স্বাভিমান:SWABHIMAN

A World Bank report states – “ the number of malnourished people with a record rise of 44 million  in the year 2008, is estimated to be total 967 million. The number of most hungry people is 1.4 billion and that of hungry people is another 3 billion. The hungry people in India, that claims to be largely free from the impact of global economic crisis, is 200 million. The situation of hungry people in the so called developed states of India are worse than Sub-Saharan Africa.” These are the official figures. The real situation is more horrifying than the official figures reveal. These figures are rising rapidly with every passing time. Thousands of working people are losing their jobs regularly. The factory shutters are getting down one after another. The unemployment rate and the number of unemployed are increasing leaps & bounds. The common toiling masses, the people of backward communities and countries, since long, have been facing the brunt of this crisis of the system in this way in their own lives. In the case of recent American Sub-Prime crisis also, the backward Afro-American, Hispanics in the American society have slided down further in socio-economic ladder. Those people, who do not have own roofs over their heads, also availed the sub-prime loan with a desire to have their own home.

Written and published in newspaper/magazine in the last part of  2008

Globalisation or Biswayan or Bhubonayan in local parlance are the words which are very familiar nowadays. According to some commentators there is nothing new in it as globalisation of capital is ingrained in capitalism. But as the present phase is new, there are some new features. Amongst these features, a radical structural change in the finance capital is one of most striking features. The deregulation of capital is the buzz-word in this phase of globalization process beginning from the eighties. The use of new instruments in financial market has created the scope for a handful of financial institutions to extract profit to the range of million-trillion dollars. This trade which is dependent on market sentiment has already gone beyond the control of any kind of existing regulatory mechanism. In the face of the growth of this trade in meteoric speed, global regulatory institution like IMF too is facing difficulties. This capital is not being directed towards productive investment. The players from underdeveloped or developing countries are not noteworthy stake-holder in this trade. The liberalized economy and the policy of taking more foreign debt for servicing outstanding debt will result in havoc in the economy of those countries in case of any dwindle or collapse in the global financial system. Profit and more profit, and for that no long-term productive investment but to make investment for quick instantaneous profit is rule of the day. Enormous growth of this quick profit market has already made the market volatile. The imbalances in the financial market may result in the situation like cyclonic storm to crash the market and formant deeper crisis in the already imbalanced global economy. Prior to analysing this situation in detail, let us see what the new financial instruments are and how they are operated.

21st July, 1986. On that day, the Assam Police had heavily come down on the agitators demanding withdrawal of SEBA CIRCULAR by which Assamese was imposed on all other linguistic groups. The police fired indiscriminately on the demonstrators mobilized in front of Karimganj Circuit house where the then Chief Minister was stationed and thereby killing two youths on the spot and injuring many. Thereafter, the reign of terror was let loose through the inhuman police atrocities to contain the people’s wrath against the police administration in particular and the power-that-be in general. Many linguistic groups of Assam was aggrieved and agitated and all were being coalesced into a common platform to fight against this chauvinist approach and the poignant situation was embroiled and pregnant with a bigger struggle. The ruling class retreated and the circular was shelved for the time being.

 The aggressive manifestation of chauvinism of Assamese ruling class was not new, it was a repetition of earlier such episode and most sordid one was 19^th may, 1961 when eleven youths were martyred by the bullet of Assam Police. This repetition of the same phenomena of aggressive chauvinism countered by people’s fury to scale down to soft chauvinism makes someone skeptical. Why those language movements of Barak Valley could not come out of the vicious cycle of action-reaction paradigm? Why those people’s movement could not rise above the transitory issues and strike the root of this Chauvinism to settle it once for all? Why undemocratic socio-economic structure could not be challenged adequately?      

There are many such questions and different answers in the minds of concerned people. Let there be a vigorous interaction which may culminate into a solution with path breaking insight & people’s activism. With this intention, few write-ups to be published in the “AMADER SAMAKAL, a vernacular magazine from Silchar, Cachar, Assam”  are posted in the SWABHIMAN website/blog. The visitors of this site/blog are invited to spell out their mind directly or to mail their write-up to swabhiman’s e-mail id.  

 written by : Arup Baisya; getting published on PRAGYAN

                   The title of this write-up has been borrowed from the book of Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, the doyen and the great thinker of modern Indian philosophy. In his book he commented, “With the progress of science becoming ever more spectacular, the forces wanting to frustrate its basic aspiration – maiming it and mutilating it – are becoming all the more menacing. This tends to perplex the scientific community itself. Absorbed as the scientists are in their detailed research they feel bewildered. Why for example should so much of scientific knowledge threaten the world with an impending doom, with no more of any scope for science itself?”1  Here comes the question of ideology. The scientific knowledge bereft of a constructive ideological commitment may cause havoc. Everything that is solid melts into the air under the modern technological era and in that case the ideology having no well defined continuum is something airy and cannot be grasped and cherished by the people. If that is so, the human civilization is destined to doom. But that is not the case. Humanity always clasped an ideology. The plain truth is that everything is ‘soaked in ideology’ whether we realize it or not. Istvan Meszaros in his book ‘Power Of Ideology’ pointed out, “to believe that one can get rid of ideology in our contemporary world  - or indeed in the foreseeable future – is no more realistic than the idea of Marx’s ‘valiant fellow’ who thought that men were drowned in water because they were possessed with the idea of gravity.”2 He rightly opined that the Ideologies are epochally circumscribed in twofold sense. First, in that the conflictual orientation of the various forms of practical social consciousness remains their prominent features for as long as societies are divided into classes. And second, that the specific character of the fundamental social conflict which leaves the indelible mark on the contending ideologies in different historical periods arises from the epochally – not on a short-term basis – changing character of society’s productive and distributive practices and from the corresponding need to subject to radical questioning of the continued imposition of the formerly viable mode of socioeconomic and cultural intercourse as it becomes increasingly undermined in the course historical development.3