Life and politics in South Asia (Part 2)
This is the second part of a two-part podcast episode. Click here for part 1.
In the second part of our collaborative discussion with Oats for Breakfast, we chat about some of the protest movements currently active in India and Pakistan, including the anti-war Pashtun Tahafuz Movement and the Shaheen Bagh protests. We also talk about the repression in Kashmir, and about how inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict can help to undermine the class struggle in South Asia.
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Episode transcript
Priyansh: My name is Priyansh.
Tayyaba: I’m Tayyaba.
Umair: And I’m Umair.
Priyansh: Welcome back to Oats for Breakfast.
Tayyaba: We’re going to be continuing the discussion we were having about life and politics in South Asia.
Umair: OK. So, where we did we leave off last time?
Priyansh: We were talking about nationhood and how it’s constructed. I think we talked quite a bit about India so maybe we should hear something about Pakistan from Tayyaba.
Tayyaba: Yeah, I mean Pakistan, there are some exciting hopeful things that are happening so maybe we can turn to some happier things. There is a new movement in Pakistan that is called Pashtun Tahafuz Movement or PTM. It’s emerging from the so-called tribal areas in the northwest that have been implicated in a war, the War on Terror, led by the US in neighboring Afghanistan. And this area has had quite a bit of fallout from this war because of an increasing number of refugees that have been coming into this region and also historical ties that bind the ethnic community or the ethnic nation of Pashtuns that live on both sides of the border here.
At the same time, they have been facing the brunt of military operations led by the Pakistan military in the area to clear away the area ostensibly for militants. And so, this movement now is emerging that is very clearly asking for an end to war and militarization and the brutalization of people that are living here. And this movement has become– it’s become very big. There are thousands of people that come out to very peaceful rallies that they hold and just recounting the violence that they have faced for so many years.
The reason that I call it hopeful is that it’s that first time, at least to my knowledge that such a huge anti-war movement has emerged in the region that’s clearly asking for an end to imperialist warfare, that’s holding the Pakistani ruling class to account for the kind of political economy of war that they have been benefiting from. And it’s very clearly drawing links with other oppressed nations. It’s been aligning itself with the women’s movement. It’s been aligning itself– the student movement has been aligning with it as well. It’s talking about issues of class.
And despite the fact that they are facing a lot of suppression by the state, and we were talking about that earlier because the media is not allowed to cover it and so on, it’s still generating a lot of enthusiasm among young people to ask for greater emancipation and greater rights. And it clearly, again in echoing what’s happening in India, it uses a very constitutional language to articulate its demands. So it holds the Pakistani constitution sovereign, saying that it allows for regional autonomy. Saying that there are socialist principles within the Pakistani constitution and really asking for rights within the constitution which makes it a very powerful movement in Pakistan.
Umair: So, just on the name, Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, that’s the name, right?
Tayyaba: “Tahafuz” means protection.
Umair: And what is “Pashtun”?
Tayyaba: Pashtun is the ethnic nation that is part– that is in northwest of Pakistan and it’s the same, I mean it has – its members are also in Afghanistan. So, it’s an ethnicity.
Umair: It’s an ethnic group.
Priyansh: And speaking of hope and protest and demonstrations, it’s interesting to me to learn about PTM because one of the more stark things about the recent protest in India particularly has been the fact that one of the neighborhoods in New Delhi called Shaheen Bagh has now been occupied for– it started around the 10th of January. And when I say occupied, I mean that there are actually people who reside in the neighborhood have been there all along in this time period. And that it has been primarily led by Muslim women. They have come to be its defining image.
But also many of the protests across the city have been led by women or by students. But you find this very interesting gendered component to it. So, just to give you an example, there was this incident where the student wing of the BJP which is called ABVP. Their workers stormed the hostel at the Jawarharlal Nehru University in New Delhi which has been one of the popular sites of protest against the Modi regime. And they entered the hostels, they destroyed the women’s hostel, hit the student union president on her head.
Essentially, this image of blood streaming from her head and then her bandaged forehead, it became the defining image of the protest as well. To the point that in fact, many of the popular faces especially your Bollywood celebrities who have been very hesitant in speaking against the government, they were then moved, to give you an example, Deepika Padukone, who is an actor, she then comes and stands in solidarity with the student union president whose name is Aishe Ghosh.
So that’s I think a very, very interesting change or trend that we see in the recent protest. It’s hopeful particularly because it’s now being– it’s not merely being led by Muslims but you see a diverse coalition. But at the front of it are Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh but women generally in different parts of India.
