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South-Up. The South as New Political Imaginary

Bharat Jodo Yatra has opened room for new imagination of India — ‘South-up’  Yogendra Yadav 14 September, 2022 https://theprint.in/opinion/bharat-jodo-yatra-has-opened-room-for-new-imagination-of-india-south-up/1127886/ If we have to resist majoritarianism, we must turn to the three ideological pillars of Dravidian politics: Regionalism, rationalism, and social justice in new ways.

Professor G. N. Devy has a name for this imagination: Dakshinayan. It is the name of the movement he started with many other writers in 2016. We were lucky that he had also come for the inauguration of the yatra and was there with us at the breakfast table that morning. Over idli sambhar and a good cup of my favourite South Indian filter coffee, he explained to us the concept and the story of Dakshinayan. You must hear from him the story of how his wife Surekha and he shifted their home from Vadodara in Gujarat to Dharwad in Karnataka to be with the wife of Professor M. M. Kalburgi after he was assassinated by Right-wing forces. Professor Devy was attracted to the dual significance of Dakshinayan: Its southern orientation as opposed to the north orientation of ‘uttarayan’, and also as a political metaphor for the times when days are short and nights long.  ( see also Ganesh Devy Dakshinayan Samas 2018 Sevagram  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B68TesJA7dM

Extract from Corrine Kumar:   The south as the new political imaginery

To all those who listen to the Song of the Wind:

In a different place, in a different time, Black Elk heard the Song of the Wind

I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place, and I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred manner of the world, she said

Remember she said, she was seeing in the sacred manner of the world

And the sacred, central mountain was a mountain in her part of the world

“But,” Black Elk continued to say: “the central mountain is everywhere”

From my central mountain, the point where stillness and movement are together, I invite you to listen to the wind;

more specially to the wind from the South: the South as third world, as the civilizations of Asia, the Pacific, the Arab world, Africa, Latin America; the South as the voices and movements of peoples, wherever these movements exist; the South as the visions and wisdoms of women: the South as the discovering of new paradigms, which challenge the existing theoretical concepts and categories breaking the mind constructs, seeking a new language to describe what it perceives, refusing the one, objective, rational, scientific world view as the only world view: the South as the discovery of other cosmologies, as the discovery of other knowledges that have been hidden, submerged, silenced. The South as an “insurrection of these subjugated knowledges”

The South as history; the South as mystery

The South as the finding of new political paradigms, inventing new political patterns, creating alternative political imaginations: the South as the revelation of each civilization in its own idiom: the South as conversations between civilizations:

The South then as new universalisms

And in our searching for new understandings of the South, it promises to bring to the world new meanings, new moorings.

It invites us to create a new imaginary to birth a new cosmology;

The South then as new political imaginary

Yogendra Yadav

Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds

We should be careful when we make memes and comments. They may tend to distance the person rather than convince them.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/facts-dont-change-minds/ Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds September 4, 2022
For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity.

Read more …

Bid to delegitimised Social Movements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiJDvgPusco  बदनामी और हमले कर सरकार जन-आंदोलनों को रोकना चाहती है" मेधा पाटकर से बातचीत
 Sep 4, 2022    This tirade against social movements is to cement vote bank. part of elections.. 

Medha Patkar was wrong on Narmada project https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Swaminomics/medha-patkar-was-wrong-on-narmada-project/ September 4, 2022, Patkar said all micro-level struggles are key to building a macro-level agitation that questions the very paradigm of development at all levels. “Chunikaka said gaon ki zamin, gaon ki hai — but is it happening now? Do the villagers have control over the jal, jungle, zameen being given away to the corporate sector, the mining mafia? Where is the three-tier Panchayati Raj system?” Patkar said, and added there “is no alternative to people’s movements.”

When Narendra Modi Exhorted 'Andolanjivis' to Rise Up Against the Government in 1974 https://thewire.in/politics/narendra-modi-andolanjivis-protest-1974-message  A message written by the prime minister in his 20s provides valuable advice to the protesters of today but also represents the drastic swing in his opinion of protests. The Modi government’s second term has faced pan-India protests opposing controversial policy decisions such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the three farm laws.

‘Yes, We Are Andolanjeevi, You Have Forced Us’: Medha Patkar  https://thewire.in/rights/andolanjeevi-medha-patkar-sardar-sarovar-narmada-project-dam-water-crisis 
'Today’s centralised policies are pushing the marginalised communities further to the margins, squeezing all options for the poor but to take to the streets.'

“No Alternative to People’s Movements,” Says Internationally Acclaimed Human Rights Activist Medha Patkar

 https://indiatomorrow.net/2021/12/22/no-alternative-to-peoples-movements-says-internationally-acclaimed-human-rights-activist-medha-patkar/  December 22, 2021 -  In a sharp snub to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘andolanjeevi’ taunt at those leading people’s movements in the country, the firebrand activist declared in her true inimitable style, “Yes, we are andolanjeevi because today’s centralized policies are pushing the marginalized communities further to the margins, squeezing all options for the poor but to take to the streets.”

In another pointed rebuff on the charges levelled by the present government about NGOs receiving foreign funds, Patkar retorted, “They allege we receive foreign funding for our agitations while I had returned even my award money, but there is huge money coming into the country to implement the so-called PPP (Private-Public-Partnership) model policies.”

Launching a frontal attack, she questioned, “How much foreign funds came into the PM Cares Fund and for disaster management? Where is it?”

According to Patkar, the government, on the one hand, claimed had no money for the tribals, the landless, the poor, and the farmers. “But this very government has money for Central Vista, for Sardar Patel statue and waiving of corporate NPAs to the tune of Rs68,000cr.”