regrouping. Groups collecting money, planning resistance strategy, debating tactics. Individuals finding themselves faced with complex political choices and affiliations. It's all a mess, but it lives and feeds and grows, and it feels new. Even from afar, even from the TV screens, even from telephone conversations and email exchanges with Calcutta, it feels different. The consequences of all this are unknown - but the future's open.

And none of this new ferment is triggered by the Right. If anything, the popular revulsion at Nandigram is a testament to a left-wing structure of feeling, or at least a widely disseminated sympathy for the disempowered, that seems to have miraculously survived the demise of the Bengal CPM as a credible democratic force. Political sympathy, solidarity, that most intangible of sentiments, is out on the streets, muddled up as always with old feuds and rivalries and unsettled scores, a range of distinct and clashing motivations, daily sacrifices of principle, and undirected, violent anger. Nevertheless, it's all alive, and that matters. Or we had all better hope it does.

I haven’t ever read anything written on Herzog, so I guess what I’m writing about may well be a staple of Herzog criticism, but it struck me that during Fata Morgana the movement of the camera bears a peculiar relationship with the objects and relationships that it films. I couldn’t believe it at first while watching it, but never, in the course of the entire film, does the camera ever actually zoom in on the set. We begin with half-a-dozen or more shots of a plane landing in a field, a shifting landscape of water and desert and cloud, punctuated by aberrant images – a man walking across the sand, factories on the far horizon, the tops of huts and shacks like a Lego set sprawled childishly across the thorns and rocks and cacti of the desert. Through all of this, the camera never moves in on its prey; rather, it follows the landscapes in their motion as though it were a car driving along a path, the distances from it of objects that lie off the track of its road being a constant. After a while we are treated to some sharp cuts and jumps, some of which amplify their preceding images – a distant shot of a car followed by a closer angle of the same car, for instance – but all of this is accomplished without the camera ever actually moving in slowly, zooming in upon its images. It’s almost as though we’re watching a series of photographs passing before our eyes without interruption.

About midway through the movie, the camera does begin moving in, tentatively – upon a line of slaughtered animal carcasses juxtaposed with a sardonic take on Genesis, a narrator telling us how heaven decreed that its creations should find protectors and caregivers to nurture them; upon the shapes of tin sheds and houses; upon images of children and beggars; upon a naturalist demonstrating the peculiarities of a monitor lizard he’s holding; upon stones and rock formations; upon sand dunes that metamorphose into waves on water and clouds in the skies with apparently smooth continuity. At moments like this, however, the camera refrains from zooming right in, mercilessly, but instead darts in and out again, in tentative flickering motions, tenderly and surreptitiously. It rests on a place, moves closer softly and quickly, and lingers for a moment or two, slides down the length of the set, before sliding back again. In a sense, the camera is making love to its subjects.

The camera, then, follows a line that is disjointed and discontinuous from the landscape it reveals. Indeed, we’re treated to something more akin to a revelation than an exploration, the voice of the narrators telling a story seemingly running parallel to the actual visual narrative, only touching it at points, to withdraw again. The music follows a similar trajectory – intimations of violence and pain and injustice on the screen immediately followed by soaring melodies, a hymn, an operatic tenor, a rousing blues, successive compositions by Leonard Cohen, as the landscape tears off at a run, past wire meshes and military camps and trucks and crashed planes and far-off hills. (But this landscape rushes past us, we never pass through it.) The relationship of the camera to its objects establishes, then, the form for the relationship forged between the principal narrative elements that keep the film moving.

But the juxtaposition of narrative, visual imagery and music in apparently parallel streams does not result in chaos and the breaking of all perspective, for it reveals deeper preoccupations. A wonderfully reconstructed Biblical creation myth – God transposed to a mythic, probably Central American, creator and creatress, the making of the world through the labours of Genesis – is countered by images of wilful destruction, of death and disease and poverty and misery. An ironical reading of Paradise is counterposed to interwoven images of serenity, serendipity, and violence and desolation. There is a particularly beautiful sequence, where ‘Suzanne’ is played across a barren desert landscape, and the image, in the central stanza of the song, of Jesus as a man dying for a beautiful cause, but bearing a promise of healing that never quite dies out (an image quite at odds with the avaricious greed, bloodlust and powerlust that characterizes so much of the history of practised Christianity), acquires an intense power and poignancy. A politics emerges from the film, an ironical affirmation of Utopia in the face of the banal, the absurd, and the wasted. The camera, which gives all of this light, shape and form – itself a principle of creation and revelation – rivets us to all of this, but also keeps us at bay, reminds us of our status as onlookers by refusing the cinematic depth that zooming close-in shots and slow zoom-outs would have created. We are denied a point of identification with the people and objects on screen, reminded on their awareness of their presence on camera, their unavoidable theatricality. The camera in Fata Morgana is the alienation effect in action.

Workers’ Recreation: Phoenix Mills And The World We Have Gained

(In Bombay last month, I found myself, one evening, unaccountably sitting on the balcony of Phoenix Mills for hour after hour, feeling angry and desperate and perversely fascinated. I sat there for four hours, looking, not doing anything else. That is where this came from.)


1. Freeze this segment of the city at any moment in time, and you encounter a very particular Bombay, a Bombay mythologized many times over, but also a real Bombay. Social distances are crossed with apparent ease here. Blue collar and white collar bump collars on crowded streets; tea and paan shops, tiny cheap restaurants and permit rooms jostle with large shopping centres and expensive eateries; working-class neighbourhoods weave through the shadows of looming residential skyscrapers and towering office blocks; narrow alleys stuffed with pedestrian life seep into broad boulevards stuffed with slow-moving car traffic; flyovers where cars whiz by overlook messy junction points of humming, throbbing pedestrian roads. The sound of drilled metal and hammered concrete, the wet slap of cement and tarmac, fugue into the chatter of families shopping for the week or the day, the honk of impatient taxis and Contessas, the music blaring from bars. The smells of stale piss and the smells of brewed Barista coffee hover together in the air. The neighbourhoods thrum with the friction of crossing social worlds, visible to one another and part of one another. This is not Delhi, with its zoned off territories, its industrial units banished to the city’s edges, its gated communities and malls designed exclusively for the super-rich. Lower Parel is a messy junction of interchanges, an exhibition of classes, communities and histories passing each other on the street, unsmilingly but also, on the whole, unthreateningly.


2. But having frozen space in time, allow time to begin moving again in this space. And now these crossing worlds, these corruptions and porosities of social distance, seem less plastic than they appeared at first, and more tragic. This used to be part of Girangaon: working-class Bombay, textile mills belching smoke from their tall chimneys, factory sirens screaming at lunch hour and the end of shifts. Spinners and weavers and doffers and reelers and moneylenders and rentiers and khanavals fabricated, through their intimate exchanges and conflicts, a distinct world. Shahirs recited their poetry, lavnis and tamashas entertained working-class families and communities, religious occasions and festivals created, alternately, flashpoints of unity and discord, powerful unions organized workers into militant political activity. This was a locality, like others in Girangaon, created and sustained by the mills and the labour market that swelled around them, fuelled by the relationships, rivalries, lives and deaths of labourers. This place belonged to them.


3. The mills died. The strike of 1982 ended in unqualified defeat. Productive technology shifted from mills to powerlooms. The market shifted from cotton to polyester and other synthetic fibres. For several years the mill lands lay vacant and unused; the communities built around them began to float apart. Meanwhile, the city continued to grow. It grew richer but also poorer. It grew more congested. Slums occupied more and more space; commercially available land, on the other hand, became more and more profitable. Bombay became one of the prime real estate destinations of the world. Real estate, as was inevitable, turned its eye upon the mill lands. This happened at a time of an acute housing shortage in the city. Environmental activists argued, with reason on their side, that the lands left vacant by the mills provided a wonderful opportunity for the city to breathe again: the unused acres could be converted into parks and green public spaces. NGOs campaigning for workers’ rights argued, again with reason on their side, that the land that had belonged to workers should be developed for their use, their sustenance. In a time when slums dotted the landscapes of the labouring and ex-labouring poor, the vacant lands offered an ideal space for the construction of low-cost housing. Real estate agents and builders, with the state and money on their side, argued that this was the chance the city had, finally, to become ‘world-class’, to become Shanghai, to become Manhattan. Cleansed, purified, beautified. It was a long battle, dragged through the media, the deliberations of contending cliques of policymakers, experts and advisers, and the courts. But eventually the side with the guns and the money won: acres and acres of mill land were turned over, largely illegally, to builders and investors for ‘new development’. Lower Parel, and areas like it, came to acquire the landscape they inhabit now: a schizophrenic juxtaposition of supremely rich corporate offices leaning into the sky, surreal skylines punctuated by the grit and dirt of plebeian neighbourhoods, caked with dust and bursting sewers and crowded bastis and chawls. The process of corporate gentrification continues. The working and unemployed poor, in a city of vast and visible economic disparities, are being squeezed into tiny corners of land that had historically been theirs. ‘New development’ in Bombay distributes entitlements and opportunities in a manner that, even by the standards of contemporary global capitalism, is blindly avaricious and unjust. It identifies stakeholders on the basis of profitability, plunges real estate investment and speculation into the city as though the poor didn’t exist.


4. In this apparent criss-crossing of classes and spaces, a significantly new form of social distance is actually being produced: the inexorable work of capital upon plebeian livelihoods and localities, plebeian communities that structured these streets and alleys, and consequently the creation of a new patriciate, ennobled by access to the benefits of real estate investment and speculation. And Phoenix Mills, where I am sitting as I write this, stands at the centre of this new strategy of urban creation, a grotesque and fascinating monument to the torn and entangled histories of Bombay, a testament to the fantasies on whose purse-strings the engines of growth now run.


5. Phoenix Mills is a scam: the land the mill stood on was leased on condition that it be used for ‘workers’ recreation’. This obscene deployment of a worker-friendly clause in urban development law for the purposes of actually disinheriting what remained of the working class testifies to the transformation of the law itself, a transformation with deep historical roots fructifying fully at this moment in time. At one point, over a hundred years ago, the law that governed the space of factories was a weak but real instrument for the protection of workers, now it became an instrument for their disenfranchisement, their erasure from the spaces they had built and sustained, the spaces they had spun and woven into their masters’ profits. The millworkers of Bombay, and the complex local economy framed around their activities, had no space in the new, world-class city that was being imagined. They were an unnecessary impediment. They were, quite simply, superfluous.


6. I’m sitting on the steps of Level 1, High Street Phoenix. Behind me is a white room with large windows – the Bowling Company. A Sports Bar belonging to the same company. A seafood restaurant named Gopaljee. Below and behind me, there are outlets of Copper Chimney, McDonald’s, Bombay Blue, Noodle Bar, Spaghetti Kitchen, Gelato Italiano, Kareem’s, Domino’s. On my far right, Big Bazaar: socialism for the rich, or at any rate for the economically empowered. Below and beside that, several open-air food stalls. Below me and facing me, a large brick-tiled courtyard, where shopping families, children, groups of young people, and couples, wander and talk. Directly below me is a tiny patch of enclosed green, and a couple of large potted plants, behind which are groups of people sitting on marbled benches with small attached water fountains. They face Barista, Quorum, Planet M, and The Dollar Store. These are mostly built within structures inherited from the old factory: this room might have been the carding room, cotton may have been reeled in its neighbouring compound, and spun into yarn in the big oddly shaped structure behind that. No matter – it’s all gone now, and our focus is on the new and the living, not the dead. Still, the intersection of dead and living is eerie in Phoenix Mills. The building that now houses Spaghetti Kitchen and McDonald’s would once have housed mill engines: it is attached to a large stone chimney, rather tastefully decorated in white, with the words ‘HIGH STREET PHOENIX’ emblazoned across its body. It is an arresting and spectral sight, a perpetual, though unwitting, reminder of the lives and deaths that passed through these factory walls once.


7. Life is happening all around. People are shopping in Big Bazaar and Pantaloons, darting in and out of the enormous building named High Street Phoenix, eating and drinking in the restaurants and bars, simply wandering around. And I am struck by the fact that despite the obscenity and injustice involved in producing this space, it remains a pleasant space to be in. This is a week-day, and so it is relatively relaxed, free of the weekend rush. It’s buzzing but not noisy. It is a middle-class space with its own generosity, embracing the gamut of occupations and experiences that constitutes the Indian middle class, not just –as in Delhi malls – the sickening conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche. The crowd is not entirely devoid of plebeian faces: careworn office faces, careworn working mothers’ faces, housewives’ faces that have finally been granted some relaxation, the faces of young men with shiny belts and slicked back hair and nowhere to go, the faces of the children of the respectable lower middle class, the faces of women who feel secure here and wander about freely, on their own or with their friends and families and lovers. A walk along a courtyard licking an ice cream, a hungrily munched chicken roll here, a long involved conversation there, the clasped hands of a couple deep into each other across the courtyard. The meanness and generosity of Bombay, as ever, can never quite cancel one another out. It is a public space.


8. It is a public space, but the public has its limits. The public experience it offers is contained, it is privatized within boundaries of class that are porous at their outer edges, but nonetheless there. I see this on Friday nights and weekends, when the mall becomes a zoo: a desperate mass of working middle-class people, a crocodile queue jostling to enter the mall. It is a desperate crush of people, many of whom, worn out after a week’s work, have this chance in this space and no other to do their shopping for the following week. The streets outside are the same as they ever were: local groceries, tobacconists, engineering and car repairing workshops, fruit and vegetable sellers, assorted mechanical blue-collar skills, surrounding this weirdly unsure, wavering, swaying circus of the local patriciate and gentry, small and large, modest and rich. This circus is contained within the space of the mall: step outside and you enter an utterly different world. The surrounding streets still belong, temporarily, to the proletarians and plebeians. But they in turn are surrounded. The corporate patriciate and white-collar gentry inhabit the oases of calm, the high-rise buildings, that survey this landscape and the rest of the city. Their meeting point is here, in Phoenix Mills, where they stock up for the week, and demonstrate the essential unity of the community they belong to, separated from them, the others, the mass of people who spit on the roads, the dirty faces of children who stare hungrily into shopfront windows from the outside, the men and women living around the mall who have no idea how long their occupancy of these roads and alleys will last, how long before they are cleansed, and we have, finally, our Shanghai or our Manhattan. This is the slow, contested, but inexorable dynamic of segregation in the city.


9. Below me, the courtyard is humming with all the delicate variations of human relationships and interchanges. But beyond this, interchanges of a different kind are at work. Beyond a fence of aluminium plastered with billboards – Pantaloons, HSBC, Samsung, HT – the landscape shifts dramatically and surreally. A giant car park is being erected. Gangs of men, small figures with hard hats, stand on a half-built roof that is also a work-floor, yelling and grunting as they haul up a half-finished door, borne on the shoulders of a man climbing a rickety scaffolding. A gigantic crane looms over their bodies, swinging this way and that. Workers move around, fix walls, stop, look around, smoke, and return to work, on the seven floors of the car park that is being built, with speed and efficiency and sweat and, in all probability, terrible pay with no benefits. Stacks of bamboo line the back of a man moving, very slowly, between the towering skeleton of the car park and the work-floor where it is being assembled. Tall rods rise from the surface, providing the weight and balance for makeshift pillars that will later be finessed into the foundations of the different storeys. Loud hammering. Drilling. Four men picking an unsteady path across a walkway precariously balanced on a grid of wooden rods, cobbled into a platform to hold the weight of working men and their materials. On the sixth floor, a man very near the edge, crawling along the walkway inspecting his work. He’d better not have vertigo. Men balancing on one another, shouting loud instructions, hauling concrete and wood and metal, cleaning surfaces, hammering in loose bolts. Construction is factory work, but with a difference: here the workers are building the factory even as they work in it. Workers’ recreation.


10. The compound that surveys this back-breaking labour, the compound where I am sitting, is not, plainly enough, built for workers’ recreation. But in another sense, it clearly is built for that very purpose. Recreation in the literal sense of the word: to re-create, to create afresh. A new economy and new forms of work. This may be a space of consumption, but it remains a factory nonetheless. Tangible goods and intangible services are produced each moment. Men and women smile plastic smiles at you from behind food counters as they wrap your sandwiches and rolls. McDonald’s gives you the assembly line in miniaturized and perfect form: the young workers who hand you burgers and fries never stop for a moment, never sit, their hands and bodies move in pre-synchronized manner. Ford and Taylor are recreated in the juxtapositions and rhythms of their work. Security guards, many of whom may have worked in the old mill, or others around it, move around sleeplessly, watching you for signs of transgression, stifling yawns but unable to hide the tiredness in their eyes, behind their dull blue suits. Waiters and shop assistants scurry to your service, always ready to be of use, fortunate if you speak to them with courtesy. A complex, dynamic economy of labour persists within the walls of the old factory. An economy with new codes, new and intimate hierarchies, but an economy of labour nonetheless. All this happens in the shadow of the old mill chimney, and if you listen very hard you can hear ghosts clanking their chains, marching in through the gates when the whistle blows, marching out again when the day’s over, and you can hear, in your mind, the hissing steam of the engines in the mill, and smell the smoke as it billows blackly out of the now cleansed, white chimney. Dead and living labour mingle. History is lived. All that was solid has melted into air, but air has crystallized as real estate, has taken shape, again, in this new economy of exchanges, services, and construction.


11. I look across this bustling, chaotic jostling of economies again, and the landscape I’m part of produces itself, with a new clarity, before my eyes. Here, Phoenix Mills, with its complex interpenetrations of work, investment, and consumption. Before me, the looming husk of a car park, the scaffolding that supports it, and the men who slowly conjure it into shape and form. Across the road, the sounds and smells of car mechanics’ workshops, cheap eateries, and small groceries that constitutes Gandhi Nagar Road, the chawls and bastis that sit in the middle of the new Shanghai that is taking shape before our eyes. A short way in the distance, three giant tower blocks, heralding the future of lower Parel. The future of new Bombay.