The Political and Legal Underpinnings of the Palestine-Israel Conflict

On 7 October 2023, Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a massive attack on Israeli territory, killing 1405 people including over 300 soldiers according to the Israeli state, although a month later the death toll miraculously came down to 1200. The Israeli state has responded by bombing the Gaza Strip, in which Hamas has its headquarters and over 2.3 million civilians have their homes, starving inhabitants of food, water, medicines and fuel. But why did this happen? And what can be done about it? On these questions, there is no agreement whatsoever.

Who is to blame?

In its editorial of 8 October 2023, the Israeli paper Haaretz was unequivocal in assigning responsibility for the death and destruction resulting from the Hamas ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’:

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister… completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians…

Ukraine and the Indian Left: An interview with Kavita Krishnan by Rohini Hensman

 

Kavita Krishnan, a Marxist feminist who had been for three decades a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, a member of the Politbureau, leader of its women’s wing (the All-India Progressive Women’s Association) and a prominent spokesperson of the party, suddenly quit these posts and the party itself in early September 2022. Many admirers were unclear about what had happened and why, although from her subsequent statements and articles it became clear that the reason was a disagreement with the party’s position on the war in Ukraine. 

On April 10, 2023, she was interviewed by Rohini Hensman on her departure from the party and her differences with it.

Ukraine and the Contested Meaning of Non-Alignment

The war in Ukraine has pulled into focus the notion of non-alignment among states of the ‘Global South’. Some observers have drawn parallels with the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that formed in the wake of the 1955 Bandung Conference, seeking to organise postcolonial states into a movement for decolonisation, nonaggression, and noninterference in the internal affairs of another country (Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference 1955). The first summit of the NAM was convened in Belgrade by Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia in 1961. One of its core principles in the context of the Cold War was that members should refrain from allying with either of the super-powers, the United States and the USSR (Munro n.d.).

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the NAM seemed to have lost its raison d’etre. Yet today, around the world and across the political spectrum, there is a sense that the NAM’s values are being resurrected, or must be, although the definition of these values is disputed.

Christianity and Capitalism in India and Sri Lanka

Introduction

Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two countries. The first section of this paper will present a general view of Christian attitudes to poverty, wealth and capitalism in early Christianity, during the Reformation, and in the modern period; the second and third sections will look at the shapes and forms these attitudes took in India and Sri Lanka respectively; and the conclusion will sum up the findings of the paper.  

'The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary' Intertwines the Personal with the Political

Review of Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy, New Delhi: Navayana, 2022, pp. 431.

The personal and the political are intertwined so tightly in Gita Ramaswamy’s Land Guns Caste Woman: Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary that it would be impossible to separate them. Another running thread is intersectionality: the way in which different axes of privilege and oppression interact, sometimes reinforcing each other but also sometimes working in opposite ways.

Nationality, Complex Identities and Multiple Belongings

As we celebrate the 30^th anniversary of Pravada/Polity, it is a pleasure to have been associated with it, as a regular contributor, over this period. One reason I did so was because it was extremely satisfying to be linked to a good quality, left-wing but non-dogmatic publication, which was discussing issues vital to the present and future of Sri Lanka and the rest of the world. But I had a more personal reason too: this was an activity that helped to anchor the Sri Lankan part of my identity, which had become somewhat fraught for reasons I will now explain.

Review of Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression by Jörg Nowak

The central argument of this book is that ‘Only a theory of strikes that goes beyond a focus on trade unions and the workplace will be able to grasp the forms of labour conflict that affect the majority of the world population, and the global working class, which lives in non-core countries’ (p.3). Jörg Nowak states that this claim emerges from his investigation of two strikes in the Indian automobile sector and three in the Brazilian construction sector, in the course of which workers created new forms of organisation and allied with other actors who were not all waged workers.

Wages for Housework in India?

 (This is a slightly edited version of a presentation at a panel on ‘Herstories of Wages for Housework’ on Day 1 of the Symposium on Wages for Housework, 4–6 March, 2021, organised by the Laws of Social Reproduction Project (Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London); Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE); and the Feminist Economics Saturday Discussion Group (FESDIG), New Delhi.) 

The bloody road to today's borders in South Asia - and how to move in the direction of peace

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, attempts  to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities in South Asia have spawned wars and crimes against humanity. They have also resulted in  almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed from the mid-20th century until today: Hindu nationalists in India launch physical attacks against Christians and especially Muslims, falsely accusing them of carrying out fraudulent conversions, duping Hindu women into marriage, and cow slaughter; in Pakistan, religious minorities, including minority Muslim sects, are accused of blasphemy and often killed; rationalists in Bangladesh have been lynched; and minorities in Sri Lanka are being persecuted by Sinhala nationalists, who have forcibly cremated Muslim victims of Covid-19. Such attempts are all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. As an activist who comes from Sri Lanka and lives in India, I have been involved in campaigns in both countries against the toxic ideologies and restrictive ethno-religious  identities – Hindu, Muslim, Sinhalese, Tamil – that cultivate much of this violence.

