|
Here the size of the smallest
landownership is 2 Kanals. 2/3 families do not have any
landownership. Gulam Nabi told us that the main reason for
lower presence of conflict in Dangerpora was because of a
committee in the village called Dangerpora Dahe Committee
which attempted to convince the youths not to join the
conflict.This explanation however needs to be testified.
Another explanation for the low conflict in Dangerpora that
Gulam Nabi gave was that the villagers preferred "Aman"
(peace) during the conflict. It was also found that Danger-
pora
was not a hub of any organiza- zational activities. As far as the
Azadi is concerned, Mr. Gulam Nabi felt that it is the first
choice of the Kashmiri people and thus disowned any Pakistani
intervention.
Boras
is a village with two blocks. It has 300 households.
Agriculture is the main occupation of the villagers. In Boras
as well, there was not any significant mobilization of
separatist organizations like Jamat-e-Islam and JKLF etc.
Although, there were 6 persons from the village who had joined
the movement. Out of those, 4 persons were killed during the
conflict period. Many of the respondents denied answering as
to why those 6 villagers did join the movement.The fear of
being harassed by both non-State and the State was clearly
reflected when the villagers tried to narrate stories of their
experience.
The
entire survey in this region confirmed the strong Kashmir
armed resistance in the initial years of the conflict and the
mass involvement in the movement for Azadi. The general
opinion on the emergence of Kashmiri Azadi movement is a
product of two main reasons. First, the unfulfilled dreamt of
the promised plebiscite on Azadi in Kashmir and second, the
betrayal of the 1987 and 1989 elections by the State by
declaring the winning candidates as defeated which was the
striking phase of the armed resistance in Kashmir.
In
those days, Azadi appeared as if it was to be simply snatched
from the city of Srinagar, recalled many villagers The public
participation in the movement till 1993/94 was with immense
firmness but the State crackdown on the movement has made the
people of Kashmir realize that the quest for Azadi is a longer
journey. This has resulted in a clear combat between the armed
resistance and the State. In the present conflict situation,
Jammu and Kashmir is indeed a disputed territory, said Syed
Ali Shah Geelani, which the Government of India has been
constantly denying. Other organizations like Jamat-e-Islam,
JKLF, J&K Muslim League, etc. maintain that the Government
of India should fulfill the agreement of a plebiscite in
J&K for a permanent political solution to the conflict. An
organization like JKLF is today doing signature campaigns for
Azadi of J&K.
Impressions from the ground
To
give a short analysis of the conflict situation in Jammu and
Kashmir would be undesirable as the conflict involves the
historical, socio-political and economic aspects of the
J&K people. The long dreamt self- determined peace in
J&K remains to be one obvious desire of the common people.
There is a widely accepted Kashmiri identity for the common
people, which has to be taken into account while engaging with
the Kashmiri identity movements. The conflict situation in
J&K has caused ultimate unrest and fear among the general
people, caused both by non-State establishments and the State
as well.
The
field survey gives the impression that the State has failed
and the representative character of the State remains
disconnected from the citizens. The common people increasingly
feel that the State should be democratic in engaging with the
issues in J&K and simultaneously question the credibility
of the armed groups.
Any
solution to the J&K issue should begin with an
unconditional talk with all the organizations. In any case,
one needs to spend more time with the people in J&K to
understand their day to day life experiences and their
operating consciousnesses.
A. Noni Meetei
A.
Noni Meetei is a Research Associate in Rights, Representation
and the Poor and Conflict and Institutional Change in India.
He is doing his M. Phil on "Dissenting Nationalisms as
Alternative Politics" from the Department of Political
Science, University of Delhi. He has delivered several talks
on Human Rights issues and is actively involved in social
movements.
e-mail: nonimeetei@yahoo.com
Perspective on Devastating Floods: Challenge to Development
Strategy
In the process of discovering the basic means of survival,
human beings enter into a complex relationship with nature.
Unlike other living beings they try to discover the diverse
laws, principles and mechanisms determining various events in
the natural world and then use this knowledge to intervene in
the settings of the nature.The question then arises as to how
to approach nature? There are several competing perspectives
available. According to one perspective, nature is organized in
such a way that any human intervention that changes the natural
arrange ment would briing
about serious consequences. The other approach is that since human
beings have
the capacity to manipulate the physical world in order to
fulfill their needs, there is a necessity and desirability for
intervention. Both the perspectives have their own problems. If
we adopt the policy of non-intervention then civilization will
never grow, as any act of transforming nature would be
considered illegitimate. If we adopt an interventionist view
then there would be no limit and wrong interventions would lead
to disastrous consequences.The human confidence generated by modern Science obviously favoured
the second perspective and we discovered an endless exercise in
the direction of remodeling nature for human habitation. In this
process we even forgot about the other living beings and adopted
an anthropocentric attitude.This perspective mediated by the
capitalist system, marked by profit maximization, started
appropriating nature without any ethics. Very soon the
limitations of this perspective became clear and it was realized
as to how disastrous it was for the survival of both nature and
humanity. The hegemonic dominance of modern science seems to be
reaching its limits. There is an intellectual and social protest
against this perspective and its consequences in the form of
green political theory and environmental movements. This is the
time when we do need to stop and look afresh at the way the
relation between human beings and nature has been
constituted.This is not to argue that one should adopt the
non-interventionist perspective, but one has to treat nature in
a non-anthropocentric way. Human intervention in nature should
be carefully planned. We have to change our attitude of
commanding nature. Instead, we should treat nature in a way so
that planet Earth can sustain itself.
