Rev Left Radio - Student Organizing, Modi's Government, and Indian Communism

Episode Date: June 7, 2020

Rea joins the show to discuss student organizing, her experiences in America as an Indian immigrant, the Modi government in India, the different manifestations of Indian communist movements, and much more!  History of Land Grant Universities  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/08/dark-history-land-grant-universities/ Case of Rohith Vemula  https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices "The Doctor and the Saint" by Arundhathi Roy  RSS and Nationalism in India https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/706808616/the-powerful-group-shaping-the-rise-of-hindu-nationalism-in-india  Israel and India / Zionism and Hindutva https://wearyourvoicemag.com/hindutva-zionism-ethnonationalist-states-two-sides-same-coin/ India’s Response to Corona Virus https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/india-coronavirus-covid19-narendra-modi/608896/   Outro music 'Yankee and the Brave (ep. 4)' by Run The Jewels LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have my friend and comrade Ria on to talk about student organizing, and then in the second half of our discussion, we talk about Indian politics, Modi, a little bit about the Naxalites and the Communist Party of India, some feminist thinkers that have come out of India, how India is responding to COVID-19, et cetera. So this is a sort of two-part conversation. In the first part, we really talk about student organizing, and then the second part we get into Indian politics, communist movements in India, Hindu nationalism, et cetera. So it's wide-ranging, compelling, informative, and

fascinating. So I hope you enjoy this episode of my friend Rhea. Hello, my name's Rhea. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, and I'm currently based in kind of in between the Bay Area in California and Central Texas with my family. So that's a little bit about me. I've kind of been involved with multiple different organizations, everywhere from like a Democratic socialist type organization through malist organizations. So I kind of have a wide range of organizing experiences as well as student organizing when I was a student

at the University of Texas at Austin. And I'm really looking forward to having a conversation with you about my thoughts and politics. Absolutely. And we're definitely honored to have you on. I know you describe yourself as a Marxist-Leninist. Before we get into the questions, could you maybe talk a little bit about what events or experiences in your life sort of radicalized you or pushed you towards the left in general, but Marxism and

Leninism specifically? Sure. So this is kind of embarrassing, but I was a debater back in high school. I know other people have talked about that on the show. But one of the positive consequences of that was just kind of an introduction to a lot of like critical theory, feminist authors, anti-capitalist authors and things like that. So that, along with the death of Trayvon Martin, happened while I was in high school, so that really, like, ignited kind of a spark into, like, how violent and horrible the world is as we currently live in it. And it just begs a lot of questions, I think, like, why do we live in a world that accepts this violence as normal? Not just that specific incident, but so many other things currently. So I started asking those questions, and then by the time I got to college, I just saw

so much inequality that was just really, really hard to swallow. Like, I grew up pretty privileged and middle class, but then when I got to college, I saw, like, really, really wealthy people, like, insane amounts of wealth. And then in contrast, like, people who were struggling with just, like, paying $20 to, like, get a transcript, who, like, were dealing with food insecurity who didn't know where they were going to be living next semester. So, like, that heavy contrast. And then, like, the theory that I was reading, as well as, like, kind of my friends and my community and my experiences growing up, all kind of just radicalized me really, really quickly between that age of, like, high school and college.

So that's a little bit about me. And then Marxist Leninism just, like, made the most sense and answered the most questions for me personally. And the struggles that I've seen under kind of the Marxist-Leninist banner just have been the most compelling to me. Yeah, I think I share that with you as well. I went through a bunch of different phases politically and had a bunch of unanswered questions. And, you know, when I really got robustly introduced to Leninism and Maoism specifically, a lot of those questions that I had began to be answered in much more systematic ways. And that was really a big push for me in that direction. But, you know, you and your family are of Indian descent. And I was hoping that before we get into questions, you can talk a little bit about maybe you and your family's experiences as immigrants in the United States. particularly, you know, under a very anti-immigrant regime like we have currently, and what you perceive maybe as the biggest cultural differences between the U.S. and India, I'm just sort of personally interested in that because I've never, you know, been to India, obviously, and don't have a lot of understanding of that culture compared to ours. So you want to talk about that, just a tad?

Sure. So that's a really big question. But growing up, so my parents immigrated right before I was born in the United States. So I grew up in a community in Austin. So a lot of the Indian diaspora have really strong migration routes. So by that I mean like the communities that Indian people migrate to. There's usually already an existing Indian community there. So I was really fortunate to grow up around a community of my parents' friends who have like the same ethnic, religious and linguistic culture, which was really fortunate just because I don't have a lot of that, I think, anxiety that a lot of diaspora or diasporic people have

about, like, where they fall in between the homeland and, like, the quote-unquote American identity. So that's something that has been really, I've been really fortunate to have. And the Indian diaspora in general in the United States is, like, pretty privileged in either caste privilege or class privilege. So a lot of the politics that they bring to the United States are kind of a reflection of that, which is sad because it's not really a true reflection of, like, the political landscape of India. itself. So a lot of that nuance is lost. But I would say that as someone who's been able to visit India a lot and has grown up in the community, a lot of the cultural differences I think that people talk about are things like communalism. So there's this large emphasis and even like a

romanticization of communalism that leftists love to talk about in the United States. And I know it's distinct from the communalism in the East, but I think that one of those cultural differences is the way that communalism is like used to as a vehicle for like misogyny for um oppression and violence interpersonally so like that's been really hard i would say that ultimately a lot of these values that we have in the west are like basically the same in india um as a result of like globalization which is sad right but like the cultural markers that we see obviously are different so whether that be food or culture or movies or media there are a lot of differences externally, but I think like the underlying culture we can probably see a lot of

things that are really, really similar and should probably be rooted out. So that's kind of my general take. But there's a lot to be said about the cultural differences between America and India that I hope we'll get into a little bit. For sure. Yeah, that's that's completely interesting and the whole sort of nuanced exploration of how communalism manifests in certain communities and cultures is interesting as well because sometimes it can be liberating and sometimes it can be sort of oppressive in its own, if it's in its own interpersonal way. So definitely worth reflecting on. But let's go ahead and shift into our student organizing part of our conversation.

