In women-authored versions of the Ramayana, Ram emerges as a man of weak character — described by women as a brute and a sinner. But this article is not only about Ram. It is about the civilization that produced him — and the state that is reproducing that civilization today.

Introduction

The RSS and BJP government’s present blueprint for a Hindu nation does not spring from nowhere — its roots run all the way back to ancient Aryan civilization. Just as Hitler in Germany promoted Aryan supremacy and made the establishment of Aryanism the cornerstone of his totalitarianism, the RSS’s Brahminism and its framework for a Hindu state has been patronizing that very same Aryanism for decades. This is not coincidence. It is continuity.

What is worth tracing carefully, then, is not merely the political surface of this continuity but its deepest structural layer — the organization of power over women’s bodies. The exercise of power over women was a familiar social structure even before Brahminism institutionalized the caste system. To understand what is happening in India today, we must begin not in 2014, not in 1992, not even in 1947 — but much further back, in the moment when the matriarchal egalitarian world was first dismantled and women were first converted into property.

The Position of Women in the Age of the Aryans

From approximately the pre-Vedic period, the Indian subcontinent came under the dominance of the Aryan peoples. The Aryans were primarily pastoralists; one school of thought holds that they seized the land of India’s ancient non-Aryan communities through armed conquest. This history has been documented repeatedly in Rahul Sankrityayan’s Volga to Ganga — a foundational text that traces human civilization from the Volga river to the Indian subcontinent, following the journey of Aryan peoples and the social transformations they imposed — and in Sukumari Bhattacharya’s Ancient India, a rigorous scholarly examination of Aryan life, society, and religious practice that reveals with precision what women’s social position actually looked like in that era.

Volga to Ganga traces how the egalitarianism of a matriarchal social structure was transferred into a patriarchal one, and how gender discrimination became institutionally entrenched. This collapse of the matriarchal egalitarian order was not a sudden event but a structural transformation — one that Friedrich Engels had already diagnosed with remarkable clarity in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Engels argued that in the earliest human communities, society was organized along matrilineal, communal lines. Women in these clans wielded genuine social authority — kinship was traced through the mother, and communal living meant women could act collectively against uncooperative men. The rise of private property broke this order. When men in former matriarchal tribes began claiming livestock as their own rather than holding it in common with the tribe, the question of inheritance became urgent. To ensure that a man’s wealth passed to his children and no one else’s, he needed absolute control over the woman’s sexuality. Monogamy thus arose not from love or morality but from the concentration of wealth in the hands of one person — a man — and the need to pass that wealth to his children.

The consequence was catastrophic for women. Engels called it plainly: “The overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”

This is not metaphor. It is the material description of what occurred when land, territory, family, and authority were reorganized around male inheritance. The agricultural shift — the very moment celebrated as civilization’s progress — was simultaneously the moment that women were converted from social equals into property. Engels further argued that the first class antagonism in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. The oppression of women and class exploitation were not separate phenomena. They were two faces of the same historical origin: private property.

This is precisely what Volga to Ganga dramatizes in the Indian context, and what Sukumari Bhattacharya documents in the Rigvedic evidence. The Aryan pastoral economy — with its emphasis on cattle ownership and male inheritance — was the local expression of exactly this global transformation Engels identified. Bhattacharya writes that Aryan society was fundamentally pastoral and patriarchal. In the Rigvedic age, women’s roles were confined entirely to childbearing, tending livestock, serving in their husband’s household, and performing cottage industries. Beyond this, women had no role in sacrificial rituals or other religious rites. The matriarchal socialist structure did not die peacefully. It was dismantled, piece by piece, as land, livestock, and lineage became instruments of male power.

The Manuist tradition that is today invoked in discussions of patriarchal aggression is in fact far older than Manu — it is the social system built by the Aryans. Patriarchal social structure was never found among India’s indigenous peoples. Traces of egalitarianism and matriarchal customs survive among tribal communities even today — across parts of the Himalayas and its foothills, in Ladakh, Jammu, certain villages in Himachal Pradesh. Many scholars also believe that Bengal was once governed by a primal matriarchal system. The worship of Shakti has been present in Bengal and ancient Tibet from the earliest times, while the Aryans primarily venerated male deities with women represented only minimally. Yet in Volga to Ganga, Sankrityayan shows how, over time, men among the Aryans systematically curtailed women’s freedom — in battle, in public life, and ultimately in the most intimate dimensions of their existence.

What History Tells Us

To understand contemporary fascist aggression, one must know its origins. No position is ever accidental — behind every stance and every event lies the history of its formation, the ground in which its seeds were sown. Without going back to that foundation, no problem can ever be resolved at the root.

Whether we speak of caste hierarchy, class division, or the practice of gender discrimination — I use the word “practice” deliberately, because age after age, the powerful have shaped society into particular structures to serve their own convenience and consolidate their own power. They have enforced certain social, institutional, and religious norms over centuries, sometimes through the manipulation of subordinate classes — and in this way, those norms have become the bedrock of society. What the original social structure actually was is difficult to retrieve. Yet it has been observed that egalitarian, communal social organization was humanity’s oldest social system, which a small minority then progressively distorted through the establishment of various regulations and codes, all for their own benefit.

The question is not whether this history is recoverable in every detail. The question is whether we are willing to see the present for what it is: not a rupture from the past but its continuation.

The Connection Between Women and Land

Our purpose is to excavate and examine, from its ancient origins to the present, the history of Aryanist Brahminism. Hegel’s Phenomenology has been something of an inspiration in tracing the continuity between that history and today. Just as land acquisition is not a contemporary phenomenon — its seeds were planted in the Aryans’ establishment of dominance over this land — so too, patriarchy is not a present-day problem. Its seeds were sown in the earliest times.

Many historians believe that equality prevailed in Harappan and Mohenjodaro society, though evidence of class divisions is visible even then in urban planning. Khitimohon Sen’s Women of Ancient India gives us evidence of the gradual decline of women’s status from the Vedic period onward. There was once equal right over property for women and men in Indian society. Later, this was transformed so that women themselves became the equivalent of land — property to be protected and controlled by men.

In 1962, Noor Alam examined the question of women’s rights and their foundational position in Indian society. He showed that women’s sexuality has, from the earliest times in this country, been treated as equivalent to land or territory. Just as ownership of land remained in male hands, so too did control over women’s bodies remain tightly gripped by men. Men understood that without claiming sovereignty over women’s sexuality, no power over women could be maintained. That ancient convention persists, covertly, to this day. Sometimes the state — sometimes the family acting as a proxy state — tells women that their sexuality is reserved for their husbands alone.

In the Vedic age, if an upper-caste woman married a lower-caste man of her own choosing, the social punishment was severe: if a child was born of such a union, both mother and child were drowned in a river. The obsession with female “purity” connects directly to this same axis of sexuality. Brahmins instituted child marriage precisely to preserve caste purity. The politics of linking that purity to the purity of land and soil is not new. It was a carefully calculated move by Brahmins to bind women to the land — to nature itself — solely to maintain absolute dominion over women’s sexuality.

Women’s Position in Ancient Literature: The Ramayana

The condition of women is also captured within this country’s epic literature. Epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are not simply religious texts — they are foundational documents for assessing what women’s social position actually looked like in their time, and more importantly, how the powerful wanted that position to be remembered and reproduced across generations.

In her essay Women Rewriting the Mahabharata, Nabaneeta Dev Sen examines Chandravati’s Ramayana through a female lens, and what emerges is a succession of patriarchal customs laid bare. Abduction and forced marriage was, for instance, a perfectly ordinary occurrence in this period. Women’s consent, women’s desire — these simply had no place. Dev Sen also brings out the dimension of women’s exile and darkened lives: Aryan men abandoned their wives, and that abandonment pushed women into a life of isolation and suffering.

She returns again and again to the argument that in Brahminical and Aryanist society, women had no freedom over their own sexuality whatsoever. To serve male desire, to fulfill male will — that was the sole identity assigned to women in that era. If a woman was abducted by another powerful man, it was she who was punished. The logic was consistent and merciless: the woman’s body is property, and damaged property is the woman’s shame, not the aggressor’s crime.

Dev Sen observes that when women write the Ramayana, the oppression visited upon them comes to the surface with force. In women-authored Ramayanas, Ram becomes a man of weak and contemptible character — women describe him as a brute and a sinner. Sita, on the other hand, is built up as a woman of strength. Even here Sita remains a victim of violence, yet she has the courage to speak publicly about the injustice done to her, to demand justice. There is a saying in Indian folk tradition: whatever language women speak, it is the language of loneliness, the language of sorrow and suffering. The women-authored Ramayana refuses that loneliness by making the suffering visible and the injustice nameable.

The model of the husband-wife relationship that Brahminical social structure has bequeathed to us is visible right there in the Ramayana. A husband puts his wife on trial for chastity, yet the man is required to prove nothing — no test of his own honesty or fidelity. That “tradition” continues in the Hindu-nationalist state we are marching toward. On one occasion, a Supreme Court acquitted a man who had raped his underage wife repeatedly over many days — the Court used marriage and childbirth as proof of innocence, and astonishingly, the burden of proving rape fell on the girl herself. Is this not identical in structure to Sita’s trial by fire? The epic and the courtroom share the same grammar. Only the costume has changed.

The Volga to Ganga Episode

In Volga to Ganga it is shown that during wars between two clans, the victorious clan plundered the defeated clan’s women along with all their property — land, livestock, weapons, grain. Women were equivalent to land, crop, and property — symbols of wealth to be seized and redistributed among the victorious. In many Sanskrit texts, women are described as Shri — a word that primarily denotes wealth and prosperity. The equation was not metaphorical. It was juridical.

The caste system, that product of Brahminism, impacted women’s lives far more devastatingly than it impacted even lower-caste men. One rule of the caste system (Pratiloma) stipulated that if a lower-caste man and an upper-caste woman had a child, the woman and child were to be drowned. The Jalpatra custom similarly represented the exploitation of lower-caste women by upper-caste men: a wealthy upper-caste man was permitted to keep a Dalit woman as a concubine, to sexually exploit her at will, and any child born of this arrangement had no recognized paternity. At the very moment that lower-caste people were declared untouchable, the upper classes felt no hesitation in physically exploiting women from those same communities. The body of the Dalit woman was simultaneously polluted and available — untouchable in public, accessible in private. This contradiction was not a failure of the system. It was the system’s design.

Property-Driven Oppression: Sati

In the early period of Indian social structure, there is no evidence of the practice of Sati — a widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Khitimohon Sen’s writings reveal that the practice was introduced not as tradition but as a mechanism of power: to ensure that the dominance of men in the transfer of property remained unchallenged. Before this, when a husband died, it was accepted practice in Aryan society that the living woman would remarry and bear children. Similarly, child marriage had no place in early Aryan society; it was introduced later by those in power specifically to maintain caste purity. The custom of women choosing their own husbands was likewise distorted, for the same reason.

Every practice that is today defended as ancient Hindu tradition — Sati, child marriage, enforced widowhood, the prohibition on widow remarriage — was in fact an invention, a deliberate institutional mechanism introduced at a specific historical moment to serve a specific material interest: the uninterrupted transmission of property through the male line. Tradition was always the mask that power wore when it wanted to avoid being recognized as power.

Oppression of Brahmin Women

Alongside Dalit women, Brahmin women too suffered the full brutality of patriarchy — a fact that is often obscured by the tendency to treat caste oppression and gender oppression as separate systems. They are not separate. They are the same system operating at different registers of the social hierarchy.

Around the practice of Kulin polygamy — where Brahmin men married multiple times — many women were murdered for property, and many more were dispossessed and abandoned. The practice of enforced widowhood — suppressing women’s sexuality and expelling them from all social rights and roles — has its origins, again, in the question of property ownership. In many instances, widows were not only exploited socially; they were physically exploited within the very households that confined them. The household, in Brahminical patriarchy, was never a place of safety for women. It was the primary site of their containment.

Women Under RSS and BJP Rule

In contemporary society, Ambedkar’s legislation and feminist legal provisions may be inscribed in the Indian Constitution, but the reality on the ground remains the same. The present government has sent its message in many forms: women’s primary purpose is to be protected like property, to serve their families and husbands, and to bear children for the nation. Golwalkar himself wrote that the role of the traditional Indian woman is to serve her husband, his family, and to produce children. This is not the private opinion of one man. It is the organizational ideology of the RSS — and it is the ideology that presently governs India.

The Bilkis Bano case is perhaps the most chilling institutional endorsement of this violence. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, Bilkis Bano — a Muslim woman, five months pregnant — was gang-raped, and fourteen members of her family were massacred. After years of relentless legal struggle, eleven convicts were sentenced to life imprisonment. But in August 2022, the BJP government at the Centre facilitated their early release under a remission policy — and what followed was not quiet rehabilitation but open celebration. The released convicts were garlanded and welcomed as heroes by BJP-affiliated groups in Gujarat. The state did not merely fail to protect a woman who had been gang-raped; it actively honored the men who did it. This is not a lapse in the system — it is the system, operating exactly as the ideological architecture of Brahminical patriarchy always intended: the woman bears the wound, the man walks free wearing flowers.

In 2023 in Karnataka, a nurse was dragged away and sexually assaulted, after which an upper-caste doctor hurled caste-based slurs at the woman. Twenty-one police officers who raped eleven tribal women in a forest were acquitted without consequence. In Rajasthan, a tribal woman was raped and then burned alive. The pattern is not regional. It is national. It is structural. And it has a very long history.

Conclusion: The Abject Body — Kristeva, the Witch, and the Living Wound

To understand why this violence is not merely political but psychic — not merely historical but structural — we must turn to the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, and her landmark 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Kristeva’s concept of abjection describes the process by which a social order maintains its identity by violently expelling whatever threatens its coherence. The abject is not simply the enemy or the outsider — it is that which disturbs identity, system, and order from within. It does not respect borders, positions, or rules. And the body that patriarchal civilization has most consistently cast as abject — across cultures, across centuries — is the female body. The woman’s body, in this psychic architecture, represents everything the patriarchal ego must dominate and contain to sustain its own fantasy of purity, territory, and control.

To make this concrete: consider how the Brahminical obsession with ritual purity — the elaborate codes around menstruation, childbirth, widowhood, caste mixing — maps precisely onto Kristeva’s framework. The menstruating woman, the widow, the Dalit woman who crosses a caste boundary — each of these figures is treated as a source of contamination, disorder, a threat to the purity of the social body. She must be expelled, contained, punished, or erased. This is abjection operating as social policy. It is not incidental to Brahminical order. It is the mechanism through which that order reproduces itself.

This abjection finds its most savage expression in the theater of war. Women and children are historically the first targets not because they are tactically significant, but because the destruction of the female body is the most legible message of conquest one patriarchal power can send to another. Genocide rape — as a deliberate instrument of war — is not a byproduct of conflict. It is the logic of it. We have seen this with shattering clarity in Palestine, where the systematic targeting of women’s bodies, the destruction of maternity hospitals, the mass killing of mothers and children, is not military necessity but a statement of territorial abjection — the conquered land and the conquered woman rendered identical, both to be emptied and controlled. This is not a new grammar. It is the same grammar Engels identified when Aryan conquering tribes looted women alongside cattle and grain. The body and the land remain, across millennia, the same site of inscription for male power.

