Bombay, personally

Ref arjun_m #16

[++
Ahead of Azim Premji, the CEO of WIPRO,
++

Forbes list of richest people.

Premji is on the top with 6.7 billion$.]

India Today was talking about political power/influence rather than wealth.

``They herd Pakistanis into separate lines, and a `registration` procedure which should take no more than half an hour ends up taking three times that much.``

That is very very sad, the poor bina had to stand in que for so long, something she has never experienced in pakistan. Spare a thought for the pakistanis coming back in ball and chain from the land of the free, USA.

Thackreys son is a fag? This is major news! Or you are just saying this because he is a photographer..

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Hmm, then different sites/reports have called it by different names. The Indian media kept calling it Socialist Forum which basically means that the organizers themselves are lending a political color and so people like us who believe in the free market are excluded. However, a name like Social Forum, though it may be sympathetic to the same leftist ideals, is not making a political statement in the nomenclature.

i say tomayto and you say tomaato. . .as the conference web site indicates, it IS World Social Forum. . .and I`m not going to get into an argument with you stuka because regardless of what your feelings are about this forum, i do respect most of what you have to say even if i don`t agree with it.

and while i don`t deny that there is a certain bias in this article. . .(how can there not be?), I for one can appreciate the strangeness of being in Mumbai for the first time in one`s life, and the personal impressions one gets. . .

*********


From Mumbai with hope
Hilary Wainwright
Red Pepper, March 2004



As the fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai showed, the social-forum movement continues to go from strength to strength. Hilary Wainwright explains what distinguishes this new way of organising for social justice from the labour movements and political parties of old.

`Can you ask them to go?` an anxious volunteer pleaded with Gautam Mody, trade union organiser turned honest spin doctor for January`s fourth World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai. A group of politically motivated Buddhists were performing a dance outside the forum`s media centre and taking up a lot of space. `Leave them,` said Mody, as firmly as a conventional press officer might order a demonstration to end. `Why does it take so long for people to let go of the old way of doing things?` he grumbled. He went on to explain how the streets outside his union offices in Delhi are always cleared of anyone loitering with political intent. `We`re creating a new culture here,` Mody said. `In the past the labour movement too often preferred to meet behind closed doors, and we would even send people to investigate who was listening. The social-forum process is completely open. That is not always easy to accept.`

But by the end of the Mumbai forum (five days of festival, conference, demonstration, workshop and rally declaring `another world is possible, we can build it`) many more people understood what makes the WSF different. The square outside the media centre became a stage squatted by any group nifty enough to get there first and perform before a motley collection of the world`s straight and alternative press.

When it comes to organising an international social forum (apart from the WSF, there are also African, Asian and European forums), it`s not just a case of the trade unions having to open up their smoke-filled rooms. In many countries the anarchist-inclined movements for global justice have also had to depart from traditional practice: they have warily and conditionally agreed to participate in the representative assemblies and committees that are responsible for organising the forums. The local social forums that are springing up in towns and cities across the world operate on the principle of direct forms of democracy. But while the meetings that coordinate the international social forums are open to contributions from anyone who shares the basic principles underpinning the forum idea, their decisions are finally agreed by representatives.

The experience of being represented has become so diminished that many people feel that only a pure form of direct democracy has any authenticity

There are many different ways of being a representative, of `making present` the views of those who for reasons of a manageable size of meeting, resources, distance and equity between organisations, are absent. Some forms of representation are more direct and democratic than others. In the South, social movements - women`s, urban, peasants` and trade union movements - have invented ways of ensuring that their collective power is transmitted beyond the level of direct democracy through forms of representation that are strengthened by systems of rotation and recall. In the North, partly in reaction to the way parliamentary and labour representative structures have become emptied of vitality and radicalism, there is a strong sense of `only I can represent myself`; the experience of being represented has become so diminished that many people feel that only a pure form of direct democracy has any authenticity.

