Lamentation
Cry, Dear Friend, On the Death of a Noble Profession
D elhi University Teacher's Association (DUTA),
one of the strongest unions of university teachers
in the country, suffered a humiliating setback
recently. On 15 November 2010, Justice Manmohan of
Delhi High Court ordered the DUTA to call off its strike
against semester system for science courses introduced by
the administration this year. Teachers are back in lecture
halls, students on benches are getting ready for
examinations, administration has its writ running back in
the university; all is quiet on the campus front. The new
Vice-Chancellor would have hardly expected a more
docile environment to establish his authority.
The DUTA struggle was done in by the pincer movement
of the bureaucracy and judiciary. While the former
remained adamant and did not come for any sort of
negotiations, the latter determined the teacher's strike to be
blackmail. The Indian judiciary in many recent
judgements has held protest marches, hartals, strikes, and
so on, illegal. Its argument is that by disrupting regular
social life, these amount to holding hostage the
fundamental rights of citizens. The bureaucracy and
judiciary are two important pillars of any liberal governing
order. The former in its ideal Weberian type gives rational
form to the operation of state power and class rule under
liberalism. The main purpose of the latter is the provision
of argued justifications for the existing status quo, or to
bring social reality back within rules if the deviations
become too embarrassing, as has happened with the 2-G
spectrum scam recently. The reality of the Indian
bureaucracy and judiciary rarely matches its liberal ideal.
Our corrupt bureaucracy lords over its citizens, brazenly
and violently if they happen to be poor, Dalit or adivasi.
Our judiciary in many cases relies not on evidence and
arguments but on sentiments and hearsay, as it did in the
recent Babari Masjid title suit, or on 'extraneous
considerations', as commented recently by the Supreme
Court about the mess in the Allahabad High Court. The
prime responsibility of the judiciary to ensure governance
is abundantly manifest in the interim order of the Delhi
High Court when it says 'that in a democratic body polity,
governance is the primary factor', or when it claims that
education results in a person becoming 'disciplined,
CRITIQUE December 2010
-Sanjay Kumar
civilised and a man (sic) of compassion' (emphasis added).
People protest not when they want more - for that
negotiation is the best tactic. They rise up when some
aspect of social life strikes them as unjustified. A survey of
recent protests and strikes in the country will surely reveal
that the majority of them were not for new demands, but in
response to the management, bureaucracy or state power
breaking their earlier promises or violating existing rules.
This clearly was the case with the Delhi University (DU)
struggle where university bureaucracy flouted established
norms to push through the semester system. Liberatory
ideologies from radical Gandhism to Marxism have held
the right to protest, and protest in ways not predetermined
by powers that be (like a dharna at Jantar Mantar) but in
ways that make rulers change their ways, fundamental to
the social nature of humans. If the purpose of education is
not to make humans disciplined subjects, but inquisitive
and questioning beings in the Socratic sense, then it is
obvious that education is implicated within protests.
Asking questions involves finding answers. And in many
cases of social injustice, protest, rather than negotiations,
is the only way to arrive at justice. Going on strike, that is,
not doing what the social system requires one to do, is
surely one way of protest. It is an assertion of the moral
autonomy of protesting subjects, confronting which
hegemonic powers often get baffled, as were the colonial
British when faced with Gandhi led general Hartals, or
Nehru on the boycott of his public meeting in Kohima by
Nagas in 1953. If the injustice of powers that be, and
protests and strikes against it, are so integral to our life as
conscious social beings, can higher education teaching
remain aloof from them? When it is ordained to teachers
'Thou shalt not strike', no matter how much injustice you
may see in university administration, against yourself,
against students, against karamcharis, then something of
the very moral basis of teaching is undercut.
For once, Delhi University's teachers' struggle this time
around was not for pay and promotion parity with higher
bureaucracy. They were fighting against the semester
system on matters of academic and administrative
principles. On way to introducing this system the previous
VC had flouted all democratic norms built in to university
9
statutes. When his pet project could not be introduced
through discussion and debate in Academic and Executive
Councils of the University, he used his emergency powers
to forcefully hoist it on the University. Course Committees
were arbitrarily (de)formed by departmental Head-Of-
Departments (HoDs) to make new syllabi. These are a hack
job, cut and pasted from old annual mode syllabi. Semester
systems have been around in the country for many years.
IITs have always had them, and some of them are about
fifty years old. All professional courses in the country are
semester based. Most of the post graduate courses in basic
sciences and humanities too are taught in this mode. If
conceived, structured and offered properly, the modular
nature of semester system provides students great freedom
to choose courses and plan their own education. They do
not need to submit to one groove decided right in the
beginning when they join university. The shorter duration
of semester system requires courses to be covered at a
faster pace, but students are also evaluated continuously
and internally, reducing the possibility of results
depending only on rote learning, question paper guessing
and selective preparation. In a properly implemented
semester system, teachers get greater freedom to select
their own course readings. Internal evaluation frees them
from the chore of preparing students for answering
questions prepared by an anonymous paper setter. The
virtues of a semester system come to the fore when number
of students is small, and all of them are doing a course
taught by the same teacher. These conditions are obviously
not met in University of Delhi, in which all the
undergraduate teaching takes place in more than 80
affiliated colleges. The positive features of semester
system are not what excite mandarins of the University
Grant's Commission and the HRD Ministry. They are
taken in by the success of this system in professional
courses like the MBAs, where its short duration and
modular nature permits quick learning of marketable
skills. They want it because it gels better with the market
demands of an expanding capitalist economy. Giving
greater autonomy to students and teachers will
compromise their power.
Higher education teaching to students who are adults, and
hence, morally and intellectually autonomous, is a very
specific social setting. It is not an arena of public
discussion between equals, because teacher-student
relationship is asymmetrical; the teacher is the boss and
she/he is the only one finally responsible for ensuring that
suitable and adequate learning does take place in her/his
class. Yet the very nature of what gets created in a class, i.e.
10
new knowledge for students, demands that the power
relationship between teacher and students in higher
education is fundamentally different from that in
management or bureaucracy. It is based on persuasion, and
rational argumentation, rather than authority to punish; it is
continuously interactive, rather than tied down in rules
established once and for all. Students in a class learn best
when they have respect for teacher's learning and moral
standing, and every higher education teacher knows these
can not be earned by command. In a way, every class
setting in higher education is unique, it results from a
special relationship established between a teacher and
students. Every higher education teacher is an employee,
but an employee whose work takes place best when away
from the monitoring gaze of the employer. A teacher not
enjoying full respect from the system which employs
her/him cannot teach. That is why best higher education
administrators have long found that it is best to give full
autonomy to higher education teachers in class. The full
professional autonomy comes along with full
responsibility for ensuring that students learn. Again, the
very nature of learning in higher education means that the
moment this responsibility is seen as a burden the entire
exercise collapses. A teacher of higher education has to
enjoy her/his profession. That many, perhaps a majority of
higher education teachers, do not reach this ideal is a fact.
But that in no way detracts from the potentially very
special place of higher education teaching in the world of
professions. If the moral fibre of a society can be judged by
the way it treats its weakest, something about it can also be
said by the way it treats its teachers. And, signs from higher
education in India are not at all positive in this regard.
The ominous process of college teaching getting pushed to
the margins of the education system, ceasing to be a
creditable profession, has been around for some time.
Outside central universities like DU, teachers of state
colleges work under same conditions as the bureaucracy.
Teachers of trust-run colleges are treated little more than
paid functionaries. They have little say in admissions and
general administration of colleges. A majority of teachers
of private professional colleges are temporary contract
employees. They are considered mere providers of
profitable skills. In the DU itself college teachers are
marginal to the University administration which has so
much influence on their profession. The twenty three
member Executive Council has only two teacher
representatives. More than one fifty member Academic
Council has only twenty six teacher representatives. Both
these deliberative bodies are stuffed with University
December 2010 CRITIQUE
bureaucracy and faculty and departmental academic
officials. Course committees are prerogatives of
departmental HODs. Their meetings are sporadic and
decisions prdetermined. An exercise most humiliating to
college teachers takes place every year before results are
prepared. A near secret committee of the University, whose
composition and working formulae are not public
knowledge, sits down to 'moderate' the internal evaluation
marks given by college teachers to the students they teach.
This means that while asking college teachers to evaluate
students on a continuous basis, the university
administration does not trust them and has kept within its
prerogative to sit on judgment over what they in their much
more interactive assessment of students have decided.
University practice lacks even basic decency of human
interaction. If evaluation given by a teacher has to be
modified, then at least she/he should be informed,
consulted and provided reasons for changes.
It will be disingenuous to blame every body else but the
teachers themselves for the current state of higher
education profession. As a highly skilled worker, and
especially after the VI Pay Commission, every higher
education teacher earns an income in the upper two
percentile in the country. As if the feudal and caste legacies
of the profession were not enough, the emerging class
character of upper middle classes in the country is
undermining nobility of higher education teaching. The
single-minded focus on enjoying fruits of current
capitalism, from consumerism of shopping malls, to moral
smugness of media, to advertised social responsibility of
the NGO sector, to supine deference before culturally
hegemonic West, to the fundamentalist Hindutva virus, to
the gung ho nationalist streak, all these real characters of
the new Indian privilegentsia ensure that teachers of higher
education in India are themselves complicit in the
degradation of their profession. After all, what else could
explain the indifference of DU college teachers to the
plight of their students who were thrown out of their
hostels so that Common Wealth Games mafiaoso could
make some more money! Or, is it not a fact that one of the
reasons DUTA strike fizzled so quickly was the threat of
'no work no salary' by the university administration! q
...........................................................................................
Dr. Sanjay Kumar teaches Physics at St. Stephens College,
University of Delhi

Apolitical Intellectuals
By Otto Rene Castillo
One day on Greek mythology, “What did you do when the poor
The apolitical or regarding their self-disgust suffered, when tenderness
Intellectuals when someone within them and life
Of my country begins to die burned out in them?”
the coward's death.
will be interrogated Apolitical intellectuals
by the simplest They'll be asked nothing of my sweet country,
of our people. about their absurd you will not be able to answer.
justifications,
They will be asked born in the shadow A vulture of silence
what they did of the total lie. will eat your gut.
when their nation died out
slowly, On that day Your own misery
like a sweet fire, the simple men will come. will pick at your soul.
small and alone.
Those who had no place And you will be mute
No one will ask them in the books and poems
about their dress, of the apolitical intellectuals, in your shame.
their long siestas but daily delivered
after lunch, their bread and milk,
no one will want to know their tortillas and eggs,
about their sterile combats (Translated by Margaret Randall, from
with “the idea those who mended their clothes, the Curbstone Press anthology Poetry
Like Bread)
of the nothing” those who drove their cars,
no one will care about who cared for their dogs and gardens (Otto Rene Castillo, born 1936, was a
their higher financial learning. and worked for them, Guatemalan revolutionary, a guerilla
They won't be questioned and they'll ask: fighter, and a poet.)

CRITIQUE December 2010 11

 Another Education Is Possible: An Account of the Struggle
against Neoliberal Restructuring at the University of Sussex
T he transformation of British Universities from
places of learning and enquiry into supermarkets,
where knowledge is a commodity, (the production
of which is driven by the needs of the market), has picked
up pace in the past several years. For a long time
universities in the UK were entirely state-funded and free
for all. Since then, fees have been introduced in three
phases. At the first stage, the maximum any university
could charge stood at £1000 . The second phase began in
2006 when the cap on tuition fees was raised by Tony
Blair's government to £3300 . We are currently entering
what may well be the final phase, where tuition fees will
either go up to something around £7000 , or the cap on fees
will be abolished completely allowing universities to
charge as high a price as they can get away with. This will
mean that universities will have to compete with each other
for students and research funding.
Governments across Europe have seized upon the
opportunity provided by the financial crisis to slash public
spending across the board. With the election of a
Conservative/Liberal coalition (both parties ideologically
committed to giving the market free reign) in the UK, the
speed and depth of these cuts will exceed what was
anticipated under the Labour government, with higher
education being hit particularly hard. Vice-chancellors
(VCs) know what is coming: that universities will soon
exist in a competitive market and so will have to be made
profitable in order to survive. Instead of opposing this,
however, VCs have jumped on the opportunity to make
education a business and have begun to undertake the task
of restructuring with gusto, cutting everything but their
salaries.
