Manish Jain (Shikshantar)
I first became involved in activism when I was
in college in the late 1980s. At that time, I focused on campus issues related
to personal and institutional racism against Asian Americans. I helped organize
protest rallies, sit-ins, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, and even special
commissions. I also tried to build bridges first with the African American,
Native American and Latino populations then with groups focusing on class,
gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc. I thought that my ‘politics’ was
becoming more inclusive as I angrily fought for the human rights of all
oppressed peoples. We could make the System work for all by reforming it so
that it gave equal rights to everyone – everyone could have a piece of the pie.
But inside something did not feel quite right.
I grew up being told that you needed to have
mainstream institutional power if you want to change the world. This meant
either lots of money, political influence, academic expertise or military arms.
So I spent the next 8 years venturing into the big power structures of the
world – Wall Street, Harvard and the United Nations systems, Ministry of
Education, NGOs – jumping from one belly of the beast to another, exploring how
I could change them from within. As I moved around, I started to discover that
there were deeper linkages and assumptions which connected and served to keep
in place these power structures. The Game was bigger than just a few ‘bad
apples’. I started to have deeper questions about the labels which we used to
describe diverse people/lifestyles from around the world (such as
‘under-developed’ or ‘illiterate’), about the framing of peoples’ problems
around the world (from a deficit perspective within a larger worldview of
scarcity), and around the nature of the experts, technocratic solutions and
institutions.
It was during this period that I came across a
little booklet by Mahatma Gandhi that was written in 1908 called Hind Swaraj. In that often-neglected piece, he seeks to explore
the real purpose of the freedom struggle. He clarifies, “It is not about
getting rid of the tiger [i.e. the British] and keeping the tiger’s nature
[tools, systems, worldview, etc].” He calls for swaraj
(rule over the individual and collective Self) and for the need to look beyond
the logic of “modern” colonizing systems of health, justice and technology. I
was deeply inspired by his challenge to look at both the ‘ends’ and the ‘means’
in the context of both the personal and the systemic dimensions of our lives.
(This had already been a part of my upbringing with Jain philosophy which
encouraged me to interrogate the premise that one could create non-violent
worlds using violence methods). Gandhi’s insights also gave me space to
transcend false polarizing and deterministic TINA (There Is No Alternative)
debates of capitalism vs. communism, Left vs. Right, East vs. West, etc. At the
same time, swaraj opened up new opportunities to ask
more fundamental questions about the nature of progress, freedom, faith, etc.
in generative ways rather than through the cynical mindgames
that I had been academically trained in.
I also felt the courage to try to move beyond playing ‘big’ power games
to fix the State and Market systems. I realized that no matter how clever I
was, these only served to further fuel the monster. I started to re-orient
myself to a place of asking honest questions about my own complicity and
insecurity as well as searching for my own real sources of organic power. Are
there forms of power that are not dependent on the growth of the State, NGOs or
Market? Could I re-generate these in my own life?
For the past 9 years, I have been trying to
explore what swaraj means today in the context of my
life and my community in
During the process, I have met people from all
over the world who are making similar efforts in honestly regenerating their
own communities – many of whom have never called themselves activists and would
never think of doing so. One of these
people is my ‘illetterate’ grandmother who is one of
the greatest environmentalists that I have ever been around. She is not a
member of Greenpeace, nor does she have a PhD in environmental sciences. But
she is an amazing upcycler. I now feel we are missing
out on a lot of possibilities because of our conditioning as ‘Left’ activists.
I remember a friend recently telling me that she was lucky to escape her local
community because the people there, including her family, were so conservative.
I challenged her to re-explore her assumptions
of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ -- there might be things that she didn’t
like that were taking place in her community but had she taken the time to
deeply look at what were the positive things (practices, stories, possibilities)
that were happening. I think the main
struggle in front of us lies in reclaiming control not only over what we choose
to see and value in our life, but also how we see and value things.
For me, the most exciting examples of Now
Activism in
- What else do I need to unlearn to see/tap
into new forms of power, identity and relationships?
- What are the diverse ways in which people are
self-organizing outside the purview of dominant authority and institutions?
- What are new tools that not only allow us to
creatively express our dissent but more importantly regenerate our cultures,
our wisdom ecologies, our imagination and our inter-connected beings?