‘SEZs will have corporate totalitarianism’

“It’s my bedrock,” says Biju Mathew, 43, of the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance that he helped co-found 12 years ago. An assistant professor of Information Systems at the US’ Raider University, Mathew is an iconic figure in the otherwise doddering American labour movement. After completing his PhD from Pittsburgh, Mathew lived in an African-American working class neighborhood “in the middle of absolute poverty… to find a way to understand America”. The Alliance has close to 12,000 members, many of them immigrants from across the world. Mathew is also active against right-wing Hindutva forces in the US. During a visit to Hyderabad, Mathew spoke to AJIT SAHI about the taxi drivers’ campaigns, the threats from Hindutva and the truth behind India’s SEZ projects.

Two years ago, the Standford University called off your speech after a students’ newspaper accused you of being a jihadist. What did you make of it?
There’s been a constant attack on me since I began working on Hindutva-related issues in the United States. Standford re-invited me after they figured it was just a series of manufactured things thrown at me. Various people connected to Hindutva in the US have written to my university seeking that I be fired, with absurd claims that I misrepresent myself as a professor when I’m an assistant professor. When I first put out a report on the funding the RSS receives in the US, it threatened a defamation suit against me for Rs. 1 crore in Gujarat. A Bajrang dal portal once had me on their homepage with blood dripping off me. After [Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra] Modi was denied a visa to the US, I received a lot of hate-mail. In a sense it’s an indication that the work we’re doing is effective. The battle against Hindutva is, of course, to be fought and won in India. But the Hindutva ideology is reproduced in a more pure form in the US than in India. Subject to a particular kind of racism, they feel the need to withdraw, ghettoise, reconstruct and identify themselves. In ideological and financial support, Hindutva’s growth in the US is a big issue.

What are the key features of Hindutva in the US?
Hindutva outifts are masters in creating different institutional forms that settle into the crevices of systems. In the last three years, the Hindutva lobby has decided to take on the US education system. Under multicultural policies, American children are exposed to world history by the 6th grade. There was a huge battle in California last year when institutions like Hindu Education Fund, Hindu American Foundation and Vedic Studies Foundation got into the curriculum review process to present mythology as history. It took action from a range of academics to bring that to a stop. The next set of textbook reviews come up next year in conservative states like Texas. Unlike in India, three or four big US states decide the curriculum for the entire country as other states adopt their textbooks. We’ll have a big battle on our hands.

Over the last two years, Hindutva organisations have modelled themselves on the Zionist lobby. The alliance between the Hindutva and the Zionist lobbies is building up at several levels. Hindutva has people working in Washington on the Beltway to try and influence policies. That infrastructure mirrors the Zionist infrastructure. They are desperately trying to penetrate universities like the Zionists’ did. They are trying to set up chaired professorships for which they are paying the money so they have a say in who gets it. They were also trying to go through [Sri Sri] Ravi Shankar. There was an attempt to use Swraj Paul’s company, Caparo, to set up chaired professorships.

How did they use Sri Sri Ravi Shankar?
Just walking down the beach in Nagapattinam will tell you the story. Ravi Shankar, Mata Amritanandamai and the VHP are deeply implicated with each other in rehabilitation efforts there. Ravi Shankar came to the Pioneer Valley where there are five colleges of repute: the University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Holyoke College, Hampshire College and Amherst College. Four of them are really top-rank liberal arts institutions. One is a toprank public institution. He [Ravi Shankar] was setting up a meeting with the presidents of those universities to start a centre. But a group of people from University of Massachusetts started a campaign and put and end to that. One of the campaigners was harassed by calls at her home from obviously VHP folks.

One of the big VHP projects is to bring all temples together. In India that’s an impossible project because there are all sorts of temples and if someone comes and tells them to join a particular temple they will just slap him and send him home. In the US that effort has been on for two years. The third US National Temple Conference has just been held. I’ve been following one of their activists for the last 12 years who is specially deputed for this task. I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be such consolidation.

Who makes up the Hindutva lobby? What motivates them?
If I stand on the corner of Jackson’s Heights in New York, probably the largest Indian market in the US, and ask the first 10 Indians who pass by, maybe six or seven would be pretty sympathetic towards and support Hindutva. The post-1960s wave of migration from India to the US was in large part upper and middle-class, urban professionals. They are the base of the Hindutva movement. Doctors, engineers, professors are so positioned by the American economy that their work disperses them. From the 1960s to the 1980s you tend to see the consolidation of Hindus in the US. In the 1980s the trading classes started migrating. At this time, Hindutva also began to grow. That group started to set up institutions and the older professionals started plugging into them. A significant number are ideologues with institutional connections in India.

But I must say it gets a very interesting set of inflections in the US. Even a suburban Hindu family that is not seriously into Hindutva finds the bal vihars the only way out. There’s a Hindu Students’ Council (HSC) which runs cabs. I know reasonable middle-of-theroad Hindu families that send their children to an HSC camp. Not because they are dramatically Hindutva but because they are in a moment of crisis, they have no way to control their culture, and they feel their own identity is getting frail at the edges, especially the second generation. At that moment they go to the packaged form. As Romila Thapar says, this is syndicated Hinduism.

