Proposed Meetings at Nagpur

The following announcement is in continuation with the Nagpur Meeting of 29th March ( English blog 3rd April, Hindi blog 6th April ). 

1.  28-29 June, 2014 (Saturday-Sunday). A gathering in Nagpur of many struggles and organizations to discuss rebuilding of the jan-andolan. A note in Marathi, announcing this, has been released to the press in Nagpur. We shall soon post an English and a Hindi translation of that note on this blog. The two main issues identified are, one, for those who live by lokavidya a steady income equal to that of a government employee and two, equal distribution of national resources like electricity, water, finance, education and health etc. 
2. 1st June (Sunday). Preparatory meeting in Nagpur for the 28-29 June conference. Members present will be from organizations and institutions of Nagpur and also other places, who would join in for the organization of the said conference. Some LJA members from different places should be present in this meeting.  
3. 31st May (Saturday). A meeting of LJA activists in Nagpur to take stock of where we are, since the Multai meeting and through the General Elections.

Preparatory notes of all these meetings will be posted on this blog soon. 

All these meetings and their proceedings highly depend upon the understanding of political process presently on. There has been some debate on this blog but definitely not enough to provide substantial and rich enough context to discuss strategies for rebuilding jan-andolan. So this is to request you to find time to write on this blog analyzing the present situation as you see it. 

It seems that two closely related but strikingly independent issues need to be focused upon separately and not doing so causes immense confusion and misunderstanding. These are -

• The anti-corruption movement and the AAP have caused a major destabilization of the established polity and may be expected to continue to do so. This causes major spaces to open up for interventions that are of different type, mainly based on people's initiative and built around political and philosophical claims of lokavidya. 
• The promise that the AAP may stand for. Analyzing policy frames that may be emerging from what they say, write as manifestos and have been doing in their campaigns including the governance in Delhi. 

These two points are very similar to the two points we have been making for more than ten years now, namely that, the computer-internet has destabilized in a big way the world of knowledge that was headed by science and in the process opened up fresh spaces for the knowledge claims of lokavidya, which in turn may be very meaningful from the point of view of a new political imagination and the other being, that the world of computers and the virtual dispensation hardly holds any promise of change that may be of interest to the ordinary people from the point of view of betterment of their lives.   

A very serious and large process has been unleashed. It is necessary to take an all sided view of this and find ways to intervene to promote the causes we have been working for. As soon as the elections are over it is going to become a pressing matter. 

Sunil Sahasrabudhey

Vidya Ashram, Sarnath