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By Frederick Noronha
Struggle India Reader questions the goal of ‘development’ in India, since liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation were ‘unleashed’ upon the country in the mid-’80s
Struggle India Reader offers a range of stories from the ‘other’ India that are waiting to be read. Two clear messages emerge from this 185-page book: first, that there’s a lot happening in today’s India that’s simply invisible to most; and, second, that alternative publishing is quickly finding its feet.
Slickly yet inexpensively produced, the book is published by the New Delhi-based PEACE (Popular Education and Action Centre) group. As is made clear in the preface, the book’s goal is to question the impact of the ‘development’ that’s been taking place right across India since liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation were ‘unleashed’ in the mid-’80s.
The book focuses on people fighting for their resources, a fair deal and the right to a decent life. It’s divided into five sections, showing how simple (and often poor) Indian citizens have fought back on various issues.
Sub-sections in the book deal with struggles for land rights, workers’ struggles, forest rights struggles, struggles for water and struggles against displacement. For those of us who live in contemporary India, these faces of the 21st century superpower-wannabe are not alien or unreal. We’ve all encountered the harsh face of the Indian state and its ruling classes at one time or another.
The book explains land struggles thus: “(India’s) highly unequal distribution of land leads to, and is maintained by, various forms of oppression and violence in rural society. The caste system provides an ideological justification for this exploitative structure. Caste hierarchy bears a close resemblance to the land-owning patterns; on the one end, the landlords are predominantly from the upper castes, whereas on the other, the dalits are mostly landless.”
From central Bihar -- a state that’s mocked by the rest of India today, but which was, centuries ago, a hub of knowledge, enlightenment and the land of the Buddha -- comes the story of land struggles. We are reminded that in a region with an extremely low level of industrialisation, agriculture forms the basis of livelihood for nearly 82% of the population. That’s about 60% in Patna, and around 90% in the other districts.
We come across descriptions of land as a source of conflict, land reforms and other state interventions, tenancy reforms, minimum wages, feudal power today, and movements that have fought back since the late-’70s. This acts as a good primer for anyone wanting to understand the complex issue of land rights.
Shifting the focus to workers, the book highlights struggles at Hindustan Lever (one of India’s largest companies, a subsidiary of Unilever, the giant multinational that runs over 60 plants all over the country) and features a resource paper on globalisation and workers’ rights. Hindustan Lever today has a product range spanning tea and coffee, ice creams, processed foods, soaps, detergents and shampoo, thermometers and industrial products. It has acquired Indian subsidiaries like Kwality Food and the erstwhile public sector company Modern Foods. The corporate employs over 9,000 workers.
The book dramatically highlights the treatment of workers at Hindustan Lever and elsewhere. For instance: “When you bite into a burger at McDonald’s, you probably don’t realise where some of it comes from: an obscure factory in Sahibabad in Uttar Pradesh. Workers there process and package sesame seeds (til). But they put in 12-hour shifts, don’t get any overtime allowances and earn just about Rs 1,800 to 2,400 (around $ 50) per month!”
By offering case studies of diverse ‘globalised’ factories with ‘localised’ working conditions, this section provides a good insight into the realities of the modern ‘global village’. PUDR, the rights group, explains the politics of outsourcing, the contractualisation of labour, ‘lean’ production, mobility of capital, mechanisation and jobless growth.
For the issue of forest struggles, we shift to the southern Indian state of Kerala and a hilly northeastern region called Wayanad. But don’t forget the context: over 200 million Indians are partially or wholly dependent on forest resources for their livelihood. This includes 7% of the country’s population, comprising forest-dwelling adivasi (tribal) communities whose very existence is intricately linked to the forests.
Also from Kerala comes the story of Plachimada, a name that has become synonymous with the anti-Coca-Cola movement in India. To get the proper setting, we are reminded: “There was a time when rivers, streams and lakes were full to the brim and water nurtured the people of the earth. But over the centuries, the overuse and misuse of water has made it a scarce resource.” One can well imagine what happens when a multinational giant sets up a soft drinks bottling plant on 40 acres of “what used to be multi-cropped paddy-growing land,” in Palakkad, Kerala.
Displacement is a huge issue for the weak and powerless in today’s India. Naturally then, a significant section of the book is devoted to this issue, covering bauxite mining in Kashipur in southern Orissa, the Koel Karo dam in Jharkhand, the lower Sukhtel project in Orissa, the Mansi Wakal dam in Udaipur, the Tehri dam project, which is one of the most controversial hydro-power projects in India and the second largest dam project in Asia in the new state of Uttaranchal, and the giant Tipaimukh high dam on the Manipur-Mizoram border.
Some figures: Since 1947, ‘development’ projects in India have uprooted nearly 500,000 persons each year. At least 40 million people have been forced off their lands and out of their homes, many of them more than once. Most were not even relocated in planned resettlements, let alone rehabilitated. According to the book, dams alone have displaced round 21.6 million people in India.
“We believe that the capitalist media allows little space for information and pro-people analyses on people’s struggles. Professional journalists often feel they have done their duty by merely touching the surface of a few well-known movements in occasional news stories,” says the team that compiled the book.
Struggle India Reader reminds us of the harsh realities many people in India face in their daily struggle to exist. While it could seem like a depressing read at one level, the optimism flows from the fact that people are willing to stand up and make their voices heard. The book is a useful contribution to the understanding of the ‘other India’, an India that urban-dwellers and those who have it good often forget in their haste to make the second most populous country on the planet a not-so-underdeveloped one.
Struggle India Reader is published by the Popular Education and Action Centre (PEACE), F 93 Katwaria Sarai, New Delhi 110016. Website: http://www.struggleindia.com. Pp 185. Price not mentioned.
(Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based journalist and editor of www.bytesforall.org)
InfoChange News & Features, April 2006 |
