India Social Forum
DELHI - I'm not going to write too much about my experience at the ISF... basically, I wasn't going to be there, I wsa supposed to be in Ahmedabad at this time..... however, my arm was infected and oozing out pus, so I ended up staying in Delhi a little longer and got to attend the ISF. A lot of People's Movements (anti-Coca-Cola, anti-dam, etc.), a lot of Dalit rights movements, a lot of Socialist/Leftist movements.... basically, an anti-globalization, anti-America theme to the entire extravanganza.
We were there with SIDH for the 'official' launch of the Gap Year College. I really thought our session on "Integrated and Holistic Education" went well... but, there weren't that many 'random' attendees. Although, there are so many Delhi youth involved with SIDH now that there were still a lot of people there....
Here's an article about the ISF from infochangeindia (http://www.infochangeindia.org/features395.jsp)
Alternative confusion
By Ashok Gopal
The India Social Forum is about different political and social movements joining forces to fight the forces that are militating against local economies, community use of land, non-Western civilisations and cultures. But in the Babel that was the ISF, most of the voices got lost
There was, ultimately, too much of everything. A lot of it good. A lot of it bad. Some of it very bad.
There were too many issues being discussed at too many pandals. There was too much song and dance outside. There were too many films being shown in temporary theatres too close to each other. There was too much dust and thrown-away food. The distance between the two main venues was too much and there were too many clueless volunteers.
After witnessing all this, documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan had one thing to say upfront about the India Social Forum (ISF), New Delhi, November 9-13, 2006.
It was “disorganised”.
Many delegates used stronger words. Comparisons were drawn with the Asia Social Forum, Hyderabad, 2003, which was by common opinion a “better show”. (Comparisons with the World Social Forum, Mumbai, 2004, would be unfair as it was a far bigger event).
There was talk about how a few organisations like Ekta Parishad had dominated the ISF, bringing thousands of their supporters who drowned the presence of everyone else.
There were questions asked about where and how the thousands of pounds given by the funding organisations had been used.
The money certainly didn’t reflect in the infrastructure at the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium grounds where the ISF was held.
Basic needs were overlooked. Free drinking water should have been made available everywhere, but wasn’t. Women could not find clean and working loos. No thought was given to the aged and the disabled who had to walk, like the others, for over a kilometre from one ground to another.
And the more substantive objections to such a show, which have been raised since the beginning of the WSF process in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001, remained unaddressed.
Few ISF participants could probably give clear and coherent answers to the question posed by rickshaw- and taxi-drivers who stood outside the venues: Yeh kya ho raha hai? What is this about? What does it seek to achieve?
Compering the inaugural function of the ISF, women’s activist Kamla Bhasin said the event was an “attempt to bring together different political and social movements, to create a sangam”, to create a “wave of optimism and a shared vision of an alternative future”.
This sounds nice, but ducks the primary questions. How can one, for instance, create a sangam between a Gandhian NGO that believes in trusteeship and a leftist union that believes an “alternative future” can be realised only through abolition of private property?
And in what language, if at all, can a family of landless labourers meaningfully “share a vision” with a jet-setting academic who has never had to worry about the source of his next meal?
It is of course possible to pinpoint some common values and aspirations between people from diverse political, cultural, social and economic backgrounds. One can talk of peace, human dignity and dialogue. This is the language that caps the clamour of the UN General Assembly.
Is the WSF process then a non-government replica of the UN? Albeit more toothless?
WSF-process regulars—and there is a growing tribe of them—are not frustrated by such questions. Like a giant corporation or bureaucracy, the WSF process has acquired a life and momentum of its own, and it moves on regardless of what anyone thinks about it. As John Samuel, international director, ActionAid, who is a WSF-regular, pointed out, those who attack the process are also part of it. Nobody wants to be left out.
At ISF, New Delhi, two strategies adopted by the regulars were visible. In the first case, most of the high-profile speakers headed straight for the session they were supposed to address, delivered their number, exchanged pleasantries with other high-profile regulars and made a fast exit—towards their hotel room or the airport. Debate across experts from diverse fields and backgrounds did not happen.
Self-funded regulars adopted the strategy of international film festival regulars. You first get hold of the programme, then ignoring the speeches at the inaugural session, you mark out your must-sees, must-do’s and must-visits. Then you get a lay of the land—the layout of the venues—and make your own programme, which you follow diligently, ignoring everything else.
