Tuesday, May 31, 2016

The Netherlands :The Relevance of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the Light of China and Russia Becoming Capitalist, by Prof. Pao- yu -Ching




Dear comrades and friends:

On May 16 1966 the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We are gathering here today to celebrate this historical event.

Why are we celebrating the launching of the Cultural Revolution half a century later?

The reason is, of course, the Cultural Revolution is as relevant today as it was in 1966.

First of all, if it had not been for the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping would have been able to carry out their capitalist development a decade earlier.

The Cultural Revolution blocked the capitalist roaders from carrying out their plan, so it provided ten additional years to develop socialism and demonstrate its superiority.

China’s socialist construction from 1956 to 1976, a period of merely 20 years, showed us that socialism was not just an abstract concept, but a shining example of what could be accomplished when the proletarian class was in charge.

Before the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966 the Revisionists in China were gathering strength to attack socialism on all fronts.

They furiously attacked the Great Leap Forward and the formation of the People’s Communes.

After the Communes were established in 1958, they employed many different strategies to sabotage China’s collectivized agriculture including initiating schemes like the “Three-self” and “One contract” campaign, designed to use profit motive to encourage peasants to leave the Commune.

In the industrial sector after public ownership was established in 1956, the Revisionists worked relentlessly to dissolve the workers’ permanent employment system in industrial enterprises and used various material incentives including the piece wage rates to divide workers.

They argued that the permanent employment system prevented industrial enterprises from recruiting workers from the countryside to keep wages low and profits high. The Revisionists also encouraged individual enterprises to impose rigid work rules to increase work intensity in order to raise labor productivity and profits.

In hindsight we can understand more clearly how the Revisionists strategized to subvert socialist construction. The Peoples’ Republic of China won the revolution against feudal landlords, foreign capitalists, and compradors by building a close alliance between workers and peasants.

The socialist construction could only succeed by consolidating the worker-peasant alliance on a new material basis.

The ownership by the whole people in the industrial sector and the collective ownership of agriculture provided the necessary conditions for this new material basis. However, the Revisionists tried at every turn to prevent this alliance from being consolidated.

Before the Cultural Revolution, there were fierce struggles between the socialist line and the capitalist line within the Communist Party – but most people in China were not aware of it.

After Liberation the attitude of workers and peasants toward the Communist Party was generally one of overwhelming gratitude.

They were grateful to the Communist Party for leading them to their liberation from oppression, exploitation, and suffering.

The peasants were grateful for the significant improvements in their standard of living, including better diet, healthcare, and education.

Workers were grateful for the rights and benefits they received including job security, decent housing, healthcare, education, and a secure retirement.

However, workers and peasants were not aware that what seemed to be the endowment of the Party could be easily taken away, and that they had to engage in struggle to protect them. Mao Zedong saw that the only way for the revolutionary line to win was to expose the revisionists and to mobilize the masses to struggle against them.

The Cultural Revolution successfully exposed the Revisionists’ plan; the masses learned how Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping attempted to carry out their Revisionist line in all spheres of the society.

However, it was not enough for the masses to understand the struggles within the Party – they also had to learn how to engage in struggle to fight against the Revisionists themselves.

The Cultural Revolution mobilized the masses and Mao and those in the Party who supported the revolutionary line gave direction to the struggle.

When the Revisionists enticed workers and peasants with material bribes to divide them, the campaigns in the Cultural Revolution broke through their capitalist logic by putting politics in command.

Mao understood that the transfer of the ownership of means of production from private to public was not sufficient to transform society; society had to be transformed on all fronts – economically, politically, socially, ideologically and culturally.

Launching the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to transform the whole Chinese society, and as a result, it made several unprecedented breakthroughs.

Even though these breakthroughs were still in their budding stage when the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, their value is forever impactful because they were proven to be essential in transforming a society during the socialist transition.

I would like to explain three of these breakthroughs.

The first breakthrough was major changes in industrial organization.

 As early as 1958, workers and cadres in the Anshan Iron and Steel Factory took initiative to innovate new ways of involving workers in decision making in running the factory.

By March 1960 Mao Zedong had seen that the changes they made in industrial organization were profound and fundamental, and named their initiatives the Angang Constitution, which included five principles: (1) Put politics in command, (2) Strengthen Party leadership, (3) Launch vigorous mass moment, (4) Systematically promote the participation of cadres in production labor and of workers in management and (5) Reform unreasonable disciplinary rules; ensure close cooperation among workers, cadres, and technicians; and energetically promote technological innovations. Mao urged all factories to put the Angang Constitution principles into practice, but his call did not receive an enthusiastic response until the Cultural Revolution, when workers struggled to change their factories by instituting the Angang Constitution as part of their overall struggle to change society.

Changes in the factories inspired by the Angang Constitution blocked the Revisionists’ efforts to turn workers into replaceable wage labor. This new industrial organization was a remarkable breakthrough, a necessary change to establish the new relations of production during socialist transition.

Another significant breakthrough during the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s education reform. This reform fundamentally changed the rules of selecting who could receive higher education.

During China’s 3000 years under feudalism, education was reserved for the privileged few. These elites, whose education was supported by the surpluses produced by the working people then used their education to rule the working people.

Actually this has always been true in all societies divided by class. Education reform during the Cultural Revolution turned this system upside down for the first time in Chinese history and in the history of the world.

The education reform during the Cultural Revolution instituted a new system of selecting workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiers for higher education by their co-workers.

The State paid for their education and living expenses and a monthly stipend while they were in school. Upon graduation they went back to work in the same factory or collective.

The Reform also revolutionized the content of college courses and with much more emphasis on practice. Students learned science and technology as well as Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought in order to change the material world and to transform themselves with the goal of serving the people.

From this new education system sprouted a new generation of integrated working class intellectuals ready to take leadership in running the Worker State. The new education system that emerged from the Cultural Revolution demonstrated concretely how the next generation of proletarian leadership could be trained and cultivated to continue the revolution.

Another breakthrough was the practice of the broadest and most comprehensive democracy. Democracy was something completely alien in China because of its long history of feudalism.

The ordinary people had to pledge their absolute loyalty and obedience toward the emperor and to all his officials.

During the Revolutionary War, democracy was practiced to a limited extent in the revolutionary bases; people were encouraged to speak their mind and made suggestions and posed criticisms to the revolutionary leaders.

Cadres also engaged in the practice of criticism and self-criticism. The revolution succeeded because peasants and workers trusted the Communist Party and recognized that Party leaders were qualitatively different from past rulers.

 After Liberation all major changes in China were made by first mobilizing the masses: from the mass movement to end the feudal land tenure, to the Anti-graft and Anti-rightist Movements, to the campaign to eliminate pests and diseases, and to the Great Leap Forward, launched to establish the Peoples Communes and industrialize China’s countryside.

 Then in 1966 the launch of the Cultural Revolution brought mass movement to an even higher level when people freely practiced what was called the “Big Four Freedoms ”: the freedom to a Big Voice, Big Openness, Big Debates, and the freedom to put up Big Character Posters.

These freedoms expanded democracy to the broadest scope. The practice of democracy was another breakthrough of the Cultural Revolution. Broad democracy was supported and encouraged, because the Communist Party trusted the masses and believed change was only possible with their participation.

The masses returned their trust to the Communist Party and together they fought to build a new society.

We are celebrating the Cultural Revolution today because it gave socialism the chance to develop ten additional years.

We are also celebrating the Cultural Revolution, because of the major breakthroughs I just talked about. Through understanding these major breakthroughs we learn not only that class struggle continues during the socialist transition, but they also give us the concrete content of class struggle in all the spheres of the society necessary to move society forward.

They provided us with answers about how workers can begin managing their factories so that they eventually can be in charge of the State; how to train new generations of educated proletariat; and how broad democracy can be practiced during the socialist transition.

 Although these changes were only carried out for one short decade, they became fundamental and deep-rooted in Chinese society.

The counterrevolutionaries today regard the Cultural Revolution as their enemy number one by viciously attacking and distorting it.

They can hate it as much as they want but they cannot erase the impact of the Cultural Revolution from the Chinese society.

After Mao Zedong died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping seized political power. In the four decades since then Deng and his followers dissolved the public ownership of the means of production and reversed all the changes made during the Cultural Revolution, drastically changed Chinese society. In 1985 they first moved to dissolved the People’s Communes and divided up collectively owned land.

Agricultural infrastructure, such as irrigation and drainage systems built during the Commune years gradually fell apart due to lack of maintenance. Land improvement projects, health and education and other social welfare programs all disappeared.

Then the Reformers turned to dissolve public ownership of China’s industrial enterprises. From the mid 1980s to the end of 1990s workers in those enterprises fought courageously against selling industrial assets to those who had political connections.

Finally in 2000 the regime gave up on reforming most of those factories built during the socialist period by closing most of them down and laying off 36 million workers. (China Statistical Abstract, 2001, 39)

Those workers who had made tremendous contributions building socialist China were literally thrown out onto the streets with barely enough income to survive and without any medical insurance.

When I visited the workers districts in a major Northeast city, I saw stores, kindergartens, barbershops, and bathhouses all closed down. Unemployed workers lined up the streets and offered their labor to do odd jobs.

Deng’s Reform had two main components: capitalist reform in China and linking China to the world capitalist system.

As the new regime dissolved the public ownership of the means of production, it moved to open up China’s economy to foreign capital.

It used low taxes, low wages, generous subsidies, and lax labor and environmental laws to attract foreign capital. Foreign capital investing in China has had two goals: the first is to occupy the Chinese market and the second is to take advantage of China’s cheap labor, cheap resources, and the freedom to pollute.

American, European and Japanese multinationals first formed joint ventures with Chinese companies but eventually 70% of them became 100% foreign owned.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies set up shop in China. According to one report, of the 28 Chinese industries that are open to foreign investment, 21 have fallen under foreign control. This means that foreign capital controls the five largest firms in those industries (Economic News, June 4, 2005).

Among the foreign-controlled industries include pharmaceutical, automobile, soft drink, beer, bicycle, elevator, cement, glass, rubber and tire, agricultural machinery, agricultural processing, retail, and delivery service. In the process, many of formerly well-known Chinese brands have disappeared from the market.

Another major way to take advantage of China’s cheap labor has been for the multinationals to hugely expand processing production in China.

Capitalists from Taiwan and Hong Kong set up processing firms first in Shenzhen and other Southern coastal cities later they moved into China’s interior.

These firms do processing work for the multinationals and the range of products expanded from clothing, shoes, toys, furniture, and numerous household items to electronics, such as computers, printers, iPhones and tablets. China’s Capitalist “Opening Up Reform” came almost exactly the same time as global monopoly capital’s new strategy of imperialist globalization to restructure the world economy.





Global monopoly capital expanded its domination over production and distribution by forcibly opening all national borders. International trade and financial organizations, such as GATT (later the WTO), the IMF and the World Bank helped to rewrite and enforce new trading and investment laws.

These changes enabled global corporations to use a complex integrated strategy that involves splitting the production process into specific activities or functions by dispersing them to the lowest cost locations. Governments in host countries compete with one another to make their countries more attractive to these giant global corporations.

They keep wages low and working conditions poor. In addition to subsidies and tax incentives, they upgrade their infrastructure, and allow these corporations the freedom to pollute their environment. Above all they use oppressive and brutal means to suppress workers from organizing. All governmental policies in this new phase of imperialism are justified on the basis of increasing a country’s global competitiveness.

This new strategy of imperialist globalization has been able to shift excess capacity and labor-intensive, high-energy consuming and most polluting production from advanced capitalist countries to developing countries.

China has been the number one country on the receiving end. Since joining the WTO China’s GDP and exports took off both reaching double-digit growth. By 2009 China’s exports of manufacturing goods reached 16% of the world total, and in 2011

China became the largest manufacturer in the world. China’s new regime indeed has successfully integrated China into the world capitalist system.