Foreword and Preface of To Do Something Beautiful (a novel)

 

Foreword to the Kindle Edition

     This novel was inspired by many of the women and men I have met in the course of my work: by their ability to keep alive their dignity, humanity, and even sense of humour in the midst of poverty and overwork; by their aspiration not merely to survive but to create a better world, to do something beautiful. However, poor people in isolation are powerless; if they compete with one another as individuals or groups, a few may come out on top, but the majority always lose. Therefore one of the most crucial and admirable qualities of these women and men is their capacity to build relationships of solidarity, friendship and love across traditional barriers of caste, religion, language and even nationality. The spontaneous warmth and generosity I have encountered among working women in widely separated parts of South Asia never fails to move me, and I think it would not be an exaggeration to talk of a common culture which they share despite superficial differences.

     There have been many changes since I wrote this novel in the 1980s. For example, information and communication technologies have been revolutionised, and the value of the rupee has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was then. The prices of essential commodities, utilities and services, especially food and public transport, have risen correspondingly or even more. Wages have increased, but at the lowest levels have not kept pace with inflation. At the opposite pole, there has been a vast accumulation of wealth, and consequently the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene proportions. Lured by sky-rocketing real estate prices and the prospect of union-free workforces, many industrialists have sold their factories in Bombay and either subcontracted their work to small enterprises or shifted production to other locations where vicious union-busting is the norm even in large-scale industry. The big pharamaceutical factories have disappeared, as have many other large factories, and along with them the relatively well-paid and secure jobs they represented. On a more positive note, formal workers are now more aware of the importance of fighting for the rights of informal workers, democratic independent unions have proliferated, and these unions have formed an all-India federation that counteracts the earlier isolation of independent unions.

Alternatives to Neoliberalism in India

 

Introduction

Modern India’s relationship with the capitalist world economy has been through three broad phases. First, British colonialism ruined a flourishing textile industry in India and converted the country into a source of raw materials for its own manufacturing industry, forcing India into the position of a colony subordinate to an imperial power. Second, the post-independence Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) government embarked on a process of industrialisation in an economy that was heavily protected though not completely cut off from global capital. The third period, globalisation and neoliberalism, is usually traced to the economic liberalisation of 1991, when India began a process of re-integration into the world economy 

This chapter will sketch an outline for each of these three periods, introducing the social forces and struggles that could constitute the basis for moving forward from neoliberalism to an economy where production is for need, not profit, and working people control their lives and work.

The Gujarat Model of Development: What Would It Do To The Indian Economy?

 

The cornerstone of Narendra Modi’s and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has ruined the Indian economy and the BJP led by Modi will make it boom. These claims have been reinforced by corporate adulation for Modi in his ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summits (Times News Network: 2013) and surveys showing that almost 75% of top corporate CEOs want him to be the PM (NDTV Profit: 2013). How valid are these claims?

India’s economic performance since the 1990s

The economic reforms initiated by the Congress government in the 1990s raised the Gross Domestic Product growth rate from an average of around 3.5% per annum since independence to more than 9% between 2005-06 and 2007-08 (Planning Commission: 2011), before dropping to 6.7% in 2008–2009 as a result of the global financial crisis (Government of India: 2010). Global competition forced manufacturers of products like electrical and electronic goods to improve the quality and reduce the price of their products. Computers, internet access and mobile phones became much more widely available. 

However, neoliberal policies that were part of the changes had serious negative consequences. Privatisation was in many cases accompanied by massive corruption (e.g. the Commonwealth Games and 2G scams), as politicians and bureaucrats received kickbacks from the corporations they favoured. In other cases, even if there were no kickbacks, lack of adequate regulation allowed corporations to make windfall profits, while public sector banks offered them generous loans without exercising due diligence. The campaign by industrialists for the abolition of protective labour laws reached a crescendo during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime. It stopped when the UPA came to power, but the anti-labour atmosphere had already influenced state labour departments and even the judiciary to such a degree that workers struggling for their rights were seldom successful. 