The effects of restructuring universities to be profit-driven
will be disastrous for both academics and students and is a
symptom of the process of subordination of social interests
to those of the market, which is the hallmark of neo-
liberalism.
The restructuring we face will severely limit academic
freedom by insisting that research is profitable and
teaching determined by the needs of the market. The result
12
-Ryan Powell
will be a sever limiting of the scope and depth of
intellectual enquiry and will signal the end universities as
places where academic knowledge and research is
recognised to have inherent value, in Britain. Students will
suffer as the quality of their education is steadily eroded,as
degrees focus more and more on teaching marketable
skills rather than independent and critical enquiry.
However, this will cease to be a concern for many: as with
the further rising of fees, university education will cease to
be a viable option for students from poorer backgrounds.
Already, going to university means signing on to years of
debt for amajority of students. With the anticipated
increases in fees, this debt will simply be too much for
most to afford. Higher education will therefore again
become an avenue which is open only to the rich,
deepening already profound class divisions.
For the past three years I have been a student at the
University of Sussex where the cut backs from the VC and
management have been particularly fierce and
ideologically driven. It is on the actions the students and
workers have taken here in opposition to this restructuring
that I will focus. The cuts faced here are by no means
unique, nor is the resistance mounted against them. Sussex
is a symptom of wider forces and the events here are
exemplary of the national struggle against the privatisation
of education.
Sussex is renowned as a radical university which draws
students due to its critical approach to research and
teaching. Sense it's founding in the 1960s, its strengths
have been in the arts and the social and physical sciences.
However, the market cares not for history and neither does
our VC. During the past three years, the VCand university
management have sought to restructure the university
entirely to stream line it with the needs of the market. £ 5
million of spending cuts are to be made this year, in
addition to the 3 million already made in the previous year.
It is clear, however, that these spending cuts are not an
“unfortunate necessity” but rather part of a project of an
ideological restructuring. This is exemplified in the fact
that, while management have closed departments such as
December 2010 CRITIQUE
Linguistics, American studies and Life Sciences, which society face similar attacks and therefore made efforts to
are seen as having little marketability, they are seeking to build links of solidarity with workers and trade unions
expand Media Studies and pour money into opening an throughout the city as well as on campus, raising the slogan
entirely new Business School- a subject which Sussex has “Students and Workers- Unite and Fight!”. This was and
had no history of teaching. An even more glaring example continues to be a very important aspect of the campaign.
can be seen in management's 112 million pound building We see political resistance as itself an educational process
and refurbishment projects. and intend to create a space where the experiences and
It is, of course, the workers who are expected to pay for the lessons learned in the course of various struggles can be
£ 8 million of planned cuts. 115 workers are to face shared between students and workers from different areas
compulsory redundancy, many more are to effectively lose of society. The nature of the campaign was to be
their jobs by being put onto temporary contracts and pedagogical, and as well as resisting the encroachment of
wages, and pensions are to be slashed. At the same time, knowledge, we hoped to envision a different kind of
the top 14 managers have continued to raise their salaries education, one which would grow out of and further, in
and now earn a combined £ 2.1 million a year with the VC turn, political struggle. As put by Paulo Feire: “education
making £ 222,000 a year, despite only working at the either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate
university 3 days a week.
Thankfully the culture of radicalism at Sussex does
not exist in the academic sphere alone. It is also a
culture of resistance and of political action.
Students at Sussex have a high level of political
consciousness and despite political differences,
always come together when it counts.
The current campaign against management
spending cuts is exemplary of this culture of
resistance. It has existed, in different forms, for
around 5 years. However, it is only in the past year,
with the immediate threat of major job losses and
course closures across the university that large
numbers of students have been mobilised and teachers
and their union (UCU) have felt able to take industrial
action. The reason for this is that whereas earlier the
management would strike down individual courses or integration of the
would axe a few jobs by merging courses, they have now y o u n g e r
come down on the university community as a whole. generation into
by Bhagwati the logic of the
Building on its predecessor “Sussex Not for Sale”, the new
present system...
campaign “Stop The Cuts” (STC) was launched during a
or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which
mass meeting in 2009. It was broadly accepted during the
men and women deal critically and creatively with reality
initial stages of this campaign that radical action was
and discover how to participate in the transformation of
needed in the form of mass demonstrations and
their world”.
occupations and that the campaign would build towards
such actions. However, we recognised that students alone Although the campaign is not directly anti-capitalist, it is
did not have the power would to protect jobs and reverse widely accepted that educational systems reflect the
the cut backs we faced, and decided that all strategy ought society they exist within, and so in imagining a different
to be conceived with the aim of building the movement and form of education, we are also envisioning a different form
encouraging the workers of the university to go out on an of society.
all-out, indefinite strike. We also recognised that the cuts The first task of the campaign was to raise the awareness of
we were not an isolated case and that other sectors of the student body and to create a space where we could

CRITIQUE December 2010 13

discuss the cuts which were taking place and where
students, academics and other workers from different areas
of the university could share experiences of cuts within
their sectors. This was done through the organisation of
mass meetings where students, academics and other
workers were invited to share a platform and discuss the
cuts they faced. As well as being informative, these
meetings were useful for creating links between students
and their lecturers, between workers of different unions,
and for giving them support by showing them that the
students were with them. These meetings were also used as
a forum for discussion for the course of the movement, and
to decide upon future action to be taken.
The first occupation of the campaign came off the back of a
mass demonstration attended by around 500 people. For
this occupation we chose a large room known as the
Conference Centre. This was chosen due to the fact that it
is not actually a part of the University, although located on
its grounds, but is rented out for business meetings and
functions at extortionate rates. By occupying this space we
were therefore able to have a direct fiscal impact on
management. We held this space for two days and anight
during which time demonstrations of students and
lecturers were organised outside in support of the
occupiers. The Conference Centre is located on the top
story of a 5-story building. During one such demonstration
we lowered down a bucket filled with money we had
collected for UCUs strike fund to a union leader below.
UCU, the largest union on campus, has formalised an in-
depth alternative proposal which would allow for the
required money to be saved whilst minimising job losses
and maintaining the integrity of the institution. However,
this has been dismissed by management categorically.
During the summer term therefore, when all attempts at
negotiation had been exhausted, UCU voted
overwhelmingly to take industrial action. On the day this
vote took place around 80 students occupied the
administration building of the university in an act of
solidarity and support for the strike which we had been
calling for.
In occupying this building we forced management out of
their ivory tower and, for a short period, kicked them out as
they planned to do to 115 workers. Not all of the
management would relinquish their citadel so easily and a
bizarre situation unfolded where a low level member of
management locked himself and several other staff
members info an office and then called the police saying
14
that we had barricaded them in and were holding them
hostage. In actuality we had given flyers to all staff
members explaining why we felt the action was
necessary,asking them to calmly leave; we even posted one
under the door of the self-imposed “hostages”. On these
grounds the riot police came with dogs and pepper spray in
an effort to intimidate students from taking part in
legitimate demonstrations. They did not forcibly remove
use (despite the urging of the VC) but did make it
impossible for use to secure the space. After much
argumentation amongst the occupiers inside (some people
saying they didn't believe in voting) it was decided that we
could not hold the space and that we should leave in a block
while there was a crowd and cameras outside. In the course
of the day 3 students were arrested.
This was a controversial occupation as the decision to
occupy had not been made at an open STC meeting but at a
smaller meeting, called by an Anarchist group, which was
not advertised and to which many who have been active in
the campaign were not invited and were unaware of. As a
result we did not have the numbers to hold the space for any
period of time. The occupation also resulted in the
suspension of six students from taking part in university
activities and management taking out a court injunction
making occupations a criminal offence. We were not
divided by these events however and seized this
victimisation as an opportunity, mobilising huge support at
Sussex and university campuses across the country for the
six suspended students, dubbed the “Sussex Six”.
The biggest demonstration of the campaign so far was held
to protest the suspensions. It involved over 700 people and
a high number of staff members attended to show their
support. During this demonstration it was decided that we
should occupy again in defiance of the court injunction
showing that we did not recognise its legitimacy. Without
any previous planning we occupied a large lecture theatre
(Arts A2) which, just the year before, had been occupied
for a week in solidarity with the people of Gaza during
Israel's campaign of mass slaughter.
Around 300 people from the demonstration packed into
the lecture theatre. Our first collective decision was to
write a list of demands (very simple: 1. Reinstate the
Sussex Six 2. No redundancies) and a letter to management
requesting that a high ranking member of management
come into the occupied space to collect our demands in
person and stating that we would not leave or negotiate
until this happened. Amazingly two members of upper
December 2010 CRITIQUE
management agreed to this. They entered the lecture hall
through the back door and had to walk the whole length of
the room, pact past capacity with protesting students, to
reach the podium where they were handed demands. The
room was silent with anticipation as they entered and
remained so until the second the demands were handed
over when it erupted into cheering. They were asked to
make a statement but preferred to leave hurriedly and
without a word.
Over the next week we used this space for a continuous
programme of talks, discussions and workshops on a great
number of issues, mostly relating to the role of education in
society, its potential as a tool of liberation and the role it
could play in a society based on human needs rather than
profit. We also invited speakers to talk on subjects such as
the history of student protest, art and protest movements,
and the role of universities in the neoliberal world. As well
as discussion of a more academic nature we also
encouraged workers from the university to speak about the
cuts and redundancies they faced and gave over a day for
the discussion of the UCUs alternative proposals.
Cleaners, porters, computer technicians, lecturers and
associate teachers all entered the occupied space to give
talks and contribute to discussions. Even the security
guards supported us despite our actions making them have
to do over time, although would not join discussions for
fear of losing their jobs. Workers from the city of Brighton
bin workers union (GMB) and the rail and transport
workers union (RMT) also addressed the occupation and
offered their solidarity for our struggle.
We left occupation after 7 days at 6.30 am on the first of
two days of strike action by UCU in order to join the picket
lines. The day had an atmosphere of jubilation, it felt like a
culmination of the worker/ student unity we had been
building and both lectures and students were excited to be
standing shoulder to shoulder on the picket line. On same
day management announced that the suspensions had been
dropped and so the Sussex Six came onto campus together
and joined the picket line giving the campaign its firstsmall
but realvictory.
The strike took place at the end of the year, only lasted two
days and was not able to seriously disrupt the functioning
of the university. But it was a start. UCU going on strike
has strengthened the confidence of workers and their
unions here and has put industrial action on the table at the
University of Sussex as a means by which workers can
resist the attacks they are currently facing. The
CRITIQUE December 2010
management has shown that they will not listen to
suggestions and are not interested in our concerns; they do
not care about the people who make up the University or the
proud history of our institution. They have their own agenda
and, with the support of the state, seek to bulldoze it through.
We have so far been successful in reducing the number of
redundancies from 115 to 100 and management have
agreed to make as many of these as possible “voluntary”.
This shows just how far we have to go and the extent to
which we will have to escalate worker and student
militancy to achieve our goals. The first priority of our
movement is saving jobs and protecting the workers of the
university from attacks on their livelihoods. For this, the
unions need to go on all-out, indefinite strike. When this is
combined with student strikes and occupations we can stop
the institution from functioning and show the management
that it is our university and they cannot afford to ignore us.
However the drive towards neoliberal restructuring is not
isolated to individual universities and their vice
chancellors but is the result of an agenda formed and
imposed by the state. The government seeks to
simultaneously reduce its fiscal responsibilities and to
subordinate the needs of society to those of the market for
the benefit of the rich. With a conservative government in
power ideologically committed to privatisation and cutting
government spending this trend will intensify in the years
ahead. Keeping higher education in the public domain
will therefore require resistance at the national scale and as
part of a wider fight back against the government's efforts
to make ordinary people pay for the financial crisis. This
movement has already begun and on November 10th 2010,
52,000 people have taken to the streets of London, with a
large group of protestors storming the conservative parties
head quarters, in protest of the proposed rise in tuition fees.
In the course of resistance the seeds for an alternative
education, and an alternative society to that envisioned by
the coalition of cutters and the capitalist class, will
continue to grow.
