Our Statement

The Citizens' Initiative

We at The Citizens’ Initiative are trying to organize a continuing open discussion on the paradigms of development and the relationship, in this context, between politics and ethics. These issues, we feel, are extremely important given the kind of state-sponsored violence that people are facing all over India and particularly in West Bengal.

The group of students, researchers, and teachers that is the CI started out in February 2007 to debate and question the cost of development and the growing schism between ethics and contemporary political culture. Questions have also begun to arise on the naive equation of the 'partisan' with the 'political', and the brushing aside of any non-partisan civil political action as not just irrelevant, but, as in some circles it is fashionable to say, 'anti-political'. The role of the civil society in a democracy is a subject of critical re-examination now, and it is the disregard for non-partisan opinion and the consequences of it that have led us to discuss and take more concrete action.

We launched this initiative with a one-day seminar on 16 February 2008 on 'Development and Ethics', where the speakers were Dr Dilip Simeon and Dr Aseem Shrivastava. Dr Dilip Simeon taught history at Delhi University for several years and is currently a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. Dr Aseem Shrivastava has a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has taught Economics at various universities in the US and India, and Philosophy at Nordic College in Norway. He is an independent writer who writes on various contemporary themes like globalisation, human rights and US foreign policy. At the seminar, Dr Simeon spoke on ‘Ethics and Contemporary Political Culture’, and Dr Shrivastava’s talk was titled ‘SEZ and the Cost of Development’.

Our next event on 5 April 2008 was a workshop on the legal possibilities of the common citizen’s redress of wrongs. Mr Sabir Ahamed of the Calcutta Samaritans spoke on the Right to Information and Mr Sujato Bhadra of Association for Protection of Democratic Rights spoke on Public Interest Litigations.

We have been visiting Singur since February 2008. A full report of our findings can be found here. In the last few months, we have carried relief – in the form of clothes, rice and pulses – to Dobandi in Singur (in March 2008), and organized medical camps there (on 18 May 2008 and 27 July 2008) with the help of the Centre for Care of Torture Victims. But neither of these efforts reflects our primary objectives. Our most ardent wish is to everywhere induce long-term reflection on models – and ethics – of development, and to contribute to reconstructive thought and efforts in the areas already adversely affected by the present political take on development. To this end, we have extensively photographed life in Singur and how it has been affected by the fencing-off of the land for the Tata Motors factory. Very few people in Kolkata have any idea of what Singur looks like, and press photographs can perhaps tell only a minuscule portion of the story. Our photographs are aimed at covering this invisible distance between the affected village and the urban centre – to put it simply, to show what development looks like in reality. With the help of and using as venue the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkata, we organised from 27 June to 2 July 2008 a tripartite event 'Under Development: Singur'. It was launched with a Panel Discussion on 'The Representation of Development and Displacement' where the speakers were Samik Bandhopadhyay, Kavita Panjabi, Rajarshi Dasgupta and Paromita Chakravarti, to lead into a two-day Film Festival with screenings of several takes on the issues of development/'development' and whether a degree of violence is (seen to be) inherent to the process of it. All the while, the Photo Exhibition remained mounted for viewing at the Centre. We have been reported in several of the national dailies, and our own stand on the representation afforded us is here.

In July 2008, we succeeded in taking a slideshow of our photographs to Singur. Our aim, well-fulfilled, was to enable the people of Singur to see how they were being represented by us.

In September 2008, we managed to take the Photo Exhibition to Delhi (where it was hosted by the Women's Studies Programme at JNU) and we organised a panel discussion on development where the speakers were Tanika Sarkar, Amar Kanwar and Praful Bidwai. Meanwhile, we also spoke about development and our experiences in Singur and Nandigram at Lady Shriram College for Women, WSP at JNU, IIT-Delhi, Miranda House, St. Stephen's College and IIT-Kanpur.

In February 2009, we screened Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajar Deshe outside the club-house in Dobandi, Singur.

In March 2009, we were able to set-up a children's library in Dobandi. For the inauguration, we had a sit-and-draw event for the children.

In April 2009, we were invited by The Media Lab at Jadavpur University to organise a workshop and demonstrate how we use the internet to sensitise people. The campaign which was developed in this workshop was on anti-ragging.

In our present plans, we wish to visit schools in and around Kolkata and sensitize students about development in West Bengal and India and the fall-out of such modes of development in places like Singur. Importantly, we intend to take the Photo Exhibition (even as it grows over time, or changes over our further visits to Singur) to other places in India, and to initiate dialogue there about Singur, development, land, political violence...

We should stress that we have not been to Singur as unaffected photographers who are there to snatch images and leave. We wish to be able to propose/introduce alternative means of livelihood for people who have for generations been based in agriculture. Unhappily, the government’s promises that alternative training and employment shall be the norm rather than the exception among all peoples displaced from land and/or livelihood, have been resoundingly empty. In even our limited ways, we are trying to organise in Singur schemes for certain alternative means of livelihood like organic dyeing and hand emroidery and help some of the women involved in such projects to form a self-help group and market their products themselves by eliminating the role of intermediaries thereby maximising their profits.

Our other blog, at http://www.development-dialogues.blogspot.com/ serves as an archive for articles and newspaper reports on issues of development in West Bengal and India, and in some cases, in the world.

We can be contacted at citizensinitiativecalATTHERATEOFSIGNgmail.com.