IT WAS very different from Porto Alegre’s. Porto Alegre, even though it’s in Brazil, is like a little first-world city, whereas Mumbai is certainly not that. I think many people who had come for the WSF from outside India and were visiting India for the first time were shocked, but not necessarily only in a bad way, by what they saw. It was a grittier, less pretty experience, I imagine. I think the World Social Forum was a very exciting place to be this year. It was interesting that there were something like 150,000 official delegates, yet the Indian media managed to ignore it almost completely, which I think gives us quite a wonderful insight into the way the world is working right now.

As I said in my talk at the opening plenary, I continue to be worried that the World Social Forum, which is an essential forum and an essential platform for many of us, shouldn’t be using up all the energies of the best activists and the best minds in the world. Because whatever happens at the forum isn’t in itself real resistance. It’s important for us to discuss the things we discuss, but that discussion should be in addition to fully engaging in the real fight.

THE REAL fight is that we are up against an economic system that is suffocating the majority of people in this world. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to address it? The world is getting more and more polarized. Is there some form of real civil disobedience, apart from the World Social Forum and apart from major demonstrations, that can actually inflict damage on the system that we oppose?

NOT JUST India, but all over the world. The fact is that nonviolent resistance isn’t just about street demonstrations and it isn’t just about political theater, although political theater is an incredibly important part of it. But such actions can’t be disconnected from real civil disobedience. The example I keep giving is the Salt March in the 1930s in India. It wasn’t just political theater. It wasn’t just a march to the coast where Indians made salt. It was a strike against the economic underpinning of the British Empire. We need to go beyond demonstrations now to really talk about how we can use the instrument of civil disobedience to dismantle the underpinnings of the system.

Not that I have heard of. But of course I think there are a lot of people discussing these strategies. Corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton are engaged in the privatization of essential infrastructure, dams, water, electricity, and other basic resources that affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. How do you boycott companies like these? Or are these the companies we should target? We have to really agree on exactly which companies and what kind of strategies we are talking about. I think we have to relate this discussion to the occupation of Iraq. The war in Iraq is a culmination of the process of corporate globalization. These companies that are privatizing Iraq’s natural resources are doing similar things across the world, and therefore they have outposts across the world and therefore their flanks exposed across the world. Their strengths could be, should be, turned into their weakness.

YES, THAT’S now become something that a lot of people are saying, including peer leaders of the corporate globalization program like Thomas Friedman.

In that same book, RUPE writes that the Indian rulers are eager to be anointed the U.S. satraps in the region.

WELL, RIGHT now we are facing national elections in India, and there is a sort of fairground atmosphere here, with the Congress Party pretending to battle the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and so on. But economically, there is complete consensus between the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). People say that corporate globalization undermines the power of the state. Far from it. As corporate globalization drives a wedge between the rich and the poor and as unrest grows, far from not needing the state, the free market needs the state in order to quell the mutinies. And, therefore, when we vote in our elections, we are really voting for who we would like to invest the coercive powers of the state with. What is happening in India is frightening. We are having to deal with the effects of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which is similar to the Patriot Act in the United States. In states like Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, it isn’t even used against "suspected terrorists." It’s really used against people who are protesting their own disposition, who are protesting their own impoverishment by these huge development projects. So there is a sort of conflation of terrorism and poverty.

POTA has been used against something like 3,000 people in the state of Jharkhand alone. It’s not that this terrorism act is being misused. It’s being used exactly for the purpose it was enacted, which is to suppress dissent.

MY ASSESSMENT is that Kashmir has become a place where the dividing lines between politicians and terrorists and journalists and intelligence officers and surrendered terrorists have all become very blurred. It’s really very difficult to pick your way through this. But it remains the case that the people of Kashmir consider the Indian army an occupying force. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai, I attended a panel called "Resisting Occupation in Iraq, Palestine, and Kashmir" [Sponsored by CERSC, the publisher of the ISR] And there were many Kashmiris there for whom that title was a political statement that gave them a lot of hope. But the fact is that Kashmir is not an issue that can be easily resolved. There are no easy solutions. What is sure is that anything that has been done in the past few years has only made it worse and we have to acknowledge that, as Indian citizens, as people who claim to belong to a democracy.