And, you know, we're going to get to India and Modi and other important topics. But let's first talk about this specific topic, and this is something I think you have some real insight on. Rev Left obviously has a wide and diverse audience, but a significant segment of it are in high school and college and we get messages from those sorts of younger folks quite a bit asking questions about how they can organize. And for many of them, student organizing is often their first real engagement with any sort of organizing or socialist organizing broadly. So it is an important topic and one that we probably don't cover enough generally on the left. So with all of that said, can you just talk a bit about student organizing and some maybe common pitfalls that, folks should watch out for when engaging in it? Yeah, absolutely. It is a really big topic. So like I said before, I attended the University of Texas at Austin, which is a really, really huge school, but it's also

part of a system of really big schools. So UT has the second largest endowment in the United States after Harvard. So just to contextualize, like, that's a shit ton of money. Yeah. So similarly to like other private and public universities, you see those like really large. wealth disparities and like students are hit with fees and tuition and like the tuition doesn't even match the value of the education or the experience that you're getting like in terms of the job that you'll probably get post college or whatever that's just like context and one thing that I saw like at UT Austin like one of the recent reasons we were in headlines was the Abby Fisher case regarding like affirmative action and UT went all the way to the Supreme Court to kind of defend

itself and its right to use affirmative action in the admissions process. But despite that, UT only has a 4% black population at school when it's meant to serve the population of Texas, which has a 12% black population. So that's just like one contradiction of like many contradictions that exist in public universities and high schools across the United States. Like segregation in general of schools in public education today is more segregated than when segregation was legal. And you see this all across the United States. but even especially in like northern, quote-unquote northern states where you would think that those issues don't exist anymore. So it's a really interesting context for like where this student

organizing quote-unquote is taking place. And a lot of these universities, they also exist because of the forcible removal of indigenous populations. So specifically like the 1862 Moral Land Grant Act, that's the reason like part of Yale exists, Penn State, the University of Maine, Ohio state. So I know a lot of student organizations are starting to do things like land acknowledgments and things like that. But I think it's important just like as a starting point when you go to college or you go to high school to kind of research a little bit, the surrounding community that you're going to be living in if it's not where you're originally from, kind of understand the context, understand the history of that university is a really good starting

point. And then to answer kind of your question about like the pitfalls and the liberal bend, especially in college I see that like a lot of organizing spaces are filled with people of this like revolving door of baby senators or that's just like kind of the way that I describe it where they really use like organizing quote unquote they call it organizing now by the way like it's not even like student senate or like student government like they do call these things organizing nowadays like you could throw a party and literally call it organizing on your resume like that's a thing. I know. Kind of sad. So we see a lot of people with political ambition enter organizing spaces with the intent of patting their resume. And I'm sure some of them, like, I don't think a lot of this is like maliciously intended when they're like, oh, I'm running on a campaign for racial equality. I'm running on a campaign for like increased access to mental health resources. Like those are things I hear all the time. But there's like basically no progress. Like I don't know if there's any student. campaigns that really are worth mentioning because they don't really seem to have any semblance of like results. So I think part of that is just like this contradiction of like what are student goals and what is the goal of the university? The goal of the university is to make money. It is to increase their brand like the valuation of their brand and the valuation of their degrees. What is the goal of the student? This goal of the student is to gain an education and to like

one day enter the quote unquote like adult world with like a job, to find out what you want to pursue, your passion, things like that, like your individual interests and, like, flourishment, right? So, like, those two goals are probably diametrically opposed. And liberal organizing attempts to reconcile these things by working within the school's confines, which just will never work or make any progress. So I think that's kind of the general pitfall of, like,

trying to involve yourself in student campaigns and student organizing from a liberal standpoint, like you won't make any progress. You'll invest a lot of time and energy into it. And there's not going to be anything to show for it. And there's also always going to be a line between like trying to improve student quality of life at the expense of potentially the community surrounding the school. So a lot of people when you move to school and things like that, you're probably going to be complicit in like the gentrification of the city that you're going to be moving to. I would say that's particularly true for this, for the University of Austin or the

University of Texas at Austin, like gentrification is like a huge issue that is absolutely wrecking communities right now really, really rapidly. And the school is absolutely a part of that process. So I think understanding like your social position and like dealing with organizing from that point of view is really important, especially when you're moving to a community that you're not originally from. So that's kind of my thought on student organizing as it exists today in the United States. Yeah, and I wonder, because I mean, a lot of what you say completely resonates, and I find it insightful and definitely true.

