Karunanidhi’s Nandigram

Fearing displacement of about 20,000 people across 10 panchayats, villagers unite in two districts of Tamil Nadu against a Tata group project

Another Nandigram is in the making in Tamil Nadu. In spite of vociferous protests against the Tata’s titanium dioxide plant to be situated at Sathankulam in Tuticorin district, the ruling party appears to be in favour of it. The mining area of the proposed project spreads across Tuticorin and Tirunelveli districts.
PROMISED LAND: proposed Tata project site:

This impression has gained ground notwithstanding Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi’s assurance that the final decision on the project would be taken only after consulting the affected people. But before the beginning of the consultation, it is alleged that DMK leaders are coercing presidents of the affected panchayats to support the project. Minister of State for Home Radhika Selvi is alleged to have met some of them in this regard.

Former Arasur panchayat president M. Jeyapandian — whose wife is the current president — said Selvi once visited his house late at night to discuss the project. “The minister said all other panchayat presidents had agreed to the project and I was the only one opposing it,” he told TEHELKA. He is determined to oppose the project, and contrary to the minister’s claim, he enjoys the support of other presidents as well. On August 3, eight of them along with the Sathankulam union chairman and 11 union councillors gave a representation to the Tuticorin distr ict collector opposing the project.

On June 28, the Tatas signed a memorandum of understanding (mou) with the state government for establishing the Rs 2,500-crore titanium dioxide project. The previous Jayalalithaa government had dropped the project due to people’s opposition. In a statement, Jayalalithaa said the project was dropped after it was found that it would affect the livelihood of people and pollute the environment.

REBELLIOUS: Villagers protest at Sathankulam
Documents available with TEHELKA say top officials of Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Tuticorin districts, during the previous regime, had given their opinion against the project. TEHELKA also has a copy of the Tuticorin district collector’s letter to a senior industries official in which he warned of serious law and order problem if the land is acquired. Even the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (tnpcb) had opposed it. tnpcb Member Secretary Dr T. Sekar, in a letter dated January 17, 2006 to the Tirunelveli collector, said “The mining proposed by the Tata Iron and Steel Company Limited…for a depth of 6 metres will affect trees, vegetation cover and permanent features of the area.” Sources said the company had applied for permission to mine at depths from 6.9 m to 8.3 m.

There is also a hitch in acquiring the patta land for the project. It is pointed out that there is no provision in the Mines and Minerals Act-1957, the Mineral Concession Rules-1960 and the Land Acquisition Act-1894 for acquiring mineral-bearing patta lands. The project requires a whopping 16,000 acres of land — about 70 sq km — spread over nearly 10 panchayats. According to estimates, it would displace nearly 20,000 people.

In a 10-page letter dated September 26, 2006 to the director, department of geology and mining, the Tuticorin district collector listed out a number of negative impacts of the project and recalled the earlier findings that the project would adversely affect the livelihood of farmers. “It’s not fair on the part of the government to acquire our land. We will oppose the move. We are prepared to face any consequence,” said AVK Balasubramaniam, a farmer at Vijayaramapuram in Thatchamozhi village. He scoffed at the promise of employment to the locals. “What employment did they provide to the people of Koodankulam who gave their land for the atomic power plant? Should we sell our land and work as labourers in the Tata company?” he asked.V. Gurusamy of the Arasur village adds, “They say the Tata project would give jobs to thousand people. But agriculture can produce more jobs.” The villagers have formed ‘land protection committees’ to safeguard their interests.

The region is generally dry and arid but the area earmarked for the project is quite green. There are several coconut, mango and palmyra groves. “Drumstick produced here is exported to the Arab countries,” said PP Sakthivel, a farmer in Poovudayarpuram. “If the government wants to acquire our land, Tamil Nadu will witness another Nandigram,” he said.

Many DMK members in Prakasapuram area are also opposing the project. K. Rajapandian, organiser of the DMK’s farmers’ wing, is upset over the developments. “Three-fourth of the land which is to be acquired is under cultivation,” he said.

According to the Tatas, the potential of farming in the area is limited due to the non-availability of water and the sandy nature of the soil. The company claims that only less than 5 percent of the land required for the project is wetland. S. Asokan, executive in-charge, Tata’s titanium project, said: “We believe that, by consultation, we will be able to win the support of the people. We have clearly said that the land will be acquired based on the price arrived at mutually by the government and the landowners in consultation with us.”
Few favour the project, and they do not own any land there. K. Senthil of Pudukapathu, a labourer, said he welcomes the project as it would generate more employment. But prominent political parties including the AIADMK, MDMK, CPI and PMK are opposed to the project. Since the Nadars are the dominant community in the region, various Nadar outfits have pledged their support to the stir.

