anti-caste

MIGRANT WORKERS FROM OTHER PARTS OF INDIA FACE EXPLOITATION, OPPRESSION

Come south, young man, but here be dragons by Madhumita Dutta (The Hindu)

“Tamil Nadu has more than 10 lakh migrants, doing jobs that local workers shun because of poor pay and dangerous working conditions, but they are easy targets of prejudices against ‘north Indians’. [...]

“Hailing from Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and even Nepal, these men come to work on private and government construction sites, in small engineering ancillary units, steel rolling mills, lathe, hosieries, foundries, in roadside eateries as well as fancy city restaurants, as security guards and even as farmhands. [...]

“Most of the migrant workers in the State land up through informal arrangements orchestrated by multiple contractors and sub-contractors. Munniraj, a Dalit labour contractor in Hosur, has 650 Bihari workers whom he supplies to the various small-scale engineering units in the industrial area. The workers, who earn anywhere between Rs.3,500-Rs.4,000 per month, give him 10 per cent of their wages, which works out roughly to Rs.2 lakh a month. [...]

“‘I left my job in a food company in Delhi three months back and came here. They used to make me work for 16 hours a day and paid Rs.5,000. Here I have better pay for less number of hours of work. But I don't want to stay here. I feel insecure. Police has made our lives miserable,’ said Nandlal from Gaya who sends his family of six Rs.4,000 every month. As if waiting for a cue, Manas, who had so far not said anything about the police harassment, said: ‘I am too scared to step out of the house after seven p.m., the police patrol stops us and asks for ID proof, and if you don't have one you are taken to the police station for enquiry’. After the bank robbery last month, police have been visiting the slums where large migrant populations live and asking the ‘north Indians' to show their IDs or proof of employment. ‘Where will these migrant people get any proof of employment or any ID for that matter?’ asked Geeta Ramakrishnan of Unorganised Workers' Union. [...]

“The interstate migrant is a much-reviled figure, often unjustly so. Ghettoised and insecure, and lacking any legal or social protection, the interstate migrant workers become easy targets for the state, administration, overzealous nationalist forces and, more worrisome, the local working class.”

IMPORTANT NEW ARTICLES IN THE THEORETICAL JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST LEAGUE (4TH INTERNATIONALIST)

Edmund Samarakkody and the Legacy of the Ceylonese LSSP:
The Fight for Trotskyism in South Asia
(Spartacist English edition No. 62):

“Our relations with the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP) of Edmund Samarakkody in the 1970s constitute a significant chapter in that difficult, long and uneven struggle. By the time of his death in January 1992, Samarakkody’s revolutionary days were well behind him. But at one time, this founding member of the Ceylonese Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) represented a rare breed: a militant won to Trotskyism in the late 1930s who had not been utterly compromised and corrupted by homegrown popular-frontism or by the revisionist current of Michel Pablo, which had destroyed the Fourth International in 1951-53. In outlining the prospects for revolutionary regroupment, the 1974 declaration of the international Spartacist tendency, now the International Communist League, took particular note of Samarakkody’s RWP as having ‘emerged with integrity from the welter of betrayals perpetrated by the old LSSP’ and abetted by the Pabloite United Secretariat (USec) of Ernest Mandel and the craven ‘International Committee’ (IC) of Gerry Healy (ibid.).”

1960 Letter by James Robertson to SWP Political Committee:
No to Public Silence on LSSP Betrayal (August 8, 1960):

“Dear Comrades, I am addressing you on the matter of our party’s public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party’s entry into a ‘Popular Front’ electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.”

M.N. Roy: Nationalist Menshevik
Spartacist English edition No. 62:

“Ervin’s treatment of this pseudo-Marxist adventurer, who figured prominently in the Bukharinite Right Opposition from its inception in 1928, is a piece of philistine idolatry fully in line with bourgeois academic studies of Indian Communism, in which Roy is far from neglected. What distinguishes Roy, and makes him attractive to such types, is that he embodied the revisionist endeavour of trying to blend Communism and nationalism. In pursuit of this effort, Roy became a vulgar democrat who pushed the bourgeois ideology of nationalism, albeit with some Communist colouration, making him an opponent of the fight for a Leninist vanguard party based on proletarian internationalism.”

