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Last week this column had spoken about the fact that there are about 100 million women less on this earth than there should be. Women who are “missing” since they are aborted, burnt, starved and neglected to death by families who prefer sons to daughters. This column had also identified the countries of South Asia, East Asia, West Asia and Saharan Africa as the main regions which were missing most of these women. The estimated number of women who are missing are 44 million in China, 39 million in India, 6 million in Pakistan and 3 billion in Bangladesh. This is the single largest genocide in human history. Ever. Some researchers have coined a word for this phenomenon: Femicide, or the killing of the human female because she is female.
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The recent protests in Tibet have again put the spotlight firmly on China and its politics. By global standards, both the violence and the Chinese Government’s efforts to control it are not unprecedented. More people die in the US colonies of Iraq and Palestine in a week than have been reported killed in Tibet over the past week by even staunchly pro-Tibet information sources. Even the information clampdown and externment of foreigners ordered by the Chinese authorities, pales in comparison to the track record of the US and its allies in media manipulation. Moreover, it is also likely that Governments and media in the US and Europe are encouraging a bigger coverage of the events in Tibet for clearly political reasons. It is easy to do this since unorganised citizen protestors facing heavily armed soldiers and armoured personnel carriers readily lends itself to heroic adulation. Read the rest of this entry »
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Some months ago, during the Lal Masjid standoff in Islamabad, the world was treated to sights of burka-clad women with sticks coming out to impose their version of morality on the city streets as well as to defend the Masjid from the police. In neighbouring Iran, women have been in the security forces and participate in public activities, albeit under segregation from men. Over India, a significant number of women have come out to actively work in the public sphere for militant Hindu nationalist organisations like the Durga Vahini and other such organisations. Similar examples can be found in almost every country of the world where women have become active in the public sphere on an agenda that is conservative and celebrates the traditional roles assigned to women in society. Read the rest of this entry »
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Haiti is today a country broken by poverty, destitution and hopelessness. A country which was once the biggest source of colonial plunder – providing France with £ 11 million out of its total trade of £ 17 million in 1789 – is today the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, eighty percent of whose population lives below the poverty line. The country, whose slave army repeatedly defeated the mightiest European armies of the 18th and 19th centuries, is today without an army of its own. A land famous for its forests and agricultural produce is today denuded of all its forests and can’t grow enough to feed itself. The Haitian State itself verges on the brink of collapse and cannot survive without the crutches of Aid dollars and the UN military force.
How did the first colony of the modern world to free itself come to this sorry pass? Read the rest of this entry »
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As this column recounted last week, Haiti was the first colony of the modern world to win freedom. What is even more astounding is that when Haiti declared independence from France on January 1, 1804, its army – composed of slaves who had been brought from Africa – had defeated the armies of France, Great Britain and Spain in the span of 13 years.
I would argue that Haiti was the completion of the process that began with the American War of Independence about three decades earlier. The American War of Independence was fought on the principle of self-rule and against colonial subjugation. It raised the slogan of “No taxation without Representation” and stated that all countries were equal and one could not subjugate the other. The French Revolution extended this principle of self-rule, which the American War of Independence had established between countries, to the domestic sphere. The French Revolution stated that not only were all countries equal to one another, but all people residing inside the country were also legally equal and free. There could be no political authority on earth that was higher than the citizen. While these revolutions have justly been hailed as the pioneers of our modern regime of rights and freedoms, what is forgotten is that these revolutions remained confined to the white man and did not extend these rights to either the non-whites or to women. Read the rest of this entry »
“Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom…”
Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbeans, is today one of the poorest countries in the world. The State itself is weak, without any army and crumbling infrastructure, Haiti practically lives of the sharp philanthropy of Western Aid agencies. But hidden behind the poverty, destitution and fragile State which presents itself to the contemporary visitor, lies one of the greatest anti-colonial struggles of the third world. When Haiti won independence from France in 1804, it was the first colony of the modern world to win freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
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Last week this column had posited that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was the culmination of a long series of failures by the Pakistani ruling class to manage the contradictions inherent in a State based on strong landed property with a weak industrial base. The column argued that such conditions created a predilection for the use of brute repression (the strategy of the stick) to deal with popular demands and undermined the possibility of democratic institutions gaining ground. The column further argued that this predilection was conditioned by the structural limitations that landholding imposes on the political strategy that a ruling class can adopt vis-à-vis the demands of the masses.
