South Asia Citizens Web

. . . The crisis of revolutionary doctrine has one root in the history of leninism with its programmatic presumptions of absolute truth; and its dubious concept of the Outside. The ossification of critical thought in the Indian Left is partly the product of the resonance between brahmanical and leninist epistemology, both of which presume a social division between those who possess knowledge (seen as an entitlement to power), and those who work. An absolutist starting point also generates the approach of using theory as a means of sectarian demarcation, rather than understanding and changing social reality. The purveyors of this outlook may be named the “aristocracy of the intellect”. The view that a certain caste or a group of theoreticians are naturally qualified to produce the truth for society is at heart antithetical to “the democracy of the intellect”, which alone can develop the resources for social transformation.

In the general reckoning of the country’s politicians, Kashmir is an inalienable part of India, no further questions are to be entertained. This assertion has a coating of opportunism, for the same politicians are wondrously absentminded over the unearthing of more than two thousand unmarked graves across the valley: it is as if it was too small a matter to detain them. These graves, overwhelming sections of Kashmiris are convinced, are of young men killed by Indian armed forces in fake encounters. The army is in Jammu and Kashmir because of the dispensation of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The statute allows the armed forces a free rein over the lives and limbs of residents of the area where it is enforced.

[A. K. Ramanujan] . . . was such an acclaimed linguist, folklorist and translator of all things Indian, forever opening doors to the interplay between the epic and everyday experience, who was recently shunned as an “untouchable” by the academic caste panchayat of Delhi University. [ . . . ] The role played by the Oxford University Press (OUP) in the three-year long saga ending with the burial of Ramanujan’s Ramayana piece illustrates how the world out there has come to unthinkingly push artefacts of the mind out of public spaces.

We urge the government to go ahead with a transparent and democratic review of the Koodankulam nuclear power project. We also urge the nuclear establishment to desist from scuttling such process by going to media with misleading and irrelevant claims.

The protest movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is very clear about what it is against - an international capitalism that is cruel, unfair and untenable. But the movement refuses to say what it is for. Much of this refusal comes from a belief that modern capitalist society is extremely skilful at co-opting dissent and that any discussion with the media is the first step in being reabsorbed into ’the system’.