Another education is possible- but we are going to have to
fight for it.q
For more information on the Stop the Cuts campaign visit:
http://defendsussex.wordpress.com/
...........................................................................................
Ryan Powell is a student in the University of Sussex and is
a member of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in UK.
15
 Writing on the Walls of People
T he Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA),
was passed in the Parliament in 1958. AFSPA can
be looked at not only as a problem for those people
who live under this law, but as an aspect of neocolonialism,
militaristic and the undemocratic nature of the Indian
State. It does not say that it is to counter the “armed
rebellion” or that it is an “anti-terror law”. The Supreme
Court said that it was required for national interest and it
was not due to the armed rebellion. The AFSPA has its
roots in British colonial ordinance, called the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance promulgated in 1942
to assist in suppressing the "Quit India Movement".
The AFSPA itself began as the Armed Forces (Assam and
Manipur) Special Powers Ordinance, 1958, that came into
force in May 1958, and was passed by Parliament in
September of that year. It has only six clauses. Clause 1
defines the name of the act. Clause 2 defines the armed
forces are under the law, including all the central forces -
the Army, Navy and Air forces. Clause 3 defines the power
to declare a disturbed area. The real law is in clauses 4, 5
and 6. Clause 4 allows a non-commissioned officer to
shoot a person dead on the basis of suspicion, to destroy a
property or any place, to arrest a person without an arrest
warrant. Clause 5 allows an arrested person to be kept
detained for an unlimited time and does not define the
number of days and time permitted. Clause 6 says no
prosecution suit or other legal proceeding shall be
instituted, except with the previous sanction of the central
government, with respect of anything done or purported to
be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.
In Manipur, the AFSPA declared Tamenglong district a
disturbed area for the first time in 1961 and later extended
to other hill areas of Manipur. Since 1980, in the last 30
years, all parts of Manipur has been under the extra-
constitutional law of AFSPA. In 2004, after the Manorama
protest, Government of Manipur denotified 7
constituencies in Imphal from “disturbed areas”as a result
of the pressure of the people's protest and also to save the
Congress Government.
People's movements against the Act has had its ups and
downs and even reached an extreme point. From the very
moment of the enactment of the AFSPA-1958, within the
House of the Parliament, a Member of the Parliament from
28
-Seram Rojesh
Manipur strongly opposed the Act and even said that
AFSPA was a lawless law and it would degenerate society.
After the whole of Manipur was declared a “disturbed
area” in 1980, Manipur has been technically under the
direct rule of Indian armed forces. With legal impunity in
their hand, Indian Armed Forces (IAF) started extensive
military operations in Manipur. They came at midnight to
targeted houses in search of suspected people, knocking
on the door while people were asleep in their houses, and
took away people for interrogation. Many such people got
killed, tortured and disappeared in custody. People's lives,
security, dignity and humanity are being terrorized and
threatened in the name of counter-insurgency operations in
Manipur by the Indian State for the protection of the Indian
Nation. Some kind of power and collective fight by the
people has always existed, to secure the dignity and life of
the people through resistance in every human society in the
history of mankind. In a similar way, women in Manipur in
the 1980s came together and transformed the already
existing Nisha Band Movement (Anti-Alcohol/Drug
movement) into the Meira Paibe movement (“women's
torch bearer”). A women's movement for protecting and
securing the lives, physical health, and dignity from
humiliation at the hand of state's armed forces. Civil
society movements, particularly Meira Paibi, Mothers'
Associations and students' organisations in Manipur have
always called for the repeal of the AFSPA.
But these did not reach the kind of mass participation and
powerful protest that surfaced in the 2004 Manorama
protest. People have fresh memories of the two major
atrocities and massacres by IAF on the innocent people of
Manipur recorded in the 1980s. One is the 1984
Heirangoithong massacre when the armed forces opened
fire on an audience who were watching volleyball and
killed 13 peoples, injuring more than 50 people. The
sounds of the clapping and joyful cheers of the audience in
the playground were immediately replaced by the voices
of crying people and the pain of the injured people and the
last, dying call of the people fatally injured. The Numbul
River's water just flowing behind the volleyball ground
flowed red with blood. The second incident fresh in public
memory was the Oinam massacre in 1987 at Oinam village
of Senapati district in Manipur, where 15 people were
killed, and the villagers were tortured for three months and
December 2010 CRITIQUE
forced to work in the army camp. A number of women
were raped, molested, and women's bodies were frisked by
the Indian soldiers on their duty of operation, and a
pregnant woman was even forced to deliver her child at the
public ground where 100s of villagers were forced to
assemble. None of the armed forces involved in the
atrocities of operation and massacre were punished and
rather they are protected by the impunity of the AFSPA. In
1992, Central Reserve Police Forces (CRPF) massacred 8
autorickshaw drivers and one MBBS student from
Arunachal Pradesh at RIMS hospital (a central
government hospital) premises. Some of the Hindi
speaking non-Manipuri workers who were standing along
with the auto drivers were separated before the gunning
down. A medical student from Arunachal Pradesh was also
killed because he looked like the Manipuri auto drivers,
even though he had shown his identity card to prove where
he was from. All the sequences of the way of cold blooded
massacre was recorded in the RIMS Massacre Inquiry
Commission which acknowledges the racial character of
the killing in its report. Human rights organisations,
students' organisations and Meira Paibes called for justice
and compensation. They were demanding a judicial
inquiry of the RIMS massacre. But the call for repeal of the
Act was not very popular among the common masses in
the case of RIMS massacre, which was evident in the way
that they were to protest on the street. Since 1995, after the
Manipur State Commando Forces were set up as part of the
counter-insurgency operation forces, many youths were
reported to have been killed in encounters. It became so
common that a civilian was named a militant after being
killed. People in Manipur, civil society organisations, and
particularly students' organisation noticed what was
happening but could not do much without any evidence.
People were waiting for the right time to express their
anger.
In 1996, February 28, the Manipur police commands led
by Sub-Inspector Mr. Krishnatombi and Rajendro killed
Hijam Netaji, a Class XI science student at Johnston
Higher Secondary while he was waiting for his bus to
school in his school uniform. He was a brilliant student and
secured 71% in class X and wanted to become a doctor.
There was no any way that state forces could have claimed
that he was also a militant killed in encounter. Some miles
from the bus stop where Netaji was killed, two other
persons were also killed. One was reported to be one of the
student in the school I studied in, Ram Lal Paul Higher
Secondary School in Imphal. I was studying in class XI-
Arts in that school and was also the General Secretary of
CRITIQUE December 2010
the Students' Union at that time. Netaje's killing became
very clear evidence that state forces had been doing extra-
judicial killing deliberately, and we saw this as the right
time to stop and demand, No Further Killing! Punish
Those State Forces Who Takes the Law into their Hand”.
One can observe that it was the first major mass protest
across the population, particularly from the student's
community. Meira Paibi and common people came on to
the streets and the fight for justice continued for nearly one
month. There was a call for the boycott of annual Class X
examination by the All Manipur Students' Union (AMSU).
Higher secondary students groups were the major actors in
this movement under the AMSU. The government of
Manipur was forced to agree to the four major demands of
the movement. One, to conducting an independent judicial
inquiry headed by a retired High Court judge. Two, that 1
lakh rupees should be given as compensation to the family
of Netaji. Three, that a stone monument should be build
after the cremation of his symbolic body represented by
traditional wood inside his school premises. Netaji's dead
body had been cremated without his family members, as an
“unclaimed body” by the state forces, without the rituals.
Lastly, that a library should be built in the name of Netaji
inside his school. It was a major success of the student's
and Meira Paibes' movement in Manipur, even though
more than 70 public offices were burnt and many
government vehicles were destroyed and burned down by
the supporters of the movement. Some of the 30 boys and
girls studying in class XI/XII, mostly higher secondary
student's union leaders, decided not to go back to their
home until and unless justice was materialised. Police
came to every student leaders' house who involved in the
movement to arrest and this police action indirectly
supported our decisions not to go back home. I went back
home after almost 20 days when I was informed that my
grandfather had expired. I could not see him at his last
moment. Finally, the government of Manipur officially
suspended all those state forces that were suspected to have
involved in the killing. People were expecting at least
some positive actions from the judicial inquiry. One of the
suspended sub-inspector Mr. Rajendro was killed in a
heavy cross fire with some cadres of United National
Liberation front (UNLF) and insurgent organisation in
Manipur, before the announcement of the inquiry's
commission report, at a place called Wangoi in Manipur. It
was proved that his suspension was only a formality on
paper, and that he was on duty in uniform. After his death,
the inquiry commission was halted and nobody knows
what happened to it till date. Gradually people realised that
29
the judicial inquiry was one of government's tactics to buy
time, and its credibility was lost.
On the other side, the Indian Army and the Indian
Paramilitary forces have extensively expanded their
military operation in both the hills and valleys since 1980.
They took away people in front of his/her family members
from his house and later claimed that the person had
already been released from custody. Such people never
come back and finally disappeared. Since the
disappearance of Mr. Loken and Mr. Lokendro since 1980,
many other people have disappeared. In some cases, the
people who had disappeared had never been arrested.
People had no any evidence in paper to prove that their
sons had been taken away by IAF because they never
issued arrest memos to the family till 1998. People
believed that if the arrest memo was issued in every arrest,
than there would be no further disappearance cases. In
1998, a 15 years old school boy who was studying in Class
VIII disappeared . This time, under the leadership of
AMSU and Meira Paibes, a big campaign and protest were
organized in many parts of Manipur. Finally, the agitation
came to a conclusion with the assurance from the
government and military officials that issuing an arrest
memo would be made mandatory. It was a major
psychological relief for the every people in Manipur who
live in fear of losing family. People felt a little confident
that there would be no more disappearances in Manipur.
The confidence would not last long in Manipur, as two
other cases of disappearance, of Mr Khundrakpam Yaima
and Mohammad Kayab Ali occurred in 1999.
Since 1974, after the gang rape of Miss Vally Rose by one
of the Majors of Indian armed forces, women in Manipur
have been subjected to sexual assault, which seems to be a
common occurrence in many military-oppressed societies.
A mother was raped in front of her disfigured son inside
their home, while her husband was gunned down by the
IAF as she was being raped. Many women were raped in
Manipur till 2004. In 2004, Miss Manorama was arrested
and tortured in front of her mother and her brother, late at
night on 10 July. In the Manorama case, IAF issued an
arrest memo before she was taken away by the armed
forces. Her family was told that she would be released on
the following day. In the arrest memo, nothing was
mentioned to have been recovered from Manorama's
possession by IAF. The next morning, she was found dead,
lying on the hillside. Her body was not properly clothed.
She had been shot with 7 bullets; one bullet had been fired
at her vagina , obviously to abolish the evidence of rape.
Mothers of Manipur in grief protested at Kangla,
30
completely naked with a banner saying 'Indian Army Rape
Us'. After the Manorama rape and murder, people realised
that there was no use to an arrest memo. This time people
did not ask for compensation, or a judicial inquiry, but
asked directly for the repeal of the AFSPA-1958. This time,
people start saying, “Go Back Indian Army”, “We Want
Freedom from AFSPA and Atrocities from the Armed
Forces.” But common people in Manipur are still not
saying “Quit Manipur” or for Azadi, as seen in Kashmir.
However, it will not be long before the common people
start saying “Quit Manipur” if this kind of oppression and
subjugation under the AFSPA goes on in Manipur.
In the last 50 years or so, we have seen in Manipur how the
common people's consciousness have gradually
developed against the AFSPA. After many demands for
judicial inquiries, compensation, arrest memos, the repeal
of the AFSPA and freedom from army rule, it still goes
unnoticed by the media and scholars across Indian
universities. This discourse of protest and the people's
consciousness in Manipur has been outside the academic
discourse and public discourse of this country. This is the
failure on the part of the researchers and the academic
community, and the political thinkers of this country. Now,
retired army and police officials who have worked in
'disturbed territories' are being relied on for information
and analysis by scholars. If scholars had used research
capacities and made intervention in the policy matters in
these 'disturbed areas', the situation would have been much
better. It was only after the 2004 Manorama protest that
someintellectuals and academics outside Manipur, in
various universities in India and abroad, noticed that there
was a political community that existed in the far corner of
Manipur. Why do people call for the repeal of this Act?