Umair: So actually, I was also wondering about – I guess I can’t really ask about an antiwar movement in India to connect these things because there is none.
Tayyaba: There is war though in Kashmir.
Umair: There’s war, yeah.
Tayyaba: I was actually, I had a question about how this Shaheen Bagh protest is relating to the war that is going on in Kashmir.
Priyansh: So, the question of Kashmir is even more complicated than– so just to give you an example…
Umair: So wait, hold on a second. What is Kashmir? There’s a Led Zeppelin song, have you guys heard it?
Priyansh: No.
Tayyaba: It’s great.
Priyansh: I haven’t heard it. No.
Umair: Is that what this is about?
Priyansh: I don’t know.
Umair: Kashmir wool, right? That’s the other thing.
Tayyaba: Kashmir is another legacy that we have from Partition. It’s the territory that was left undivided when the British left India and by the rules of Kashmir– sorry, by the rules for Partition, it should have gone to Pakistan because it has a Muslim majority population. However, another rule was that– in India at that time had a lot of so-called princely states that were ruled by local ruling families. And so, the prince who was ruling Kashmir was a Hindu. And these princely states could effectively decide where they wanted their state to go.
And so, because the prince was Hindu, it could have gone to India. And Nehru, who was the first Prime Minister of India, wanted Kashmir to come to India because he was Kashmiri himself. And so this region has since been left in limbo and both countries have stated their claim to it and so it’s a region very much under occupation effectively. There’s two parts of it that are occupied by both countries and there is a line of control that runs through the middle.
Priyansh: And all the princely states that Tayyaba just mentioned, they were included within this new nation that was to be known as India via an instrument of accession. So, according to the terms of that instrument that was signed between the ruler of Kashmir, Hari Singh and Prime Minister Nehru then it mandated that there must be a right to self-determination. So there had to be a referendum for Kashmiris to be able to determine whether they want to stay independent or whether they want to be part of India or Pakistan. But that referendum was never carried out. So, that’s considered to be one of the major historical lapses of mistakes made by the Indian state. And that failed promise lives on.
Tayyaba: We should mention that the first war that that two countries fought with each other was almost right after Partition and was over Kashmir which resulted in the effective split that Kashmir is now under.
Priyansh: Yeah, exactly. And just to sort of– it’s interesting that one of the clarion calls or the popular chants right now in protest in India is “azadi,” which means freedom. But this call to freedom actually is a legacy of the movement for Kashmiri independence and it’s been now taken on a very different context in the anti-Modi protest. So, Kashmir lives on, just to go back to the question that Tayyaba have asked me about Shaheen Bagh and Kashmir. Because, as I was earlier saying, that actually the articulation to the protest against Modi has been done in solely nationalist terms, Kashmir actually has been not a topic for debate.
The only extent to which people have been willing to talk about Kashmir is to bring an end to the communications blockade which is now– so there has been no internet now for six months and the state is under a state of curfew ever since fifth of August last year. So much of whatever conversation that we’ve actually seen has been about bring internet back, bring “normalcy” back. Normalcy is a word that you’d hear quite often with relation to Kashmir. And so there haven’t been any demands for the referendum to be carried out for example, and that’s where it is at.
But there are very immediate political reasons behind it because most of the protests in India would get discredited completely by all quarters the moment the question of Kashmiri independence is at play because Kashmir is considered to be an integral part of India by every political formation in India. And it would lose popular support and that’s how protesters who are organizing in India seemed to think about it.
But you see far more “free Kashmir” posters, or posters which urge for Kashmiri independence outside India in the protests that have been conducted against the Modi regime. So, for example, in Toronto, we saw many of those posters. So I think within India that conversation hasn’t been possible but these protest have still made room to speak for Kashmiri independence but that’s been only been possible when it’s happened outside India.
Tayyaba: I mean we should mention that “normalcy” means that Kashmir even before the latest round of attacks was the most militarized region in the world. How many soldiers?
Umair: The figure that I saw before this recent clamp down was that for every seven civilians, there was one either soldier or police officer, or…
Tayyaba: So it’s under de facto occupation, right? And…
Priyansh: And that is normalcy.
Tayyaba: And that’s normalcy.
