Sanskriti
a bimonthly publication of
progressive south asian politics

Volume 6: Number 1                    December 25, 1995

October, 1993. The business district of lower Manhattan. A sea of yellow cabs, in file, roll down the streets immobilizing the busy early afternoon flow of the island. A massive show of strength and an effort by South Asian cabbies to focus public attention on their conditions of work after three of them were found dead within one 24 hour period. Reports of increased and continuously escalating racial violence have been pouring in over the last year. The objects of their protest are both the racist aggression of the larger dominant white society as also, and more specifically, the New York Police Department's (NYPD) brutality. "The most dangerous profession in the world" is the taxi drivers way of saying it. A CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) poster says it all "After Giuliani and Bratton: 250% increase in police beatings of Asian Americans." (Bratton, incidentally, is Giuliani's police chief.P

Forty three percent of New York city cab drivers are of South Asian origin. In numbers, it means 10,000 South Asian cab drivers ply their vehicles on NY streets. The October rally was organized by a new organization that represents the interests of the South Asian taxi drivers in NYC - the Lease Drivers Coalition (LDC). A South Asian organization taking to the streets in protest!?! That too a group of South Asians whom most of us middle class _desis(Indians) prefer not to recognize?! Well. Something is happening!!!

Let me begin with a brief description of the Lease Drivers Coalition (LDC) - the new South Asian Taxi Drivers union in New York City. Set up as part of a larger coalition called Committee Against Anti- Asian Violence (CAAAV), LDC came into being at a time when South Asian cabbies were increasingly feeling the pressures of a racist society. Since its inception in 1992, the LDC has been successfully helping member cabbies both in terms of battling police brutality on the streets, and to a lesser degree, negotiating between garages and cabbies. In the past two years, it has seen most success in battling cases of police brutality. In little more than a year, LDC and CAAAV (see box), have managed to get three different cases of trumped up charges dropped against cab drivers - Saleemi Chughati, Mohammad Asghar and Saleem Osman - and are currently fighting the case of Naseer Saleemi against NYPD in New York courts. Coordinated by Saleem Osman, a victim of police brutality himself, LDC is predominantly Pakistani in its composition. The organization is working hard on broadening its base to include Indian and Bangladeshi drivers, in other words making the South Asian character of the union more meaningful. Apart from the extensive communication channel which taxi drivers have through the CB radio, LDC is making efforts to open up new channels. In this direction it has just published the first issue of its tri-lingual magazine - Peela Paiya (Yellow Wheel) - in English, Urdu and Bengali. While it works hard on establishing a truly pan-South Asian identity, it is also making efforts to reach outwards. It has been trying to build relations with two other large ethnic groups in the yellow cab business - Haitians and Africans. In addition LDC, through CAAAV, has initiated contact with the Transit Police Guardians (an association of African American police officers) and with the Transit Police Association Jade Society (an association of Asian, primarily East Asian, officers).

The emergence of the LDC into an American political space already defined by the high visibility of the middle class South Asian immigrant - a politics that equates the racial category of South Asian with the economic category of professional middle class (the model minority) - gives me reason to stop and think. I have been involved with various activities surrounding so-called South Asian immigrant politics for over four years now. It is a politics, to say the least, with which I have been uncomfortable. To me, after four years, South Asian middle class politics, appears to be a timeless beast that is incapable of being part of the larger political battles of the US. When I first heard about the LDC (and CAAAV) through a film - _Taxi-vala/Autobiography_- by documentary film maker Vivek Bald (see box), I was struck by a clear sense of a larger politics (or problems) that constantly murmured behind the conversations about South Asian taxidrivers' lives. As I began to learn more about the LDC, I cautioned myself that I was probably painting it up in my mind as a "good" organization because of some sense of nostalgia for working class politics. But no: the LDC is not yet a successful organization in any real sense of the word, given that it is hardly a few years old. It is too early for me to celebrate it in that simple sense. What struck me, however, is that in many ways the LDC is doing what the middle class Indian public organizations don't do. The LDC, in my reading, is inserting itself into the political space called New York/USA in a manner which is very different from how most middle class Indian groups organize and link themselves to the larger political space.

