One of many workers’ mobilizations supporting the Maruti-Suzuki strikers.
Just days after the Hindu nationalist BJP Party won the elections in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, fascist posters in the small village of Jianagla made national news. “What Trump is doing in America,” the posters said, “we will do in this village because the BJP is now in power.” The posters gave the Muslims until the end of the year to leave and were signed by “Hindus of the village.” Jianagla’s population reflects that of India as a whole: about 80% Hindu and some 14% Muslim.
Communal strife (as the organized massacres or pogroms of Hindus and Muslims are called) was initiated by the British imperialists. British capitalist exploitation required them to take secondary differences and make them primary. This division has underpinned the development of the independent capitalist economies of both Pakistan and India. The threatening posters in Jianagla village once again raise the question: is the mass brutality spurred on by religious intolerance or capitalist tensions?
Of course, they are intertwined. The history of all religions is an ideological battle between the masses and the elites. While religion is often the opiate of the masses, it is also a community of survival for the oppressed. Ruling elites have taken our desire for connection and a higher purpose and produced the so-called “great religions” as official or semi-official arms of government. They have used religion and religious prejudices in the same way that ruling elites use racism and nationalism—to divide the working class.
Communist society will eliminate the ruling elites, their oppression and their governments. Winning and building a communist society will require a principled struggle against all the ideas that keep us fighting each other, including religious prejudice such as Islamophobia. Communism meets the real human needs for connection, meaning, and community that many people seek in religion.
Why the attacks on Muslim workers in India now?
Threatened by the rise of China, Indian capitalists have turned to the BJP with its “Make in India” slogan to attract and promote capitalist production. Desperate to attract a bigger share of a shrinking market, it has turned to two things. One is the attack on industrial workers, most recently the Maruti- Suzuki 13. The second is targeting the Muslim minority.
The Maruti-Suzuki 13 are automobile workers sentenced on March 10th to life imprisonment as the result of a violent 2012 strike that ended with the death of a manager. The strike, prompted by a slur against a Dalit (considered lower-caste) worker, resulted in the arrests of 148 workers who have spent years in jail. While 117 of these workers were finally acquitted, 31 of the most active mass leaders have been sentenced to various terms in prison—an attack on the entire working class.
Villagers in Jianagla say that Hindus and Muslims have lived in harmony for years. But the rise of the BJP on a national scale is making inroads into even the smallest villages. Mass communal violence plays a vital role for the capitalist elite. It builds support for them among a key sector of the population – the small business owners who have more direct ties to the masses than do the elites. Just as communists build our party through concentration on the industrial working class, fascists build theirs by recruiting the small business owners.
This was true in Nazi Germany, and also in Israel/Palestine. Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine makes it clear that the carefully planned expulsion of Palestinians by Israelis released acres of farmland to Jewish farmers. This is primitive accumulation for the small business men.
And so are the violent attacks on Muslims in India. The 2002 Gujarat violence (in which Modi himself is implicated) saw police and government officials directing rioters and giving them lists of Muslim-owned properties. It makes you wonder which small business in Jianagla will benefit from the threat to its Muslim villagers.
Workers’ deep mass anger at poverty and exploitation has too long been channeled by the rulers into attacks on our fellow workers in the name of religion. We must fight in our own class interest—to get rid of the source of pogroms—capitalist production relations—and build a communist society where we can work together to meet the needs—material and social—of us all.
Red Flag invites ICWP members and other readers of our paper to contribute letters and articles about how religion serves the ruling class.
