If I wrote fiction…

I would re-write Voltaire’s ‘Candide’. It’s a great little book – Voltaire’s writing in the 18th century (I think). The opening scene has this professor Pangloss explaining how everything is for the best and that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Then the main character, Candide, undergoes a series of disasters that were all quite routine for people at that time.

I think a re-write of such a book would be quite appropriate. Candidates for Pangloss abound, from Francis Fukuyama to any of the more upbeat right-wing types in the US. And think of all the disasters the modern Candide could undergo? You don’t need to use your imagination. In fact, Jonathan Schwarz has put together an absurdly tragic story of an Iranian family who just lost their jobs. That’s at Under the Same Sun. Check the cartoon too.

National Sovereignty

Years ago, I wrote an essay arguing against nation-states as a form of organization. Admittedly not the most immediately practical program or campaign, it was an attempt to grapple with the various problems that nationalism and states based on nationalism have caused in the world. Among these problems: the genocidal campaigns national states and settler states waged (and continue to wage) against indigenous peoples, of the suppression of the aspirations of ethnic or religious minorities that is almost always implied in national states based on a particular identity being adopted as that of the nation; of the difficult and often brutal conditions lived by millions of migrant workers who are stuck without rights or protections because they lack precious papers, citizenship rights – they don’t belong to the nation they’re in. That previous essay argued for citizenship based on democratic principles, resource rights based on principles of justice and equality, and resolution of conflicts by inter-state consensus (1).

In a recent debate on Israel/Palestine, Chomsky raised an idea of something similar, what he calls a: “no-state settlement, generalizing multinationalism (in the broad sense indicated) beyond the borders of a state. That approach would be based on the recognition that the nation-state system has been one of the must brutal and destructive creations of Europe and its offshoots, imposed by force on much of the rest of the world, with horrendous consequences for centuries in Europe, and elsewhere until the present. For the region, it would mean reinstating some of the more sensible elements of the Ottoman system (though, obviously, without its intolerable features), including local and regional autonomy, elimination of borders and free transit, sharply diminishing or eliminating military forces, etc. Applied elsewhere, say to North America, it would entail, to mention just one example, reversing Clinton’s post-NAFTA militarization of the (previously quite porous) Mexico-US border, with a severe human cost, and dealing in some humane way with the fact that the US is sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by brutal conquest. Similar issues arise throughout the world.”

Looking back, I ought to have read the writing on the wall a little more carefully. That essay was published well after 9/11, after the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, and after the coup attempt against Venezuela. In other words, there was ample evidence that the really existing alternative to a world of sovereign nation-states is a world of naked imperial aggression. A global “no-state settlement” along the lines Chomsky described recently or that I tried to present those years ago would still be nice. But it seems to me that in the world today – and I came to this opinion reluctantly — national sovereignty is a progressive force.

Had the anti-war movement and anti-imperialist opposition in the United States and elsewhere in the first world been stronger, things might be different. But our inability to channel the energy and anger that the whole world expressed on February 15, 2003, into a force capable of stopping the invasion and devastation of Iraq, the indifference of so much of the same anti-imperialist movement to the coup and ongoing slaughter in Haiti, the repeated capitulation of the best endowed parts of our movement to ineffective actions or collaboration with imperialism, suggests a need for sober reflection and re-assessment – of strategy, tactics, and goals.

The United States had plans to replace Chavez in Venezuela with pliant elites. It had plans to use occupied Iraq as a jumping off point to invasions of Syria, Iran, and beyond. I don’t want to devalue the role of anti-imperial sentiment and opposition, or act as if it makes no difference. It does make a difference. But if the US agenda was stopped or slowed in Venezuela or Iraq, it was not because of internationalists. It is because of nationalists, who fought and continue to fight for their national sovereignty. In Iraq, parts of this nationalist resistance has ugly tactics and an ugly program. But it is fighting something even uglier, and if we don’t like it, it is up to us, who are supposed to be in a better position to do so, to come up with a better way to stop the empire.

