The student protests in India are about more than just exams, and signal widespread anger at Modi’s government. South Asia Solidarity Group have released this statement in solidarity with protestors in Delhi

We in South Asia Solidarity Group stand in unconditional solidarity with the students and young people who are on the streets of Delhi today in their hundreds of thousands, surrounding the Parliament building from all sides, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as part of a protracted battle against the corruption, endemic paper leaks, and privatization of India’s education system under the Hindu supremacist, corporate fascist Modi regime.

We stand with them as they face the tear gas and horrific brutality of Amit Shah’s Delhi police. We stand with them as they pour into the streets of cities and towns across India in solidarity protests. We salute the extraordinary courage of the student hunger strikers of the All-India Students Association (AISA), Neha, Manish and Ameen who, alongside education and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk, continued their hunger strike for 23 days, only agreeing to end their hunger strike this morning when it had achieved its objective of inspiring thousands of young people to join today’s march to Parliament.

It is no surprise to us that the Modi government has responded to the students’ movement first with indifference and now with violence. But their attempts to suppress the protests, from barricades across Delhi’s main thoroughfares to house arrest of supporters in small towns across the country, to today’s lathi charges, violent beatings and tear gas, has made this about more than education – it is showing the world that Modi and the RSS will stop at nothing to crush democratic protest.

Today India’s youth have come out in their hundreds of thousands to defend basic democracy, carrying copies of the Constitution which the RSS wants to replace with the misogynistic, caste-based Manusmriti, and holding high the pictures of its architect Babasaheb Ambedkar, and the revolutionary Bhagat Singh who warned us against the ‘brown sahebs’ taking over the oppressive, plundering mantle of the British.

This crushing of any dissent is of course not restricted to students. It has been long practiced by this regime against Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, workers, and the people of Kashmir. On the same day that Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly dragged away by the police from Jantar Mantar, in Madhya Pradesh the protest of Adivasi communities against dispossession and environmental devastation by the Ken-Betwa project was attacked by the police and forcibly ended. Environmentalist Amit Bhatnagar who was also on hunger strike was arrested along with 150 other protestors.

Modi likes to flaunt the support of the diaspora which really refers to the network of fascist Hindu supremacist organisations built up by the RSS in Britain, the US and elsewhere. These organisations are allied with the far-right in Britain and across the world. They, like Modi, don’t care if Indians are murdered by racists, like 24 year-old Kirandeep Kaur in Hayes. They don’t care if Indian migrants are deported in chains and shackles from the US by Trump. But there is another face of the diaspora which is here today and which will never be silenced. These fascist organisations do not represent us, these cheerleaders of ethnic cleansing by JCB bulldozers do not speak in our name.

We in South Asia Solidarity Group were here outside the High Commission when hundreds protested in solidarity with the anti-CAA movement in 2019. We remember all too well how the regime used communal violence and fabricated UAPA charges to crush that movement, and we remember that some activists including scholars Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam are still in jail. We were here too protesting in solidarity with the Farmer’s Movement in 2021. And we are proud to be here today in solidarity with the students, as people’s resistance to fascism in India enters a new phase of mass uprisings by the youth, filling us with hope for the final inevitable defeat of fascism.

Jai Bhim! Inqilab Zindabad!

Reposted from the South Asia Solidarity Group