This iconic image from Delhi, India, in December 2019, of four women protecting a fallen male comrade showed that women can fearlessly defend working-class brothers and sisters.
From India to Iran: Confront Fascist Sexism by Mobilizing for Communism
DELHI (India), October 3— “I was born in a conservative Muslim family in North India,” writes comrade Nadia, “People like me wore hijab. Traditions of the past, not laws, compelled us to wear hijab. I don’t wear a hijab now.
“Last year I joined ICWP. I was a student in Delhi. I participated in several mass demonstrations in Shaheen Bagh to protest the brutal beatings of several students at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where the fascist BJP and their paramilitary forces were systematically attacking Muslim students.”
Thousands of Hindu and Muslim students and workers came to occupy Shaheen Bagh against state-sponsored fascist attacks. The Shaheen Bagh protest lasted several months. Thousands of people camped on massive freeways. Food, medicine, and even schooling of children were contributed by tens of thousands of people from all over India.
“At this moment, several ICWP comrades asked me to read Red Flag,” Nadia continued. “I liked the article that asked the masses to reject nationalism and fight for a system without money. The protest was already running without money, and it was feeding, housing, and schooling thousands of people. But it was also very nationalist. The line of the mass movement was that they can defeat fascist Modi if we can strengthen the unity of Hindus and Muslims and fight as one for India.
“Our comrades who stayed for the whole protest started study groups. I was one of those who joined. Every day we talked about communism, how it will work, how to destroy capitalism, and what is the process of building a mass party for communism.
“The first obstacle we faced was that many people believed that India could become secular democracy. ICWP comrades explained that democracy is another form of class dictatorship. The rich capitalists force the working class to be wage slaves and they must compete against other capitalists to maximize profit.
“In our study groups, we talked about imperialism and its history of wars for profit. We looked at the Russian and Chinese revolutions that put the working class in power and inspired the masses all over the world. And we are still learning from them.”
Our party has learned that socialism and nationalism can never free workers from wage slavery. Mass communist parties like ours will eradicate capitalism from its roots.
“As I was getting more convinced about communism, I joined ICWP,” writes Nadia. “I saw no need to wear a hijab. I identify myself as a member of the international working class.
“But in India, many courageous women wear hijab defiantly to protest the fascist forces of the BJP, who are banning the hijab. We must win these women to our party. They display hijab to defy the male chauvinism of the BJP.
“We must struggle with these women to show that the best way to combat male chauvinism is to eradicate sexism with communism. By making the hijab acceptable to all Muslim women, they are inadvertently falling into the same trap that Muslim clerics advocate.”
Masses Confront Fascism and Imperialism Worldwide
Ironically, the fascist BJP media are not covering the violent demonstrations in Iran. They attack the hijab in India, but they don’t say a word when Iranian women and men are protesting. To read about the mass demonstrations in Iran, if you are in India, you must go to the US and European channels.
This shows the imperialist nature of the struggle all over the world. The US imperialists rejoice in the Iranian protests because it weakens the anti-US Iranian fascists. The Indian capitalist rulers want to continue getting cheap oil from Iran and build the strategic Chabahar port in Iran. Iranian fascists have amassed the second-largest and most potent military in the Middle East, but their dreams of confronting the US are ruined by the mass uprising.
From Shaheen Bagh to Tehran, the masses are confronting fascist forces. We must not be swayed by any nationalists, or imperialists into taking sides of the competing forces. The workers everywhere have one goal: to eradicate the horrors of male chauvinism, sexism, racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and casteism with communist revolution.
Read our pamphlet:
“The Communist Fight Against Sexism”
available here