Statement of the ILPS on Secretary-General Basavraj’s Assassination by U.S.-Modi Regime
The
International League of Peoples’ Struggle vehemently condemns the
assassination of Comrade Basavraj, the Secretary General of CPI
(Maoist), and 26 others in a supposed encounter in the Abujhmarh forests
of Chhattisgarh by the fascist-puppet Modi regime in India. This
encounter takes place in the context of explicit fascist repression and
reaction across India along with their expansionist goals and Nazi-like
Hindutva ideology, backed principally by U.S. imperialism: spanning from
the bloody counterinsurgency Operation Kagar, increasing their
occupation of Kashmir along with its increasing links to the Zionist
entity, and attacks on Muslims and all minorities.
India
stands as a country marred by widespread impoverishment and foreign
control, dominated first by British colonial conquest and then by U.S.
imperialism especially after the 1980s. National independence in 1947
was a sham, with the ruling bourgeois Congress and Muslim League parties
accepting the Mountbatten Plan to partition the subcontinent between
Pakistan and India on communal lines between Hindus and Muslims to
preserve imperialist and feudal domination. After independence, India
was a key member of the Non-Aligned Movement, having a dual character of
both maintaining feudalism in the countryside while also pursuing a
path towards national industrialization with its large internal market
and aid from the Soviet Union. Due to the limits of import-substitution
industrialization in an increasingly neoliberal world and the collapse
of the Soviet Union, India fell into a balance-of-payments crisis in
1991 and began to accept IMF deals to open their economy to an
import-dependent, export-oriented trap that has only deepened the crisis
within the country.
Since
then, India has become economically dominated, therefore politically as
well too, by the United States. But even before the liberalization,
privatization, and deregulation of India’s economy, its ruling class has
repressed and exploited the oppressed and toiling masses along with
national and religious minorities. It has occupied Kashmir since its own
independence instead of allowing the Kashmiri people the right to their
self-determination and annexed much of the Northeast as well. Workers,
peasants, Dalits, and Adivasis have always remained at the lowest rung
of society and subject to the worst violations whenever they stand up
for their ancestral land, livelihood, and democratic rights, with
Naxalite forces facing a counter-insurgency that disappeared and killed
thousands under Indira Gandhi even before ‘Emergency’, a two year period
of martial law from 1975-77. Muslims and other religious minorities
have been regular subjects to pogroms and ghettoization since Partition
by fascist Hindutva forces such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
progressively allowed into the mainstream.
The
RSS was founded in 1925 on the principles of creating an
ethno-supramacist state in the Indian subcontinent bent on exterminating
Muslims and Christians, committing cultural genocide against Adivasis,
and subjugating Dalits to further dehumanization and caste exploitation.
It had absolutely no role in India’s independence movement,
collaborated heavily with British imperialism, and was actively inspired
by Nazi Germany’s Holocaust against Jewish peoples. As a paramilitary
organization, it has organized its suppression of dissent and its own
active destruction of Muslim communities through the Sangh Parivar, a
network of organizations that have regularly meted out violence and
pogroms against Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi, and minorities. It controls the
military through its drive to annex Kashmir and minority nations in the
Northeast with its neo-Nazi Hindutva ideology. Despite being banned
three different times through its history, India’s semi-feudal and
communal nature has allowed for it to become the ruling force in Indian
society as the crisis has worsened.
Today,
the Indian Congress Party has been supplanted by Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), an electoral party led by the RSS, and has continued the trend
of strengthening its ties to the United States since the latter’s “Pivot
to Asia” strategy against China. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the head
ideologues of the BJP, have beaten their chests to the call of making
India a regional ‘superpower’, but have only deepened its semi-feudal,
semi-colonial character. Their alliance with Adani, arguably the most
prominent comprador within India, has increased the exploitation,
plunder, and export of the Indian peoples’ labor, land, and resources
for the sake of superprofits for U.S. imperialism and a cut for its
local lackeys as well as actively collaborating with the Zionist entity
for its own occupation of Kashmir. The BJP also has abrogated Article
370, ending any level of self-governance in Kashmir and allowing
full-fledged occupation by the Indian government to facilitate its
plunder and settlement. In relation, attacks on Muslims have worsened
with large-scale displacement through their homes being razed, the
passing of the fascist Citizenship Amendment Act, and targeting Islamist
parties through the ‘anti-terror’ Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act
(UAPA). Finally, after the failure of Congress’s Operation Greenhunt
against CPI(Maoist), the BJP-Modi regime has launched two offensives –
Operation SAMADHAN-Prahar and Operation Kagaar – against the Adivasi
people protecting their ancestral land against corporatization and
plunder by multinational corporations along with the armed struggle
waged by the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) in the fight for
national and social liberation. It has also increased implementing the
UAPA against mass activists fighting for national democracy in the
cities.
Secretary-General
Basavraj’s martyrdom comes in context to this and at a time of immense
contradictions within and outside of India. Despite its BRICS status,
India has become a bulwark of U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific due
to its border with China, joining alliances such as the Quadrilateral
Security Dialogue (Quad), removing tariffs on Indian heavy industry to
the United States, and reversing its historical pro-Palestine position
by increasing its links to the Zionist entity. It has become a
battleground of inter-imperialist warring between the U.S. and China in a
time where Pakistan’s economy and military is becoming increasingly
dependent on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, escalating the crisis on
the border to the largest scale air-fight since the Second World War.
India’s deepening economic and political crisis has intensified its
Zionist-like conquest in Kashmir and its genocidal tactics against the
Adivasi people and revolutionary forces.
Nonetheless,
despite setbacks to the peoples’ movement due to this fascist
offensive, there is no end to the peoples’ resistance and fight for
national liberation, self-determination, genuine democracy, and their
path towards socialism. The accelerating fascist attacks on the people
calls for progressive forces and revolutionary parties in India to build
strong unities against Modi’s neo-Nazi Hindutva regime, and beat back
the regressive reactionary forces. At the same time, it also calls for
international solidarity to increase multifold against the brutish and
fascist Modi regime, build a united front against rising fascism and
imperialism across the world, and support the national and social
aspirations of the workers, peasants, Adivasis, Muslims, and minority
peoples of and within India.
Down with the fascist Modi regime!
Stop Operation Kagar, Stop the Killings!
Fight for the Right of Self-Determination of Kashmiris and other oppressed nationalities in India!
Unity of the People Against Fascism and Imperialism!
Signed,
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
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