What about the liberal Hindus in the US? Over the last 10-15 years we’ve put in place various institutions to do some of these battles. It’s very difficult to make the battle against Hindutva in the US an offensive battle because, whether you call me progressive, liberal or leftist, the number of struggles that I see in New York — the anti-war movement, the taxi drivers — that I need to be part of, are large. Hindutva does not appear on my radar because the Indians are not necessarily my entire community. [But] for every liberal who vacates the space in the community in the interest of hip-hop, for the pleasures of the markets, it is precisely the space the right-winger gets into. Around 11 years ago we started training South Asian kids to be youth community activists. We’ve trained more than 350 of them. We put together a coalition against genocide, of around 42 organisations, including leftist and Marxist groups, the Indian Muslim Council, the Vaishnav Centre.

You’ve been visiting India’s SEZs. What is your assessment?
The SEZs are a huge landgrab. They are a potential flashpoint. I’ve been putting together a group in the US and this was part of my task to visit the various SEZs. I’ve been to SEZs in Maharashtra and spent time in Raigarh, the two power plants, the port development. I’ve been to SEZ in Andhra Pradesh and in Orissa. For the Indian industrialists — the Reliances, the Tatas, the Jindals — rural India matters only as a point of resource extraction. They couldn’t care less about that place. India is being recrafted as 20-25 “hubs” as SEZs, all within a 40-50 km from the big metros or on the coast near the ports. To see them as Bihar, Jharkand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh is wrong: it’s one mine, one stretch.

In India, you have gunda or rogue capitalism, which allows the Kalinga Nagar atrocities [where police fired and killed tribals protesting an SEZ]. It would have been very difficult to do a Kalinga Nagar in America. I don’t think it will go on uninterrupted because the protests are mounting. But if it goes on uninterrupted you’ll have a dual India: a formal parliamentary democracy as a certain kind of sham, a nation state in which the nation has vanished and only the state remains. And you will have corporate totalitarianism in these hubs.

In India, if you object to an SEZ, you are seen as opposed to development and prosperity.
Reliance SEZ has taken over 45 villages. But the claim is that the villages don’t need rehabilitation as they’re not being touched. This is a multipurpose SEZ. We don’t know what it is going to do. The SEZ Act allows 70 percent of the land to be used for other purposes. This is real estate speculation. There are supposedly two power plants coming up: Tatas’ and Reliance’s. Everyone there asked me, where will the coal come from? There is none close by. Everybody is convinced there won’t be any power plant. They’ll start the project, it’ll fail, and they’ll have the land.

The Georgia Tech University has been granted 250 acres of land in Andhra Pradesh at Rs 1.5 lakh an acre while the market rate is Rs 1.5 crore an acre. It will only grant MSc and PhD degrees. An engineer with Oracle filed an RTI and pulled out the papers. A 7-star hotel has been planned there. Why should a university get land at Rs 1.5 lakh an acre to build a 7-star hotel? It’s grabbing the commons. What belongs to everybody is being appropriated and privatised.

Has unionisation helped the NY cabbies?
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, 30 percent of Manhattan was closed for months. Miles around WTC were dead. Broadway, airports were closed. Drivers lost a third of their business. The New York City administration said drivers are not eligible for emergency relief but airlines were. Our huge campaign for eight months forced the Federal Emergence Management Assistance to re-open for drivers. Probably 8,000 drivers got out of debt.

Then we mounted a wage increase campaign. In Hollywood films you see a four-character string on top of the yellow cab. That’s a medallion number. It’s a permit issued at $5 non-transferrable in 1937. By 1950, brokers had started to manipulate it and turned it into a commodity. Its market value now is $450,000. No driver can buy it, of course, so he leases cars from those who hold these medallions. To run one 12- hour shift from 5pm-5am, a driver puts around $130 on the table and $40 for gas. This is a profession where you can go home with a negative amount after work.

Every time there is a fare increase the owners increase the lease. In 1996, the drivers got 14 percent and the owners 86 percent. In 2004, we ran a campaign for a fare increase and a holding down of the lease. Drivers got a 26 percent fare increase and leases got eight percent. That was the biggest wage increase in 35 years. Our third campaign was launched when gas prices were shooting up. We won it as waiting time. Because we’ve won three battles, we’re facing a backlash. One of the things the owners lost when they went into leasing was control over how much the drivers were making. Now they are forcing GPS trackers into the taxis. It’s a battle from hell. We’ve gone to court and the legislature. We went on a near-total strike for three days in September 2007, but the government refused to back off.

A section of India is striving hard to become America. Will it work?
Not a single American student of mine can think like a citizen. Everything they do or evaluate — life choices, how to live in a community — is like a market decision: buy one, get one free. If hyper consumption catches up in India, only 30 percent will have access to it. These worlds are going to split culturally so completely that the only answer will be fascism.