THERE IS one good thing that has happened. A large number of Indians, about 10,000 people, went across the border to Pakistan for the first time ever and were welcomed very warmly by people along the street. I visited Pakistan once at the height of the tension, when both our countries were pointing nuclear missiles at each other and a million soldiers were massed on the border on red alert and had the same experience. I think that this is a wonderful thing because even people from Jharkhand had gone over and came back quite shocked at the warmth they have experienced and the similarity between the two countries.

I feel nervous about what is happening only because it’s happening so suddenly. Just a few months ago the policy was one of war. You had the movies and mainstream newspapers and mainstream journalists being vitriolic about Pakistan. It was dreadful. And the same rhetoric was being expressed on the other side, of course. And suddenly it’s as if a switch has been thrown and everybody is pretending that it never was like that. I feel that it’s a very brittle moment, and anything can happen to change it. I don’t really trust it now, even though I’m very happy that people went across because I think that’s the only solution at the end of the day. The only solution is to open the borders and let people get to know each other because then you really can’t control what they think. Obviously you can control what they think when nobody has access to the other place.

I THINK fundamentalists actually get on quite well together. They seem to speak the same language sometimes. If you look at the way the way the BJP and the governments headed by Ariel Sharon and George Bush are getting along, calling themselves "natural allies" and so on, you see that fundamentalists sometimes understand each other. People here say that the BJP would never allow peace between India and Pakistan if it were in the opposition.

So it’s a very complicated process and of course the strings are being pulled by the United States in this case.

IF THEY were counting on that it was only because they have so little understanding about what is going on in the world and what people really think. And the fact is that at the end of the day people are not willing to be humiliated endlessly. If you listen to the language used on mainstream television, you hear resistance fighters in Iraq being called insurgents and militants and terrorists. If you try reversing that, and imagine that Iraq or India had occupied America and was patrolling the streets of New York City and there were attacks on their troops, would that same language be used or would those fighters be honored as heroes? Right now there isn’t a country in the world that can withstand a military attack head-on by the United States. So all people can do is to allow the U.S. military to occupy their countries–that disables the awesome air power and "smart missiles"–and then engage them in street battles. Of course the fighters will be called terrorists. The U.S. government is manufacturing "terrorists" on a mass scale and I am increasingly dumbfounded by the way even liberals are now talking. I had an interview last month, a discussion with two very well-known, supposedly liberal historians, and one of them said, look at the case of Japan. It’s a fantastic example of a country that was defeated in war and has now become a country where good middle-class people read the Wall Street Journal. I wondered if India had dropped atomic bombs on two American cities and killed 150,000 American people and implanted cancer in the bodies of future generations would he have still said look at these good middle-class American people doing puja [a Hindu prayer ritual] and reading the Hindustan Times? Is this not a kind of fundamentalism? An inability to see, or make place for the Other? It’s as if these people have bags over their heads now and they can’t see another point of view.

EVEN THOUGH India is poised on the brink of fascism there is still a huge reservoir of feeling against U.S. imperialism here. Right now there are elections happening, so nobody is going to take that step. But it would have been a hard thing for the coalition government to do.

WELL RIGHT now it’s overstretched, isn’t it? In Iraq, the people are engaging it directly. The U.S. cannot afford another Iraq or another Afghanistan. So, in a way, these two countries have engaged the military front of empire, and are keeping it busy. That’s a huge crack, which is why I think it’s very important for us to understand that this fight is not their fight alone. They’re keeping U.S. troops busy on behalf of the rest of the world. While it has tremendous military might, I think the project of corporate globalization leaves its economic outposts vulnerable. These are other cracks that we must be exploring.

SARAI IS a unique example. It has resources. It works with new media and is doing wonderful work. But I think in India there is a huge schism now between the so-called national media, which is mostly English and mostly corporate media, and the vernacular press, published in regional languages. The vernacular press actually has more influence than the English papers, as we have seen during the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. The English media, which sort of supported the BJP and this whole project of globalization, was a little bit upset when the killings started, and so they took a position against it, although they had supported the processes that led to the violence. But the vernacular media in Gujarat was completely rabid and fascist during the pogrom. So it’s a complicated situation. The fact is that the media here are not as easy to control as they are in the United States, where we know now that six major corporations control the mainstream media. In India, you still have hundreds of little newspapers and pamphlets and a kind of anarchy underneath these major newspapers read by the rich and powerful. But on the whole the situation is bleak–between the English media’s support for corporate globalization and the vernacular press’s support for the Hindutva project.

