The situation in India right now
Let’s go back to the 1940s following the path of history of India’s anti-fascist movement: we’ll find that the spirit of Internationalism inspired the great artists and thinkers of the time to unite against the carnage of World War 2. After the days of Independence from the British Raj, the face of the enemy changed -- the oppressed became the oppressor --- Indian people hadn’t yet won and resolved the class and caste war within. The long bloody battle for azaadi made way into the people’s minds, as the Partition displaced thousands of people. India’s map has been redrawn. Newer borders gave birth to newer people’s struggles and movements. The Kashmiri Intifada came to be against the reign of Indian Occupation. In later years, the Congress regime launched Operation Green Hunt to curb the maoist activities in the Red Corridors, the Indian State deployed armed forces under the draconian law AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) to police the daily lives of the people of Kashmir, North-East and Red Corridor areas (Bastar, Dandakaranya). This law allows the military force of India to rape, kill, incarcerate and have civilians disappear without a trace, most often in the name of curfew, in the regions designated as “disturbed areas”.
India has had a long history of people's struggles but in the recent past, a new wave of anti-fascist movements have erupted all across its land, led by the most marginalised peoples! Today the fragmented nation of 1.3 billion people stands on the bodies of people from Kashmir, Bastar, Manipur, Bengal; it stands on the trampled bodies of farmers dead in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh; on the bodies of Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi peoples beaten, murdered, shamed and displaced; on Muslims lynched in various parts of the country, it stands on the dead bodies of womxn assaulted, policed, shamed to the point of suicide; LGBTIQA+ people persecuted, murdered and media gagged; scholars, artists, students, teachers, journalists and ideologues incarcerated. The promise of Acche Din (Good Days) stand as a farce and laughs at us, as the people of the lower caste and lower class falter through the dream of a 'cashless economy' dreamt by the power at the Centre through the overnight implementation of demonetisation to curb the menace of black money. And yet the people of this land don't have any account of the same.
The Finance Bill, 2017 has taxed sanitary napkins at 20%. The school textbooks are wrought with xenophobia, communalism, Hindutva propaganda, and in some states such as Gujarat, the history books boast about how great a nation Nazi Germany was.
99% of the population today hold the ominous Aadhar Card which is a means to collect the biometric information of the people, to keep them under constant surveillance. A nation which doesn't have the basic impetus needed for the democracy to grow wants its people to go cashless, to become digital.
The Brahminical State of India is forcing people belonging to the lowest rungs of our society to not eat beef, a staple and cheap source of protein in many states such as Bengal, while that very State hypocritically milks cows in hoards and tortures them for their whole lives, and, on top of that, is one of the largest exporters of beef in the world.
- That very state doesn't care about a person’s bodily autonomy;
- it doesn't recognise the rights of the adivasi people fighting for their jal-jangal-zameen (water, forest, land) displacing them for profit, selling their land to the corporates like Tata and Vedanta;
- it doesn't care about the people fighting for their self-determination in Kashmir;
- its law doesn't even recognise marital rape;
- it tells the hetereosexual couple how to give birth to the ‘best Aryan child’;
- like a giant mansplaining machine, it tells the females that motherhood is their only duty -- the new and improved India has no place for womxn, muslims, dalit-bahujans and adivasi (indigenous) people.
With its project 'Make in India', the present government strives to be the global superpower at the expense of the well being of its peoples. The paradox of embracing neoliberal economic policies on one hand and regressive casteist and fundamentalist politics in practice reveals the oppressor's face masked by the fake promises.
The slow genocide of Indian people is now an open secret and people are beginning to unite across the country against the Hindutva regime in power, people belonging to the most marginalised sections of the Indian society. As you read this, the state and its right-wing cadres are torturing and murdering those it deems its enemies, while at the same time, there are brave revolutionaries in collectives and movements like the Bhim Army, the Una Movement, all the Kashmiri people fighting with life and stone, people from the North-East of India ignored and shamed to the point of oblivion, and adivasis red with anger across the region of South Asia.
This was originally a speech given by Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, stolen and edited by us to make the exact same point, within the context of India. Many of you may have read his speech before.
So this is what he had to say, and this is, ultimately what we, as an association of antifascists, as radical feminists, as anarchists, as communists, as dissenting students, peasants and workers, have to express as well.
“Yes, ANTIFA is gay. ANTIFA is gay in Saudi Arabia, black in South Africa, a dalit, a muslim, an adivasi in India, a woman in the streets of Delhi (or anywhere else in this country, really), an Asian in Europe, a Rohingya in Myanmar, an African-American teenager in the United States of America, a Kurd in Turkey, a Yazidi in Syria, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, a Zapatista in the mountains, and of course, an antifascist in South Asia.
ANTIFA is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. They are every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. They are every untolerated group searching for a way to speak, for their voice to be heard. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is ANTIFA.”
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Dear Comrades,
We are some of many antifascists of the State of India. And alive. For now. Yes, the totalitarian, fascist nightmare is already here.
And as such, we want to start ANTIFASCIST ACTION in India as there still isn’t one officially. We want to reach out to as many International ANTIFA groups as possible through the intrawebs because we believe that the visibility of Indian Antifascists in the post-globalised world is imperative to its new anti-casteist, anti-classist, feminist, anti-heirarchical, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and indigenous revolutions blooming at every corner of this land. As Savarnas and the petit-bourgeoisie enjoying the freedom of the Internet and education we intend to amplify the voices of the most marginalised of Indian society -- the ones already waging daily battles against the nexus of neo-liberal, capitalist Corporate Raj and the Brahminical State in the fields, factories, sweatshops, workshops, forests, classrooms and the streets, armed with stones, education and rifles alike -- we want to spread the word of revolution brewing inside the minds of the Indian Proletariat and connect solidarities from the comrades outside of India that they are yet to meet and pass the mic on to the ones who do not have access to the stage.
The recent movements of India are led by Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, farmers, students, intellectuals -- so many of them female, so many of them queer -- united in their fight against fascism yet divided by the institutions of class, caste, gender and sexuality -- regularly taken advantage of by the Brahmanical State and its right-wing forces such as RSS (Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh), VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Shiv Sena, Durga Vahini and so many more. We as a united force of Antifascist peoples want to spread the discontent further and join the larger movement sprouting in different corners through whatever International solidarities we can gather from this campaign. We draw inspiration from comrades fighting in Latin America, in Kurdistan, in Turkey, in Palestine, in the streets of Athens, and from our Black sisters and brothers of BLM spread across the United Snakes of AmeriKKKa.
The intersectionality of privileges and oppression in India is highly complicated because the caste system exists. The caste system was built to assign and maintain one’s class position in the society according to the caste one is born into. Now it's 2017. And the caste system has evolved into a toxicity existing within all institutions of power that only the Dalits and Adivasis can smash and destroy.
Till the next 2019 elections, our job will be direct action in terms of forming free food kitchens, building cultural centres which will hold gender, caste, class, law and other awareness programs, create free, alternative schools and be a free bastion of resources in terms of information.
By 2019 our hope is to create a well-connected network of solidarity between all the different antifascist movements (Una Movement, Bhim Army, Adivasi resistance such as the one in Niyamgiri, the ongoing fight in Kashmir, and so many North-Eastern regions under the rule of the dreaded AFSPA, such as Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram) happening in India right now.
We wish to create bastions and safe spaces of antifascism where womyn, dalits, muslims and anybody else who is interested in antifascist action can come and communicate and use our resources to learn and educate themselves. To steal a quote from Errico Malatesta, we do not want to emancipate the people, we want the people to emancipate themselves!
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