However, if we look beneath the surface, we discover that in the past four decades especially since the 1990s, China as a country (its land, natural resources, and environment) and the Chinese people have paid a horrendous price for this so called development.

During the decades of the Reform both foreign and domestic capital has ruthlessly exploited the Chinese people, thoroughly depleted China’s resources and savagely damaged China’s environment. Chinese workers have become wage labor.

The 200 million workers selling their labor in multinational processing factories all came China’s countryside.

They work from 12 to 14 hours a day and often only get one day off every two weeks.

The pace of work is oppressive: large numbers of workers suffer from exhaustion and work related diseases and injuries and some have committed suicide.

 On the agricultural side, China has only 9% of the world’s arable land but feeds 22% of the world’s population. During the socialist period China was self-sufficient in food but now is increasingly dependent on food imports.

The strategy of using exports to spur short-term growth has meant taking more and more land from agriculture for industrial use. Local governments have used brutal forces to remove people from their land and their homes.

Moreover, China has a very limited fresh water supply: on a per capita basis China’s access to fresh water is merely 25% of the world’s average. Industrial water use has deprived people adequate water supply.

Currently, 400 out of 600 major cities in China do not have adequate water for their residents. China is depleting its underground water so rapidly that is causing the desertification to advance at the rate of 2,000 square meters a year.

 i On top of rapid depletion of China’s limited resources, China’s environment has been damaged to the point of almost no return. 80% of China’s rivers are severely polluted. In many major Chinese cities where the air is so heavily polluted, particles smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), the most toxic smog, reached 40 times the maximum level allowed by the World Health Organization. The effects of these and other conditions have resulted premature death of cancer and other diseases

.ii A large part of China’s resource depletion and pollution can be traced back to its manufacturing for exports, because in 2011 Chinese people only consumed 35% of the GDP

.iii I think it accurate to say that China saved capitalism by providing global capital a golden opportunity to expand and occupy beyond its dream. Moreover, China’s financial support to the United States has helped the largest empire in the world sustain its global hegemony.

But while China saved capitalism, capitalism has destroyed China.

The Left in China was defeated 40 years ago when counterrevolutionaries seized political power and began its Capitalist Reform.

However, the Left has not faded away.

To the contrary, forces on the Left have revived and have been fighting furiously and relentlessly against the Right, who now hold political and economic power.

As the contradictions in Chinese society intensify, forces on the Left are further strengthened. They have fought those in power in every way possible – by engaging in ideological, economic, and political struggles.

They have published book and articles; held public forums on critical issues; engaged in struggles against environmental pollution and against Genetically Modified foods; formed study groups to discuss Marx, Lenin and Mao; organized students to learn from workers and to investigate and publicize working conditions in factories; conducted mass rallies where they delivered speeches and sang revolutionary songs; tested all conceivable means to organize workers.

Now with the most serious economic crisis impending, and with rising numbers and increasing scale of labor and environmental protests, the Left is ready to battle.

These current experiences are a testimony to the enduring legacy of Mao, his teaching, and the Cultural Revolution.

The Chinese revolution and its socialist construction transformed China from a poor underdeveloped country exploited by imperialist powers to become an independent country free from foreign domination and exploitation.

During socialism working people in China commanded the highest respect ever in the history of humankind, and they exerted their utmost efforts to build a new society for future generations.

It was a country full of hope, pride, and aspiration.

The Cultural Revolution’s major breakthroughs clarified and articulated the fundamental differences between socialist development and capitalist development and showed us the concrete path to continuing class struggle during the socialist transition.

We can say with confidence, “Socialism has not failed”. The counterrevolutionaries seized power from the proletariat.

We just have to take the power back and WE WILL.


SEE ALSO: 


http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/thirty-years-of-capitalist-reform-by.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/study-and-learn-celebrating-50-years-of.html

Sunday, May 29, 2016

China : The Civil War 1946 to 1949 and the Founding of The People's Republic Of China



Democracy and Class Struggle  says that the exposure of the KMT duplicity around the double 10th Agreement opened the road for Communist Party of China  to move to strategic offensive and capture political power in China..

The current revolutionary movement has been stuck at revolutionary defensive or revolutionary equilibrium for many decades - this period in history of Communist Party of China is instructive on how to go onto strategic offensive and not remain forever stuck at revolutionary defensive or equilibrium.

SEE ALSO:

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/china-from-first-world-war-to.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/china-in-world-war-one-age-of-warlords.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Tenth_Agreement

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm




Saturday, May 28, 2016

China : From First World War to Liberation of China



This is an introduction to China and Mao and the Civil War - it does not have the pejorative terms usually found in Western videos about China and Mao hence we have published it as a basic introduction along with other videos from same source.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty China fell apart and both, forces loyal to Chiang Kais-shek's National Kuomintang Party and as Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China, fought to rule the country.

This struggle would ultimately result in the Chinese Civil War.




It would take more than 22 years but would come to a halt during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. 

After Japan's defeat, Mao's troops grew strong quickly and soon after they were able to force Chiang Kai-shek and his followers out of China.

They sought refuge in Taiwan. Shortly after, Mao Zedong called out the People's Republic of China. Learn all about the Chinese Civil War in this episode of Battlefields with Indy Neidell

SEE ALSO:
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/china-in-world-war-one-age-of-warlords.html


China in World War One - The Age of the Warlords




China was in a constant period of unrest and turmoil after the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion.

None of the new leaders and presidents could really consolidate their power in China and a struggle between the different warlords. broke out.

At the same time, China was eyeing a more prominent role within the international community and sent 150,000 workers to the Western Front as part of the Chinese Labour Corps.

The May 4th Movement of 1919 was born out of social contradictions of First World War and The Treaty of Versailles which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party.

Although not discussed in video above also study the New Culture Movement .





US Hegemony in Latin America by Jesus Rojas : On August 5th, 1829 the Liberator, Simon Bolivar proclaimed. "The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom"


                                                         Simon Bolivar


On August 5th, 1829 the Liberator, Simon Bolivar proclaimed.

"The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom"

Bolivar  pointed out the expansionist, interventionist and warmongering policy that has characterized the USA since it gained its  independence from British colonialism in the year of 1776.
Already at that time the "imperial eagle" was raised as main objective, the conquest and domination of the entire American continent.

It was precisely Simon Bolivar which exposed the annexationist claims of the United States, which fiercely opposed to the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

These actions were carried out under the development of American capitalism and its constitution as an imperialist power.

The purposes of US administrations  were and still are to  militarily dominate the continent, to seize the natural resources of the region, to maintain control over the means of land, river and sea transportation  and set line policies related to their interests for which they would use oligarchs regimes - constituted by the nascent Latin American bourgeoisie, by large landowners, military and conservative sectors of the church, which were characterized as puppets of the imperial eagle as well as the brutal application of violence, in some cases, and surreptitious manipulation in others.

With the implementation of policies such as the FTAA the US are seeking to leverage hegemonic control and appropriate the surplus sources of primary activities in Latin America.

Through this agreement the US seeks to institutionalize the instruments of  control of  police  and military type in the region; accentuate the pillaging of natural resources (minerals) on the continent, racist way regulating migration flows; extending the free flow of capital, but preventing the free labor market; destroy the incipient industrial production chain and the countries of the region, privatize oil, water and biodiversity; maintain control of scientific investment in the region, among others.

The actions undertaken by this country to ensure its hegemony in the global economic order, have meant perverse effects on the political, diplomatic, military, economic and cultural level among the countries of Latin America.

Since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has had as main objective to control the new independent Latin American markets and close to English merchants and European interests.

The imposition of this neo-mercantilist imperialism led to explosive social conditions and the reemergence of nationalist and socialist alternatives; and the anti-terrorist military doctrine of Washington, with its threats of violent interventions and its active and direct military presence has served as a useful ideological weapon to impose such empire.

In recent years Latin America has remained resilient to the will of Washington and has obtained a series of victories whose background so far is not fully identified by the US.

First it can be mentioned Latin American organizations such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Besides that, Latin America currently has all the necessary requirements to solve internal problems without outside help and without the US, causing its strong indignation.

An independence of this nature does not fit into the overall plans of Washington, which has to maneuver and invent various scenarios for each country in an attempt to somehow keep relations with its neighbors.

The resistance of countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil despite the coup, to the capitalist imperialism that leads us to imagine an imperial structure with cracks that expose the weaknesses of the hegemony of the United States in the Global order  and ask ourselves  what will be  the actions of that country to maintain control within the capitalist system.


SEE ALSO: 

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/venezuela-is-facing-its-worst-threat-by.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/coups-detat-by-jesus-rojas.html

Trump's Mob Ties Exposed



Democracy and Class Struggle has been publishing about Trump Mob ties for over a year and the information published by the Young Turks has been known for years - as we have pointed out we found it strange that US media is largely silent on this question.



Trump is known to have had ties to notorious crime figures like Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese mob, and others of their ilk in New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey.

You will see in our article linked below from Murray the Humps Daughter Luella that US Politics would not be the same without the Mob and election rigging in the 20th century.

SEE ALSO : 

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/organised-crime-in-us-politics-from.html


http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/american-first-by-woody-guthrie-america.html

http://www.helpfreetheearth.com/news1222_trump.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/donald-trump-deception-and-self.html


Friday, May 27, 2016

Donbass : Myths and Realities and the Role of Communists by Dmytriy Kovalevich



Democracy and Class Struggle has heard conflicting reports from Donetsk and Lugansk about situation of comrades.

 To clarify the situation for readers of Democracy and Class Struggle we have asked comrade Dmytriy Kovalevich for clarification of the current situation in Donbass.

We know that West governments for two years blackmailed Moscow demanding to take measures and press Donbass rebels as they couldn’t press them by Kiev troops.

Although, we can’t know the plans of Moscow for sure, but definitely Russian government is not as united as it is portrayed by West press: it has several factions with their own vested interests and it is the internal Russian political struggle causes contradictory decisions over Donbass and Ukraine.

The policy of Moscow is (and has been since Maidan) is rather determined by a desire to have Donbass inside Ukraine and Russian officials stated it quite clearly, by the way.

Russia doesn’t want a seceded Donbass (dependent on Russia and a burden on its budget) - it would like to see it inside Ukraine as a counterbalance to Kiev nationalists and a leverage to influence the policy of entire Ukraine.

But definitely Moscow can’t allow Kiev to defeat Donbass by military force.

The difference between Moscow and Kiev approach is not over Donbass status as such (both governments are agree over it), but Kiev wants a military victory and to expel local Donbass people to Russia, while Russia can’t allow this scenario to happen and would like to see a strong Donbass with its people inside Ukraine.

The opinion of Donbass people is effectively ignored by both sides (Moscow and Kiev). 

Russian government (threatening to stop humanitarian aid) made Donbass rebels in 2014 to stop their advancement (when they nearly seized Marioupol and even entered Zaporizhya region).

Moscow also tries to force them to fulfill Minsk agreements.

But the problem is that Kiev and Moscow differently interpret the Minsk agreements.

Currently, the leader of DPR A.Zakharchenko is outraged that Moscow presses them to postpone the elections in DPR - for the third time (Moscow doesn’t want Donbass elections to be held, but would like Donbass people and organisations to participate in all-Ukrainian elections, while Kiev would like to forbid ‘the terrorists’ participation’ in Ukrainian elections).

As to the issue of Donetsk communists. I should remind that still Donetsk Communist party is the only (!) political party officially registered in DPR.

There are no other political parties there (only newly formed movements and civic organizations).

There is still no definite law on political parties and their registration (Moscow as usual doesn’t allow the local political sphere to be formed, as it sees Donbass in Ukraine).

The registration of Donetsk communists is seen, thus, as a ‘mistake’ to be corrected.

Some think that this began from the comment said by the former Ukrainian president L.Kuchma during Minsk negotiations over the prospect of elections in Donbass:

 “You have in Donetsk an officially registered Communist party, but you are not going to allow our parties to participate in the elections in Donbass!”.