This is good commonsense but has a big pitfall: You can miss out on some of the most engaging and thought-provoking sessions.
And the most unfortunate aspect of ISF 2006 was there were a lot of these sessions, but the voices of speakers got lost—either because of the din outside or extremely thin attendance.
At the inaugural session, Eileen Kuttab, sociologist and activist from the Women’s Studies Programme at Birzeit University, Palestine, spoke about how the Palestine situation is related to the “human deficit” all over the world, which is the result of sustained “wars” against local economies, community use of land, non-Western civilisations and cultures. NGOs that have “pragmatically” chosen to work with, rather than against, this onslaught are as guilty as the warmongers for the “death of revolution”.
Few heard her forceful argument. Her speech was too long; no effort was made for simultaneous translation into Hindi, and by the time she had come to a third of her printed speech, most of the audience had drifted away.
A fundamental dimension of Eileen Kuttab’s argument was corroborated by Thomas Wallgren, professor, University of Helsinki, Finland, at one of the sessions held after the inaugural day. The author of Transformative Philosophy said that the celebration of the individual, which has been the hallmark of the history of the Western world over the past 500 years, inevitably leads to destruction of the community. “A Western man simply cannot accept community.”
If Wallgren’s argument was at too high a plane for the audience of activists from tribal areas, economist Jean Dreze, who made a rare appearance at a session on livelihoods, provided a concerted strategy suggestion to civil society organisations. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), he said, provides a wonderful opportunity to organise and unionise landless labourers. It gives an opportunity to increase their bargaining power, and create a situation in which payment of statutory minimum wages by big farmers becomes unavoidable.
Later in the same session, economist Jayati Ghosh attempted to make sense of the latest NSS figures on employment. For the first time since the introduction of liberalisation policies, there has been a growth in employment in India in rural as well as urban areas.
However, according to her analysis, agricultural employment is not growing; in rural areas, people are moving from wage labour to self-employment. Increase in participation of rural women in manufacturing, she argued, was due to the huge increase in the number of women’s self-help groups. In urban areas, the growth of women’s participation in manufacturing was mainly because large numbers of unorganised women are being hired to work at low wages by small-scale units.
Ghosh’s arguments needed to be contested by pro-liberalisation economists. But of course none were present among the speakers or the thin audience.
At one of the well-attended events, an Assembly of Poor and Discriminated, economist Amit Bhaduri told dalit leaders that they didn’t have a ghost of a chance of capturing real power at the Centre unless they developed and forcefully used “alternative cultural symbols”. Gandhi’s use of Ram Rajya gave momentum and mass appeal to the freedom movement. Dalit leaders need to develop and propagate an alternative vision.
The Assembly of Poor was organised by a slew of networks. But there were at the ISF, other dalit organisations that had planned other sessions and events, and they were conspicuously absent at the Assembly of Poor.
Nobody benefited from such groupism. Nobody benefited either from the language barrier and a lot of avoidable confusion: seminar halls were not grouped according to thematic areas, or even clearly identified. Several sessions did not start or end on time. Some seminar venues were shifted at the last moment and some venues could be found only after extraordinary effort or sheer luck.
This combination of effort and luck was also required to pick up gems from the large number of stalls located in three grounds. You could pick up old books on Ambedkar and dalit issues at a 50% discount. You could get scarcely available works of the Gandhian historian Dharampal in English. You could get inexpensive and very thoughtfully produced children’s literature in Hindi from the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti. You could get hard to find classics such as Rahul Sankrityayan’s Volga Se Ganga. You could get CDs of Indian folk music. And of course the usual range of SHG-made pickles and jams.
And if you had any energy left to watch films, you could watch an eye-opening but relatively unknown documentary like Autumn’s Final Country by Sonia Jabbar, who hadn’t made a film earlier, and has not made a film since. A sensitive recording of the displacement stories of four women in Kashmir, it brought out the human tragedy of the political conflict without bias or pontification.
But you needed luck. Too much of it. Because there wasn’t a directory detailing exhibitors and their wares. There wasn’t a low-priced and substantial document on all the films that were shown. There wasn’t even a clearly printed map in the programme document.
