By Ranjit Devraj
MUMBAI, India, Jan 12 (IPS) - A gathering of 75,000 people for the fourth World Social Forum (WSF) that begins in this bustling Indian port city on Friday does not impress office clerk Abhay Khadilkar.
In fact, Khadilkar is preparing to leave Mumbai and travel 600 kilometres east to attend a 'Kumbh Mela' or mass bathing ritual in the city of Allahabad, an event that attracts several million people for a month starting Jan. 15.
A 'Kumbh Mela' in January 2001 attracted 20 million people on a single auspicious day and is regarded as the world's biggest gathering yet.
''The World Social Forum is not going to improve this life but if I attend the Kumbh Mela, I may expiate my sins and hope for a better birth next time,'' Khadilkar told IPS with the resignation of a lifetime of drudgery in this city of 18 million people that features extreme contrasts between the haves and the have-nots.
Khadilkar has found an explanation for a life spent shuttling between the plush airconditioned environments in which the trading firm he works for is ensconced, and the two-room, tin-roof shack in a filthy slum in Dharavi, the world's largest slum, that his family of five calls home.
''I don't need any forum to give me another explanation, or even a solution,'' he remarked.
Those flying into Mumbai airport this week from different countries to attend the WSF, a gathering of the world's social movements, may catch a glimpse of Dharavi's tin and cardboard constructions that seem to nibble away at the perimetre fencing and doubtless affirm faith in the movement's catchy tagline -- 'Another World is Possible'.
They can take time off from the ponderous deliberations on neo-imperialism at the WSF, to be held at Goreagon here, to gape at the massive colonial 'heritage' buildings left behind by the British as well as the evidence of lost opportunities and neglect in the more than half century after their departure.
Indeed, the social contrasts and contradictions that the WSF proposes to iron out by furthering ''economic and social progress'' form the very stuffing of Mumbai. And it is a goal all too familiar in an India, which is now lurching out of decades of socialism and into uncertain globalisation.
Attempting to reconcile the contradictions is as difficult as trying to figure out why India vociferously champions the cause of farmers in developing countries at the deliberations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), such as at Cancun, Mexico in September, but ignores the sufferings of poverty-ridden farmers who make up more than half of the country's one billion-plus population.
''The actual cost of producing a kilogramme of wheat in the United States minus the subsidies is several times higher than that of producing it in India. But in this country, the government actually steps in to freeze farm support prices, thereby depriving local farmers of their legitimate income,'' explained the internationally known food security expert, Devinder Sharma.
More than half-a-century after decolonisation, India has been unable to provide legal protection and just wages for agricultural workers who form 60 percent of the workforce and operate India's still largely farm-based economy. Meantime, the government pampers the information technology sector that takes away rather than provides employment.
The result of such policies is that every train going into cities like Mumbai carries swarms of people seeking to exchange hard labour and negligible wages in the farmlands for such money as can be earned off the pavements.
With no legally saleable skills, they fall easy prey to brothel owners or even agents looking for human organs to buy and trade. Last week, police in Mumbai began investigating three major hospitals that have been colluding with the purveyors of this gruesome but lucrative business on complaints by a labourer, Khurshid Alam, that he was never paid for his kidney.
At a completely different level, the Medical Tourism Council of Maharashtra, formed by the state government, is doing its bit for globalisation by actively encouraging foreigners to avail of cheap medical treatment at Mumbai's many, well-equipped and staffed private hospitals that most local people cannot afford to go to.
Said Ravi Duggal, coordinator for the Centre for Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT), one of Mumbai's better known voluntary agencies. ''I fail to see how medical care can become a tourist attraction, and the government promoting medical care through a tourism council is a sick concept.''
Given such glaring contrasts, it is little wonder that the WSF in Mumbai is coming up against stiff resistance in the shape of a parallel movement called the Mumbai Resistance - 2004, whose stated intention is the seizure of the 'anti-imperialism' banner away from what it says are the half-hearted leaders of the WSF.
The MR-2004 wants nothing less than a ''total break from all controls, domination and subjugation by imperialism and the institutions of the world capitalist system'' as represented, it said, by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and transnational corporations, all of which have been making steady, visible inroads into the long-insulated Indian economy.
''We seek to take the people of the world, including those attending the WSF, beyond the limits of reflective thinking and debate and toward organised resistance against imperialist globalisation and wars,'' said one of the movement's leaders, the distinguished former judge V Krishna Iyer.
Activists of the MR-2004 say the WSF legitimises and strengthens imperialism because despite the huge numbers of people and groups it gathers to oppose capitalist-led globalisation, it does not speak up enough against the serious disruptions this causes and prevents extreme left-wing groups from participating and voicing their opinions.
''The battle against imperialism and the global system of capital cannot be fought without also targeting the local ruling classes within countries who support and actively implement these policies,'' said a leaflet by MR-2004, which has also painted the walls of the WSF venue and other areas in the city with slogans opposing capitalist-led globalisation and institutions like the WTO.
Explaining the rationale for moving WSF out of its original home in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it began with 20,000 people in 2001, to India for this year's event, Candido Grzybowski, one of the key organisers, has said: ''They see problems there that we don't have.''
But Grzybowski could not have anticipated the apathy of people like Khadilkar -- or the determination of the MR-2004. In the midst of the Mumbai Resistance are people associated with such die-hard groups as the People's War Group, which regards the WSF -- rather than the WTO -- as the real enemy.
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