I wonder, though, for those in college specifically who really want to organize in a more material way, who want to serve the people and not get caught up in sort of the incentive structures of, you know, complete on-campus organizing, if maybe one route they could take is to look in the surrounding community, especially in a context of gentrification or, you know, living in an impoverished, you know, area and reach out and look for organizations already doing good work in that community and then try to tie a campus element to broader community organizing as opposed to organizing solely on campus and getting sucked into all of that sort of really neoliberal and careerist sort of, you know, angles to it. Do you think that is at least

possibly an option for people who really are interested in real organizing and not getting caught in those pitfall? Absolutely. And I think it also makes it much more possible for momentum to be carried. Like once you graduate, there can be greater momentum because you have an investment in the community. There's people that can replace you at that point. So I do think like when I say research the community that you're going to be moving to for college specifically, that includes like understanding the issues that most heavily impact the community you're going to be living in as well as organizations that are attempting to build projects towards those issues. So I I absolutely think that's a really, really good point or a good starting place. So there's kinds of two types of like organizing, I would say generally, but this is particularly true for student organizing. There's like defensive, right, and then offensive projects. So I think for defensive things, like a lot of campuses like will invite fascists and shit

to like speak on a public platform that is meant to be educating students. So I think organizing actions around disrupting those events or stopping them from ever getting to your campus. are really, really important actions, and that's also a good way to, like, build sort of left coalitions on campus. And then offensively to, like, be involved in projects that are trying to build something, that's where it's really, really good to be reaching out to the community, trying to get involved in existing organizations that do work against gentrification and kind of build a presence on campus for increasing awareness or increasing, like, help and

support for those organizations from a campus point of view. I think that's absolutely a really, really good place to start. Totally. So zooming out a bit, I was hoping you could talk a bit about the history of student organizing, you know, to understand the present. We must understand history. And of course, that's a huge question. You could take that a million different routes. So maybe just focus on whatever you think is particularly interesting or worth noting, but just give us a little sort of historical context about student organizing. And I think that would help sort of fill out this part of the conversation. Absolutely. So I think that currently we do see like this kind of momentum for organizing that's kind of new. And the reason it's new is because there was a lot of organizing around the anti-war and civil rights era of the 60s. We saw high school students that faced violence by participating in counter sit-sidens. They braved attacks by police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama during the Children's Crusade in 1963. We saw a lot of involvement in like the Vietnam War, like, the

anti-war things. And specifically in the year like 1968, Mark Boren dubbed it kind of like the year of the student. And there were actions like all over the world really on university campuses in France, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Senegal, the Congo and Pakistan. So we saw a lot of really, really awesome actions. Like one that I think is super cool is at Harvard, a couple students held a job recruiter for a napalm manufacturer captive for seven hours. I just think that's really funny and cool. Like today, like no one's doing that. Like no one is asking why Raytheon is like, or there are students that are asking, but I don't, you know, I haven't seen a recent action similar for like Raytheon recruiters on campus and things like that. Like your campus probably has a

professional relationship with the recruiters. the corporations that are trying to find talent for really, really, really fucked up corporations and defense contractors and things like that, just like off topic. But like the, like U.T. Austin has like a professional relationship or like a political relationship with Israel. Like we have our own separate relationship with Israel. So things are like really like we don't realize it, but a lot of these public institutions have so much money and influence that it's kind of strange like the position that they hold. Anyway, so in history, like after all of these really, really awesome actions took place and we also saw a lot of involvement in things like the second wave

feminist movement, all of those things were really concentrated in this era. And then we saw the assassination of MLK Jr. and Robert Kennedy. And college administrations took this opportunity to also crack down on demonstrations on campuses. In 1968, the police shot down three student protesters in South Carolina and a student in Berkeley, California. So that kind of sets the stage for why we saw kind of a hush on student activity for about like two decades. And now we're finally kind of seeing a resurgence in the late like 2010s, early 2020s, whatever. And that's, and that's a result of the fact that like we now have surveillance on campus. We now have our own fucking cops, like our own separate cops for a lot of public.

institutions for a lot of universities and things like that. So the political history in the United States has been really, really awesome, but like it's really sad that we have to look all the way into the 60s and the 70s to find good examples of student organizing that were connected to broader social and political movements in the United States because of the harsh crackdowns that have happened from the public institutions top down. Yeah, well said. And before we move on to talking about Indian politics. Can you maybe give some recommendations or possibly a few tips on what issues you think students today can organize around effectively and, importantly, how to stay safe while organizing? Absolutely. So I think we talked about it a little before,

but I think that doing your research and researching organizations and communities that are surrounding your campus and also acknowledging or looking into the populations, that your campus is exploiting, for example, like the labor of grad students, the people that run your facilities, that put food on the tables for students and things like that, like to see if they have unions, see if they, what their working conditions are like, look into all those things and kind of understand the landscape and the political landscape of the college or school that you'll be attending, I think is a really good starting point and it's kind of my advice. I would also check to see if your campus has a organization around the boycott divest sanction movement or

for Palestinian liberation. That is a really, really awesome point of unity right now that threads, that is kind of the thread along a lot of different campuses and is a way to kind of get in contact with other campuses. And it's connected to a really awesome international movement. It's not just about your community or your campus, but it also connects to the anti-imperialist movement broadly and other liberation movements broadly. So I think that it's a really good place to start and see what organizing is taking place on your campus. So that's kind of my general advice. Absolutely try to build around leftist coalitions that stop and disrupt fascists from speaking on your campus.

And try to plan community events and build towards investing in the larger community around you. And then in terms of like staying safe, this one I think that is really important. not just for students, but for everyone, but I think it's particularly important for students who are kind of new to the whole thing. But taking your online security and in-person security really seriously is of utmost importance.

There are people at school who will try to get you kicked out. You don't want to get arrested. You don't want your scholarships taken away. There are people that will snitch on you. There are people that are going to try to infiltrate your organizations. People really just don't have shit to do sometimes. in school and there's absolutely like neo-Nazis and the right have a presence on your campus as well. So it's important to kind of eliminate a lot of those factors that could get you in trouble.