Events can change the meaning and nature of representation, however. Thus, the brutality with which Italian police attacked protesters at the G8 summit at Genoa in 2002 set the pace for bringing the social movements and trade unions together. `It created a desire to cooperate, which made it possible to build trust and organise the [November 2002] Florence European Social Forum in a way that involved everyone,` the Italian forum spokesperson and Aids campaigner Vittorio Agnoletto explained in Mumbai. Thus, after experimenting with creating `autonomous spaces`, many Italian social movements now often work alongside the cautiously left trade unionists of the CGIL.

Political parties excluded

The organisations most challenged by the theory and practice of social forums are the traditional political parties of the left. The WSF`s principles specifically exclude political parties

The organisations most challenged by the theory and practice of social forums are the traditional political parties of the left - both from the social democratic and Leninist traditions. The WSF`s principles specifically exclude the direct participation of political parties. The basic idea is all about building up the power of social and trade union movements. `The WSF,` says the forum`s Charter of Principles (agreed by the WSF International Council in 2001), `is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context that inter-relates organisations engaged in concrete action[,] from the local to the international in order to build another world… Neither party representatives nor military organisations shall participate in the forum.`

This does not mean that the forum is anti-party. Indeed, in Italy and Brazil many of those most energetically building the forum come from parties (Rifondazione Communista and the Workers` Party, respectively) that are trying to open themselves up to the influence and activity of the social movements. Indian anti-dam campaigner Medha Patkar described the WSF`s relationship to electoral politics thus: `Electoral politicians are not untouchables here, but the WSF is really an expression of people power and non-electoral politics. Non-electoral politicians need to build their strength to challenge elected politicians. Those representing an alternative view of development need to realise the commonality of their ideologies and strategies.`

In this way social forums put into practice the assertion of the women`s and ethnic minorities` movements of the 1970s, that movements of the oppressed and marginalised need autonomy to develop and identify their own needs, identities and sources of power. Political parties do not have a monopoly of the power to achieve change; indeed generally they have flunked the task of reform. The emergence of social forums doesn`t make the political party redundant. It leaves it a distinctive contribution to the wider process of struggle carried out by a plurality of actors: the role of linking extra-parliamentary campaigning with the very different timetables and tactical necessities of electoral politics. To perform this role effectively - to act as amplifiers rather than mufflers of the movements in the streets and the workplaces - parties have to open up their methods of organising and thinking. `Every way of reforming party policy has to start from an experimental approach,` Rifondazione Communista leader Fausto Bertinotti told the Mumbai Forum. `Practice has to come before theory. The collective intellect is the movement, and the party is helping to contribute to that, but it cannot in itself be that collective intellect.`

Traditional parties of the left have long acted as if knowledge can be centralised for dissemination to a passive membership

Crucial to this rethinking of the role of political parties, especially their relationship to social movements, is a challenge to conventional ways of understanding knowledge, whose knowledge is important and how it is produced. Traditional parties of the left have long acted as if knowledge can be centralised for dissemination to a passive membership. The mass membership have not been seen as creative, knowing, autonomous and interconnected human beings; they have been treated as supporters, voting fodder or, in the military analogy, `the rank and file`. Historically, this attitude has deprived `left` parties of a huge source of creative power.

By contrast, the hallmark and vital source of strength of both the new movements and the older feminist, peace, green and radical trade union movements on whose traditions they build is a fundamental belief in the importance of practical, indigenous, personal knowledge. Portuguese philosopher and activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos organised a workshop at Mumbai on combining different kinds of knowledge - the theoretical and practical. He said: `There is an implicit recognition running through the way these forums are organised, especially in Mumbai, that knowledge embedded in practice cannot always be codified and documented. Indeed, the horizontal, networking ways of organising these movements is in part a result of the need for practical, non-traditional ways of sharing that knowledge.`

Creating diverse sources of power

One purpose of social forums is to find ways of connecting different sources of power and making them more than the sum of their parts

The sharing of knowledge is closely linked to the discovery and creation of different sources of power. The campaigning movements and networks that met in the old warehouses and newly constructed tents at the WSF site in Mumbai do not assert a rival monopoly to that of traditional political parties. Rather, they demonstrate, in practice more than in theory, a belief in diverse sources of power. One purpose of social forums is to find ways of connecting those different sources of power and making them more than the sum of their parts.

