Live from The World Social Forum
WHY's own Peter Mann reports from Mumbai, India
I am trying hard to get my head around this amazing event of the first World Social Forum in Asia. Moving the WSF from Port Alegre, Brazil -- where it took place for the first three years -- to Asia, and to Bombay (Mumbai), and to a very poor part of the city, means that this is a massive confrontation with Asian poverty on a huge scale. It is creating a culture shock for me, and I suspect, for many others not familiar with Asia.
Of course, there is great poverty in Brazil, but Porto Alegre is paradise compared with the section of Mumbai we travel to each day. The WSF event -- which has brought somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 --people together is taking place in an industrial complex of the Western highway on the way to Goregaon. You travel through shantytowns on the way, and outside the complex there are about 100 families living along the highway divider and under a few scraps of polythene sheeting that they call home.
We published several articles on the water crisis, but it never came home to me the way it does when I see a family washing in the polluted water of the ditch. The water and sanitation conditions are as bad as any I have seen in the worst photographs. But it also makes me reawaken my zeal to link our work on water and sanitation to the water activists at this forum, and join in the work to change the horrendous conditions people have to live in.
Diversity
Another result of shifting the WSF from Brazil to Mumbai is that the forum has become much more diverse. I think the WSF in Port Alegre -- great in creating this process of building common ground between the social movements of the right to food, to land, to water, to fair trade, etc. - - was largely dominated by Westerners (Europe and Latin America), by people who were white, mostly Christian or
post-Christian, and more men than women.
A director of the Landless Movement in Brazil, Pedro Stedile, is quoted as saying: "We hope that in India, participation would become more popular, more open, more Asian, more plural, more Islamic, more Buddhist, more Hindu." This is how it is working out in Mumbai; it is also more women than men. This diversity is also a culture shock, although a pleasant one, and is making us all see the way the world is: two-thirds non-western, non-white, non-Christian. It is also consolidating the WSF movement as a world process, although this feels like a challenge that is not yet resolved so far, with two days to go.
Two World Social Forums
Given the huge numbers of people here, evaluations are risky, but one thing seems clear. There are two WSFs taking place in Mumbai. One is the intellectual forum in the halls and workshops, dominated by talking heads, many of them famous -- from Joseph Stiglitz "Globalization and Its Discontents" and the Nobel Prize for Economics to Arundhati Roy ("The God of Small Things"). So this is not so different from Porto Alegre where Noam Chomsky was treated like a rock star. And many of these people are deeply serious and in close contact with grassroots movements.
But the other WSF uses a very different language: it is mostly outside the halls and on the streets, and its languages are marches, dances, songs, drums, popular theater, calls and responses. Vivid costumes, puppets, families with children, Dalits, groups from every country in Asia and vivid in their diversity. Often the two interact as groups come through the halls where we are discussing alternative globalization or fair trade actions or the Iraq war, and treat us to a dance, a chant, or a march. Not to oversimplify -- the street WSF has its own intellectuals, workshops, assemblies, and there is great common ground on what we agree on and what we oppose. Many of us join the marches occasionally and sign the petitions and get into conversations when the language barrier allows it. But there is an enormous difference also, and this is a big challenge to the WSF.
An organizer of the Brazilian WSF whom I interviewed in Rio after WSF2003, Candido Grybowski of Ibase, said the fourth WSF would reduce the global deficit in social equality that has so far affected the forum. He added: "In Mumbai, the majority of participants will be from among poorer sections of the people who are more numerous and more organized in India than the economic and intellectual elite."
This is turning out to be a huge issue at the Forum. Last night we had a heated discussion in one tent on "How Radical Do We Have to Be?" George Monbiot who writes in the Guardian online was of the opinion that the talking heads and the grassroots are divided at the WSF and we have to break the division. Others -- including activists from Japan,Korea, India, among whom were Dalit leaders -- said the WSF is one of the best things that has ever happened to them in terms of pulling them into the world movement, giving them support, empowering them, and making their work more effectively.
Something powerful is happening. Monbiot, in a more pacific mood this morning in a discussion on "Alternatives to Globalization," made an interesting point that the power of the world elites is actually making the social movements powerful. Bush goes to war as the hyper power and creates another global power opposing the war. The WTO is expanded to bring in the poorer countries and get access to their markets and resources, and they oppose the rich countries at Cancun. The Pentagon's research creates the internet, and we use it to build a world social movement opposed to militarism and corporate control. "Now, everyone hates Monsanto and Bechtel," he said.
But there was just as much bad news on globalization and its economic effects on Mexico, Brazil, the
Philippines, and on many people in the USA, in the panel with Stiglitz on Globalization and Social and Economic Security, so I would not get euphoric too soon.
The Divine Comedy
Just one final experience from the WSF. There are moments of such joy and energy when you connect to the groups marching and singing -- the women in their gorgeous dresses, often with children, the workers and farmers from India and nearby states -- and with the intellectual energy and compassion from all sides, including the talking heads. It amazes me how friendly and good natured people are, in conditions of extreme poverty and oppression.
Then night falls and you have to find your way over the ditches and find your bus if you can, and navigate the infernal traffic, and once you get to the railway station you have to get on the train, which is like joining a rugby scrum as people hanging off the open doors fight their way off and we try to fight our way on, and the dust and noise and smells and masses of people make you feel far from paradise. I suppose finding your way from one state to the other is the purgatorial journey. Well, we are certainly on a journey here, one that ends on Jan 21, officially, but will certainly go on beyond this point.
Peter Mann is the International Coordinator for World Hunger Year and is also editor of
WHY Speaks.
