Ukraine and the Indian Left: An interview with Kavita Krishnan by Rohini Hensman

 

Kavita Krishnan, a Marxist feminist who had been for three decades a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, a member of the Politbureau, leader of its women’s wing (the All-India Progressive Women’s Association) and a prominent spokesperson of the party, suddenly quit these posts and the party itself in early September 2022. Many admirers were unclear about what had happened and why, although from her subsequent statements and articles it became clear that the reason was a disagreement with the party’s position on the war in Ukraine. 

On April 10, 2023, she was interviewed by Rohini Hensman on her departure from the party and her differences with it.

The 2020 Elections in the United States: A Socialist View from Afar

While votes were being counted after the US elections of November 2020, despots from around the world – in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela and Brazil – crowed over the delay in announcing results.[1] It is easy for rulers in countries where opposition leaders are disqualified, killed or hounded into exile to mock the time taken to count votes meticulously. However, many of us watching with envy from afar  – ‘envy’ because the persecution of minorities, crushing of dissent, domination of the media and destruction of democratic institutions has gone much further in our countries – have nothing but admiration for the way in which a would-be dictator has peacefully been overthrown.

But what about claims by the Trump campaign that the election was stolen? It is clear to us that there have been systematic efforts to steal this election… by Trump and his diehard supporters. That became evident well before the election when he started alleging, in the midst of a deadly pandemic in which many feared the risks of in-person voting, that he opposed extra funding for the Postal Service because mail ballots encouraged voter fraud. At the same time Republican mega-donor Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General by Trump on 15 June, began making changes to the U.S. Postal Service – like a reduction in employee overtime hours and the elimination of postal sorting machines – that would sabotage the timely delivery of mail ballots.[2] We saw reports of polling locations being shut down and African-Americans complaining about the long distances they had to travel in order to vote. With Trump instructing his supporters to come out and vote on election day, and several states counting mail-in ballots only after in-person ballots had been counted, the scene was set for his post-election claim that he had won. He expected the case to go to the Supreme Court, and explicitly stated that he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to the court because he believed she would vote in his favour.[3]   

Rolling Back the Global Advance of the Far Right

 

In recent years, there have been many articles by socialists and left-liberals noting with alarm the advance of far-right regimes and parties in the United States (Donald Trump), Europe (the National Front/Rally in France, UKIP and the Brexit Party in the UK, the League in Italy, Vox in Spain, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, AfD in Germany, Freedom Party in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary) and indeed throughout the world: Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jin-ping in China, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyep Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines – the list goes on and on.[1] If we add regimes that were already extremely authoritarian, like the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gulf Arab monarchies, the picture looks bleak indeed.

One common explanation for the growth of the far right and simultaneous decline of centre-right and centre-left parties is the espousal by the latter of neoliberal policies which have led to job losses, widespread poverty, and growing inequality. In many instances, they have also pandered to anti-immigrant sentiment instead of combating it. Since they are seen as the mainstream or ‘the establishment’, it becomes understandable that people hurt by these policies should turn to other parties which have previously been less popular.

There is some truth in this explanation, but it begs the question why the number of people turning further to the left has been so much smaller than the number turning further to the right. One reason why this could be the case is that the left has been badly divided, with a section of it converging with the far right on many issues. For example, the supporters of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria include former KKK leader David Duke, the white supremacists demonstrating at Charlottesville, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, Greek fascists of Golden Dawn, the French National Front, the Belgian Vlaams Belang – all neo-fascists who see their own politics reflected in Assad’s ruthless totalitarian regime. Yet at the same time there are people who are seen to be on the left – figures like Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, David North and Alex Lantier of WSWS and Max Blumenthal – supporting Assad by spreading his propaganda. Again, Putin invited observers from European neo-fascist parties like the French National Front, Italian League, and Freedom Party of Austria to endorse a widely-boycotted referendum preceding the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, yet this annexation was also endorsed by people seen to be on the left like John Pilger. [2] A third example is Brexit in the UK, fronted by far-right ideologue Nigel Farage, whose campaign poster picturing a long queue of refugees bore a striking resemblence to a Nazi poster.[3] Yet some MPs in the Labour Party as well as sections of the extra-parliamentary left also supported Brexit.