Some of the reasons are that Armed Forces (Manipur and
Assam) Special Powers Act, 1958 is one of the most
dangerous and draconian laws enacted by the post-
independent Indian Parliament to suppress, oppress and
repress nationalities which are racially different from
others in mainland India. This was later extended to the
Muslim majority state of Kashmir in India. It is a racist law.
With the implementation of the AFSPA, in the last 62 years
in many parts of the country, it can be seen that in India,
laws are being made on the basis of the region, race, and
religion. There is no one rule of law across the country. All
the fundamental rights in the disturbed area have been
totally suspended. People in the disturbed area live without
basic fundamental rights which are enjoyed by other
Indians who live in non-disturbed areas, which excludes a
large part of the tribal areas in north, south and central
December 2010 CRITIQUE
India, who are also have been exploited and oppressed by
Indian capitalist state with the support of the multinational
companies. The state order which is supposed to be an
instrument of protection and security of the common
people has become an instrument of death and humiliation
for the people who are living under the shadow of the
AFSPA- 1958. People in the 'disturbed area' are politically
excluded even though they are within the territory of India.
Just as Dalits are socially excluded from the Hindu social
order even though they have been living with Hindu
society from centuries.
There is no other country in the world which has as
draconian and fascist a law as AFSPA in India. It is the
shortest law of the world, and the most dangerous law of
the world. It is worse that any other anti-terror law which
was enacted around the world after the 9/11 such as the
Patriot Act or theUK Security Act . It rejects the very idea
of constitution of India . The very fundamental problem of
this Act is that in the areas under the AFSPA, all people are
treated as criminal/militant/terrorist or a threat to the
nation by birth. So, everybody then needs to prove that
they are not a threat to the nation or a militant. It contradicts
the basic right granted to non-AFSPA areas that everybody
should be treated innocent until and unless a person is
proved to be a criminal by the rule of law. That is why
Mohamad Kasav, a lone Pakistani terrorist, is still under
trial that seeks to prove that he is a terrorist. So, technically
speaking, a position of a terrorist from Pakistan or any
other country is better in Mumbai or any non-AFSPA states
than in Manipur of Kashmir or any other territory that is
characterised as a 'disturbed area'i. There is no possibility
CRITIQUE December 2010
of dignity and respect for the life of a human being under
the AFSPA. This is why Irom Sharmila challenges the
power of the state which destroys lives, being on an
indefinite fast for the last ten years. Irom Sharmila is still
in judicial custody in Imphal, since the Indian state force-
feeds her to assert its power. People are not allowed to visit
her freely. She has not met her mother in the last ten years.
In the neighboring country of our nation, Burma, the pro-
democracy leader Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was released
recently, from 7 years of continuous house arrest. She has
spent 15 years under house arrestduringthe Burmese
military regime. Interestingly, in the case of Burma, every
subject of the Burmese State is subject to the same rule of
law under the military regime. AFSPA is a classical
example of the suspension of the rule of law, on the basis of
religion and race and region.
To conclude, if the ruling clasess of India, who claim to
love the idea of the Indian nation, have no courage to say,
let people decide their own destiny to solve their problems,
and and come out in support for those fighting for their
right to self-determination, be it in Kashmir, Manipur, or
Nagaland , they should at least have the courage to say, let
us treat them equally under the rule of law , i.e., repeal the
Act and stop the neo-colonial of the state. The state of
exception cannot be the way of governance. Politics and
the principles of the state should be based on the principle
of securing the existence of people, and not crushing
people's aspiration, dignity and well-being. q
...........................................................................................
Seram Rojesh is researcher & political activist
31
 Dissents
Organising Revolutionary Dissent: Glimpses into the Praxis of
Korean Students' Movement under Military Dictatorship
I.
T oday Professor Kim is a well-respected
progressive academic in one of the numerous
Universities of Seoul, where I have also spent my
last three years – first as a student and then as a Research
Program Officer/Faculty. But I never had the opportunity
to chat with Professor Kim about politics. He spoke only
Korean and Russian; and I spoke only English and
'unintelligible' Korean.
But Professor Kim is well known among students as the
'nutty professor' who, as a graduate student, went to
Moscow to study in the early 1990s. As the rumour goes,
study was just an excuse for him- in reality he wanted to
(un)confirm his worst nightmare : whether the Soviet
Union has truly collapsed or was yet another western
capitalist propaganda.
To anyone today it would appear that he was 'crazy'. After
all, why do you need to go to Moscow to see for yourself
whether the Soviet Union has collapsed or not? The whole
world read about it in newspapers and saw images of it on
television. I would have also thought that this Prof. Kim
guy is crazy if I had not become a student of the
contemporary labour and student movements of Korea.
It was not just “young” Mr. Kim who was shocked at the
demise of the Soviet Union; there were thousands and
thousands of other Korean student activists who could not
believe it, and they felt as if the grounds beneath them had
slipped away.
Starting in the late 1970s, in the East, China traversed the
path toward market liberalism, followed by Uncle Ho's
revolutionary Vietnam; towards the West, the Berlin Wall
said “good bye to Lenin”, ushering in many a multi-
colored “revolutions” in various formerly communist
republics of Eastern Europe.
In 1989 the rock band The Scorpions sang the now famous
song “Winds of Change”, commemorating the fall of
Berlin Wall and perhaps the demise of the then existing
socialism.
And then, of course, the Soviet Union fell apart in 1992,
32
- Bonojit Hussain
adding to the trauma of young Mr. Kim and his comrades.
Why wouldn't they have felt so? After all, the 1980s were
the period when in South Korea the revolutionary fervor
was at its height, especially among students and young
industrial workers. Only few years ago, in June 1987,
armed with the revolutionary ideas of Marx, Lenin,
Trotsky and Gramsci, students and young workers
marched on to the streets in what is now known as the
“Great Labour Offensive”, bringing down a brutal
authoritarian 'fascist' military regime of three decades to its
knees.
II.
Way back in 1945, soon after Korea's liberation from
Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), Korea was divided
along the 38th parallel. It was not only a geographical
division between the capitalist-oriented 'right-wing'-
'south' and a socialist-oriented 'left-wing'-'North'; it also
led to extreme polarisation of social forces along the 'right -
wing' and 'left-wing' lines. The United States Military
Government (1945-48) in the South and subsequently Pro-
US Syngman Rhee-led Government (1948-60) had
systematically decimated the working class movement,
popular political dissidents and anybody who was
suspected of being sympathetic to left-wing ideas. The
Korean Civil War (1950-53) between the North and South
further facilitated the complete annihilation of even
moderate political dissent and left-wing ideas in the South.
Only pro-governmental right-wing organisations could
exist without the threat of death or imprisonment. The
tumultuous period from 1945 to 1960 had laid strong
foundations for “Anti-Communist Regimentation” of
South Korean society and an extremely repressive
authoritarian state.
In April of 1960, students, mostly in Seoul, rose up against
the oppressive and 'corrupt' Sygman Rhee Regime which
led to the installation of a short-lived democratic
government. However, in early 1961, General Park Chung
Hee led a coup and established a military regime which
was to stand out among all the dictatorships across the
December 2010 CRITIQUE
post-colonial world not only for its absolute control over
the populace but also for the rapid industrialisation it
achieved.
Under the military regime of General Park Chung Hee,
from 1961 onwards, the South Korean society and
economy had embarked upon a very compressed and state-
led top-down transformation. Since the early 1960s, the
South Korean economy and society under went a
transformation which is no less significant than the “great
transformation” that Karl Polanyi has described for
nineteenth-century Europe. Rapid industrialisation and
subsequent proletarianisation of a mammoth scale turned
millions of farmers and their sons and daughters into wage
workers in urban factories. The temporally compressed
nature of the transformation of a whole society within a
generation and the magnitude of the change produced by
this in South Korea is comparable to what took a whole
century in most European societies. Just to give you a
sense of the magnitude: 1 out of 10 South Koreans were
engaged in service sector or industries and the rest were
engaged in agriculture in 1959; by 1985, only 1 out of 10
persons was engaged in agriculture and the rest were
engaged in either the service sector or industry.
The war (1950-53) was not over, it ended in a truce. Under
the pretext of 'constant military threat' from North Korea,
the State was able to mobilise the entire populace and
restructure social relations. Every aspect of social and
economic life was disciplined along the militaristic lines.
Schools and universities were run like military garrisons;
military-like dresses, anti-raid drills, anti-communist song
sessions were made an every day part of school life,
starting from elementary level.
Factories were also structured along the lines of military
garrisons. Workers had to wear gray uniforms. Their hair
had to be cut short. Their ranks were revealed by the shape
of their name tags which were pinned on the left breast
pocket. They came to the factory before 8:00 A.M,
accompanied by marching music blaring from loud
speakers. The factory cafeteria which provided lunch was
divided into sections for different ranks of workers.
Sections of workers were referred to by numbers like 2nd
squad, 3rd platoon, 4th column and so on, instead of their
functions or production lines.
The pervasive influence of the military did not stop at the
level of outward forms but penetrated more deeply to
shape the dominant pattern of authority relations and
institutional culture. “Do as you are told to do with no
questions and no excuse allowed” became the dominant
institutional norm that pervaded industrial firms, schools
CRITIQUE December 2010
and universities.
The rapid industrialisation and the internationally
applauded economic growth rate (which came to be known
as the Miracle on River Han) relied heavily on the “Anti-
Communist Regimentation” of the society and the
possibility it opened up for mobilization of a docile and
disciplined labor force.
During this 'great transformation', young women and men
were becoming wage laborer and entering the factories
without any political and cultural resources of the pre-
existing working class movement or consciousness
(remember; the organised working class movement and
any political dissent was completely annihilated). Like in
all other sectors of the society, these young women and
men entered the factories as atomised workers. In a very
perverse way, it was like what Marx said in a different
context that, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Devoid of any political and cultural resources of
resistance, these young workers worked under terrible
conditions. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the wages of
South Korean workers were lower than in any other Asian
countries and South Korea had the longest working hours
(55 hours per week) and the highest industrial accident rate
in the world (these are of course official data).
Any industrial conflicts were identified as tantamount to
communist politics and no institutional channels were
allowed for resolving the grievances of the work force.
These were the labour laws backed by brute force like
lynching, executions, abductions, torture, intimidation,
and the rape of anyone who tried to organize workers. The
police, the army, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency
(KCIA), special units of police in civilian dress called the
'White Skeleton Brigade' (Baekgoldan), and special
company hired mercenaries called the “Save-the-
Company-Squads” (Gusadae) were used to monitor and
identify any “trouble maker”.
III.
On the afternoon of 13 November 1970, a dozen workers
in the sweatshop district of Pyunghwa Market in western
Seoul came together for a protest. The protest was
organized by a young 22 year old worker called Chun Tae
Il. Soon the police and market security came in to break up
the protest; while the protesters refused to budge, Chun Tae
Il disappeared for a few minutes. When he returned he was
holding in one hand a can of kerosene and in the other hand
a copy of the 'Labour Standards Law'. He set himself on
fire while shouting from within the flames that engulfed
33
him: “We are not machines!”, “Let us rest on Sunday!”, discipline. But the period did see some efforts of
“Don't exploit workers!”, “Abide by the Labor Standards unionising among the workers who were predominantly
Law”. young women.
