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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/49-general-strike-india/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/49-general-strike-india/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">We Are Grass. We Grow on Everything: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2020).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">December 3, 2020 - Vijay Prashad<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_32608" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/KruttikaSusarla-All-India-Farmers-Protest-2020-1.jpg" alt="Kruttika, Susarla, All India Farmers Protest, 2020" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="440" height="415"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-32608" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Kruttika Susarla (India), <i>All India Farmers Protest</i>, 2020</span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>Farmers and agricultural workers from northern India marched along
various national highways toward India’s capital of New Delhi as part of
the general strike on 26 November. They carried placards with slogans
against the anti-farmer, pro-corporate laws that were <a href="https://mronline.org/2020/11/03/how-indias-modi-is-changing-laws-to-help-imperialists-dominate-the-countrys-agriculture/">passed</a>
by India’s Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) in September, and then
pushed through the Rajya Sabha (upper house) with only a voice vote.
The striking agricultural workers and farmers carried flags that
indicated their affiliation with a range of organisations, from the
communist movement to a broad front of farmers’ organisations. They
marched against the privatisation of agriculture, which they argue
undermines India’s food sovereignty and erodes their ability to remain
agriculturalists.</p>
<p>Roughly two-thirds of India’s workforce derives its income from
agriculture, which contributes to roughly 18% of India’s gross domestic
product (GDP). The three anti-farmer bills passed in September undermine
the minimum support price buying schemes of the government, put 85% of
the farmers who own less than 2 hectares of land at the mercy of
bargaining with monopoly wholesalers, and will lead to the destruction
of a system that has till now maintained agricultural production despite
erratic prices for food produce. One hundred and fifty farmer
organisations came together for their march on New Delhi. They pledge to
stay in the city indefinitely.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_32543" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Aswath-Lenin-met-India-2020-1.jpg" alt="Aswath (India), Lenin met India, 2020" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="440" height="346"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-32543" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Aswath (India), <i>Lenin met India</i>, 2020</span></p></div>
<p>Around 250 million people across India <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/27/250-million-people-participate-in-nationwide-strike-in-india/">joined</a>
the general strike on 26 November, making it the largest strike in
world history. If those who struck formed a country, it would be the
fifth largest in the world after China, India, the United States, and
Indonesia. Industrial belts across India – from Telangana to Uttar
Pradesh – came to a halt, as workers in the ports from the Jawaharlal
Nehru Port (Maharashtra) to the Paradip Port (Odisha) stopped work.
Coal, iron ore, and steel workers put down their tools, while trains and
buses stood idle. Informal sector workers joined in, and so did health
care workers and bank employees. They struck in opposition to labour
laws that extend the working day to twelve hours and strike down labour
protections for 70% of the workforce. Tapan Sen, the general secretary
of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, <a href="http://citucentre.org/694-salutes-to-the-toiling-masses-on-the-warpath-congratulations-for-massive-general-strike-on-26th-november-2020">said</a>, ‘The strike today is only a beginning. Much more intense struggles will follow’.</p>
<p>The pandemic has deepened the crisis of the Indian working class and
peasantry, including the richer farmers. Despite the dangers of the
pandemic, out of a great sense of desperation, workers and peasants
gathered in public spaces to tell the government that they had lost
confidence in them. The film actor Deep Sindhu joined the protest, where
