Emergence Of A New Left or A New Turn By The Old: Some Propositions On Recent Movements In India

By Mithilesh Kumar

10 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

“In a revolutionary period it is very difficult to keep abreast of events which provide an astonishing amount of new material for an appraisal of the tactical slogans of revolutionary parties.”
Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution

Several movements, recently, have come to a state where an analysis of the trends of radical politics can be done. These movements range from FTII to the return of awards from intellectual, artists and academic to the movement against scrapping of UGC fellowships to the agitation against the institutional murder of RohithVemula culminating finally in the JNU movement. There are several other movements, big or small, that has happened all over the country but the above mentioned ones are those which captured the imagination of the ‘people’ and where ideological battle lines were divided decisively. The task now is to discern those signs in politics and political movements which indicate that these movements have indeed brought a distinct trajectory in radical politics in India which has broken the relative deadlock and a bit of staleness that had set in the form and content of mainstream Left politics. By mainstream left the indication is towards parliamentary left especially the triumvirate of CPI, CPI (M), CPI (M-L) Liberation. By radical/revolutionary left it means those groups who are mainly in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist camp and those who differ with the mainstream in terms of programme, stage of revolution, question of party etc. We should also be prepared that no such change has actually been achieved.

Let us first examine the movements that have been mentioned above; their genesis, their ideology, the vocabulary of their struggle and the strategy and tactics adopted by them. It is now a popular aphorism that a single spark can start a prairie fire. This prairie fire was the decision of IIT-Madras to derecognize the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC) following an anonymous report that they are instigating protests against Prime Minister Modi and government policies under him. This was a crude method adopted by the institution to suppress a student group. This was the moment when the state will change its strategy to suppress dissent. After a widespread protest the de-recognized status of APSC was lifted with assigning of a faculty advisor. It was an indication that the authorities knew that outright crude strategy of suppressing dissent will not work. They have to be suppressed by a combination of violence and polarization of ideological stands. APSC succeeded in achieving a political victory and in some ways set the template of battle between the governmental authorities and the students which was going to inform the movements that followed. The struggle was an old one, between the oppressed and the oppressor but the methods of struggles of both the state and the subject had changed.

In a way FTII is where the new template of struggle started to develop. On the surface it was a very innocuous act. What should have been a routine appointment became a center of political storm and the new forms of battle began to unravel. However, there were two very different aspects to this movement in a political sense and which were in contradiction. The first aspect was that the appointee was a person without eminence hence he was not fit to head a prestigious institution. It is very hard to say that this is a political demand. The political aspect came when this was linked to an attempt to saffronise institutions and was seen as an attempt by the government to capture legally autonomous institutions. This contradiction it could be said was not resolved. Thus, the success of the movement was that it brought the issue of saffronisation stridently to fore however it could not decisively took a leap from localization to a more general struggle. It is true the protest came to Delhi with support from all around the country but it receded after a heroic strike that continued for 138 days. But the movement ensured that a discourse for a radical movement was set.

The so-called “award wapsi” created even more flutter in the intellectual imagination of the “people” as well as the government. Against the killing of artists and rationalists the intellectuals took a strong stand. The returning of award in itself was not a novel act as repeated reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s return of the Nobel Prize made it clear. What was novel about this protest and its vocabulary was the decisive way in which violence which could have been deemed case of individual crime was connected with form of state violence. This protest made an implicit point that these acts of violence was in fact state violence proper and it is not only a case of mere complicity. This understanding of violence by the movement showed clearly that state’s complicity in mass violence like Gujarat riots and state violence against individual contrarian political activists have evolved as twin iron-fists of state-power in the contemporary times or under a neoliberal regime of accumulation and governance. Identifying this was a major achievement of these acts. The fact that an isolated and individual act triggered this movement also showed something novel. That it does not always require well defined networks of activism to make certain political acts. This nebulousness and local nature of political association is something that future movements will use and it is quite apparent that this particular tactical maneuver is being used increasingly. Even the location of the struggle was diffused in the sense that there was no center where the struggle was concentrated. The attack on state was literally from all sides spatially and temporally. It would not be hyperbolic in any sense to say that the “award wapasi” movement did show a new way to conduct political battles in the intellectual arena and making intellectual the political battles to corner the government, something which has not always been the case.