After that there began attempts to ‘correct a mistake’ – that is: no registered parties at all - so, no possibility for Kiev parties to participate in Donbass elections.

Officially Donetsk Communist Party is included into the movement ‘Donetsk Republic’ (headed by A.Zakharchenko) - actually it’s a ruling block (not a party).

In May 2016 two deputies of the Communist Party of Donetsk were excluded from the Donetsk council under pretext that they didn’t followed the block’s discipline and voted not as was agreed by the entire faction in the Parliament.

However, unofficially Donetsk politicians say that this is the instruction from Moscow - to ‘suppress communists’ so that to remove a potential argument from Kiev in negotiations.

Apparently this happens because Donetsk communists were the initiators of the Donbass uprising - all began from their rallies to defend Lenin’s monuments two years ago and seizing administrative buildings in the region.

B.Litvinov (the head of Donetsk communists) was the main organizer of the referendum on Donbass independency.

That’s the comment from Russian media Nakanune:

“Whatever happens, but the DPR still follows the instructions from Moscow, and one should not try to find in the exclusion of Litvinov a sort of persecution of Communists. 

His removal does not mean any prohibition of the Communist party. To ban the Communists in Donbas is impossible. 

Moreover, the Communist party officially registered in DPR, just in current circumstances can not participate in the elections in the interests of the process [i.e. Minsk agreements]. 

And the fact that the Communist party is the first and the only party that managed to register in DPR, says only that the support of the Communists in the industrial Donbass is very high.

"http://www.nakanune.ru/articles/111720/"

Currently there are two main political forces in DPR: the movement “Donetsk republic” (headed by A.Zakharchenko) which nominally includes Communist party and the movement ‘Free Donbass” headed by Pavel Gubarev [former activist of the Progressive Socialist party of Ukraine].

Both movements have a significant number of pro-communist and pro-workers groups and activists included.

The communists and pro-communist activists are the most committed militants in Donbass and apparently Russian authorities see them as an obstacle to get rid of Donbass (which needs support) and re-integrate it into Ukraine (though, it’s rather a speculation since no one knows real plans of Moscow and how much it will bend to West demands to press the rebels).

Obviously there is no suppression of the communists in Donbass like in Ukraine.

The problems of Donetsk communists are rather a matter of internal tensions within ruling block [apparently resulted from Moscow pressure which is the result of west pressure] as communist insist on independency and don’t tolerate Kiev regime.

However, we should understand that the West presses [formally] Kiev to get rid of notorious Nazis and Kiev promises but actively sabotages this.

Moscow presses Donbass to get rid of most militant antifascists - in the name of the ‘peace process’] and Donbass promises but actively sabotages this too.

Kiev says: if there were no communists, there would be no separatism.

Donbass says: if there were no Nazis [Banderites] in Kiev, there would be no separatism and attempts to secede.

Nazis in Kiev have influence mostly via their force [paramilitary groups]  - not via electoral representation and they can’t tolerate communists.

Communists in Donbass also have a presence rather not in Donbass administration but in rebels’ units and they are not agree to tolerate Nazis [Banderites].

Recently, Donetsk officials tried not to allow Donetsk communists to march but Donetsk armed rebels intervened and officials had to concede.

In Kiev some officials tried not to allow Nazis to march but their armed paramilitaries intervened and the officials had to concede.

Internationally, Kiev tries to hide its Nazis, Donbass tries to hide its communists [for international observers].

However, the main war is still between Nazis and Communists and other forces have to follow them and try somehow to influence the situation.

Attempts of some leftists to equate the situations in Kiev and Donbass are largely caused by the desires of pro-west liberals and Ukrainian nationalists to respond somehow to the accusations about communist ban in Ukraine and constant Nazi assaults on Ukrainian communists.

I should emphasize: Communist Party in Donetsk is still the only acting registered political party.

As for Lugansk - the communists there are even more numerous, though there are political tensions with the LPR leadership too (as well as between pro-communist groups).

I should remind that the first armed resistance to Maidan coup was an attack of Lugansk communists on Ukrainian border guard aimed at seizing weapons.

This week, Lugansk communists managed to depose Lugansk transport minister [criticized for incompetence].

"http://leftinform.net/?p=1442"

In short, communists are the most active and militant force in Donbass, what some see as an obstacle for Minsk agreements and re-integration of Ukraine.

As for the prospects of the conflict: we see that civil war still goes on - at least shelling happens daily.

But no side still can advance significantly. Donbass waits for the economic collapse of Ukraine, while Ukraine relies on pressure from West so that to integrate Donbass on Kiev terms.

Moreover, Kiev Nazis are also dangerous for Kiev regime so they are being sent to the frontline - to fight and die somewhere - far from Kiev.

Ukrainian Nazis are not pro-EU or for ‘European values’ but need Western aid to fight communists so they are ready to blackmail it by ‘Russian aggression’.

Communists in Donbass are not pro-Russian - rather they try to impose their agenda to Russia, blackmailing Russian officials by a possibility to lose their domestic support.

From one side it’s a sort of a proxy war between Russia and West, from another side - a civil war.

And agendas of internal and external actors don’t coincide.

I think we’ll see a sort of frozen conflict with regular shelling - at least until presidential elections in the USA - and after that the conflict may be escalated again.

At the same time Kiev regime quickly loses the popularity as it has to implement unpopular IMF austerity measures.

The internal tensions in Kiev grow but still the regime can survive only due to West financial aid – as soon as it stops, the regime will collapse.


SEE ALSO:

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Donald Trump : The deception and self deception of bourgeois politics - I am with the workers but I am really with Wall Street




So why is Wall Street changing its tune and secretly cheering behind closed conference room doors?

Counter to Trump's initial stance against Wall Street, many believe he's recently been giving the industry a "wink-wink."

"Of course he pledged to be tough on Wall Street. He has to say that," an investment banker said. "But when he says he has plans to dismantle Dodd Frank, it's like playing

 'We Will Rock You' inside of a stadium. It's awesome." 

When you ask someone outside of the business about Dodd Frank they don't really understand what it means.

But to everyone within the industry they know it's a Wall Street reform and consumer protection act. It's a massive and financial reform legislation that's aimed to decrease risk in the system.

It was put in place to prevent a repeat of 2008.

SOURCE : 

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/26/how-donald-trump-is-winning-over-wall-street-commentary.html


The appointment of a Wall Street insider for the Trump campaign financing


Mnuchin an Investment Professional with Soros Fund Management LLC and spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs. 

He also has innumerable other affiliations with establishment financial institutions and corporations.




SEE ALSO: 

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/usa-trumpism-lethal-combination-wall.html

India: Red Salute to the Agricultural Labourers of Sangrur district of Punjab - Long Live Spirit of Naxalbari by Harsh Thakor




OPPOSE THE GROSS INJUSTICE OF INDIAN STATE ON AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS  IN SANGRUR AND SALUTE THE HEROIC RESISTANCE OF ZAMEEN PRAPT SANGHARSH COMMITTEE 


Police firing has taken place on dalit peasants in Sangrur district of Punjab.

In recent weeks a protracted agitation has been taken up by the zameen prapt sangharsh committee in Sangrur demanding 1/3rd rights for dalits in a panchayat.

Backed by the ruling party the police clamped down heavily  and exposed their anti-people nature.

It is ironic that it took place on the very day the Naxalabri movement started on May 25th.

All democrats should resolutely stand by the arrested activists and support their just agitation.

Such a movement has great significance in a semi-feudal society and where the dalit community is humiliated.

It teaches us how much importance has to be given to caste analysis,organizing of agricultural labourers  or studying the dalit phenomena

We must salute forces like  the Zameen Prapt Sangharsh Committee for so meticulously organizing the dalit labourers

Tribune News Service
Sangrur, May 25

Following a clash between Dalits and the police at Balad Kalan village (near Bhawanigarh) yesterday in which about 15 persons, including five policemen, had sustained injuries, the Bhawanigarh police registered two criminal cases against about 150 Dalits and their leaders.

The police have arrested seven Dalits in a case, registered against over 70 Dalits and others, including Mukesh Malaud, district president of Zamin Prapti Sangharsh Committee (ZPSC), under various Sections of IPC, including 307 (attempt to murder) and 120-B.

This case was registered against them for allegedly “pelting stones” on the policemen at Balad Kalan village etc while blocking the Sangrur-Patiala main road. Seven persons have been arrested.

Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Sangrur, Gagandeep Singh Bhullar, said this evening that four of them were today produced in the court of the CJM here that remanded them in police custody for two days.

According to the Bhawanigarh police, the other case was registered against the agitating Dalits on the complaint of one Bhola Singh for allegedly “issuing threats” and keeping them “detained” in the BDPO’s office at Bhawanigarh after the auction of land.

In this case, the police booked over 75 persons, including 45 who have been named.I just got a report from activist Rupinder Singh of Sangrur and leader of Nuajwan Bhrat Sabha that in many villages protest rallies are being staged within Sangrur district.


These include Khedi,Nizampur,Chenedi,jalur and Mander kalan

The heart of the dalits  are burning like a flame and the resistance against injustice was sporadic.The dalit sit-ins in those villages are a thorn in the flesh of the ruling classes. This agitation is an inspiration and lesson to dalits and agricultural labourers  of India as a whole.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Seditious Heart - An unfinished diary of nowadays by Arundhati Roy





ON A BALMY FEBRUARY NIGHT, aware that things were not going well, I did what I rarely do. I put in earplugs and switched on the television.

Even though I had said nothing about the spate of recent events—murders and lynchings, police raids on university campuses, student arrests, and enforced flag-waving—I knew that my name was still on the A-list of “anti-nationals.”

That night, I began to worry that, in addition to the charge of criminal contempt of court I was already facing (for “interfering in the administration of justice,” “bashing the Central Government, State Governments, the Police Machinery, so also the Judiciary,” and “demonstrating a surly, rude and boorish attitude”),

I would also be charged with causing the death of the eternally indignant news anchor on Times Now. I thought he might succumb to an apoplectic fit as he stabbed the air and spat out my name, suggesting that I was a part of some shadowy cabal behind the ongoing “anti-national” activity in the country.

My crime, according to him, is that I have written about the struggle for freedom in Kashmir, questioned the execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru, walked with the Maoist guerrillas (“terrorists” in television speak) in the forests of Bastar, connected their armed rebellion to my reservations about India’s chosen model of “development,” and—with a hissy, sneering pause—even questioned the country’s nuclear tests.

Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.

Sitting in Delhi, somewhat at the mercy of what looks like a democratically elected government gone rogue, I wondered whether I should rethink some of my opinions.

I thought back, for instance, on a talk I gave in 2004 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, just before the Bush-versus-Kerry election, in which I joked about how the choice between the Democrats and the Republicans—or their equivalents in India, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party—was like having to choose between Tide and Ivory Snow, two brands of washing powder both actually owned by the same company. Given all that is going on, can I honestly continue to believe that?

On merit, when it comes to pogroms against non-Hindu communities, or looking away while Dalits are slaughtered, or making sure the levers of power and wealth remain in the hands of the tiny minority of dominant castes, or smuggling in neoliberal economic reforms on the coat-tails of manufactured communal conflict, or banning books, there’s not much daylight between the Congress and the BJP.

(When it comes to the horrors that have been visited upon places like Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur, all the parliamentary parties, including the two major Left parties, stand united in their immorality.)

Given this track record, does it matter that the stated ideologies of the Congress and the BJP are completely different?

Whatever its practice, the Congress says it believes in a secular, liberal democracy, while the BJP mocks secularism and believes that India is essentially a “Hindu Rashtra”—a Hindu nation.

Hypocrisy, Congress-style, is serious business. It’s clever—it smokes up the mirrors and leaves us groping around. However, to proudly declare your bigotry, to bring it out into the sunlight as the BJP does, is a challenge to the social, legal, and moral foundations on which modern India (supposedly) stands. It would be an error to imagine that what we are witnessing today is just business as usual between unprincipled, murderous political parties.