The government has constituted a committee comprising Mines & Minerals Minister K. Ponmudy, Tourism Minister Suresh Rajan, Animal Husbandry Minister Geetha Jeevan and three officials — the revenue secretary, the industries secretary and the minerals commissioner — to study the situation. But on August 1, Selvi and two DMK MLAs took out a procession in support of the project in Tirunelveli. Speaking to TEHELKA, Selvi said: “All the industries were set up in the northern districts. So, there was no development in the southern part. A project like this would change the scenario.”
Source: PC Vinoj KumarTuticorin/Tirunelveli www.Tehelka.com

‘Kalbela’, Naxalbari and Radical Political Cinema

Gautam Ghose’s Kalbela is a film set against the background of the Naxalite movement. Based on a 1980s novel by Samaresh Majumdar, the film sets itself up, quite self-consciously, within a certain tradition of films, namely radical political Bengali cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. It thus establishes an intertextuality and a certain connection with them.

The casting sequences take us through a rapid tour of some of the more emblematic moments of that cinema and that time:

• The shot from Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 of the young man on the run jumping off a wall, running through the lanes, pursued by the police and finally shot in an open field. You can almost hear Akashvani’s signature tune as it begins its news bulletin to announce the discovery of yet another anonymous dead body in those troubled times.

You are barely through with it and in quick succession you see two, now somewhat iconic, scenes representing the 1970s angry young Bengal:

• Ranjit Mallik in the final sequence of Interview, flinging a stone to break open the showcase of a shop. He would denude the mannequin and remove the suit it is wearing, and take it for his interview the next day. It is a stylized ‘trial’ of this character for the offence of disrobing the mannequin that becomes the opening sequence of Sen’s ‘Chorus’.
• The other sequence is also equally iconic: Dhritiman Chatterjee ‘turning the tables’, literally, as it were, on his interviewers. This is a sequence from Ray’s Pratidwandi. Satyajit Ray, who has all too often been accused of ‘evading politics’, however captures, in this sequence, an important mood of rebellion that marked the 1970s.

By situating itself and the story it has to tell, within this matrix of the 1970s radical Bengali cinema, Ghose anchors the film squarely within its time, within that time. The mood and the events certainly, but even the way these black and white shots are used, underlines a somewhat documentary – and thus temporally limited – character of the way these sequences are put to use.

And yet, the making of the film in 2007 must say something more. Based on a novel published about twenty years ago (itself at two decades remove from the event of Naxalbari), could its filmic rendering forty years after the event be read as a comment on ‘our time’?Amar joubane dekha Kolkata onek palte gechhe” ["the Calcutta of my youth has changed a lot now"] from the background in Animesh’s [the male protagonist] voice, as you are taken over one of the many flyovers that mark the 2000s Kolkata skyline would have you guessing as to the meaning of this change. The quiet Kolkata of the 2000s – the Kolkata of flyovers and New Townships, Aqua Villages – all dressed up to invite or welcome ‘Capital’ which it once drove away? The cryptic “

Some of the film’s limitations in fact stem from this desire to anchor the film in a particular time such that we neither have the advantage of looking at the subject [the Naxalite movement] with any serious degree of criticality nor indeed the possibilities of playing with the layered temporalities that can appear through the mere retelling of the tale/s over time (the Event, the Novel and the Film, separated by almost two decades from each other). How is the Event actually recalled in popular memory? How does it appear not just to the actual participants but to those around them – and what is it of that period that is recalled in the present conjuncture: All these remain unexplored in the film. It is as though even the reference to the earlier films – including Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta trilogy – is merely to index a ‘reality’ in the manner of a document.

The period since the first eruption of the Event (the Spring Thunder in Radio Peking’s celebrated but highly exaggerated description) to the period of the film has seen what might be called an epochal shift in terms of what we might properly describe as ‘radical’. The large ideological emancipatory narratives that set the terms of discourse then stand displaced by what we could call a situated radicalism, an instance of which we could see irrupting within the filmic text despite the intention of the author-director, in the person of the female protagonist. However, that remains, at best, an irruption – the main text remaining firmly within a largely orthodox representation of the radical.

At the manifest level, Kalbela is a film set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement, its rise and eventual fall, as it degenerates into a spiral of violence that will eventually consume its own members. Once the movement reaches this phase, the speed of events and their logic leaves little room for self-doubt and reflection. The moments of doubt that arise in Animesh’s mind over the killing of the rapist-landlord, for example, are rapidly subsumed by the force of events that eventually land him in jail. The movement is, in a sense, merely the background to what is a story of relationships and especially one relationship of love. And yet, somehow it is the movement that repeatedly moves to the foreground, so much so that we barely manage to see the unfolding of complications in the relationships. There are glimpses and we are often left to infer the rest.