Priyansh: And it is interesting that the situation even in Kashmir is considered to have reached this point where now, there’s an Armed Forces Special Powers Act which has been active in Kashmir for the better part of two and a half decades. And it’s eerily coincidental with the rise of the Hindu Nationalist Party, BJP, in politics. Although it’s not that both phenomena can explain each other. But it does say something about how an assertive nationhood came to be considered a fair game and that one of the other things that you see is actually increased militarized presence.
Tayyaba: And the recent round of oppression in Kashmir has meant that this special status that Kashmir had within the Indian federation has been revoked legally, right? And so, people even outside of Kashmir can now buy land in Kashmir and that is explicitly seen by Kashmiris as a violation even further violation of the rights that they – the limited rights that they had before .
Priyansh: And much of the– many of the Kashmiri activists, the language that they use is that they see this as a settler-colonial project which is obviously Canada itself is seen as a settler-colonial country. And they see eerie similarities between how the colonial or the imperial project was carried out and how Kashmir is seen in those terms. When you speak of its nature and when Bollywood films have to be shown and have to show these beautiful landscapes but the people are erased to the point that it’s the physical landscape which seems to hold far more importance in the national imaginary than anything else.
Tayyaba: And I think also this entire event is a reflection of the links between the Modi regime and increasingly a big capital in India, right? As soon as Kashmir’s special status was revoked, there were deals signed with the largest financial groups in India to start investing in Kashmir. And at the same time, India was forging a huge alliance with Saudi Arabia and getting money from Saudi Arabia so again, that questions the entire Muslim unity project that Saudi Arabia is trying to build in the region when India is effectively colonizing Muslim-majority region, Saudi Arabia is helping to support that entire project.
Umair: Can I say something that might get me in trouble? I don’t know if the term “settler-colonialism” is really helpful for understanding Kashmir. I think it’s one of those unfortunate exports from Western academia. “Settler-colonialism,” I think, yes, it very much describes the Americas but to suggest that non-Kashmiri Indians are somehow colonizing India or settling there and doing so in a way that’s comparable to Europeans coming in and wiping out 90% of the population that was original to this land and then settling it. I don’t think that’s helpful.
Priyansh: I think the terms, I guess you were indicating it anyway that I think the term’s potency is from the fact that much of what’s happening in Kashmir wasn’t talked about enough. And then obviously the Modi government decided to go ahead with the state of curfew in August and many Kashmiri activists or journalists, writers, they wanted to really describe what was happening. And it is a term that helps make the situation intelligible so it’s this ready term which– I’m in agreement with you that it doesn’t actually describe what’s happening in its entirety but it’s a useful term because it makes things intelligible of what’s happening in Kashmir.
Tayyaba: At the same time, don’t you think that that is– what you’re saying is dependent on where you draw the line between indigenous and foreign?
Umair: I don’t know if that’s the crucial thing. I just don’t think that India’s project in Kashmir can be described as settler-colonial. It could just not– it’s not even colonial.
Tayyaba: But in terms of extracting resources and capital from Kashmiris to develop and to enrich India but not the Kashmiris themselves, isn’t that an extractive project that could fall under what colonialism used to do? I’m just pushing back…
Umair: I mean Kashmiris have, you know, formally speaking, full citizenship in India. They have the right to vote. They had the right to take part in politics, wider society, culture. And the other point is that I’m not trying to say that somehow Kashmir is better. The argument for me is not that things aren’t so bad in Kashmir. In fact, I’m sure that from today’s standpoint, if you look at the conditions of indigenous people in Canada and compare them with people in Kashmir, people in Kashmir have it worse. So the point is not that I’m trying to say that one is worse than the other. It’s just that I– it doesn’t help from the standpoint of categorizing it or understanding it.
Tayyaba: I think I see where you’re coming from but at the same time, India’s laws are not applied equally to Kashmiris. Kashmiris are governed under AFSPA like Priyansh said and that draws from older colonial logics of governing colonized populations the way that that law functions. In Pakistan, the same law used to be governing our tribal region and that was completely– it used to draw from colonial logics of governance, right? So, again, it is, I think it is a tricky way. You’re right that it’s not fully a settler-colonial project as it was over here. But I would argue that Kashmiris even formerly are not regular citizens of India.
