Tag: Activism

Migrant Workers as Cultural Practitioners: Singapore’s new ‘in-thing’

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Cultural Conversations at Dibashram

May Day Celebration`16_Photro Exibition

Poet Dr Gwee Sui Li opening a May Day photo exhibition

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Mr. A K M Mohsin speaking about Dibashram’s work at Bicara Titian Budaya, a SG50 celebration event in December 2015

Singapore is a hub of economic activity in this region, with one of the highest Gross Domestic Product in Asia. Migrant workers from South Asia have been attracted to Singapore for its proximity to home geographically and due its higher pay compared to the Persian Gulf.

Migrants from South Asia in particular from Bangladesh are bred in a rich cultural milieu as the descendants of the artistic legacy of Kazi Nazrul Islam and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.  A normal Bangladeshi school going child composes poetry and song as a way of living due to the environmentally varied nature of the country rather than a special subject at school. Thousands of Bangladeshi Workers make Singapore their temporary home as guest workers to make their living. Half of them have a school-leaving certificate and a small number of them possess diplomas and college degrees.

These brothers often work at 18 dollars basic per day building and maintaining Singaporean Infrastructure in grueling sun and torrential rain. They have a voice which is stifled by structural constraints such as lack of fluency in English and being at the bottom of the labor hierarchy holding work permits, often at the mercy of the employer’s whims and fancies as their visa can be cancelled anytime. An average migrant in the construction and shipyard sector makes about 600 to 700 dollars per month. Often his salaries are not paid in time and take a minimum of two years to pay back the economic cost of migration back home.

I observe a lot of migrant related activity (if not activism) over the past one year in Singapore, with plenty of events, competitions and citizen centric engagements, which brings the migrant regularly back into the mainstream conversation. Most of these events are kind, create mini celebrities out of migrant brothers, who release books, music cds and perform in theatrical plays. We ‘like’ them on social media, sometimes without realizing that many of these brothers have attended college, and have been performing/published artistes back home. They are made migrants due to economic realities back home. I am fortunate to know them in person and is a delight interacting. They are also normal writers and artists who are innovative in plying their trade and have a day job to pay their bills. Many of the strategic diasporic elites do that too, right?

A lot of these famous migrants are nurtured by Mr AKM Mohsin, Editor of Singapore’s only Bengali Language newspaper Banglar Kantha and Founder of Migrant Cultural Space Dibashram who started off as a pioneer helping out migrants in the early 1990’s writing letters for migrants back home. He then started a community paper in 2006, to serve as the voice of the diasporic subaltern. His platform has helped catalyze the Migrant Poetry Competition and Migrant Awareness Week among other events.

Migrant Poets such as  TEDXSingapore Speaker Zakir Hossain and newly minted author Md Mukul are products of the Banglar Kantha platform. They are invited to be toast of town at Poetry events at Artistry, a chic downtown cafe and national poetry festivals. This celebration is needed but how much of this celebration is helping redeem real issues such as injury claims and unpaid salaries?

Migrant literature as a genre promoted by Mr Mohsin and his cultural group Banglar Kantha Literary Association is a long term effort even when the spotlight was not shining. Migrant culture is a long term endeavor with sweat and toil, with lots of personal sacrifices with financial hits and burning volunteer weekends rather than one event every year for publicity sake.

Migrant activism should create space for silent conversations through cultural mediation rather a tick the box measure.

Activists as Entrepreneurs: Boot Strapping to Fund Raising

Activists are pejoratively called ‘professional dissenters’, who do not create ‘value’ by the business community at large. In fact, to invert the lens, they are intellectual entrepreneurs who are bringing their thoughts to life. An idea is undergirded by tangible resources to last a while. Activists are traditional organizations in a very corporate sense. The bottom line lies somewhere else, only the quarterly reporting format differs. Ask any fundraising manager for a non-profit the reality and he would be speaking the same lexicon as a corporate manager. Boot-strapping for scaling is the forte of an activist, working on scant resources, long before the term became cool in contemporary literature. Hiring the correct talent becomes as headache as cash is often in short supply unless it is an INGO such as the International Rescue Committee which can hire David Miliband as its CEO. There is no Series A Funding round for an activist, as the funding rounds are perennial.