The movement against scrapping of UGC fellowship is a momentous movement whichever way we look at it. In fact, one can go further and say that the complete ramification of this movement is still to be analyzed and understood and this will still take some time. This is so because the range of issues it brought forth for which a complex evolution of political praxis was and is needed. Again, it had distinctly two aspects. One was the economic demand of restoring fellowship to research students and extending it to all universities including the state universities without any revision of enforced criteria. The political demand which was similar yet took it further from the FTII movement which concentrated on the issue of saffronization and autonomy the movement against UGC started a debate on who is a researcher. This was in addition to pointing out the fact of privatization of education on a large scale due to WTO-GATS agreement. This was an important issue but not unique to this movement. What was unique was the earlier question. Suddenly, there was a debate on whether a researcher was simply a passive recipient of state grant or she is an active worker in intellectual production with a distinct production relation with the government and the ‘people.’ There were positions for and against this proposition. The proponents of this line of thinking said that there was real proletarianzation of student-researchers in the universities not only because they came from economically weak background but also because of working conditions while they are doing research and producing tangible products. Those who opposed said that a university could not be equated to a factory so the student-researcher as worker thesis is fallacious. This debate is still valid and one of the surprises during the JNU movement was that this point was not brought and debated again anew when the accusation of misusing taxpayers’ money was brought on the student-leaders who were later arrested. There will be more occasions when this acute political question about the very nature of the political subject will be debated. As yet a lot of theoretical work needs to be done. There is a point that should be made here as it is intrinsically linked to the political economy in which a researcher functions. Let us assume that university is indeed a factory. It must be mentioned here that when ‘factory’ is invoked it is not the classical 19th century or the fordist factory we are talking about but this is another debate. There is also the assumption that researchers along with the teachers and the karamcharis are workers with respective division of labour. Clearly, this is a factory that produces different kinds of goods and services. Let us also assume a market that is one, heavily regulated by the government through grants etc. and two that the various commodities need to be valorized. For commodity to valorize itself it needs to be sold in the market. We know that a large quantity of commodity produced by researchers and academic staff do not get valorized. Who suffers the loss then? Is it the capitalist (university) that pays the wages? In that case who owns the commodity: the capitalist or the worker (university or researcher)? How are the processes of alienation manifested in this production relation? Since, there is a valid claim on part of the worker that the produce is its own how do we understand the relationship between the capitalist and the worker? Is this a rent seeking behavior on part of the university and the government? These might be sketchy questions but they are the kind which needs to be resolve before we can make the assertion of “student-researcher as worker.” This is important because if it indeed could be shown that student-researcher is a worker then new forms of class alliances would have to be made. It will also radically revise and determine our understanding of the alliance, frictions and contradictions between student and workers’ movement. This movement also organized, perhaps, the most successful of all ‘Occupy’ movements in India.