Organisers of ISF-type events would do well to heed a telling comment made by Jayati Ghosh’s mother. After trudging with Jayati for over an hour to find the venue of a seminar Jayati was to address, the old lady declared, “I tell you, this is why your alternatives don’t work.”
We were there with SIDH for the 'official' launch of the Gap Year College. I really thought our session on "Integrated and Holistic Education" went well... but, there weren't that many 'random' attendees. Although, there are so many Delhi youth involved with SIDH now that there were still a lot of people there....
Here's an article about the ISF from infochangeindia (http://www.infochangeindia.org/features395.jsp)
Alternative confusion
By Ashok Gopal
The India Social Forum is about different political and social movements joining forces to fight the forces that are militating against local economies, community use of land, non-Western civilisations and cultures. But in the Babel that was the ISF, most of the voices got lost
There was, ultimately, too much of everything. A lot of it good. A lot of it bad. Some of it very bad.
There were too many issues being discussed at too many pandals. There was too much song and dance outside. There were too many films being shown in temporary theatres too close to each other. There was too much dust and thrown-away food. The distance between the two main venues was too much and there were too many clueless volunteers.
After witnessing all this, documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan had one thing to say upfront about the India Social Forum (ISF), New Delhi, November 9-13, 2006.
It was “disorganised”.
Many delegates used stronger words. Comparisons were drawn with the Asia Social Forum, Hyderabad, 2003, which was by common opinion a “better show”. (Comparisons with the World Social Forum, Mumbai, 2004, would be unfair as it was a far bigger event).
There was talk about how a few organisations like Ekta Parishad had dominated the ISF, bringing thousands of their supporters who drowned the presence of everyone else.
There were questions asked about where and how the thousands of pounds given by the funding organisations had been used.
The money certainly didn’t reflect in the infrastructure at the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium grounds where the ISF was held.
Basic needs were overlooked. Free drinking water should have been made available everywhere, but wasn’t. Women could not find clean and working loos. No thought was given to the aged and the disabled who had to walk, like the others, for over a kilometre from one ground to another.
And the more substantive objections to such a show, which have been raised since the beginning of the WSF process in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001, remained unaddressed.
Few ISF participants could probably give clear and coherent answers to the question posed by rickshaw- and taxi-drivers who stood outside the venues: Yeh kya ho raha hai? What is this about? What does it seek to achieve?
Compering the inaugural function of the ISF, women’s activist Kamla Bhasin said the event was an “attempt to bring together different political and social movements, to create a sangam”, to create a “wave of optimism and a shared vision of an alternative future”.
This sounds nice, but ducks the primary questions. How can one, for instance, create a sangam between a Gandhian NGO that believes in trusteeship and a leftist union that believes an “alternative future” can be realised only through abolition of private property?
And in what language, if at all, can a family of landless labourers meaningfully “share a vision” with a jet-setting academic who has never had to worry about the source of his next meal?
It is of course possible to pinpoint some common values and aspirations between people from diverse political, cultural, social and economic backgrounds. One can talk of peace, human dignity and dialogue. This is the language that caps the clamour of the UN General Assembly.
Is the WSF process then a non-government replica of the UN? Albeit more toothless?
WSF-process regulars—and there is a growing tribe of them—are not frustrated by such questions. Like a giant corporation or bureaucracy, the WSF process has acquired a life and momentum of its own, and it moves on regardless of what anyone thinks about it. As John Samuel, international director, ActionAid, who is a WSF-regular, pointed out, those who attack the process are also part of it. Nobody wants to be left out.
At ISF, New Delhi, two strategies adopted by the regulars were visible. In the first case, most of the high-profile speakers headed straight for the session they were supposed to address, delivered their number, exchanged pleasantries with other high-profile regulars and made a fast exit—towards their hotel room or the airport. Debate across experts from diverse fields and backgrounds did not happen.
Self-funded regulars adopted the strategy of international film festival regulars. You first get hold of the programme, then ignoring the speeches at the inaugural session, you mark out your must-sees, must-do’s and must-visits. Then you get a lay of the land—the layout of the venues—and make your own programme, which you follow diligently, ignoring everything else.
This is good commonsense but has a big pitfall: You can miss out on some of the most engaging and thought-provoking sessions.
