[Imc-india] kickstarting India.indymedia

[Boud Roukema]

Dear Sivaraman, Yamanoor and other IMC-India friends,
   I am a non-Indian, living outside of India, who spent two years in
India (at IUCAA, Pune, www.iucaa.ernet.in) - I'm an astronomer - and now 
live in Poland.

   Having spent two years in India I think it a great pity that the
india.indymedia.org site is not being systematically used. I think
that Indian uni students know that something is not quite right about
global capitalism, and with Indian economic "liberalisation", but they
don't have access to the information or the debates to know how to
escape the propaganda.  (They don't realise that the "liberalism", the 
liberty to economically dominate, is not the same as real liberty,
the liberty to *not* be dominated...)

   india.indymedia.org is the perfect tool to free them!

   I saw some posts discussing india.indymedia at:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:oH3NCiAMhwQ:mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2001-June/000174.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:nT35t74aU2M:mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2001-June/000139.html


Grass-roots non-elite activists (adivasis, dalits) vs elites (students)
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   I agree that the site can only become serious if it's run from the
grass-roots by people based in India, rather than top-down.

   However, I think that the non-hierarchical structure of indymedia sites
means that the site could still be useful and run as a catalyst to locals
to get involved, who would easily "take over" once they are ready.

Indian internet demographics:
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/india_stats.html

> the student community which contributes accounts 
> for about 38% of Internet surfers. 

> Over half (59.2%) use the Internet as an information resource, 11.3%
> use it as an educational tool and just under 8.2% use it for
> entertainment.

   I agree that elite activism should not dominate dalit/adivasi/ other
disadvantaged group activists. 

   But surely getting students informed in a way that counteracts the
WTO/IMF/WB politically correct economics is a very useful and
sufficient goal.  Wouldn't it be useful for the students presently
battling against fee increases to put press releases on
india.indymedia, rather than just communicate by "ordinary" email?

Propositions that NRI's or foreigners can do as catalysts
---------------------------------------------------------

1) Encourage NBA/Friends of Narmada to cross-post their press-releases

http://www.narmada.org/pressrelease.html

to india.indymedia. This would require very little effort, and since
there are press releases several times a week, would give a very dynamic
aspect to the site. This would clearly *not* be duplication: on indymedia
people could comment, request clarification, add web references, etc. etc.
(And if the Sangh Parivar mob start saying rubbish, it would be easy
to post precise arguments with web references or other analyses.)

2) Either randomly, or based on a pre-agreed division of "themes", 
if each one of half-a-dozen of us agreed to search on existing Indian 
web newspapers, e.g. using keywords in www.google.com, for useful 
Indymedia-type articles, and to repost short extracts + html links,
say, once a week, this would make about one non-Narmada post per day!

3) Looking up 
http://www.zmag.org/southasia/southasia1.htm

we could contact e-connected activists and encourage them to post
to india.indymedia.org. There are *many* excellent sites there.

Surely 1) + 2) + 3) would get the ball rolling.

4) I also noticed that "Marxist-Leninists" post some interesting stuff
to www.indymedia.org. As long as they don't try to dominate, and it
would be difficult for them to, I think they could make a useful
contribution.


Given that Indian activists are so overcommitted, it is important to
get new people active. I'm sure that india.indymedia will help, once
it is going. Once this is underway, I'm sure among the 500 000 or so
Indian students there must be a few dozens who would get involved at
the grass-roots level. Maybe even more...

Propositions for Indians-in-India (like Srihari, from Coimbatore)
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I'm sure you have your own ideas, but just in case you want mine:

Find out your local activist groups, try contacts from the 
southasia1.htm site 3) above to help find out adivasis' groups,
dalits' groups, etc.  Ask them in what ways you can help them,
propose publicising their cause with text and/or photos (if you
have a camera + access to a scanner), and see if there is
any common interest! Expect to take time to build up the 
relationship. It might not be obvious to them why 
india.indymedia will help them, unless, for example, this helped
Uni students (apparently half the indian internet population) to
support the activists.

Even better, set up some local adivasi/dalit activists on the
internet, if you can work out some way of getting funding...

Or work with students on opposing student fee hikes and encourage
them and show them how to use india.indymedia ...

General functioning
-------------------

The following seems to me one example of a well-functioning
editorial list:

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-dc-editorial/

Long term - tech/grass-roots question
---------
 For many grass-roots Indians to get involved, local languages will be
needed. Questions of multiple fonts and how to help new readers and
total novices read the fonts or write using them (e.g. with emacs-mule
from www.gnu.org) etc. will need to be dealt with in order to support
the numerous Indian national languages.  Time scale: a few years?

Let's get india.inydmedia going!