Hari: My Comrade

(The below piece was read out at the 75th birthday party of Hari P. Sharma, 14 November 2009)

Hari and I were born in the British colony of India, he on the other side of eastern Punjab where the Hindi-Urdu linguistic community begins and I in the Southern Siraiki speaking belt of Punjab; the land now divided into India and Pakistan. We went to school when the raj was still intact and the Second World War, started by the imperialist powers, was still raging. The Punjabi youth were being enticed to join the British Indian army with musical chants of “bharti ho ja rey recruit.†But we never knew each other until decades later when from different routes we ended up in North America in the 1960s at a time when the winds of change were blowing strong and turbulent.

As I recall those days from the vantage point of a visiting academic in a university town of the US Midwest the majority of black, Afro-American, people trapped in the poverty stricken ghettos of big cities were up in arms protesting racial and economic discrimination. Riots, burning inner cities and police shootings were the scenes brought daily on the TV screens in American homes when families assembled for evening meals. At the same time the young people in general were in revolt against the Vietnam War. The rampant destruction of a poor Asian country, its bombed out villages, its terrified refugees, the wounded bodes of its people scorched with napalm were catalyzing another movement for change which was fast becoming global in scope.

In this political environment was born in mid-1960s the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) from within the American Asian Studies Association. It was through this Committee and its publications that Hari and I later got acquainted. In Hari’s words, “CCAS members were organizing free universities, teach-ins, panels at academic conferences; holding classes on modern China, on Asian revolutions, on national liberation movements, on imperialism. They were building links with revolutionary forces in Asia.†1

Hari is well known in North America and Asia as an activist in many community-based organizations, but my focus in writing this note is on the contributions he has made to the understanding of Asia through the CCAS and its periodical, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, BCAS, later renamed Critical Asian Studies. As one of the original members of CCAS Hari has remained consistently committed to its Statement of Purpose, “to develop a humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront such problems as poverty, oppression and imperialism.â€

Hari has confronted the problems of poverty oppression and imperialism, particularly in South Asia, with his skilful and forthright manner which at times has earned him the ire of Indian authorities and shallow patriots. A superb example of his talent is the famous photographic collection in which he has captured on camera a series of particular images of life in India. A sample of this collection was first published in America as a photographic essay in the BCAS issue of April-June 1977. A bare foot coy girl of Orissa with deep and soft eyes clutching a corner of her tattered sari to her mouth, neatly dressed and sombre faced pedestrians of Calcutta passing by a beggar with her forehead on the pavement, three young women planting rice seedlings in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, a policeman on the railway tracks aiming his gun at the crowd of striking workers, and many more fragments of “the universe that is India†were incorporated in his essay in a bold and perceptive, narrative which is Hari’s unique style, “in the hope that one day the particulars will merge to change the nature and destiny of the universe.â€

After the mid-1970s the grass-root movements for change and efforts to build a humane and knowledgeable world order began to dissipate. The anti-war movement in North America based on insufficient understanding of the nature and mechanisms of capitalism and imperialism began to fold. In the academia new fads of post-modernism, post-Marxism, and so forth began to disorient the minds of those interested in the study of war and peace, poverty and exploitation in this world. Even within the community of scholars brought together in the CCAS network occasional debates began to erupt on the interpretation of post-Vietnam war events, the emergence of market economy in China after Mao Zedong, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of neo-liberalism.

One such internal debate was touched off in the pages of BCAS concerning the fiscal and economic programs imposed by the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. A key participant in the debate argued that the lack of development in these countries and growing gap between the rich and poor was a result of their internal “statist bureaucratic†structures and not the external factor of WB/IMF interventions. Hari in his rejoinder challenged the fallacy of drawing a line between the internal and external causes of economic backwardness. He pointed out that the modern day imperialism with WB and IMF as its global agencies was internalized in the economic and political structures of semi-colonial neo-colonial societies. It was “tied to the industrial bourgeoisie, banking capital, landlord and kulak lobbies, contractors and builders, state bureaucracies, military command, cultural elites, intelligentsia.†The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) aiding this internalization, as many of them were “created by imperialism.†2

The WB and IMF were there to “serve the capitalist-imperialist system: (1) by facilitating capital accumulation, and (2) by mediating at times of capitalist crises.†Their agenda should not be confused, said Hari, with any pretence of seeking the welfare of people. The insistence by the WB/IMF on balancing government budgets “has meant cutting funds for education, health, child care, family support, unemployment insurance, job security.†And Hari, the activist, was not going to leave the debate just at that. He went on to add that, “People are marching, shouting, fighting. Those of us who live in these more developed societies, including concerned Asian scholars, have to join in these struggles – provided we care for the people, provided we are opposed to the capitalist-imperialist agenda, provided we also care for the people of Asia.†3

In 1998 when India and Pakistan test exploded their nuclear bombs, the half a century old hostility that had characterised the relations between the two sibling states acquired a new and alarming dimension. Hari and I were asked to produce a special issue of BCAS as guest editors on the implications of these nuclear explosions.4

Writing editorially, Hari commented that to begin with the nuclearization of the military arsenals of India and Pakistan “was bound to accelerate the unconscionably wasteful arms race the two countries had been engaged in, while doggedly hugging the bottom rug of human development index.†5

