BENGALURU (India), August 21— “TV news was flashing nonstop, showing hundreds of houses and shops belonging to Muslims that were bulldozed by the fascist BJP government,” said Sangita, who works in a garment factory. “I have been a member of ICWP who reads Red Flag regularly. But this heinous crime can no longer be ignored. I need to be an active organizer.” The comrades in the garment factory had an urgent meeting to find ways to expand our communist work in the face of intensifying fascism in India.
It started as ethnic cleansing in Manipur. It has engulfed much of North India. Right-wing Hindu fascist groups’ hate speech is provoking the killing of Muslims in Haryana. The fascists are protected by the police. BJP goons paint Muslims’ properties with ‘x’. The next day they set them on fire, followed by bulldozers.
Many of these Muslim families are migrants from faraway states. They are afraid to travel by train because a police officer, who supposedly oversaw the train’s safety, shot and killed three Muslim men identified by their long beard. As he killed the last man in front of the passengers, he hailed Modi.
“Everybody in my neighbourhood says that BJP is preparing for the 2024 general election in India,” said another comrade from the same garment factory. “Modi himself became famous for instigating pogroms like what we see in North India now. The fascist BJP wants to consolidate its power base. Nobody talks about 25% unemployment of the youth.” She spoke of how BJP constantly blames Muslims for the problems and not the capitalist system.
“There are 550 million workers in India. Currently, 62 million have no jobs. More than 300 million workers are on contract and can be fired at any time,” the comrade explained. “Every month 2 million people migrate to city slums. These millions of workers are an opportunity to organize our Party.
“The parliamentary democracy is controlled by the richest capitalists to make maximum profit. Here in Karnataka state, when the Congress party won recent state elections, they passed a bill legalizing a 12-hour work week for six days with the same wages as before, when workers had an 8-hour workload.”
There was some disagreement and struggle around the nature of the open fascists compared to the Congress Party, which some consider more tolerant and progressive. Some comrades thought that we can cultivate many groups that work under the Congress Party umbrella.
Others believed that these so-called progressive groups are only interested in narrow issues like identity politics. This is more dangerous to the working class as it divides and isolates workers.
Most workers join Congress and affiliated groups hoping that they are better than the fascists. Our main task in these groups is not to build them but to build our party. We must constantly sharpen our ideological struggle. Liberal groups come across as pro-worker when we don’t struggle around communism. Today’s meeting gave confidence to more than twenty new workers who came to our meeting for the first time.
More importantly, how do we guarantee the growth of our party under all conditions? If we build a strong relationship with the communist line, we can build our party anywhere.
One comrade gave an example of his childhood friends who joined the paramilitary wing RSS, which is affiliated to BJP. They were unemployed for several years and anti-Muslim propaganda led them to RSS. However, our friend was able to struggle with them and now they are staunch communist supporters. We have to develop this kind of collective struggle to recruit many more.
As fascism intensifies and as ICWP becomes a mass party, we must be present everywhere with our line.