In India, this abjection carries an additional layer of historical violence specific to the fate of the mother goddess tradition. Mother goddess worship — Shakti, the feminine divine as supreme creative principle — was not a marginal or subordinate tradition. It was the indigenous spiritual bedrock of vast swathes of the subcontinent, particularly in Bengal, the Dravidian south, and tribal communities across the country. This tradition encoded a fundamentally different relationship between society and the female principle — one in which the feminine was not abject but sacred, not a source of pollution but of power. British colonialism, in its anxiety to classify and control Indian religion through a Brahminical upper-caste lens, systematically delegitimized these goddess-worshipping, matrilineal, and often lower-caste traditions. The colonial anthropological gaze — itself a patriarchal and racist instrument — recorded Brahminical textual religion as “real” Hinduism and everything else as primitive superstition. Brahmin cultural hegemony, which had already been working to subordinate these traditions for centuries, found in British colonialism a powerful amplifier. The abject was now not merely the woman but the indigenous woman’s spirituality — doubly expelled, doubly erased.

This same logic of abjection produced the witch hunt. In Europe, between the 15th and 18th centuries, women who held knowledge, who healed, who lived outside male domestic structures, who owned land, who were simply inconvenient — were systematically identified as abject threats to the Christian patriarchal order, tried, tortured, and burned. The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the theological rulebook of the witch hunt, is essentially a manual of abjection: it catalogues in obsessive detail the dangers of the female body, female sexuality, and female autonomy. What is being destroyed is not witchcraft. What is being destroyed is the last remnant of female social power that predates the fully patriarchal order.

This is not a closed chapter of European history. It is a living, breathing condition in India today. In Bihar — and across Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and other states — women, overwhelmingly Dalit and Adivasi, are regularly branded as witches, stripped, paraded, tortured, and murdered. The accusation of dayan — witch — is most frequently deployed against women who own property, who refuse sexual advances from powerful men, or who are simply inconvenient to dominant-caste interests. The structure is identical to the European witch trial: the female body as abject threat to social order, the community as instrument of its destruction, and the state as indifferent or complicit witness. The witch trial did not end. It migrated. It changed its language. But in Bihar today it wears the same face it wore in 15th century Europe — the face of a social order that cannot tolerate a woman who refuses to be expelled.

What Kristeva gives us, then, is not merely a psychoanalytic framework but a mirror held up to the entire history this article has traced. From Vedic ritual pollution codes, to the Brahminical conversion of women into land-equivalent property, to the dayan murders of Bihar, to Bilkis Bano’s garlanded rapists — the same psychic structure persists across every transformation of the social surface: the female body as that which must be expelled, controlled, or destroyed so that the patriarchal order can narrate itself as pure, sovereign, and legitimate.

Whose Nation Is This?

The RSS’s political ideology has always been inseparable from Brahminism — and Brahminism has always been inseparable from the most crude and systematic patriarchy. Golwalkar’s own writings make no pretense otherwise: women belong in the home, in the kitchen, and in the service of reproduction. The woman, in this worldview, is not a human subject with interiority, desire, or political existence. She is a vessel. A demographic instrument. A body whose primary function is to produce children for the nation — which is to say, for the Hindu Brahminical order.

This is not incidental to the RSS project. It is foundational to it. When we witnessed the demolition of Babri Masjid, the slogans that rang out were not only communal — they were simultaneously casteist. ST, SC murdabad. The annihilation of the mosque and the annihilation of Dalit and Adivasi dignity were spoken in the same breath, by the same mouths, driven by the same logic. Brahminical crude patriarchy and Brahminical casteism are not two separate pathologies. They are one integrated structure of domination — and the BJP-RSS axis is its present political form.

The data confirms this with brutal consistency. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat — states where BJP governance is most deeply entrenched and most ideologically saturated — rank among the most dangerous states in India for women. The Labour Codes consolidated under this government carry within them the same patriarchal logic: women’s labor systematically undervalued, women’s wages structurally unequal, women’s bodies available for economic exploitation just as they have always been available for sexual and domestic exploitation. The Shrama Code is not merely bad labor policy. It is patriarchy institutionalized in the language of economic management — the ancient equation of woman and property, now dressed in the administrative language of the modern state.

This, then, is the moment to pause. To revisit. To think with the full weight of this history pressing down on the present. What does this government actually want to do with India? What is the destination of this road paved with demolished mosques, garlanded rapists, burning Adivasi women, and rewritten textbooks? Indian democracy — the constitutional vision of Ambedkar, the plural, secular, egalitarian republic wrested from centuries of hierarchical violence — has been progressively hollowed out, its institutions bent toward majoritarian Brahminical will.

The BJP and RSS speak of Akhand Bharat — One Nation, undivided, eternal, supreme. But we must ask the question they do not want asked: whose nation? One nation for whom? This land — this ancient, plural, multilingual, multi-religious, matrilineal-in-its-bones land — belongs to whom?

It does not belong to those who garland rapists. It does not belong to those who burn Dalit women as witches. It does not belong to those who erase the mother goddess, rewrite the epics, and demolish the evidence of every civilization that preceded their own claim to sovereignty.

Source references: Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884); Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980); Rahul Sankrityayan, Volga to Ganga; Sukumari Bhattacharya, Ancient India; Khitimohon Sen, Women of Ancient India; Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Women Rewriting the Mahabharata; M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts; Malleus Maleficarum (1486).

( The author is a gender activist, psychoanalysis scholar, and editorial assistant)

The post Whose Nation Is This? Abjection, Brahminism, and the War on Women’s Bodies – Sneha Nandi appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

Introduction
Today, when we are in the third decade of the 21st century, fast changes are taking place in imperialism. The law of impermanence or the idea that every social phenomenon is constantly changing and transforming itself, is becoming more evident in the case of imperialist world system too. As such, two centuries of world domination by Anglo-American capitalist-imperialist system is now in a downward phase. The industrial capitalism that flourished from mid-18th century to the last quarter of the 19th century under the leadership of Britain gave way to monopoly finance capitalism or imperialism by the turn of the 20th century, resulting in the emergence of US as the leading capitalist-imperialist power. However, UK continued as the formal colonial leader till the Second World War. Since then, the US took over the role of supreme imperialist arbiter as manifested in the transition from so called “Pax Britannica” to “Pax Americana”.
Thus, after Second World War and following the so called ‘decolonisation’ (i.e., formal ending of colonialism), the US took over the position of world hegemon in the postwar neocolonial phase of imperialism. Together with the political, economic and military arrangements required for unleashing neocolonialism, based on the 1946 agreement between US and UK, world’s most powerful intelligence network called the “Five Eyes Alliance” led by CIA also came into being. Till the 1970s, on account of the presence of a Socialist Camp, US-led imperialism pursued a policy of state-programming of the economy or “welfare capitalism”. But, when the imperialist crisis strengthened in the form of ‘stagflation’, taking advantage of the ideological-political setbacks of the International Communist Movement (ICM), since the beginning of the 1970s, US-led imperialism abandoned the ‘welfare state’ and embraced neoliberalism. Characterising the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 as ‘end of Communism’, US ended the Cold War and declared Isam as the new enemy and conceptualised the infamous “global war on terror” based on “Islamophobia”, which now forms the ideological basis of neo-fascism (neoliberal fascism) at a global level. Establishment of WTO in 1995 and ranging it along with IMF and World Bank in which US already has veto power, further strengthened neoliberal globalisation.
However, by the turn of the 21st century, especially after the World Economic Crisis of 2007-08, US stature as world’s leading manufacturer and biggest trader has been lost to Chinese state monopoly capitalism or “imperialism with Chinese characteristics”. US GDP, which was around half of the world total in 1945, has declined to about 25 percent, while US gold reserve which was 75 percent of world total in 1945 is reduced to less than 20 percent as of now. This has led to a loss of trust in dollar’s continuity as world currency, leading to a “de-dollarisation” trend in which China has its overt and covert role. And of late, as a manifestation of the inability to carry out the super-power responsibilities incumbent on it including the maintenance of around 750-800 military bases across 80 countries of the world, US imperialism has been backtracking from its international commitments, especially to UN-affiliated institutions, which, to an extent, were political tools propped up by US itself, that enabled it to carry on the tasks as postwar neocolonial leader.
Trumpism and Vanishing Domestic Political-Economic Basis of US Hegemony
Trumpism is a catalyst of the inherent crisis and a grave-digger of US imperialist hegemony. Trump’s far-right, racist, Islamophobic, neofascist policies codified as MAGA and characterised by extreme ‘economic nationalism’ coupled with protectionist trade measures on friends and foes alike, have already become self-defeating moves. His short-sighted and reckless tariff policies have boomeranged in the form of stock market crash and threat of stagflation, leading to irresolvable differences within the US administration itself. Obviously, relative to other imperialist powers like China and EU, the US today is a money-spinning ‘bubble economy’ where the financial sphere is growing totally cut off from the productive sphere. Most of the consumer goods are being imported from cheap labour-based low-cost global sources such as China, India, etc.
As part of ruthlessly suppressing domestic opposition to his policies, Trump is undermining judiciary and rule of law, autonomy of universities, media freedom and long-established rules and procedures of US federal administration. Ever since American Civil War, federalism has provided the internal coherence and strength for US emergence as a leading world power. Now Trump is undermining all these established liberal and federal traditions. So far, the Republicans have been solidly standing with him. However, including leading members among them, the parliamentary opposition and vast majority of the American people are now against Trump. His Gaza Board Peace, constituted on the eve of the US-Zionist aggression against Iran is already exposed as a move for another US military base. The US-Zionist aggression on Iran and severe setbacks arising therefrom have led to widespread opposition against Trump from his own camp, and consequent irreparable damage to the US image as “paradise of democracy” that formed the solid domestic basis for US projection as world hegemon. That is, growing people’s resistance against Trumpism is now speeding up the erosion of the domestic base essential for US imperialist hegemony.
Undermining of NATO and Trump’s Withdrawal from Multilateral Agreements
The decline and downfall of US hegemony are integrally linked up with the shaking of the postwar strategic US-EU alliance. The European powers who were weakened by the Second World War had also accepted the 1941 Atlantic Charter or the Anglo-American blueprint prepared jointly by the eclipsing and rising global hegemons, UK and US respectively, that envisaged the essential political, economic and military arrangements for the postwar world. Accordingly, the UN system, the Bretton Woods Monetary system (IMF and World Bank with US veto power in them) and the dollar as world currency, and a whole set of military arrangements such as NATO, and world-wide US military bases were the essential tools at the disposal of postwar neocolonial order led by US. And through Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, the US took the initiative for reconstructing war-torn Europe. The NATO or Transatlantic Military Alliance led by US and founded in 1949 that included Canada and 10 EU members (which expanded overtime to include 32 members) began as the largest US-led neocolonial military organisation that strengthened the Anglo-Saxon global dominance. To be precise, it has been this Western or US imperialist-led military bloc that acted as the foundation for US hegemony on the one hand, and provided effective political weapon against Soviet bloc till its collapse, on the other. However, due to Trump’s unilateral economic and military moves, including the latest aggression on Iran, and NATO members’ reluctance to extend open military cooperation for it, have already weakened cohesion within NATO. In the same vein, Trump had already withdrawn from more than 60 international organisations (including those related to UN) and treaties. And the aggressiveness displayed by Trump regime, as manifested in the case of Venezuela, Iran, etc., is unravelling, not the strength, but the weakness of declining US imperialism!
Trend Towards “De-dollarisation”
The most decisive factor that is going to dismantle US hegemony is the so called “de-dollarisation” or the impending shift away from dollar as the international currency. Dollar as world currency, reinforced by US Treasury and Bretton Woods system, has been one of the foundations of US hegemony. Obviously, the trend towards de-dollarisation is intertwined with the declining phase of US imperialism. Most of the members of SCO and BRICS (except India which is still clinging on to the apron strings of US) in their bilateral relations have already bypassed the dollar, and are using their own respective currencies. Iran’s announcement, in the context of US-Zionist aggression, that only ships paying in Yuan will be allowed to pass through Hormuz, is one of the biggest blows to the petro-dollar system itself. China-led initiatives for a BRICS currency, internationalisation of China’s Yuan in its digital version as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) beginning with cross border payments among members of RCEP, China’s bilateral payment mechanism with Saudi, UAE, and Iran, etc., are crucial in the de-dollarization process. And, in view of the decline in US hegemony and possibility of the emergence of new alternatives, now countries are rapidly reducing their dollar reserves and acquiring gold, Euro, Yuan, and other generally acceptable financial instruments such as bonds. At the same time, fully knowing that dollar as world currency forms the primary roots of US hegemony, and that a de-dollarisation implies the death-knell of a century of US dominance, Trump is now threatening ‘junior partners’ like India to move away from such steps.
Tilting of Imperialist Power Balance Towards China
Of course, while the US, with its Military-Industrial-Complex linked up with the financial oligarchy, still continues as world’s largest military machine, in terms of industrial production, trade and export of capital, China is much ahead of US. It is also successful to carve out “neocolonial spheres of influence”, while competing with the Anglo-Saxon imperialists. And in the case of all “frontier technologies” including, Digitization, AI and Biotechnology, China is ahead of both US and EU. With its cheap labour and powerful economic base and superiority in infrastructure, transport equipment, high speed rail, rare earth, defence and space technology and manufacturing, and control over their global supply chains, and above all with its professed “multipolarity”, China is set to emerge as a leader of the 21st century neoliberal world order. However, the emerging geopolitical configuration, economic and financial initiatives such as SCO, BRICS, RCEP, BRI, AIIB, etc., led by China, will not be a text copy of the two-centuries of Anglo-American model, though the essence is also neocolonial and neoliberal.
Task of the Communists
To be precise, the unfolding global situation is not going to be a repetition of the two centuries of Anglo-Saxon imperialist trajectory. Though China has transformed into a major imperialist power capable to challenge the US, it’s modus operandi is entirely different from that of Western imperialist bloc.
At this critical juncture, unless the emerging struggles and resistances of the people against imperialism and fascism are coordinated and led with a revolutionary political alternative, the crisis confronting humankind in manifold ways will intensify further, irrespective of whether US is replaced by another hegemon or another imperialist bloc, or a by a different multipolar world order. However, the crucial issue is the lack of a Communist Coordination at the international level capable to give ideological leadership to these emerging struggles from the standpoint of the working and oppressed peoples of the world. This enables ruling classes to divert and suppress the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles. In this context, ideological-political clarity on 21st century imperialism, neofascism and war and proper understanding on their operations at the global level are of utmost significance.
Viewed in this perspective, urgent bilateral and multilateral initiatives are required on the part of Communists and revolutionary parties to build up broad global anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist coordination and movement based on a concrete analysis of imperialism, fascism and war. This also calls for a genuine introspection on the part of Communists regarding their failures and setbacks in general.

The post Decline of US Hegemony, Shift in Imperialist Power Balance & Task of the Communists – P J James appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

As part of a renewed effort to build our international relations, the aim of which is to put Italian comrades in touch with the most advanced points of view and analysis developed by communists, socialists and anti-capitalists from all over the world, we publish a long interview with PJ James, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (ML) Red Star.