Although the idea of India as a Hindu Rashtra is constantly being imbued with an aura of ancientness, it’s a surprisingly recent one. And, ironically, it has more to do with representative democracy than it does with religion.

Historically, the people who now call themselves Hindu only identified themselves by their jati, their caste names. As a community, they functioned as a loose coalition of endogamous castes organised in a strict hierarchy. (Even today, for all the talk of unity and nationalism, only five percent of marriages in India cut across caste lines. Transgression can still get young people beheaded.)

Since each caste could dominate the ones below it, all except those at the very bottom were inveigled into being a part of the system. Brahmanvaad—Brahminism—is the word that the anti-caste movement has traditionally used to describe this taxonomy.

Though it has lost currency (and is often erroneously taken to refer solely to the practices and beliefs of Brahmins as a caste group), it is, in fact, a more accurate term than “Hinduism” for this social and religious arrangement, because it is as ancient as caste itself and pre-dates the idea of Hinduism by centuries.

This is a volatile assertion, so let me shelter behind Bhimrao Ambedkar. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognised,” he wrote in Annihilation of Caste in 1936, “is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves.”

So how and why did the people who lived east of the Indus begin to call themselves Hindus? Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the politics of representative governance (paradoxically, introduced to its colony by the imperial British government), began to replace the politics of emperors and kings.

The British marked the boundaries of the modern nation-state called India, divided it into territorial constituencies, and introduced the idea of elected bodies for local self-government. Gradually, subjects became citizens, citizens became voters, and voters formed constituencies that were assembled from complicated networks of old as well as new allegiances, alliances, and loyalties.

Even as it came into existence, the new nation began to struggle against its rulers. But it was no longer a question of overthrowing a ruler militarily and taking the throne. The new rulers, whoever they were, would need to be legitimate representatives of the people. The politics of representative governance set up a new anxiety: Who could legitimately claim to represent the aspirations of the freedom struggle? Which constituency would make up the majority?

This marked the beginning of what we now call “vote bank” politics. Demography turned into an obsession. It became imperative that people who previously identified themselves only by their caste names band together under a single banner to make up a majority. That was when they began to call themselves Hindu.

It was a way of crafting a political majority out of an impossibly diverse society. “Hindu” was the name of a political constituency more than of a religion, one that could define itself as clearly as other constituencies—Muslim, Sikh, and Christian—could. Hindu nationalists, as well as the officially “secular” Congress party, staked their claims to the “Hindu vote.”

It was around this time that a perplexing contestation arose around the people then known as “Untouchables” or “Outcastes,” who, though they were outside the pale of the caste system, were also divided into separate castes arranged in a strict hierarchy. To even begin to understand the political chaos we are living through now, at the centre of which is the suicide of the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, it’s important to understand, at least conceptually, this turn-of-the-century contestation.

Over the previous centuries, in order to escape the scourge of caste, millions of Untouchables (I use this word only because Ambedkar used it too) had converted to Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity.

In the past, those conversions had not been a cause of anxiety for the privileged castes. However, when the politics of demography took centre stage, this haemorrhaging became a source of urgent concern.

People who had been shunned and cruelly oppressed were now viewed as a population who could greatly expand the numbers of the Hindu constituency. They had to be courted and brought into the “Hindu fold.” That was the beginning of Hindu evangelism.

What we know today as ghar wapsi, or “returning home,” was a ceremony that dominant castes devised to “purify” Untouchables and Adivasis, whom they considered “polluted.”

The idea was (and is) to persuade these ancient and autochthonous peoples that they were formerly Hindus, and that Hinduism was the original, indigenous religion of the subcontinent. It was not only Hindu nationalists among the privileged castes that tried to embrace the Untouchables politically while continuing to valorise the caste system.

Their counterparts in the Congress did the same thing too. This was the reason for the legendary standoff between Bhimrao Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi, and continues to be the cause of serious disquiet in Indian politics.

Even today, to properly secure its idea of a Hindu Rashtra, the BJP has to persuade a majority of the Dalit population to embrace a creed that stigmatises and humiliates them.

It has been surprisingly successful, and has even managed to draw in some militant Ambedkarite Dalits.

It is this paradox that has made the political moment we are living through so incandescent, so highly inflammable, and so unpredictable.

Ever since the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded, in 1925, this ideological holding company of Hindu nationalism (and of the BJP) has set itself the task of making myriad castes, communities, tribes, religions, and ethnic groups submerge their identities and line up behind the banner of the Hindu Rashtra.

Which is a little like trying to sculpt a gigantic, immutable stone statue of Bharat Mata—the Hindu right’s ideal of Mother India—out of a stormy sea. Turning water into stone may not be a practical ambition, but the RSS’s long years of trying have polluted the sea and endangered its flora and fauna in irreversible ways. Its ruinous ideology—known as Hindutva, and inspired by the likes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler—openly proposes Nazi-style purges of Indian Muslims.

In RSS doctrine (theorised by MS Golwalkar, the organisation’s second sarsanghchalak, or supreme leader), the three main enemies obstructing the path to the Hindu Rashtra are Muslims, Christians, and Communists. And now, as the RSS races towards that goal, although what’s happening around us may look like chaos, everything is actually going strictly by the book.

Of late, the RSS has deliberately begun to conflate nationalism with Hindu nationalism.

It uses the terms interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. Naturally, it chooses to gloss over the fact that it played absolutely no part in the struggle against British colonialism.

But while the RSS left the battle of turning a British colony into an independent nation to other people, it has, since then, worked far harder than any other political or cultural organisation to turn this independent nation into a Hindu nation. Before the BJP was founded, in 1980, the political arm of the RSS was the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. However, the RSS’s influence cut across party lines, and in the past its shadowy presence has even been evident in some of the more nefarious and violent activities of the Congress.

The organisation now has a network of tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and hundreds of thousands of workers. It has its own trade union, its own educational institutions where millions of students are indoctrinated, its own teachers’ organisation, a women’s wing, a media and publications division, its own organisations dedicated to Adivasi welfare, its own medical missions, its own sad stable of historians (who produce their own hallucinatory version of history), and, of course, its own army of trolls on social media.

Its sister concerns, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, provide the storm troopers that carry out organised attacks on anyone whose views they perceive to be a threat. In addition to creating its own organisations (which, together with the BJP, make up the Sangh Parivar—the Saffron Family), the RSS has also worked patiently to place its chessmen in public institutions: on government committees, in universities, the bureaucracy, and, crucially, the intelligence services.

That all this farsightedness and hard work was going to pay off one day was a foregone conclusion. Still, it took imagination and ruthlessness to come this far. Most of us know the story, but given the amnesia that is being pressed upon us, it might serve to put down a chronology of the recent present. Who knows, things that appeared unconnected may, when viewed in retrospect, actually be connected. And vice versa. So forgive me if, in an attempt to decipher a pattern, I go over some familiar territory.

THE JOURNEY TO POWER began with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In 1990, LK Advani, a BJP leader and a member of the RSS, travelled the length and breadth of the country in an air-conditioned rath—chariot—exhorting “Hindus” to rise up and build a temple on the hallowed birthplace of Lord Ram. The birthplace, people were told, was the exact same spot on which a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood in the town of Ayodhya. In 1992, just two years after his rath yatra, Advani stood by and watched as an organised mob reduced the Babri Masjid to rubble. Riots, massacres, and serial bombings followed. The country was polarised in a way it had not been since Partition. By 1998, the BJP (which had only two seats in parliament in 1984) had formed a coalition government at the centre.

The first thing the BJP did was to realise a long-standing desire of the RSS by conducting a series of nuclear tests. From being an organisation that had been banned three times (after the assassination of Gandhi, during the Emergency, and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid), the RSS was finally in a position to dictate government policy. We can call it the Year of the Ascension.

It wasn’t the first time India had conducted nuclear tests, but the exhibitionism of the 1998 ones was different. It was like a rite of passage. The “Hindu bomb” was meant to announce the imminent arrival of the Hindu Rashtra. Within days, Pakistan (already ahead of the curve, having declared itself an Islamic republic in 1956) showed off its “Muslim bomb.” And now we’re stuck with these two strutting, nuclear-armed roosters, who are trained to hate each other, who hold their minority populations hostage as they mimic each other in a competing horror show of majoritarianism and religious chauvinism. And they have Kashmir to fight over.

The nuclear tests altered the tone of public discourse in India. They coarsened and, you could say, weaponised it. In the months that followed, we were force-fed Hindu nationalism. Then, like now, articles circulated predicting that a mighty, all-conquering Hindu Rashtra was about to emerge—that a resurgent India would “burst forth upon its former oppressors and destroy them completely.” Absurd as it all was, having nuclear weapons made thoughts like these seem feasible. It created thoughts like these.

You didn’t have to be a visionary to see what was coming.

The Year of the Ascension, 1998, witnessed gruesome attacks on Christians (essentially Dalits and Adivasis), Hindutva’s most vulnerable foes. Swami Aseemanand, the head of the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram’s religious wing (who would make national news as the main accused in the 2007 Samjhauta Express train bombing), was sent to the remote, forested Dang district in western Gujarat to set up a headquarters. The violence began on Christmas Eve. Within a week, more than 20 churches in the region were burned down or otherwise destroyed by mobs of thousands led by the Hindu Dharma Jagran Manch, an organisation affiliated to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. Soon, Dang district became a major centre of ghar wapsi. Tens of thousands of Adivasis were “returned” to Hinduism. The violence spread to other states.

In Keonjhar district in Odisha, an Australian Christian missionary, Graham Staines, who had been working in India for 35 years, was burned alive along with his two sons, aged 6 and 10. The man who led the attack was Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist.

In April 2000, the US president Bill Clinton was on an official visit to Pakistan, after which he was due in Delhi. It was less than a year since the war in the Kargil district of Ladakh, in which India had pushed back the Pakistani army after it, in an aggressive, provocative move, sent soldiers across the Line of Control to occupy a strategic post.

The Indian government was keen for the international community to recognise that Pakistan was a “terrorist state.” On 20 April, the night before Clinton was expected to arrive, 35 Sikhs were shot down in cold blood in Chittisinghpora, a village in south Kashmir. The killers were said to be Pakistan-based militants disguised in Indian Army uniforms. It was the first time Sikhs had been targeted by militants in Kashmir. Five days later, the Special Operations Group and the Rashtriya Rifles claimed to have tracked down and killed five of the militants. The burnt, disfigured bodies of the dead men were dressed in fresh, unburnt army uniforms. It turned out they were all local Kashmiri villagers who had been abducted by the army and killed in a staged encounter.

In October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the BJP installed Narendra Modi as the chief minister of Gujarat. At the time, Modi was more or less unknown. His main political credential was that he had been a long-time and loyal member of the RSS.

On the morning of 13 December 2001, in Delhi, when the Indian parliament was in its winter session, five armed men in a white Ambassador car fitted with an improvised explosive device drove through its gates. Apparently, they got through security because they had a fake home ministry sticker on their windscreen, the back of which read:

INDIA IS A VERY BAD COUNTRY AND WE HATE INDIA WE WANT TO DESTROY INDIA AND WITHT THE GRACE OF GOD WE WILL DO IT GOD IS WITH US AND WE WILL TRY OUR BEST. THIS EDIET WAJPEI AND ADVANI WE WILL KILL THEM. THEY HAVE KILLED MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE AND THEY ARE VERY BAD PERSONS. THERE BROTHER BUSH IS ALSO A VERY BAD PERSON HE WILL NEXT TARGET HE IS ALSO THE KILLER OF INNOCENT PEOPLE HE HAVE TO DIE AND WE WILL DO IT

When the men were eventually challenged, they jumped out and opened fire. In the gun battle that ensued all the attackers, eight security personnel, and a gardener were killed.The then prime minister, AB Vajpayee (also a member of the RSS), had, only the previous day, expressed a worry that the parliament might be attacked. LK Advani, who was the home minister by then, compared the assault to the 9/11 attacks. He said the men “looked like Pakistanis.” Fourteen years later, we still don’t know who they really were. They are yet to be properly identified.

