Says Dr Vandana Shiva of Navdanya, which promotes indigenous organic food, “I am participating here because there is a disconnect between the people and NGOs who claim to represent them, and it is time to reconnect to the real world of people’s concerns and issues. There is not a single body, government or NGO, which is preoccupied with the pressing issue of today, the changing face of retail, whether it is the traders who have been booted out of the streets in Delhi, or the land grab in Punjab. The NGOs live in their world and talk to themselves only.”

Gita Hariharan says she would like to talk about “shrinking spaces for cultural debate because of increasing parochialism and exclusivism.”

The WSF first took off in 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, organised by several groups involved in alternative globalization movements, and its mass protests have stomped the streets of Seattle to Davos, Mumbai, Karachi, Caracas, and other global economic conclave hotspots. Past speakers have included humanist heavies like Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Danielle Mitterand (widow of the late French President), Argentine Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winning economist sacked as head of the World Bank for criticising International Monetary Fund policies, who spoke in Mumbai alongside anti-capitalist economists like Samir Amin from Egypt and Prabhat Patnaik from Delhi.

Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva, was a regular too. Mukul Sharma, co-ordinator of ISF is ecstatic about the new thrust on Asia-Africa solidarity, tribal displacement, youth and children, conflict in North-East and Dalit empowerment. “A new kind of space is emerging for public discourse,” says Sharma, “it will be a forum to integrate cultural expressions too.” Cultural resistance to the “manic, marauding American imperialist designs” will be expressed through poetry, dance, plays and songs.

... contd.