{"id":3410,"date":"2021-06-19T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2021-06-19T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=3410"},"modified":"2021-06-29T11:19:25","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T15:19:25","slug":"authoritarianism-and-resistance-in-india-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/06\/authoritarianism-and-resistance-in-india-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Authoritarianism & resistance in India (pt. 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ashley Smith: <\/span>The huge spike in Covid cases in India, the massive rates of hospitalization, with people dying from lack of oxygen cylinders and other basics, even after Modi boasted that India had \u201cdefeated\u201d Covid, have led to calls for his resignation. Do you see the tide tuning at all?<\/p>\n

Nagesh Rao: <\/span>The news these days is so distressing. We all know about the ongoing catastrophe in India, but no one really knows its true scale. The official figures (283,000 dead and more than 300,000 new cases each day) are staggering enough but the real numbers are much higher<\/a>–by some estimates as much as five times higher<\/a>. In January this year Modi was crowing at Davos about how India had defeated Covid. Now in May, the papers are filled with horrific reports of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses found washing up on the banks of the Ganges and buried in shallow riverbeds.<\/p>\n

It needn\u2019t have been this way. Kerala\u2019s disaster mitigation, led by science and a grassroots approach, and managed by a competent left-led government, stands in stark contrast<\/a> to the national and criminal disgrace that is the Modi regime\u2019s death machine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is widespread anger amidst the grief and suffering but Modi isn\u2019t the resigning type. National elections are still three years away and a lot can happen before then but the pressure is building, no doubt, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, the regime has responded with more repression–jailing dissenters, policing online speech, and trying to gag independent media–even as former civil servants, and even state high courts have criticized the government\u2019s handling of the pandemic.<\/p>\n

Internationally, the media have become more and more critical of the Modi government. Indian embassies in the U.S. are now trying to recruit people to prop up the government\u2019s image because for this cynical regime it\u2019s all about perception management. They will get many takers too\u2014the BJP still has a large base of support in the U.S.<\/p>\n

For the left in the U.S. the time is now to join hands with progressive and leftist groups such as Stand With Kashmir, Equality Labs, the Polis Project, South Asia Solidarity Initiative and others, build solidarity with protesting farmers, demand the release of jailed student activists, leftist intellectuals and scholars, and dissident journalists.<\/p>\n

AS: <\/span>How do you read the recent election results in Assam, where the BJP had a strong showing, and West Bengal, where despite much effort, the BJP was defeated, as well as Kerala?<\/p>\n

NR: <\/span>The BJP retained power in Assam, where they have established a base by capitalizing on anti-Bengali and anti-immigrant prejudices. [For e.g. see the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act and a proposed National Register of Citizens. – Eds.] In Bengal they lost ground that they had gained in the 2019 national elections. It is a huge blow to the party, which pulled out all the stops and spent who knows how many millions in a bid to take the state. But in the state assembly in 2016 BJP had won just three seats; this time around they won 75. They now have a firm foothold in the state, and they aren\u2019t going to let go. In Kerala, where for several decades now the government has alternated between a social-democratic front led by the CPs and a center-right alliance led by Congress, the BJP didn\u2019t have much of a chance to begin with.<\/p>\n

AS: <\/span>What is the state of the opposition politically to the BJP? You would think in this moment that there’s a potential for cohering a political stand against the whole project you’ve been describing. What has Congress done? What have the Indian CPs done? Are there other political projects or formations that are giving a more developed articulation of what’s implicit in this [strike], which is a challenge to all the things you’ve just described.<\/p>\n

NR: I can\u2019t really talk about the state of the opposition on the ground, except for what I\u2019ve been able to glean online. It\u2019s also difficult to make definitive claims about a complex and rapidly evolving situation.<\/p>\n

Just think about this time a year ago. Millions of people were on the march, rallying, marching, sitting down, and sitting in against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). It seemed like an unstoppable wave, but a couple of months later things looked very different, and not only because of Covid.<\/p>\n