Within days, on 16 December, the Special Cell of the Delhi police announced that it had cracked the case. It said that the attack was a joint operation by two Pakistan-based terrorist outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Three Kashmiri men, SAR Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru, and Mohammed Afzal Guru, were arrested. Shaukat’s wife, Afsan Guru, was arrested too. The mastermind at the Indian end, the Special Cell told the media, was Geelani, a young professor of Arabic at Delhi University. (He was subsequently acquitted by the courts.) On 21 December, based on these intelligence inputs, the Indian government suspended air, rail, and bus communications with Pakistan, banned overflights, and recalled its ambassador. More than half a million troops were moved to the border, where they remained on high alert for several months. Foreign embassies issued travel advisories to their citizens and evacuated their staff, apprehending a war that could turn nuclear.

On 27 February 2002, while Indian and Pakistani troops eyeballed each other on the border and communal polarisation was at fever pitch, 58 kar sevaks —Hindu pilgrims—travelling home from Ayodhya, were burned alive in their train coach just outside the train station in the town of Godhra, Gujarat. The Gujarat police said the coach had been firebombed from the outside by an angry mob of local Muslims. (Later, a report by the State Forensic Lab showed that this was not the case.) LK Advani said that “outside elements” may have also been involved. The kar sevaks’ bodies, burnt beyond recognition, were transported to Ahmedabad for the public to pay their respects.

What happened next is well known. (And well forgotten too, because the bigots of yesterday are being sold to us as the moderates of today.) So, briefly: in February and March 2002, while police stood by, Gujarat burned. In cities and in villages, organised Hindutva mobs murdered Muslims in broad daylight. Women were raped and burned alive. Infants were put to the sword. Men were dismembered. Whole localities were burned down. Tens of thousands of Muslims were driven from their homes and into refugee camps. The killing went on for several weeks.

There have been pogroms in India before, equally heinous, equally unpardonable, in which the numbers of people killed have been far higher: the massacre of Muslims in Nellie, Assam, in 1983, under a Congress state government (estimates of the number killed vary between 2,000, officially, and more than double that figure, unofficially); the massacre of almost 3,000 Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, by Congress-led mobs in Delhi (which Rajiv Gandhi, who then went on to become prime minister, justified by saying, “When a big tree falls, the ground shakes”); the massacre, in 1993, of hundreds of Muslims by the Shiv Sena in Mumbai, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In these pogroms too, the killers were protected and given complete impunity.

But Gujarat 2002 was a massacre in the time of mass media. Its ideological underpinning was belligerently showcased, and the massacre justified in ways that marked a departure from the past. It was perpetuation, as well as a commencement. We, the public, were being given notice in no uncertain terms. The era of dissimulation had ended.

The Gujarat pogrom dovetailed nicely with the international climate of Islamophobia. The War on Terror had been declared. Afghanistan had been bombed. Iraq was already on the radar. Within months of the massacre, a fresh election was announced in Gujarat. Modi won it hands down. A few years into his first tenure, some of those involved in the 2002 pogrom were caught on camera boasting about how they had hacked, burned, and speared people to death. The footage was broadcast on the national news. It only seemed to enhance Modi’s popularity in the state, where he won the next two elections as well, securing the backing of several heads of major corporations along the way, and remained chief minister for 12 years.

While Modi moved from strength to strength, his party faltered at the centre. Its “India Shining” campaign in the 2004 general election was received by people as a cruel joke, and the Congress made a stunning comeback. The BJP remained out of power at the centre for the next ten years.
The RSS showed itself to be an organisation that thrives in the face of adversity. The climate was what is known as “vitiated.” Between 2003 and 2009, a series of bombings and terror strikes on trains, buses, market places, mosques, and temples, by what were thought to be Islamist terror groups, killed scores of innocent people.

The worst of them all were the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which Lashkar-e-Taiba militants from Pakistan shot 164 people and wounded more than 300.

Not all the attacks were what they were made out to be. What follows is just a sampling, an incomplete list of some of those events: On 15 June 2004, a young woman called Ishrat Jahan and three Muslim men were shot dead by the Gujarat police, who said they were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives on a mission to assassinate Modi. The Central Bureau of Investigation has since said that the “encounter” was staged, and that all four victims were captured and then killed in cold blood. On 23 November 2005, a Muslim couple, Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife, Kausar Bi, were taken off a public bus by the Gujarat police.

Three days later, Sheikh was reported killed in an “encounter” in Ahmedabad. The police said that he worked for Lashkar-e-Taiba, and that they suspected he was on a mission to assassinate Modi. Kausar Bi was killed two days later. A witness to the Sheikh killing, Tulsiram Prajapati, was shot dead a year later, in a police encounter. Several senior officers of the Gujarat police are standing trial for these killings. (One of them, PP Pandey, has just been appointed as the director general of police for Gujarat.)

 On 18 February 2007, the Samjhauta Express, a “friendship train” that ran twice a week between Delhi and Attari in Pakistan, was bombed, killing 68 people, most of them Pakistanis. In September 2008, three bombs went off in the towns of Malegaon and Modassa. Several of those arrested in these cases, including Swami Aseemanand of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, were members of the RSS. (Hemant Karkare, the police officer who headed the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, which led the investigations, was shot dead in 2008, during the course of the Mumbai attacks. For the story within the story, read Who killed Karkare? by SM Mushrif, a retired inspector general of the Maharashtra police.)

The assaults on Christians continued too. The most ferocious of them was in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008. Ninety Christians (all Dalits) were murdered, and more than 50,000 people were displaced. Tragically, the mobs that attacked them were made up of newly “Hinduised” Adivasis freshly dragooned into the Sangh Parivar’s vigilante militias. Kandhamal’s Christians continue to live under threat, and most of them cannot return to their homes. In other states too, like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, Christians live in constant danger.

In 2013, the BJP announced that Modi would be its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general election. During his campaign, he was asked if he regretted what had happened on his watch in Gujarat in 2002. “Any person if we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,” he told a Reuters journalist, “even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”

The media dutifully filed the Gujarat pogrom away as old news. The campaign went well. Modi was allowed to reinvent himself as the architect of the “Gujarat model”—supposedly an example of dynamic economic development. He became corporate India’s most favoured candidate—the embodiment of the aspirations of the new India, architect of an economic miracle waiting to happen. His election broke the bank, costing $115 million—more than R700 crore—according to the election commission.

But behind the advertising blitz and the 3D dioramas, things hadn’t really changed all that much. In a district called Muzaffarnagar, in Uttar Pradesh, the tried and tested version of the real Gujarat model was revived as a poll strategy. Technology played a part. (This would become a recurring theme.) It began with an altercation over what was, at the time, being called “love-jihad”—a notion that played straight into that old anxiety about demography. The Muslim “love-jihad” campaign, Hindus were told, involved entrapping Hindu girls romantically and persuading them to convert to Islam. In August 2013, a Muslim boy accused of teasing a Hindu girl was killed by two Jats. Two Jats were killed in retaliation.

A video of an obviously Muslim mob beating a man to death began to circulate on Facebook and over cell-phone networks. In reality, the incident had taken place in Sialkot, Pakistan. But it was put about that the video documented a local incident in which Muslims had beaten a Hindu boy to death. Provoked by the video, Hindu Jat farmers armed with swords and guns turned on local Muslims, with whom they had lived and worked for centuries.

Between August and September 2013, according to official estimates, 62 people were killed—42 Muslims and 20 Hindus.

Unofficial estimates put the number of Muslims killed at more than 200. Tens of thousands of Muslims were forced off their lands and into refugee camps. And, of course, many women were raped.

In April 2014, just before the general election, Amit Shah, a general secretary of the BJP at the time, and now the party president (he had been arrested in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, but was discharged by a special court), spoke at a meeting of Jats in a district bordering Muzaffarnagar. “In Uttar Pradesh, especially western UP, it is an election for honour,” he said. “It is an election to take revenge for the insult. It is an election to teach a lesson to those who have committed injustice.” Once again, the strategy paid off. The BJP swept Uttar Pradesh—the state with the largest share of seats in parliament.

In the midst of all this, the slew of genuinely progressive legislation which the Congress-led government had pushed through—like the Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which brought a modicum of real relief to the poorest of the poor—seemed to count for nothing. After ten years out of power at the centre, the BJP won a massive single-party majority. Narendra Modi became the prime minister of the world’s largest democracy. In an election campaign in which optics was everything, he flew from Ahmedabad to Delhi for his swearing-in on a private jet belonging to the Adani Group. The victory was so decisive, the celebrations so aggressive, that it seemed the establishment of the Hindu Rashtra was only weeks away.

Modi’s ascent to power came at a time when much of the rest of the world was descending into chaos. There was civil war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. The Arab Spring had happened and un-happened. ISIS, the macabre progeny of the War on Terror, which makes even the Taliban and al-Qaeda seem like moderates, was on the rise. The European refugee crisis had begun, even if it had not yet peaked. Pakistan was in serious trouble. In contrast, India looked like the warm, cuddly, unruly, Bollywoody, free-market-friendly democracy that works. But that was the view from the outside.

As soon as he was sworn in, the new prime minister began to display the kind of paranoia you might expect from a man who knows he has a lot of enemies, and who does not trust his own organisation. His first move was to disempower and make redundant a faction within the BJP led by Advani, whom he now viewed as a threat.

He usurped a great deal of the decision-making in the government, and then set off on a dizzying world tour (which hasn’t ended yet), with a few pit stops in India. Modi’s personal ambition, his desire to be seen as a global leader, soon began to overshadow the organisation that had mentored him, and which does not take kindly to self-aggrandisement.

In January 2015, he greeted the visiting US president, Barack Obama, in a suit that cost over a million rupees, with his name woven into the pin stripes:

arendradamodardasmodinarendradamodardasmodi. This was clearly a man who was in love with himself—no longer just a worker bee, no longer merely a humble servant. It began to look as though the ladders that had been used to climb into the clouds were being kicked away.

The ModiModi suit was eventually auctioned, and bought by an admirer for R4.3 crore. Meanwhile, it became the delight of cartoonists and the butt of some seriously raucous humour on social media. A man who had been feared was being laughed at for the first time. A month after his wardrobe malfunction, Modi experienced his first major shock. In the February 2015 Delhi state election, even though he campaigned tirelessly, the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party won 67 of 70 seats. It was the first election Modi had lost since 2002. Suddenly, the new leader began to look brittle and unsure of himself.

Nevertheless, in the rest of the country, thugs and vigilante assassins, sure of political backing from the people they had brought into power, continued about their bloody business.

                                        MM Kalburgi,Narendra Dabholka Govind Pansare

In February 2015, Govind Pansare, a writer and a prominent member of the Communist Party of India, was shot dead in Kolhapur, in Maharashtra. On 30 August 2015, MM Kalburgi, a well-known Kannada rationalist and scholar, was assassinated outside his home in Dharwad, in Karnataka. Both men had been threatened several times by extremist right-wing Hindu organisations, and told to stop their writing.

In September 2015, a mob gathered outside the home of a Muslim family in Dadri, a village near Delhi, claiming that they had been eating beef (a violation of the ban on cow slaughter that had been imposed in Uttar Pradesh, as well as in several other states). The family denied it. The mob refused to believe them. Mohammad Akhlaq was pulled out of his home and bludgeoned to death. The thugs of the new order were unapologetic.

After the murder, when the Sangh Parivar’s apparatchiks spoke to the press about “illegal slaughter,” they meant the imaginary cow. When they talked about “taking evidence for forensic examination,” they meant the food in the family’s fridge, not the body of the lynched man. The meat taken from Akhlaq’s house turned out not to be beef after all. But so what?

