Cynics try to dismiss the movement against corporate globalisation as an indulgence, a game enjoyed by activists in Europe and Latin America. The fourth World Social Forum (WSF), held for the first time in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) in January, proved them wrong. Asia embraced the movement and the movement embraced Asia.
The WSF is further evidence that the phenomenon which exploded onto the streets of Seattle at the World Economic Forum in 1999—where tens of thousands demanded the end of Third World debt and the abolition of sweatshops—is continuing to develop and grow. In 2003, 80,000 attended the WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This year, 120,000 descended on Goregaon, in the poor northern suburbs of Mumbai.
The site was a huge, empty industrial complex—machines removed and jobs lost because of corporate globalisation. For ten hours each day for four days, roads through the site were choked with a river of protesters. Union members, Dalits (untouchables), Bhutanese refugees, South Korean revolutionary socialists, HIV/AIDS activists, anti-privatisation groups, women’s organisations, Indian farmers campaigning against debt and many more paraded, danced and sang their way through the dust.
Filled with the spirit of tens of thousands of South Asian activists, the WSF became a festival of the oppressed.
Choo Chon Kai from Malaysia was impressed by the marches and the chanting on the street. ‘We hardly ever see that in Malaysia’, he said. Jagan Devara from Bangalore in India said the WSF was a ‘great formation of what we have all been doing. It is great to see so many people working in the same direction’. Many Indian activists said that this had been the first time they had gained a sense of the size and diversity of the movement in their own country—an enormous boost to their confidence.
Each day there were more than 220 seminars and workshops, the largest drawing up to 5000 people. The seminar on water and food security, for example, attracted 4000 to hear speakers from India, Latin America, and south-east Asia describe a global water crisis. Corporations like Coca Cola were stealing communities’ water by drilling the bedrock and mining it, while every eight seconds a child died from drinking dirty water. The World Trade Organisation had recently targeted water as a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.
Only the rich would be able to drink clean water. Speakers demanded that access to water be recognised as a