Priyansh: Yeah. And also, I think like Tayyaba said, it doesn’t maybe capture entirely what is happening in Kashmir. But I think it’s also– in fact, for me, one of the severe indictments of what is happening in Kashmir is actually an indictment of how nation-states are supposed to operate. How territory and borders are so centered to its own understanding that even the slightest change is unacceptable. And it really is the question of– I mean this term that we keep hearing from nationalist voices in India that it is an integral part of India. It’s this idea that the physical displacement of borders would amount to the collapse of the Indian project and this vision of the nation-state is insecure. So, it actually, that’s what also captures the issue at hand for me that because of the very design of the nation state, it cannot fathom losing territory and territory is so centered to its– how it understands itself.
Umair: Yeah. I don’t know if I have anything else to say on this but I can say something else that might get me in trouble.
Priyansh: Sure. Go ahead.
Umair: To the extent that there are demands for separatism in Kashmir. And that’s not what all the Kashmiris are– there’s no homogenous movement that’s necessarily calling for a separatist movement at this point as far as I know. But to the extent that there are demands for separatism and yet another partition on the Indian subcontinent, I’m wary of that demand being met. And so not that I am somehow tied to this idea of a unified India with very rigid borders but to me, separatism, I don’t if it really solves the problems that it seeks to.
Tayyaba: I think again going back to what we discussed previously, I think the demand for separatism often hides just demands for greater autonomy and greater access to or self-determination over your own resources, right? And this is something that recently we were talking about the Khalistan Movement and how again the demand for Khalistan which is a demand for a Sikh nation being created out of Punjab, also hides elements of the fact that the Sikh people feel that they have not been given enough rights over their own territory or their own resources.
Or, it also hides or contains demands for acknowledging the oppression that has been visited on the Sikhs, right? So, yes, we can be wary of the demand for more borders and more bloodshed. But at the same time I think if we were to understand the fact that this is– these demands are coming out of desires for greater emancipation, we can find ways to support those ideas for the spirit in which they are made without necessarily supporting the demand for separate states.
Umair: That’s tricky though. And the thing that you’re talking about, you guys published on the Jamhoor website an interview with… Pritam Singh?
Tayyaba: Yes.
Umair: I read that.
Tayyaba: How did you like it?
Umair: I thought it was interesting. I disagreed with some things. I do not support– can I just say very stridently that I do not support the struggle for a separate Sikh homeland. And if you want to see the problem with some of the contradictions of minority nationalisms and how they can lead to some of the most reactionary types of characters coming to the fore, that’s a movement in which that has happened. And not to say that I don’t support the struggle to win rights for Sikh people in India but I– yeah, I think there’s lots of ways you can do that without Partition.
Tayyaba: I think and that’s exactly what the article explores, right? The article talks about or the interview talks about the fact that the demand for Khalistan is only for some people within the movement that they’re actually even genuinely invested in the project of a separate state. The vast majority of people that are part of that movement– or if you can even call it a movement, I don’t think it’s a very strong movement within India, it’s mostly driven by people in the diaspora.
Umair: In Brampton.
Tayyaba: In Brampton, exactly and in parts of England. And again, there are a lot of tensions within that movement, of class and so on, and the visions of what that state would look like. And so the vast majority of people that are in– that are joining that demand or supporting that demand are really only acknowledging or wanting the state to acknowledge the oppression that happened in 1984, right? And doing something to redress those grievances.
And if you also again, like looking in Pakistan and the demand for a separate Balochistan which was a very strong demand up until there were huge military operations in Balochistan to crush that demand. A lot of people were supporting that project, not specifically or only for the state of Balochistan but also the fact that Balochistan is the biggest, one of the biggest contributors to the economy of Pakistan and at the same time is completely underdeveloped– is the most underdeveloped region in the country. There are no schools. There are no hospitals. It supplies natural gas to the entire country but has no natural gas for itself, for its own homes. And so those are really grievances that we need to look at beyond just looking at it as the demand for a separate state.
Umair: Yeah, I completely agree.
Priyansh: Yeah, I agree with Tayyaba. And also, I think just looking at the Indian context again there have been other movements as well as in the northeast, speak of Assam. But recently in the state of Kerala where the BJP has not been able to make any breakthroughs or in the state of Tamil Nadu, they have obviously very complex politics. We can’t get in too much detail about them. But these are states in which, you know, BJP has not been an electoral force for very long. And this fact is proudly paraded by residents in these states to a point that they have been questioned– Kerala is essentially called Pakistan in many of the Hindu nationalist circles and you find that this constant chat or…
Umair: There’s not as many communist in Pakistan as there are in Kerala so…
Priyansh: Yeah. So there’s that difference– but pretty much it’s called Pakistan on two major counts. First of all, obviously that BJP is not doing very well there politically but secondly, because people eat beef. And the politics of food is very important to that question. But just sort of speaking to Tayyaba’s point is that we don’t have to imagine them as a separate state or a nation-state. In fact, in Kashmir’s case, it has lost its statehood. It’s not even a state anymore within India. This is an act of violence through legislation in which the state of Jamhoor and Kashmir, it loses its powers and the whole process about it that was carried out was unconstitutional.