Manufacturing Offence - The Cartoon Controversy

Background

When the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power, it revised school textbooks published by the National Council of Educational and Research Training (NCERT) in accordance with the ideology of Hindutva. After the NDA was defeated in the elections of 2004, the NCERT under Dr Krishna Kumar began working on the National Curriculum Framework, which came out in 2005. One of the main issues discussed was whether to go back to the pre-NDA texts or design new textbooks altogether. The decision was in favour of the latter course of action, for two main reasons: one, new research and knowledge that had emerged since those textbooks were written needed to be incorporated, and two, the educationists wanted to encourage students to engage in more analytical thinking and debate rather than rote-learning (Menon 2012). ‘The gist of these debates – in which more than 3,000 scholars, teachers, civil servants, activists, students and parents participated through various means – was that the knowledge imparted in schools fails to inspire children, hence any new educational initiative should first worry about reconceptualising the knowledge that different subjects comprise’ (Kumar 2012, p 13). The textbooks came out in 2006, and while they were far from perfect, the new pedagogical approach was widely appreciated by both students and teachers.

The controversy

The cartoon by Shankar Pillai that caused such pandemonium in parliament when various Dalit and non-Dalit members demanded its deletion on May 11, 2012 was published in 1949, and depicted Ambedkar with a whip riding a snail entitled ‘Constitution,’ and Nehru, also with a whip, looking down at the snail from behind. It was entitled ‘Snail’s Pace,’ referring to the slow pace of the drafting of the Indian Constitution, and appeared in a Class XI textbook. This was read as an insult to Ambedkar by Dalit activists, led by Thirumavalavan of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and Ramdas Athavale of the Republican Party of India, who protested against it (Vijapurkar 2012). Thirumavalavan is a Tamil nationalist who extended full support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) even while the Tamil Dalits of Sri Lanka felt that ‘the social movement against caste discrimination has been silenced and more or less co-opted by the LTTE. Caste is seen as, at best, an unnecessary diversion and, at worst, a threat to political and social unification of the desired Tamil nation’ (International Dalit Solidarity Network: 2008, p 7). Athavale (who fought the last municipal elections in Mumbai in alliance with the anti-Dalit Shiv Sena and BJP) demanded not only the withdrawal of the textbooks, but also the arrest of Prof Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, who were advisors for the political science textbooks and resigned in protest. He even condoned the vandalising of Palshikar’s office by four activists of the Republican Panthers of India.

The Spectre of Fascism

 BOOK REVIEW

Godse’s Children: Hindutva Terror in India by Subhash Gatade (New Delhi: Pharos Media and Publishing), 2011; pp. 400, Rs 360.

The Saffron Condition: Politics of Repression and Exclusion in Neoliberal India by Subhash Gatade (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective), 2011; pp. 475, Rs 500

If the message of both these books had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: The spectre of fascism is haunting India. Godse’s Children (hereafter GC) concentrates on the phenomenon of Hindutva terrorism, while The Saffron Condition (hereafter TSC) is divided into three sections: Saffronization and the Neoliberal State, Logic of Caste in New India, and State and Human Rights. There is thus an area of overlap between the two, with Hindutva terror also appearing in TSC, but treated in far greater detail in GC.

Workers, Unions and the Left: Responding to the Global Crisis

(This is the text of a talk introducing my book Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India (Columbia University Press, New York, and Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2011) at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, on 23 January 2012. It was subsequently published as NMML Occasional Paper: Perspectives in Indian Development, New Series 2.)

I started working on what became this book more than ten years ago, because I felt there was so much confusion in the way that large sections of the trade union movement and the Left responded to globalisation. They took a straightforward anti-globalisation position which, by default, reinforced a nationalist reaction against globalisation. This went against all my Marxist internationalist instincts. Also, having been involved in trade union research for decades, it was obvious to me that many of the evils attributed to globalisation, such as subcontracting and the shifting of production, had been rampant for years or decades prior to it. Most disturbing of all, much of the anti-globalisation rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the extreme Right. (I have given examples of this in my book.)

Therefore one of the first tasks I set myself was to come up with a working definition of globalisation that sorted out some of these confusions.

Revisiting the Domestic Labour Debate: An Indian Perspective

 

Introduction

At the heart of the class struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely an element of production and source of surplus value, whereas for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings. Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of waged work, and control over it, have easily been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of class struggle. Yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is produced, though equally important, have received far less attention, except from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labour-power to capitalism – since as the only commodity that can produce surplus value, and therefore profit, it is the sine qua non of accumulation – it is somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels did recognise the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within it, but did not take the analysis further. The domestic labour debate of the 1970s was an attempt to fill this gap, but it left many of the crucial issues unresolved.

One consequence of the under-theorisation of this particular arena of class struggle by Marxists is that it has been largely ceded to reactionary ideologies and politics. In Third World countries like India, it also results in extremely high rates of infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, and disability or premature death resulting from preventable or curable diseases. This article attempts to take up this theoretical task, using examples from contemporary India. Recognition that the production of labour-power constitutes a crucial arena of class struggle would enable Marxists both to combat male domination within the working class more effectively, and to play a more effective role in revolutionising the social relations of production. 