To do that specifically, be aware that you have campus police and surveillance and people infiltrating your organizations, kind of be mindful of those things. Make sure if you have a school directory, you take down your personal information. Sometimes you don't even opt in to the school directory. it's like an automatic on switch. It was for my school and I had to like take it down after I got doxed. Learn from my mistakes. Don't let that happen to you.

Just remove your personal information from the directory. Try not to put any personal information on your online kind of like leftist social media presence, like first name only or a nickname or something like that. No other personal information. And just understand that like you're at school to be learning and things like that. Organizing can be really, really stressful and have a lot of, like, negative impacts. So try to make sure that you're balancing all of that can be hard, but I recommend taking it seriously so that you don't have to like fix things that go wrong later. Yeah, I don't

know if you had any thoughts about that. But, and just in general, kind of being careful about what you say online, I think is important. Like, it's important that once you join an organization as well, that like when you speak online, like it really is a reflection not just of you, but also the principles of that organization. That's something that you're going to learn once you leave student organizing as well, that it's important to like be principled in every different sphere of life that you would live in, whether that be your personal interactions, whether that be in school, in the classroom, out of the classroom, with your family, with your friends, and especially online, is to just kind of put your best foot forward and also stay safe, being on lists

and stuff like that's really not a joke i don't i don't want to say too much more than that but um also specifically around the bDS movement there's things like lists about people that are pro-palistine and stuff and they will try to dox you there's just a lot of a lot of threats out there especially on student campuses because they know you have like quote-unquote professional ambitions or whatever that's that's just my kind of take on that if you had any other things you wanted to add yeah no I just want to sort of maybe reiterate what you said. It's specifically around online security. There's the obvious things you can do like using cryptid messaging to, you know, organize.

Using aliases is helpful just to muddy the water around your personal identity. And then just realizing that, you know, you can't fully separate your political life from your personal life online as much as you'd like to. And so you really have to sort of make a decision. Do you want a public Facebook page with all of your old high school buddies that anybody can access that has your full name, your employment history, and pictures of your family, or do you want to organize in a way that keeps you, your family and your, you know, close friends safe? And I always would err on the ladder. And so, you know, I deleted my Facebook years ago after a doxing campaign against me. And then insofar as I have a personal, like, Instagram, I keep it completely

private. There's no way you can find me. And I only allow people that I personally know and trust to follow me on that Instagram account because that's an account where I do share pictures of my kids and my, you know, my pets and my wife and stuff. And so I do not want anybody that I don't personally know and trust to ever be able to have access to that. And then on my more political pages like on Twitter with Rev Leff's account, there's a thing called like tweet delete. You can install it on your Twitter and you can leave it there and you can set it for two months, six months, one year. But what it does is it actively deletes everything past a certain point. And so I'll in there, you know, every few months and maybe delete every old, everything I've said on Twitter

back to three months ago. And so that still leaves like my newest episodes up and my most recent communications up, but it is consistently sort of clearing out the backlog of messages because, you know, in one of my doxing campaigns against me by neo-Nazis, they found an old Twitter page that I had when I had like 16 followers and it was just, you know, me as an early 20-something, But I was just sort of naive and I didn't know that I would get so involved in political organizing to the point where I would become a target. And so there's just pictures of me and my family and my face. And I couldn't go back into Twitter because I had long forgotten that password and delete it. So that was basically a trove they used to make flyers about me and to post pictures of me online and stuff.

So, you know, when you get into organizing, even if it's not explicitly anti-fascist organizing, you will create enemies. And so thinking ahead and not giving them resources to pull. plunder in the scenario where they're really trying to target you is a good sort of preemptive step you can take. And I had to learn it the hard way. And I just want other people not to have to learn it the hard way, you know. Absolutely. I feel like everyone I know that talks about security just has like a shitty story to tell about how it went so wrong for them. Yeah. So definitely, absolutely, everything that you said, I actually do myself or need to do myself. I've been thinking a lot about those things. But I think it's really prevalent.

just on campuses especially. Like, the reason I got docs was because InfoWars was on campus and, like, they literally didn't even have, like, the authority to be on campus. They were just walking around campus, interviewing students, and someone caught my face on a camera, and it was over. So it was. That sucks. Yep.

Yep. I was, yeah. I didn't even, I don't know. Anyways, so I just think it's pretty prevalent on student campuses. and with social media and like social clout especially being so important in kind of a school type space, I just see it really, really commonly people trying to docks each other and cancel each other and like have all sorts of campaigns about people's character. So I would do my best to play it safe as well.

Absolutely. Take safety seriously. If not for yourself, then at least for your family members and those around you because when you do get doxed, it's not just you who suffers. you know if they really do a robust campaign against you like was waged against me it's like the innocent people in my family that were negatively affected my mom getting letters from Nazi weirdos a state over saying they're going to come visit her and shit it really blows back on your loved ones more than anything and that's what you know you hate to see the most if it's

just on you that's one thing but on the people that you care about around you that's a whole other thing and so do it for them but let's go ahead and shift into a broader conversation about Indian politics and Modi. And I know this first question is a big question, and I'm like terrible asking huge questions all the time, but I always tell my guest, feel free to answer it in whatever way you want to. But I was hoping maybe you could talk a bit about Indian history, specifically a sort of pre-colonial and colonial period, because I think that has a lot of important context, just to give us some of that context for the remainder of our discussion about Indian politics broadly. Absolutely. So there is so much history. I took a couple of history classes