IN INDIA’S PRISON-HOUSE OF NATIONS, MARATHI CHAUVINISM AND ANTI-TAMIL OPPRESSION

India’s Many Tongues (The Diplomat)

“In November last year, newly-elected Maharashtra state legislator Abu Azmi was assaulted by members of the right-wing Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) for insisting on taking his oath in Hindi. MNS chief Raj Thackeray, the now-estranged nephew of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, had earlier written to all 288 state legislators of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, urging them to take their oath in Marathi. Azmi was slapped, pushed and punched by MNS politicians when he rose to take his oath in Hindi—hooliganism in the country’s high offices that was broadcast live on TV for the nation to see.

“The incident followed the controversy a few weeks earlier that erupted after a request by the first-time Member of Parliament from southern Tamil Nadu state, Union Minister of Chemicals and Fertilisers M. K. Azhagiri, to speak in his mother tongue in the Lok Sabha (the Indian Parliament’s elected house) was turned down. Tamil speakers were outraged, arguing the speech could easily have been translated into Hindi and English for the rest of the House. They also claimed the decision violated their rights and was an insult to Tamil, which they see as much a national language as Hindi.

“The Tamil-Hindi tussle has a long history. Over the decades, many non-Hindi speaking states have opposed the imposition of Hindi nationwide. However, southern Tamil Nadu’s resistance has always been the most sustained and most vociferous, while anti-Hindi campaigns in Tamil Nadu saw mass mobilisation both before and after India’s independence was secured in 1947.

“Although seemingly omnipresent, in part due to its cultural reach through Bollywood (the Hindi film industry), Hindi is not actually a national language. According to the 2001 census, Hindi and its various dialects are spoken by about 422 million people or just over 41 percent of the national population.

“India has no legally-defined national language, and although Article 343 of the Constitution declares Hindi and English to be the official languages of the union of India, to be used for administrative, judicial and legislative business in Parliament and other central bodies, there are 18 official languages that states can use to conduct their intra-state affairs.”

See also:

Navigating India's language wars (Daily Times (Pakistan), April 26, 2010):

“India’s 1961 census recognised 1,652 languages and dialects, while the 2001 version broke it down into a slightly more manageable roster of 29 that are spoken by a million or more people, and 122 that have more than 10,000 native speakers.

“At the time of independence, the constitution recognised 14 official languages, but the growth of regional politics soon resulted in a flood of demands for further additions.

“Sindhi was added in 1967, three others in 1992 and four more in 2004 to make up the current total of 22, and the Home Ministry is currently considering 38 new requests for inclusion.”

And see:

Attacks by Chauvinists Continue Against the Use of Name Bombay (Communalism Watch, March 12, 2010):

“The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), a 126-year-old landmark institution that has undertaken pioneering wildlife conservation and research in the country, on Thursday became the latest victim of the campaign for the Marathification of Mumbai being undertaken by the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena.

“Around 50 Shiv Sainiks marched into the premises and, using hammers and a chisel, vandalised the society's sign by taking off the ‘B’ from ‘Bombay’ in the name. They then put a ‘Mumbai’ over the ‘Bombay’ in the Devanagari part of the sign and erected a banner proclaiming the organisation as the 'Mumbai Natural History Society' in Devanagari.”

IS URDU A MUSLIM LANGUAGE?

Myths about Urdu by Dr Tariq Rahman (Dawn (Pakistan))

"[On the myth that Urdu is a Muslim language:] For about 500 years of its existence nobody called it Urdu. It was called Hindi and had many words of Sanskrit origin as do other texts—until the 18th century.

"Then a language reform movement initiated by Muslim poets (Hatim, Mirza Mazhar, Nasikh’s students, etc.) threw out certain words from the corpus of the language. Among them were words like chinta (worry), prem (love), sundar (beautiful), etc. The movement was actually an attempt to create a linguistic marker for the cultural elite which was mostly Muslim. However, instead of being merely a class movement it became a religious one. Thus, Urdu was imbued with distinctive Perso-Arabic cultural content and served as an identity symbol for the Muslims of India.

"In the same way, after 1802, modern Hindi was created by weeding out Persian and Arabic words and using only the Devanagari script for writing. These new languages—Sanskritised Hindi and Persianised Urdu—drifted apart from each other and still serve as identity markers for Hindu and Muslim nationalism in South Asia.

"During the Pakistan Movement, Urdu became a symbol of the identity of South Asia’s Muslims. It was invested with emotional force and Maulvi Abdul Haq, who used to term it a composite language while in India, started calling it the mainstay of Muslim separatism.

"Similarly, Sanskritised Hindi became the symbol of the attempt to eliminate the share of Muslims in Indian culture. This political gulf between the two sister languages remains to this day—although at the spoken level, Urdu and Hindi remain the same language as all Indians who watch Pakistani dramas and all Pakistanis who watch Hindi movies will testify."