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
Leave A Reply
Related News
