POPULAR leftist icon Tariq Ali was speaking in Delhi this past week to
audiences of slum-dwellers, academics, factory workers and communist
leaders. He addressed an anti-imperialist rally in the company of
Prakash Karat, the CPI-M’s phlegmatic general secretary. He forcefully
spoke in his Punjabi-accented Urdu to a sizeable rally about the growing
resistance to American hegemony in Latin America, about the pivotal role
played by Cuba in creating an alternative political space right in the
backyard of the United States itself.
The audiences savoured his stories of the resistance under way in Latin
America. He recalled how Cuba had dispatched 14,000 doctors in one go to
Venezuela to set up people’s health infrastructures in the neighbouring
country and how Venezuela had made available its enormous oil resources
to Cuba and others in the region to sideline American domination of
their economies.
The story of an old Venezuelan woman was a tear-jerker. When the middle
class, nudged by Washington, appeared to be plotting against Chavez, and
the economy was sinking into a serious crisis, Chavez undertook a tour
of townships on the outskirts of Caracas. An old woman accosted the
president, took him to her small rundown house where she was cooking a
paltry meal.
“Chavez,” she told her president, “I have burnt my chairs for fuel,
tomorrow it would be the table. I have two or three wooden doors in the
house that would be enough fuel for the next several days. We’ll look
after ourselves, so that you don’t get deterred from your mission to
usher a new dawn for our people.”
The encounter gave the president some badly needed courage at a rare
time when he was feeling truly low, Ali said, quoting from his numerous
visits to Venezuela. The stories seemed so far away from South Asia’s
own completely different kind of engagement with the United States, and
yet the message was enticing enough to probe a salvage operation.
The opportunity came with one of Ali’s favourite ideas that came up at
an informal chat with students and teachers at Delhi University when he
dwelled on his dream of a South Asian union. This was perhaps the most
tricky part of his lecture tour not only because even Tariq Ali didn’t
seem to have a very clear answer to a student’s question: “How is your
concept of a South Asian union different from the idea of Akhand Bharat,
which the rightwing Hindus want?”
Tariq Ali tends to get impatient with those who come in the way of his
brilliant flourishes. On this occasion he managed to mumble something to
the effect that Muslims would be safe under such a union, which they
would be denied under Hindutva. But clearly the problem was more
complex. It was not just about exhorting the two biggest countries of
the region with an emotional appeal to pare down their defence budgets
so as to be able to spend more on education, health and other urgent
needs of their peoples.
The question that troubled his listeners really had more to do with the
fear of a union that didn’t in any basic way alter the picture for any
of the countries, much less for their people. Imagine a pact, as one
history lecturer observed at the end of Tariq Ali’s talk, with rightward
leaning governments of South Asia, all fighting their versions of
terrorism under American tutelage, would such a union not be tantamount
to a veritable axis? The nightmarish prospect was too disconcerting to
persist with the debate.
In other words, the fact that not much bonhomie exists in today’s
circumstances between the states of South Asia, should be seen with
considerable relief. For who would want Indian troops to be summoned to
help Pakistani garrisons in Balochistan, or who would welcome Pakistani
commandoes taking potshots at Naxalite insurgents in the heartland of
India? Or who would want both the countries joining hands to bail out
the authoritarian monarch of Nepal, as they seem so eager to do, in a
bloody anti-Maoist operation?
So basically, any idea of a confederation of South Asian countries is
viable if the member states first become reasonably agreeable
democracies. At this point someone mentioned Arundhati Roy’s idea of a
parallel parliament for India, which could be replicated at a South
Asian level.
Roy had first presented the idea at a lecture in Aligarh in April 2004.
She had appealed to India’s grassroots workers, struggling across the
country, to unite. She had urged ‘single-issue’ resistance movements to
become more involved with each other’s issues. “Many non-violent
resistance movements fighting isolated, single-issue battles across the
country have realized that their kind of special interest politics which
had its time and place, is no longer enough. That they feel cornered and
ineffectual is not good enough reason to abandon non-violent resistance
as a strategy,” Roy declared.
In a way non-violent resistance had atrophied into feel-good political
theatre, which at its most successful offered a photo opportunity for
the media, and at its least successful, was simply ignored.
“The ‘Ngo’isation of civil society initiatives is taking us in exactly
the opposite direction. It’s de-politicising us, making us dependent on
aid and handouts. We need to re-imagine the meaning of civil
disobedience,” Roy had appealed.
“Perhaps we need an elected shadow parliament outside the Lok Sabha,
without whose support and affirmation parliament cannot easily function.
A shadow parliament that keeps up an underground drumbeat, that shares
intelligence and information (all of which is increasingly unavailable
in the mainstream media).
“Fearlessly, but non-violently we must disable the working parts of this
machine that is consuming us.” It is this parliament that could
replicate itself in other countries of South Asia and then strike a bond
with each other at the grassroots. Tariq Ali’s dream may yet be
fulfilled. Roy was there to listen to him last week. Now it’s his turn
to listen to her.