India

Ambedkar, Pankhurst and political awakening

Playwright Sonali Bhattacharyya may be known to some readers as a member of Momentum’s national coordinating group (elected as part of the Forward Momentum grouping ). Judging by her Two Billion Beats , which has just finished a second run at the Orange Tree Theatre in SW London, her generally wider fame as a writer is well-deserved. (Last year Bhattacharyya's Chasing Hares , about factory workers’ lives and organising in West Bengal, was on while I was involved in discussions about setting up the India Labour Solidarity campaign . Somehow I didn't go in the end, and hope it will return soon.)...

Indian students confront Modi's censorship

Police detain a student after announcement of a screening of the BBC documentary at Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi Last week we reported on the Indian government’s ban on the new BBC documentary exposing Narendra Modi and his comrades’ role in the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat . Social media platforms have rushed to enforce the ban. Between Modi first becoming prime minister in 2014 and 2020, Indian government legal actions to remove content from Twitter increased by 48,000%. The company previously fought back at least a bit; the indications are that under Elon Musk that is...

The BBC, Gujarat and Modi's fake anti-imperialism

India’s far-right government has banned even clips from a BBC documentary under legislation that allows for “blocking of information in case of emergency”. The “emergency”? The programme documents how India’s ruling Hindu nationalist movement, and prime minister Narenda Modi specifically, are responsible for bloody anti-Muslim pogroms. In 2002, when Modi was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he facilitated the murder of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of Muslims by far right-led mobs. Many tens of thousands were driven from their homes. We told the story in Solidarity last March. Part...

Hindu nationalism, communalism and the left

Professor Dibyesh Anand spoke with Daniel Randall about the recent rise of the Hindu right in Britain, and how the left should approach questions of communalism and chauvinism within and between minority communities.

The strange tale of Tulsi Gabbard

Congresswoman Gabbard meets Narendra Modi, 2019 Imagine if a Labour MP championed Corbyn in 2016, stood to be leader in 2020 – then left the party and become active on the far right. You are getting something of the flavour of US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (in office 2013-21). Discussing Gabbard, the cases of George Galloway and Barry Gardiner spring to my mind, for different reasons. Gabbard’s case, stranger and more disturbing than either, surely has lessons beyond the US. Gabbard made great play of being the first Hindu member of the US Congress. But the Hindu tradition in which she was...

“BAME Labour” erases Labour’s first MP of colour

The tiny, inactive and secretive BAME Labour grouping has been back in the spotlight, after Labour’s National Executive junked plans to create a democratic structure representing black, Asian and minority ethnic party members. To give a flavour of this “organisation”, in 2018 it had less than a thousand members, out of an estimated 70,000 party members of colour. Yet it has representation on the National Executive. A quick look at BAME Labour’s website confirms it is a non-organisation. But its “What is BAME Labour” statement is worth scanning. Generally vapid in the extreme, it says: “The...

New India solidarity group launched

Delhi anganwadi (early years) workers on strike earlier this year About 50 people attended the formal launch of the India Labour Solidarity campaign in London on 6 December. ILS was set up in the summer – its first activity was leafleting at Labour Party conference in September – to “promote solidarity between workers and their trade union and labour movements in the UK and India”. The meeting was chaired by Praveen Kolluguri, a Communication Workers’ Union member in the telecoms sector who is BAME officer of Kingston and Surbiton Labour Party in South London and on the Labour Campaign for...

Justice for Bilkis Bano - solidarity with Muslims in India

Trigger warning Bilkis Bano (pictured above) was 21 and five months pregnant when she was gang-raped during the anti-Muslim pogroms in the north-west Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. In the attack 14 members of her family were murdered; that included her three year old daughter, whose head was smashed aganst a rock, and her cousin with her newborn baby. The attackers only left Bano because they thought she was dead. As the overview of the Gujarat massacres we published in March explained , the prominent Hindu nationalist politicians and officials who bear responsibility for what happened –...

Citizens spurned by the UK

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (on right) and her husband join protest to demand freedom for Alaa Abd el-Fattah Jailed Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, whose profile rose during COP27 because the summit was in Egypt and he is a UK citizen, is still alive. His family has finally been allowed to see him , and reports his hunger strike was broken by the regime, which forced him to take intravenous fluids. They revealed many harrowing new details of the most recent period of his decade behind bars. There are over 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt’s jails. The UK labour movement should...

BJP out of the Labour Party!

The BJP announces Neeraj Patil (in black jacket) has joined it at a press conference in Karnataka, March 2014 There has been significant disquiet about left-wing candidates excluded from Labour Party parliamentary selections on absurd pretexts. Starmer’s leadership has grotesquely abused the notion of “due diligence” — disqualifying candidates because of bad past behaviour — to rule out even left-wingers who under the rules should automatically make the list because they have multiple union nominations. So far, the unions are making little fuss. But in Camberwell and Peckham (South London)...

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