So, to this already simmering alienation that you had against the Indians and then now it’s the question of Kashmiri separatism is actually popular and growing. And that’s down the actions of the Indian state of pushing that alienation so far that now you have to start considering the fact that even the previous Home Minister– the Home Minister under the Congress government, P. Chidambaram, he feels like India has lost Kashmir– who was known for carrying out aggressive actions which were carried out by the state’s military or the police forces. But even in his own estimation he seems to think that India has lost Kashmir. That may not be the case territorially but that’s the general political sentiment in India.
Tayyaba: I think another, just to shift gears a bit, another way that can talk about how the law is being used against the people is through the sedition law that is being applied on both sides of the border these days.
Priyansh: And it’s a colonial era sedition law which has pretty much stayed the same despite the fact that independence was gained but many of the laws remain unchanged. Earlier we talked about how any dissident in India right now is being told to go to Pakistan or in Pakistan…
Tayyaba: Go to India…
Priyansh: Go to India or you’re an agent of RAW or in the Indian case, it would be an agent of ISI. It’s interesting how litigious the kind of government is to the point that you could be charged with sedition for anything. You have this ridiculous case recently in schools in the southern part of India where there was a play that was organized against the Citizenship Amendment Act and now, the child’s mother, she’s been now been threatened with sedition, with the charge of sedition. So, even if you do any anti-government activities, anti-government has come to equate anti-India and that’s not even getting into the whole question of actually how the sedition law is oppressive because it is there to clamp down on dissent.
Tayyaba: Wasn’t sedition also applied to some people who were celebrating Pakistan’s victory over India in a cricket match?
Priyansh: Yeah. Yeah. That and it was also charged on some academics and intellectuals who were in support of the movement for Dalit assertion. Dalits are lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy. So, it’s essentially grossly misused and it’s obviously a law that is designed to clamp down dissent so it’s– we’ve talked about nation-states quite a bit but in a world that in which one of your prominent identity is as a citizen of a country, being rendered stateless is really the one of the scariest things that can happen to anyone.
Tayyaba: I mean in Pakistan as well, the sedition law is being used against students who are just asking for safer universities, more investment in education, a stop to budget cuts on the education sector and the health sector that are being launched by the government. So again, I think this also points to the fact that it’s not just the law and how the law is obviously inherited from our colonial times and it suits the ruling class to keep using that law. But also the fact that the ruling class continues to follow this logic of colonial times, of colonial governance where they’re using, you know, they’re clamping down or suppressing people in the vast majority of the country for various reasons. And then that lends itself to various nationalist movements that are then explicitly articulated in their own national idiom. Again, this sort of post-colonial state is using the tools and weapons that the colonial powers have left us with and continue to encourage us to use.
Umair: And of course, all of this sort of inter-ethnic, inter-religious or as it’s called in South Asia, “communalism”– which is very confusing because that’s not what we mean when we say communalism here. Communalism is an anarchist tendency. But yeah, in the Subcontinent, it usually means that Hindus and Muslims are murdering each other once again. It’s a ritual– every weekend. [Laughter] Sorry. No, but this communalism is something that we focused a lot on and it’s of course something that is very important to that context.
But one of the things that it does is that it hides the material conditions that the majority of the people on the subcontinent face. And the material conditions are characterized by a very large amount of poverty. And there doesn’t appear to be a strategy to have poverty alleviation. There’s lots of communal infighting, there’s lots of militarization. Two of the states, the largest states in the region have nuclear weapons, while at the same time, a scarily large number of people in these countries don’t have access to basic needs.
Priyansh: It’s interesting that Prime Minister Modi, he thinks of himself as poor. And that’s the image that he projected when he came to power in 2014, that he calls himself a fakir. And the idea that he’s been able to really sell is that he’s actually fighting for the poor and he’s against the elite– which, some of the criticism of India’s elite classes is not entirely unfounded although it is delivered in these sort of Hindu supremacist overtones. But it’s interesting that poverty seems to be the occupation of every Indian politician. Everybody is speaking of a different scheme.