Everyone at Mumbai expressed the excitement of connecting their struggles with those of others. Homa Kadeep, for example, helps coordinate campaigns defending forest people`s rights to land and natural resources across India. She said: `What is happening here is that we are connecting with people from Brazil, South Africa, Canada… We go home knowing we are not alone. We are also discovering how to be more effectively coordinated.`

This sense of opening possibilities was shared by young Zimbabwean activist Kelvin Hazangwi. `I`m organising against the privatisation of water,` Hazangwi said. `But I want to learn from a group that`s working on freeing the people of Tibet. I want to know the struggles they`re facing. But I also tell them how we are fighting the struggle against water privatisation. And my cause in Zimbabwe can also be part of a cause against water privatisation in Mali. These linkages can now be made. What I`m saying is that there should be coordinated linkages.`

Coordinating linkages that are horizontal rather than vertical, that function across popular movements rather than up from the masses to the party leadership, was the original vision of the social forum [idea/ founders]. Chico Whitaker, an activist intellectual from Brazil with a history of involvement with the Workers` Party and radical movements associated with the Catholic Church, was one of those who formulated [it/ the WSF Charter of Principles]. A modest man, now in his 60s, Whitaker believes that the forum idea draws on the most important political discovery of recent times - `the power of open, free horizontal structures`. He told Red Pepper: `It is this idea that explains the success of the first three WSFs in Porto Alegre as well as of Seattle and the 15 February demonstrations [against the war in Iraq] and now Mumbai.`

The purpose of the WSF is to develop this `horizontal social articulation`, as the networking of the global justice and anti-war movements is clumsily described. This, [the WSF`s founders/ Charter of Principles] argues, requires a `space to serve a common objective` of creating alternatives to neo-liberalism and war. That space would `function as a public square without leaders or pyramids of power. It is intended as ``a factory of ideas`` or an incubator from which new initiatives aiming at the construction of another world can emerge.`.

In this way the social forums, whether internationally or locally, are experimenting (not always successfully, it must be said) with new ways of integrating the particular - ie, demands and campaigns on `single` issues - with the universal - the wider effort to bring about a radical transformation of the whole of society. Historically, this was exclusively the function of the political party.

So, this is what the social forum movement aspires to: it seeks to provide a purposeful space in which activists can create new alliances and extend their networks of resistance, and help them turn their organisations into the sources of alternative policies, stronger strategies and more convincing visions. And this is our task in hosting the next European Social Forum in London: we must develop the forum so that it is not only a celebration of diversity and international solidarity, but also an innovative collective intellect nourished by people`s daily resistance to the pressures of the global market. First, as the Indians managed to do in Mumbai, we have to break from the old closed ways that so irritated Gautam Mody. But, again like the Indians, and the Italians, the Brazilians and the French, we also have to find a way of developing new ways of organising that build on what`s left of the foundations of democratic organisation and collective strength that the trade unions historically laid.

---

A short history of the World Social Forum

The World Social Forum (WSF) developed out of the anti-capitalist movements in the late 1990s. It was organised as an alternative to the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, at which neo-liberal intellectuals and political leaders meet to discuss and supposedly solve the problems of the age.

2001: The first WSF meets at Porto Alegre, a city of 1.5 million people in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Both the city and the state are governed by the Workers` Party of Brazilian president Lula. There are 30,000 participants.

2002: The second WSF meets again at Porto Alegre. At least 60,000 people participate.

2003: Porto Alegre hosts the third WSF. More than 100,000 people attend.

2004: The fourth WSF meets at Mumbai, a city with a population of more than 30 million people governed by the extreme nationalist right. The forum is attended by more than 100,000 people.

2005: The fifth WSF is planned for Porto Alegre.

2006: The sixth forum is planned for Africa. The International Council of the WSF is talking of reorganising the forum so that in future it takes place every two years instead of every year.