What are the Lessons of the UK Election?

There have been many articles attempting to explain the crushing defeat of the Labour Party in the UK election of 12 December 2019. Some of them are very insightful, and list reasons that undoubtedly played a part in that defeat. However I have not come across any which highlight two factors that are important, namely insufficient internationalism and a failure to uphold democracy strongly enough. Let me explain – but first, a brief summary of other viewpoints.

Introduction to Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism

 

In September 2015, the image of little Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a beach in Turkey, temporarily jolted the conscience of European politicians who had been preoccupied up until then with turning back the tide of refugees from Syria. The compassion and kindness of those who welcome refugees to their countries is certainly admirable, especially in contrast with the cruelty of the far right, which seeks to exclude them. We must ask, however: is this enough? As a member of the Syria Campaign pointed out soon afterwards:

Since the picture of Aylan hit headlines across the world, 6 children have been killed in Syria every day – the majority from barrel bombs and missiles from Syrian government aircraft. But their bloodied and blown apart corpses don’t make the front page of any newspaper. None of the other 10,000 children killed in the fighting have. What broke my heart this week was a cartoon by Neda Kadri, a Syrian artist, that pictured Aylan in heaven being welcomed by children: ‘you are so lucky Aylan! We’re victims of the same war but no one cared about our death.’ (Nolan 2015)

Despite the tendency of the mainstream media to conflate ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’, it is important to remember that they are different. Refugees are fleeing violence. Therefore, the only viable solution to the refugee crisis would be to end the violence that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

That is, however, easier said than done. Ending the Syria crisis would entail, first and foremost, identifying its causes. For some of those who call themselves anti-imperialists, there is only one cause: Western (that is, North American and Western European) imperialism, which is responsible for all the bloodshed, including the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),[i] which, according to them, is responsible for most of the violence in Syria. An example of this argument is an article in the Guardian by Seamus Milne (2015) titled ‘Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq’.

Foreword and Preface of To Do Something Beautiful (a novel)

 

Foreword to the Kindle Edition

     This novel was inspired by many of the women and men I have met in the course of my work: by their ability to keep alive their dignity, humanity, and even sense of humour in the midst of poverty and overwork; by their aspiration not merely to survive but to create a better world, to do something beautiful. However, poor people in isolation are powerless; if they compete with one another as individuals or groups, a few may come out on top, but the majority always lose. Therefore one of the most crucial and admirable qualities of these women and men is their capacity to build relationships of solidarity, friendship and love across traditional barriers of caste, religion, language and even nationality. The spontaneous warmth and generosity I have encountered among working women in widely separated parts of South Asia never fails to move me, and I think it would not be an exaggeration to talk of a common culture which they share despite superficial differences.

     There have been many changes since I wrote this novel in the 1980s. For example, information and communication technologies have been revolutionised, and the value of the rupee has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was then. The prices of essential commodities, utilities and services, especially food and public transport, have risen correspondingly or even more. Wages have increased, but at the lowest levels have not kept pace with inflation. At the opposite pole, there has been a vast accumulation of wealth, and consequently the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene proportions. Lured by sky-rocketing real estate prices and the prospect of union-free workforces, many industrialists have sold their factories in Bombay and either subcontracted their work to small enterprises or shifted production to other locations where vicious union-busting is the norm even in large-scale industry. The big pharamaceutical factories have disappeared, as have many other large factories, and along with them the relatively well-paid and secure jobs they represented. On a more positive note, formal workers are now more aware of the importance of fighting for the rights of informal workers, democratic independent unions have proliferated, and these unions have formed an all-India federation that counteracts the earlier isolation of independent unions.