All social movements need resources and are limited by the same variables which start-ups are limited. Non-profits need war rooms to coordinate efforts for large scale projects. ‘Blitz scaling’ as coined by Venture Capitalist Reid Hoffmann (HBR April 2016) is performed out by mobilizing the common spirit of the times. #FeeltheBern or the Sanders presidential campaign is classic example of reaching out to small donors and scaling a movement. A performing social movement like a political campaign for elected office, serves a purpose. Activism such as selling a product is also selling an idea. The idea becomes the basis of the product cycle. The campaign for the food security legislation in India took decades to be written in to law, but the ground work intellectually started many years back by activists such as Aruna Roy, Jean Dreaze and Amartya Sen.

Activism needs the same skill set as an entrepreneur as the buy in is needed. The product being a normative idea makes it a very challenging sell in comparison to a FMCG product. Let us have the humility and listen to these struggles as lessons to learn.

Writing as a mode of Activism: Do the structures listen?

“I will tell you this, I may be dead, but my ideas will surely not die.”

        – Saro-Wiwa, Ogoni-Nigerian Writer speaking to the tribunal that sent him to the gallows

I grew up in the milieu of post liberalization middle class India and the diaspora in the Gulf resembling  a similar socio-economic sentiment, which held the socialist ideals in great contempt as the economic ideals then were of the emerging Asian Tigers. The downfall of Calcutta from an industrial powerhouse to a pale former shadow, due to the policies of Left Activism such as ‘Hartals’ (Public Strikes) and a poor work culture; framed activism, and speaking for the margins pretty passé. I grew up in a household filled with Marx and Engels and ‘Das Capital’ being a prominent feature in our house library in Navi Mumbai. We did not have fancy couture furniture, but we surely had Marx.

Activism was framed in the 1990’s Star News and India Today fed discourse as a relic of pasts economic sins.  Activism was the forte of the chic ‘jholawala’ the well-heeled latte drinking intellectual usually a product of the famed Jawaharlal Nehru University, Presidency or a Tata Institute of Social Sciences with an Oxbridge or Ivy League degree. The other extreme was the grassroots activist working in the rural hinterland in India, with demonstrable sympathies towards the left.  This was ‘India Unbound’ in the words of Philosopher-CEO Gurcharan Das, as the IT/Engineering Major-MBA combo educated urbane Indian was out to seek his pot of gold (Humanities Majors in India simply do not make the mention even). The Infosys-HCL success story was shamelessly circulated a number of times.

The poor, marginalised Indian was not sexy enough for primetime news. ‘India Shining’ failure ushered in Left supported socialist politics of the Congress for a decade. More than secular progressive politics, graft and slow development dominated the discourse. It was known as the ‘missed decade’ by the TV Studio commentators. This was the decade that supposedly would have brought India in touching distance of China. We had a ‘Harvard Man’ in office, in the words of the most influential global justice activist and writer of our generation Arundhati Roy. Yet, unbridled greed filled orgy of graft derailed a government which had some good social welfare programs on ground such as MNREGA and Public Health initiatives which this Modi regime is dismantling in favour of private sector involvement, as Dalal Street dons wield influence rather than the aganwadi worker in rural Ratnagiri. Activists of all color as represented by the corporate media as road blocks towards the utopia of late capitalism. People displaced and killed by riots or by mega projects are simply footnotes in a report, gathering dust in a ‘sarkari’ office.

No one will scream ‘The Nation Wants to Know’ for the invisible Indian who cannot buy a share for a blue chip. Activism is not aspirational, the 42 inch flat screen TV in the living room is.

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Activism and writing are connected with the common bond of language. The limitations of language is the limits of our imagination in the words of Wittgenstein.

The English educated elite dominate structures of power. I am one of them. English is not a language in India, but a ‘Class’. English has the appeal of connecting the average middle class Indian to the global circuit of capitalism. The IIT’s and IIM’s have their content taught in English and not in the vernacular languages. English bequeathed by our former colonial masters, has helped the South Asian diaspora to be enormously successful. We have had a rich literary tradition of Indian writing in English. Chetan Bhagat, the enormously commercial writer in English, has brought ‘Ingris’ to the first generated educated in India. He has democratized reading in English to the masses, however pop culture it might be.

But, the chasm between India and ‘Bharat’ is accentuated by the access to the English Language as well. English perpetuates an elitism driven by language, and removes the Lutyens Delhi elite from the conversation on the ground in Satara or Purulia.  There is a positive in knowing English as it gives the writer the access to engage the world.

How many vernacular translations do we read?

English has enabled us to converse with global commercial and political elite and sometimes challenge them. Access to the language has been us the cultural resources to challenge dominant thought processes of the times. Aruna Roy, Yogendra Yadav, Harsh Mander and Medha Patkar all speak in English to engage with the wider world with the stories of struggle and resistance and build solidarity with the movements of the global south.  Many an underground Naxalite leader has been known to be well-versed in English. Power is reinforced and circulated through the language, and writers have used this weapon to challenge the present, in the hope of a better future.

