What does radical really look like?

Does it have a different meaning for ideating (flirting in the domain of ideas) and 'on the ground'? Inverted commas, as a friend pointed out recently, are damn handy. I punctuate 'on the ground' with these helpful inverted commas because I both use the words literally as well as remind myself that beyond a point what is on the ground cannot be separated from the acrobatics being done in the domain of ideas. They feed each other, yes, but one can't pretend that there isn't a theory-praxis divide. Or atleast, I can't.

Radical means from the root. But sometimes, one can go on digging and discover that the root exists at the other end of a bottomless pit.

Is uprooting more radical than tending to, say, the soil around the root?

Is it cooler, more 'authentic' (ha! again.) to demand a complete overhaul of a system when you know that changes much smaller than that can serve the purpose of a lot of people? When does hatred, anger, opposition become self-serving?

As you might know, Kolkata has been seeing evictions. Till a couple of weeks ago, the Nonadanga slum demolitions and the hawker evictions along the E.M. Bypass looked the same to me. They both struck me as outrageous, cruel and revealed a complete volte-face of the government that came to power on the Ma-Maati-Manush platform. This blatant about turn was just a wee bit more shocking than the volte face most parties perform once they get elected, because of Mamata Bannerjee's political stance and actions but a few months ago. Beyond a point, whoever comes to the government, behaves the same. Does that ossify the relationship between government and the governed? Does this characteristic of the field of government mean that the electorate are always already screwed? Heck no. The pressures of interaction remove governments, bring new governments, and all the while, governments are forced to re-learn how to impose that sameness of behaviour. Within that sameness, there grows difference. Within this relationship there are countless revolutions.

Since the initial few days of both demolitions and evictions, however, I began to see more Nonadanga in the two newspapers I subscribe to (The Telegraph and The Times of India). There was Police brutality, there was blood, there were arrests. And they continue till date. Police are refusing permission for rallys, arresting people, goons of suspected Trinamool Congress affiliation are beating up 'intellectuals' (TOI's terms, not mine) gathered at Jatin Das Park to protest the Nonadanga demolitions.

There was no news of the hawkers protest, atleast not much. But my friends and I saw visible resistance: not just in the regular michhils or marches taken out by the hawkers in the Patuli and Big Bazar area, not just in the huge banners calmly planted at the eviction sites asking 'Ucched kar sharthe' ('evictions in whose interest') but more importantly, in the hawkers who immediately came back to the very spots that the eviction squads had tried to displace them from, doing business, even if not quite brisk business.

A few of us met Saktiman Ghosh, the General Secretary of the National Hawker Federation and the Hawker Sangram Committee, today and I asked him what this lack of media visibility meant. His answer is what brought me back to wondering the radical. It made me realise that the media can be an important tool, but beyond a point, it means nothing. This is what I got from our conversation- that the wisdom of action lies in long term vision. A movement is of the people and therefore by the people. Leadership is strategic and for the purpose of organisation. That a movement needs to be built and sustained. That action cannot be fleeting. That even without the spectacular there is iron strength. What is important at the end of the day, is results.

The radical is, for me I think, that which gets sustainable results.

I want to know more about what is happening at the level of organisation at Nonadanga. I can only hope that the trajectory of events don't end up shifting the focus of the movement and the focus of the media from those who have been made homeless. While thoroughly condemning the undemocratic, illegal and violent actions of the West Bengal Government, one must also keep in mind the politics of solidarity and the uneven force of support (and might of defence) behind what the Times of India termed as intellectuals and those who need a roof over their heads asap.