as well in college, and it didn't really provide that much more clarity because it really is so much. But generally before colonization, if we start up until around the time the British arrive, we see that the region of South Asia actually was divided among a lot of different states. So examples of those states include like Hyderabad, the Mughal Empire, Sin, the Mysore, and other states. And this was actually used by the British. to kind of pit different Indian states against each other and to pay different states to kind of enforce colonization on other states

and they used economic and military coercion during the East India Company to kind of colonize India. And we see this kind of distinctly from settler colonialism that we talk about in the context of like Australia or the United States or South Africa or Israel and things like that because there weren't that many settlers in India

and once colonization ended, like almost all of them went home. So I think that's like kind of important to distinguish. But at the same time, like the period of colonization was just really, really long in India's history. So prior to that, so there's a large part of the South Asian continent that truly wasn't really colonized by the British, which I think is something people don't really know. When India did gain independence, they did this because British colonies, aside India actually fell first. And then at that point, colonization was actually losing its economic feasibility among many European countries, not just the British. So the British almost chose to functionally leave India as the independence movement grew within India as well. So I think

that's kind of strange because there wasn't really like this huge revolution and like there wasn't this like kicking out of the British. Like India and Britain had a great relationship even to this day as a former colony to the British. And they were even part of like kind of drawing borders as they left. So I kind of say this just to kind of point out some unique parts of Indian history and kind of to place India politically among like other former colonies. Like there isn't that much quote unquote like radical history at the highest level, at the national level of like how Pakistan or how India was formed, we don't really see kind of like this liberation politic or this liberation praxis like throughout the formation of the nation state.

So that's kind of part of India's history. And then as well, we see this kind of split. Obviously, Pakistan and India split during the partition, which is a really traumatic period of history and a large migration of people that was not only just traumatic. but also has kind of never been really acknowledged or made up for in any kind of way to this day. But specifically to talk about India, we see this really awesome important political figure whose name is Ambedkar. He was an economist and politician, and he drafted the Indian Constitution. He was a prolific writer.

He studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia. And he was a Dalit man who focused on like kind of the Dalai people. cast in India. He later converted to Buddhism to kind of reject Hinduism altogether, which he saw as inextricably, like, kind of linked to casteism. And he writes a really great text, or there's a really great text called The Annihilation of Cast, which I absolutely recommend as reading if you want to know more about cast and how cast functions in India as a political project as well. So him and Gandhi, who's like a really big figure in Indian history, kind of came to a head when Ambedkar wanted to have a separate electorate for the other people to ensure their

representation. And Gandhi actually threatened to fast to death, which is a totally normal response to this suggestion. He attempted to fast to death. And eventually Umbaithker like kind of acquiesced and like backed off because he didn't want any negative consequences. Like he was kind of pushed into a corner because if Gandhi literally died, which he would have done, I assume, there would have, we can assume, been a really great backlash and it also would have reflected poorly on him as like killing Gandhi. So he backed down and we see from this moment that like this Brahman agenda is kind of woven into the fabric of the constitution, woven into the fabric of the nation of India. So we see from that point kind of this Hindu agenda that's created

with the creation of India as a state, despite this kind of secular democracy brand that India promotes to kind of distinguish itself from Pakistan, which is explicitly a Muslim state in a way that India is not explicitly or whatever a Hindu state. So yeah, that's kind of the general history up until the creation of India. Absolutely. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the rise of Hindu nationalism specifically, which you obviously touched on a little bit, but more explicitly perhaps, and how it has led to the election of, you know, the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi and how Modi's policies today are targeting non-Hindu Indians, but particularly and specifically Muslim. So just, it's a big question just about Hindu nationalism, how it sort of

grew up and then where it is today. Absolutely. So I talked a little bit about kind of the roots of Hindu nationalism when I talked about the creation of India. India's political identity, we see that Hindutvah, which is the political ideology of Hinduism or Hindu character, which kind of inscribes how India should be a quote-unquote homeland for Hindus and should emphasize like Hindu teachings and culture, which is functionally just like a fascist ideology. So that was first coined in 1923. So it's kind of a newer project that kind of aligns. itself as we see Indian independence like talked about and created as well as India as a state is created and then the political project it is today. So that's the ideology in general. But as it

stands today, we see the organization, the RSS, which is not a political organization. It calls itself kind of like a volunteer type organization. They have five million members. And their mission statement is to firmly root itself in like nationalism. And it talks about how India appeases the Muslim population and how that we should embrace Hindu culture and Hindu ideologies and things like that in the state of India. So they have five million members, which is huge. They have a shit ton of affiliate organizations for students, for women. And their goal is to kind of see this Hindu nation to kind of expel Muslim citizens, remove their citizenship. And a lot of Hindu nationalist terrorism has kind of been linked to RSS members, former RSS members, or the RSS as an

organization. So they're kind of a back end of Hindu nationalism that isn't explicitly political, but is political. And the rise of Modi is pretty similar to like the rise of Trump or the rise of fascism in general is that Modi is merely like the product, right, of a fascist culture and a larger movement. Like Modi is only possible because he's supported by millions of people. The 2019 election, we saw, if anything, Modi's popularity or like his support has only increased, despite like the fiasco of demonetization, despite him not really having any results to show for from his previous time and power, but rather because he represents this fascist ideology that a lot of Hindu Indian people see themselves in. So that his recent

policy, which is kind of like the policy that everyone has been focused on today, in terms of organizing efforts back home and kind of fighting fascism today is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which articulates the redefinition of a legal immigrant. So the immigrant status for Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist, and Christian immigrants who are like considered refugees or migrants from other nations to India would have a path to citizenship, whereas Muslim people are just excluded and given deprioritization to any kind of act. to citizenship. And this is especially difficult because a lot of people just don't have papers or proof of residency and things like that. So it not only hurts people who are migrants