The Modi regime responded by calling the protesters \u201canti-national,\u201d as people who want to break up India (see tukde-tukde gang<\/a>). Corporate media outlets parroted this line over and over. On January 5, 2020, masked goons armed with sticks and clubs stormed the JNU campus and terrorized the students for what felt like hours. They did this under the cover of darkness, after the lights had somehow been cut. Squads of police held back people from entering the campus for the duration of the terror-inducing rampage. Cellphone footage of the attack went viral. Similar, and even more vicious and large-scale attacks took place at Jamia Millia Islamia University in December 2019 and at Aligarh Muslim University in the state of Uttar Pradesh. These attacks were all in rapid succession, and all this was happening even as thousands were sitting in and occupying public spaces.<\/p>\n

Then came rabble-rousing far-right politicians<\/a>, whipping people up into a frenzy with chants of “Desh ke gaddaaro ko \/ Goli maaro saalon ko!” (“Traitors to the nation \/ Shoot the bastards!”). Then came the Hindutva goons leading mobs of rioters and uniformed police<\/a> to break up the protests by violence and chaos. More than 50 people were killed, and many more injured and brutalized. And then came Covid and the lockdown.<\/p>\n

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Photo wall at Jamia Milia Islamia University; Credit: DTM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I\u2019m not going to offer any predictions about how these new protests will develop. Right now, it seems the farmers are prepared for a long haul and are unlikely to back down without a complete repeal of the laws. But a lot can change in the coming weeks and months.<\/p>\n

That said, yes, I think the farmers\u2019 protests are a big opportunity for the left, and also a big challenge. There\u2019s no doubt that there\u2019s a huge potential for cohering a stand against Modi\u2019s neoliberal economic agenda, but beyond that we\u2019ll have to see to what extent this translates into a new mass radicalization, and with what effects on the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and nationality.<\/p>\n

The parliamentary opposition is weak and fragmented. The BJP faces no credible rival on the national stage. The main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (the Congress Party, or simply Congress), is a pale shadow of the mass party that hegemonized the anti-colonial struggle, and in either case offers (and offered) no real alternative to the project of Hindu nationalism. After all, the \u201cauthoritarian democracy\u201d (Achin Vanaik\u2019s term) that is the Indian state was created and fine-tuned under Jawaharlal Nehru and then under his daughter Indira Gandhi. It is a bourgeois, center-right party controlled by dominant caste Hindus, which has played to majoritarian sentiments just as much as the other Hindu parties, and has an undeserved reputation for secularism and pluralism. In 2016 Congress recovered a bit from its low point of 44 parliamentary seats in the previous election to 52 seats, about a sixth of the BJP\u2019s 302 seats. It\u2019s unlikely to make a comeback on its own and will have to build a coalition with other national and regional parties. But India\u2019s political parties are notoriously fickle and politicians everywhere are notoriously opportunistic, so there\u2019s no use holding out for some grand national coalition that will unseat Modi and Shah.<\/p>\n

The communist parties, which are really social-democratic parties with Stalinist baggage, have only a couple of seats each in parliament, and are at their weakest point in recent memory. They are still paying the price for what happened in Nandigram and Singur in 2006 when their attempted neoliberal land-grabs on behalf of Tata and Vedanta Resources Limited corporations sparked peasant uprisings and led to their losing power in a state they had governed for 35 years. Nationally they\u2019ve gone from a high point of 43 seats in parliament in 2004 to 3 seats in 2016. So at least for the foreseeable future, the prospects of a national left-led electoral opposition to the BJP are bleak.<\/p>\n

In either event, fixating on elections alone will get us nowhere when it comes to pushing back the Hindutva agenda. As I said earlier (see Part 2) there is widespread social struggle in India. In the last decade, we\u2019ve seen an explosion of Dalit, feminist, and LGBTQ-rights activism, climate activism, and anti-nuclear activism, the anti-CAA\/NRC movement, and now the farmers protests. As comrades in the Kolkata-based group Radical Socialist have argued<\/a>, there\u2019s an urgent need for a new left that is rooted in these struggles. To defeat the fascists you need a left that is not only rooted in the various protest movements but can also offer a vision of a different future. And this the CPs have struggled to do because they are hamstrung not only by their commitment to a statist, developmentalist, gradualism, but also by their commitment to Indian nationalism. Working class liberation is impossible without decolonization, but these left nationalists twist this way and that to justify a colonial occupation in Kashmir.<\/p>\n