Identities and Borders in South Asia: A View from the Left

Introduction

From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the attempt to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic or religious identities in South Asia has spawned civil wars and crimes against humanity, resulting in almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed. This is all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. The Left potentially has a conceptual and theoretical framework which would allow it to propose solutions to these conflicts, yet flawed interpretations of ‘the right to self-determination’ have led many on the Left to compound the problems instead. A different interpretation suggests that the key goals should be less violence and more democracy, and taking down barriers between peoples rather than erecting more and more of them.

Introduction to Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India

 

The politics of globalisation

Globalisation has had a profound impact on labour worldwide. But what, exactly, has this impact been? Enthusiastic proponents of globalisation in its heretofore dominant form argue that it levels the playing field between developed and developing countries, creating employment in the latter and enabling them to pull themselves out of poverty (cf T.Friedman 2005). Diametrically opposed to them are the passionate proponents of de-globalisation, who see globalisation as synonymous with inequality and oppression, and advocate disabling the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and transnational corporations (cf. Bello 2000).

The economic crisis, which started in the US in September 2008 and swept through the world, left the first camp in disarray. With financial institutions collapsing, millions of jobs being lost, GDP shrinking and world trade contracting (Wade 2009), even Thomas Friedman (2009) had to admit that the market was ‘hitting the wall’. The opposite camp, predictably, was triumphant: ‘The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization,’ proclaimed Walden Bello (2009).

However, there is a third position, which represents the majority of workers throughout the world. They have been fighting a losing battle for jobs, better employment conditions and social security for over three decades, a struggle that has become more desperate since the downturn. While it is clear that the model of globalisation pursued so far has been a disaster for them, de-globalisation would mean a further loss of jobs for workers in exporting countries, and raise both costs of production for companies using their products and the cost of living for consumers. Dissatisfied with both these positions, international unions have advocated building workers’ rights into the new global order (cf. ICFTU 1999), but this has yet to emerge as a concrete alternative.

This book argues that it is not globalisation as such but the dominant neoliberal model of it, alongside traditional authoritarian labour relations, that have exerted downward pressure on labour standards.  It attempts to put flesh on the bones of the third alternative by looking at workers’ responses to globalisation: responses which indicate that labour is ‘a social force which is central to the development of the international political economy and international relations’ (Harrod and O’Brien 2002a: 8).

Kashmir, Socialists, and the Right to Self-Determination

The bloodshed in Kashmir beginning in June 2010 gave rise to a heated debate in India concerning the causes of and possible solutions to the conflict. A meeting in Delhi organized by the left-wing Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners on 21 October was entitled ‘Azadi (Freedom) – the Only Way’. Interpreting ‘azadi’ as shorthand for ‘the right to self-determination’, the keynote speakers – writer-activist Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani of the Islamist Tehreek-e-Hurriyat – argued that the only solution to the dispute in Kashmir was freedom for Jammu and Kashmir from India. The audience and other speakers, including Varavara Rao speaking for the Communist Party of India (Maoist), concurred, although the conference was invaded by Kashmiri members of the Hindu Right, who staged a protest and later brought charges of sedition against the speakers.[1] At around the same time, a parliamentary delegation was sent to Kashmir, followed by the appointment of three civil-society ‘interlocutors’ by the Indian government to speak to and obtain the opinions of all sections of the population in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

Dilemmas of the 'Right of Nations to Self-Determination'

The hectic discussion over the Kashmir meeting in Delhi in October [2010] entitled ‘Azadi – The Only Way’ has made it urgent to revisit the debate between Lenin and Luxemburg on the right of nations to self-determination. Lenin, starting from his experience in imperialist Russia, insisted on the right of nations like the Ukraine to self-determination (in the sense of their right to form separate states), contending that denial of this right would merely strengthen Great Russian nationalism. In a colonial situation, Lenin was surely right. When a country is under foreign occupation, all sections other than a very small number of collaborators want to be free of the occupiers, even if there are sharp differences between these sections. A striking example is RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) which, despite speaking for a section of the population which is sorely oppressed by the Taliban, and continuing to fight against it, nonetheless shares with the latter the goal of ending the occupation by US and NATO forces. In such situations, the right of an occupied nation to self-determination makes sense.

So why did Rosa Luxemburg reject the whole notion so passionately? Her question was: Who embodies or represents the ‘nation’, given that it consists of groups that are often at loggerheads with one another? ‘The “nation” should have the “right” to self-determination. But who is that “nation” and who has the authority and the “right” to speak for the “nation” and express its will? How can we find out what the “nation” actually wants?’ she asks (Luxemburg 1909). This is surely a valid question where the territory claimed by those who speak for the nation-to-be is shared by others (who may be a minority or even the majority) who do not want to be part of that vision. In such situations, more complex than the clearcut opposition between an imperial power and a colony, Luxemburg’s question needs to be taken seriously.