Tribute To My Father

 

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Back July 1983 is an appropriate time to remember my father, C.R. (‘Dick’) Hensman, who died peacefully on 9 July 2008. At that time, under the pseudonym L. Piyadasa, he wrote a book – Sri Lanka: The Holocaust and After (published by Marram Books in 1984) – which documented and analysed the events not only of that fateful day but also of the periods preceding and following it. This was one of the first publications to expose the shocking evidence of government sponsorship of the violence, and involvement of people at the highest levels of power in what would today be classified as crimes against humanity.

The analysis was continued in a sequel, Sri Lanka: The Unfinished Quest for Peace, (Marram Books, 1987), published following the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. What was striking was that it attributed the violence not to widespread inter-ethnic hatred but to the drifting of the Sri Lankan state towards fascism. It was made very clear in both books that the solution was not a separate Tamil Eelam, which would inevitably suffer from the same authoritarian and exclusivist politics as the proposed Sinhala Buddhist state, but a Sri Lanka where people from all ethnic and religious communities could live in any part of the island in security, dignity and peace. His message remains as relevant today as it was then.

Democracy as the Solution to Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis

The political Right and Left seem to concur in linking democracy to bourgeois rule; the two concepts have even been hyphenated in the adjective ‘bourgeois-democratic’. Yet history gives us no reason to believe that there is a necessary connection between the two. It is true that when the bourgeoisie is fighting against feudal power to establish its rule, it seeks the support of the plebeian masses, and in the process allows them to fight for their own demands: hence the famous slogan of the French Revolution, ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. Yet once their rule is established, they are quite capable of turning on their erstwhile allies, repressing or even slaughtering them. This is not to say that capitalism is incompatible with democratic rights and freedoms either, but to emphasise that the latter will prevail only if working people fight to establish and defend them. Even in advanced capitalist countries, long-established rights can quickly be demolished. Social-Democracy in Germany was followed by fascism, and even today, democratic rights are under attack in the heartlands of capitalism.

In the former colonies, there was likewise a popular movement for liberation from imperialism, often followed by a sense of disappointment when independence was won but the working masses remained in much the same condition as before. Again, the illusion that democracy is the free gift of the bourgeoise, or a necessary condition of their rule, is responsible for this disappointment. Alternatively, there has been a tendency, shared by both Maoists and Trotskyists, to deny that a bourgeois revolution has taken place or that capitalism is developing. A more realistic view would be to recognise that for the working class, independence from colonialism is only the first of many battles for democracy.

Women Workers and Neoliberalism

Book review of Women Workers and Globalization: Emergent Contradictions in India, by Indrani Mazumdar, Stree, Kolkata, for Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, 2007. xxiv + 349 pages.

The bulk of this book consists of four sectoral studies of women workers in Delhi and its satellite townships of Noida and Gurgaon, through a combination of structured questionnaires and individual and group discussions conducted in 2002-2004. 

Fine-Tuning the Linkage Proposal: Commentary

A cross-country comparison which finds ‘Strong evidence that countries with open trade policies have superior labor rights and health conditions and less child labor’ (Flanagan 2004: 26) suggests that openness to the world economy does not undermine workers’ rights and may even enhance them. However, the finding that in any particular country openness to the world economy can go with high labour standards is not incompatible with the proposition that globalisation as a process undermines labour rights globally.

One process by which this could and does take place is by the transfer of production from countries with higher labour standards to countries with lower standards, leaving workers in the former unemployed. Thus in developed countries, jobs in the labour-intensive textile and garment industries have been decimated as production shifted to developing country export sectors (Williams 2004; Narendranath 2004). This has also caused job losses in developing countries, when production moved from higher-wage countries like Korea to lower-wage ones like Cambodia. Outsourcing in the service sector led to further transfer of employment from developed to developing countries, leading to calls for a curb on outsourcing in the US (Alden 2004).

A less obvious, more insidious way in which labour standards are undermined is by the spread of low labour standards to countries which did not formerly suffer from them, or at least not to the same extent. The global expansion of informal labour – workers who do not have any formal employment contract with an employer and therefore are extremely vulnerable to abuse – is a case of this. Informal labour was always preponderant in India, but the expansion of homeworking, sweatshops, and the hiring of workers through intermediaries (‘labour contractors’, ‘agencies’, ‘gangmasters’ and so on) in countries which were formerly free of these problems (Mather 2005) has caused serious concern within the ILO in the 21^st century (ILO 2002).

In this context, the publication of International Trade and Labor Standards, with its carefully crafted proposal for a linkage between trade and labour standards that is both feasible and capable of stopping the downward pressure on labour standards, is of great importance. The authors have taken up objections to linkage in a step-by-step manner in order to formulate a proposal that meets almost all the arguments against it that are commonly put forward. This paper is an attempt to strengthen it by tackling some of the few remaining weaknesses.

No Peace Without Human Rights

I have been asked to talk about Rajan Hoole and Kopalasingham Sritharan of University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR(J)), who received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders this year. I was absolutely thrilled when they got the award, because I had been feeling for years that they hadn't received sufficient recognition for the amazing work they had been doing under extremely difficult circumstances, without any institutional support
or proper funding, and leading a hunted existence due to their refusal to give up human rights work despite death threats from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon

Review of Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48, by Charles Wesley Ervin, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, 2006, xiii + illustrations + 366 pages

Tomorrow is Ours is an impressive account of the emergence of the Trotskyist movement in Ceylon and India, ending soon after Independence in both countries. The first chapter sketches the historical background: Mughal India, the rule of the East India Company, the consequent de-industrialisation of India, the 1857 insurrection followed by the takeover of India by the British government, the building of the railways and genesis of the textile industry, and the origins of the national movement. This is followed by a summary of debates within the Marxist movement on the national and colonial question, the nature of the impending revolutions in the colonies, and the united front vs. the popular front, all constituting an essential theoretical background to the ensuing account.

Erasing Diversity and Hybridity

Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia, by Kumari Jayawardena, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, 2007, iv+312 pages + photographs

The significant contributions to history of Euro-Asians – a term coined by Kumari Jayawardena to encompass Burghers, Anglo-Indians and Eurasians – are documented in detail in this book, which deals mainly with Sri Lanka, but also takes up some cases in India, and a few elsewhere. The central question posed by it is the following: There were many men and women of mixed European and Asian descent in India and Sri Lanka, who questioned both foreign domination and oppressive local social structures – visionaries and agitators who supported national liberation, feminism, pluralism, secularism and the rights of workers and peasants – yet their contribution to history has largely been erased. In the case of Euro-Asians of maternal European descent, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, they have been recognised, but at the cost of erasing their mothers. What is the reason for this denial?