The institutional murder of Rohith Vemula can be and should be thought of as a turning point in how we conceive of our polity. The facts are clear. Rohith Vemula was hounded for his activism (by the university as well as ministers in the central government) based on Ambedkar, his trenchant criticism of caste system and religious fundamentalism. He was vacated from his hostel and forced to live in the open. He committed suicide by hanging himself. He was a Dalit. More important than the outrage it created in the country it forced the conscience of the ‘people’ to stand and take notice of the Dalit question. One has to appreciate the fact that the death of Rohith Vemula happened in a city and in a university. There is no dearth of horrible news coming from the length and breadth of the country about the most inhumane and barbaric treatment of the Dalits by the savarn castes. But these were from the hinterlands away from certain civilities of the urban space that successfully conceals the everyday discrimination and atrocities that Dalits have to suffer in the city. All this is not new. Dalit scholars and activists have made this point a number of times over a number of years. It always fell on deaf years of the Brahmanical intellectual and activist despite they being well meaning. Perhaps the problem was precisely that they were well meaning of the liberal variety and never took pains to understand the problem. Rohith Vemula’s death took each one of us who claim to think politically by the scruff of the neck. There is a catch though which should not be forgotten. He was a university student, a researcher (maybe a worker too in the sense discussed above) an articulate, passionate and rigorous political activist. The similarity with mainstream intellectual space was too acute and the physical proximity too close to ignore it. The fable of university being an equal space, a space for debate, discussion and other liberal luxuries lay shattered. It was not possible for the radical and mainstream left to be silent. It was forced to take a stand and it did and we will see later the problematic of that. The advantage of that movement beyond the solidarity aspect was that it was again no longer possible to ignore the politics that exists in the country on the basis of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. And this Ambedkar is not the myth of an intellectual yet gentle scholar who gave the constitution. He was a fierce critic of the entire Brahmanical social structure which makes more than half of India. In fact, his political and ideological honesty did not even spare his own work as evident in the fact that he disowned the constitution. So, there it was this was a new kind of Dalit politics which respects its radical tradition but also aware of the tasks it has to fulfill in the contemporary times.

We now come to the JNU Movement which in some ways reflected and assimilated all the movements above and added to it question of nationalism and patriotism to set the matrix, nay paradigm, which radical and mainstream left politics has to confront, find answers and evolve their praxis. One should not forget in this entire narrative that these movements were conducted under great state repression. This repression was also not random or spontaneous as sometimes is claimed to be especially alleging that the police was provoked to the extreme. Everything about the violence that was perpetrated was coldly thought out, calculated and planned even the quantum and target of violence. It was meticulously planned like a war on whom to target: a crowd or an individual. Personnel were mobilized accordingly. These recent acts of violence in the above mentioned violence where the state goes to such detailed planning is reserved mainly for the ‘Maoist Zone’ of Chhatisgarh, the concerted deployment of army and paramilitary in Kashmir or Manipur. The strategy and tactics of those wars have now been introduced in the urban areas.

The incident at JNU is too recent; in fact, ongoing for the need to recap it so we will go straight to the analysis of it. What the incident of JNU did was to bring together the issue of autonomy, saffronization, question of freedom of expression, political economy of being a student, caste, religion and nationalism. In here everyone was implicated maybe even embedded. The movement was and is overdetermined. Since, the attack was on the student-leaders who belonged to the left of different hues the left parties, radical and mainstream (which were directly involved) had to confront the questions raised by all these movement not individually but collectively and in the complexity of their interaction. The left never had to face all these questions not only together but when these questions were interacting together. It was only inevitable that some new idioms of politics have to emerge. It is here that we now have to carefully extricate whether these idioms and praxis are pointing to an emergence of a New Left or whether it is the old that is just trying to accommodate some new things in its old vocabulary and praxis.

It will not be an exaggeration to say that the mainstream left has had a tightrope walking to do ideologically. The necessity was first to set the terms of the battle. And this was done through defining the battleground on which it has to be fought out. This battleground was the constitution of India. This was the limit as well as the reference. So, this was not so much about a radical change in society but to restore and preserve the ‘original’ spirit of the constitution. This constitution now had to be theoretically and practically amalgamated with the larger political, economic and social concepts of left politics and almost to be made and alloy. This is by all means a very tough, if not impossible task, to achieve. It is here Ambedkar and Ambedkarist politics becomes so important for the left. The person Ambedkar who made the constitution which now has “socialist” and “secularism” as two of its declared goals provided the legitimacy required both in the field of economic issues as well as political and social ones in the contemporary time. The social politics now is being defined by secularism and that of economic ones are being defined by socialism. And there is a very conscious effort to make the distinction between the two to which we will come later. Ambedkarist politics becomes important to the mainstream left because it gives them the radical subaltern status. Is it any wonder then that the slogan of “Jai Bhim” became part of the left vocabulary so effortlessly? There was no critique of Ambedkar from a leftist point of view (which some radical groups have done stridently) and certainly no critique of themselves on appropriating Ambedkar. The point is not against that they are giving the slogan of “Jai Bhim.” They are not only entitled to but, in fact, it gives them a fresh sense and direction of politics. The problem is that mainstream left has suddenly taken to their own variety of Ambekarist politics without critiquing or having an appraisal of their own very problematic relationship with them. This is plain and simple appropriation at least till now. One can only hope that there indeed happens an amalgamation of mainstream left politics and Ambedkarist politics. It will have a lot of potential and it will be interesting to see how it changes the Indian polity if that amalgamation happens.