AS I said earlier, when you look at the way political parties in India have evolved, you see that beneath this shrill exchange of insults, there is an almost absolute consensus, certainly on economic issues. But this doesn’t mean that one takes a position absolutely without nuance: that the Congress and the BJP are the same, the Conservatives and Labor are the same, Democrats and the Republicans are the same. Because, of course, they are not the same. And we must exploit their differences to keep them off balance. In India, there is a difference between an overtly communal party with fascist tendencies (BJP) and a party that slyly pits one community against the other (Congress). There is a difference, but I’m talking about real alternative politics. Which doesn’t mean having nothing to do with mainstream politics. But it certainly means understanding that it’s a process of cynical manipulation. And we too must observe and participate, somewhat cynically. The real pressure on Parliament or on Congress can only be applied from the outside, and that has to come back to the discussion about civil disobedience and nonviolence. I find the personality politics of putting forward well-known activists for seats inside Parliament meaningless. It’s not going to lead to radical change of any kind.

In India, increasingly movements–like the movements against the dams–have been pushed to the wall now.

So there is a debate taking place between basically two positions. One says that only armed struggle will help, and the other is talking about entering electoral politics. And I’m cautioning against both. While nonviolence hasn’t worked, we can’t just dump it. We have to ask ourselves where we went wrong, and reimagine it.

THE RIGHT-wing BJP-led government was not just voted out of power, it was humiliated by the Indian electorate. None of the political pundits and pollsters predicted the results. It cannot but be seen as a decisive vote against communalism, as well as neoliberalism’s economic "reforms." The Congress Party has become the single largest party. The Left parties, the only parties to be overtly, though ineffectively, critical of the reforms, have been given an unprecedented mandate.

But even as we celebrated, we knew that on every major issue other than overt Hindu nationalism–nuclear bombs, big dams, and privatization–the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the legacy of the Congress that led us to the horror of the BJP.

Even before it has formed a government, there were overt reassurances by Congress leaders that "reforms" will continue. Exactly what kind of reforms, we’ll have to wait and see.

After the election results were declared, the corporate media essentially dumped the teeming millions who had voted for a change of course. They were sent home like badly paid extras on a film set. They had provided the spectacle of the great Indian democracy–the journey to election booths on elephants and camels and bullock carts, the poor farmers, the old and infirm, the veiled women, the gnarled and rugged men. All the television channels had split screens: one half showed the hysterical crowds of party workers outside Sonia Gandhi’s house; the other was stationed outside the Bombay Stock Market. We saw the Sensex stock index move up and down and sideways. When it plunged, the papers reported it as though there had been a nuclear holocaust. I did not see one farmer, one villager, one laborer, or one slum dweller on television being asked what they thought of the results.

The Indian poor provided the votes, then they were asked to fuck off home. It looks very much as though economic policy will be decided by the stock market.

MIXED SIGNALS. Because in some senses I feel that things may have to get worse in order to get better but while they are getting worse, you’ve got to keep fighting the waves of despair that come over you. And yet at the same time I think processes are being clarified and that is very important. And one thinks that maybe fascism is something that we will have to confront head on, and emerge stronger from. But while it’s happening, it’s terrifying. Indian activists working on the ground are in fear for their lives. I have never seen such apprehension in the toughest, bravest people I know.

IT’S NOT a bad thing. Sometimes it’s a burden always being expected to end on a note of hope. Brittle hope. But despair is not the opposite of hope. One needs to introspect, to understand, and to pick up and run from there. We mustn’t flinch from that. It’s important to come to grips with this very serious and dark time the world is going through. And yet look at what is happening in Iraq. People that have been bombed, starved, tortured, and oppressed by the "international community," as well as their own dictator, are resisting. Look at the fight the Iraqis are waging. They are redefining the meaning of power. How can that leave us hopeless? There’s always hope. It’s just that sometimes it’s buried deep under debris. It’s a question of locating it, digging it up.

DAVID BARSAMIAN is founder and director of Alternative Radio based in Boulder, Colorado. His interviews and articles appear regularly in the Progressive and Z Magazine. He is the author of several books, including Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting.