The question hanging in my mind has many splinters and here goes: The high-level of awareness among the villagers, their ability to articulate the issues at the core is all very commendable, but is their awareness and articulation borrowed? Have they been excessively tutored and thoroughly blinkered to follow a particular path of logic by intelligent outsiders? Is there nothing local about a local issue? Can all men in a village splurge money, abandon their women and push them to prostitution? Why weren't they forthcoming about their personal or family crisis, which, I am sure, they are more familiar with than Nandigram? Why didn't these women say they'll attack the house of their elected representatives (MLA and MP) if the power plant is allowed? Why is their anger controlled by logic? Why are they not speaking through their gram panchayats? Why are they, by default, isolating their immediate leaders? Assuming that they they have a 'useless' and 'lousy' bunch of representatives, why do they not foreground their disenchantment about them forcefully? Why do they not think of ways to bring them to account? Have they subverted the political system to directly establish contact with alternative representatives (ecologists, writers and lawyers) to speak on their behalf? What will happen after the issue falls off the media radar and the alternative people move on to other sites of protests?
Can we blindly apply the dilemma of liquidity that Noida farmers faced some years ago or the aggression of Andhra women pressing for prohibition or the violence of Nandigram and Singur to create a homogenous and universal rhetoric of protest in Chamalapura? Can protest be devoid of a local flavour and devoid of innocence too? In an increasingly globalising world, are protests too networked? Are there now icons of protests parachuting to venues across the globe physically or through e-mails? Do all local issues now need a universal language and a familiar face to be taken seriously?
Recently, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and others made a statement on Nandigram and advised people against splitting the Left in India, in the face of American imperialism. But the most respected Bengali writer and activist Mahasweta Devi, among others, protested and said "their distance from events in India has resulted in their falling prey to a CPI(M) public relations coup and that they may have signed the statement without fully realising the import of it in Bengal." Ironically, Arundathi Roy, who grandstands on a whole variety of issues from dams, nuclear bombs to democracy and death sentences had protested along with Mahasweta Devi. That apart, does not the issue of "distance" and "local import" hold good in the case of Chamalapura too?
So, finally, do we live in a time when there is nothing local, not even protests?