In Venezuela to date, the defense of sovereignty has not only been effective, but it has not been ugly at all. Instead, it has been inclusive, humane, and genuinely democratic – certainly more so than the United States or most other countries. The open, democratic character of the Venezuelan process might render it vulnerable, but it is also its strength. The Venezuelan experience suggests that there doesn’t have to be a conflict between national sovereignty and democracy. If that’s the case, perhaps the struggle for the moment isn’t an aggressive attempt to push towards a “no-state settlement”, but a defensive one, against imperialism and for the kind of world proclaimed in the United Nations Charter: a world of sovereign nation-states, self-determination within those states, and co-operation between them. After March 2003, even getting to that world seems a long struggle.

Even if you accept the defense of national sovereignty against imperialist depredation for third world countries, is the same true for the first world? Wouldn’t everyone be better off if US citizens loved their country a little less and loved the rest of the world a little more? Probably. But perhaps there is no contradiction here either. The Michael Moore phenomenon, for example, is powerful because he seems to start from a sincere love of the US and goes from there (sometimes not far enough from there) to a concern for the many victims of the US. The idea that a country like the US or Canada ought to concentrate on solving its own political, social, and cultural problems and developing its own people with its own resources (as opposed to resources plundered from all over the world) would not only resonate with many North Americans, it would also imply a radical change in world affairs (military bases closing down, assets and infrastructure being returned to the nations that they belong to, etc.). And as wonderful as globalism and internationalism is, it is hard to think that such a development would be anything but positive. Indeed, it would be the basis for internationalism that isn’t based on exploitation and inequality. Perhaps it is even the necessary first step towards a global “no-state settlement” for a better future.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist. Feedback on this essay is particularly welcome: write to justin.podur@utoronto.ca

Notes

1) “Instead of Nation States” http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/content/2002-05/28podur.cfm

India – the fight against fascism has only just begun…

Readers have probably heard that Sonia Gandhi will not be the Prime Minister of India. In some ways this is a good thing: she was going to be the leader of India because of her last name. But she is being replaced by Manmohan Singh, the man most associated with neoliberalism in India (again it is worth remembering that Sonia Gandhi got her last name by marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, and the neoliberal opening of India begun under Rajiv Gandhi). Less important,, it would have been kind of nice that India could have a Prime Minister who was born in another country and have it be no big deal.

But of course, the BJP, now in opposition, made it a big deal. Arundhati Roy, in an interview with Amy Goodman, describes what happened:

“What has happened is that as soon as the election results were announced, the BJP, the hard-right wing members of the BJP and its goon squads started saying we’ll shave our heads. We’ll eat green gram and make a revolution in this country against this foreign woman on the one hand, and on the other hand, equally hard core corporate groups were acting — they were out on the streets. They were yelling like fundamentalists would, and all of these corporate television channels had split screens where on the one hand, you saw what is happening in Sonia Gandhi’s house and on the other half, you just had what the stockbrokers are saying. And the whole of the one billion people who had voted had just been forgotten. They had been given their photo opportunity, their journeys on elephant back and camel and whatever it was to the election booth. Now they were just forgotten. The only comments you get are what the industrialists think… and what the centrists think about Sonia Gandhi. It is an absolutely absurd kind of blackmail by fascists on the one hand and corporate fascists on the other.”

The day after the election, Sudhanva Deshpande published a ZNet Commentary analyzing the election results, the growth of the left, and the fall of the BJP. To Deshpande, it is the Indian left, of which he is a part, that is the key: If “the Left fails to grow, the historic verdict of this election will become a mere hiccup in the rise of Indian fascism.”

I think that is right. I was very happy to see the BJP gone. But the real battle for India is only just starting…

India’s Elections again

Thinking a little more about it, and reading Arundhati Roy and P Sainath’s pieces on the subject, I have decided that I am going to take a minute and celebrate the results of India’s elections. The result is only hitting me now. Readers have probably deduced that I am somewhat pessimistic. But this is actually a major event: the population of India has rejected fascism and neoliberalism and done so in a way that pulls the country back from the brink. I stand by what I said yesterday — the government can’t be relied upon to pull India back very far from the brink. But it’s not the distance from the brink that matters, it’s the depth of the hole. That 1/5 of the world is now a little further back from it is very good news indeed.

A little blog accountability

In the interests of blog accountability, I will remind readers that I made an incorrect prediction days ago, when I followed the trends and said that India’s right wing Hindu fundamentalist party, the BJP, would win the elections with a minority. Well, it looks like the BJP won’t be at the head of the government after all. Instead, it will be the Congress party.