Consider a middle class desi organization. It reeks of "Indianness" to the exclusion of all else. A few progressive middle class organizations have in the past sought to define themselves as South Asian, but by now we are quite clearly aware of the limitations of such an effort. How many times have I not grimaced when an organization that calls itself South Asian something or the other, discusses an issue at length - momentarily realizes its exclusion of all other South Asians except Indians - and immediately proceeds to make token adjustments - "can we have something about the others please?!?" This is not to point fingers at my fellow progressive desis (for I have been and am as much part of such organizations), but to point to a fundamental problem. A middle class Pakistani and a middle class Indian immigrant share very little. They can and do lead lives disconnected from each other. This is where the LDC is forced, by the very defining imperatives of its mass base, to be different. The fundamental difference lies in the issues at stake. The work of driving cabs belongs as much to a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi or an Indian driver. This is not to say that South Asian`ness' has no culturally produced meaning. It does - through intersections of language and region. However, the consolidation of the cultural category of South Asian makes sense and will work only because they - all of them - are out on the mean streets together. _Peela Paiya_ talks of very material cab driver problems in all three languages. While the languages distinguish, the problem of police brutality is what holds them together and produces the impetus to talk to each other, and in the process perhaps recover the strands of common history that were lost to nationalism over the last century. Alongside this effort to consolidate and concretize the meaning of South Asianness, is, of course, yet another trend that I mentioned above - the effort to link with Haitian and African cab drivers, and with colored police officers' associations. This dual trend, of inward consolidation of identity (South Asian) and a simultaneous movement outwards towards other groups (colored/immigrant?) marks a particular idea of politics. The drive towards building a South Asian identity may at the moment seem far more "concrete," while the cultural categories available to produce a link with African or Haitian drivers may seem far more "speculative." In real terms however, both efforts are equally concrete or equally speculative. The concrete aspect of both efforts is of course the lived reality of driving cabs in NY - "the most dangerous profession" - the shared experience of 12-hour days, white racism and police brutality. The construction of identity in both cases is speculative - in as much as it builds on some potential cultural signifiers that are shared. None of us have a ready made South Asian identity. None of us had an "Indian" or a "Pakistani" identity as we refer to it today. A century of nationalist struggle against the British produced these for us to flout today. Identities are always built from the fragments that float in the air - fragments of history, fragments of daily lives, fragments of sad victories and hopeful tragedies. The symbolic material available to us for building a South Asian identity may be far more obvious than that which is available to construct a immigrant or colored peoples identity, but it is indeed difficult to deny that both are clearly within the same speculative mode. What then do we mean when we say that the material condition of existence is what produces the possibility for a speculative politics of identity? In other words, what makes the speculative, especially the reaching outward possible? What allows a group to say - "that group there, it is with them we must link up," and then proceed to build, in this case the notion of color or immigrant status, out of almost nothing? What we find happening in the case of the LDC, at least in its rudimentary form, is that identity politics becomes a mode of strategic organization while what drives the politics of identity from below is that of class. What I am suggesting is that the speculative politics of identity hides, though never completely, the class nature of politics, for in "talking" of LDC or any such organization, it is finally the identity that is often spoken about. This hidden politics of class is nevertheless the fundamental impetus for the speculative movements both outward and inward.