Its World Socialist Forum. The Indians nostalgic for poverty, ration card, 10 people gathered around radio, waiting 10 plus years for scooter, TV restricted to one channel....and the people at the mercy of bureaucrats and a ``mai-baap sarkar`` mentality.

Thanks but no thanks.

You should also mention that the shivaji forts photo exhibit drew record crowds. Shivaji is an important historical-political figure, who brought alamgir A`zeb to Deccan (and he never left it RIP in Burhanpur). So, exhibition of these forts has many more pbvious angles than communal. A few are listed below.

1. Photographic
2. Historical
3. Tourism
4. Nature (most forts are in wild settings)
5. Architecture
6. Hiking

Also, can it will be interesting to get more elaboration about how Karachi is same-same with Mumbai (which is what it was always called, except the UP folks called it bumbai, and english bombay). For example a comparison of architectural similarity between VHP madrassas and its Karachi counterparts perhaps?

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on second thought, it is World Socialist forum, and everyone there including those who were there in spirit (jaise ke maiN) are all deluded, and having a balanced repput from the businesswallahs who have more capital and power, yes, that would be desirable and perhaps preferable.

my apologies, and i bow as far as my naazuk kamariya can bow to the wisdom of those who think the WSF is a waste of time. i am only a woman who is not pret-a-porter these labels that you all wish to foist on me, and perhaps some others like me who would like to listen to these ideas anyway without being labeled as `commie lovers` and `leftists`. i wonder what this makes some priests, and concerned `people of faith` who were there as well.

So hindus are our friends now? What`s the big deal here, I don`t understand. I don`t think the expression on the faces of yateems, when langar is about to be distributed in an orphanage, is that of happiness. They usually evalute the yateem next to them and prepare for the upcoming fight for one extra morsel. Jeez. What is wrong with you people.

bas yahan pe arjun ki hi kami reh gayee thi.

aur jinnah ki. ; )

i know from personal experience that when some indians have asked me whether i`m from india and i tell them i`m from pakistan, they`ve said, oh it`s all the same thing, are these people necessarily leftists?

and arjun bhai, i tell you what, when i go to bombay next year *keeping fingers crossed*, for neither a business meeting nor as you put it a `commie lovefest`, i`ll be sure to write an article about it. do you think you can wait until then?!?

and it`s World Social Forum, not Socialist. . there is a difference you know, minor as it may seem.

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Harimau,

I think those Muslims of India who followed Jinnah`s parting words `Establish yourself educationally and economically, and avoid confrontational politics.` (To the delegation of the Coorag State Muslims at the eve of Pakistan)... did very well in India. Amazingly those `Nationalist` Muslims of JUH who hated Jinnah are not on the list of those Muslims who have made it in India. In any event, I think Jinnah Papers record exactly what kind of relationship Jinnah envisaged between Pakistan and India... and no amount of brainwashing on both sides about the man can deny that he was the first one to give us the vision of a free trade area.


Now ... knowing you and the general style of some of our friends from India on this site, I am sure soon enough Jinnah-bashing will go on left and right... as if that could change history.


-YLH

Beena,

You seem a bit surprised that ``Muslim names are openly displayed at sweetmeat or garments shops, and most of the riksha or taxi drivers one encounters seem to be Muslim.``

Actually, that is the reality ALL OVER India, not just in Bombay.

Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, Jains, etc., have no problem with each other until some politician or thug stirs up trouble. When the trouble subsides, people go back to the previous situation.

Last week. the magazine India Today listed the 50 Most Powerful People in India. Ahead of Azim Premji, the CEO of WIPRO, in the rankings is Nusli Wadia. So much for Jinnah`s claim that Muslims cannot get a fair shake in a united India. For those Pakistanis with short memories, Nusli Wadia is known in India as the CEO of Bombay Dyeing but to the Chowk crowd as the grandson of Jinnah.

Nusli Wadia`s advisor is also listed among the Top 50. He is S. Gurumurthy, who is described as the BJP Ideologue. So much for Muslims and Hindus not being able to get along! I suggest that you guys convert the Jinnah Mausoleum in Karachi to an electrical generating station.... Jinnah must be spinning real fast in his grave.