Nationalism brought moments which gave a glimpse of changing thinking about mainstream left on the issue of self-determination. This is no place to get into a rather complex debate about self-determination between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. However, one has to say that the way nation-state being is defined by them it seems that they have reconciled to the federal system of solving the problem of nationhood. Currently, the vocabulary does not suggest that they are close to the position of right to secession. Even on the issue of Kashmir the struggle is against AFSPA and there is nothing to suggest that the mainstream left will demand or defend that right. The very slogan of Azadi has been in some way twisted, after the incident at JNU, into a limited signifier. Azadi stood for a complete withdrawal of the Indian state from Kashmir lock stock and barrel. However, the way it has evolved after the incident it seems Azadi has become one withdrawal of just the repressive apparatus of the Indian state but not a complete secession. Also, as with Ambedkar the slogan is again being appropriated and sometimes not in a very subtle way and sometimes erroneously. In fact, it was claimed that the slogan emerged from the struggle for justice in December 16, 2012 gang rape case. There is no political harm in borrowing, transporting or translating slogan. But in that event it has to be assured that where the slogan is translated or transported to it makes that political space equally radical. In this case, the slogan of Azadi was raised to displace and replace the original slogan which purportedly brought the law of sedition on the heads of the student-leaders. The original Kashmir was replaced by a more acceptable set of demands ranging from poverty to casteism.

The final point that needs to be made in this preliminary investigation is one that is mentioned above. The difference that is made between the socio-economic and political demands. For example, there was hardly any movement described above that did not raise the question of farmers’ suicide. But the vocabulary in which it was done is very suspect. The way it was presented it seemed farmers’ suicide and the agrarian crisis is due to the failure of the government. If the government which is more liberal can be installed the problem could be tackled through better policy. There is no attempt to analyze the situation through the prism of class and property relations which a left group is supposed to do. The agrarian crisis then becomes not the crisis of capitalism (or even semi-feudal semi-capitalism) but a crisis of governance. The good old leftist approach of land relations has been firmly laid to rest by the mainstream left in practical terms. This at least a novel phenomenon among the mainstream left. However, there are several other movements that are bent into the paradigm of governance and not the paradigm of capitalism or political economy. This leads to the concluding point that there are certain kind of movements that lend itself to be politicized which the left has picked up to define itself today. Yet, there are other demands which should have been raised by the mainstream left but they do not let itself so easily to politicization within the paradigm of governance. For example, can we imagine the political possibility which could have emerged if the demand for the release of 147 jailed Maruti workers along with the student-leaders was raised? One of the problems that prevents such a politics to emerge is that the theory of mainstream left is tested in the electoral arena or popular arena where class and class alliances are homogenized to form the ‘people’. In that sense, the mainstream left has displaced the concept of united front based on class alliance.

We come now to the question: Is this current phase emergence of New Left or just the old mainstream left taking a new turn. The contingent answer is that it is the latter for the contradiction in the praxis of the former has yet to play out. Also, there is the small matter of radical/revolutionary left who now are grappling with the problem of how to do class politics by eschewing populism. It is the dilemma that has wracked the left and continue to do so. At least, this has not changed.

Mithilesh Kumar is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia. His interest is in the issues of logistics, migration and labour, political philosophy and theory. He wants to work on the nature, evolution and innovation of the Indian state with respect to social and political movements in India. Email: [email protected]