We believe that the extraordinary richness and analytical depth of his answers can offer useful insights for understanding the current situation of a country, India, whose developments will have a profound impact on the future of Asia, and therefore of the world.SS

The impression one gets, observing the evolution of the Indian political framework from the outside, is that of a rapid transformation of the country in an authoritarian direction, driven by the Sangh Parivar galaxy of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party is a filiation. How does this evolution manifest itself in the concrete life of the country?

Since 2014, under the BJP government led by Narendra Modi, India, the world’s most populous country, has been a typical example of 21st-century fascism or neofascism, i.e. fascism under neoliberalism which, of course, is not a true copy of classical fascism. The BJP, the world’s largest political party that leads the Indian regime, is a political tool of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the largest and longest-running fascist organization in the contemporary world. With its countless extensions and overseas affiliates such as the HSS (Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh), the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and others, which fall under the great umbrella of the “Sangh Parivar” (Family of the Sangh), the RSS has extended its tentacles to 156 countries around the world. While the centenary celebrations of the RSS are taking place in India with the full support of the Modi regime, it has reportedly reached the goal of 100,000 shakhas (sections) across India.

The founding of the RSS in 1925 was contemporary with the classical fascism associated with both Mussolini and Hitler, and maintained close ties with them throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In this sense, the RSS represents the only fascist organization in the world with a historical continuity that goes from the colonial period to the neocolonial-neoliberal phase of imperialism. With its ultimate goal of establishing a majority Brahmanical Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), the “cultural nationalism” of the RSS, since its very inception, has been the camouflage of extreme subservience to Britain, when India was its colony, and dependence on the United States in the period of post-war neocolonialism. In other words, the RSS was never part of the anti-colonial struggle and, after Britain’s formal withdrawal in 1947, the RSS conceded its absolute allegiance to US imperialism. Like its Zionist counterparts, the extreme right subservient to international monopoly capital represented by the RSS also exercises a flourishing lobbying activity in the United States, through the Republican-Hindu Coalition, Overseas Friends of BJP and other structures.

The demonstrations of RSS fascism in India are truly horrible. The entire political, economic, administrative, judicial, military, cultural and educational sphere of India is in the fascist grip of the RSS. And state power is not enough: much like Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts, the RSS thugs (also called Sanghi or Saffron) control street power in India. To be precise, the entire micro and macro sphere of Indian society today is under the firm grip of RSS fascism. When RSS thugs unleash terror, including lynching “untouchable” Dalits and minority religious communities, especially Muslims and Christians, law enforcement agencies often remain inert bystanders, when they do not openly support fascists. Political decisions are dictated by neoliberal centers (the IMF-World Bank-WTO trio) or taken in the offices of the RSS and in the boardrooms of the most corrupt monopoly billionaires, directly connected with the fascist regime through the most sordid constraints, while the parliament remains an empty shell or a mere spectator. While the Modi regime promotes India as the “Mother of Democracy”, freedom of speech and expression are restricted under the guise of national security and through draconian laws.

The government’s discriminatory policies against the Muslim minority, which, it should be remembered, in India numbers over two hundred million people, are becoming increasingly evident. How do these discriminations manifest themselves and what forms of contrast are developing on the part of the Indian democratic forces?

According to the most recent estimates, out of 1,470 million inhabitants in India, 202 million are Muslims and 32 million are Christians. According to Hindutva, or “political Hinduism,” which constitutes the central ideology of the RSS, the number one enemy of the Hindu nation is Muslims, the second is Christians, and the third is Communists. It is revealing that Golwalkar, the main leader of the RSS who took over the leadership in 1940, was at the time an admirer of the anti-Semitism of German fascism, including the Nazi method of “purifying” society of so-called “inferior races”, mainly Jews. And Golwalkar suggested the same Nazi method as a good example for India to solve the “Muslim question.” More to the point, while US-led imperialism has adopted Islamophobia (along with the usual anti-communism) as the ideological basis of post-Cold War neo-fascism, for the RSS Islamophobia has been the ideological foundation since colonial times.

Since 2014, when the RSS, through its political instrument BJP, took the reins of the Indian regime, the structure and character of the Indian Constitution have been systematically weakened through the introduction of religion as a criterion for Indian citizenship. For example, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019, for the first time, enshrined the selective position of denying Muslim migrants access to Indian citizenship. Now, after transforming the Electoral Commission into an appendage and a flexible instrument of the executive (Modi regime), millions of Muslim voters are being removed from the electoral rolls under the so-called Special Intensive Revision (SIR), thus systematically depriving them of the right to vote. In continuity with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 (destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya by a mob of Hindu activists, an event that triggered serious interreligious violence in India, Ed.), the Modi regime built the temple of Rama (the main Hindu deity) on the very site of the demolished mosque, and Modi, as prime minister, he assumed the role of high priest there. Now, across India, mosques and Muslim settlements are being demolished and erased with the support of the fascist regime and its police, while the judiciary remains silent. Those who protest are imprisoned using anti-sedition laws. And all the constitutional protections guaranteed to Muslims are progressively removed through stigmatization, deprivation of political rights and denial of citizenship. Although the protests emerge in various forms, the Modi regime represses them with extreme harshness, through repressive laws.

Our Party is at the forefront of ongoing campaigns and protests against RSS fascism in a number of ways. As part of this, on December 6, 2025 (the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid), we held a National Conference Against Fascism RSS together with organizations from Muslim and Dalit oppressed communities, and the Party, alongside its long-term strategic tasks, is taking up this struggle against fascism as an immediate task in today’s India.

How do you assess the impact of the recent economic and labour market reforms led by the Modi government on the urban and rural working classes?

India has about 650 million workers distributed between agriculture (41%), industry (26%) and services (33%). Unemployment is very high, even among young people (aged 18–30), and exceeds 10%. Of the total workforce, more than 94% fall into the informal/unorganized category. In addition, globalization, liberalization and privatization under neoliberal corporatism are pushing more and more workers towards precarization and undeclared work.

With the intensification of far-right neoliberal policies since 2014, Modi’s pro-monopoly regime, illicitly in cahoots with the most corrupt crony capitalists and junior corporate partners from imperialist countries, has systematically stripped the Indian working class of all the rights hard-won through decades of struggle. For example, since colonial times India had a series of labor laws guaranteeing minimum wage, 8-hour workday, employment guarantee and social security, which received further reinforcement under the developmentist state by Nehru, as part of the “welfare state” that US-led imperialism maintained as an ideological weapon against communism until the 1970s. However, the collapse of the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s and the subsequent adoption of neoliberalism, which conferred unlimited freedom on monopoly capital, also had repercussions in neocolonial India, leading to its complete integration into the flows of international finance capital.

One of the effects was the imposition by the Modi regime of the notorious labor reforms, in the form of four labor codes that completely replaced the 44 laws inherited from the “Nehruvian model.” This measure completely liberalized the Indian labor market according to IMF-World Bank directives, making India compliant with the requirements of “easy of doing business” and “favorable to investors” (i.e. multinationals). As a result of the internationalization of capital and the consequent new international division of labor, including the global relocation of production, India, with its inexhaustible labor force, has become one of the cheapest sources of production for multinational corporations and their subordinate Indian partners such as Adani, Ambani, Tata, Birla, etc. This has also led to an unprecedented extraction of surplus value and a super-exploitation of the Indian working class, increasingly driven towards unprotected undeclared work.

The effect of the rapid global progress of so-called “frontier technologies”, including digitalisation, robotisation and artificial intelligence, on the Indian working class is that it is becoming increasingly disorganised and submerged, with no distinction between urban and rural society. In addition, due to the corporatization of agriculture led by the WTO, which leads to the expropriation of farmland and the abandonment of the countryside, India is experiencing one of the largest internal migrations in history, in which more than 100 million workers without means of subsistence are forced to survive in the underground economic sectors and migrate to urban centers, crowding into ever-expanding slums. Of course, as a consequence of the increasing integration with the international financial economy, the productive sphere is also relatively stagnant in India while the speculative sphere thrives, leading to international reports that indicate India as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

How is the political framework described here affecting the survival of the caste system in Indian society? What movements are developing within it for the destruction of the caste system?

The caste system is a peculiarity of South Asia in general and, more specifically, of India. India’s caste system is the world’s most inhumane social institution, treating the vast majority of India’s working people as “subhuman,” meaning they are even below animals in terms of dignity. The system divides people into four castes: the Brahmins (the divine or priestly class, superior to all others, almost on a par with God), the Kshatriyas (the warrior class from which kings come and who must serve the Brahmins), the Shudra class (made up of merchants and businessmen) and the Dalits, who are the “untouchables” and are forced to serve the other castes through unpaid and bonded labor, always keeping an established distance from them. The Indian caste system is both the ideological and material basis of the fascism of the RSS, which identifies the Indian nation itself (Hindu nation) with the caste system. According to Manusmriti, the ideological reference text of the RSS, untouchable Dalits and women are subhuman and deprived of any human rights. Today, Dalits include agricultural workers, informal workers, manual waste removal workers, sewer workers, rag pickers, and other manual and unskilled workers. According to caste rules or the Manu code, Dalits cannot own land, wealth, education, art, literature and must remain on the margins of society.

With the emergence of the anti-caste movement and the sincere efforts of the greatest leader of the Dalits, Dr. Ambedkar, some principles and actions have been included in the Indian Constitution, such as caste-based reservation in public workplaces and the provision that untouchability is a criminal offense, etc. However, the caste system is still entrenched in Indian society and Dalits, with a few exceptions, are always on the margins of society, although the fascist RSS-BJP parties (and other non-fascist ruling class parties, including some left-wing parties) are trying in every way to co-opt and assimilate Dalit organizations and their leaders into the support base of Hindutva (i.e. political Hinduism) and to secure electoral advantages. Despite reservations, only about 1% of bureaucratic posts are still accessible to Dalits (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, as referred to in the Indian Constitution), while they make up almost 25% of the Indian population. Brahmins, on the other hand, who make up 3% of the population, occupy more than 60% of high-level bureaucratic posts and, including the Kshatriyas, the top 10% of the population hold 80% of top bureaucratic positions. Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Muslims, Christians and Dalits, who together make up about 90% of the population, have only 20% of government posts.

Of course, it is necessary to state self-critically that the Indian communists, from the right-wing reformists to the left-wing sectarians, have totally failed to approach the caste question in the correct Marxist perspective. Although he had only second-hand information about Indian society from colonial writings and documents, Marx had specifically mentioned the Indian caste system in almost all of his works, such as articles for the New York Daily Tribune, For the Critique of Political Economy, Capital, and, above all, in the Ethnological Notebooks, which, written between 1880 and 1882, they were compiled and edited by Lawrence Krader in 1972, in which Marx provided a detailed analysis of non-Western societies. Also with regard to his analysis of the “mode of production”, Marx believed that the “capitalist mode of production” he had elaborated for Europe was not applicable to non-European societies. According to Marx, “there is no general path of development prescribed for all nations.” It is in this context that Marx conceptualized the “Asian mode of production” (formerly “Eastern despotism”) with reference to Indian caste-marked society. And for more than a decade, from 1919, the Comintern also held this Marxist position with respect to non-European societies. In line with this, the Communist Party of India (ICC), founded in 1920, also held the same position, as evidenced in the Draft Platform for Action published in 1930, in which the CPI unambiguously stated that even minimal democracy in India requires the abolition of caste.

However, the Leningrad discussions of 1931 abandoned that Marxist understanding and, under pressure from Soviet Russia, neglected the specific and concrete realities of oppressed peoples in non-Western societies. On the contrary, under the pretext of an exclusive ideological focus on class struggle, they adopted a rigid and mechanistic approach, including a unilinear position on historical development, rejecting the socio-economic structures peculiar to non-Russian societies, including the Indian caste system and the Marxian conceptualization of the Asian mode of production, the solid basis of which, according to Marx, it is caste. When the Comintern began to propagate this Russian position in total disregard of the earlier Leninist slogan “proletarians and oppressed peoples of the world unite”, adopted at the Second Congress of the Comintern on Lenin’s initiative, Mao Zedong adopted a different approach, in line with the concrete reality of China, leading to the success of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. On the contrary, under the influence of the Soviet Union and the British Communist Party, instead of developing a class analysis appropriate to Indian caste-marked society and thus applying Marxism-Leninism to India’s concrete conditions, the CPI abandoned the Marxist caste approach and rejected Marx’s Asian mode of production, as outlined in its 1930 Draft Platform. As a result, the CPI also abandoned its own unity with the initiatives of the oppressed castes of Ambedkar, prompting it to refer to communist leaders as “Brahmin boys”.

This Eurocentric orientation on the part of the CPI, which alienated it from the vast masses of the oppressed castes that make up India’s working class, caused serious damage to the communist movement over time. The mechanical copying of Russian or European class analysis in the Indian context was one of the most serious mistakes. For example, in India the division of labor, the wage structure, the extraction of surplus value, the ownership of the means of production including land, etc., are determined by caste. More precisely, in India caste and class are inseparable, and any class analysis that ignores caste relations is mechanistic and meaningless. However, there are still Marxist scholars who maintain that caste is part of Indian feudalism, and others who believe that caste will disappear with the progress of modernity, i.e. that the material basis of caste will disappear with the end of feudal relations. The revisionist communist parties, which share or have shared power with the ruling class parties at the state level, regard caste as part of the superstructure. These mechanistic Marxists do not understand that caste is capable of traversing social systems and has even migrated to Silicon Valley. In many Indian higher education institutions, research centers and scientific institutions, untouchability, caste discrimination, killings and suicides of Dalit students and researchers are recurring news. Contrary to the predictions of mechanistic materialists, despite the “progress of modernity”, the caste is firmly seated on the throne of Indian scientific institutions.

It is in this context that, since 2011, our Party has adopted, in its program, the annihilation of the caste system as a strategic task of the People’s Democratic Revolution in India, as an indispensable prerequisite for the transition to socialism. It was the first communist party in India to do so. The Party Programme states: “The mechanistic approach that evaluates the Indian caste system as a superstructural phenomenon and the inability to understand how it is intertwined with the Indian social formation across both structure and superstructure, has rendered the Communist Party unable to lead the struggles of both the working class and the oppressed, and thus to establish its own leadership in the struggle for independence.” It is in this perspective that the Party, in 2011, took the initiative to form the Movement for the Abolition of Castes. The Party Program, updated at the 2022 Twelfth Congress, further states: “The People’s Democratic State will take concrete steps for the abolition of the inhumane caste system, eradicating all forms of untouchability, oppression and caste discrimination in all areas of life. All caste practices and reactionary institutions must be suppressed and those responsible for such crimes will be punished…”

To what extent do you think that the caste system also influences the internal life of democratic forces and the left?

It is evident that not only democratic forces, but also communists regularly practice the caste system and untouchability in their social and family relationships, including marriage. In India, people of the upper castes, especially Brahmins and Kshatriyas, use the caste surname as “social capital” in their relationships, as those who belong to the upper and elitist castes automatically receive veneration, respect, and preference in all spheres. Logically, those who belong to Dalits and lower castes usually do not reveal their caste for fear of the social ostracism they face.