The Congress party isn’t the fascists, but it certainly is neoliberal, corrupt, and so on. It’s BJP-Lite. Sound familiar? It seems to me that it is part of a global phenomenon. Right here in Ontario, Canada, for example, the hard-right vicious regime of Conservatives were thrown out, and the Liberals, (Conservative-lite) were put in. The Spanish got rid of Aznar in Spain, and to the new regime’s credit, they have actually withdrawn their troops from Iraq. In Colombia, regional elections brought the left to power all over the place. And of course in the previous wave in Latin America there was Kirchner, Lula, Chavez, etc.

But there’s a problem. First, it’s not all peacemakers and ‘lite’ regimes coming to power. In Sri Lanka, for example, the more conciliatory party lost elections. In El Salvador, the nasty right wing party won.

But more importantly, these ‘lite’ regimes, having come to power on the heels (optimistically interpreting) of popular repudiation of the viciousness of the ones they were replacing, have little idea what to do when they are in power or (like in Colombia) don’t really have the power to do much in this global context. There’s actually an argument to be made that such do-nothing ‘lite’ regimes, especially if they are accompanied by corruption, pave the way for hard right regimes to come to power. That’s because they don’t do anything for their own constituency (the poor and oppressed constituencies), so they don’t get access to that energy and power, but at the same time they can’t possibly serve elites as much retrogression as fast as the more brutal governments of the right. That leaves people at an impasse, and even leads to some people on the left believing that ‘the worse, the better’, that a Bush is better than a Kerry, since Bush provokes more opposition than Kerry would.

I don’t agree with this assessment. I think that more progress would be possible, more reform could be wrested, out of a more wishy-washy ‘lite’ regime than out of a ruthless right wing regime. But the basic problem remains — the electoral system is a sealed little circle that deprives people of meaningful choices. How can people force their way into the equation, in a context like this one?

India

Elections are going on in India right now (they take 5 weeks). The outcome is still uncertain, although the Hindu right-wing (fascist, if you want to be impolite) party is likely to form the government, though probably not with a majority.

In other India news, a complicated death penalty case is at a stage when it could be commuted. The bare bones of the case: four landless dalit (that’s the untouchable caste — the caste system works something like institutional racism in North America, and the dalits are the worst oppressed by it, historically and socially excluded from anything but misery. India instituted some forms of affirmative action, called ‘positive discrimination’, after independence, but it has not solved caste inequalities by any means) peasants have been sentenced to death after a violent incident in 1992 when 35 men belonging to upper caste families were killed. The accused did not get a fair trial, and in any case the death penalty is, as always, applied with a severe class and caste bias. I am including a Q & A on the case below, for those who want to pursue it further, courtesy of the All-India Committee Against the Death Penalty.

In still other news, Food First recently released a very interesting report debunking the ‘Indian Economic Miracle’. It reviews a lot of very interesting and useful material.

And last on India, there are a lot of reports coming out on the use and abuse of Indian workers in Iraq. This ought to be viewed in a wider context of the use and abuse of immigrant labor, in the Middle East, and in the West as well. The stories of these workers in Iraq are horrifying, but so are the stories of millions of migrant workers who are at the mercy of those who employ them and those who deny them legal status and precious papers.

Oppose Death Penalty To Landless & Poor Peasants
Dear Friends,
The Supreme Court on 15 April 2002 confirmed death penalty to Krishna Mochi, Bir Kuer Paswan, Dharmendra Singh and Nanhe Lal Mochi, all poor peasants from Gaya district of Bihar. The four were convicted for the killings at Bara village in Gaya district in 1992 in which 35 men belonging to upper caste families were killed. In another case the Supreme Court has confirmed death penalty on Shobhit Chamar, a dalit landless labourer from Bhabua district. He is also accused in the killing of upper caste landowner.