Keeping
this in mind, there is a need to debate on the methods and
technologies of the water management in India. The recent floods
have given a signal that we need to do it as soon as possible,
otherwise major problems might be waiting for us in near future.
We need to come out of the domination of the modern scientific
worldview and its anthropocentric, egoist attitude towards
nature.Laloo Prasad’s casual comment that floods give the poor
an opportunity to eat fish has a hidden approach in it. One may
encounter similar statements if one tries to meet the people in
the floodprone area. The statement comes from a perspective and
we need to take it seriously. This seminar was a first step in
the direction to initiate a dialogue among policy makers,
geographers, economists, social scientists and NGO activists.
This dialogue will gradually include the people at the
grassroots levels in the movement against the dominant models of
development.
Manindra
N.Thakur
Rights,
Representation
and Poor:
Project meeting, Bangalore
The project meeting of RRP was held at Bangalore from 28th June
to 1st July 2004. The participants were Prof John Harriss, LSE,
Peter Houtzager, IDS, Sussex, Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Sao Paulo,
Brazil, Prof VK Nagraj, MIDS, Chennai, and they discussed the
main issues that are emerging out of the research survey from
the primary data collected last year at Delhi, Bangalore,
Coimbatore in India and from Mexico City in Mexico and Sao Paulo
in Brazil. Keeping in view,the comparative ambitions of the
project, it was decided that two levels of comparative study
would be required: first, to compare the various Indian cities
and second, to analyze the comparative perspective in terms of
cross national comparisons at the level of public action,
gender, problem identification and problem solving. The main
questions that emerged at the meeting were as follows. Has the
pro- cess of globalization changed the eco- nomic status of the poor
groups?
|
|
How are individuals identifying and prioritizing their
problems (seeing the comparative trends in terms of demography)?
What is the relationship between the perce-ption of problems and
social action both at individual and collective level? The
related issues raised were that of state-society relationship in
terms of citizens expectations, claim making and entitlements,
conditions of basic service delivery in these cities
(sanitation, etc), mapping the associational life in these
cities, including the typology of organizations, change in
labour status and the role of trade unions, public-private
partnership in service delivery, networks of civil society
actors, social and democratic rights movements and
representation. The team also visited suburban labour colonies
in Bangalore and explored the possibilities of comparing field
studies in Delhi and Bangalore. The dimension of what determines
the politics of neighbourood was analysed.
Ravi
Ranjan
Ravi
Ranjan is an Associate and is the Project Co-ordinator on
Rights, Representation and the Poor at DCRC. He is doing his PhD
on Conceptualizing Human Security : A Rights Based Approach and
has completed his M.Phil from Department of Political Science,
DU on Conceptualizing the Right to food.
e-mail: ranjanr1@rediffmail.com
DCRC: "Where lies the future?"
He
article on ‘Idea and Context’ that appeared in the Jan-April
issue of the DCRC newsletter asserted that the Centre aims at
changing the ‘terms of discourse’ from the vantage point of
the poor, oppressed, marginalized people of the world in
gen-eral and that of Asia, Africa and Latin America in
particular. I would like to reflect here upon the intellectual
enterprise of the scholars involved in the Centre in order to
understand its achievements, goals and directions. When I try to
look at the Centre from a distance, (which is a difficult thing
to do for someone who has been deeply involved with it since its
very inception), I find it ironically, full of both hopes and
tensions.
The Centre is a concrete expression of the dissatisfaction of
the third world scholars, living in a post-colonial situation
and struggling to come out from the intellectual boundaries
created by the Eurocentric structures of compartmentalized
knowledge systems. The key idea at the Centre is to engage with
our own reality with all the available theories and methods and
to evolve new understanding, new theories and new methods. In
the last ten years, the scholars at the Center have been able to
articulate their specific viewpoints on various issues. If we
consider the following illustration, I feel we can formulate a
tentative perspective on what DCRC has been developing.