On the other hand, if the film were to be read as a film whose central subject is the Naxalite movement, then it does leave us with a sense of wanting a more self-reflexive account, a deeper contemplation on the pitfalls of the form and methods it finally adopted. A relevant comparison here could be made with Mrinal Sen’s Padatik and the far greater critical reflection by the protagonist Dhritiman: Recall his comment “Joley koomir aar daangaey baagh” (The water is infested with crocodiles and the banks are full of tigers). That was a militant on the run, hiding from the police (the tigers on the bank) but equally suspected by his own party men (the crocodiles). The predicament of the individual caught in the vortex of violence and mutual suspicion that inevitably accompanies such secret underground movements, often romanticized as an episode in an inevitable World Historical Drama, one would imagine calls for much greater reflection today than was possible earlier.

This is an imperative today, especially since, over the last few decades, feminist critiques have unveiled before us the inherently masculinist/militarist nature of such an enterprise. The Dalit critique of such radicalism has underlined the very deep connections of this radicalism with a disaffected but elite, upper caste youth. The critique of violence today has acquired dimensions that far exceed the old Gandhian critique that was conducted in the name of a moral Self. While it shares some ground with the Gandhian critique, the feminist critique also forces us to consider violence as being grounded in an inherently male notion of world domination or mastery. The work of scholars like Susie Tharu has put iconic movements and struggles like the Telengana peasants struggle and the Naxalbari movement itself under the scanner. What would happen in that case, if the film were to be seen – not through Animesh’s eyes but through the ‘displaced’ gaze of the female protagonist, Madhabilata? [That caste remains a non-question is in itself interesting, as we never countenance in bhadralok Bengal the figure of the Dalit even in the peripheries of the movement, unlike say in Andhra and Bihar, where it becomes central to a critique of the movement. And what do we make of the fact that in a state with over 25 percent Muslims, the only Muslim name that is associated with the movement in that period is that of Azizul Haq?]

Quite unexpectedly, however, the film does provide us with a different vantage point of a female if not a feminist voice. This voice does not come to us from within the movement but in fact entirely outside it. One is forced to pause for a moment and linger over the characters of Neela and Madhabilata: Powerful, resolute and prepared to face the consequences of their decisions.

These are new female characters, not quite available to the radical political cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Even though Madhabilata is not quite as important a character as she could have been, she is nonetheless a woman, one is tempted to say, who belongs to the 1990s, to this time: a woman who makes love and bears a child out of wedlock and disregards her friend Neela’s suggestion of aborting it, thus taking on every possible challenge involved in being a single, unwed mother. Undoubtedly, this kind of a female figure can be excavated from earlier literatures too, but there is something interesting, significant and very contemporary about these women (Neela included), who stand in stark contrast to the female characters of the 1970s.

Madhabilata’s strength of conviction and her values do not come from any synthetic ideology but out of something else – of her immersion, her being-in-the-world, and thus of knowing where and how much the limits of the possible can be pushed. Her values and her decisions are determined not by any external criteria but through situations; by the creation or precipitation of situations, unavoidably arising in the flow of daily life. Madhabilata is, to start with, very conventional and unapologetically apolitical but one who is repeatedly confronted with the task of taking a decision in critical phases of her life. She does not choose the most conventional path – from falling in love with a man who is involved in a politics that she does not, in the first instance, care for to bearing a child as an unwed mother. She is aware, for instance, that these situations can tip over and lead her to abandon her parental house without even the benefit of any assurance from Animesh. (All she has is Neela’s unstinted support who has herself walked out her parental house). Hers is a situated radicalism that does not bear the name ‘radical’. But this is how the ordinary person – as opposed to the ‘heroic’ vanguard – is radical: contextually and complicitously, that is to say, often without drawing a permanent line of impermeability in relation to power. That is what makes possible the existence of ambiguous spaces where the opposition to the oppressor thrives. The revolutionary remains a guest visitor to these spaces, so important for the success of his or her project.

Animesh too is faced with such a situation: falling in love with a woman who confronts him with the most ordinary and aggressively nonpolitical concerns while he is inexorably being drawn towards the most extreme wings of the movement. He can resist neither. But unlike Madhabilata, he is unable to take full responsibility for his decisions and must sacrifice the personal to some abstract ‘world-historical’ responsibility, leaving Madhabilata to fend for herself. The Agent of History, Animesh, is completely devoid of all agency where personal relationships are concerned. This is not a predicament, to be sure, of activists of the Naxalite movement alone but in fact, of all political movements and an investigation of these predicaments that may help us to raise some of the most important philosophical questions of our time/s.

[Based on a presentation at a panel discussion on 'radical political cinema' at the Osian's Cinefan Festival]

http://www.kafila.org