For this reason, at the last congress of our Party a resolution was also passed to abolish the caste surnames of all members of the Central Committee, starting with me. And it is very revealing that a section that advocates the traditional and mechanistic approach to caste has left our party and formed another organization, which later became a member of the international ICOR network. There is no doubt that India is a society marked by castes in all their manifestations, and revolution in India is only possible through the breaking of caste barriers.

This year, India announced that it had surpassed Japan in terms of GDP, becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy. Despite the fact that it is fully among the so-called BRICS countries, competition with China and growing tensions with the Muslim world have pushed India to an increasingly close embrace, albeit amidst a thousand contradictions, with the US and Israel. Is there a widespread consensus in society for these choices?

Contrary to the claims of the Modi regime, according to the IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook, India’s nominal GDP is estimated at $4.15 trillion, placing it behind the United Kingdom ($4.26 trillion) and Japan ($4.38 trillion). As a result, Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy, while India is the sixth. It is said that statistics measured by experts are not experienced by people. This is true in the case of GDP measurements in India. Even if India surpasses Japan in terms of GDP, this would not make any qualitative difference to India’s population, the world’s most populous country with 1.470 million inhabitants. In fact, while Japan’s GDP per capita in 2025 was about $36,000 according to the IMF, India’s was only about $2,800. In fact, in the GDP per capita ranking, India’s position is among the lowest, ranking 146th in the world, far below other South Asian countries, although India is their “big brother”. In addition, 40% of India’s wealth produced in a year is absorbed by the richest 1% and corporate billionaires, including crony capitalists and corporate junior partners such as Adani and Ambani, making India one of the most unequal countries in the world. Of course, the caste system we were talking about earlier plays a dominant role in perpetuating this terrible inequality.

For example, according to the World Bank’s definition of “absolute poverty” (a situation in which people live on less than $2.15 a day), out of some 700 million “absolute poor” or “extremely poor” in the world, more than 50% are in India, leading many analysts to call India a “stronghold of global poverty.” The severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food essential for survival, safe drinking water, sanitation, health, housing, education and high infant mortality rates, is the very essence of the so-called “Mother of Democracy” promoted by the fascist regime in India. It is revealing that the neoliberal centers and the Western media are reluctant to expose these harsh realities, as the Indian ruling classes have opened every sector of the Indian economy to the uncontrolled plunder of imperialist capital. Moreover, for US-led imperialism, India is a launching pad for its manoeuvres against China and a junior strategic partner of the US in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific.

As for the China-led BRICS group, despite being a founding member, in line with the extreme servility of the RSS to the United States, the Modi regime constantly clings to the layers of Yankee imperialism. While China uses the BRICS as a tool against the US in the Sino-US contradictions, Modi has already given his firm assurance to Trump that India will not be part of the de-dollarization process initiated by China in the BRICS. Materially, India is incapable of taking an independent position on many international issues. For example, although the United States continues to be the world’s largest military machine, in the productive sphere and frontier technologies China’s state monopoly capitalism has already surpassed the United States. Through the “New Silk Road”, China has become the largest exporter of capital as well as the largest exporter of goods. India is a long way from China in this regard. For example, while more than 30% of global manufacturing output belongs to China, the predominantly speculation-driven U.S. economy has less than half of China’s industrial output. On the other hand, the so-called “rapidly developing” India has an industrial production equal to only about a tenth of that of China. In frontier technologies, including digitalization and artificial intelligence, India is totally dependent on China for hardware and the United States for software. In addition, India imports 90% of its crude oil. On the instructions of the United States, India had already stopped importing oil from Venezuela and Iran. Later the United States allowed the import from Russia. Later, sanctions were also imposed on Russian oil imports. Now Modi is appealing to the United States to ease sanctions on crude oil imports from other countries. As a result of all this, India’s domestic oil prices are skyrocketing and the Indian rupee, pegged to the dollar, has plummeted to an all-time low.

The undeclared alliance between Trump, Netanyahu and Modi has become even more evident in the context of the US-Zionist aggression against Iran. It is evident that the main ideological enemy of Hindutva is Islam. As a result, Islamophobia forms the solid ideological basis of the dangerous Evangelical-Zionist-Hindutva alliance (Trump-Netanyahu-Modi trio). As in the case of the US-India strategic alliance, the Modi regime maintains close military, infrastructure and trade treaties with Israel. And, as made evident by the Modi regime’s use of the Mossad’s notorious “Pegasus” spying software against political opponents in India, investments in the Israeli port of Haifa by Adani, Modi’s closest crony capitalist, etc., the neoliberal-neofascist period saw close integration between Zionist Israel and Hindutva India. And while many African-Asian and Latin American countries, including South Africa and Brazil, founding members of the BRICS, are strongly condemning the illegal US-Zionist aggression against Iran, the Modi regime has significantly avoided any statement of condemnation. This is a U-turn by India under RSS fascism, as India was a firm ally of the Palestinian people until the onset of neoliberalism in the post-Cold War period. Mahatma Gandhi, although a bourgeois liberal political leader and considered the Indian “Father of the Nation” (assassinated by Godse, a former member of the RSS and an element of the Sangh Parivar, in 1948), was firmly opposed to the US-UK imposition of a Zionist state on the Palestinians, even when the Stalin-led Soviet Union was the first country to recognize it. However, all this now belongs to history. Of course, opposition parties, communists and all democratic forces, including the CPI(ML) Red Star, are strongly opposing this betrayal of India’s previous pro-Palestinian stance by the Modi regime. At the same time, the fascist regime is repressing such stances in various ways.

In what forms is anti-imperialist resistance manifesting itself in your country, and what role do communists play within it?

In general, the anti-imperialist political orientation, despite the Indian regime’s heavy dependence on US imperialism, is weak today. When the RSS remained a staunch supporter of colonial Britain, the Indian people, led by many political forces with different ideological orientations, had a glorious history of anti-imperialist struggle. Following the US-led “decolonization” in the post-war period, colonialism turned into neo-colonialism and Britain was forced to transfer power to the Indian state, led by the Indian National Congress, then the main party of the ruling class. However, in the post-war phase of US-led neo-colonialism, and mainly because of the ideological-political delays suffered by the communists and their weakness in understanding the workings of “pernicious and insidious” neocolonialism, anti-imperialist sentiment has relatively weakened in India. Several parties of the depoliticized left have even become apologists for imperialism in the neoliberal-neofascist period. In this context, we consistently organize resistance struggles and campaigns against the neoliberal-neofascist and anti-worker and anti-peasant policies of the Modi regime, in line with the diktats of the IMF-World Bank-WTO trio and other US-led agencies.

However, the main issue in the left in general concerns the concrete understanding of neoliberal imperialism in relation to the internationalization of capital. In this regard, when the German MLPD party put forward its thesis of the “new imperialism” in 2015, as Deputy Principal Coordinator of ICOR (the MLPD is the main coordinator), the CPI (ML) Red Star intervened by denouncing this erroneous view. For example, according to the MLPD, in addition to the existing Anglo-Saxon imperialist powers, Japan, Russia and China, as well as 12 other countries such as India, Indonesia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina would also become imperialists. We challenged this hypothesis by publishing arguments and counter-arguments in a 200-page book entitled “Polemics on New Imperialism” in 2018. If one accepts the MLPD’s hypothesis of the “new imperialism”, this is tantamount to stating that more than 90% of the world’s population lives in imperialist countries. This would render irrelevant and meaningless the strategy of the Anti-imperialist People’s Democratic Revolution in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries, and the communist parties of these countries would have to be dissolved or revise their program directly towards the Socialist Revolution. This position of the MLPD represents a direct violation of the Leninist position that, in the present era, the world revolution comprises two currents, namely the Socialist Revolution in the imperialist countries and the People’s Democratic Revolution in the oppressed countries. On the basis of this theory, the MLPD has replaced the recognized slogan “Proletarians and oppressed peoples of the world, unite” with “Proletarians of the world, unite” on the ICOR website. After our intervention and following objections from other ICOR members, the Leninist slogan was reinstated, but the MLPD continued to support its own hypothesis of the “new imperialism”. As a result, despite being one of the founding members of ICOR, we are no longer active members of it. We have also already published many of our close debates with the MLPD. I mention this only to highlight the continuing and serious ideological differences among communists regarding the understanding and conceptualization of imperialism in the twenty-first century. Of course, this is a question that would require further study.

In recent years, the peasant movements and protests that have taken place in your country have had great visibility, even at the international level: what role has your party played in supporting them? What methods of action have you adopted?

From the beginning, the CPI(ML) Red Star has played an active role in the Peasants’ Movement against the three draconian agricultural laws, from their promulgation in September 2020 by the Modi government until their repeal in November 2021. The peasant sector of our Party, the All India Krantikari Kisan Sabha (All India Revolutionary Peasant Organization), was a component of the Peasants’ Movement that led the struggle.

When India was under the strictest lockdown during the Covid pandemic, it was under pressure from the WTO, more precisely under the provisions of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), that without any parliamentary discussion these agricultural laws were passed, as the deadline for compliance was September 30, 2020. As a result of the peasants’ struggle, the entire Capital Region was paralyzed.

The agricultural laws aimed to open up India’s vast agricultural sector to agribusiness multinationals, abolish public procurement, the minimum price of support (MSP) and, in the process, transform Indian agriculture into industrial agriculture, or what is termed the corporatization of agriculture. More precisely, these laws aimed to align Indian agriculture with the principles of free trade promoted by the WTO and imperialist powers such as the United States and the European Union and other international bodies. Thanks to unprecedented popular support, including that of Indians abroad, the fascist regime was forced to give in to the historic struggle of the peasants.

Your country has a rich and fruitful tradition of the left and communist. The state in which you reside, Kerala, continues to be a more “traditional” and reformist model of government of the Indian communist movement. How does your party stand with respect to this legacy? Do you think that the current fragmentation of the movement can, at least in part, be reduced to unity?

I will be brief on this complex issue, which nevertheless requires a thorough discussion. For reasons of time, I will limit myself to a brief exposition. The Indian communist movement has had a glorious tradition since its formation on October 17, 1920 in Tashkent, then part of the Soviet Union, with Mohamed Shafiq as its first secretary. Despite the great sacrifices of the communist cadres, part of the failure of the CPI to lead the anti-imperialist people’s democratic revolution, as already explained, is related to the inability to develop a concrete understanding of Indian society, particularly with regard to the caste issue.

In fact, the first communist government to come to power through elections was in Kerala, a federal state in India (of course, I must acknowledge the historic victory of the Italian Communist Party in the 1946 municipal elections in Italy). This victory of the CPI took place against the historical background of the long and heroic struggles against the caste system that preceded the communist movement in the Principality of Travancore (present-day Kerala) since the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, all the workers and masses of the oppressed castes in the state united compactly behind the CPI, leading it to its historic victory in the 1957 Kerala Assembly elections, following the formation of the language states in the Indian subcontinent in 1956.

Following direct intervention by the CIA (see the book “A Dangerous Place” written by Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. ambassador to India and to the UN) and the so-called “Liberation Struggle” led by the Roman Catholic Church against the CPI government, the Congress-led central government dissolved that state government in 1959. However, under the influence of the Brahmanical caste system combined with the CPI’s surrender to Khrushchevian revisionism and links with the then British Communist Party, the CPI government in Kerala failed to fulfil all its electoral promises to the people. For example, on the eve of the state elections, the CPI declared that the hundreds of thousands of hectares of plantations illegally held by British companies in Kerala, in violation of the Indian Constitution and the country’s sovereignty, would be nationalized once in power. But once in government, the CPI ignored this promise, revealing its neocolonial dependence. Similarly, because of its inherent casteism, the land taken from feudal landlords through state-sponsored land reforms was not distributed to the Dalits, the true cultivators of the land, although the communist slogan was “land to those who work it.”

Over time, both the CPI and the CPI (M) (which arose from the former in 1964) have completely degenerated to assume positions of the ruling class, now applying neoliberal policies with a “more royalist than king” attitude compared to the other parties of the ruling class. The current CPI(M)-led government of Kerala is a typical example of this. For example, it was Pinarayi Vijayan, the CPI’s Kerala prime minister, who led the opening ceremony of the London Stock Exchange, a symbol of global financial speculation, on May 17, 2019, as part of attracting foreign investment through “Masala Bonds.” Soon after coming to power in 2016, Pinarayi appointed Gita Gopinath, a neoliberal economist at Harvard, as his economic adviser, who later became chief economist and deputy managing director of the IMF, a neocolonial instrument in which the United States still retains veto power. He has even resorted to disqualified global consulting firms such as KPMG and PwC, defined as “architects of multinational tax avoidance”, to develop proposals aimed at turning Kerala into a “showcase” of neoliberal corporatism.

The CPI(ML), born in 1969 against the revisionism of both the CPI and the CPI(M), adopted a sectarian position, advocating armed struggle as the only valid form of struggle. He also advocated the “Chinese way” as the only revolutionary way for India and other Afro-Asian and Latin American countries. Completely ignoring the penetration of global capital into agriculture and the countryside and the changes in land relations, the CPI(ML) totally neglected the neocolonial transformation of post-war India and defined the country as semi-colonial and semi-feudal. He also initially supported the Maoist theory of the “Three Worlds”, which he called “Soviet social-imperialism” more dangerous than US imperialism — a theory formulated by Mao in early 1974, following the visits of Kissinger (three times) and Nixon to Beijing and the subsequent entry of mainland China into the UN and the Security Council instead of Taiwan.

All these ideological-political confusions led to numerous splits in the CPI (ML). The CPI(ML) Red Star is also one of their achievements. Born as the Central Reorganization Committee (CRC), we have started a long process of self-critical evaluation of the entire communist movement both internationally and in our country. We support Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as our ideology and reject “Maoism”, which we consider sectarian. We support the perspective that everything is constantly changing (or the law of impermanence that every phenomenon changes). According to our understanding, Marxism-Leninism must be developed through its concrete application to the specific conditions of countries, as Lenin asserted. We also believe that there is no “universal key” that applies to all societies. We are open to discussion and debate and want to learn from the experiences and opinions of others.

Some of our positions are available on our website: www.redstaronline.in, and on this basis we are constantly trying to connect with like-minded organizations. In India, from our experience, we have decided that unity or merger between parties is possible only on the basis of ideological-political unity on strategic issues such as imperialism, fascism, caste question, etc. Otherwise, we are in favour of united front activities based on a ‘common minimum programme’. At the same time, with regard to the immediate task of defeating fascism, tactical unity is also necessary with all anti-fascist forces, without however renouncing the long-term strategic interests of the communists, i.e. those of the working class and all the oppressed. (

What principles and objectives inspire your internationalist work?

In the current context there is no room for an International Communist Movement on the model of the former Comintern. There is no doubt that corporate finance capital, with its global reach, is unleashing a terrifying super-exploitation of the working class, unprecedented oppression of the world’s peoples, and hitherto unknown levels of plundering of nature. In the face of this, although the growing popular discontent manifests itself in various forms, the communists fail to have a coordinated initiative to adequately guide popular discontent, mainly due to ideological-political and organizational weaknesses. Despite this, the time has come to create an international platform capable of confronting imperialism and growing neo-fascism at the global level, even if the subjects participating in such a platform/forum/coordination may have different ideological orientations. At the same time, such coordinated efforts are also important to achieve greater ideological-political clarity on the functioning of finance capital both globally and in relation to the concrete conditions of countries under imperialism and neofascism in the 21st century.