Who are these people condemned to death?
Nanhe Lal Mochi and Krishna Mochi were semi-bonded dalit agicultural labourers who cultivated the fields of the Bara landowners. They were well known to the Bara landowners as those active in the peasant organisation and therefore their adversaries. They have spent 7 and 13 years respectively in jail till date, of which the last two years were spent in condemned cells in Bhagalpur jail. Veer Kuer Paswan was a dalit resident of nearby Khutbar village who herded goats but due to serious indebtedness was forced to work as an attached labourer. He too was known as a participant in struggles for wages and land led by the local poor peasant organisation. Dharmendra Singh is Rajput by caste, educated till matric who tried to leave cultivation, but unable to obtain remunerative employment, came back to the village. The larger landowners of the village had meanwhile captured his land. He approached the court to regain control over his land, meeting expenses by taking loans. The court decided in his favour, but by then his financial state was miserable and Bara massacre had occurred. His opponent in the court case implicated him in the Bara case.
How were the charges framed against them?
Immediately after the Bara incident, police started rounding up people from dalit hamlets who were known to have participated in land and wage struggles. The terror created by the landowners and police forced dalits from neighbouring villages to flee. Bhatbigha dalit tola of Bara village was completely deserted. The FIR was filed on the basis of an eyewitness account naming 35 people and 400-500 others. 115 people were arrested of whom 13 were later charged. This eyewitness was however not part of the witnesses produced in court. No Test Identification Parade was conducted to identify the accused.
The charges were filed under TADA, a law that the Parliament allowed to lapse in 1995, in the face of its rampant misuse due to the arbitrary powers it gives to police officers, and since it violates all norms acceptable evidence and of a fair trial and. The numerous instances of killings of dalits by upper caste landlords never invited the provisions of TADA. No authorisation was taken for the application of TADA. Still the trial for the Bara killing was conducted under TADA after the lapsing of the law.
Two weeks after the Bara killings, police arrested Bihari Manjhi and two others from Bodh Gaya under another case. The Superintendent of Police was said to have recorded his confession that named many others as involved in the Bara killings. Such confessions are valid evidence under TADA. But in this case the SP did not record it but stated in court that he had assigned this job to an Inspector in his presence. The SP was unable to identify Bihari Manjhi in court. The Inspector turned out to be an accused in the murder of the nephew of Wakil Yadav, another accused in the Bara killings whose inclusion was based on the confession of Bihari Manjhi!
Still this confession became the clinching evidence and the basis for conviction of 9 people by the TADA court – four to death, four to life imprisonment and one to 10 year imprisonment.
How this happened is again related to the way TADA operates wherein the accused were denied their right to bail and to a fair trial, but all the procedures in TADA meant as a check on the prosecution were conveniently flouted. An inspector was made the investigation officer (I.O.) when TADA requires that investigation be conducted by an officer of rank not lower than a DSP. The I.O. was changed midway. The second IO stated in court that most of the investigation was conducted by the first I.O., yet neither the first I.O. nor his case diary was presented before the court. TADA however ensured that the accused remained continuously in jail and were even denied appeal to the High Court, which is normally the court that can confirm a death sentence. In this way the accused were denied one level of appeal.
The case was heard by the Supreme Court against eight of the accused. One had already completed his 10 years and did not appeal. Four facing life imprisonment were acquitted. The court was divided in its opinion on the other four. Two judges awarded death penalty to the four while the third judge acquitted one and converted the sentence to life imprisonment for the other three. Bihari Manjhi, whose confession to the police became the basis for the conviction in the TADA court, was acquitted.
This time the reason for the conviction was identification of the accused by witnesses. But the witness accounts show serious discrepancies. Each witness was either unable to identify the accused s/he had named, or denied they had ever named them, or named them for the first time in court, or wrongly identified the accused. In this game of matching names and faces, the faces that were randomly matched correctly got sentenced to death. So serious were the errors that one of the judges stated in the judgment that: “It is apparent that the investigation in the case is totally defective”; and again “it can be said without any doubt that almost all witnesses have exaggerated to a large extent.
But the conviction and sentencing failed to address the crucial facts that (i) the witnesses never said that these accused were involved in any specific violent act; (ii) that they held any weapon; and (iii) the police never recovered any weapon from them.
Why did the Bara killings occur?