Does the knowledge of English alienate the urban Indian from having the consciousness of the marginalised?

Lobbying for social change, unfortunately needs the lexicon of resistance, and English is unfortunately the Lingua Franca for achieving this end. Ambedkar encouraged his followers to learn English as a tool to beat caste oppression. The language of the ruling class is not oppressive and emancipatory at the same time as it depends on the context. The subaltern who are erased from the mainstream discourse, often are erased due to the inability of communicating in the language of power. Writers although guilty of the ‘politics of representation’ in text, lend a voice to the silenced and this is the essence of activism; speaking up when all others are muted.

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Writing as a form of activism enables the helpless soul to speak to the structures of power, even if it does not listen. Rob Nixon in his seminal environmental justice work ‘Slow Violence’ writes

“In one of his final letters from detention, Saro-Wiwa assured his friend, the novelist William Boyd: “There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment. . . . the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not able to do it as a politician or a businessman. My writing did it. . . . I think I have the moral victory.” “

Saro-Wiwa used his writing as a strategic tool to voice out the oppression that his Ogoni micro minority faced in the oil rich delta region in Nigeria. The oppressors were the state and multinational companies in his words. He faced the gallows as he used his writing as a tool for activism. The gallows did not silence his ideas of fermenting resistance. Silencing a writers voice, amplifies his message, and this creates the resistance he ultimately wishes to generate against the military dictatorship and the transnational oil corporation bed fellows, which have laid the delta region polluted and bereft of its natural ecosystem. Saro-Wiwa utilized his writing to force the structures to listen to him. Activism needed guts, which he had in ample measure. His death brought the focus on the oppression, which was the ultimate oppression in it itself.

His writing succeeded. Arundhati Roy in our times speaks against the ‘Upper Caste Hindu Corporate State’ that is India and sometimes speaks to Ed Snowden in Moscow regarding the Anti Imperialism Project, which she has so successfully written and spoken earlier. Her voice brings the global lens on anti-minority and anti-poor projects in India in a space where it is a rare flicker of hope.

Writing becomes impactful with guts. Activism is all about guts and intellect, hence writing and activism are good bed fellows.

Trans-national Advocacy Actors: Time to return to core competency?

Recently, there were media reports last month criticizing the Greenpeace Executive who was flying between Brussels and another EU Capital for work every week whereas the commute could be done via a carbon effective route. So, much positive press for being environmentally aggressive on the high seas of the Arctic that Greenpeace is so known for. Last year, the esteemed UK based Charity Oxfam had advertised for an employment position for its Head of Communications with a price-tag of 75K Pounds. Staggering I would contend for a non-profit. But as the tribe of global, corporatized non-profits would retort they need to pay top pound for the best talent in the house. Partially true, but it would certainly not buy sympathy from a college going kid, donating his pocket money to satiate his green conscious. An industry executive whom I to spoke last week was point blank direct in labeling Greenpeace as ‘extortionist’ and questioned about the fuel bills and mobilization costs for the much publicized arctic expeditions. Genuine question indeed raised; which doubts the credibility of the moral entrepreneurship of Greenpeace.
Media Reports of Non Profit Training Seminars in Star Hotels where folks bleed their heart out on poverty while sipping chardonnay is simply not done. Well, one does not have to behave like an acetic, though this does not bring good press to the sector which depends on reputational capital and funder sympathy. Poverty porn creates cynicism and ultimately donor fatigue. In the effort to create ‘Shared-Value’, the non-profit movement has sold its soul to the devil that they so love to mock. The Social Entrepreneurship set-up is commercially not sustainable as there is too little real impact rather than fashionable fluff. They are good souls, but they tend to lose out in the crowd of wannabe do-gooders.
The lack of accountability and transparency in funding as informed by the leaked Indian Governments internal intelligence department report on foreign funding of Activist Non Profits that almost undermined so called developmental progress such as the nuclear power plant in power hungry Tamil Nadu. After Fukushima, the paradigm of risk and nuclear capitalism came to fore and a lot of activists rode the wave against nuclear power. A freshly churned MSF report on developmental interventions in crisis areas indicts non-profits as gunning for funding rather than concentrating on delivering the goods: creating an impact where state actors have failed.
It is time that Non Profits return to their core competence of creating impact, rather than rhetoric and function as true Force Du Resistance in empowering communities to realize their potential.