{"id":150100,"date":"2019-12-23T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=150100"},"modified":"2019-12-19T10:26:45","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T10:26:45","slug":"indias-government-is-going-to-war-against-its-own-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/indias-government-is-going-to-war-against-its-own-people\/","title":{"rendered":"India\u2019s Government Is Going to War against Its Own People"},"content":{"rendered":"

18 Dec 2019 – <\/em>On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement<\/a> that criticized India\u2019s new citizenship law. This \u201cfundamentally discriminatory\u201d Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019<\/a> would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India\u2019s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. It does not name Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingyas). The UN said that not only does this law violate India\u2019s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s ruling party\u2014the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)\u2014led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi put this bill before both the lower and upper houses of India\u2019s parliament. Apart from the Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house (the Lok Sabha) was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim margin\u2014125 votes to 105 votes.<\/p>\n

Protests against the Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law. There are 200 million Muslim citizens of India\u2014almost 15 percent of the population; this bill sends a clear message that they should see themselves as second-class citizens. There is no other interpretation of the BJP\u2019s agenda here.<\/p>\n

The BJP government was particularly ruthless against protests at two major universities\u2014Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) and Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh), both historically Muslim universities. The police have been extraordinarily violent against student protests in the past several months, but this was at another level. At Jamia, the police beat unarmed students, chased them into their dormitories and continued to beat them, and fired tear gas into the library. There is video evidence of policemen burning buses<\/a>, assaulting<\/a> journalists, and creating the conditions of a full-scale police-driven riot; in Aligarh, there is video<\/a> evidence of the police breaking student motorcycles.<\/p>\n

Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who went to Jamia during the attack, said, \u201cThe police action is unacceptable.\u201d Jamia, she said, must be \u201cfreed of police presence and action be taken against those responsible.\u201d The Delhi Police has announced<\/a> that it \u201cwill investigate\u201d the violence, although Deputy Commissioner of Police M.S. Randhawa seemed to suggest that all the violence came from the students, none from the police. Senior advocate Indira Jaising appeared before the Supreme Court on December 16 to urge<\/a> the bench\u2014headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde\u2014to take up the case since the violence \u201cis a very serious human rights violation all over the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

As if on cue, the BJP government hastily shut down internet access in India\u2019s northeast, and in parts of the country where the protests have been most virulent. Last year, India led<\/a> all other countries in internet shutdowns<\/a>. Overall, 67 percent<\/a> of all shutdowns of the internet took place in India; this year, already, 63 percent of all shutdowns have been in India. Internet in Jammu and Kashmir has now been off for 136 days<\/a> (between August 4 and December 17); there is no sign that it will be restored. Indeed, the suffocation of Jammu and Kashmir continues unabated. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce says that Kashmiri businesses have lost over $1.4 billion<\/a> in this period.<\/p>\n

Several state governments have said that they would not fulfill the provisions of the new Citizenship Act, since they argue that it is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of India will soon discuss this bill. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front\u2019s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said<\/a>, \u201cWe are accountable only to the ideals of the Constitution of India, not to the fundamentalist ideology of the RSS-BJP.\u201d (The RSS refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist movement that is behind the BJP.)<\/p>\n

The Left parties have called<\/a> for demonstrations on December 19 across the country against the Citizenship Act.<\/p>\n

Austerity<\/strong><\/p>\n

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath is in India this week. She said<\/a> that the slowdown of the Indian economy has surprised many, \u201cincluding us here at the IMF.\u201d India\u2019s Gross Domestic Product growth has slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter. All the noises made by the BJP government about \u201cMake In India\u201d are silenced by the slump in manufacturing and the low domestic consumption.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the IMF urges the Modi government to push ahead with its \u201cstructural reforms,\u201d<\/a> which include what is so euphemistically called \u201clabor\u2026 market reforms\u201d and \u201cfiscal consolidation.\u201d The former\u2014labor market reform\u2014means that the government should erase protections for workers, and regulations of businesses; the latter\u2014fiscal consolidation\u2014means that the government must cut spending to lower public debt levels. This means less earning power for the majority of the population, and lower government spending to create social programs for the public.<\/p>\n

What the IMF proposes is what the BJP government wants to do\u2014to push a much deeper austerity agenda in India.<\/p>\n

This is precisely what the students and workers, the farmers and the youth have argued against in protest upon protest.<\/p>\n

The BJP government pushed for a 150 percent rise in hostel fees for the flagship university in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This astronomical increase would force<\/a> at least half the post-graduate students to leave their studies. A #FeesMustFall protest dynamic opened up across the country in solidarity with JNU, it being clear to the students that what happens at JNU will spread outward. The police violence against unarmed students was shocking. It was equally outrageous that the intelligence services visited the home in Sopat, Jammu and Kashmir, of a former student leader\u2014Aejaz Ahmad Rather\u2014and said<\/a> to his family chillingly, \u201cA bullet never asks for an address.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farmer, peasant, and trade union organizations have been consistently on the march against the government\u2019s various economic policies. In the past five months, the price of onions\u2014a good indicator of food inflation\u2014spiked<\/a> by 253 percent. Rather than fix the endemic internal problems in the domestic onion market, a demand of the farmer and peasant organizations, the BJP government has loosened rules for the import of onions, a demand of the big traders. BJP policy is not made to benefit the working class and peasantry. It is made on behalf of the big businesses. It is almost as if the BJP-IMF slogan is \u201cSave the Billionaires,\u201d or \u201cBillionaires Bachao,\u201d as Srujana Bodapati, the coordinator of the Delhi office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes<\/a>. Little wonder that the farmer, peasant, and trade union federations have announced a major general strike for January 8, 2020. It is expected that hundreds of millions of workers and peasants will be on the streets on that day. Their charter of demands is a direct assault on the BJP-IMF austerity policies.<\/p>\n

The First Bullets<\/strong><\/p>\n

The temperature in India is very high. The BJP government feels that it has a mandate to push through a hard-right agenda, both in economic and social policy. It has received backing for this from the IMF (in terms of labor market reform and bank reform) and from its hard-right partners across the world (in terms of its citizenship and anti-immigration policies).<\/p>\n

But the government faces stiff resistance that seems unwilling to abate. As night fell over Jamia, and the fires burned out, Chandrasekhar Azad, the leader of the Bhim Army\u2014a social movement in nearby Uttar Pradesh\u2014gave a powerful speech. He said<\/a> that Muslims are an integral part of India, and that if the State fires on Muslim students, \u201cwe will take the first bullets.\u201d This is the mood. It is something that the BJP and the RSS and the IMF need to consider.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the <\/em>Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of <\/em>LeftWord Books<\/a> and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. <\/em>He is the author of 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations: A People\u2019s History of the Third World<\/a> (The New Press, 2007),<\/em> Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), <\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South<\/a> (Verso, 2013),<\/em> The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution<\/a> (University of California Press, 2016) and<\/em> Red Star Over the Third World<\/a> (LeftWord, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was produced by <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the <\/em>Independent Media Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Dec 2019 – On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India\u2019s new citizenship law. The UN said that not only does this law violate India\u2019s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":148202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[239,1713,670,120,487,759,866,504,103,107,985,126],"class_list":["post-150100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brics","tag-brics","tag-cab-citizenship-amendment-bill","tag-citizen-rights","tag-conflict","tag-human-rights","tag-india","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-international-relations","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-social-justice","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}