For days after that, the Twitter-loving prime minister said nothing. Under pressure, he issued a weak, watery admonishment. Since then, similar rumours have led to others being beaten to within an inch of their lives, even hanged. With their tormentors assured of complete impunity, Muslims now know that even a minor skirmish can ignite a full-scale massacre. A whole population is expected to hunch its shoulders and live in fear. And that, as we know, is not a feasible proposition. We are talking about approximately 170 million people.

THEN, QUITE SUDDENLY, just when hope was failing, something extraordinary began to happen. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the BJP’s massive majority in parliament had reduced the opposition to a rump, a new kind of resistance made itself known. Ordinary people began to show discomfort with what was going on. That feeling soon hardened into a stubborn resilience. In protest against the lynching of Akhlaq and the murders of Kalburgi and Pansare, as well as that of the rationalist and author Narendra Dabholkar, murdered in Pune in 2013, one by one, several well-known writers and film-makers began to return various national awards they had received. By the end of 2015, dozens of them had done so.

The returning of awards—which came to be known as award-wapsi, an ironic reference to ghar wapsi—was an unplanned, spontaneous, and yet deeply political gesture, by artists and intellectuals who did not belong to any particular group or subscribe to any particular ideology, or even agree with each other about most things. It was powerful and unprecedented, and probably has no historical parallel. It was politics plucked out of thin air.

Award-wapsi was widely reported by the international press. Precisely because it was spontaneous, and could not be painted into a corner as any sort of conspiracy, it enraged the government. If this was not enough, around the same time, in November 2015, the BJP suffered another massive electoral defeat, this time in the state of Bihar, at the hands of two wily, old-school politicians—Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav. Lalu is a doughty foe of the Sangh Parivar, and, way back in 1990, he was one of the few politicians to show some steel and arrest Advani when the rath yatra passed through Bihar. Losing the Bihar election was a personal as well as political humiliation for Modi, who had spent weeks campaigning there. The BJP was quick to suggest some sort of collusion between its opponents and “anti-national” intellectuals.

As a party that can mass-produce trolls but finds it hard to produce a single real thinker, this humiliating setback sharpened its instinctive hostility towards intellectual activity. It was never just dissent that our current rulers wished to crush. It was thought—intelligence—itself. Not surprisingly, the prime targets in the attack on our collective IQ have been some of India’s best universities.
The first signs of trouble came when, in May 2015, the administration of the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai “de-recognised” a student organisation called the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC). Its members are Dalit Ambedkarites, who have a sharp critique of Hindutva politics but also of neoliberal economics, and of the rapid corporatisation and privatisation that is putting higher education out of the reach of the poor.

The order banning the APSC accused it of trying to “de-align” Dalit and Adivasi students, to “make them protest against the Central government” and create hatred against the “Prime Minister and Hindus.” Why should a tiny student organisation with only a couple of dozen members have been seen as such a threat? Because by making connections between caste, capitalism, and communalism, the APSC was straying into forbidden territory—the sort of territory into which the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and the US civil-rights leader Martin Luther King had strayed, and paid for with their lives. The de-recognition led to public protests, and was quickly rescinded, although the APSC continues to be harassed and its activity remains seriously impeded.

The next confrontation came at India’s best-known film school, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, where BJP and RSS cronies were appointed to the institute’s governing council. Among these “persons of eminence,” one had until recently been the state president of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS. Another was a film-maker who had made a documentary called Narendra Modi: A Tale of Extraordinary Leadership. An actor by the name of Gajendra Chauhan was appointed the council’s chairman. His credential for the post, apart from his loyalty to the BJP, was his less than mediocre performance as Yudhishthira in a television version of the Mahabharata. (Of the rest of his acting career, the less said the better. You can find him on YouTube.)

The students went on strike, demanding to know on what basis a chairman with no qualifications for the job could be foisted on them. They demanded that Chauhan be removed from his post. Their real fear was that, by stacking the governing council with its cohorts, the government was setting up a coup, preparing (for the nth time) to privatise the FTII, and turn it into yet another institution exclusively for the rich and privileged.

The strike lasted for 140 days. The students were attacked by off-campus Hindutva activists, but were supported by trade unions, civil-society groups, film-makers, artists, intellectuals, and fellow students from across the country. The government refused to back down. The strike was eventually called off, but the unrest just moved to a bigger arena.

For several years now, the University of Hyderabad (UOH) has been a charged place, particularly around Dalit politics. Among the many student groups active on the campus is the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA). As a formation of Ambedkarites, like the APSC in Chennai, the ASA was asking some profound and disturbing questions. For obvious reasons, its main antagonist on campus was the ABVP, which is emerging as the eyes and ears of the RSS, and its agent provocateur, on almost every campus in the country.

When, in August, the ASA, quoting Ambedkar’s views on capital punishment, protested the hanging of Yakub Memon—convicted for the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai that followed the Shiv Sena-led pogrom against Muslims—the ABVP branded them “anti-national.” Following a head-on confrontation between the two groups over the documentary film Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hain (Muzaffarnagar is Still Standing), which the ASA screened on campus, five students—all Dalits, and all members of the ASA—were suspended, and told to leave their hostels. Young Dalits reaching out to the Muslim community was not something the Sangh Parivar was going to allow if it could help it.

These were first-generation students, whose parents had toiled all their lives to scrape together enough money to get their children an education. It’s hard for middle-class people who take the education of their children for granted to imagine what it means to have such painstakingly cultivated hope so callously snuffed out.




One of the five suspended students was Rohith Vemula, a PhD scholar. He was the son of a poor single mother, and had no means of supporting himself without his scholarship. Driven to despair, on 17 January 2016 he hanged himself. He left behind a suicide note of such extraordinary power and poignancy that—like a piece of great literature should—his words ignited a tinderbox of accumulated fury. Rohith wrote,

I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan.

I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.
The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.

I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense.

May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding [the] world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. … My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.

Imagine this. We live in a culture that shunned a man like Rohith Vemula and treated him as an Untouchable.

A culture that shut him down and made a mind like his extinguish itself. Rohith was a Dalit, an Ambedkarite, a Marxist (who was disillusioned with the Indian Left), a student of science, an aspiring writer, and a seasoned political activist. But beyond all these identities, he was, like all of us, a unique human being, with a unique set of joys and sorrows. We might never know what that last secret sadness was that made him take his life. Perhaps that’s just as well. We must make do with his farewell letter.

The things that make it revolutionary might not be immediately obvious. Despite all that was done to him, it contains sorrow but not victimhood. Though everything we know about him tells us that he was ferocious about his identity and his politics, he refuses to box himself in and define himself by the tags that others had given him. Despite bearing the weight of an oppression and cultural conditioning that is centuries old, Rohith gives himself—wrests for himself—the right to be magnificent, to dream of being stardust, of being loved as an equal, as all men and women ought to be.

Rohith was only the latest of the many Dalit students who end their lives every year. His story resonated with thousands of Dalits in universities across the country—students who had been traumatised by the medieval horrors of the caste system, and the segregation, discrimination, and injustice that follow them into the most modern university campuses, into India’s premier medical and engineering colleges, into their hostels, canteens, and lecture rooms.

(About half of all Dalit students drop out of school before they matriculate. Under 3 percent of the Dalit population are graduates.) They saw Rohith Vemula’s suicide for what it was—a form of institutionalised murder. His suicide—and, it has to be said, the power of his prose—made people stop in their tracks, and think and rage about the criminal arrangement known as the caste system, that ancient engine that continues to run modern Indian society.

The fury over Vemula’s suicide was, and is, an insurrectionary moment for a thus-far marginalised, radical political vision. It saw Ambedkarites, Ambedkarite Marxists, and a coalition of Left parties and social movements march together.

Alert to the fact that if this configuration was allowed to consolidate it could grow into a serious threat, the BJP moved to defuse it. Its clumsy, outrageous response—claiming that Rohith Vemula was not a Dalit—backfired badly, and pushed the party into what looked like (and could still turn out to be) a tailspin.

Attention had to be diverted. Another crisis was urgently required. The gunsights swung around. The target had been marked a while ago.

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), long known to be a “bastion of the Left,” was the focus of a front-page story in the November 2015 issue of Panchajanya, the RSS’s weekly paper. It described JNU as a den of Naxalites, a “huge anti-national block which has the aim of disintegrating India.” Naxalites had been a long-standing problem for the Sangh Parivar—Enemy Number Three in its written doctrine. But now, evidently, it had another, more worrying one, too.

Over the last few years, the student demography in JNU has changed dramatically. From being in a small minority, students from disadvantaged backgrounds—Dalits, Adivasis, and the many castes and sub-castes that come under the capacious category known as Other Backward Classes (OBC), formerly called Shudras—now make up almost half the student body. This has radically changed campus politics.

What troubles the Parivar more than the presence of the Left on the JNU campus, perhaps, are the rising voices of this section of students. They are, for the most part, followers of Ambedkar, of the Adivasi hero Birsa Munda, who fought the British and died in prison in 1900, and of the radical thinker and reformer Jyotirao Phule, who was a Shudra and called himself a mali, a gardener. Phule renounced, in fact denounced, Hinduism—most trenchantly in his famous book Gulamgiri (Slavery), published in 1873.

In much of his writing and poetry, Phule deconstructs Hindu myths to show how they are really stories grounded in history, and how they glorify the idea of an Aryan conquest of an indigenous, Dravidian culture. Phule writes of how Dravidians were demonised and turned into asuras, while the conquering Aryans were exalted and conferred divinity. In effect, he frames Hinduism as a colonial narrative.

In 2012, an organisation of Dalit and OBC students in JNU began to observe what it calls Mahishasur Martyrdom Day. Mahishasur, Hindus believe, is a mythical half-human half-demon entity that the goddess Durga vanquished in battle—a victory that is celebrated every year during Durga Puja. These young intellectuals said that Mahishasur was actually a Dravidian king, beloved of the Asur, Santhal, Gond, and Bhil tribes in West Bengal and Jharkhand, and others.

The students declared that they would mourn the day Mahishasur was martyred, not celebrate it. Another group, that called itself the “New Materialists,” began to hold a “free food festival” on Mahishasur Martyrdom Day, at which it served beef and pork, saying these were the traditional foods of the oppressed castes and tribes of India.

OBCs make up the majority of India’s population, and are vitally important to every major political party. It is for this reason that Modi, in his 2014 election campaign, went out of his way to foreground the fact that he was an OBC. (Most people think of “Modi” as a bania surname.) OBCs have traditionally been used by the dominant castes as henchmen, to hold the line against Dalits (just as Dalits have been used as foot soldiers in attacks on Muslims, and Adivasis are pitted against Dalits—as they were in Kandhamal in 2008.) These signs of a section of OBCs breaking rank with Hinduism set off the RSS’s extremely alert early-warning system.

If this were not trouble enough, a tentative conversation (or perhaps just an argument that was prelude to a conversation) had started between some young communists—who seemed to have begun to understand the past errors of India’s major communist parties—and the followers of Birsa Munda, Ambedkar and Phule. These groups have a vexed history, and had every reason to be wary of each other. As long as each of these loose constituencies remained hostile to the other, they did not constitute a real threat to the Sangh Parivar.

The RSS recognised that if what was going on in JNU was not stopped, it could one day pose an intellectual and existential threat to the fundamental principles and politics of Hindutva. Why so? Because such an alliance proposes, even if only conceptually, the possibility of a counter-mobilisation, a sort of reverse engineering of the Hindutva project. It envisions an altogether different coalition of castes, one that is constituted from the ground up, instead of organised and administered from the top down: Dalit-Bahujanism instead of Brahminism.

