Perspectives

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the CPI(Maoist) have, in their respective journeys, reached a blind alley. The impasse is not peculiar to the Indian situation. It reflects the worldwide crisis of Marxism, and is rooted to the historical experience of the international communist movement, in general, over the last century or so. It will take a long time to restore the bruised moral values which are based on respect and struggle for the freedom of the individual - values that are inherent in Marxist humanism.

The absence of first level healthcare facilities and the high cost of treating even routine illnesses are the immediate problems in the existing healthcare system as also the fact that high costs do not necessarily imply reliability of treatment. No insurance scheme or altruistic healthcare providers can address these problems. The solution lies in strengthening the public healthcare system.

The rushed passing of the 18th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution by parliament - allowing for greater powers and removal of term limits for the executive presidency - has precipitated the descent of Sri Lanka into a dictatorship. Both the ruling and the main opposition parties - not to mention the lax supreme court - are responsible for the current state of affairs. Seeds of hope, however, exist in the democratic consciousness of the Lankan people and in the fact that politicians from the left and the minority Tamil community have raised their voice against the amendment.

In 1969, the author started fi eld research on rural poverty in western India. He began as a dependency theorist, but the villagers taught him to rethink his assumptions. He discovered that villagers (even landless labourers) have agency in their own lives and that the cumulative weight of their decisions and actions could reshape regional and national policy in the colonial and post-colonial periods. He found that growing an expensive cash crop does not impoverish small farmers. These discoveries went contrary to conventional wisdom, contrary to a strong consensus among social scientists around the world, contrary to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and big-name dependency theorists. Despite his confi dence in the data, he needed a reality check. How could he test whether he had misunderstood the lessons from the villagers?

With a number of individuals and groups seeking to organise peace talks between the Maoists and the State, the events in Andhra Pradesh between 1997 and 2005, when the Committee of Concerned Citizens played a similar role, are extremely relevant. The CCC made a broad-based effort to move the debate away from the violence-counter violence question and to centre stage the democratic aspirations of the people in the violence-torn rural areas of Telangana. Although the effort came to an abrupt end after talks between the government and the Naxalites broke down in early 2005, the experience of the CCC and the core principles of the action it pursued during those eight years can give pointers to the challenges and possibilities that civil society actors face in the current confl ict.