The structure of landholdings in rural Bihar that emerged after the land reforms, initiated by the government since the 1950s, left the lives of the poorest sections comprising dalits, landless and small peasants largely unaffected. They remained at the mercy of landlords for access to land, work, food and credit. Raising of any demands by this section led to swift and brutal attacks. Things began to change from the mid and late 1970s when organisations of this poorest section of the people started forming in the plains of central Bihar. By the mid eighties, different parties of the CPI (ML) emerged as the major organisers of the poor in rural Bihar. Successful struggles were waged for distribution of ceiling surplus lands, access to common lands and other resources, better wages; against feudal practices of forced labour, indebtedness and to stop sexual exploitation of women workers. The state at best remained a mute spectator, and in perceiving these struggles of the rural poor as a law and order problem, failed to even address the issues raised by the struggles.
By mid 1980s landowners started forming caste-based armies to reverse the gains achieved by the struggles of poor peasants. Bhoomi Sena, Kisan Sangh, Sunlight Sena, Sawaran Liberation Front, Ranbir Sena are some of the more notorious ones. Their modus operandi was to create terror through organised masscares. They attacked dalit hamlets, setting them on fire, killing men, women and children, and destroying houses and goods. Police was either found conniving with these armies or at best was a spectator. Even the IG of Bihar police admitted in a policy document that the police was responsible for promoting the formation of these armies. But police repression on even peaceful rallies by the poor was growing. In 1986 at a mass rally at Jehanabad demanding distribution of a fourth of an acre of land for nine landless families police opened fire killing 23 people.
The Sawaran Liberation Front was the most brutal one till that time operating in Gaya, Jehanabad, Patna and Aurangabad. Targetting its leaders, Ramadhar Singh ‘Diamond’, and Haridwar Singh became a necessity for the peasant movement. Bara village was a known hideout of these leaders. News of their presence in Bara village led to the Maoist Communist Centre organising an attack with hundreds of people on the upper caste village.
Why should the death penalty be opposed?
The details of the present case make it amply clear that awarding of death penalty is unfair. When one judge acquits an accused and two judges award death penalty, the only conclusion one can draw is that the judgment of the court shows a high degree of subjectivity. In addition the flouting of procedures by the investigation, exaggerated and faulty witness accounts makes the conviction itself seriously suspect. One judge of the Supreme Court has even hinted at ‘free fabrication of evidence’. Death sentence cannot be permitted in such a situation and the imposing of the irrevocable penalty can lead to serious miscarriage of justice.
The killings such as at Bara form the few exceptions in a long string of killings by upper caste landlord armies. But the killings by landlords have neither invited harsh punishments, let alone the death penalty. Most have not even resulted in conviction. The state has never found them to be a fit case for the imposition of TADA. All this simply shows that “terrorism” is defined merely as a violent activity which challenges the existing power structure. And death penalty cannot be awarded when dalits are killed by landlords simply because such instances are the norm. Death penalty, like TADA and POTA, leads to arbitrariness in law and punishment and should be opposed.
Death penalty in our country is awarded only in the rarest of rare cases. This statement is as subjective as it can get. The fact is that only the poor and dalits or else those whose crimes are seen as threats to the state get this punishment. This is natural because such accused are normally unable to get access to competent lawyers. The subjective factors such as judicial authorities’ lack of empathy with the lives of such accused makes the awarding of the extreme penalty more likely. Death penalty is therefore both subjective and biased.
The only argument presented in favour of death penalty, is that it deters people from crime. But evidence of this is singularly lacking. In the present case, no such claim can be made. Since the Bara massacre landlord armies have killed several hundred more persons and peasant organisations have retaliated in some cases. Crimes, both by the landlord armies and by the organisations of the poor are a reflection of the conditions of existence of the people and the role played by the state. Doing four people to death makes no difference to this living reality.
Crimes have a social, economic and in such cases, a political basis, which means that crime can only be reduced by addressing its root causes. Officially murdering 4 people disregarding this larger responsibility of society and state is brutal, and amounts simply to an act of vengeance by the state. Vengeance cannot be the basis of modern law, or a legitimate motivation of the state.
More apparently in this case, but in virtually every case of heinous crime, the responsibility for the crime also rests upon society. The penalty of death tries to shift the entire blame on to the criminal and society in turn forgets the lessons that need to be learnt. The myth that purging society of some aberrant individuals is the solution to crime needs to be shattered. Abolition of the death penalty is a first step in that direction.
We appeal to everybody to oppose this death sentence in every sphere of life to prevent the gross miscarriage of justice. Join rallies and write letters to the President of India and to the Governor of Bihar to commute the death penalty against the five landless peasants.

All India Committee Against Death Penalty
For more details: Gautam Navlakha, sagrik@vsnl.com or 9811153254
New Delhi
23 April 2004