Chun Tae Il had stumbled upon the booklet called “Labour Chun Tae Il's sacrifice did send ripples across different
Standards Law” a few years before this in a second-hand sections of the society and came as a brute reminder to the
book shop, much to his delight; to his surprise, he learnt rest of the society that the high rate of economic
from this booklet that workers are entitled to certain rights development came at a great price paid by the members of
like 'rest on Sunday'. He pinned great hope on the law and a nascent working class.
petitioned different
The first to plunge into
authorities, until he was fed up
organising workers were the
and thought it necessary to
church group. Two church
under take the extreme step of
organisations played the most
self-immolation. While he was
significant role in the efforts
being carried to the hospital, he
to organise democratic and
begged his fellow workers:
independent workers union:
“Please don't waste my life”.
the Catholic “Jeunesse
His dying words were
Ouvnere Chretienne” (JOC)
addressed to his mother-
and the Protestant “Urban
“Mom, please accomplish the
Industrial Mission” (UIM).
work which I haven't
JOC and UIM recruited a
succeeded in accomplishing”.
significant number of
This was the phase of export- Christian students and youths
oriented industrialisation in who would go to shanty towns
South Korea where a majority and working class
of the factory workers were neighbourhoods to run
young women. Even Chun Tae clandestine educational
Il embarked upon labour programs and night schools to
activism out of deep humanist educate the workers and
concern with the plight of all helped them in forming
the young female apprentices unions.
under him. Once he wrote to
his friend; “how can these Schools and university
young apprentice bear such campuses became fertile
long hours of work? ... At this grounds for anti-government
age of 14, they are only a c t i v i s m . To d o d g e
children, and then they often surveillance and anti-
get scolded by the tailor for not communist witch hunts, these
finishing their job on time, and during lunch time, they eat students operated through small reading groups on
from their tiny packed lunch box they brought from home, campuses and through campus educational programs
just like an elephant eating biscuits”. provided by religious organisations. Whenever vacation
and semester breaks allowed for it, students started going
After Chun Tae Il's self-immolation, several other workers
to shanty towns and working class ghettos to work amidst
attempted it and self-immolation became a recurring
workers to uplift them from their plight.
theme of the Korean working class struggle throughout
1970s. However, this great individual sacrifice only They were vilified as pro-communist and were often
generated short-lived public sympathy. It was still quite imprisoned along with workers. But they didn't necessarily
early for a development of a organized working class think of their activities as part of the labour movement, nor
movement. Most of the workers were predominantly did the issue of labour called for a fundamental re-thinking
neophyte industrial workers from the rural setting, busy of their lives and privilege- when the time arrived to return
adapting to their new environment and industrial to their schools and jobs, they went back without any

34 December 2010 CRITIQUE

hesitation, and so did the members of National Democratic
Federation of Youth, an organization accused of planning
to overthrow the South Korean Government in the mid
1970s.
There was ample discontent among the student community
when their hair, skirt length and what they read, wrote and
sang were the subject matter of state censorship. There was
a complete strangulation of popular and youth culture; in
1975 alone, 45 pop songs were banned for their supposedly
“negative influence on national security and citizen's
unity”.
However, it was not state censorship on youth culture that
was the driving force behind students plunging into
working class shanties to educate and help organize
workers. It was out of a deep sense of Christian
humanitarian concern and due to Confucian moral and
ethical discourse embedded in Korean society. Korean
Confucianism emphasizes that an educated elite should
provide leadership for society by setting a moral example
in wisdom and virtue. Traditionally Korean intellectuals
have regarded their role to be that of 'the conscience of
society' or as the 'watchman in the darkness'. This gets
beautifully reflected in the popular traditional phrase -
“conscience without action is useless'.
IV.
Entering the 1980s, the landscape of student movement
changed dramatically. Students no longer looked at
industrial labour as only the object of humanitarian
concerns. Involvement in labour ('Labour Praxis' or
nodong hyonjang) was privileged as the most important
form of praxis. Not only were the workers hailed as the true
revolutionary subject, but labour also acquired the aura of
the inevitability of a revolution.
This fundamental re-orientation came about because of the
Gwangju People's Uprising of 18 May 1980 and the
subsequent massacre by the Korean Army.
The Gwangju People's Uprising, initially an ordinary
students' protest organised by the Chonnam University
Students' Association demanding the lifting of martial law,
turned into a citywide rebellion. The citizens of Gwangju
city organised a city wide commune that lasted for 9 days
until the South Korean Army crushed the rebellion and
recaptured the city killing over 1000 people. With arms
looted from provincial police armoury, a People's Militia
(Mobile Strike Task Force) was organised to repeal and
resist the regular para-troopers of South Korean Army.
When the regular para-troopers made their final assault on
the night of 26 May, the last battle was fought by the
CRITIQUE December 2010
Mobile Strike Task Force till the wee hours of 27 May in
the Provincial building of Gwangju city.
During the Gwangju People's Uprising, 59.9 percent of the
injured, 59.2 percent of the dead, 58 percent of the arrested,
and 80 percent of the People's Militia were workers,
peasants and lumpen proletariat. The disproportionate
sacrifice made by the working class and lumpen proletariat
during an uprising started by students became a metaphor
for the intellectuals' “inherent weakness” and workers'
“inherent revolutionary qualities”. A metaphor that
immediately became the central theme of popular
literature as a popular short story after the uprising puts it:
“remember those who remained in the provincial building.
You have to remember who participated, who fought, and
who died … then you will know what kind of people make
history … that knowledge will become your strength”.
The shame of fleeing the provincial building drove the
former President of Chonnam University Students'
Association to his death after a prolonged hunger strike in
prison. The “truth” of the Gwangju Uprising turned out to
be immense source of guilt for the students and
intellectuals. Students started using self-deprecatory
words like “weakling intellectual” (hakppiri) and
“watered down ink” (mongmul) to refer to their “inherent
weakness”.
The post-Gwangju guilt and despair along with other
socio-political developments had irrevocably changed the
student movement – it had to be “REVOLUTIONARY”.
The irrevocable changes did not happen only at the level of
praxis. The intellectual atmosphere within the student
movement also underwent iconoclastic changes. The
atmosphere was perhaps very similar to the May 4th
Movement of 1919 in China. Students started smuggling in
Marxist, Anarcho-Marxist and North Korean Jucheist
literature from Japan; suddenly they were trying to grapple
with a century of development of Marxist philosophy in
couple of years and at times in couple of months.
Even within academia, owing to alleged American
involvement in the massacre of Gwangju Uprising,
intellectuals shunned Pro-US developmentalist,
neoclassical approaches in favour of various strands of
Marxism, resulting in a Marxist intellectual movement
which engulfed disciplines like economics, history,
sociology, journalism, geography etc. Various Marxist
research institutes like Women's Society for the Study of
Korean Society, Korean Association for the Study of
Industrial Society, Korean Institute on Farming and
Fishing Community, Social Philosophy Study Room,
35
Historical Research Institute and so on also sprung up.
Several critical journals also made appearances in the
intellectual horizon.
There was also a great hurry to publish contemporary
Marxist works. For example, Yi-Tae-bok, the leader of
National league of Democratic Workers (Jeonmin
Noryeon), ran Gwangmin Publishing House and published
the works of Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Hill and
Maurice Doob, for which he was charged with the
violation of the National Security Law for encouraging
“anti-state class struggle”.
Ideologically, the radical student movement consisted of
three distinct camps: NL (National Liberation) who
adhered to Kim Il Sung's Jucheism; NDR (National
Democratic Revolution) and PDR (People's Democratic
Revolution), both of which adhered to Marxism-Leninism.
At the level of praxis there were two distinct opposing
camps. The first was the “small-group movement” camp
which stressed the importance of fostering class
consciousness among rank and file workers and producing
a nucleus of worker-activists with advanced class
consciousness (sonjin nodongja) that would be capable of
leading the working class movement in the future. This
camp was of the opinion that any large scale political
mobilisation of workers at that period was impractical and
immature, considering the political circumstances under
which even legitimate unions could not operate.
The opposing camp was the “area-based labour
movement” who criticized the former camp for putting too
much emphasis on education and preparatory work while
neglecting the immediate importance of the “Revolution”.
This camp insisted that the task at hand was to mobilize the
“explosive energy of the masses of workers” at the level of
industrial area rather than individual factories, and develop
political organisation that would be capable of
coordinating revolutionary insurrection at the regional and
national level.
Student activists who adhered to the “small group
movement” entered factories as “hakchul nodongja” or
student-turned-workers (hakchul henceforth) and worked
diligently at the lowest level of Labour Praxis (nodong
hyonjang), raising consciousness among workers. On the
other hand, adherents of the “area-based movement”
engaged in political struggle to form regional labour
organisation in open defiance. However, the “area-based”
camp also considered it a prerequisite for student activists
to have experience of being a factory worker for their
regional political struggle. In hindsight, it's easy to
comprehend that the divergence between the two camps
36
were not as great as they believed it to be at the time. There
were conflicting aspirations: the neo-Gramscian aspiration
for an organic fusion with the workers versus the Leninist
one to lead them; while across camps most organizations
operated in clandestine fashion, some like the 'Sonoryon'
openly defined itself as a revolutionary organization – a
revolutionary act in itself in the sociopolitical context of
South Korea at that time.
Students becoming factory worker was the core emphasis
of Labour Praxis. Labour Praxis was not something that
was just restricted to the radical students' movement, but
was almost a prerequisite for even the members of
religion-inspired students' organization. In fact it was a
Christian students' organization – Korean Student
Christian Federation – who brought out the first extensive
manual for would-be-Hakchul entitled “Guideline for
Factory Activism”.
However, becoming a Hakchul was a great challenge for
the students at an individual level. They had to adjust to the
harsh life of a factory worker, which even in 1980s evoked
the Dickensian image of a “blighted patch of humanity”
and “murderous” low wages, harsh working conditions
and crammed 'chicken coop' housing. Students also had to
forge their identity papers to become workers, true
identities divulged meant languishing in prison or
“purification camps” run by the military owing to the
infamous “third party intervention” clause in the labour
laws of 1980. But the biggest challenge, as can be gathered
from accounts of former hakchul, was to confront their
parents. Many student activists underwent immense
trauma in being pulled between their parents' expectation
out of them and their own sense of obligation to bring
about revolutionary changes.
Despite these challenges thousands and thousands of
students did become hakchul. According to one estimate
there were around 3000 hakchul in early 1980s and 10,000
by late 1980s only in metropolitan Seoul. There were so
many in factory towns of metropolitan Seoul that they
would unknowingly bump into each other. In the mid
1980s, when Kim Seung-Kyung left her prestigious
university to become a hakchul, she recalls: “I went to at a
small electronic factory with 140 workers in Inchon. And
guess what? Of those 140 workers, there were about 10
disguised workers. Immediately, I could tell who were
activists (hwalddonga). That small factory was over-
flowing with 'hwalddonga”.
V.
The Daewoo group was the fourth largest South Korean
conglomerate in the mid 1980s. Daewoo witnessed two
December 2010 CRITIQUE
historic highly organised and aggressive strikes,
unprecedented in any Korean conglomerate. In August
1984 in a Daewoo Auto Plant twenty miles west of Seoul,
workers' brewing resentment burst out in spontaneous
protest over unfair bonuses and the failure of the pro-
management union to uphold the workers interest. Song
Kyung Pyung, a hakchul, took the leadership and skillfully
channeled workers resentment to the larger issues of
industrial relations and union representation. The
management learnt that Song was a hakchul and fired him.
Motivated by Song Kyung Pyung's dedication to the cause,
rank and file workers had formed a rebel union committee
and prepared for major confrontation with the
management.
Come April (the month of wage increase negotiations)
1985, the rebel union committee had asked for 18 percent
wage increase. And they demanded that a young worker
Hong Young-Pyo should lead the negotiation. Workers had
already been on strike for six days and the strike was
turning more aggressive and violent. Not seeing any easy
resolution, the management called for a negotiation with
the rebel representative. Two men were sitting across a
table in a meeting room in the plant. On one side of the
table was Kim Woo Jung, Chairperson of Daewoo Groups
and on the other side was a young man of 28 wearing a red
ribbon on his forehead, Hong Young-pyo, representative of
the striking workers. Negotiation between Chairman Kim
and Hong lasted through two nights and the workers won a
ten percent wage increase with other benefits. Hong was
neither a typical worker nor a union leader; he was an ex-
student who majored in Philosophy but left university to
become a hakchul in the early 1980s.
Soon enough the Daewoo strikes had spillover effects
across heavy and chemical industries. But then two months
later, an even more significant strike took place in Guro
Industrial Park in suburban Seoul. In June, Daewoo
Apparel, a medium size garment factory, fired two hakchul
– Lee Sun-Ju and Shim Sang-Jung - for being involved in
night school activities (yahak) leading to their arrest by
police. On June 24 workers across factories in the
industrial park went on a Solidarity Strike. Sadly, by June
29 the strike ended with massive police crackdown and
mass dismissal of workers. But the Guro Solidarity Strike
owing to its overtly political nature electrified the nascent
working class movement by bringing about tremendous
solidarity amongst workers across industries and factories;
it also had a huge impact on the Democratisation
Movement.