A powerful movement, contemporary and yet rooted in India’s unique social and cultural context, that has people like Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, Savitribai Phule, Periyar, Ayyankali, Birsa Munda, Bhagat Singh, Marx, and Lenin as the stars in its constellation. A movement that challenges patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism, that dreams of a caste-less, classless society, whose poets would be the poets of the people, and would include Kabir, Tukaram, Ravidas, Pash, Gaddar, Lal Singh Dil, and Faiz.

 A movement of Adivasi-Dalit-Bahujans in the sense championed by the Dalit Panthers (who, in the 1970s, took “Dalit” to connote “Members of the scheduled castes and tribes, neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion.”) A movement whose comrades would include those from the privileged castes who no longer want to claim their privileges. A movement spiritually generous enough to embrace all those who believe in justice, whatever their creed or religion.

Small wonder, then, that the Panchajanya story went on to say that JNU was an institution where “Innocent Hindu youth are lured after being fed wrong facts about the Varna system, which is an integral part of Hindu society.” It wasn’t really the “disintegrating” of India that the RSS was worried about. It was the disintegration of Hindutva. And not by a new political party, but by a new way of thinking. Had all this hinged on a formal political alliance, its leaders could have been killed or jailed. Or simply bought out, like any number of swamis, sufis, maulanas and other charlatans have been.

But what do you do with an idea that has begun to drift around like smoke?

You try and snuff it out at its source.

The battle lines could not have been marked more clearly. It was to be a battle between those who dream of equality and those who believe in institutionalising inequality. Rohith Vemula’s suicide made the conversation that had begun in JNU more important, more urgent, and very real. And it probably brought forward the date of an attack that was already on the cards.

THE AMBUSH WAS BUILT around an obstinate old ghost who refuses to go away. The harder they try to exorcise it, the more stubbornly it persists with its haunting.

The third anniversary of the hanging of Mohammad Afzal Guru fell on 9 February 2016. Although Afzal was not accused of direct involvement in the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, he was convicted by the Delhi high court and given three life sentences and a double death sentence for being part of the conspiracy.

In August 2005, the Supreme Court upheld this judgment, and famously said, “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no direct evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy. … The incident which resulted in heavy casualties had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”

The controversy over the parliament attack, over the Supreme Court judgment, and over Afzal’s sudden, secret execution is by no means a new one. Several books and essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, and writers (including myself) have been published on the subject. Some of us believe that there are grave questions about the attack that remain unanswered, and that Afzal was framed and did not receive a fair trial.

Others believe that the manner of his execution was a miscarriage of justice.

After the Supreme Court judgment, Afzal remained in solitary confinement in Tihar Jail for several years. The BJP, which was out of power at the centre during those years, made frequent and aggressive demands that he be pulled out of the queue of those awaiting execution and hanged. The issue became a central theme in its election campaigns. Its slogan was: Desh abhi sharminda hai, Afzal abhi bhi zinda hai. (The country hangs its head in shame because Afzal is still alive.)

As the 2014 general election approached, the Congress-led government in power at the centre—weakened by a series of corruption scandals and terrified of being outflanked by the BJP in this contest of competitive nationalism, one that the Congress is doomed to lose—pulled Afzal out of his cell one morning and hurriedly hanged him.

His family was not even informed, let alone permitted a last visit. For fear that his grave would become a monument and a political rallying point for the struggle in Kashmir, he was buried inside Tihar Jail, next to Maqbool Butt, the Kashmiri separatist hero, who was hanged in 1984. (P Chidambaram, who served the Congress-led government as home minister from 2008 to 2012, now says that Afzal’s case was “perhaps not correctly decided.” When I was in Class IV, we had a saying: Sorry doesn’t make a dead man alive.)

Every year since then, on the anniversary of Afzal Guru’s hanging, the Kashmir valley shuts down in protest. Leave alone the Kashmiri nationalists, even the mainstream, pro-India Peoples Democratic Party, currently the BJP’s coalition partner in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, continues to demand that Afzal’s mortal remains be returned to his family for a proper burial.

A few days prior to the third anniversary of his death, notices appeared on the JNU campus inviting students to a cultural evening “Against the Brahmanical ‘collective conscience,’ against the judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Butt,” and “in solidarity with the struggle of Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination.”

It was not the first time JNU students had met to discuss these issues. Only this time, the 9 February anniversary fell three weeks after Rohith Vemula’s suicide. The atmosphere was politically charged. Once again, the ABVP was the cat’s paw. It complained to the university authorities, and then invited the Delhi police to intervene in what it said was “anti-national activity.” A camera crew from Zee TV was on hand to record the event.

The first batch of footage in that Zee broadcast showed two groups of students confronting each other on the JNU campus, shouting slogans. In response to the ABVP’s “Bharat Mata ki jai!” (Victory to Mother India!), another group of students, most of them Kashmiris, some of them wearing masks, began to chant what Kashmiris chant every day at every street-corner protest and at every militant’s funeral:

Hum kya chahatey?
Azadi!
Chheen ke lengey—
Azadi!
What do we want?
Freedom!
We will snatch it—
Freedom!
There were also some less familiar slogans:
Bandook ke dum pe!
Azadi!
At gunpoint if need be!
Freedom!
Kashmir ki azadi tak, Bharat ki barbaadi tak,
Jung ladengey! Jung ladengey!
Until freedom comes to Kashmir, until destruction comes to India,
War will be waged! War will be waged!
And:

Pakistan Zindabad!

Long live Pakistan!

From the Zee TV footage, it wasn’t clear who the students actually chanting the slogans were. Sure, it riled viewers, but winding people up about Kashmir or getting them to rail at unknown students who looked and sounded like Kashmiris was not the point, and would have served no purpose. Especially not when the BJP’s negotiations with the Peoples Democratic Party about forming a new government in Jammu and Kashmir had run into rough weather. (That problem has subsequently been resolved.) In the JNU ambush, Kashmir was just the trigger-wire. The real goal was (and is) to tarnish the reputation of JNU, in order to eventually shut it down.

It was an easy problem to solve. The soundtrack of the confrontation was grafted onto the video of another meeting that took place two days later, this one addressed by Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the JNU Students’ Union. Kanhaiya belongs to the All India Students Federation, the student wing of the Communist Party of India. At the meeting he addressed, the refrain of “Azadi!” was the same, only the slogans raised were completely different. They demanded azadi from poverty, from caste, from capitalism, from the Manusmriti, from Brahminism. It was a whole other ball of wax.

The doctored video was broadcast to millions by major news channels, including Zee TV, Times Now, and News X. It was shameful, unprofessional, and possibly criminal. These broadcasts set off a frenzy. First Kanhaiya Kumar, and then, two weeks later, two other students accused of organising the Afzal Guru meeting, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, formerly members of the left-wing Democratic Students Union, were arrested and charged with sedition. Posters went up across Delhi putting a price on these students’ heads. One even offered a cash reward for Kanhaiya Kumar’s tongue.

The Kashmiri students who were actually seen raising slogans in the Zee TV footage remained unidentified. But they were only doing what thousands of people do every day in Kashmir. Can there be separate standards for sloganeering in Delhi and Srinagar? Perhaps you could say yes, if you argue, as many Kashmiris do, that all of Kashmir is a giant prison, and you can’t arrest the already incarcerated. In any case, did those students’ slogans really deliver a mortal blow to this mighty, nuclear-powered Hindu nation?

Matters continued to escalate in ever more ludicrous ways. Based on a joke on a parody Twitter account (“Hafeez Muhamad Saeed”), the home minister, Rajnath Singh, announced that the protest at JNU was backed by Hafiz Saeed, the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba and India’s equivalent of Osama bin Laden. Television channels began to suggest that Umar Khalid, a self-declared Marxist–Leninist, was a Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist. (The hard evidence this time was that his name was Umar.)

Smriti Irani, the unstoppable minister of human resource development, who is in charge of higher education, said the nation would not tolerate an insult to Mother India.

The saffron-robed Yogi Adityanath, a BJP member of parliament from Gorakhpur, said that “JNU has become a blot on education,” and that it “should be closed down in the interest of the nation.” Another self-styled man of god, the BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj, also clad in saffron, called the students “traitors,” and said they “should be hanged instead of being lodged in jail for life or they should be killed by police bullet.”

Gyandev Ahuja, a BJP member of the Rajasthan legislative assembly and empiricist extraordinaire, informed the world that “More than 10,000 butts of cigarettes and 4,000 pieces of beedis are found daily in the JNU campus. 50,000 big and small pieces of bones are left by those eating non-vegetarian food.

They gorge on meat … these anti-nationals. 2,000 wrappers of chips and namkeen are found, as also 3,000 used condoms—the misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters there. And 500 used contraceptive injections are also found.” In other words, JNU students were meat-eating, chip-crunching, cigarette-smoking, beer-swilling, sex-obsessed anti-nationals. (Does that sound so terrible?)

The prime minister said nothing.

The students of JNU and UOH, on the other hand, had plenty to say. The protests on those campuses spread to the streets, and then to universities in other parts of the country. In Delhi, on the day Kanhaiya Kumar was to be produced before a magistrate, the war zone shifted to the courts. On two days in a row, sheltering under an oversized national flag, a group of lawyers who boasted openly of their affiliation to the BJP beat up students, professors, journalists, and finally Kanhaiya Kumar himself inside a courthouse.

They threatened and abused a committee of senior lawyers that the Supreme Court had urgently constituted to look into the matter. The police stood by and watched. The Delhi police chief called it a minor scuffle. The lawyers gloated to the press about how they “thrashed” Kanhaiya and forced him to say “Bharat Mata ki jai.” For a few days, it looked as though every last institution in the country was helpless in the face of this insane attack.

THE RSS HAS NOW DECLARED that anybody who refuses to say “Bharat Mata ki jai!” is an anti-national. The yoga and health-food tycoon Baba Ramdev announced that, were it not illegal, he would behead anybody who refused to say it.

What would these people have done to Ambedkar? In 1931, when questioned by Gandhi about his sharp critique of the Congress—which was seen as a critique of the party’s struggle for an independent homeland—Ambedkar said, “Gandhi-ji, I have no homeland. No Untouchable worth the name would be proud of this land.” Would they have charged him with sedition? (On the other hand, garlanding portraits of Ambedkar, as the Sangh Parivar has done, and suggesting that he—the man who called Hinduism “a veritable chamber of horrors”—is one of the founding fathers of the Hindu Rashtra, is probably much worse.)

The other tactic the BJP and its media partners have used to silence people is an absurd false binary—the Brave Soldiers versus the Evil Anti-Nationals. In February, just when the JNU crisis was at its peak, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier killed ten soldiers, whose bodies were flown down for military funerals. For days and nights, screeching television anchors and their studio guests inserted their own words into the mouths of the dead men, and grafted their tinpot ideologies onto lifeless bodies that couldn’t talk back. Of course they neglected to mention that most Indian soldiers are poor people looking for a means of earning a living. (You don’t hear the patriotic rich asking for the draft, so that they and their children are forced to serve as ordinary soldiers.)

They also forgot to tell their viewers that soldiers are not just deployed on the Siachen glacier or on the borders of India. That there has not been a single day since Independence in 1947 when the Indian Army and other security forces have not been deployed within India’s borders against what are meant to be their “own” people—in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Telangana, and West Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Jharkhand.
Tens of thousands of people have lost their lives in conflicts in these places.

An even greater number have been brutally tortured, many of them crippled for life. There have been documented cases of mass rape in Kashmir in which the accused have been protected by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, as though rape is a necessary and unavoidable part of battle. The aggressive insistence on unquestioning soldier-worship, even by self-professed “liberals,” is a sick, dangerous game that’s been dreamt up by a cynical oligarchy. It doesn’t help either soldiers or civilians.

And if you take a hard look at the list of places within India’s current borders in which its security forces have been deployed, an extraordinary fact emerges—the populations in those places are mostly Muslim, Christian, Adivasi, Sikh, and Dalit. What we are being asked to salute obediently and unthinkingly is a reflexively dominant-caste Hindu state that nails together its territory with military might.