And the most unfortunate aspect of ISF 2006 was there were a lot of these sessions, but the voices of speakers got lost—either because of the din outside or extremely thin attendance.
At the inaugural session, Eileen Kuttab, sociologist and activist from the Women’s Studies Programme at Birzeit University, Palestine, spoke about how the Palestine situation is related to the “human deficit” all over the world, which is the result of sustained “wars” against local economies, community use of land, non-Western civilisations and cultures. NGOs that have “pragmatically” chosen to work with, rather than against, this onslaught are as guilty as the warmongers for the “death of revolution”.
Few heard her forceful argument. Her speech was too long; no effort was made for simultaneous translation into Hindi, and by the time she had come to a third of her printed speech, most of the audience had drifted away.
A fundamental dimension of Eileen Kuttab’s argument was corroborated by Thomas Wallgren, professor, University of Helsinki, Finland, at one of the sessions held after the inaugural day. The author of Transformative Philosophy said that the celebration of the individual, which has been the hallmark of the history of the Western world over the past 500 years, inevitably leads to destruction of the community. “A Western man simply cannot accept community.”
If Wallgren’s argument was at too high a plane for the audience of activists from tribal areas, economist Jean Dreze, who made a rare appearance at a session on livelihoods, provided a concerted strategy suggestion to civil society organisations. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), he said, provides a wonderful opportunity to organise and unionise landless labourers. It gives an opportunity to increase their bargaining power, and create a situation in which payment of statutory minimum wages by big farmers becomes unavoidable.
Later in the same session, economist Jayati Ghosh attempted to make sense of the latest NSS figures on employment. For the first time since the introduction of liberalisation policies, there has been a growth in employment in India in rural as well as urban areas.
However, according to her analysis, agricultural employment is not growing; in rural areas, people are moving from wage labour to self-employment. Increase in participation of rural women in manufacturing, she argued, was due to the huge increase in the number of women’s self-help groups. In urban areas, the growth of women’s participation in manufacturing was mainly because large numbers of unorganised women are being hired to work at low wages by small-scale units.
Ghosh’s arguments needed to be contested by pro-liberalisation economists. But of course none were present among the speakers or the thin audience.
At one of the well-attended events, an Assembly of Poor and Discriminated, economist Amit Bhaduri told dalit leaders that they didn’t have a ghost of a chance of capturing real power at the Centre unless they developed and forcefully used “alternative cultural symbols”. Gandhi’s use of Ram Rajya gave momentum and mass appeal to the freedom movement. Dalit leaders need to develop and propagate an alternative vision.
The Assembly of Poor was organised by a slew of networks. But there were at the ISF, other dalit organisations that had planned other sessions and events, and they were conspicuously absent at the Assembly of Poor.
Nobody benefited from such groupism. Nobody benefited either from the language barrier and a lot of avoidable confusion: seminar halls were not grouped according to thematic areas, or even clearly identified. Several sessions did not start or end on time. Some seminar venues were shifted at the last moment and some venues could be found only after extraordinary effort or sheer luck.
This combination of effort and luck was also required to pick up gems from the large number of stalls located in three grounds. You could pick up old books on Ambedkar and dalit issues at a 50% discount. You could get scarcely available works of the Gandhian historian Dharampal in English. You could get inexpensive and very thoughtfully produced children’s literature in Hindi from the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti. You could get hard to find classics such as Rahul Sankrityayan’s Volga Se Ganga. You could get CDs of Indian folk music. And of course the usual range of SHG-made pickles and jams.
And if you had any energy left to watch films, you could watch an eye-opening but relatively unknown documentary like Autumn’s Final Country by Sonia Jabbar, who hadn’t made a film earlier, and has not made a film since. A sensitive recording of the displacement stories of four women in Kashmir, it brought out the human tragedy of the political conflict without bias or pontification.
But you needed luck. Too much of it. Because there wasn’t a directory detailing exhibitors and their wares. There wasn’t a low-priced and substantial document on all the films that were shown. There wasn’t even a clearly printed map in the programme document.
Organisers of ISF-type events would do well to heed a telling comment made by Jayati Ghosh’s mother. After trudging with Jayati for over an hour to find the venue of a seminar Jayati was to address, the old lady declared, “I tell you, this is why your alternatives don’t work.”
posted by Raj Kanani | 11:22 PM
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