By mid 1980s the working class movement was taking
shape and class consciousness among workers was
CRITIQUE December 2010
reaching historical heights in the post-civil war era in
South Korea. There were, of course, socio-cultural and
political factors for this, as well as structural changes in the
Korean economy, such as a move towards heavy industries
from late 1970s onwards. But as the historic Daewoo
strikes and Guro solidarity strike demonstrated, hakchul
constituted a critical element in labour activism and within
the working class movement. The post-Gwangju student
movement did play a major role in radicalising and
organising workers and leading various strikes. And all of
it culminated into the “Great Labour Offensive” of 1987,
which along with the general civil and students' uprising
brought down the brutal “military-conglomerate”
dictatorship.
Here it is worth keeping in mind that when the student
movement in South Korea got radicalised with
revolutionary zeal and Marxist-Leninist ideas,
revolutionary politics was in a world historical retreat.
While post-war South Korean students had their first
encounter with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci, radical
students and intellectuals across the world were shunning
Marxism and moving towards Post-Marxism and
postmodernism.
The reality of fall of Berlin wall and the collapse of the
Soviet Union came as a brutal shock to students in South
Korea. It was in this contradictory context that the likes of
“Young” Mr. Kim had to find ways of going to Moscow to
see for themselves whether the “Socialist Paradise” had
collapsed or not.
Soon, ideological disillusionment prevailed. Some went
back to their pre-hakchul days and resumed their studies;
some jumped onto the bandwagon of “Post-Marxism and
Postmodernism” and gradually moved towards NGOs.
But some remained within the working class movement
which grew more and more militant and radical through
out the 1990s.
Today, in 2010, South Korean working class movement
like elsewhere is at a crossroad as a result of intense
offensive from the State and capital. But still it remains the
most organised, most militant and radical working class
movement across the post-colonial world. As for the
radical student movement today, only a marginal
Trotskyite student group exists. q
...........................................................................................
Bonojit Hussain is formerly a Research Professor at Sung
Kong Hoe University, Seoul, South Korea.
37
Surveillance
UID: Facility or Calamity?
I t is quite likely that someone will be knocking at your
door a few weeks from now and asking for your
fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a
national database, along with personal characteristics (age,
sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been
collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census
Household Listing” earlier this year.
The purpose of this exercise is to build the National
Population Register (NPR). In due course, your UID
(Unique Identity Number, or “Aadhaar”) will be added to
it. This will make it possible to link the NPR with other
Aadhaar-enabled databases, from tax returns to bank
records and SIM registers. This includes the Home
Ministry's NATGRID, smoothly linking 21 national
databases.
For intelligence agencies, this is a dream. Imagine,
everyone's fingerprints at the click of a mouse, that too
with demographic information and all the rest! Should any
suspicious person book a flight, or use a cyber café, or any
of the services that will soon require an Aadhaar number,
she will be on their radar. If, say, Arundhati Roy makes
another trip to Dantewada, she will be picked up on arrival
like a ripe plum. Fantastic!
So, when the Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI) tells us that the UID data (the “Central Identities
Data Repository”) will be safe and confidential, it is a half-
truth. The confidentiality of the Repository itself is not a
minor issue, considering that UIDAI can authorize “any
entity” to maintain it, and that it can be accessed not only
by intelligence agencies but also by any Ministry. But
more importantly, the UID will help to integrate vast
amounts of personal data, available to government
agencies with few restrictions.
Confidentiality is not the only half-truth propagated by
UIDAI. Another one is that Aadhaar is not compulsory – it
is just a voluntary “facility”. UIDAI's concept note stresses
that "enrolment will not be mandated". But there is a catch:
"...benefits and services that are linked to the UID will
ensure demand for the number". This is like selling bottled
water in a village after poisoning the well, and claiming
that people are buying water voluntarily. The next sentence
is also ominous: "This will not, however, preclude
governments or Registrars from mandating enrolment."
That UID is, in effect, going to be compulsory is clear from
38
-Jean Drèze
many other documents. For instance, the Planning
Commission proposal for the National Food Security Act
argues for “mandatory use of UID numbers which are
expected to become operational by the end of 2010" (don't
miss the optimistic time frame). No UID, no food!
Similarly, UIDAI's concept note on NREGA assumes that
“each citizen needs to provide his UID before claiming
employment”. Thus, Aadhaar will also be a condition for
the right to work - so much for its voluntary nature.
Now, if the UID is compulsory, then everyone should have
a right to free, convenient and reliable enrolment. The
enrolment process, however, is all set to be a hit-or-miss
affair, with no guarantee of timely and hassle-free
inclusion. UIDAI hopes to enrol about half of India's
population in the next four years – what about the other
half?
Nor is there any guarantee of reliability. Anyone familiar
with the way things work in rural India would expect the
UID database to be full of errors. There is a sobering lesson
here from the BPL Census. A recent World Bank study
found rampant anomalies in the BPL list: “A common
problem was erroneous information entered for household
members. In one district of Rajasthan, more than 50 per
cent of the household members were listed as sisters-in-
law”.
Will the UID database be more reliable? Don't bet on it.
And it is not clear how the errors will be corrected as they
emerge. Under the proposed National Identification
Authority of India Bill (“NIDAI Bill”), if someone finds
that her “identity information” is wrong, she is supposed to
“request the Authority” to correct it, upon which the
Authority “may, if it is satisfied, make such alteration as
may be required”. There is a legal obligation to alert the
Authority, but no right to correction!
The Aadhaar juggernaut is rolling on regardless (without
any legal safeguards in place), fuelled by mesmerizing
claims about the social applications of UID. A prime
example is UID's invasion of the National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act. NREGA workers are barely
recovering from the chaotic rush to bank payments of
wages. Aadhaar is likely to be the next ordeal. The local
administration is going to be hijacked by enrolment drives.
NREGA works or payments will come to a standstill where
workers are waiting for their Aadhaar number. Others will
December 2010 CRITIQUE
be the victim of unreliable technology, inadequate IT Bill”, starting with why it was drafted by UIDAI itself. Not
facilities, or data errors. And for what? Gradual, people- surprisingly, the draft Bill gives enormous powers to
friendly introduction of innovative technologies would UIDAI's successor, the NIDAI, with minimal safeguards.
serve NREGA better than the UID tamasha. To illustrate, the Bill empowers NIDAI to decide the
The real game plan, for social policy, seems to be a massive biometric and demographic information required for an
transition to “conditional cash transfers” (CCTs). There is Aadhaar number (Section 23); “specify the usage and
more than a hint of this “revolutionary” (sic) plan in applicability of the Aadhaar number for delivery of various
Nandan Nilekani's book Imagining India. Since then, benefits and services” (Section 23); authorize whoever it
CCTs have become the rage in policy circles. A recent wishes to “maintain the Central Identities Data
Planning Commission document argues that successful Repository” (Section 7) or even exercise any of its own
CCTs require “a biometric identification system”, made “powers and functions” (Section 51); and dictate all the
possible by “the initiation of a Unique Identification relevant “regulations” (Section 54). Ordinary citizens, for
System (UID) for the entire population…”. The same their part, are powerless: they have no right to a UID
document recommends a string of mega-CCTs, including number except on the NIDAI's terms, no right to correction
cash transfers to replace the Public Distribution System. of inaccurate data, and – last but not least - no specific
means of grievance redressal. In fact, believe it or not, the
If the backroom boys have their way, India's public Bill states (Section 46) that “no court shall take cognizance
services as we know them will soon be history, and every of any offence punishable under this Act” except based on
citizen will just have a Smart Card - food stamps, health a complaint authorised by NIDAI!
insurance, school vouchers, conditional maternity
entitlements and all that rolled into one. This approach may So, is UID a facility or a calamity? The question is, for
or may not work (that's incidental), but business at least whom is it one or the other. For intelligence agencies, the
will prosper. As Wall Street Journal says about Rashtriya corporate sector, and NIDAI, it will be a facility and a
Swasthya Bhima Yojana (a pioneer CCT project, for health blessing. For ordinary citizens, especially the poor and
insurance), “the plan presents a way for insurance marginalised, it could well be a calamity. q
companies to market themselves and develop brand ...........................................................................................
awareness”. Jean Drèze is a renowned Economist & also member of
The biggest danger of UID, however, lies in a restriction of National Advisory Committee
civil liberties. As one observer aptly put it, Aadhaar is
creating “the infrastructure of authoritarianism” – an
unprecedented degree of state surveillance (and potential
control) of the citizens. This infrastructure may or may not
be used for sinister designs. But can we take a chance, in a
country where state agencies have such an awful record of
arbitrariness, brutality and impunity?
Mr. Nilekani is no Big Brother, but the real toughies are not
far behind – like Captain Raghu Raman (of Mahindra
Special Services Group), who is quietly building
NATGRID for the Home Ministry. Raman believes that
growing inequality is a “powder keg waiting for a spark”,
and advocates corporate takeover of internal security
(including a “private territorial army”), to enable the
“commercial czars” to “protect their empires”. Even Mr.
Nilekani is not beyond a little compromise with thought
control. His propaganda blitz, orchestrated by PR firms,
would be the envy of Baba Ramdev. And criticisms are not
taken kindly. Within hours of an enlightening critique of
UID (written by Dr. Reetika Khera) appearing in a leading
national daily, on 30 August 2010, Nilekani called the
editors. Is it an accident that two editorials supportive of
UID appeared in the same newspaper within two days?
There are equally troubling questions about the “NIDAI

CRITIQUE December 2010 39

 Value and its Other in Electronic Culture:
Slave Ships and Private Galleons
T he slave ships have come ashore,and are
offloading their precious cargo on the docks,and
are waiting to take other goods in exchange.Out
in the high seas the pirates are waiting in agile vessels
anchored in the bays of islands not visible on the map.
They wait for the tall ships to cross the channel on their
return journeys and then strike under cover of darkness,
recovering abundance from scarcity, restoring the nothing
that is mined for gold,into the void depths of the sea.
“The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which
it creates out of nothing….”
William Paterson,founder of the Bank of England,in a
prospectus written to the Bank' s potential investors,
1694
For capitalism to be what it is,large amounts of wealth
need to be generated out of nothing.
This is as true today as it was in 1694. If then,the '
nothing'
essentially consisted of ' new worlds', 'new lands'and
'other people' that capital could mould in its own image,
then today the void is the relatively uncharted terrain of
information,the high seas of data and culture,which
precisely because for millennia they have grown through a
process of the exchange of ideas and expressions
undertaken essentially in the spirit of gift giving,are now
up for grabs for a new rule of the commodity. They are like cotton of our times.They are the primary commodities
the rain forests of ideas ? containing many centuries of a
biological diversity of cross fertilised cultures and
information systems,making them prime targets for the
pharmaceutical corporations of knowledge.
The spirit of the age demands the making of scarce goods
out of things,such as stories,ideas,images,music and
numerical expressions which were until recently
considered inexhaustible, even when shared, and
abundantly so,by all humanity.The zero,after all did not
cease to be an expression with some use in the context in
which it emerged when it passed from one culture of
mathematics to another.Were the zero to be discovered
today,it would promptly beg the question as to whose
property it could become.There is money to be made out
of nothing.
40
-Raqs Media Collective
And so, even if stockpiled inventories far outnumber sales,
even if theatres run empty,electronic warehouses choke
with unsold products, and media channels pile losses upon
losses,the promotion of the latest desirable cultural good
premises itself on the fact that if you don't buy it,
you won'
t
have something that everyone else ( or at lease anyone
worth considering)has,and if you don' t buy it '
now'
('
while stocks last'), everyone else will buy it before you,
and then you it won' t be yours to buy any longer.Hence,
buy it,even if it costs you a fortune.
If you 'accessed' the worth of that good by other means ( as
you would have traditionally,given that it is a cultural or
intellectual good), or by payment of a lesser sum of money
in exchange for a replica which gave you the same results
and '
gave access to the same worth', you would be doing
something wrong.Typically,you would either have
worked out how to crack the code that imprisons the value
of the good,and made its equivalent for yourself,or you
would have paid someone a far lesser sum of money for a
good enough copy.It could be a CD,a DVD,a text,a
game, perhaps a string of code.