At the same time, all paternalistic, supercilious and bureaucratic attitudes on the part of the various components participating in this coordination or platform must be consciously avoided. The imposition of the position or visions of one party on the others, or their presentation as the position of the entire forum, would make joint work difficult. While mutual consultation, exchange of views, and discussions on crucial issues are welcome, the final decision on country-specific issues should be left to that country’s parties or organizations. For example, the intertwined historical, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Europe are fundamentally different from those of Asia, Africa, or even Latin America. Ignorance or denial of this fact can lead to reductive views on complex issues concerning Trumpism, Zionism, the Palestinian question, RSS fascism and the class character of regimes such as India’s, the understanding of what we call “imperialism with Chinese characteristics”, or even the equating of imperialism with fascism, resistance struggles against fascism, and so on.

In general, it can be said that the immediate task of communists and the left is to achieve ideological-political clarity on imperialism and fascism in the twenty-first century in general, and in relation to the concrete conditions of different countries. From this perspective, Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary parties and organizations must initiate bilateral and multilateral discussions to build broad coordination and anti-imperialist and anti-fascist movements, accompanied by a self-criticism of the failures and setbacks suffered by communists, while the structural crisis of the world imperialist system is intensifying.

The post India: Anti Fascism and Social Struggles. Interview with P J James, General Secretary of CPI(ML) Redstar appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

Abandoning Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Mode of Production was a Fatal Mistake of Indian Communists!

P J James

Introduction

Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) was conceptualized by Marx mainly in his writings on Asia, more specifically India, during the 1850s. Through AMP, Marx pointed out the incompatibility of European mode of production (social formation) and class analysis in the case of non-Western/non-European societies like India. To be specific, the theory of AMP suggested how India is run by an ‘elite’, ‘despotic’ ruling clique that directly expropriates surplus from village communities. Marx also tried to explain the absence of European model of feudalism or land ownership in India, and instead pointed out how an elite state class always runs the regime or the ruling system with specific linkage between agriculture and manufacturing based on socio-cultural relations whose “solid basis” being the Indian Caste system.

Of course, the theory of AMP has been one of the most controversial and hotly debated Marxist conceptualizations. Academic and scholarly debates on AMP among a whole set of Leftist scholars and Marxist historians, and a large body of writings on the concept are there in the public domain. However, and very revealingly, the Communist parties in India, ranging from the revisionists to the sectarians, including their entire cadres, are totally insulated or immune from this discussions and debates regarding AMP, as they are often taking place in the form an intellectual discourse. As such, this note is not for adding any new information to the theory of AMP, rather it  intends to point out two inter-related issues, viz., a) the context for the altogether abandoning of AMP by International Communist Movement (ICM) and Indian Communists, and b) the consequent failure on the part of Communists in accomplishing the revolutionary tasks according to the concrete conditions of caste-ridden Indian society.

Marx and Engels’ observation on Indian Caste system and conceptualization of AMP, are spread across German Ideology (1845-46), Articles on India in New York Daily Tribune (1853-61), Marx-Engels Correspondence (1852-62), Economic Manuscripts (1857-1859), Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital Vol.1 (1867), and even in the 454-page Ethnological Notebooks (which Marx compiled during 1880-82, edited by Lawrence Krader and printed by International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam in 1974). In the theory of AMP, Marx and Engels distinguished Asiatic production from all other pre-capitalist production forms. In fact, in the beginning, Marx was also using the generally accepted term “Oriental Despotism” popularized by French philosopher Montesquieu, to refer to the ruling system in Asia. However, it was in conformity with his historical-materialistic interpretation of society that Marx later modified Oriental Despotism as the theory of AMP. This was based on his understanding and analysis of production/class relations (or Oriental Despotism) with respect to the unique Indian caste system that acted as their “solid foundation”. Accordingly, surplus labor always belongs to the despotic class or the ruling class (often identified with the elite, upper, Brahmin caste in India) which has exclusive rights to extract surplus from peasants and toiling people in the form of a “tribute”, and irrespective of the changes in regime or political power, “the structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched…”

The AMP that did not fit in with the ‘European feudal model’ was also in conformity with Marx’s rejection of a “unilinear” theory of history, as Marx never suggested a “master-key” or “general path of development” applicable to all societies. After Marx and Engels, the Second International (1889-1916), on account of its Eurocentric and unilinear orientation, and inability to grasp the concrete social relations in non-European societies like India and China, often collapsed into a European model of slavery and feudalism, and tended to ignore or sideline AMP. However, while acknowledging Marx’s AMP in most of his analyses including in “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are”, Lenin used it according to the concrete Russian situation through such terms as “semi-Asiatic” to characterize Russian monarchy and bureaucratic structure. Of course, till the completion of October Revolution, Lenin had little time to go into the details of Indian caste system and its link with Marx’s AMP. Other Russian leaders like Plekhanov had also embraced AMP, more or less in a way applicable to Russia. On the other hand, after the October Revolution, Lenin’s pre-occupation was with global anti-imperialist tasks in the epoch of imperialism. At the same time, Lenin’s modification of the earlier slogan, “Workers of the World, Unite” that was applicable to industrial capitalism (pre-monopoly capitalism) to “Workers and Oppressed Peoples of all Countries, Unite” at the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, was sufficient enough to include other oppressions including that from Indian caste system. For instance, Lenin’s emphasis that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded” in general highlighted the strategic significance of the struggle against caste, race, nationality, etc.

Leningrad Conference of 1931 and Banning of AMP from Comintern Documents

However, the 1920s witnessed intense debates within the Comintern about the nature of Asian societies, mainly regarding the course of Chinese Revolution, though the trend was firmly toward belittling relevance of the concept of the AMP. Soviet scholars have rejected AMP on the ground that the socio-economic formations of pre-capitalist Asia did not differ enough from those of feudal Europe to warrant special designation. Still the concept of AMP was there in the official documents, and during the 6^th Congress of the Comintern held in 1928, following the adoption of its “class against class” policy, the entire orientation was towards a disapproval of AMP as the Asian societies could be interpreted in class terms as “feudal” or “semi-feudal”. The understanding was that Eastern societies like China (and India) were essentially feudal and hence were amenable to the unilinear stage theory of Marxism as applicable to Europe. As such, everything began to be included in the broad framework of anti-colonial/anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggles without any emphasis on AMP, though the concept still prevailed in the deliberations.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Academic Conference held in Leningrad or the so-called Leningrad Discussions in 1931 which focused on AMP, took a qualitative turn in this regard. In a way, it culminated in standardizing ‘Soviet historical materialism’. Amid differences from minority sections, the strong Soviet-backed anti-AMP faction that got majority in the Conference argued that the use of AMP as a separate category is a deviation from ‘official’ Marxist class approach, and a negation of the 5-stage theory – primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism/communism – of historical development. This was contrary to Marx’s unequivocal position as stated by him in 1877 that there is “no general path of development prescribed for all nations”. Differing with self-professed Marxists who stood for a “general path”, which is European path in essence, in his Letter to Vera Zasulich in 1871 itself, Marx had clearly stated that his analysis of capitalist mode of production was limited to the countries of Western Europe. It was against this perspective of Marx himself that, the Leningrad Conference rejected AMP interpreting it as a non-Marxist artificial category in direct opposition to standardized European/Soviet framework. This Soviet intervention to remove AMP has prompted critics to allege the close similarity between AMP and “despotic”/bureaucratic nature of USSR, and anti-Soviet theorists of the time also used AMP against Soviet Union itself.

Following this, the Comintern which came under the control of Soviet Union completely rejected AMP and depicting it as obsolete, expunged the entire concept of AMP from official Marxism altogether, and superimposed European feudal/semi-feudal model on Asiatic societies since 1931. To put it differently, according to Comintern, the ‘specific features’ of “feudalism” attributed to Asian countries were secondary or unimportant and hence did not fundamentally change the basic mode of production in them. At that time when almost all parties upheld the rejection of AMP by Comintern, Mao Zedong, while accepting the general framework of Comintern, diverged from the 5-stage European-model unilinear orthodoxy and began focusing on formulating Marxist praxis according to Chinese conditions. For instance, while Comintern insisted on focusing the urban working class, led by Mao, the Communist Party of China (CPC) after rejecting the Eurocentric 5-stage model, mobilized the peasantry in rural base areas as the primary force of Revolution in tune with the concrete Chinese situation. Interestingly, questioning this Chinese line, the “Soviet Marxists” had even labelled Mao’s strategy as “oriental” error. Thus, bypassing the traditional standardised capitalist development that has to precede socialism as put forward by the then Comintern, the CPC led by Mao proposed “New Democratic Revolution” for moving towards socialism.

Discarding AMP as Tragic Failure of the Indian Communists

Obviously, unlike the stance taken by CPC under the leadership of Mao, which enabled China to successfully complete revolution in 1949, the Communist leadership in India being tied to  Soviet policies, and often depending on the advice from British Communist Party, miserably failed in applying Marxism-Leninism as suited to caste-ridden Indian society. Of course, despite these limitations and while facing severe colonial repression through a series of conspiracy cases during the 1920s, the Indian Communists, in general, were pursuing the Comintern line, and based on the Leninist slogan “Workers and Oppressed peoples, Unite”, moved forward building up class and mass organisations uniting both workers and the oppressed. After all, the solid ideological-material basis of Marx’s AMP being caste, the theory was more specific to India. However, as noted above, influenced by the main orientation of Soviet-led Comintern in the 1920s, there was no ideological-political intervention on the part of CPI to apply the concept of AMP in India.  At the same time, even without reference to AMP, the CPI was seeking to mobilize the toiling masses including the oppressed “outcastes” (pariahs) into a united front against British imperialism and feudalism.

It was in consonance with this orientation that the “Draft Platform of Action” prepared by CPI in 1930, resolutely put forward the complete abolition of the Indian caste system with special relevance to Indian social structure.  For instance, the Draft Platform of Action, in its Part 2, Subsection D, says: “Emancipation of the Pariahs and the Slaves:  As a result of the rule of British imperialism in our country there are still in existence millions of slaves and tens of millions of socially outcast working pariahs, who are deprived of all rights. British rule, the system of landlordism, the reactionary caste system, religious deceptions and all the slave and serf conditions of the past throttle the Indian people and stand in the way of its emancipation. They have led to the result that in India, in the twentieth century, there are still pariahs who have no right to meet with all their fellow men, drink from common wells, study in common schools, etc…  The CP of India calls upon all the pariahs to join in the united revolutionary front with all the workers of the country against British rule and landlordism. The CP of India calls upon all the pariahs not to give way to the tricks of the British and reactionary agents who try to split and set one against the other the toilers of our country. The CP of India fights for the complete abolition of slavery, the caste system and the caste inequality in all its forms (social, cultural, etc.).”

It was this Draft Platform of Action with its clear-cut perspective on “complete abolition of … caste system” that served as the foundational ideological framework for CPI’s alliance with Dr. B R Ambedkar in the 1930s. This was based on a shared focus on bringing together workers and India’s oppressed castes (“depressed classes”) in a “united revolutionary front” against colonial oppression and Indian caste system. Though Ambedkar was not a Communist, his Independent Labour Party formed in 1936 (the same year when Ambedkar released “Annihilation of Caste”) became a left force working together with CPI. For instance, the CPI-affiliated All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party jointly called a massive strike of over 100,000 workers in Bombay in 1938 to oppose the Trade Disputes Act of 1929. This merger of the politics of “caste and class” jointly addressed the demands of the workers and the need for abolition caste practices in factories. However, towards the end of the 1930s, the upper-caste orientation of the Communist leadership became pronounced, leading to serious ideological differences and accusations between Ambedkar and Indian Communists, the details (for instance, Communist leaders labelled Ambedkar a “stooge of imperialism” while Ambedkar branded Communists as ‘Brahmin boys”) of which are already available in the public domain.

In fact, the roots of this ideological difference between Indian Communists and Ambedkar lay deep in CPI’s withdrawal from its stand on “abolition of caste” as laid down in Draft Platform of Action in the context of the rejection of AMP by Comintern following 1931 Leningrad Conference. While the Comintern leadership was busy with the Anti-Fascist Struggle of the 1930s, there was a time-lag for the conclusions of the Leningrad Discussion, especially its ‘sectarian class approach’ to reach India and take on a dominant position among the Indian Communist leadership. To be precise, the worsening of CPI’s relation with Ambedkar was coterminous with the abandonment of the approach to “abolition of caste”, as laid down in the 1930 Draft Platform of Action. As already pointed out, following Comintern’s rejection of AMP and embrace of sectarian, unilinear “class only approach”, CPC led by Mao Zedong differed from it and took an independent position based on the concrete analysis of Chinese society. On the other hand, the CPI, on account of its heavy dependence on Comintern and Soviet advice, was unable to take an independent position on AMP, though the concept was of strategic importance and more suited to caste-ridden India than China.  While this operational independence enabled CPC to correct the mistakes made by Comintern and adapt Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions, due to CPI’s dependence on the then British communist leaders who interpreted Comintern guidelines, it failed to apply Marxism-Leninism according to the ground realities of caste-ridden India.

Conceptualization of Caste as Superstructural Phenomenon

As already stated, the context of the cordial relation between CPI and Ambedkar (symbolizing the strategic unity between workers and oppressed in the Indian context) during the 1930s was in accordance with the position in the 1930 Draft Platform of Action that unequivocally upheld “abolition of caste” as an integral part of the anti-imperialist People’s Democratic Revolution (PDR) in India. Conversely, this unity ended when the CPI embraced sectarian ‘caste-only’ approach following Comintern’s rejection of AMP, and the consequent freezing of the Draft Platform of Action by CPI. Thus, in gross disregard of India’s historical caste-class integration or inseparable link between caste and class, the mechanical and reductionist approach to caste as a superstructural phenomenon started dominating the Indian Communist movement since the early 1940s. Of course, though the usual condemnation of caste-oppression, caste-discrimination and caste atrocities had been there, the CPI documents kept a revealing silence on annihilation or abolition of the caste system. No doubt, this was a serious mistake that did immense damage to the cause of Indian revolution.

Meanwhile, rejection of AMP by Comintern and consequent CPI’s move away from its earlier approach to Caste, logically led the Communist leadership since the beginning of 1940s, to conceptualise caste as part of the superstructure, or as a remnant of pre-capitalist feudal relations, and hence secondary to class struggle. Put it differently, identification of caste with cultural superstructure rather than political-economic base also resulted in a mechanical text-copying of the European class analysis to India, which Marx himself had said in the 1870s as inapplicable to non-European societies like India. For instance, if we make a concrete analysis of the Indian society based on objective facts, it is easy to comprehend how ownership of wealth including land and means of production, division of labour, wage structure, surplus value extraction and profit accumulation together with cultural and political power, etc., are essentially caste-based. There are sections who still argue that caste solely belongs to (or a legacy of) Indian feudalism. Hence, they argue that the march of modernity and advancement of capitalism will lead to a withering away of caste altogether. Of course, then the question comes how caste is safely and comfortably sitting on the throne of modern industry, and in scientific and higher institutions of learning?

Thus, caste can easily cut across both economic base and cultural superstructure, it can cut through religions, can migrate from one socio-economic system to another or from feudalism to capitalism and even penetrate into modern science and technology, and even capable to migrate to Silicon Valley, the so-called citadel of modern technology. This inherent laws of motion of Indian Caste system, where both caste and class are inseparable and interpenetrating, point to a qualitatively different social formation (mode of production) compared to Western societies, where people belonging to the oppressed and lower castes form the real working class of India. It’s the greatness of Marx that, in spite of lacking personal and direct experience, or any first-hand information, and merely based on historical facts and secondary data from colonial documents and writings, he could clearly realise that the mode of production conceptualised by him in the context of Europe, was not applicable to India. And, it is in this context that he put forward Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) with caste as its solid foundation. This ideological-theoretical breakthrough regarding India proposed by Marx, was totally abandoned by Communists leading to grave political setbacks suffered by them in course of time.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset, instead of adding any new theoretical formulation on AMP, the scope of this note is limited to bring to the attention of all genuine Communists the immense damage inflicted on them due to the abandonment of Marx’s AMP and consequent neglect of the task of annihilating Caste, the most inhuman social institution in human history. Contrary to the perspectives of both mechanical materialists and sectarians that economic transformation coupled with scientific-technological advancement will weaken Indian caste system, untouchability and casteism in all their manifestations are flourishing without any let up. On the other hand, in continuation of the mechanical approach towards caste and ideological antagonism towards Ambedkar, the Communist parties themselves have alienated from the caste-oppressed people who comprise vast majority of the real proletarians of India. Further, if the Communists and the oppressed caste-movement led by Ambedkar that prevailed in the 1930s, had unitedly proceeded ahead as a strategic united front of working class and the oppressed in consonance with theory of Marx’s AMP, the history of India would have been different now.

Today this issue becomes all the more significant in the fascist context when RSS, world’s largest and longest-running fascist organisation, is now engaged in a maddening pace towards its ultimate goal of establishing a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. While Muslims are its declared enemy number one (as identified by Golwalkar), the ideological basis of Indian fascism is “Casteism” as laid down in Manusmriti, according to which the most oppressed Dalits are subhuman. Regarding this, it was Ambedkar who resolutely came forward uncompromisingly resisting Hindutva and its ideological foundation. As exemplified through such historic moves and initiatives as burning of Manusmriti on 25 December 1927, publishing of “Annihilation of Caste” in 1936, drafting of Indian Constitution against which RSS proposed Manusmriti, proposing the Hindu Code Bill for which RSS burned Ambedkar’s effigy along with that of Nehru on 12 December 1949, and so on, Ambedkar stands head and shoulders above everyone as the undisputed ideological enemy of casteism and Hindutva. As such, it is high time on the part of Communists to have a self-critical evaluation of their ideological clashes with Ambedkar. At this critical juncture, and to be precise, for taking up both the strategic task of caste-class annihilation, and immediate duty of overcoming RSS fascism, it is the solemn task of Communist revolutionaries in India to have an objective evaluation on the inherent ideological-political convergence between Marx’s AMP and Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, as a precursor for relentless ideological-political offensive in the days ahead.

[This Article is an Edited Version of the Speech delivered in the Seminar on “Asiatic Mode of Production” Organised by Proletarian Samaran Team, Tamil Nadu in Chennai, on 15 February 2026]

The post Abandoning Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Mode of Production was a Fatal Mistake of Indian Communists! – P J James appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

In Noida, Uttar Pradesh, several migrant workers who had come from West Bengal had been living for a long time. Among them were Sonali Bibi and Sweety Bibi from Birbhum district of West Bengal. Hearing them converse in the Bengali language, the Uttar Pradesh police detained them under the “Drive Out Bangladeshis” campaign. Pregnant Sonali, along with her husband Danish and their eight-year-old son, as well as Sweety Bibi and her two minor children, were handed over by the central government to the Border Security Force (BSF). Despite repeated protests by these people, the BSF pushed them back across the West Bengal–Bangladesh border and sent them into Bangladesh.

In this manner, many Indian citizens have been forcibly pushed into Bangladesh and continue to be pushed out. The Modi government ran into difficulty only when a Bangladeshi court identified them as Indian citizens and sent them to jail. Meanwhile, there was considerable uproar in West Bengal over this issue. On the appeal filed by Sonali Bibi’s father, Bhodu Sheikh, seeking the return of Sonali, her son, and her husband to India, the Calcutta High Court expressed a positive opinion, stating that Sonali is an Indian citizen and pregnant, and directed the central government to immediately make arrangements to bring her back to India. However, the Modi government stood by its decision, declared Sonali to be Bangladeshi, and refused to bring her back.

The Calcutta High Court then initiated contempt proceedings against the central government and once again ordered it to bring Sonali back from Bangladesh. Even then, the Modi government did nothing, treating the matter as an issue of prestige. The case then went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court directed the central government to secure the release of the pregnant Sonali Bibi from a Bangladeshi jail, bring her back to India, and ensure proper medical treatment for her.

One of Sonali’s relatives went to Bangladesh and tried to arrange bail for Sonali Bibi and Sweety Bibi. On humanitarian grounds, a Bangladeshi court granted bail to Sonali Bibi. However, her husband Danish, Sweety Bibi, and Sweety’s two minor children have still not been able to leave Bangladesh. After Sonali Bibi and her eight-year-old child returned, the West Bengal government ensured proper medical treatment for her. Sonali is very happy to be reunited with her family in Birbhum, but she remains deeply worried because her husband Danish and Sweety Bibi are still stranded in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, during the SIR process in Birbhum, since Sonali Bibi’s father Bhodu Sheikh’s name appeared in the 2003 voter list, Sonali’s name has also been updated in the new SIR list.

The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the self-proclaimed new “Hindu Hriday Samrat” Yogi Adityanath, has now resolved to outdo Assam in promoting this new model of Hindu Rashtra. During the CAA/NRC period in Assam, under labels such as “illegal migrant,” “infiltrator,” or “stateless foreigner,” people were arrested on mere suspicion, incarcerated in detention camps on a massive scale, tortured and harassed, and driven to the point of suicide. Now, under Yogi Adityanath’s leadership, Uttar Pradesh is moving in the same direction.

Proof of this is the recent order issued by the Uttar Pradesh government to all district collectors, instructing them to identify infiltrators, illegal migrants, and foreigners in their districts and to set up temporary detention centers in every district. Identified “illegal migrants/foreigners” are to be sent to these centers and then deported as per central government directions. At present, in districts such as Bahraich, Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Mirzapur, Aligarh, and others, the Uttar Pradesh police are engaged in a witch-hunt-like search for so-called Bangladeshi or Rohingya infiltrators. In this campaign, the UP police are particularly targeting Muslims, especially Bengali-speaking Muslims from West Bengal.

For now, the lapdog media has no other work except hunting for “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingyas” in Uttar Pradesh and using this as a pretext to spread hatred and division. Switch on the TV and one is confronted with hateful headlines such as: “Yogi’s Strike, Panic Among Infiltrators” or “Bulldozer Baba’s Terror, Wrath on Bangladeshi Infiltrators,” and so on. This endless hatred claimed the life of Ramnarayan Baghel, a Dalit migrant worker from Chhattisgarh who had gone to Kerala in search of work. In Palakkad district, saffron goons beat him so brutally on the suspicion of being Bangladeshi that he died. According to the doctors who conducted the post-mortem, they had never seen such brutality—every part of his body was broken. What is more, even in supposedly progressive Kerala, when saffron goons demanded proof of Indian citizenship and beat Ramnarayan, he was not speaking Bengali but Hindi-mixed Chhattisgarhi. Yet, the RSS goons killed him. Similarly, in Maharashtra, Odisha, and several other states, Muslim migrant workers from West Bengal have been killed by saffron gangs in this storm of hatred.

After Bihar, among the 12 states where the Election Commission has implemented SIR, Uttar Pradesh stands out as the state with the largest number of voters in the country. The real objective of SIR is not to identify fake voters but to identify migrant workers/citizens, strip them of their voting and civic rights, and promptly send them to detention centers for deportation—this is abundantly clear from the actions of the Uttar Pradesh government. The Chief Minister has justified this in the name of maintaining law and order, communal harmony, and above all “national security.”

According to the latest SIR figures from these 12 states, Uttar Pradesh has a total of 154 million voters. In the SIR process, the highest number of names deleted from the voter lists anywhere in the country—28.9 million—has been in Uttar Pradesh. Yogi Adityanath and his administrative officials surely know that the United Nations has classified Rohingya refugees among the most persecuted communities and has urged governments worldwide to take special measures for their protection. In any case, the number of Rohingya refugees in India is very small; most are in Bangladesh.

As long as the Awami League under Sheikh Hasina was in power in Bangladesh, the fascist Sangh Parivar had no concern about “Bangladeshi infiltrators,” because the Modi government enjoyed cordial relations with the Hasina government. But circumstances have changed. Since Hasina was ousted from power in Bangladesh and granted diplomatic asylum by the Indian government, the Sangh Parivar and its blind followers have been projecting infiltrators—especially Bangladeshi or Rohingya Muslims—as the cause of all problems in the country. In BJP-ruled double-engine states such as Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Delhi, Bihar, and Assam, all these maneuvers are driven by Islamophobia—hatred toward Muslims and an attempt to isolate them.

In Uttar Pradesh, under recent government instructions, 17 municipal corporations have been asked to identify Bangladeshi and Rohingya workers employed alongside sanitation workers and hand over lists to the police. The Yogi government has even abolished the Christmas holiday on December 25.

While this orgy of hatred and division is underway in Uttar Pradesh, the state ranks very low on the Human Development Index according to official data. Unemployment and poverty are at their peak. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, atrocities against Dalits/oppressed communities, women, and minorities are the highest in the state. Demolishing the homes of the poor, workers, and minorities with bulldozers; allowing upper-caste strongmen’s hooliganism to reach its zenith; and killing oppressed people and minorities in fake encounters and declaring the state “crime-free”—these are the Uttar Pradesh government’s crowning achievements. But none of this is visible to the petty journalists of the corporate-controlled lapdog media who survive on crumbs while worshipping Bulldozer Baba daily.

In Assam, the state government justified detention centers as necessary for securing the northeastern borders. But Uttar Pradesh shares an international border with only one country—Nepal. So which country is Uttar Pradesh threatened by? Relations with Nepal are stable, and Nepali citizens in Uttar Pradesh are not being harassed by saffron goons or the state government. Then why this hateful campaign against Bengali-speaking working people in Uttar Pradesh?

Across all BJP-ruled states, hateful and violent campaigns against Muslims and, more recently, Christians are intrinsic to their Hindu Rashtra project. On December 23, in Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, the police forcibly picked up 120 elderly Muslims—many of them women—who had just returned from the Haj pilgrimage, from their homes at midnight, detained them all day, and subjected them to humiliating interrogation. The Muslim community in Raipur protested against this. Similarly, in every BJP-ruled state, there is a hunt for infiltrators—especially Bengali-speakers—leading to indiscriminate arrests and harassment.

In reality, this violent campaign to crush “infiltrators” under the guise of SIR has a larger objective: to conquer Bengal. With this aim, on the occasion of the RSS completing 100 years, its chief Mohan Bhagwat organized several conferences in Bengal, including public recitations of the Gita. According to him, everyone residing in India is Hindu, and there is no need to declare a Hindu Rashtra—India already is one. Mohan Bhagwat, who reveres Hitler, has even claimed that this time there will be “change” in Bengal and a pro–Hindu Rashtra government will be formed. That is why the political arm of the Sangh Parivar, the BJP, is aggressively targeting Bengali-speaking working people.

Among BJP Chief Ministers, there is intense competition over who can run the most violent Islamophobic campaign. In this race are Himanta Biswa Sarma, Devendra Fadnavis, Pushkar Dhami, Bhajan Lal Sharma, and Mohan Yadav. Vishnu Deo Sai is busy proving himself a “pure Sanatani,” while Rekha Gupta has mastered hate speech. And Yogi Adityanath is running just behind Modi in the race to become the supreme “Hindu Hriday Samrat.” Therefore, even after the Bengal elections, the fascist Sangh Parivar’s primary weapons—hatred, fear, and division—will continue unabated, whether in Uttar Pradesh or in whichever state faces the next election.

The post Will forcibly pushing Indian citizens like Sonali Bibi to Bangladesh turn Modi–Yogi’s dream of a Hindu Rashtra into reality? — Tuhin appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

Modi regime’s role as a corporate-facilitator together with its maddening pace towards a majoritarian Hindu Rashtra, is steadily assuming unprecedented far-right political-economic dimensions. A notable move in this direction, which is also perfectly in tune with the ‘cultural nationalism’ of RSS, has been the anti-Federal move towards simultaneous elections to Parliament and State Assemblies (also called “One Nation One Election” – ONOE). As is obvious, the objective behind this is the establishment of a unitary, highly centralised and majoritarian fascist regime and total demolition of whatever left of Federalism in the Indian Constitution. And, it is also inseparable from the ongoing efforts to super-impose one culture, one religion, one language, one police, and so on, at the pan-Indian level.

Along with opposition parties, all democratic forces and well-meaning people from all walks of life have come up against this fascist move, even as the ruling regime has justified simultaneous elections in terms of saving in cost and for avoidance of disruptions in development work due to elections. In September 2023, the government had appointed a High Level Committee headed by Ramnath Kovind, former President of India, to examine the whole issue of holding simultaneous elections for the Lok Sabha, State Legislative Assemblies and Local Bodies of all States. And, in spite of serious objections, the Modi government has introduced the 129th Amendment Bill for changing the basic character of the Constitution in relation to this. Now, this Bill which was introduced in Lok Sabha in December 2024, is referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for scrutiny.

Revealingly, two prominent neoliberal economists have recently appeared before the JPC in the guise of sharing valuable insights regarding ONOE. Of the two, one is the renowned Gita Gopinath, a naturalized American citizen. As a prominent American economist from Harvard, which plays a leading ideological role in shaping global neoliberal governance, Gita became the Chief Economist and later the First Deputy Managing Director of IMF, the key promoter of neoliberal corporatism, the hallmark of which is unfettered cross-border mobility of corporate capital through liberalisation/deregulation, privatization and globalisation. Revealingly, till her appointment as Chief Economist of IMF, during 2016-18, Gita was the Honorary Economic Advisor to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, leader of the depoliticised CPI (M). She was also a Member of the Eminent Persons Advisory Group on G-20 Matters for India’s Ministry of Finance. Gita’s appearance before the JPC, as the former IMF Deputy Managing Director, and sharing of her views ardently supporting ONOE, have already got much attention from Godi media.

The second expert, who appeared before JPC and shared his positive views on ONOE along with Gita, was Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) since 2022, with the rank of Secretary, Government of India. Though a neoliberal economist by profession, Sanyal is widely known as a Sangh Parivar ideologue, especially as a staunch advocate of “new history writing”, a major trend in 21st century neofascism at a global level. As such, while remaining an EAC-PM member, Sanyal’s main work is linked with the ongoing majoritarian and Islamophobic campaign to create a new Hindutva-oriented history. Many concerned scholars and historians have already exposed his affinity to majoritarian prejudices, accused him of “historical distortion”, lack of scholarly rigor, depth,”contextual understanding, and even called his conclusions as “bastardized form of early colonial interpretations”. However, as usual, the corporate -saffron media have no qualms in eulogising him and highlighting his appearance to JPC along with Gita Gopinath.

As representatives of neoliberal corporatism, the wholehearted support of far-right experts like Gita and Sanyal to ONOE serves an ideological function too. Of course, already being integrated with the Hindutva bandwagon, Sanyal’s support to ONOE is perfectly in tune with his anti-federal, unitary, and majoritarian Hindutva orientation. On the other hand, Gita’s solidarity with simultaneous indian elections is intertwined with IMF’s prescription on downsizing of government and rollback of state expenditures. At a time when horrific proportions of public funds are appropriated by corporates and crony capitalists, and even as trillions of rupees worth corporate tax exemptions are available to them, Gita’s main concern is with the expenditures (for Lok Sabha election, average total expenditure by Election Commission, Parties and candidates is estimated at around ₹50000 crore in India) required for separate elections. Another argument in favour of ONOE by Gita is that separate elections will disrupt the development effort which, amid the rhetoric of Viksit Bharat, is very appealing to Indian rulers.

As a matter of fact, if Gita Gopinath, as an American citizen and as a former IMF expert, is that much concerned about election expenditures, then she should have raised this issue before appropriate US bodies or in front of US voters. For, as already noted, when the Indian parliament election requires ₹50000, US presidential election alone needs an expenditure of ₹ 135,000 crore ($15 billion dollar). Further, US presidential election and State elections are separate and take place at different levels, and the entire election proces including constitutional procedures and funding, etc., amply reflect significant powers for federal states, which have different sets of rules and regulations. All these make American election expenditures several times larger than that of India, the most populous country in the world. Obviously, US imperialism, the supreme neocolonial arbiter does not require Gita Gopinath like experts’ advice in this regard. Same was the case when GST was super- imposed over India, the blueprint of which was prepared by a whole a set of US agencies. When GST that took away the federal tax powers of States in India, no neoliberal expert has come forward with a similar GST proposal for the US.

To be precise, the direct involvement of pro-corporate neoliberal experts in the Hindutva fascist project of demolishing Indian federal structure emanates from global corporate capital’s need of a unified Indian market in gross disregard of the complexities and diversities of multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious India. In the specific case of India, in accomplishing this task, Gita Gopinath like Indian-born American experts act as bridge between neoliberal imperialism and Indian ruling regime, it’s faithful lackey.

Postscript : In this context, the adorable initiative on the part of a group of leading International Experts including Nobel Laureate, renowned economists, policy experts, and others, in writing an Open Letter addressed to Modi government on MGNREGA repeal, should be duly acknowledged. Raising their concerns on demolishing MGNREGA, world’s largest rights-based public employment programme, and replacing it with VB-G RAM G as a tool of Central regime that puts the financial burden on States, these world-famous experts, mainly from US and EU, have characterised the move as a “structural sabotage” and a “historic error”. While upholding the heartwarming response of these concerned scholars and experts, as Indian citizens, it is our task to expose the pro-corporate and anti-people essence of neoliberal think-tanks.

The post Role of Neoliberal Experts in Blending Corporatism with Hindutva Fascism – P J James appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

On the Immediate Task of Building up the All India People’s Movement against RSS Fascism!

(Synopsis of Keynote Speech at the Anti-Fascist Convention on 6 December 2025)

Introduction

6th December, is the day when Sangh Parivar goons demolished the Babri Masjid 33 years ago, i.e., on 6 December 1992. 6th December is the death anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar too, and is observed as “Mahaparinirvan Diwas” (a term borrowed from Buddhism) to honour the great contributions of Dr. Ambedkar as the chief architect of Indian Constitution. True, Ambedkar is widely considered as the “greatest ideological enemy” of RSS and its Hindu Rashtra agenda as codified in Manusmriti (Code of Manu) which Ambedkar burned on 25 December 1927. And, when the Constituent Assembly adopted the Indian Constitution on 26 November 1949, RSS even proposed Manusmriti, which identified Dalits and Women as subhuman, as India’s Constitution.

Since the time of its founding on 27 September 1925, the RSS has been the proponent of “Sanatan Dharma” (as laid down in Manusmriti) that is synonymous with Indian Caste system, the most inhuman social institution in history. The “cultural nationalism” of RSS is rooted in Brahmanical “Sanatan Dharma”. Golwalkar, while interpreting “Hindu Nation” as synonymous with “Casteism” also defined “Hindus as a nation unto themselves”. As such, he also identified Muslims, Christians and Communists as internal enemies, with particular emphasis on Muslims as enemy number one. And, together with its genocidal hatred towards Muslims, the RSS totally dissociated from the Indian Independence struggle. Thus, the “cultural nationalism” of RSS has been a camouflage for its servility to British colonialism and betrayal of Indian independence struggle. Therefore, “cultural nationalism” of RSS is the antithesis of oppressed people’s “nationalism”, which is invariably anti-colonial and anti-imperialist in essence. Of course, before its proposal of Manusmriti as Constitution, the RSS was banned for some time following the assassination of Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi by Godse in 1948. Since then, for almost two decades, i.e., till the 1970s, the RSS kept more or less a low profile.

RSS’ Sudden Shot Up Since the 1970s

Historically, fascist forces are adept in transforming crises into opportunities, and this is applicable to RSS also. Thus, the 1970s that witnessed turbulent political-economic crisis leading to the abandonment of “welfare state” and embrace of neoliberalism at a global level, had its repercussions in India too, leading to the declaration of Emergency in June 1975. This turned out to be a godsend opportunity for RSS to come to the political limelight from more than two decades of its relative obscurity. Taking advantage of the weakness of progressive-democratic forces, the RSS came to lead the anti-Emergency struggle that also enabled its pan-Indian expansion. After the Emergency, the RSS replaced Jan Sangh with BJP as its political tool in 1980. Today, the BJP has become the world’s biggest political party, whose ideological fountainhead is RSS, the largest and longest-running fascist organisation in the world.

Since the 1980s, the RSS had to traverse a series of Hindutva milestones marked by Ram Janmabhoomi movement that began in 1984, Shilanyas of 1989, demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, ascendance of the first BJP government led by Vajpayee by the turn of the 21st century, 2002 Gujarat Pogrom on Muslims, and a number of riots (such as Nellie pogrom on Bengali Muslims, 1983; Anti-Sikh violence in Delhi, 1984; Bhagalpur massacre of Muslims, 1989; Kandhamal violence against Christians, 2008; etc.) targeted against minorities, more frequently against Muslims, finally culminating in the coming of Modi regime since 2014. And now under Modi 3.0, RSS’ fascist hold over the Indian state power is of unimaginable proportions. Today, RSS has its tentacles over the entire micro and macro spheres of Indian society. Using the BJP regime, it has systematically penetrated into all institutions of power including civil administration, military, judiciary, police, culture, education and even scientific research. Affiliated organisations or wings of RSS, which come under the umbrella Sangh Parivar, have spread across trade union, organisations of women, students, youth, tribals, medical service, media, legal profession, religion, industry, agriculture, finance, rural mission, cooperative societies and even charity and philanthropy. As such, though not a registered organisation and accountable to none, leading hundreds of secret and open organisations including innumerable overseas extensions and affiliates, RSS is now in a maddening pace towards the establishment of an intolerant, majoritarian, theocratic Hindu Rashtra.

Multi-Dimensional Political-Economic, Social and Cultural Impact of RSS Fascism

Obviously, with its far-right, pro-corporate political-economic agenda, coupled with Manuvadi and Islamophobic “cultural nationalism” as ideological basis, the brunt of the multifaceted fascist oppression unleashed by RSS-BJP is borne by common people comprising the super-exploited workers, caste-oppressed Dalits, Adivasis, Women and above all Minorities, especially, Muslims. While Modi himself is claiming that India is on the verge of becoming world’s third largest economy in his third term, according to the latest World Hunger Index, India’s rank is 105th out of 127 countries. With more than half of the world’s “extreme poor” (or “absolute poor”) people, India has become a “citadel of global poverty” and one of the most unequal countries of the world now. While 40% of the country’s wealth is appropriated by the top one percent of the superrich comprising crony capitalists like Adani and Ambani, the bottom 50% of the population holds only 3% of the country’s wealth. Parliament remains a spectator under ‘crony capitalism’ – i.e., close nexus between most corrupt capitalists and the regime that is transformed as a ‘corporate-facilitator’ – while policy decisions are taken in corporate board rooms or in RSS headquarters. Public assets and national wealth are systematically sold out to crony capitalists while laws pertaining to tax, labour and environment are liberalised for facilitating corporate plunder. More than 90% of the Indian working class now belongs to the category of informal or unorganised workers and are condemned to subsist as bonded labourers or contract workers, devoid of basic democratic rights. The draconian pro-corporate Farm Laws and Labour Codes were designed to deny peasants and workers their hard-earned rights, as they are increasingly driven to landlessness, unemployment, poverty and destitution.

Since 2014, concerted efforts have been in full swing to alter the basic structure and character of the Constitution, including undermining of Federalism, which Golwalkar interpreted as a “poisonous seed” of disruption. Many of the moves in this direction were aimed at the establishment of a unitary, majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. For instance, the superimposition of GST in 2017 undermined the economic basis of federalism in India. Islamophobic undertones of Abrogation of Article 370 that took away the special status of J&K, the CAA that incorporated religion as a criterion of citizenship, prime minister himself leading the consecration ceremony of Ram Mandir constructed at the very site of demolished Babri Masjid, Waqf Act, move towards Uniform Civil Code and so on, are self-evident. And, the ongoing SIR is functioning as the re-incarnation of CAA and NRC, specially constituted for disenfranchising Muslims. For instance, according to reports, 24.7 lakh Muslims alone were removed from voter’s list through Bihar SIR. Move towards simultaneous elections to Parliament and Assemblies, and proposals like ‘one nation, one police’, ‘one nation, one language’, etc., are all aimed at altering the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious character of India.

Meanwhile, by incorporating upper caste-oriented EWS into the Constitution through 103rd Constitutional Amendment, caste-based reservation is also undermined or diluted. On the one hand, RSS is trying to deconstruct various caste organisations by depoliticising and disorienting them, while on the other, a process of integrating the oppressed castes into the Hindutva bandwagon is also going on, thereby diverting attention from the badly needed Caste Census. A process of saffronisation, Sanskritisation and corporatisation of the entire education is taking place through the NEP. As part of it, Sanskrit, already a ‘dead’ language, and Hindi are superimposed on other linguistic nationalities in disregard of their cultural traditions. In tune with the Hindutva fascist agenda, vicious moves are there to re-write and falsify history through “new history writing”. Democratic and scientific thinking among the younger generation is obstructed through eulogization of Brahmanical, Casteist, Sanatan traditions, obscurantism, superstition and pseudoscience. Rejection of all values of modernity such as rational and critical thinking, worship of heroism and elitism, etc., have become the new normal. Those who question the fascist regime, or say their opinion freely, or express dissent and disagreement, are treated as anti-nationals and traitors and are subjected to draconian laws.

Building up the Broadest Anti-fascist Movement as the Immediate Task

In this horrific situation, it is the solemn task of all democratic forces and peace-loving people to come forward for building up the broadest possible anti-fascist front for resisting and overcoming the horrors of RSS fascism. Obviously, the political-economic basis of 21st century fascism at the global level is far-right, neoliberal-corporatism, the victims of which are the working and oppressed peoples everywhere. However, the ideological basis of Indian fascism led by RSS, whose ultimate aim is the establishment of a majoritarian patriarchal Hindu Rashtra, is Manuvadi caste system together with anti-Muslimness or Islamophobia. Viewed in this perspective, the anti-fascist movement has to evolve as the broadest peoples’ movement against corporate-Hindutva fascism and all its multifaceted political, economic and cultural manifestations. Taking the concrete specificities of linguistic states, and with the orientation of building up a pan-Indian anti-fascist movement, such an initiative has to unite with struggling organisations of workers, peasants, oppressed women, Dalits, and Minorities. While uniting with the most exploited workers, majority of whom being in the unorganised or informal sectors, and oppressed Dalits and Minorities, such an anti-fascist movement has to join with all like-minded organisations fighting for people’s right to livelihood and sustenance, basic democratic rights and freedom of speech and expression.

In this grave situation, along with the indispensable ideological and political struggles and campaigns against Manuvadi Brahmanical casteism, Islamophobia, and patriarchal measures of RSS-BJP, sustained struggles against the far-right, pro-corporate, anti-worker, anti-farmer and anti-federal policies of the fascist regime are indispensable. It is high time on the part of all anti-fascist, progressive and democratic forces, to come together and join with the super-exploited workers and all oppressed, to rise up for an all-embracing offensive against the vicious political, economic and cultural agenda of RSS fascism. To make this initiative effective and successful, it is also indispensable to put forward a common minimum agenda mutually acceptable to all the constituents of such an Anti-fascist Coordination.

P J James
General Secretary
CPI (ML) Red Star

The post On the Immediate Task of Building up the All India People’s Movement against RSS Fascism! appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

The post Assam Minister’s Glorification of 1989 “Gobi Farming” is part of a Fascist Horror Campaign Instilling Psychological Terror ! – P J James  appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

Mahakal Temple: In the Race to Build Shiva, Mamata Builds a Monkey

Shankar

Before the cement at Digha’s Jagannath Temple even had a chance to dry, Mamata Banerjee announced that the next Mahakal temple would be built in Siliguri. The vote-bound state has become preoccupied with religion. As the BJP’s assertion of Hindutva intensifies, Mamata Banerjee’s competitive embrace of Hindutva is likewise increasing. The Trinamool Congress lacks the capacity to mount an effective political challenge to the BJP; instead, in an effort to defeat BJP, TMC is trying to capture its votes in religious line, the Trinamool has further degraded West Bengal’s political environment. What could be more grotesque than a state, already beset by unemployment and losing millions of working people who migrate to other states in search of jobs, whose share of national output is falling behind and whose debt burden is rising toward the stratosphere, proceeding to build temple after temple? It is difficult to imagine a more ignoble spectacle.

Most important is this paradox: in attempting to contain the BJP, Mamata Banerjee is legitimizing and implementing many of the BJP’s odious policies and trying to surpass the BJP by adopting the same playbook. Whether she and her party understand the implications is doubtful, but the effect is that the BJP benefits politically. If the BJP’s policies continue to become entrenched in this fashion, there will come a moment when voters will prefer the original BJP over ersatz imitations. It is likely that Mamata and her circle do not possess the political insight to foresee this.

The success of a state and its government should be measured by how far they secure for their citizens the fundamentals of livelihood: education, health, housing, safety, and democratic freedoms. It is well known that since coming to power, the Trinamool Congress has neglected these core responsibilities. Unemployment is a pressing problem in the state. From many districts millions of young men have migrated outward. According to 2023 figures, nearly 1.5 million Bengali workers are in Kerala alone. The 2011 census showed about 2.9 million workers from the state employed as migrant laborers in other states; since then hundreds of thousands more join them each year. Altogether, approximately 3.5 million workers from the state currently work in other states—and that number increases daily. Recent incidents in BJP-ruled Odisha and in northern BJP-ruled states—where Bengali workers were labeled as Bangladeshis, arrested, abused, beaten, and in some cases forcibly deported—provoked widespread outrage. In response, the West Bengal chief minister announced that returnees to the state would receive a monthly allowance of five thousand rupees: an initial one-time payment of five thousand rupees, followed by five thousand per month until they find new employment. She gave the scheme a florid name—“Shramshri”—but her government has no coherent policy for creating dignified, sustainable employment. There is no plan. The Trinamool government has now been in office for fourteen years; their continued failure to address these matters is an unforgivable dereliction.

