Abstract

India Hosts the World

The author reports on the issues discussed at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. To the beat of drums by India's Dalits (former Untouchables) and Adivasis (forest-dwelling tribes) celebrating indigenous popular movements that refuse to be subdued, the World Social Forum opened in Mumbai. There were peace campaigners and labor unionists from the Arab world, feminists and sexual fights activists from Pakistan, refugee fights defenders and ad-busters from Western Europe, anticorporate campaigners and grassroots environmentalists from North America, artists and citizen weapons-inspectors from Central Europe, indigenous fights activists and media-freedom campaigners from Africa, and secularists working against politicized religion from around the world. It was highlighted at the inaugural and concluding plenaries, where speakers, including India's former President K.R. Narayanan and former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, Iraq's Abdul Amir Al-Rekabi and Brazil's Chico Whitaker, described the "war on terrorism" as an attempt to demonize Islam and establish US hegemony. Prominent in this dialogue process were India's Communist Party (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India, which command high moral and political importance despite having suffered a halving of their national vote (now under 3 percent each). Until the 1998 India-Pakistan nuclear blasts, they looked at the issue of nuclear weapons through a cold war prism.