From: sanil v <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:36 AM Have our struggles and samarams become unimaginative?
In another thread, I read that many people who participate in hartals and bandhs have no idea about their objectives. This is shameful in a media society. Does this lack of basic information make these struggles unimaginative and pointless? What do we expect the participants in a struggle to know? What makes a struggle lively? Many freedom fighters did not know what they were fighting for! As Shahid Amin's book Event, Metaphor, Memory shows, many who participated in chauri chaura believed that Gandhi was a saint with the power perform miracles and cure illness etc. People struggle because they have had enough. Why do we insist that they should know the reasons and causes of their struggle? Even if they know, I do not think that this knowledge is politically significant. Those who struggle should know how to succeed. This involves rigorous analysis of the situation, power relations, stakes etc. Struggles derive their life from this will to success. However, success in a political struggle does not mean to achieve predetermined objectives or satisfying desires and interests. Rationality of political struggle does not lie in participants ability to justify the ends or legitimize their motivation. This marks the difference between political struggle and marketing competition. It is the task of ideology to give people a reason to protest. People need reason to succeed but not to justify their protest. People project some demands as part of their struggle. Often they feel betrayed when these demands are met. Meeting the demands compromises the life and spirit of the struggle, which goes beyond demands. The rulers always try to convince people that they could have achieved their objectives without the struggle. Those who struggle take this truth as an insult or a trick. The morbidity of our struggles lies in their lack of will to success. Our samarams are still born! They do not live beyond their demands. Parties want only the appearance of success. They want to hide their failure from their competitors. Victory in a struggle means much less than victory in a cricket match. What do the traditional parties find unacceptable in chengara? They have no problems with the so called demands of this struggle. What they can't digest is the enthusiasm or liveliness of those who are making these demands. There are two kind of political enthusiasm - the passive enthusiasm of the neutral observers ( Kant saw that in French revolution) and the militant enthusiasm of the participants. Traditional parties accept the former but not the later. They can't digest those cute tribal kids chanting slogans instead of going to schools and singing nursery rhymes. They can't take those young urban kids necking while on vigil. This objection does not come from conventional or patriarchal morality. Criticism of orthodoxy and patriarchy has become the conventional agenda of all parties. The problem lies in the over-excitement which threatens to go beyond the specific demands and ideals of the chengara struggle. The morally upright pro-civil society champions of chengara are no less life denying and unimaginative than the traditional parties. They flock to chengara because, there, they find the purest of the pure victim – the tribal. Unlike the worker who is complicit in welfare schemes, the tribal is a pure victim who has a monopoly on moral capital. The demands of the pure victims must be self evidently legitimate. (Marx did not put his bet on workers because the later were purest of the pure or poorest or the poor victims.). "marginalization" has lost its critical edge and become a category of moral imputation. Once you have a pure victim, moralists of various hues folk together to form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of victimhood. The Liberal democratic enthusiasm of the neutral observer is infectious and anticipates a "we". The rebellious enthusiasm of chengara dispel all "we". Those who make the lived experience of being a tribal. Dalit or woman the basis of struggle, miss this point. The NGO funded "we" can't anchor political struggles for long. The communitarian civil society they invoke is a theoretical regression. They want to retain a civilised opposition in place of the bloody conflict. This is the old State in new bottle. The universalist aspirations of our struggles can no longer be thought in terms of society. The withering away of State from theory has torn asunder society in reality. It is unreasonable to expect that our "society" has the symbolic resources to legitimize the struggle of tribal people. Its does not have enough symbolic power for its daily sustenance! No wonder the pro-civil activists clamor for media attention. They hope that attention of media can fill- in the real deficit in social meaning. Traditional parties say: Interest of those tribals are legitimate. But why make a big fuss about it? The pro-civil guys reply: We want a big fuss. Do you have a pure interest to out in front of the "magnifying glass" of our camera or our blogs? The fate of these pro civil society defenders of tribals will be no different from that of the secularist defenders of minorities. The energy of minority politics has gone beyond the legitimacy seeking politics of demands and interests. Today both the supporters and the traditional parties want a decent way out of Chengara struggle. A compromise will translate the enthusiasm of inebriated song, dance and necking into a language of legitimate demands and objectives. Death has another name – win-win situation. Perhaps it is time to remember Gandhi's tactics. Whenever he suspected that a struggle is reaching a win-win situation where its agenda is set by demands and interests, he abruptly called it off. He had a name for what is at stake in such self aborted struggles – truth! Even if the tribals choose to call off their struggle for the sake of upholding the truth, I do not think their enthusiastic supporters or jealous competitors will allow them to do that. This lack of interest in experimenting with truth and its traumatic enthusiasm explains the unimaginative nature of our struggles. (None of the above should come in the way of expressing my unambiguous and unqualified contempt for the CPM sponsored hooliganism in Chengara.) sanil Sanil.V Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110 016 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