he <a href="https://theprint.in/india/english-speaking-protester-in-viral-farmer-protest-video-is-punjabi-actor-deep-sidhu/553937/">told</a> a police officer, ‘<i>Ye inquilab hai</i>. This is a revolution. If you take away farmers’ land, then what do they have left? Only debt’.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_32627" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Nehal-Ahmed-India-Cold-Nights-High-Spirits.-Farmers-from-Punjab-who-have-joined-the-movement-against-the-farm-laws-passed-by-the-Modi-government.-Delhi-Haryana-border-at-Singhu-November-2020.jpg" alt="Nehal Ahmed (India), Cold Nights, High Spirits. Farmers from Punjab who have joined the movement against the farm laws passed by the Modi government. Delhi-Haryana border at Singhu, India, November 2020." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="330" height="440"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-32627" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Nehal Ahmed (India), <i>Cold Nights, High Spirits.</i> Farmers
from Punjab who have joined the movement against the farm laws passed
by the Modi government. Delhi-Haryana border at Singhu, India, November
2020.</span></p></div>
<p>Along the rim of New Delhi, the government positioned police forces,
barricaded the highways, and prepared for a full-scale confrontation. As
the long columns of farmers and agricultural workers approached the
barricades and appealed to their brethren who had set aside the clothes
of farmers and put on police uniforms, the authorities fired tear gas
and water cannons at the farmers and agricultural workers.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_32513" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Dharampal-Seel-senior-leader-of-the-All-India-Kisan-Sabha-from-Punjab-uses-his-Red-Flag-against-the-tear-gas-27-November-2020.-2-300x295.jpg" alt="Dharampal Seel, a senior Kisan Sabha leader from Punjab, uses his Red Flag to push a tear gas canister, 27 November 2020." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="300" height="295"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-32513" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Dharampal Seel, a senior Kisan Sabha leader from Punjab, uses his Red Flag to push a tear gas canister, 27 November 2020.</span></p></div>
<p>The day of the general strike of farmers and workers, 26 November, is
also Constitution Day in India, which marks a great feat of political
sovereignty. Article 19 of the Indian Constitution (1950) quite clearly
gives Indian citizens the right to ‘freedom of speech and expression’
(1.a), the right to ‘assembly peaceably and without arms’ (1.b), the
right to ‘form associations or unions’ (1.c), and the right ‘to move
freely throughout the territory of India’ (1.d). In case these articles
of the Constitution had been forgotten, the Indian Supreme Court
reminded the police in a 2012 court case (<i>Ramlila Maidan Incident vs. Home Secretary</i>)
that ‘Citizens have a fundamental right to assembly and peaceful
protest, which cannot be taken away by an arbitrary executive or
legislative action’. The police barricades, the use of tear gas, and the
use of water cannons – infused with the Israeli invention of yeast and
baking powder to induce a gagging reflex – violate the letter of the
Constitution, something that the farmers yelled to the police forces at
each of these confrontations. Despite the cold in northern India, the
police soaked the farmers with water and tear gas.</p>
<p>But this did not stop them, as brave young people jumped on the water
cannon trucks and turned off the water, farmers drove their tractors to
dismantle the barricades, and the working class and the peasantry
fought back against the class war imposed on them by the government. The
twelve-point <a href="http://www.citucentre.org/75-12-point-charter-of-demands">charter</a>
of demands put forward by the trade unions is sincere, having captured
the sentiments of the people. The demands include the reversal of the
anti-worker, anti-farmer laws pushed by the government in September, the
reversal of the privatisation of major government enterprises, and
immediate relief for the population, which is suffering from economic
hardship provoked by the coronavirus recession and years of neoliberal
policies. These are simple demands, humane and true; only the hardest
hearts turn away from them, responding instead with water cannons and
tear gas.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_32493" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Amrita-Sher-Gil-India-Resting-1939.-3.jpg" alt="Amrita Sher-Gil (India), Resting, 1939" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="380" height="440"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-32493" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Amrita Sher-Gil (India), <i>Resting</i>, 1939</span></p></div>
<p>These demands for immediate relief, for social protections for
workers, and for agricultural subsidies appeal to workers and peasants
around the world. It is demands such as these that provoked the recent