to India, but also just people that have lived in India for a really, really long time, but just don't have the proof of the fact that they've been living here. So that's the most recent policy that we see a lot of organizing around or that we see a lot of violence and terror around in India today. Yeah. And Modi is a part of the BJP party, is that correct? Yes, yes. So the BJP party is the foremost Hindu nationalist party in India. So there's support for the BJP throughout India, but mostly in states with obviously like a high concentration of a Hindu population. So the BJP party in the 2019 election saw, saw the same level of support, if anything, an increase in support across India. So that's been kind of a loss for the left in India and kind of has

caused people to kind of rethink their strategies in terms of the electorate because it was a pretty substantial loss. And the elections in India for a lot of different seats in different levels of the state and the national level, the seats are a long time. Like you can sit in certain positions for quite a long time. So it's pretty sad and horrible just because we'll see an increase in violence in relation to the fact that the people in power are Hindu nationalists. So there's a lot of surveillance and a lot of police brutality or the opposite of police brutality just like when acts of terror happen in India, we don't see any kind of semblance of justice

for the people who are victims of Hindu nationalist terror. and violence. So that's kind of the cause and effect relationship that we see with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India today. Totally. And I was doing some prep for this episode and doing some listening, reading around the BJP and its history. And there was a period of time where it was more or less sort of dormant. You know, it reemerged more recently, spectacularly. But it has its ties sort of decades in the past to explicitly fascist movements in India that even sent some of its members to Italy and Germany to study those forms of fascism and to learn what they could to bring back and apply to the Hindu nationalist cause.

And so you can really trace a direct lineage back to explicit pro-Nazi fascist groups with the BJP. Exactly. So that's kind of why I talked about the RSS is because the RSS was also specifically influenced by the Italian fascism and Mussolini specifically. So they see this explicit tie from fascism in Europe to the tie to the RSS, which has direct backing to the BJP. In addition, Modi himself was an RSS member, and a lot of people in the BJP party are RSS members or supporters themselves. So that's kind of the reason I talked about that.

So it is very explicitly a fascist ideology for sure. So, you know, India is also home to many wonderful feminist, progressive, and socialist thinkers. and movements. So I was just hoping that maybe you could tell us which thinkers and activists from India's history or even present that you find particularly inspiring and why you do. For sure. So Pule was a really awesome feminist, kind of the mother of feminism in India. She was a teacher and author and poet who worked to end discrimination along cast and gender. And she also ran like three schools for girls in Hune. Her husband was also really influential himself. So for example, another feminist, Anurada Gandhi, she was a member of the CPI Maoist party and took part in the Dalit Panther movement,

which was really, really cool. So they're an organization that was inspired by the Black Panther Party, and they mainly operated in Maharashtra. And they used the influence of like Ambedkar, who I mentioned previously, and then Giotrero, Pule, and Karl Marx and kind of fused all three of their ideologies and, like, influences together as, yeah, it's really, really cool. So she was a member of them and a really awesome militant feminist herself, who was arrested many times for her work with the Delta Panther Party. So I find really great inspiration from her. She also wrote explicitly about proletarian feminism.

so as a Maoist. So I think that there's a lot of really interesting work being done, not just in India, but in a lot of former colonies about kind of linking feminism and post-colonial studies together. And then I'm sure a lot of people know Iron Dati Roy, who's a writer and really well-known for her book, The God of Small Things, which is a really great novel, I would recommend it. She's involved in a lot of different causes, specifically like the anti-imperialist movement and like anti-globalization, which I think isn't something that we talk too much about in the United States, but the ways in which globalization impacts non-Western countries. And she's an advocate for Kashmir, which I would love to talk about,

just because it's an issue that a lot of people ignore in India as well as outside of India. And yeah, so those are kind of some key figures that I take a lot of my inspiration from and who have written some really, really great work to look into. And Roy wrote, Walking with the Comrades, about the Naxalites, right? Yes, she did. I've been meaning to read that book, and we'll get to the Naxilites in a second. And we've even been talking outside of this recording about doing an entire episode on that.

So we'll get to that in a second. But before we get to the Naxalites, I'm somewhat confused, and maybe this is just my own ignorance, but about the distinctions between the Communist Party of India and the Naxalite movement. So can you tell us a bit about the Communist Party of India specifically, maybe a little bit about its history for some context, and the establishment of socialism in Kerala, and just to be clear, if those are distinct movements, the Naxilites, and the CPI.

Yes. So there's the CPI, the CPI M, and the Naxilite movement, which generally brand themselves as Maoists. So, like, they use CPI Maoists sometimes, which isn't CPIM. I'm not sure why they did this, to be confusing or not. But the Communist Party of India was established

basically after the Soviet revolution. So after the Soviet Union was formed, there were already kind of, because this is before India gained independence, right? So there were already a lot of land reforms. There were unions that were being established throughout India. And we see during this period a lot of rebellions and riots, things like the Belangana Rebellion, which is from my home state in India,

which is a really, really cool project. I don't want to talk about that too much. But as well as in Kerala, we see a lot of things like the peasant rebellion of Malabar in 1921. So a lot of people were suffering due to persecution by landlords. And we see a lot of resistance in organizations that were cropping up here and there throughout India. And then after a lot of the writings and texts and influence from the Soviet Union came to India, we see kind of the first Communist Party of India that's formed. So once the Communist Party of India was established, not almost immediately, but we see a split

kind of following the Sino-Soviet split. And this is during the establishment of the Indian National Congress, which was attempting to gain independence and kind of talk to the British about the needs of Indian people before independence was gained. So the CPI basically saw the collaboration of the Communist Party with the Indian National Congress as a revisionist approach to liberation. And they saw it as like class collaboration. So they split and formed the CPIM, and that was kind of coupled with the Soviet Chinese split at the time.