After all, information - and all things that carry
information inscribed into them,like all cultural and
informational goods -is the gold,silver,tin,rubber,and
which add ' value' to the world of material goods. They are
the signs that rule over all things,they are the engines of
desire; they apportion the values that accrue to goods from
their real or notional scarcity.
In sharp contrast,the counterfeit item,the pirated good,
the unauthorised copy that stalks each manufactured sign
and cultural good openly,in the back streets and grey
markets of every global city or small town, defies the laws
that govern the making of money out of nothing today.It
does so by challenging the real or presumed scarcity of any
good with its ubiquity -the lush,fecund abundance of the
copy. Which can pass from hand to hand, from user to user
to user in such a way as to reveal the spectre of ' high
values' to be the nothing other than the processed illusion
that it is.
December 2010 CRITIQUE
The idea that a cultural good can be marked as an ' original', haemorrhaged. However, the contemporary digital
that it is therefore of higher value,is in turn premised on environment does tend to give to this process an
the idea that goods once sold ( or purchased, or in any other unprecedented velocity.Unlike commodities,gifts can
way transacted) perish,at least in an economic sense. Here, accrue value to themselves as they pass from one person to
it is held that the transaction,and the transference of another in a network of gift exchange. The ethnography of
ownership onto the person of the consumer that it entails, the gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands,famously
'consumes'the value of the good.It is as if the life of a known as the Kula Ring, is an instance of this
thing is short- circuited when it is sold.It can no longer phenomenon; as is,
in a less exotic sense the ways in which
enter the chain of circulation ( except at a diminished heirlooms add value to themselves as they pass down
value)as a thing that could be used for different purposes generations.In a digital environment it is not necessarily
by different people.Hence,once bought,an object the patina of age or prestige that will lend value to a digital
becomes,' second- hand', 'used', '
depreciated'or in some object as it passes between persons,rather,it is the
general sense, '
degraded'. possibility that it will be improved,refined,and have
While this may be true of some material goods,( and is things added to it through usage ( without doing any
strictly true only for rapidly perishable goods)it is difficult damage to an always available earlier iteration of the
to imagine how it can be true for non material goods today object itself,which can be recovered through the layers
?a recording of sounds or images,an arrangement of text that gather to a work in a palimpsest).
or numbers, or a piece of software,loses nothing when it is It is this fact that gives to electronic piracy,and to any act
reproduced,or is passed on from one user to another in a that frees information from the prison of artificial or
digital environment.We are well aware of the fact that illusory ' originality', its true cutting edge. It does so not out
with the arrival of digital encoding of information,it no of any radical intent to subvert the laws of property and the
longer makes sense to distinguish between an original commodity,but because it makes eminent common sense
(which attains only the status of an event, or an instance of for people to share information in any community through
its first emergence)and a copy, because the act of making networks of informal sociality,especially if the act of
of copies in and of itself need not involve any perceivable sharing brings with it no depreciation in the value of that
loss of information. which is shared.Rather,the person who shares more
In fact,with each instance of a data object moving from gathers prestige to herself,and by now we are all
person to person, the information content contained within accustomed to extraordinary feats of electronic generosity
it may actually increase. It does not make sense to speak of (which sometimes carry with them an aura of ' bravado') as
'end users' of digital information;rather it would be more means of earning reputations within tightly knit online
accurate to speak of custodians who nurture pieces of communities.The new pirates are just as desirous of
information when they receive them,as part of a chronicles of their adventurous heroism as their
networked community of receivers who are also always ancestors! The shadow of the pirate galleon sneaks in on
givers ?of users,who are also potentially,if not actually, the slave ship,and the slaves stir restless in the hold.
producers. Thus, each person who becomes a custodian of In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,when
the 'material' has the possibility of adding to it something Capitalism was but a rash young beast,still taking
that was not present before, before passing on a copy. It is catastrophic baby beast steps out into the world,there
in this way for instance, that ever-lengthening play lists of were two prime engines that propelled its progress.The
music make their way from hand to hand,or rather first amongst these were the institutions of slavery,( its
between disc to disc in a community of aficionados. still- born precursor, off which it still nourished)and later,
There is nothing new in this process.The epics,stories, indentured labour, both of which could produce high
songs and sagas that represent in some ways the collective volumes of primary commodities like cotton,tobacco,
heritage of humanity have survived only because their sugar,rubber and minerals in ' new worlds'( which were
custodians took care not to lock them into a system of ' end then processed to produce other goods)at low costs. There
usage', and embellished them,adding to their health and was of course also outright the allied institution of plunder
vitality,before passing them on to others.When codes or which worked just as well,and was often engineered
languages closed in on themselves, allowing no through the mechanisms of war and conquest,( early
'interpolations'or trespasses after a point,they rapidly slaves were essentially prisoners of undeclared wars)so as

CRITIQUE December 2010 41

to later found plantations,mines,banks and of course,a
few parliaments.
The second was the expropriation of the commons, which
'freed'large territories for capitalist agriculture,logging,
mining,and speculation in land,and created at the same
time a vast army of the dispossessed who were then ' freed'
to become wage earners in new industrializing areas at
home or abroad,or criminalized through harsh laws that
imposed penal servitude in the ' colonies'. Tall ships
carrying slaves, indentured labourers, or the new '
workers'
(freemen or convicts), and large holds of primary
commodities,gold,silver,cotton,sugar,opium crossed
the seas,and sometimes fell prey to pirate ships.The
crews of these ships often consisted of runaway slaves,
mutinous convicts, and the otherwise adventurous
dispossessed of the then known world.They would
ransack the tall ships,and set their commodities into other
conduits of usage and exchange,setting off eddies and
convulsions in the then global economic system.
Piracy was troublesome in the way it led to sudden re-
distributions of wealth,which even if they were minor,
were considered enough of a menace to make the mastery
of the high seas a top military and political priority in the
external policies of the leading mercantile powers.In a
way,piracy was as troublesome then,as what is
considered to be “piracy”today.It not only plundered
plunder,it also advocated a ' pirate ethic'of the high seas,
where the laws of emerging nation states were held in
abeyance,where slaves became captains,and mutineers
founded precarious and momentary island pseudo-
republics that abolished private property and the formal
institutions of the state; not because they were
ideologically committed to an anarchist programme,but
because it was convenient and expeditious to dispense
with laws and the other paraphernalia of the state in the
wilderness of the high seas,so as to better undertake the
serious 'business'of redistributing the wealth of the world.
Today,intellectual property,the new cluster of primary
commodities made up of culture and information,is also
brought into the world through trans- continental networks
of new ' indentured'labour,made in virtual vessels that
pass each other in the global working night,on the high
seas of data.These tall ships of our times that fly many
flags of convenience are the software sweatshops,the
media networks, the vast armadas of the culture industries
and the lifestyle factories.They produce high value
primary commodities, stars, stories,
sagas, software, idols,
lifestyles,and other ways of ordering meaning in an
42
increasingly chaotic world.Typically,even though they
sell the fantasies of place and identity in an increasingly
enmeshed world, they are produced in a global
everywhere,and delivered through electronic pipelines
everywhere, and when necessary more or less
instantaneously,through telecommunication networks.
Their ubiquity,and their global reach is also the hallmark
of their greatest vulnerability;for like their precursors,
the
cargo of the tall ships of the new economy is just as
vulnerable to attacks of piracy. The new electronic pirates
are located in the precise interstices of the global culture
economy,which are the nodes that make the network
viable in the first place.If we cannot imagine a global
media industry without the technology that made possible
the phenomenon known as ' peer- to-peer networking'on
intranets,then it is precisely the same technology on the
Internet that renders any attempt to police the distribution
channels of media content in the interests of proprietary
agencies almost impossible.
Just as the piracy of the past disturbed the equilibrium
composed of slavery, indentured labour, the expropriation
of the commons,the factory system and penal servitude,
the electronic piracy of the present is destined to wreck the
culture industry either by making the economic and social
costs of policing content prohibitive,or by ushering in a
diversity of new protocols of usage,distribution and re-
production of cultural and intellectual content that will
make the whole enterprise of making vast sums of money
out of the '
nothing' of data and culture a difficult business.
The culture industry,by insisting on stricter anti- piracy
laws and instituting harsher protocols of encryption,is at
best buying itself some time. Their ships have been struck,
and are sinking. For the foreseeable future, the pirates will
be hoisting their standards, stowing away the ' nothings' of
culture to their grey market archipelagos of the global
information commons that mark the map of the high seas
of data with their volcanic peaks of electronic
abundance. q
...........................................................................................
Raqs Media Collective is collective of artists, media
practitioners, curators, researchers, editors, and catalysts
of cultural processes. They are based in SARAI, Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The article
was published in the Raqs Media website in 2003.
December 2010 CRITIQUE
Reflections
Eye On Queering Studies
F ew people appreciate having groups of people in
crowds surprised by their presence: pointing at
them, staring at them, talking about them, gaping at
them as they pass on their way, hearing loud comments
made about them to others in the gawking groups. This
crude description approximates a knee-jerk response to
difference. On the female body, for example, this is
described as eve-teasing, and denounced as a disgusting
manifestation of sexism. Yet, fascination about the
feminine body is reflected in a variety of aspects of our
lives, especially the fantasies we project onto big and small
screens. Heteropatriarchal men and women repeatedly
humiliate and punish the feminine body on these screens:
fantasies of sexual coercion slip into an elixir of romantic
submission and is celebrated as marital bliss. His
masculinity conquered her femininity. Is there any wonder
that the sexism regularly projected in films reverberates in
virtually every other area of life?
Unlike race, caste and class, gender is more rigorously
performed, where infants the world over are commonly
donned in colors and designs deemed appropriate to their
heteropatriarchal gender role. For example, dawning an
infant in pink and pastels identifies the baby as a future
wife, and adults respond to her accordingly throughout her
adolescence, particularly at the onset of puberty. Though
we normatively socialize girls and boys differently,
difficulties in adult cross-gender communication forms an
entire self-help section of popular literature; legislation
and law enforcement dedicate specific resources to deal
with husbands who physically, emotionally and sexually
abuse their wives. Perhaps not so ironically, ethnographies
of those who themselves cross normative gender roles
could serve as a dense pool of research to unpack
heteronormative roles, yet same-gender identity has been
heretofore dominated by HIV/AIDS discourse or else
deemed pathological. In contrast, queerness potentially
unhinges sex from normative gender roles, and this
precisely disrupts the patriarchal order by implying that
men can be sexually objectified.
Until July 2009, criminal law in India was used by the
state to deny the very plausibility of adult consensual
CRITIQUE December 2010
-Diepiriyie Sungumote kuku-Siemons
homosexual intercourse. Socially, effeminate men are
stigmatized, and even traditional queer identities are
marginalized. Until a relatively recent surge of activism to
fight IPC section 377, queer women in India were largely
invisible even in anti-queer rhetoric. Ruth Vanita has
written an informative treatise about lesbian couples
committing suicide together, seeking togetherness in the
afterlife since their families in collusion with agents of the
state vehemently denied them this freedom on earth. In
practice, IPC Section 377 reduced queerness to the moral
judgment of bestiality or paedophilia. The targeting of the
male penetrative sex acts is reminiscent of the way in
which the state inherently subordinates female sexuality-
the queer woman is absolutely invisible before the law.
Only recently has queerness earned pop-cultural currency,
yet the exchange of fame and stardom ebbs and flows more
than empires and modern economics. By fixing our gaze
on how gender, race/caste and class collide- and not just
transgress- we are better able to note the contours of
patriarchal hegemony.
Somewhat comparatively, in the way in which
Political Correctness conceals white-skin privilege,
aspects of one's religious or caste in India are quietly
signified in various ways (for e.g., in surnames), or in so-
called civil conversation (for e.g., on more than one
occasion I have been assaulted with: “I'm Brahmin but I
don't believe in caste”. I have yet to hear: “I'm Dalit and
caste doesn't matter”). What's more, the myth of
meritocracy sells itself to many on the belief that just
anyone can achieve anything, if they try. That belief
effectively conceals nepotism and the nexus of gender,
class and caste. Similarly, patriarchal socialization denies
boys many opportunities to learn and practice nurturing
and empathy in a non-competitive environment. Far too
often, boys are denied basic care-taking and domestic
skills, justifying a specific sort of inter-dependence in
marriage, parenting, and the reproduction of inequality.
