DEVELOPMENT-ASIA: Globalisation Spells Recolonisation – Critics

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

HYDERABAD, India, Jan 5 2003 (IPS) - Globalisation is nothing but a grand strategy for the recolonisation of Asia with the support of local elites, warn academics at the ongoing Asian Social Forum (ASF) in this southern Indian city.

”Globalisation seeks to make up for the failure of the old globalisation – colonialism,” noted Indian demographer and sociologist Ashis Bose said at the forum, which is being attended by some 11,500 activists from Asian and other countries.

India, where the ASF is being held as a prelude the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Brazil later this month, was at the forefront of an anti-colonial struggle led by the semi-ascetic Mahatma Gandhi, who was opposed by the Indian feudal classes and was finally assassinated by religious fundamentalists.

Bose said globalisation worked wonderfully well for the feudal order and the upper middle class in many Asian countries to ”recapture space lost in the post-colonial period”.

To help along the process, a concerted move was now underway to hegemonise key areas of public life by handing them over to so-called experts. ”We now have experts for diplomacy, development, public hygiene, agriculture and even security,” he added.

Bose said that if one were to look closely at what was happening, this handing over was being done by exactly those people who were losing power in democratic politics because they are a small minority anyway.

What was particularly reprehensible was the fact that the whole process was giving new legitimacy to different kinds of violence, including state violence, said Bose and other top academics and activists attending the five-day meeting due to end Tuesday.

According to Nighat Said Khan, dean of the Institute of Women’s Studies in Lahore, the case of Pakistan was particularly bad because of its history of intermittent rule by the military – which had strong links with a feudal order intact from the colonial era.

”Every military dictator from Yahya Khan down to Pervez Musharraf have justified military rule on the same grounds – failure of democracy, corruption and state security,” she said.

Khan noted that the militarism and Islamisation supported by the military seemed to find favour with the male patriarchal order far more than with women. Also, both processes seemed to be getting ever more entrenched with the backing of the United States, she added.

There was support for the military from the elite and the feudal classes that also exerted influence on voluntary organisations so that, for example, no voices were being heard against U.S. policy in Iraq or Israel.

Mohammed Taka, dean of the Baghdad College of Economic Sciences, said the importance of oil as a strategic commodity was realised by western powers well before the decolonisation of Iraq and the Arab world.

”The prime cause of U.S. interest in the Arab Gulf region continues to be oil rather than secularism or democracy and the simple fact was that the U.S., along with Europe and Japan, have become more dependent on oil now than at the end of the Second World War,” Taka said.

Egyptian-born economist Samir Amin said religious fundamentalism went hand-in-hand with market fundamentalism. ”The so-called religious movements, Muslim or Hindu, are neither religious nor movements,” he said.

Amin supported the view of Bose that there was a deliberate process of ”depoliticisation” people going on because democracy was antagonistic to neo-liberal globalisation.

Harsh Mander, who resigned from the Indian bureaucracy in protest against last year’s pogrom against minority Muslims in western Gujarat state, said globalisation was marginalising those who were already marginalised from historical times – socially, culturally, politically and even psychologically.

The state response to the marginalised is ”invisibilisation, illegalisation, criminalisation and finally custodialisation,” said Mander, who now heads Actionaid, the international voluntary group, in India.

Exactly how globalisation works against the marginalised was presented by Ruth Manorama, head of the National Federation of ‘Dalit’ (low-caste people) Women, through the example of the recent closure of the Kolar Gold Fields in southern Karnataka by the state government.

”First the British and then the state mined out tonnes of gold worth billions of dollars from Kolar using cheap ‘dalit’ labour and now they have shut it down leaving thousand of people unemployed and destitute,” Manorama explained.

”They told us that running the mine was no longer profitable and even while we were agitating for adequate compensation, plans were being made to sell the fields off to an Australian mining company,” Manorama said.

She said what happens to the Kolar Gold Fields would be a test case for what is labelled globalisation in India,where the elites were stuffing their pockets by selling off public property to transnational corporations while ordinary workers were left high and dry.