And so the new party was formed, which was really interesting. And then in 1967, that's when the uprising broke out in Nuxelbury, which is in northern West Bengal. And that was led by, at the time, CPIM leaders who kind of rejected this approach to electoralism and things like that. They really wanted to see a militant revolution in India, and they wanted this uprising to kind of be the spark to ignite an Indian revolution truly. And the Communist Party of China actually praised this rebellion, which caused another split from

the CPIM, because the CPIM, along with the West Bengal government, put down that insurgency. So that caused another break, which gives us the current Naxillite movement, and then the CPIM party, which is in power in Kerala and also has 5 million members across India. So they're pretty large and have a lot of influence, and they take part in electoral politics throughout India, and then the old CPI party. So those are kind of the three distinct parties. And in Kerala specifically, this version of socialism, that's that we see. So the workers don't actually own the means of production in Kerala, but they do have like the highest literacy rates. Their response to the coronavirus has been really, really great. They have really good quality of life metrics throughout the state. And they have like the most religious or not the most, but like one of the most like religiously diverse states in India. So we can see that like early on they kind of tried to root out things like castism and gender inequality and things like that. And that's kind of reflected in their current state today in the ways that they've been able to protect the adivasi and the lith

populations. There's still a lot of criticisms, I think, to be made about how well they handle that. But it's, it is interesting. And throughout Indian history, like, we don't really have any revolutions. We have all these, like, rebellions and riots and, like, different things throughout history, but we never really had a revolution. And even when trying to gain independence, we didn't have a revolution. So this kind of reform-based approach to independence or like to liberation has kind of been popular, I would say, like in India. So a lot of people are very, very critical of the Naxilite movement. The Naxilite movement is condemned very, very broadly throughout India. Most journalists just do not talk about them. The surveillance state in India is

really, really strong. So people don't talk about them on social media. They don't talk about them anywhere. They're all branded as terrorists and there's like pretty wide celebration when any of them are killed. So it's a pretty horrible situation, especially considering a lot of them currently are usually like rural farmers. They are indigenous people. They are the people. They're generally the people that have very, very little to lose and everything to gain by being involved in such a militant operation. So that's kind of some context. for the distinction between the two because they really don't have very much in common today. So if the Naxalites are more of a Maoist, you know, protracted people's war approach to

revolution, is it fair to, is it fair to say that in Kerala, it's more of like a democratic socialism, like using the mechanisms already in place to build reforms and make it just a slightly less brutal sort of area? Is that like a fair distinction to make between those two movements? Definitely, definitely. I think that the things that they're doing well and the criticisms for both are just so different, but that's absolutely a good summary of the distinction between the two. Okay. And the Naxalites, again, they're more in the rural areas with the peasantry, with the indigenous people, the lowest of the low, sort of excluded from mainstream Indian society, and that's where they really have their foothold. Exactly, exactly. So as I said, I do want to do

an entire episode of the Naxalite soon, and we'll talk after we record about possibly moving in that direction. But I was hoping you could just talk a bit more about the Naxalite specifically, their political activity, and importantly, sort of what the relationship between them and the Modi government is currently. Yeah, so like I said, they're mostly active in kind of the northern central parts of India, and then, like, they have a stronghold kind of in the Thelangana on their region, which is where I'm from. So the places that they've been active today are kind of the same places. that they've been active historically from basically their inception.

So their current activities are honestly really hard to find information on just because of the things that I mentioned. Like the surveillance state in India and, like, journalism in India is, I mean, it's pretty similar, I guess, to the United States and that a lot of them are just like mouthpieces for the state. So there isn't too much conversation about them just because in India, a lot of the media and things like that, or like your phone and all of that, like, is 100% the police have access to it. So their activities mostly are waging war against landlords, against the local cops and the police and things like that.

They have been doing some really, really great work on just, like, land reform and the liberating land and, like, claiming land back for people and also stopping the building of things like factories or nuclear power plants and things like that across India. So that's kind of some of the things that they've been doing. And their relationship to the Modi government is basically that they are widely condemned as terrorists. So that means that a lot of resources go into putting them down, which honestly, I think, speaks to the threat that they pose to the government and the way that they are recognized as a threat by the state. And then beyond that, their reputation in general throughout India is also kind of similarly. So a lot of people kind of follow the state line in terms of how they feel

about the next light movements. But they are, like you said, a representation of kind of the lowest of the low, the people that don't have anything to lose and everything to gain, which makes them, I think, like, so, so disciplined and so committed to liberation and their project. Like, they really do see themselves as soon as they join kind of be willing to sacrifice everything, sacrifice their life, et cetera, which, I mean, is pretty realistic, considering the way that they are placed in the larger political landscape of India and the threat that they face by the government. So they are just a very disciplined political organization and their lines and their political

lines are very strong. So that's a little bit about them. I would love to talk about it more another time and try to do some more research because it really is difficult to get sources, especially in English, about their activities. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, of course there would be a media blackout and just a general mainstream sort of either ignoring or branding as terrorists towards the Naxalites. And if you could imagine in the U.S. an actual armed militant uprising in the poorest communities, you know, fighting landlords and using extreme sort of militant strategies to gain liberation, how would the U.S. corporate media respond to them. Of course, they're not going to be anything close to sympathetic. It's just going to be a sort

