India

India

• Garment workers in South India rise up against Covid-linked retrenchment

  

  Hundreds of unionised women workers are combating efforts by the fashion industry to pass the costs of Covid-19 onto the world’s most vulnerable, reports Susan Ram

• Winston Churchill: he fought for his class, never ours

  

  We repost Dominic Alexander's 2019 article documenting Churchill’s record which tells a very different story to the heroic legacy of popular myth

• Keir Starmer, don’t pander to Modi's fascist regime and its allies in Britain - SASG statement

  

  A statement from Indians for Labour and South Asia Solidarity Group

• Starmer’s foreign policy and the spirit of Blairism

  

  Dragan Plavšić considers what Labour’s foreign policy will look like under Starmer’s leadership

• Republic of hunger: In the time of lockdown

  

  Deaths by hunger will outpace deaths due to novel coronavirus in India, says Shashi Kant Tripathi

• Locking down rights, ramping up hate: fascism and Covid-19 in India

  

  In Modi's India, coronavirus crisis is just another reason to ramp up Islamophobia, using it to cover his inept handling of the pandemic, says Kalpana Wilson

• Lockdown crisis in India: a people's perspective of Covid-19

  

  With no access to state support, healthcare or testing, India's working and poor people have been completely abandoned by the government during the lockdown

• Modi is driving Islamophobia in India, the world is watching

  

  Protesters gathered in London to oppose the horrific violence perpetrated against Muslims in Delhi, reports Ben Tunstall

• Modi, Trump and the defilement of Delhi

  

  Hope for Delhi's ravaged communities lies in practical solidarity irrespective of faith, writes Susan Ram

• India rises against Modi

  

  A popular uprising is spreading across India confronting the fascism of the Modi regime, reports Amrit Wilson

• After a bruising election... What next for the left? - Counterfire Freesheet January 2020

  

  Labour leadership contest, general strike in France, growing protest movement in India, why socialists oppose imperialism, a year of climate strikes and more in this month's Counterfire freesheet

• Protest has helped define the first two decades of the 21st century – here’s what’s next

  

  We’re living in an unprecedented moment - the fortunes of popular protest will depend on the collective leadership of the movements, writes Feyzi Ismail

• India after Naxalbari: unfinished history - book review

  

  An account of the Naxalbari movement in India fails to get to grips with the problems and consequences of the Maoist insurgent strategy, argues Susan Ram

• Kashmir crisis: how the left should respond

  

  It is time for the international left to throw its weight behind the Kashmiri struggle for democracy, argues Sweta Tapan Choudhury

• Stop Boris' Coup - Counterfire Freesheet September 2019

  

  All out for 29 September: Protest the Tory Party Conference, Central Manchester. Plus social care crisis, William Blake: artist and radical, how we won democracy, India's crackdown on Kashmir and more in this month's Counterfire freesheet

• Profiting from death and destruction: DSEI 2019

  

  The world's worst arms dealers will be gathering to exhibit their instruments of death at London's ExCel Centre once again, writes Lucy Nichols

• India's annexation of Kashmir sets a path for war

  

  The Indian government revoking Article 370 is an outright transgression of the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination, writes Sweta Choudhury

• Stand with Kashmir against military occupation and colonialism

  

  At a London vigil for Kashmir after India's suspension of Article 370, Nirmala Rajasingam of the South Asia Solidarity Group gave this speech

• The 2019 Indian General Elections: what’s at stake?

  

  With results due to be announced on Thursday May 23, Susan Ram explores the mammoth voting operation in terms of issues, significance and possible outcomes

• State terrorism and the British Empire: The Amritsar Massacre, 1919

  

  Marking the centenary of one of the most grotesque atrocities in the history of British imperialism, John Westmoreland revisits the Amritsar Massacre

• India and Pakistan must pull back from the brink of war - SASG statement

  

  Indians, Pakistanis, Kashmiris and UK citizens of South Asian origin issue a statement calling on the Indian and Pakistani governments to work for peace not war

• In India, epic worker mobilisations challenge the Modi government as never before

  

  In what is estimated to be the biggest strike in history, over 200 million workers in India took strike action, reports Susan Ram

• The summer of climate chaos

  

  The heatwave seems to be over, but with floods in Kerala to wildfires in California making history, capitalism still can’t fix climate change, writes Elaine Graham-Leigh

• Resisting the republic of fear: protesters take on Modi

  

  Over a thousand people protested outside Downing Street last week as India's Prime Minister Modi visited Theresa May, Amrit Wilson explains why

• A memory buried under the debris of Babri

  

  The demolition of the Babri mosque led to the end of peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Hindus in Rutuja Deshmukh Wakankar's town. She looks back on the day

• 'The resistance is coming from all sections of society': Hindu nationalism and its opponents

  

  Writer and activist Amrit Wilson talks to Counterfire’s Shabbir Lakha about the BJP’s violence and the growing protest movement against the Hindu supremacists

• Empire and partition: the violent end of the British Raj

  

  Contrary to the rose-tinted view of decolonisation, the end of British rule in India was marked by blunder and duplicity, writes Sean Ledwith

• India’s Hindu supremacist lynching epidemic: Trump, the Tories and the legacies of colonialism

  

  Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia is running rampant in India. Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya argues its relevance in contemporary politics because of Britain's colonial history.

• Solidarity statement by JNU alumni and international academic community

  

  Uditi Sen explains the background to the ongoing protests at JNU over the political persecution of the left by the Modi government

• Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire

  

  Hungry Bengal demonstrates the central role of imperialism and racism in creating the wartime Bengal famine which killed millions and divided the country, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

• Trouble in the Tarai: a new political crisis for Nepal

  

  Following the catastrophic earthquake that hit Nepal in April, the country is experiencing a new crisis, which this time is entirely political in nature, writes Fraser Sugden

• Modi and Cameron: partners in neoliberal plunder

  

  Protesters gather across London as David Cameron rolls out the red carpet for an Indian Prime Minister with blood on his hands

• India's nightmare: the extremism of Narendra Modi

  

  As the Indian prime minister visits Britain, Sheena Sumaria talks to writer Amrit Wilson, founder member of the South Asia Solidarity Group, about Modi's violent past and neoliberal policies

• The morality of the poor: 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers'

  

  Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries you headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget

• Capitalism: A Ghost Story

  

  Arundhati Roy’s essays depict Indian society in all its extreme inequality, but also show how some of the poorest people in the world have been fighting back, finds Dominic Alexander