Meanwhile, corruption has reached extreme levels. Public-sector recruitment examinations have become nightmarish. Ministers and leaders accused of corruption spend days in jail. The picture is the same in education and health. The private sector has flourished everywhere while public hospital systems have been progressively degraded under Trinamool rule. Hospitals have become hubs of malpractice. Doctors who have protested corruption have themselves been subjected in hospital settings to rape and even murder. The market in dead bodies, fake medicines, and expired drugs is rampant; innumerable other illicit, shameful trades persist. Private hospitals and nursing homes have exploited and plundered patients. Contractual employment has proliferated nationwide, but in West Bengal it appears to have shattered all previous records. From police forces to healthcare workers, from college and university lecturers to municipal sweepers, contractual recruitment dominates. The extensive corruption and malfeasance in hospitals are repeatedly linked to the treatment of contract employees. Disturbing reports have even emerged of a security guard employed at one public hospital entering another hospital disguised in a doctor’s coat and participating in sexual assaults.

Education, too, has become a site of disorder. Enrollment in government and semi-government schools has declined considerably; the government seems unconcerned. Rather than strengthening public education, authorities have closed clusters of schools. Budgetary allocations to education have shrunk. The Mid-Day Meal program is faltering; in many places substandard food is supplied under the scheme. For months on end universities have had no permanent vice-chancellors. Educational institutions have become arenas for the assertion of power and dominance—an objective that, like the BJP, the Trinamool now appears to pursue. Consequently, the future of the public education system in the state is increasingly insecure under both the BJP and Trinamool.

Amidst all this, yet another temple is to be constructed with state funds. As with the Digha project, public money will be spent. The Digha Jagannath Temple reportedly cost ₹250 crore. The exact budgetary allocation for the proposed Mahakal Temple remains unclear, but it is reasonable to assume that it will not receive less allocation than the Jagannath Temple.

First, West Bengal is a state with acute fiscal constraints. The government must borrow substantial sums each year simply to maintain operations. In 2023–24, the ratio of the state’s total debt to its GSDP was approximately 34.2 percent; it has since risen toward 39 percent. According to the 2023–24 financial-year budget, the state’s total debt stood at roughly ₹5.86 lakh crore; by the close of 2024–25, estimates in the budget presented by the present government project the debt could rise to about ₹6.5 lakh crore. The Fifteenth Finance Commission of India recommended that states keep this ratio under 20 percent. West Bengal is evidently far from that target. Moreover, a significant portion of the debt services old loans and interest. A large share of the state’s revenues—on the order of ₹40,000–50,000 crore per year—goes merely to interest payments on past debt. Consequently, little remains for developmental expenditure on education, health, roads, drainage, and so forth. Although the state government claims GSDP growth in recent years has exceeded the national average (approximately 6–7 percent), allegedly approaching 8–10 percent, the plausibility of these claims is doubtful; even if they were accurate, they would still be insufficient to sustain government expenditures given the debt-to-GSDP ratio. In short, the state’s economy is in decline. It is astonishing that the government can justify spending hundreds of crores on temple construction in such circumstances.

Second, in a secular republic such as India the state should maintain a safe distance from the construction of temples, mosques, and other religious undertakings. There must be no entanglement of religion and state—that is the principle of secularism. Yet since independence this principle has rarely been applied rigorously. Where political expediency permitted, the Congress linked official functions to religious rituals. Inaugurations were sometimes accompanied by Hindu rites; ministers and party leaders were frequently seen at Iftar parties when Muslims broke their fast. Under the BJP these practices have been pursued more openly and assertively, reflecting their programmatic promotion of Hindu religious activities. Two distinctions separate Congress and BJP practices: first, BJP leaders actively perform and sponsor Hindu rites and institutionalize Hindu religious activities; second, the BJP is the only major political force that has taken an explicit theoretical position against secularism. This is a bold departure from previous norms and places the party in a category of overt majoritarian Hindutva—indeed, tendencies that can be characterized as fascistic in their scale and audacity.

Fascist parties do not exist in isolation; there are parties that surrender to fascism’s pressures. In India, among the parties that have capitulated to BJP policies, the Trinamool Congress increasingly presents itself as a leading example. As Modi’s leadership consolidates a form of authoritarian governance across India, the political criminality inherent in adopting, implementing, and attempting to outdo the BJP’s Hindutva agenda is grave. Mamata Banerjee and her colleagues do not seem to perceive this. Should they ever do so, there may be no political refuge left for them.

The Ram Temple in Ayodhya was constructed under a trust structure set up by the BJP rather than through direct state funding. By contrast, the Digha Jagannath Temple was built with direct state funds and under the chief minister’s explicit supervision. The proposed Mahakal Temple will follow that same model. The chief minister’s public declaration—“I will build a Mahakal temple; I will build the largest Shiva idol”—disregards the normative constraints of modern state governance. The situation is so absurd that even BJP leader Sri Shubhendu Adhikari felt compelled to remark that building a temple with personal funds is one thing, but constructing one with government money is not the government’s role. Different observers will judge Adhikari’s remark differently. Mamata may take pride in having placed the BJP in a difficult position over Hindutva competition. But defenders of democratic norms will say that secularist rhetoric from the mouths of fascistic Hindutva proponents is like a pearl necklace on a monkey—and Mamata herself has placed that necklace around the monkey’s neck. The monkey is dressed before the god is sculpted. In this manner, instead of effectively resisting the BJP, Mamata Banerjee and her cohort are paving the way for a future in which a sectarian, Hanuman-centric polity may be established.

(The article was originally published in Nagorik.net in bengali.)

The post Mahakal Temple: In the Race to Build Shiva, Mamata Builds a Monkey – Shankar appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.

When Co-perpetrator of Genocide Becomes Peacemaker!

P J James

Trump’s 20-point Gaza Peace Plan that calls for immediate ceasefire and wide-ranging peace process, comes in the context of growing international isolation of Zionist regime. Among other things, the Plan involves demilitarization of Gaza and making it a terror free zone along with disarming and decommissioning of Hamas which has been resolutely resisting Zionism; release of hostages, first by Hamas and then by Israel; creation of a US-led “international stabilization force” with the involvement of Arab States and a Transitional Authority led by Trump and Tony Blair (who, as part of Bush-Blair notorious “evil axis” slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people in 2003); de-radicalisation of Gazans who are survivors of holocausts through religious dialogue; etc. On the other hand, there is no mention of punishing the war criminals like Netanyahu for the crimes he committed against humanity, disbanding the IDF, GHF and others for the horrors unleashed on civilians including children and pregnant women. A meaningful peace plan should have also included appropriate measures for dealing with US, which, through weaponization and funding, acted as the patron and co-perpetrator of the Zionist crimes. Of course, nothing of the sort can be expected from a peace plan designed by Trump and endorsed by Netanyahu, co-perpetrator and perpetrator of the genocide.

As such, Trump’s peace-deal is totally silent on the core issue of the right of return of Palestinians to Israel from where they were driven out since 1948 Nakba that followed the UK-US superimposition of Zionist state on the Palestinians. In fact, the present Trump-Netanyahu peace plan that is superimposed on the Palestinians without even consulting them is also a tragic repetition of what the US-UK axis together with Zionists did in1948. And, above all, Trump’s peace deal ignores the most fundamental question of self-determination and statehood for Palestinians.

No doubt, this Trumpian exercise in deception, is an ingenious move to save his closest ally Netanyahu, who is declared a “war criminal” by ICC, from the wrath of the global community, and in the process to whitewash the “crimes against humanity” committed by the US-Zionist Nexus. For, after endorsing Trump’s plan that cunningly covers up the accountability of US-Zionist nexus in Gaza genocide, at the White House Press Conference on 29 September, Netanyahu praised Trump, his patron and imperialist master thus: “You’ve proven time and again what I’ve said many times – you are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Equally despicable is the quick endorsement of the Trump plan by Anglo-Saxon allies of US and Arab lackeys who are all complicit in the ongoing holocaust on Palestinians. As reported, the leaders of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have issued a joint statement “welcoming” Trump’s “sincere efforts to end the war in Gaza”, thereby falling into the US-Zionist trap and betraying the Palestinian people. And, in tune with the Zionist-Evangelist-Hindutva unholy nexus, the neo-fascist Indian regime has also upheld the peace plan of imperialist Trump.

If the Trumpian plan comes into force, then Gaza will be taken over by the International Stabilization Force (ISF), a kind of outsourcing of Gaza to an ‘external force’, but linked with the vicious US-Zionist nexus, in tune with standard neocolonial arrangements of US imperialism. As already mentioned, the Transitional Authority and Board of Peace led by Trump-Blair duo will begin overseeing the transition indefinitely, regarding which no time frame is scheduled in the ‘peace plan’. And, while the core issues of the Palestinians including statehood are kept out of the agenda. Hamas will have to leave the scene, even as Zionist regime and troops will continue in Gaza unchallenged, giving them new avenues of infiltration and expansion to West Bank.

In spite of that, far-right and extremely reactionary Zionists in Netanyahu’s cabinet like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a declared “war criminal” has condemned Trump-Netanyahu plan as a “political failure”. And to appease such elements like him, Netanyahu had also stated that “Israel will retain security responsibility for the foreseeable future” in Gaza. True, while imperialists of all hues, neo-fascists and their apologists alike are eulogizing the Trumpian plan, just hours before, Zionist regime has ordered Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate the city or be considered terrorists. Meanwhile, reports on Israeli navy intercepting vessels that form part of Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) and detaining the activists aboard including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, are also coming in.

Thus, the Zionist regime is again revealing itself as the embodiment of criminality and terrorism. The much trumpeted Trumpian ‘peace project’ is intended for whitewashing this criminal and terrorist character of Netanyahu government and to grant impunity and exonerate it from the crimes that it has committed against humanity, by diverting the attention of world people, thereby hoodwinking them, and for the unabated continuity of Zionist “settler colonialism”. It is becoming more and more evident that an independent, secular, and democratic Palestinian State cannot co-exist with Zionist regime. Hence, it is upto the international community to reject this 20-point (or 21-point) Trumpian Gaza Peace Plan which is an ‘exercise in deception’.
P J James

When Co-perpetrator of Genocide Becomes Peacemaker!

Trump’s 20-point Gaza Peace Plan that calls for immediate ceasefire and wide-ranging peace process, comes in the context of growing international isolation of Zionist regime. Among other things, the Plan involves demilitarization of Gaza and making it a terror free zone along with disarming and decommissioning of Hamas which has been resolutely resisting Zionism; release of hostages, first by Hamas and then by Israel; creation of a US-led “international stabilization force” with the involvement of Arab States and a Transitional Authority led by Trump and Tony Blair (who, as part of Bush-Blair notorious “evil axis” slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people in 2003); de-radicalisation of Gazans who are survivors of holocausts through religious dialogue; etc. On the other hand, there is no mention of punishing the war criminals like Netanyahu for the crimes he committed against humanity, disbanding the IDF, GHF and others for the horrors unleashed on civilians including children and pregnant women. A meaningful peace plan should have also included appropriate measures for dealing with US, which, through weaponization and funding, acted as the patron and co-perpetrator of the Zionist crimes. Of course, nothing of the sort can be expected from a peace plan designed by Trump and endorsed by Netanyahu, co-perpetrator and perpetrator of the genocide.

As such, Trump’s peace-deal is totally silent on the core issue of the right of return of Palestinians to Israel from where they were driven out since 1948 Nakba that followed the UK-US superimposition of Zionist state on the Palestinians. In fact, the present Trump-Netanyahu peace plan that is superimposed on the Palestinians without even consulting them is also a tragic repetition of what the US-UK axis together with Zionists did in1948. And, above all, Trump’s peace deal ignores the most fundamental question of self-determination and statehood for Palestinians.

No doubt, this Trumpian exercise in deception, is an ingenious move to save his closest ally Netanyahu, who is declared a “war criminal” by ICC, from the wrath of the global community, and in the process to whitewash the “crimes against humanity” committed by the US-Zionist Nexus. For, after endorsing Trump’s plan that cunningly covers up the accountability of US-Zionist nexus in Gaza genocide, at the White House Press Conference on 29 September, Netanyahu praised Trump, his patron and imperialist master thus: “You’ve proven time and again what I’ve said many times – you are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Equally despicable is the quick endorsement of the Trump plan by Anglo-Saxon allies of US and Arab lackeys who are all complicit in the ongoing holocaust on Palestinians. As reported, the leaders of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have issued a joint statement “welcoming” Trump’s “sincere efforts to end the war in Gaza”, thereby falling into the US-Zionist trap and betraying the Palestinian people. And, in tune with the Zionist-Evangelist-Hindutva unholy nexus, the neo-fascist Indian regime has also upheld the peace plan of imperialist Trump.

If the Trumpian plan comes into force, then Gaza will be taken over by the International Stabilization Force (ISF), a kind of outsourcing of Gaza to an ‘external force’, but linked with the vicious US-Zionist nexus, in tune with standard neocolonial arrangements of US imperialism. As already mentioned, the Transitional Authority and Board of Peace led by Trump-Blair duo will begin overseeing the transition indefinitely, regarding which no time frame is scheduled in the ‘peace plan’. And, while the core issues of the Palestinians including statehood are kept out of the agenda. Hamas will have to leave the scene, even as Zionist regime and troops will continue in Gaza unchallenged, giving them new avenues of infiltration and expansion to West Bank.

In spite of that, far-right and extremely reactionary Zionists in Netanyahu’s cabinet like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a declared “war criminal” has condemned Trump-Netanyahu plan as a “political failure”. And to appease such elements like him, Netanyahu had also stated that “Israel will retain security responsibility for the foreseeable future” in Gaza. True, while imperialists of all hues, neo-fascists and their apologists alike are eulogizing the Trumpian plan, just hours before, Zionist regime has ordered Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate the city or be considered terrorists. Meanwhile, reports on Israeli navy intercepting vessels that form part of Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) and detaining the activists aboard including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, are also coming in.

Thus, the Zionist regime is again revealing itself as the embodiment of criminality and terrorism. The much trumpeted Trumpian ‘peace project’ is intended for whitewashing this criminal and terrorist character of Netanyahu government and to grant impunity and exonerate it from the crimes that it has committed against humanity, by diverting the attention of world people, thereby hoodwinking them, and for the unabated continuity of Zionist “settler colonialism”. It is becoming more and more evident that an independent, secular, and democratic Palestinian State cannot co-exist with Zionist regime. Hence, it is upto the international community to reject this 20-point (or 21-point) Trumpian Gaza Peace Plan which is an ‘exercise in deception’.

The post When Co-perpetrator of Genocide Becomes Peacemaker! – P J James appeared first on CPI(ML) Red Star.