The graphical representation points out my perception of the
Centre’s endeavour at two levels: both in terms of the
concerns, themes and perspectives and of the theoretical tools
evolved over the years. Atleast four such innovative methods are
our experiments with: Grassroots Politics Colloquia, Visual
Sociology, Philosophical journey and Theatre. It appears to me
that the Centre certainly has the potential to evolve as a
distinct school of thought, one that believes in the creative
potential of human beings across any geographical space of the
globe and one which is open to all forms of knowledge, existing
in any social formation in any period.It is also open in so far
as it is continuously evolving and is attempting to transcend
the disciplinary boundaries.
The Centre is attracting young minds from different disciplines
and it provides them the creative space to interact and
articulate their understanding. A cursory look at the projects
the individual scholars have taken up under the degree
programmes of the university and also the research projects at
the Centre gives an idea that it has taken a step towards ‘moving
the centre’. These individual and collective projects have
raised new questions, used innovative methods and discovered
generative mechanisms of social reality.
However,
I have only been talking about the hopes so far. Let me also
share what I feel are the tensions involved in the theoretical
enterprise of the Centre.The emerging perspective is like a
nascent child who needs a lot of care and nurturing. We have to
engage in exploration of the philosophical foundations of
methodological innovations and theoretical findings. This
process has to be a collective engagement of the discursive
community of scholars belonging to different disciplines and
different cultural contexts. All the individual and collective
research projects have to be continuously linked together and
questions of common concern need to be raised. This would mean
strengthening the process of hermeneutical dialogue within the
DCRC community and outside it. By outside DCRC I mean the
grassroots activists, the policy makers, NGOs and national and
international communities of scholars. Such an engagement
requires tremendous commitment and conscious involvement with
the enterprise. This is something, I have a feeling, is yet to
evolve at the Centre. In fact, I have a fear that it may not be
an easy task for the Centre. The main reason, I feel, is that
atomization of intellectuals is an inevitable process in a State
structure. The Indian state does provide creative space in the
form of the University structure, but we should never forget
that it is also an ideological state apparatus. The rules of the
game are predetermined and we have no choice but to follow them.
In this situation, how much autonomy we actually have is indeed
a matter of concern. Many of us feel that academic freedom is
being reduced and the creative space shrinking very fast. Above
all, the process of atomization of intellectuals unleased by
fierce competition for awards and resources makes this
collective enterprise quite difficult.To conclude, DCRC seems to
be full of creative potentials and simultaneously there are
serious problems and tensions. All depends on how success
fully
the Centre attracts bright scholars and is able to provide them
the creative space to realise their potentials while enabling
them to contribute to the production of knowledge which perhaps
the university departments and colleges have not been able to
adequately provide.
The
Centre needs to institutionalize the process of intense but
democratic debates and negotiations. This is the prerequisite
for free growth of knowledge and development of Creative Theory.
Manindra N.Thakur
Interface
is an interactive forum for critical responses to writings that
appear in the dcrc newsletter. Readers are invited to express
their views on what they feel about the issues raised in
specific articles.
Classical
Indian Philosophy by
J.N.Mohanty
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000
The scholars of Indian Philosophy
throughout the world have been struggling hard against the
Eurocentric nature of global philosophical enterprise. J.N
Mohanty’s book Classical Indian Philosophy is a significant
contribution, marking the transition from the third to the
fourth phase of scholarship in Indian philosophy from
comparative philosophy and hermeneutical dialogue between
philosophies to the argument of a democratic negotiation between
different traditions. He discusses the major concepts and
problems of Indian philosophy. The style and mode of discussion
of the book is a statement on the method of approaching Indian
philosophy. Instead of dealing with various schools of
philosophy, he has chosen to show the connections, common
concerns and problems that knit them together. He has focused on
themes as theory of knowledge, metaphysics, religion, morality,
aesthetics and social philosophy. These issues have been dealt
in a most lucid and conversational style which makes the book
accessible to the students of other philosophical
traditions.This book may be considered an essential reading for
the students of social science who feel that the philosophy of
social science needs to be enriched by accessing Indian
philosophical traditions. The book rejects the monolithic
perception of Indian philosophy and presents the diverse
traditions available within it. It also gives an exposition on
their view on the issues of contemporary relevance.
Fact
File
Growth Rate of GDP (% per year),South Asia
* The growth rates for the
years 2003 and 2004 are
projected and not actual.
Source:
Asian Development Outlook 2003, Oxford University Press
We
will be happy to receive yoursuggestions
and comments at:
e-mail:
manindra_thakur@rediffmail.com
e-mail: riminamohapatra@rediffmail.com
We
have shifted. Our temporary address is:
Developing
Countries Research Centre
Non-Formal
Educational Cell, Old Jubilee Hall Barracks, Chhatra Marg,
University
of Delhi – 110007
Phone:
91 11 2766 6281(d) 2766 7725, Ext-1823, Fax. 91-11-2766 7049
Email:
dcrc@ dcrcdu.org, director@dcrcdu.org
Website:
www.dcrcdu.org
Issued
by: DCRC, Editorial Collective
|