These structural limitations are the falling rate of return on primary products in global trade and the physical difficulty of dividing landed wealth among new aspirants to the ruling class. Read the rest of this entry »
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Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is perhaps as significant a turning point in the history of Pakistan as was the assassination of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali. In a sense these three killings form three significant watersheds in the political history of Pakistan and each represent the culmination of the failure of the country’s ruling class to successfully manage the contradictions of their time. What is particularly significant is that each assassination, built as it was on the failure of the previous attempt to overcome contradictions, has been more calamitous for the country than the previous one. Today, in the opinion of this columnist, it’s a situation of do or die for Pakistan as a nation and its citizens as a people. Read the rest of this entry »
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By the beginning of the 20th century the world had been divided into colonies. The Western Hemisphere was a colony of the USA while Africa and Asia were divided between Britain, France and Russia. As the new industrial power – Germany – emerged on the foundations of Bismarckian rule, it found itself bereft of colonies to plunder for its growing industrial appetite. This laid the foundation for the first global war or World War I in 1914. Germany had formed a military alliance with Austria-Hungary and the Turkish empire while the older colonialists – Britain, France and Russia – formed the rival bloc.
When open hostilities finally broke out in 1914, each side hoped to win a decisive victory over its opponents which would provide the victors with the colonies and territories of the defeated powers as trophy. Fired by the most brazen national chauvinisms, people in each country rose up to fight for what was drummed up as their national rights and hundreds of thousands of young men marched happily to their death in the name of national glory. Read the rest of this entry »
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On the morning of September 11, 1973, a little before 9:00 am, US-manufactured air force planes attacked the presidential palace of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. This was part of the CIA-sponsored coup d’état led by the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. In the face of a massive attack using tanks, infantry and air force planes, Salvador Allende refused to surrender or run away, defending the presidential palace and Chilean democracy with a gun in his hand. Surrounded and with no chance of defeating the enemy, Allende preferred death rather than be taken prisoner by the usurper generals in the pay of US imperialism. Read the rest of this entry »
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This is the time for all columnists to hold forth on the achievements and shortcomings of six decades of our independence. Hundreds of thousands of trees have been sacrificed to produce the newsprint needed to print long column inches to celebrate the independence of our nations from colonialism. Much has been written about what has been good and what has been bad in the past 60 years of our independent republics’ existence; of whether the defining word for 1947 is independence or partition; of whether in the final analysis these 60 years have been a success or a failure; of who our villains and heroes have been.
So can this columnist save himself from the temptation to jump into the ring with his own list of high and lows? Perhaps I can, and I will do this by arguing for the necessity of the death of the nation in the era of the success of globalisation. Read the rest of this entry »
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We are all pirates today! Specially those of us who live in what is called the Third World. One would be hard pressed to find a person who has not bought an “illegal” copy of either music, films, books or software. But these are only those who can afford the luxury of both surplus income to spend on entertainment and the luxury of surplus time to partake of leisure. Even the poorest of the poor would have sustained “piracy” when they bought medicines which infringed patents drawn in the First World or similarly, bought seeds to cultivate their half acre plot. Read the rest of this entry »
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Assertion of caste identity has increasingly become the favoured mode of agitation for rights by the working people of India. In fact, there has been no significant class based agitation of the working people since the first half of the 1970s. This shift has been paralleled by the retreat of the Left led mass agitations as well as the retreat of the Left organisational growth into its governmental enclaves of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. This is not to deny the existence of various left led movements in various parts of the country, some of them successful too, but none of these have been able to leave a lasting impact either on long term State policy, nor on political correlations. Read the rest of this entry »
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One of the central insights of Marxism is that it demonstrated the incompatibility of interests between those who own property and those who are property-less. The former are called Bourgeois while the latter are the Proletariat. The former is numerically small but controls large amounts of capital and property, while the large mass of property-less workers have no means of survival, other than to sell their labour power to the propertied. The workers, typically, own nothing of productive use but work on the machines owned by the capitalist and are paid a wage at the end of their labour. Without wage employment the workers would not survive. This necessity of selling their labour power to survive enslaves them to the capitalists, which explains the universal resonance of Marx’s famous exhortation, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains”. Read the rest of this entry »
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