of tar and feathering in the media or a complete ignoring of the movement and hoping people don't, you know, learn about it and latch on to it. So that's not at all surprising. And then I'm sure, and I don't know this for a fact, but I mean, I would be very surprised. that this isn't true in the same way that the U.S. interacts with the Duterte government to put pressure on and put down the Maoist movement in that country. I'm sure the U.S. has relationships and conversations with the Modi government with regards to the Naxalite movement and the U.S. either directly funneling arms and funding to fighting them or ready to fight them should the need become more explicit. So the U.S. imperialism also probably can't be extracted

from this conversation either. Absolutely. I mean, I would say that everything that you said is true, and I think this also kind of speaks to the fact that there isn't really a similar organization or threat to the United States government that I could compare it to, which is, you know, sad. But like you said, there is absolutely cooperation from the United States government in this instance, but also more heavily related to Kashmir and their involvement in cooperation

with the occupation of Kashmir currently and historically, if anything, kind of this trifecta with Israel as well. So we see kind of the three fascist states kind of collaborating in their efforts to occupy and suppress violently the liberation projects under them. Well, that's fascinating. And again, we'll do more work on this broad topic for sure. So if you're interested, you know, don't despair. We will come back around and do full episodes on that entire. movement and the context surrounding it, but sort of zooming into the last question before we

end this wonderful conversation. I just want to sort of talk about what has India's response been to the pandemic and where do you see the country going over the next several years coming out of this crisis? Sure. So just for a little bit of context for when I talk about India's response to COVID. So in August, the Indian government revoked Article 370, which had been used to give Jammu and Kashmir a special status within India to be able to preserve its autonomy. And this was revoked. And then since that revocation, Kashmir has been placed under curfew. And they basically are under the longest internet and cell service blackout ever. And their journalists also basically have been cut off. And there's like very limited

access to information there. So that's kind of the context. But it's only been like really exacerbated by the coronavirus just in context, like the limitation on information has just been very, very dangerous. And they already had like pretty low infrastructure that was considered barely sufficient, quote unquote, to handle patient inflow. And that was before the pandemic. So it's only been worse, I assume now. And in absence of this reliable internet connectivity, there's been very few information about closures, shutdowns and travel and things like that. And then more broadly, India in general, we see a lot, a lot of lockdowns and just very, very large, scary, frankly, broader police powers that have been increased and surveillance as well, being justified on the grounds of public health. So we see kind of this very fascist response, this opportunistic fascist response to the pandemic. Police brutality has been like pretty widespread in terms of like violations of the lockdown. So people aren't supposed to be traveling. Migrant workers are trying to get home, but instead they're forcibly being held in really, really shitty conditions.

Temporary housing has been absolutely abysmal. Even the hospitals themselves, the conditions have been pretty poor. And I'm speaking pretty broadly. So throughout some states, like, the response has been slightly better or, like, astronomically worse in, like, the example of Kashmir. So that's been sad. But the, I guess, slightly more positive is that laborers who rely on like daily weekly wages who have been in a really really tough position just in terms of like getting back home or having their income taken away. The government has said that for people that don't make a certain amount of money or things like that, they have been given like five kilograms of like rice or wheat, a kilogram of like legumes and like some form of cash. But basically

the response has just not been sufficient for the crisis that is taking place. And the lockdowns honestly have probably come a little too late just in terms of how the virus has spread, especially in a more densely populated countries such as India. So it's a pretty horrible response all around. And I think that we'll see probably a lasting impact or a lasting effect of just the way that fascism has increased or like that the state's powers have increased due to the pandemic, post-pandemic, whenever that is or whatever that looks like. So I think that, especially during a time when there are very few ways to organize any sort of response when the government has shut down so quickly on everything, I'm not sure

like what kind of organized response we'll see at some point, but that's kind of been the general response in the country as a whole. Yeah. And obviously, whether it's Brazil, the United States, or India and lots of other examples as well of right-wing, you know, neo-fascist, crypto-fascist, capitalist states have just been the absolute worst at performing to help humans get through this crisis, making sure people have everything they need, and instead are using it as a pretext to expand the surveillance state.

In the U.S. specifically, you see the way that police brutality when it comes to social distancing is inflicted on black and brown communities while white spring breakers can go to the beach or hold AR-15s in the front of capital buildings and literally nothing happens but if a copse is a black person not wearing a mask or something they get slammed into the concrete and shit. So this is just a much bigger than any one country.

It's a far-right wave across this globe and there has to be some sort of response both nationally and internationally. In the coming years, if we're going to get out of this absolute grinding dystopia that we're all being ushered, into daily. But thank you so much, Ria, for coming on and talking about this.

You educated me on a lot of these questions, cleared up a lot of my confusion, inspired me with some of the communist and feminist and socialist movements in India, and we'll absolutely have you back on to have more in-depth conversations, whether that's on the Naxalites, Kashmir, or anything else. I really enjoy talking to you. Before we let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you online if you want to, and then maybe offer a recommendation or two for anyone who wants to learn more about what we've discussed today?

Absolutely. So I am on Twitter at a underscore busy underscore woman. That handle is a handle I made after getting doxed. So it's pretty hard to find me. But other than that, I would absolutely love to be able to drop some links in your show notes or anything like that. I would recommend Anurada Gandhi and Arndhati Roy's writings and readings on the topics that I mentioned and absolutely doing your research. But that's kind of what I would like to leave you with. Okay. Yeah, we'll put those links in the show notes, and we'll definitely have you back on. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Back at it, like a crack at it, Mr. Black, Magic, Crack, a bitch, back.

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