South Asia Citizens Web

Management at Amnesty’s International Secretariat informed workers’ union Unite that the organisation’s current redundancy policy would not apply to any staff who lost their jobs as a result of the restructuring plans. In response the union statement says ’Amnesty International cannot be an effective or credible human rights organisation if it does not respect the rights of its workers. The organisation’s senior management must adhere to the same standards it demands of governments and corporations globally.’

So worker rebellions against “their own unions” and against the “legal framework” for collective bargaining have a distinguished history. Since Marikana there has been a strike wave of some 100 000 workers across the country – from the platinum province, to the coal and gold mines of the North West, Gauteng and the Free State, and from the workers at Kumba in the Northern Cape; to Toyota in KZN; and even home-based textiles workers in Cape Town. And now farm workers in De Doorns. A common feature of these strikes has been that they were led and driven by self-organised workers’ committees in defiance of the existing unions and of signed collective agreements made with these unions.

Many questions still remain unanswered about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Unless we face them squarely to give the event a sense of an ending, its ghosts will continue to haunt us.

Given that we forget many things, given that we, at the same time, remember many things, that we beat our breasts to remember many things, it is urgent that we reflect sociologically, on what is remembered and what is forgotten, on how processes of remembering and forgetting occur. This leads me to ask, how do we make sense of the 2012 communal violence ? How will we remember it? It is important to point out that state has already embarked on the task of forgetting. And therefore, it is most important, nay urgent, that we re-think, that we counter-think, the issue of communalism.
. . . In contemporary Bangladesh, the marketing of patriotism by corporate capitalism and the corporate-owned media has succeeded in concealing, and also, in censoring communal divides and communal differences. The totalising narrative of mutual goodwill and a denial of differences, in reality, works toward strengthening the identities of “us” and “them.”

The 2012 Deutscher Memorial Lecture was delivered by Jairus Banaji as part of the Historical Materialism conference on Friday, 9 November 2012
at the Khalili Lecture Theatre, School of Oriental and African Studies,
in London.