protests in <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/24/carlos-barrientos-there-is-rage-on-the-streets-of-guatemala/">Guatemala</a> and that led to the general strike on 26 November in <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/26/greek-working-class-unites-strikes-for-health-safety-and-rights-amid-covid-19/">Greece</a>.</p>
<p>We are now entering a period in this pandemic when more unrest is
possible as more people in countries with bourgeois governments get
increasingly fed up with the atrocious behaviour of their elites. Report
after report shows us that the social divides are getting more and more
extreme, a trend that began long before the pandemic but has grown
wider and deeper as a consequence of it. It is only natural for farmers
and agricultural workers to be agitated. A new <a href="https://www.landcoalition.org/en/uneven-ground/">report</a>
from the Land Inequality Initiative shows that only 1% of the world’s
farms operate more than 70% of the world’s farmland, meaning that
massive corporate farms dominate the corporate food system and endanger
the survival of the 2.5 billion people who rely upon agriculture for
their livelihood. Land inequality, when it considers landlessness and
land value, is highest in Latin America, South Asia, and parts of Africa
(with notable exceptions such as China and Vietnam, which have the
‘lowest levels of inequality’).</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/20201202_Pash-1.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="440" height="440"></p>
<p>A young man, Avtar Singh Sandhu (1950-1988), read Maxim Gorky’s <i>Mother</i>
(1906) in the early 1970s in Punjab, from where many of the farmers and
agricultural workers travelled to the barricades around New Delhi. He
was very moved by the relationship between Nilovna, a working-class
woman, and her son, Pavel, or Pasha. Pasha finds his feet in the
socialist movement, brings revolutionary books home, and, slowly, both
mother and son are radicalised. When Nilovna asks him about the idea of
solidarity, Pasha says, ‘The world is ours! The world is for the
workers! For us, there is no nation, no race. For us, there are only
comrades and foes’. This idea of solidarity and socialism, Pasha says,
‘warms us like the sun; it is the second sun in the heaven of justice,
and this heaven resides in the worker’s heart’. Together, Nilovna and
Pasha become revolutionaries. Bertolt Brecht retold this story in his
play <i>Mother</i> (1932).</p>
<p>Avtar Singh Sandhu was so inspired by the novel and the play that he took the name ‘Pash’ as his <i>takhallus</i>, his pen name. Pash became one of the most revolutionary poets of his time, murdered in 1988 by terrorists. <i>I am grass</i> is among the poems he left behind:</p>
<p><i>Bam fek do chahe vishwavidyalaya par</i><br>
<i>Banaa do hostel ko malbe kaa dher</i><br>
<i>Suhaagaa firaa do bhale hi hamari jhopriyon par</i><br>
<i>Mujhe kya karoge?</i><br>
<i>Main to ghaas hun, har chiz par ugg aauungaa.</i></p>
<p>If you wish, throw your bomb at the university.<br>
Reduce its hostel to a heap of rubble.<br>
Throw your white phosphorus on our slums.<br>
What will you do to me?<br>
I am grass. I grow on everything.</p>
<p>That’s what the farmers and the workers in India say to their elites,
and that is what working people say to elites in their own countries,
elites whose concern – even in the pandemic – is to protect their power,
their property, and their privileges. But we are grass. We grow on
everything.</p>
<p>In the next week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will
host two events with The People’s Forum. On 4 December, cultural workers
from Venezuela, South Africa, and China/Canada will discuss art making
for people’s struggles in times of CoronaShock. <span id="gmail-m_3725204535526172265gmail-docs-internal-guid-556cfdb1-7fff-22bd-ef29-3742e1c5597a">The discussion will highlight the <a href="https://antiimperialistweek.org/en/posters/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibition</a>;
the last of the four exhibitions launched today on the concept of the
hybrid war includes artwork from 37 artists from 18 countries across the
world. You can RSVP <a href="https://peoplesforum.org/event/coronashock-and-art/" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.</span></p>
<p>On 8 December, the feminisms working group of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research will discuss the recently launched study, <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-4-coronashock-and-patriarchy/"><i>CoronaShock and Patriarchy</i></a><i>,</i> and the gendered impact of the pandemic. You can RSVP <a href="https://peoplesforum.org/event/coronashock-and-patriarchy/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Warmly,</p>
<p>Vijay</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/49-general-strike-india/?output=pdf">Download as PDF</a> </p></div></div></div>
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