The tests took place when both the countries were being governed by right wing, ultra- nationalist political parties. A. B. Vajpayee was leading India at the head of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with the support of all the Hindutava forces and Nawaz Sharif, a protégé of dictator Zia was wooing the Islamist parties and seeking to make himself Amirul Momineen, the chief of the righteous believers, through a constitutional amendment. Without mincing any words Hari eloquently expressed the extraordinary risk in this coincidence: “Nuclear bombs, as such, are bad because they are tools of ultimate terror, of ultimate destruction. They are worse – in fact unpardonable – if their acquisition involves deployment of scarce resources that could have been better used to provide the basic needs of the citizenry. …Nuclear bombs are absolute disaster if they are acquired by socio-political forces with a fascist agenda as is clearly the case with the saffron clad marching soldiers of Hindutava or the Islamic Mujahhedeen of Pakistan.†6

There were of course spuriously soothing words coming from certain quarters that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the two mutually hostile South Asian states will act as a deterrence to engage in any future wars, the MAD theory etc., and therefore contribute to a greater sense of security among their peoples. To this Hari responded that the “scientific-military establishments of two of the world’s poorest countries are operating with the same perverted logic, impervious to what this type of thinking did to the security and integrity of the Soviet Union, once a superpower of formidable economic and military stature.†In hindsight it is quite clear that since the nuclear tests, giving India and Pakistan the status of nuclear powers, the security situation in the two countries has continuously and dramatically deteriorated. They have fought one more major war in 1999 with heavy loss of life on both sides in Kargil on the Kashmir line of control and others on their international borders have been barely averted. Neither have they refrained from adding one wasteful set of destructive weapons after another to their arsenals at the expense of providing any kind of security, physical or economic, to their people.

The positions that Hari takes on various issues are based on his profound knowledge of social history combined with his conviction that a better more humane world order is possible. He has written much on the rise of social systems and movements that have brought us to where we are today and on how we can change the insecurity and oppression around us. I will try to present some of his thinking in this respect, again from his work with the community of scholars associated with the BCAS now renamed Critical Asian Studies or CAS.

In the process of editing a book for CAS, entitled China’s Economic Transformation, Hari wrote an introduction to it in which some of his seminal ideas on imperialism, capitalism, Marxism, the historical socialist project and the significance of the Chinese Revolution fall together in a remarkably cohesive formulation.7 The Chinese Revolution of 1949 which the imperialists of the world and some Western intellectuals now tend to dismiss as an “aberration,†something that “was doomed to failure,†in Hari’s view was the “outcome of a prolonged and sustained effort by a vast multitude of Chinese people under the leadership of a communist party, to do away with imperialism and its local props (feudalism and comprador capitalism) and to lay down the foundations of building a socialist society.â€

As such the Chinese Revolution remains “an important landmark on the long worldwide emancipatory project, which began precisely a hundred years earlier with the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party.†The Manifesto itself was a milestone which signified the “beginning of the proletarian class consciousness.†It was commissioned by an international association of workers, the Communist League, to form “a detailed theoretical and practical programme for them,†and was first published as a 23 page pamphlet in February 1848 without the names of the authors, Marx and Engels.

When the Chinese Revolution happened it “elated and inspired working people and toiling masses all over the world. It did so especially in formerly (and in places still) colonized peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America for whom Chinese Revolution also provided a model, a distinctively ‘Chinese path’ – with its focus on peasantry with a multi-class alliance, with protracted people’s war …†In Nepal for example the end of the monarchy and inauguration of a democratic setup would be hard to contemplate without the prolonged people’s war led by the Communist Party of Nepal, Maoist (CPNM), although much has yet to be accomplished.

In China itself discontent with the so-called capitalist reforms is mounting. The present regime is worried about the “resurgence of socialist thinkers critical of the lurch toward capitalism.†With the present deep crisis of global capitalism, the conditions of life and work for the Chinese masses have greatly deteriorated and protests by the working class are escalating. What might eventually come out of these protests and revived ideological debates is uncertain.

But in Hari’s view what “is certain is the fact that the Global Emancipatory Project is still on, in China as elsewhere, and will certainly remain so for a long time to come. There have been setbacks; these may happen in future too. But a century-and-a-half is not that long a period to undo a history of class domination, going back thousands of years ….â€

This is a very important point that Hari makes. The history of the system we have inherited, in which class domination, gender inequality, organized violence or warfare, alienation from our species being and from our natural environment is deeply rooted, indeed goes back thousands of years. It is pre-Biblical to say the least. Hari is very right in saying that a century-and-a half is not enough to undo this system.

This time perspective on societal change is also the secret of Hari’s abiding conviction that a better more humane world is possible. Every setback on the path of struggle to achieve that goal is a temporary setback. As he says in the context of China, “It is our task to learn the positive and negative lessons from the Chinese experience and carry on with the urgent task of fighting and defeating imperialism and its hold, wherever we live, and lend support to the struggles for national liberation and for socialism wherever they take place.â€

The conviction that is present in Hari’s social scientific thought is also the intuitive faith of South Asia’s leading Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I would like to end this brief note on Hari’s valiant effort to keep the community of Concerned Asian Scholars on the right track by quoting a few lines from a poem by Faiz, which incidentally turned out to be the song of the day in the streets of Kathmandu when Nepal’s 240 year old monarchy was abolished in 2007.

End Notes:

1. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 27, Oct. – Dec. 1995
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 31, April – June, 1999
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Hari P. Sharma (ed.), Critical Perspectives on China’s Economic Transformation, Daanish Books, Delhi, 2007.