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Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India
The crisis in the late capital society is steadfastly located in the structures of technological dominance, economic violence and ideological legitimation. This results in an apocalyptic turn towards socio-ecological crises in many nations like India that have relentlessly hankered after unfettered development at the cost of environmental sustainability. In a world entranced by profit and power, public space is privatised, land fenced off, seeds, medicines and genes patented, water metered, and democracy turned into purchasing power. In recent years, the world has been witness to large scale protests in Quebec City by protesters who tore down the fence surrounding the summit meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The radical guerrillas in South Africa broke the fence of privatisation that keeps the poor from having electricity by installing illegal connections. Peasant women in Asia freely exchange seed, defying the restrictions of market logic that would have them go into debt to buy commercial seed. The lack of clean drinking water and the absence of any national health services or supply of medicines together multiply the burdens of a society that ironically now dreams of countering Pax Americana with Pax Indica. Thus the serious and urgent need of addressing issues such as the problems of the working class, social inequity and environmental imbalances, religious bigotry, fight against fascism and terror, in order to confront the crisis now emerging from the uncontrolled drive towards technological development. Churning the Earth is indeed a timely analysis of the making of global India and the dark underbelly of major problems of conflicts over land and water and other natural resources that have not received the attention of the leadership: "A considerable amount of ‘vish’ (poison) is emerging, in the form of social disruption, increasing inequalities and environmental damage; simultaneously, a variety of initiatives, struggles and movements are resisting the vish and attempting to find alternative paths to human welfare." The book therefore, fundamentally provokes not only consciousness raising of the marginalised, but emphasises a development that becomes a self-conscious anti-capitalist strategy directed against predatory forces evident in the political and economic adventures of the West, in the very savagery that lies under the veneer of free-market economy. Shrivastava and Kothari have convincingly shown the urgency of countering economic exploitation and environmental devastation, thereby making a case for the ushering of a "Radical Ecological Democracy". As Michael Ignatieff writes, "America’s entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism." Interestingly the Philippines Government advertisement in Fortune magazine in 1975 reads as: "To attract companies like yours… we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns… all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here." Herein lies enough evidence of the power exercised by global economics on third world nations. The privileged elite, the corporate world and the irresponsible successive governments are rightly put in the dock for the miseries of the dispriveliged. There seem to be "more dangers now than opportunities". This is the result of neoliberalism, the incarnation of free market economy that outlines the rules of the world we live in. We are restricted by transnational corporations, the World bank, and the IMF, the dominion of a corporate-led global trade. Standing on the outer reaches, the third world becomes an onlooker of the steamrolling effect of Western capitalism. The people of the developing world, in the words of the Notes from Nowhere Collective, remain "disconnected from what they produce and what they consume, from the earth and from one another", living in an "arid homogenised culture." Corporate globalisation pushes farmers off their land; crops, water, patents are being corporatised with no respect for human rights or ecology or justice. All the institutions behind the global economy like the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the G8, the World Economic Forum represent "entrenched and often invisible interests." Contestation is basic in this exceedingly multifaceted world of interstate systems. We need to find new strategies of resistance to the monolithic structures of capitalism. Civil society has to come to grips with issues concerning energy, social justice, gender and environmental degradation in its march towards economic progress. In this lies our hope for a sustainable future and a dynamic India of our dreams.
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Every
piece of earth, every natural resource, and every working hand is now
the raw material for the capitalist world. But the time has come
when the oppression of globalisation has to be countered for which we
need a new language of resistance. In this grand globalisation debate,
we have to ask the relevant question: "Who rules, and in whose
interests and to what ends?" This becomes profusely applicable in
the context of the murky state of affairs in the world —
gangster-style mafias in Russia, nationalism in Asia with rivalries
growing between India and China, and most of all the wild hunger of
the United States’ military-industrial complex combined with the
unbridled march of predatory globalisation.