Steering Between Islamophobia and Muslim Fundamentalism: The Position of the Left in the Debate on the Veil

Introduction

Islamophobia is in many ways similar to racism. Just as racism justifies the oppression of and discrimination against certain peoples on the grounds that they are inferior to the oppressors, Islamophobia, as defined by the Runnymede Trust in 1997, justifies the oppression of Muslims on the grounds that they adhere to a religion – Islam – that is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unchanging, irrational, sexist, violent and aggressive. While use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ has been criticised by Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and others who argue that it is ‘often used to silence the critics of Islam, including Muslims fighting for reform in their own communities,’ Meera Nanda defends its use to describe ‘prejudice against Islam itself as somehow singularly evil and backward as compared to other religions’ (Nanda 2011:63). She also notes the convergence between European Islamophobia and the Hindutva Right in India with the formation of the organisation ‘The Voice of India’, set up in Delhi in 1981 and cited repeatedly in the manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, whose mantra – ‘the problem is not Muslims but Islam itself’ – encapsulates this view.

Racism and Islamophobia are characteristics of the political Right, and even in their milder forms are conducive to the growth of the far Right. It goes without saying, therefore, that revolutionary socialists must oppose them.

The term ‘fundamentalism’ is actually a misnomer, since there are, in the case of every religion, basic disagreements about what fundamentalists claiming allegiance to it regard as ‘fundamental,’ and what progressives claiming allegiance to the same religion regard as fundamental. Nonetheless, the term has now passed into common usage, and will therefore be used here in its accepted sense. The object of faith, for fundamentalists, is clearly defined, absolute, and cannot be questioned. It therefore provides a stable point of reference in a world that is otherwise changing rapidly, creating all manner of insecurities. This characteristic of fundamentalism has led to its being explained as a response to capitalism and modernity: a clinging to certainty in a world where, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, ‘All that is solid melts into air’. In Karen Armstrong’s words, ‘Fundamentalists will often express their discontent with a modern development by overstressing those elements in their tradition that militate against it. They are all – even in the United States – highly critical of democracy and secularism. Because the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture, fundamentalists tend to emphasise conventional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home’ (Armstrong 2001: 141).

Thus fundamentalism is a very specific type of response to capitalism and modernity: a reactionary response. Its purpose is to provide justification and reinforcement for the domination of those who have traditionally exercised power within a community: men, religious leaders, community elders, and so on. It speaks for the oppressors whose power to oppress is being challenged by modernity and especially by democracy. It is therefore politically right-wing. It is important to distinguish between religious fundamentalism (which is not necessarily violent) and the political use of fundamentalism (which almost always is); but the abdication of the right and responsibility to think and make moral judgments for oneself makes fundamentalists easily manipulable by right-wing political leaders.

Labour and Globalisation: Union Responses in India

 Introduction

The first major shock of what subsequently came to be called globalisation in India was the economic liberalisation programme initiated in July 1991. The Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao, faced with a crisis resulting from foreign exchange reserves sufficient for just a fortnight’s imports, undertook some of the measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the late 1980s. The new policy included abolition of licensing procedures for manufacturing investment (which had popularly come to be known as a corruption-ridden ‘license-permit raj’), reduction of the high import tariffs on most goods (but not consumer goods), liberalising terms of entry for foreign investors, and liberalising capital markets (Balasubramanyam and Mahambare, 2001). It would be a mistake to see these changes simply as being imposed on India. Many of them were designed to encourage the expansion of big business after what were perceived as decades of stagnation, for example by removing restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, encouraging businesses to seek finance abroad, and sparking a wave of expansion into new sectors which had either barely developed (e.g. telecom), or had until then been reserved for the public sector (e.g. banking). 

The next milestone was the birth of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 1 January 1995, with India being a member from the beginning. This involved new pressures, for example to eliminate quantitative restrictions on imports, simplify and reduce tariffs, reduce export constraints, reduce the number of activities reserved for the public sector and small-scale sector, further liberalise the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regime, and address the fiscal deficit (cf. WTO, 2002). The process of integrating India more closely into the world economy has been more or less continuous since 1991, despite changes of government, and the world economy itself has globalised rapidly during this period.