The field however is not cleared for a progressive politics just by this realization that class is often the basis of speculative identity politics. Constructing an identity that is constantly reflective of its material basis is difficult. The first pitfall is that a constructed identity freezes, becomes solid and immobile easily. The fundamental building block of any identity is a set of essentialisms about oneself and the other. Thus, the politics of identity can for this reason get stuck - trapped, so to speak, with the essentialisms that one may have deployed only strategically. Identity politics stops being meaningful as a basis for an expansive politics the moment identities freeze. The frozen or reified identity is then far more relevant to those who wish to deploy it as only an identity, a marker for themselves - that is, within a politics that has lost all notions of the race and class politics that mark this country. We thus return to our theme that it is the impetus provided by the needs of a class that can shape identity politics in a way that is not regressive. A class that does not need to build new alliances will not keep its identity fluid. It is for this reason that middle class Indian efforts to mobilize along lines of identity become rigid - for the identity deployed is an essentialized one - a Abourgeois sentiment of exile," in Benedict Anderson's words. The only interest a significant section of the Indian middle class has in its essentialized identity is that their Indianess has a currency within the dominant white society - the civilizational, the heritage based and the exotic identities that work at least partially as marketable commodities. The porosity of identities is kept alive only as long as class politics is recognized as an important basis of alliances that need to be created. This recognition is what forces an identity, constantly in danger of freezing to come unfrozen and unglued at appropriate moments. The LDC is possibly one of the few examples of South Asian groups attempting such a lucid politics in the US (the other potential example, though in far more limited sense, being the different women's groups). Its success will depend on the consolidation of internal identities - South Asian today, maybe Asian tomorrow and color the following day, but at each stage its success will depend on the outline of the new margins it comes against and the question - "on the basis of class, which group should we link up with now?" The answer, and the effort required to fashion a new identity is what will keep the old one from becoming ossified.

There are two observations that I wish to make in closing. The first is that this relation between identity politics and politics of class is not a new one - it is something that many Marxists, especially those suspicious of identity politics, have spoken of again and again. The reason why I chose to outline it lies in the fact that in seeing the LDC grow we have the possibility of identifying the process that makes or breaks an organization as it seeks to deploy identity as a relevant and strategic category within organizing. It is definitely not enough for Marxists to be suspicious of identity politics - the field of the political is in these times defined so often in identity terms. Therefore what is crucial is to work out an understanding of how, in the dynamic of political mobilization, identities are kept from being reified, and instead function both to mobilize and re-work the internal boundaries of a class. The LDC may be a small and recent initiative, but we also have examples of such a politics articulated in much bigger movements. The Zapatistas in Chiapas come to mind as an obvious example of a movement that has worked a notion of the indigenous into the dissatisfactions of a larger Mexican population who are being destroyed by the neo-liberal economy.

On the other hand, it also makes possible for me to ask the question - "how must a middle class progressive desiposition him/her self?" Briefly, the answer, I feel, is to see the relevance of the politics of color. Not only has the desi progressive no other choice but to constantly try and produce larger and larger identity categories - from Indian to South Asian to Asian to third world to immigrant to colored - but such a politics will have to "speculate and produce" in its imagination, the link to the larger politics of race in this country - black vs white. We have not just to make the effort ourselves, but also be willing and watchful to pick up and act on the "speculative" dynamics that black politics puts out as indicators for us. The questions are simple: "Are middle class desis capable of it? - breaking out of our middle class experience and the normalized ideas of black pathology that we so often carry with us however politically correct we may act?" and "Is black American politics capable of escaping its historically produced liberal individual mode and capable of building larger identities of color in which others can participate?"

(Biju Mathew is an Assistant Professor of Business at Rider University, NJ.)

Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence CAAAV The Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) was started in 1986. It has since been working with Asian communities on issues of racially motivated violence and police brutality. CAAAV brings together Asians of different nationalities, ethnicities and generations to address issues of racism, anti- immigration discrimination and economic injustice. CAAAV s most visible success has been in assisting hundreds of victims of anti-Asian violence over the last eight years. In addition to this visible task of fighting anti-Asian violence related cases, CAAAV seeks to unite New York s Asian communities so as to force changes in the police department, criminal justice system, public policy and media representations. Further CAAAV is involved in organizing projects with the Chinese, Korean, South Asian and the South East Asian immigrant communities in areas of youth leadership and worker organizing. If you wish to get more information about CAAAV or support them in any way call (212)-473-6485 or write to: CAAAV, 191 East 3rd Street, New York, NY 10009