by Rinita Mazumdar
Daily Lobo Columnist
On March 14, Nandigram, India, a small farming village about 100 miles from Calcutta, faced the realities and horrors of globalization. The communist government of West Bengal brought in police to beat up people who were united under the umbrella of Save our Farmland against the government's plan to develop a chemical hub and an economic processing zone in the region.
During the first stages of negotiation, the farmers were offered compensation. They refused, and the government changed the location. Nonetheless, party workers, in order to teach the farmers a lesson, unleashed violence together with police. There were killings and rapes that night, as reported by the Human Rights
Commission.
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Ironically, the communist regime has won elections in West Bengal since 1977 on the strength of radical land reform. In Calcutta, the party was never popular as it was opposed by the middle class. Nandigram is a typical example of the local being terrorized by global forces of industrialization.
Literature for and against globalization is enormous. Both evidence and morality is used to defend and oppose globalization. Those in favor point to the success of the Eastern Pacific nations. Missing in their argument is the fact that deregularization of the market is a result of structural adjustments and rising poverty in Africa and South America.
Scholars opposed to globalization describe it as similar to the apartheid regime of South Africa. Globalization has created ghettos by deindustrializing Europe, setting off massive migration of nonEuropeans into Europe and engendering new forms of racial violence and segregation.
Conservatives have taken the opportunity to use the term "under class" as a disease of the poor who are outside of globalization. In Africa, international economic relations have penetrated deeply, disrupting pre-existing patterns in the continent.
Globalization is not a phenomenon of the 20th century; violent forms of land acquisition and genocide are part of human history. But the 20th century saw resistance to this new form in three ways - decolonization, birth of nationalisms and Soviet-style, noncapitalist, state-controlled economies.
While nationalism was the weapon of the middle class to rule in sovereign nation-states whose borders were drawn by their colonizers, state-controlled economies are another form of globalization that was introduced in czarist Russia in 1917 and violently converted the age-old Narodniks into modern-day industrial arenas.
China and the state of West Bengal in India went through all three forms of globalization and decolonization, and the last resistance via state-sponsored killing was a decolonization from the Marxist-Leninist ideology, a Fukuyamaian dream of the end of history.
Yet, everything is not going well with the New World Order - the opposition to Western globalization remains possibly in some kind of reconstructed religious discourse, termed in Western media as fundamentalism.
What then is the solution? In thinking of the local and the global, we are possibly falling trap to essentialist thinking of both as pure. Take the villagers of Nandigram. They were already globalized by the communist party workers who trained them in Marxist-Leninist ideology. In other words, Nandigram was modern much before the new form of modernism was forced upon them.
What then were the people of Nandigram resisting? It is difficult to say. But it seems that they were resisting the change in a community they were more or less content with. It is possible that the new location to which the West Bengal government moved its chemical hub will not face any resistance, possibly because the needs of the community are not met, and they do wish to change.
This shows that people revolt locally only when they feel a need to. All real changes are thus organic by nature. This also reveals that the branding of local as homogenous and pure is also the result of faulty logic. In the 21st century, neither the local nor the global are pure - they are all hybrids, one overdetermining the other. For this, a new and hybrid way of thinking of local and global is necessary.
The practical application of catering to hybrid communities' needs is difficult. Since the Industrial Revolution, the factors of global industries, long-distance trade and national laws have organized our lives. Local communities suffered violence in Europe and elsewhere when they were forcibly brought under nations. Possibly, they suffered more violence elsewhere when both industrialization and the concept of nation was forcibly introduced to them.
To cater to local needs, one needs to think about the true meaning of both decolonization and development. For the Greeks, economics was a function people performed at home to ultimately be happy. Those who dream of ways to resist violent globalization owe it to the community to rethink what our real needs are as human beings - to think of economic development as another form of humanism.
Rinita Mazumdar is a lecturer with the women studies and philosophy departments.