Even for men for whom those lessons may have been
important, the very persistence of sexism would imply a
sheer lack of valourization and internalization of
feminism. Lest the tone of modern consumerism intoxicate
43
our senses, we should be clear that just as sure as
individuals do not move about the physical world in
fragmented pieces, and many spend portions of their adult
emotional lives piecing together those parts irrationally
ripped apart, so too should social theory engage social
difference in its totality. In practice, this means more
interdisciplinary studies, research and collaboration.
For example, in mapping safe spaces for queer people
in Delhi, cultural geography not only encouraged my use
of Internet cartographic tools, but also, crucially, provided
me a language with which to and curate my menagerie of
spaces. Then, in looking at urbanity and gender, marketing
and other economic data pointed me in the direction of
emerging trends. The Internet is emerging as a prime
academic meeting space, given its sociability, ports of
exchange, and currency as its own terrain. The Internet is
its own galaxy; its greater integration into human society
will certainly pose new and exciting queries for all our
disciplines.
Diss orientation: Firangi at DU
Arriving at D.U. a few short years ago from abroad,
there was no orientation session, nor any printed or
Internet material that explained the full registration and
visa application process which involved several bureaus
spread across the campus and city. Hence, no single
individual could have possibly possessed enough
information to offer an overall picture of the bureaucratic
necessities involved in pursuing a research degree at Delhi
University. Moreover, the Foreign Students' Office- which
has dramatically improved- had no permanent staff and no
individual who could directly liaise with the Foreign
Registration Office or Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
This proved prohibitive and humiliating when I first went
to the MHA to deal with my visa. Upon pressing for
information regarding the visa application process from
the only available attendant, I was abruptly rejected. The
attendant barged into the waiting room held my application
high in the air and yelled that my case had been denied.
This demonstration swiftly put everyone in their place, and
a silent hum quickly cast over the unventilated crowded
area. My husband followed the attendant back to his office
where the man persisted: “It's their race,” he said. The
attendant's unambiguousness was strangely satisfying
when compared to the widely ambivalent situations I had
faced when denied a rental property by a landlord who
actually smiled in my face just after telling the
accompanying property dealer that he did not want to rent
to Blacks.
Doors have literally been slammed in my face, library
44
access has been stubbed, pedestrians have jumped from the
pavement, gangs of boys have teased and taunted, groups
of schoolgirls have picked and prodded, whole crowds
have stopped and stared. People are often surprised that I
(dare) look back, that I take as much curiosity in them as
they demonstrate in me. Unless I offer a disarming grin,
when I look back at people in public places, they seem
shocked or even threatened and move away quickly,
gathering their kids and hurriedly moving along.
Recognizing the curiosity of host country nationals has yet
to satiate my own fascination and intellectual interest in
this intense gaze. Certainly, regional/cultural variability
and degrees of urbanity influence the social distancing of
this interrogative gaze. It has roughly been my experience,
for example, that smiles are offered in Kerala whereas they
are extracted from the public in Delhi. This may be implicit
knowledge for someone socialized in the region. The
nature of the public gaze in Delhi presents itself as hostile;
stone faces concealing any intentions, or perhaps afraid to
'chance' a liminal, ephemeral space between two strangers
that is immediately broken down in other parts of the
country.
At one point, I used a camera to investigate the nature
of this gaze, placing the lens as the spectator watching the
watcher. Ultimately the videos culminated in a video series
on YouTube. Admittedly, the videos reflect a very nascent
stage in my life as an expatriate in India. The videos are not
benevolent and reflect a frustration with being 'marked' in
public, and an intense need to frame this marking in
another context. The videos have provoked many sharp
reactions from users, many of whom defend the gawking
as sheer curiosity. In most of the videos, 'race' is only
mentioned in the title: “Look, a Negro.” Yet, several users
have specifically charged that the gawking is sheer
curiosity, while few immediately identify internalized
oppression (and therefore hatred/fear of the dark 'other').
What is curious is that all these responses were provoked
by videos that literally show pedestrians in Delhi simply
watching. The videos feel tense in their intense, fixed gaze,
yet eerily calm amidst the noisy sounds of the city. On the
video, Let's stop-n-gawk LIVE ON the DELHI Metro, one
user commented:
you've got some balls posting all these cheapshit
videos on youtube and disrespecting my
countrymen on why they dont treat you with
respect.I can answer that for you im pretty sure 1.
youre a dirty NIGGER and we refer to you all as
HABSHI in our country that means dark unclean
barbarians. 2. INDIA is ARYAN and worships
December 2010 CRITIQUE
 ANCIENT ARYAN GODS. Yes white skin is
important to us and we look down upon NIGGERS
as not worth mixing with. 3. On top of that you're
GAY. Haha isnt that the icing on your cake.
It is impolite. Certainly, for me, it is more than
unfriendly to have such epithets directed at me, and worse
as an adult. Yet the comments do not persecute me, per se,
but an imago- those things that naturally threaten the user's
idealised Indian social order: the dark and queer 'other'.
Beastly! In addition, this is mentioned in all caps to drill the
severity of not only difference, but also a supremacy that is
not to be altered- in spite of modernity. With India's growth
rate, municipal infrastructure projects mean that the
ground literally shakes beneath an urban dweller's feet.
Economic aftershocks cause daily waves in our urban
existence. Commutes accelerate, then shuffle. Jobs and
rents soar, then food prices surpass even their rise. The
higher and faster the rise, the more clear and prescient need
to define a “we,” particularly when confronted with
difference. The narrow and narrower “we” is distilled and
reproduced.
When I see myself reflected in India's popular culture-
fantasies as virile Black sportsmen or exotic dark muses, I
am also interested in the “we” on the other side of the
fence: the spectator. This is not to lament the martyrdom of
the dark queer 'other', but to acknowledge that the process
of determining who gets to be inside the circle of “we”
becomes increasingly unfair. Or, rather, the modern “we”
becomes increasingly fair. For example, Sunday
Matrimonials in English dailies are covered with young
men and women measured by skin tone- and miraculously
not one chocolate or mahogany colored single surfs for a
mate. Internet sites like Shaadi.com reproduce 'caste' right
on their homepages, though the site's PR reclaims fewer
and fewer users choose mates based on that caste as
criteria. I am more interested in the “we” turning in on
itself, taking a closer look, and opening itself to
renegotiating the terms of the fence.
Choosing to deal with such daily battles more wisely.
than with silence, I joined activist groups that dealt with
cross-platform oppression. I was intent upon exploring not
only the source of fascination with the dark queer other, but
also the sheer manner in which any society confronts
alterity. To sustain myself financially, I worked as a
consultant with various international health intervention
and development NGOs. This work afforded me the
opportunity to conduct field research throughout southern
India, and even facilitated my fieldwork in the Tamilian
transgender festival Koovagam. This experience elicited a
CRITIQUE December 2010
rich chapter on communal power, pleasure and inversion in
my own research.
For one year, I wrote India's first and only regularly
featured Gay and Lesbian column in a mainstream
magasine. This increased my public profile as a human
rights' activist, which was then amplified through a series
of appearances on national news television shows where I
was invited to speak exclusively on racism or homophobia
in India. Following the racialised violence against Indians
in Australia, a national weekly news magazine invited me
for an interview, photo session, and the opportunity to
publish an article on racism in India. As the initial
television appearances and even this magazine project
were presented to me, it felt as though I was expected to
trash locals on a lack of respect for Africans.
Rather than calling out 'hypocrisy', I suggested that
moral leadership would be a more effective and
sustainable means of responding to domestic and foreign
racism since it requires change at home. Instead of blame,
we might ask ourselves to account for our own tolerance.
In place of marking difference, we might seek common
ground. Hence, this is a disposition towards dealing with
difference rooted in a principle best articulated by
Buddhism in relieving human suffering. The corporeality
of difference may provoke uncertainty in many alongside
their fascination and curiosity. Without faith, uncertainty
breeds fear. Yet, if we take as much interest and fascination
in our own flesh and our own corporeality, we might see
that fear is something we all share, and hence we should
demonstrate this understanding through compassion.
Tolerance is taught and requires constant cultivation.
For this cultivation, we are all individually and collectively
accountable. We are accountable to maintain a youthful
spirit, and an open mind. We must give our youth the tools
to engage with others, so that they do not just stop and stare
and are not halted by their own fear or apprehension.
Effective communication across differences is always
dynamic and dialectic. In research, this translates into
physically moving our own bodies into places and spaces
that may discomfort us. Just as a spelunker surveying a
cavern may have to crawl, climb and squeeze, it is
important that we as ethnographers map out those tight
spots in order that spectators may more fully appreciate the
Mammoth Caves. q
...........................................................................................
Diepiriyie Sungumote kuku-Siemons is an African
American Doctoral scholar in the Department of
Sociology, University of Delhi
45
Preface
Draft Manifesto of
New Socialist Initiative/Inqilabi Socialist Front
Y ou are invited to read, evaluate and comment on
the Draft Manifesto of the New Socialist
Initiative – an ideological-political platform in
the making. Another proposed name for this upcoming
platform is Inqilabi Socialist Front.
The Draft Manifesto is an outcome of the intense process
that has been underway for the last several years among a
group of Marxist activists and intellectuals active in and
engaged with the revolutionary left movement in India. It
has been prepared as a first step towards the launching of a
platform that will articulate, confront and address the
enormous challenges presented by the rapidly changing
times. The politics of opposing capitalism have to be
reworked and strategies for replacing it with socialism are
to be redesigned. Socialism, furthermore, is to be freshly
envisioned with the aim of taking the society and the
humanity to higher levels of creativity, productivity,
equality, democracy, prosperity, sustainability and
freedom.
The world is a very different place than it was a century ago
or even half a century ago. Revolutionary left became a
global force in the last century under the conditions of
imperialist colonialism and indigenous feudalisms. But
these are no longer the mainstream conditions of the world
today. Colonialism has been forced out of the stage of
history and feudalisms, wherever they exist, have been
relegated to the margins of the political and economic
systems. Imperialism has fashioned a new modus operandi
that better serves its interests in the postcolonial
conditions. Capitalism reigns supreme and has, for the first
time, succeeded in penetrating and taking under its fold
every country and every society on the planet. For the first
time in history revolutions directly confronting capitalist
systems and bourgeois democracies are on the agenda.
Revolutionary left has to prepare for this altogether new
condition and forge a suitable strategy and a new language.
Lessons and the strategies of the previous century,
important as they are, will no longer suffice.
Dogma invariably feeds on populism. Both sidestep the
truth and both work against the real interests of the
working people. Together they conspire to prevent large
48
parts of the left movement from coming to grips with the
changing times. A revolutionary movement must proceed
from the actually existing conditions of the present and it
must proceed towards building a future that resonates with
the claims and the desires of the working people. Such a
future can only be a freshly envisioned socialist future.
The Draft Manifesto is an attempt to address this issue and
confront this challenge. We appeal to you to consider it,
criticize it, and improve it. We appeal to you to become a
part of the process that has shaped this manifesto and that
aims to create this new platform - one that will speak on
behalf of the revolutionary left in a new voice and with a
fresh promise.
National Convening Committee
New Socialist Initiative/Inqilabi Socialist Front
This is the Preface to the Draft Manifesto which has
been recently published by the New Socialist
Initiative. Copies are available both in Hindi and in
English. Translations to various other Indian
languages are in the process. The Manifesto lays
out our basic approach and broad understandings.
the Manifesto has evolved over a period of 3-4
years and has been mush discussed and debated
over in many meetings, both organisationally and
otherwise.
The New Socialist Initiative holds regular bi-
annual residential meetings in the months of June-
July and December-January in different parts of the
country. The meeting is a 3 to 5 days process
wherein intensive and detailed discussions and
presentations on various issues are deliberated
upon, with a conscious effort to understand these
processes with a view to bring in progressive
changes, both in theory and in practice. Friends and
comrades from all parts of the country come
together in these meetings.
December 2010 CRITIQUE