Dave Stockton, Red Flag 34, March 2020<\/i><\/p>\n
On the night of 23 February, whilst Donald Trump and Narendra Modi were engaged in mutual admiration in Ahmedabad, the capital of Modi\u2019s home state of Gujarat, Muslims in Delhi were subjected to the first of three days of what the western media called, \u201ccommunal riots\u201d.<\/p>\n
In fact, what happened was a pogrom, incited by local and national politicians in Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, and carried out by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS, a fascistic organisation affiliated to the BJP.<\/p>\n
In the pogrom, mosques and small Muslim businesses were vandalised, houses were torched and their inhabitants beaten. At least 42 people were brutally killed, and 300 others seriously injured.<\/p>\n
The incitement by BJP figures is clear enough. A few weeks before, the BJP held a rally at which Anurag Thakur, Minister for Corporate Affairs, condemned those who protested against the new Citizenship Amendment Act, declaring them, \u201cTraitors to the country, shoot them\u201d. Since then, BJP rallies repeatedly saw the crowds chanting, \u201cShoot the traitors!\u201d The new citizenship law privileges non-Muslim immigrants\u2019 applications to become Indian citizens, a brazen violation of India\u2019s secular constitution.<\/p>\n
Shortly before the February 23-25 attacks began, a BJP politician from Delhi, Kapil Mishra, smarting from defeat in the recent city elections, made a provocative speech against the citizenship protesters. Standing next to a high-ranking police official, he singled out the women protesters staging a peaceful sit-in in Shaheen Bagh, a working class district of the capital with a substantial Muslim population. \u201cEither the cops must clear them out\u201d, Mishra said, \u201cor we will take things into our own hands\u201d. Within hours, RSS mobs, waving saffron flags and chanting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) hit the Shaheen Bagh area. The Delhi police, under the direction of Home Minister Amit Shah, either stood idly by or even escorted the mobs.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, February 25, Justice S. Muralidhar of Delhi\u2019s High Court summoned police to berate them for failing to file a complaint against Mishra and two other BJP politicians. The next day, Muralidhar was transferred from Delhi to a court in Punjab and India\u2019s Supreme Court deferred hearing petitions on the violence. Clearly, alongside the destruction of the semi-autonomous government in India\u2019s only Muslim majority state, Kashmir, Modi is deliberately moulding India in a communalist direction that can only lead to both internal and international conflict.<\/p>\n
Modi and Trump<\/p>\n
Modi himself has a long history of inciting racist violence. At the age of 8 he was recruited to the RSS which has generated the BJP\u2019s political ideology, Hindutva (Hindu-ness) which is virulently hostile to India\u2019s minority religions. As against the Hindu majority, who are 79.8 percent of the population, Muslims are 14.2 percent, Christians 2.3 percent, and Sikhs 1.7 percent.<\/p>\n
Modi became infamous in February 2002 when, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he and his party encouraged days of ferocious communal rioting after Muslim terrorists attacked and killed passengers on a bus of Hindu pilgrims. Leaders of his BJP and its ally, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, openly urged Hindus to \u201cteach Muslims a lesson\u201d. Gujarat was in flames for days and a thousand Muslims were killed. Modi himself gave incendiary speeches mocking the victims.<\/p>\n
Clearly, Modi and Trump share the tactic of targeting minorities for violence as well as the need for lashings of egregious flattery. During his visit, Trump laid on the latter with a trowel, calling Modi \u201can exceptional leader, a great champion of India, a man who works night and day for his country, and a man I am proud to call my true friend\u201d. At the same time, he assured journalists he had not mentioned the Delhi killings. Yet, at a press conference in the city at the conclusion of his trip, as news of the pogrom filled the world\u2019s media, Trump sprang to Modi\u2019s defence. \u201cThe prime minister said he wants people to have religious freedom,\u201d he declared. \u201cThey have worked really hard on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump had sound, if cynical, reasons for this fawning, aside from his fellow feeling for an Islamophobe. He is after something. He hailed the \u201cIndo-US global strategic partnership\u201d, a project aimed at making the country an ally against China. Nevertheless, no concrete steps forward were taken towards the \u201cgreat\u201d trade deal Trump has been seeking. That would open up its 1.38 bn population as a market for US corporate plunder. Clearly, \u201cmaking the US great again\u201d while making India into a first division world power, economically and militarily, is a difficult trick to pull off.<\/p>\n
At the same time, India is actually experiencing an economic slowdown, with unemployment recently reaching a 45-year high, and a wave of mass worker protests since 2016, including one-day general strikes. By stoking up Hindutva chauvinism, Modi and the BJP\/RSS want to use their shock troops against opposition not only from the working class, but also from the movements of women and youth, plus national, religious and caste minorities. Their aim is to divert growing popular anger and frustration; undermine democratic rights and to poison the working class with reactionary hatreds.<\/p>\n
Modi\u2019s Islamophobia and the BJP\u2019s willingness to incite and organise pogroms have an international dimension, particularly vis-\u00e0-vis Pakistan, a constitutionally Muslim state. Imran Kahn condemned the Delhi pogrom, but his shaky government could also do with a diversion from its domestic problems. An Indo-Pakistan war could have untold consequences.<\/p>\n
For all these reasons, across the subcontinent, the exploited classes and oppressed peoples need to resist the poison of \u2018religious\u2019 and communal conflict, not a product of \u201cancient hatreds\u201d but of politicians willing to cynically exploit religion for reactionary and inhuman ends. The foundation for this resistance must be class solidarity; international fraternity.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that the protests against the CAA united Indian workers, students and professionals across religious-sectarian, caste and ethno-linguistic divides. Working class people from across these divides have also protested against the killings in Delhi. Indeed, there are stories from the victims of their Hindu neighbours who took them in and protected them from the thugs who came from outside the district.<\/p>\n
Obviously, Modi realises that the country\u2019s multiple economic and political grievances could create a \u201cperfect storm\u2019 of resistance. They could even result in the creation of a pre-revolutionary situation, if the huge working class which came out, tens of millions strong, in a one-day general strike in early January, were to take the lead. Across the great sub-continent, socialists should advance a goal that combines self-determination and self-government for its different peoples with the unity needed to develop its huge natural and human resource, in a way that protects its environment. This would be a United Socialist States of South Asia.<\/p>\n
Today, all the progressive struggles and resistance movements against right wing populist despots around the world demonstrate a profound \u201ccrisis of leadership\u201d, that is, the absence or weakness of a political and organisational force to chart the way forward. All this, points towards the need for new, revolutionary, working class parties in these countries, as well as in the imperialist \u201cheartlands,\u201d united in a new, a Fifth, International.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave Stockton, Red Flag 34, March 2020 On the night of 23 February, whilst Donald Trump and Narendra Modi were engaged in mutual admiration in Ahmedabad, the capital of Modi\u2019s home state of Gujarat, Muslims in Delhi were subjected to the first of three days of what the western media called, \u201ccommunal riots\u201d. In fact, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,1],"tags":[104,219],"class_list":["post-3941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-uncategorized","tag-archive","tag-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6994,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3941\/revisions\/6994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}