But policy which would then speak of redistribution of wealth hasn’t been seen in nearly 50 years now ever. Indira Gandhi was the last Prime Minister to undertake such a strong initiative when she essentially distributed the privy purses of all the princely families. And even in the current moment and as you’re saying the poverty is so stark, there hasn’t been an opposition party which has actually been able to make– has been able to exploit the abject situation.
There was some hope at the end of 2018 when there was a huge farmer’s march from the west of India, in the state of Maharashtra, to the national capital in the north, in New Delhi– which had about three million farmers marching for that vast distance to be able to put their demands forward. None of their demands were really heard, it was done in the usual manner of how politicians play. They made some fake promises and the election cycle wasn’t very far away so many promises were made.
But, really, India is still reeling severely from the demonetization when 86% of the currency notes were delegitimized as a drive against corruption by the Modi government in November 2016. The economy is in a terrible state, the unemployment numbers are the highest in about four decades. So, the economic situation actually– and many people who are critics but also the supporters of this government, that’s what they fear will eventually bring things to the point that might mean the defeat of Modi and BJP which is a distinct possibility. I certainly take that possibility fairly seriously. But the problem is that even the opposition has not been able to really speak of the needs of the working class which is most of the Indian population. And that’s really, you know, the gap which an opposition could exploit and then bring other issues together and that I think would be politically very productive. But that’s not been an opportunity that has been taken up until now.
Tayyaba: I think yeah, I would echo what both of you have said. In Pakistan, we have right now one of the largest youth populations by proportion of the total population in the world. And actually many people, many economists have described that as a ticking time bomb. It’s a very young population and joblessness is at an all time high in Pakistan as well. And the education infrastructure is really crumbling.
In recent times, we have gone back to the IMF to get another round of debt and that of course involves more budget cuts, more decimation of public infrastructure and greater privatization or relaxation of regulation on businesses. And so, while the debt-servicing itself takes up a huge portion of the budget, another drain on the resources is really the war economy and how the country has effectively been in a state of war since its founding, first with Kashmir and trying to maintain its hold on the part of Kashmir that it does have and then in imperial wars across the region, either in alliance with the United States or in alliance with Saudi Arabia.
And so, that entire war economy has led to creation of a very large military infrastructure and a dominance of the military in the political and economic affairs of the country, which means that again, the budget the country has to work with for its population is extremely limited when you cut out debt and the military that you have to pay for. And then there is the problem that the elites that run the country are really not invested in investing in the country itself. So, food and health and education really just take a back seat. And so, malnutrition is– Pakistan is one of the highest in the list of countries with child malnutrition and also for infant mortality and maternal mortality during pregnancy.
Umair: While you guys were talking, I was thinking about, I was thinking that– was it Walter Benjamin who said something along the lines of, “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution”? And if we think of the anti-colonial movements– in India, the first major anti-colonial victory of this country that had been under occupation for almost two centuries– that as a kind of revolution. It had a social democratic kind of leaning, a strategy of class collaboration, right?
The Nehruvian project was, really, sort of industrializing with the– not with forcing it upon the capitalist class but to bring them along for the project. That this would be good of them as well. And I guess it didn’t work. And here, I guess, is the outcome of that failed revolution, the slow death of the promise of Indian independence and with it, the death of and the falling apart of Congress as a ruling party of India and then the rise of this fascism in form of the BJP.
Priyansh: That’s a hard one to answer because in some ways you could also say that– things that worked in the Nehruvian project are actually still very valuable and powerful in terms of articulating the opposition to the fascism that we see now. But what has happened I think– that failed promise of an independent India, it succumbed completely to the other global overarching factor which we haven’t had the time to discuss– of global capitalism and especially neoliberal state institutions which it wholeheartedly adopted at the beginning of the ‘90s, which I think probably also explains what is happening in India now fairly well because until then the state’s social schemes and its protections were far stronger than they are now.
And with the reduction in public services and with these cuts to all of these services as well, what has happened is that many of the basic needs of Indian citizens were not being fulfilled by the state. So, who was stepping in? It was actually the grassroots Hindu nationalist organization, which is the RSS. So we mentioned the Chief Minister in UP who identifies himself as Yogi Adityanath. He is from Gorakhpur and there were many reports when he was selected as the Chief Minister, many reporters went to his hometown in Gorakhpur and they were trying to learn of why he’s been so popular. I think he’s won general elections in that constituency five or six times running until he became the Chief Minister.
And they learned that actually what– why he was popular was not so much because of the ideas of Hindu supremacy but many of his workers in his office would ensure that if you were unwell, you would have an appointment at the public hospital or somebody would step in and get your pending railway ticket confirmed so that you could go to Delhi for an exam or whatever– which earlier the state services would have come in handy for the needy, the state would have stepped in and helped.
But here, in fact, the Hindu nationalists– obviously, this has been as I said at the beginning, that this has been the organization that has been working since 1925. So they were already ready to pounce at that opportunity. So, the Indian state’s willful submission to neoliberal institutions and capital actually meant that this possibility was created. And I think these forces almost worked in conjunction to bring us to this moment.
Tayyaba: I think even beyond that, just to add in a last thing, that despite the fact that both states were formed on this aspiration, after colonialism, to bring all the population under the nation-state and consider everyone equal, was itself– there were so many contradictions even from the beginning, right? So, even right after Partition, the Indian state cracked down on peasant movements, on trade unions and the same thing happened in Pakistan.
So, while they were paying homage to this conception of this ideal nation-state or republic, there were a lot of class contradictions that were there. And so, on both sides of the border, there were these realizations that this is a freedom, this is the so called freedom but at the same time, it’s not really a freedom. So, on the Indian side, the communist party, they published that pamphlet called Ye Azadi Jhooti Hai or this is a false freedom. And on the Pakistani side, the poet, the famous poet Faiz wrote “Ye Dagh Dagh Ujala” which called this freedom a night-bitten dawn. So it’s a stained dawn. And so they immediately realized that the promise that they had founded these countries on– that promise itself was compromised in many ways.
Umair: And that Partition, especially, overshadowed Independence.
Tayyaba: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Umair: Well, actually, before we wrap up, I remember we haven’t talked about Babri Masjid.
Priyansh: Yeah. Yeah.
Umair: And one way to actually tie that in with what you just said Priyansh is you mentioned the introduction of neoliberalism into India in 1991 with– who is your finance minister?
Priyansh: Manmohan Singh?
Umair: Manmohan Singh, right.
Priyansh: Who later on goes on to become Prime Minister in 2004, yeah.
Umair: Right. And in the case of Pakistan, we’ve always had neoliberalism. We had it before neoliberalism existed. Pakistan has been the poster child of the World Bank throughout its existence. But it’s interesting to me that in 1991, the Indian government says that OK, we’re open for business. All of this red tape, this Nehruvian regulatory state, we need to get rid of it. So scale back social services, all of the things that are part of introducing neoliberal globalization. And then in 1992, something happens in Ayodhya where one of the mosques, this historical mosque, is destroyed by a mob of Hindu nationalists.
Priyansh: And that conjuncture is interesting because the movement to destroy Babri Masjid, the mosque, almost starts at the point when India is actually experiencing severe economic depression. The economy is in a poor state, not enough jobs. To the point that there is– at one point, there is a serious threat of even bankruptcy. So, it is in that moment that the Hindu nationalist movement is actually able to make a significant breach. Not politically but through this contentious argument that they make about– it’s not even contentious even, it’s without any evidence, that this was the birthplace of Lord Ram, who’s obviously one of the more hallowed Hindu gods. There is no hierarchy but if there was to be one, he’d probably be at the top.
And they’re able to sell this lie pretty much, turn it into a really popular political metaphor. The point that your identity to being a Hindu is linked to the fact that whether you support the building of the Ram temple in place of the mosque. And it’s considered that that site where the mosque exists is where Lord Ram was born. That’s the contention anyway. So it builds into a movement over time and obviously, the Indian state itself makes many lapses. It doesn’t act as swiftly as it should to the point that on December 6th of 1992, a mob goes in and goes and destroys the mosque. It opens up a pandora’s box. It is followed by riots in Bombay in 1993.
But moving past a couple of decades and arriving to last year, there had been an ongoing legal dispute following that destruction of the mosque which was finally adjudicated upon by the apex court in India, the Supreme Court. And in a unanimous judgment, it decided that actually the destruction of the mosque was a violation of the law but it still went ahead and granted the site to the Hindu nationalist petitioners which is a baffling judgment and it’s also built on specious grounds because it denies the claim of the Muslims to that site on this assumption that they were not able to prove that there was the Friday prayers were taking place on that site going back to the19th century– or going back to, sorry, in the 16th century in fact.
But it is odd that they do admit that the mosque existed but they’re saying, they’re making this – coming to this laughable conclusion that there were no prayers being offered so then why would the mosque exist? So that is the problem with how it’s been– with how the judgment went on. But now, essentially those who destroyed the mosque have been rewarded and a Ram temple is supposed to be now going to be built on that site, which is a travesty of justice.
And it also speaks to the status of Muslims who are pretty much treated as second-class citizens not just by the Indian government but the judiciary. And in India, most of the protections have actually collapsed, so if the state actually violates your fundamental rights, you can’t go to the court expecting anymore that it will look after you. And that is why when people call it a quasi-fascist or a fascist state right now, it’s for the precise reasons that all the pillars of democracy– considered to be, obviously, the executive, legislature, the media and all of them have actually completely, essentially bought into– are essentially speaking from the same line or speaking from the same hymn sheet.
Umair: The Indian media is insane. It’s worse than the Pakistani media.
Priyansh: Yeah. I mean there’s no comparison I think. So that is the state and I think that is the context behind the Ayodhya judgment which arrived last year.
Umair: So I guess for me, it’s interesting that ethnic-religious conflict comes in at the very moment when people’s material conditions are being downgraded and so then ethnic conflict stands in for what should be taking place– which is class conflict.
Priyansh: Yeah, I agree with that diagnosis. Definitely.
Tayyaba: Yeah. But also we didn’t touch upon the trajectory of the Left itself in both countries and with the kinds of challenges that it has faced especially in the context of the Cold War and the implications of the Cold War in that region. Especially for– if I can speak to Pakistan, it’s that the US and Pakistan were very closely tied together and so the Left did face a lot of repression in that time. And also, with the fact that the Afghan war happens in the ‘80s and when the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in support of a movement there, the United States used the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies to hit back and cultivated – with the help of Saudi Arabia – what began as Afghan Taliban freedom fighters that were fighting the Soviet Union in the name of Islam, considering the Soviet Union was the great disbeliever or atheist.
Umair: The great Satan!
Tayyaba: Well, the great Satan is now the US.
Umair: Oh, right, that’s the US. But there was this– the Islamists in the region were happy to work with the US because the US was, they said, a Christian power whereas the Soviet Union was a…
Tayyaba: Atheist.
Umair: Atheistic.
Tayyaba: Yeah. And religious movements were in fact cultivated by the US across the region and the Taliban was part of– one part of that entire policy. And with the Pakistani state officially being allied with the US and getting a lot of money from the US to conduct this war on its behalf meant that the Left faced a lot of repression across the country. And that worked well for the elites within Pakistan as well so they were happy doing that.
Priyansh: Yeah. I mean there’s obviously a long history of Left politics in the Indian context as well. But just to summarize where it is at in the current moment. So in the 2004 elections, all the Left parties combined had 64 seats. It was a huge number because it essentially enabled the Congress party to form a government. Without their support that would not have been possible. In the current legislature they only have four seats, so electorally decimated.
But in terms of a hopeful possibility for the left in the Indian context is the fact that many of the current protests are actually being organized by people who would identify themselves under the banner of one of the communist parties, one of the many iterations. And you find that they’re at the universities but also at Shaheen Bagh, which we discussed. They’re fairly visible and maybe this is now the opportunity for them to be able to make a political breakthrough because electorally, they have been pretty much wiped across the board.
Tayyaba: I think same– I can say the same thing for Pakistan as well where the absence or the repression on the Left meant that nationalist politics did gain a lot more prominence. Although they were a part of – they were part of certain left formations but officially the Communist Party went underground and was banned. But now, there is a growing attraction of people towards the Left. A lot of young people and a lot of movements that are now lead by young people are being conducted and have very progressive principles and are genuinely demanding social justice and articulating themselves on the Left, which is again as you can see in the women’s movement or student’s movement and in the latest iteration of the ethnic-national movement which is the PTM.
Umair: You know, one thing I love about the South Asian context and speaking to South Asians like you guys is that when you say “Left” you mean “communist” whereas in North America– well, in Canada, I guess it means the NDP. In the US, it means the Democratic Party.
Tayyaba: Obama.
Umair: Obama!
[Outro music plays]
Priyansh: Thanks for tuning in to Oats for Breakfast.
Tayyaba: We’ll see you again soon.
Umair: Bye!
Oats for Breakfast is an independent eco-socialist podcast based in Toronto.