What if some of us dream instead of creating a society to which people long to belong? What if some of us dream of living in a society that people are not forced to be part of? What if some of us don’t have colonialist, imperialist dreams? What if some of us dream instead of justice? Is it a criminal offence?

So what is this new bout of flag-waving and chest-thumping all about, really? What is it trying to hide? The usual stuff: A tanking economy and an abject betrayal of the election promises the BJP made to gullible people, as well as to its corporate sponsors. During his election campaign, Modi burned his candle at both ends. He vulgarly promised poor villagers that R15 lakh would magically appear in their bank accounts when he came to power. He was going to bring home the illegal billions that rich Indians had parked in offshore tax havens and distribute it to the poor. How much of that illegal money was brought back? Not a lot. How much was redistributed? Approximately zero point zero zero, whatever that is in rupees.

Meanwhile, corporations were eagerly looking forward to a new Land Acquisition Act that would make it easier for businessmen to acquire villagers’ land. That legislation did not make it past the upper house. In the countryside, the crisis in agriculture has deepened. While big business has had tens of thousands of crores of rupees worth of loans written off, tens of thousands of small farmers trapped in a cycle of debt—that will never be written off—continue to kill themselves. In 2015, in the state of Maharashtra alone, more than 3,200 farmers committed suicide. Their suicides too are a form of institutionalised murder, just as Rohith Vemula’s was.

What the new government has to offer in lieu of its wild election promises is the kind of deal that is usually available only on the saffron stock exchange: trade in your hopes for a decent livelihood and buy into an exciting life of perpetual hysteria. A life in which you are free to hate your neighbour, and if things get really bad, and if you really want to, you can get together with friends and even beat her or him to death.

The manufactured crisis in JNU has also, extremely successfully, turned our attention away from a terrible tragedy that has befallen some of the most vulnerable people in this country. The war for minerals in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, is gearing up again. Operation Green Hunt—the previous government’s attempt at clearing the forest of its troublesome inhabitants in order to hand it over to mining and infrastructure companies—was largely unsuccessful.

Many of the hundreds of memorandums of understanding that the government signed with private companies regarding this territory have not been actualised. Bastar’s people, among the poorest in the world, have, for years, stopped the richest corporations in their tracks. Now, in preparation for the as yet unnamed Operation Green Hunt II, thousands of Adivasis are in jail once again, most of them accused of being Maoists.

The forest is being cleared of all witnesses—journalists, activists, lawyers, and academics. Anybody who muddies the tidy delineation of the state-versus-“Maoist terrorists” paradigm is in a great deal of danger.

 The extraordinary Adivasi schoolteacher and activist Soni Sori, who was imprisoned in 2011 but went straight back to her organising work after being released in 2014, was recently attacked, and had her face smeared with a substance that burnt her skin. She has since gone back to work in Bastar once again. With a burnt face. The Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, a tiny team of women lawyers that offered legal aid to incarcerated Adivasis, and Malini Subramaniam, whose series of investigative reports from Bastar were a source of embarrassment to the local police, have been evicted and forced to leave. Lingaram Kodopi, Bastar’s first Adivasi journalist, who was horribly tortured and imprisoned for three years, is being threatened, and has despairingly announced that he will kill himself if the intimidation does not stop.

Four other local journalists have been arrested on specious charges, including one who posted comments against the police on WhatsApp. Bela Bhatia, a researcher, has had the village she lives in visited by mobs shouting slogans against her and threatening her landlords. Paramilitary troops and vigilante militias, confident of impunity, have once again begun to storm villages and terrorise people, forcing them to abandon their homes and flee into the forest as they did in the time of Operation Green Hunt I. Horrific accounts of rape, molestation, looting, and robbery are trickling in. The Indian Air Force has begun “practising” air-to-ground firing from helicopters.

Anybody who criticises the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an anti-national “sympathiser” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of?

Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say “Bharat Mata ki jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country—Pakistan—than loving our own. It’s more about securing territory than loving the land and its people.

Paradoxically, those who are branded anti-national are the ones who speak about the deaths of rivers and the desecration of forests. They are the ones who worry about the poisoning of the land and the falling of water tables.

The “nationalists,” on the other hand, go about speaking of mining, damming, clear-felling, blasting, and selling. In their rule book, hawking minerals to multinational companies is patriotic activity. They have privatised the flag and wrested the microphone.

The three JNU students who were arrested are all out on interim bail. In Kanhaiya Kumar’s case, the bail order by a high court judge caused more apprehension than relief: “Whenever some infection is spread in a limb, effort is made to cure the same by giving antibiotics orally and if that does not work, by following second line of treatment. Sometimes it may require surgical intervention also. However, if the infection results in infecting the limb to the extent that it becomes gangrene, amputation is the only treatment.” Amputation? What could she mean?

As soon as he was released, Kanhaiya appeared on the JNU campus and gave his now famous speech to a crowd of thousands of students. It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with every single thing he said. I didn’t. But it’s the spirit with which he said it that was so enchanting. It dissipated the pall of fear and gloom that had dropped on us like a fog. Overnight, Kanhaiya and his cheeky audience became beloved of millions. The same thing happened with the other two students, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya. Now, people from all over the world have heard the slogan the BJP wanted to silence: “Jai Bhim! Lal salaam!” (Salute Bhimrao Ambedkar! Red salute!)

And with that call, the spirit of Rohith Vemula and the spirit of JNU have come together in solidarity. It’s a fragile, tenuous coming together, that will most likely—if it hasn’t already— come to an unhappy end, exhausted by mainstream political parties, NGOs, and its own inherent contradictions. Obviously, neither “the Left” nor the “Ambedkarites” nor “OBCs” are remotely homogenous categories in themselves.

However, even broadly speaking, the present Left is, for the most part, doctrinally opaque to caste, and, by unseeing it, perpetuates it. (The outstanding exception to this, it must be said, are the writings of the late Anuradha Ghandy.) This has meant that many Dalits and OBCs who do lean towards the Left have had bitter experiences, and are now determined to isolate themselves, thereby inadvertently deepening caste divisions and strengthening a system that sustains itself by precluding all forms of solidarity.

All these old wounds will act up, we’ll tear each other to shreds, arguments and accusations will fly around in maddening ways. But even after this moment has passed, the radical ideas that have emerged from this confrontation with the agents of Hindutva are unlikely to ever go away. They will stay around, and will continue to be built upon. They must, because they are our only hope.

Already, the real meanings, the real politics behind the refrain of “Azadi” are being debated. Did Kanhaiya pinch the slogan from the Kashmiris? He did. (And where did the Kashmiris get it? From the feminists or the French Revolution, maybe.) Is the slogan being diluted? Most definitely, as far as those who chant it in Kashmir are concerned. Is it being deepened? Yes, that too. Because fighting for azadi from patriarchy, from capitalism, and from Brahminvaad is as radical as any struggle for national self-determination.

Perhaps while we debate the true, deep meanings of freedom, those who have been so shocked by what is happening in the mainland over the last few months will be moved to ask themselves why, when far worse things happen in other places, it leaves them so untroubled?

Why is it alright for us to ask for azadi in our university campuses while the daily lives of ordinary people in Kashmir, Nagaland, and Manipur are overseen by the army, and their traffic jams managed by uniformed men waving AK 47s?

Why is it easy for most Indians to accept the killing of 112 young people on the streets of Kashmir in the course of a single summer?

Why do we care so much about Kanhaiya and Rohith Vemula, but so little about students like Shaista Hameed and Danish Farooq, who were shot dead in Kashmir the day before the smear campaign against JNU was launched? “Azadi” is an immense word, and a beautiful one too. We need to wrap our minds around it, not just play with it.

This is not to suggest some sort of high-mindedness in which we all fight each others’ battles side by side and feel each others’ pain with equal intensity. Only to say that if we do not acknowledge each other’s yearning for azadi, if we do not acknowledge injustice when it is looking us straight in the eye, we will all go down together in the quicksand of moral turpitude.

The end result of the BJP’s labours is that students, intellectuals, and even sections of the mainstream media, have seen how we are being torn apart by its manifesto of hate. Little by little, people have begun to stand up to it. Afzal’s ghost has begun to travel to other university campuses.

As often happens after episodes like this, everybody who has been involved can, and usually does, claim victory. The BJP’s assessment seems to be that the polarisation of the electorate into “nationalists” and “anti-nationals” has been successful, and brought it substantial political gain. Far from showing signs of contrition, it has moved to turn all the knobs to high.

Kanhaiya, Umar, and Anirban’s lives are in real danger from rogue assassins seeking approbation from the Sangh Parivar’s high command.

Thirty-five students of the FTII (one in every five) have had criminal cases filed against them. They’re out on bail, but are required to report regularly to the police.

Appa Rao Podile, the much-hated vice chancellor of UOH, who went on leave in January and had a case filed against him, laying responsibility at his door for the circumstances that led to Rohith Vemula’s suicide, has reappeared on the campus, enraging students.

When they protested, police invaded the campus, brutally beat them, arrested 25 students and two faculty members, and held them for days.

The campus has been cordoned off by police—ironically, the police of the state of Telangana, which so many of the students on the campus fought so long and so hard to create.

The arrested UOH students too have serious cases filed against them now. They need lawyers, and money to pay them with. Even if they are eventually acquitted, their lives can be destroyed by the sheer harassment involved.

It isn’t just students. All over the country, lawyers, activists, writers, and film-makers—any who criticise the government—are being arrested, imprisoned, or entangled in spurious legal cases. We can expect serious trouble, all sorts of trouble, as we head towards state elections—in particular the 2017 contest in Uttar Pradesh—and the general election in 2019.

We must anticipate false-flag terrorist strikes, and perhaps even what is being optimistically called a “limited war” with Pakistan. At a public meeting in Agra, on 29 February, Muslims were warned of a “final battle.”

 A fired-up, 5,000-strong crowd chanted: “Jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule, khoon nahin woh pani hai.” (Any Hindu whose blood isn’t boiling has water in the veins, not blood.) Regardless of who wins elections in the years to come, can this sort of venom be counteracted once it has entered the blood stream? Can any society mend itself after having its fabric slashed and rent apart in this way?

What is happening right now is actually a systematic effort to create chaos, an attempt to arrive at a situation in which the civil rights enshrined in the Indian constitution can be suspended. The RSS has never accepted the constitution. It has now, finally, manoeuvered itself into a position where it has the power to subvert it. It is waiting for an opportunity. We might well be witnessing preparations for a coup—not a military coup, but a coup nevertheless. It could be only a matter of time before India will officially cease to be a secular, democratic republic. We may find ourselves looking back fondly on the era of doctored videos and parody Twitter handles.

Our forests are full of soldiers and our universities full of police. The University Grants Commission’s new guidelines for higher educational institutions suggest that campuses have high boundary walls topped by concertina wire, armed guards at entrances, police stations, biometric tests, and security cameras.

Smriti Irani has ordered that all public universities must fly the national flag from 207-foot-high flagpoles for students to “worship.” (Who’ll get the contracts?) She has also announced plans to rope in the army to instil patriotism in the minds of students.

In Kashmir, the presence of an estimated half a million troops ensures that, whatever its people may or may not want today, Kashmir has been made an integral part of India. But now, with soldiers and barbed wire and enforced flag-worshipping in the mainland, it looks more and more as though India is becoming an integral part of Kashmir.

As symbols of countries, flags are powerful objects, worthy of contemplation. But what of those like Rohith Vemula, who have imaginations that predate the idea of countries by hundreds of thousands of years?

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Human beings appeared on it about 200,000 years ago. What we call “human civilisation” is just a few thousand years old. India as a country with its present borders is less than 80 years old. Clearly, we could do with a little perspective.

Worship a flag? My soul is either too modern or too ancient for that.

I’m not sure which.
Maybe both.

SOURCE:

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/essay/seditious-heart-arundhati-roy/7