India

By revoking Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution that provide special autonomous status and residency rules for Jammu and Kashmir, and preparing to break up the state, Narenda Modi’s far-right, Hindu-supremacist government has effectively declared war on the Kashmiri people.

It has virtually declared a literal war too, with tens of thousands of troops invading the state, mainstream political leaders under house arrest, a total communications blackout, and reports of widespread human rights abuses. An already bad situation has got much worse, fast.

The Parliamentary Labour Party is full of unscrupulous and unprincipled politicians willing to exploit communal divisions and promote reactionary “community leaders” for electoral gain. However, the efforts of shadow trade minister Barry Gardiner go well beyond a few public appearances with the local vicar or imam.

On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, India, 50 soldiers under the command of the British General Dyer opened fire on a crowd gathering in the Jallainwala Bagh – a garden-cum-open area popular for meetings and social or religious gatherings.

Many of the crowd were there to celebrate Vaisakhi, the Sikh New Year. No one was armed, there were no disturbances, it was peaceful.

The British authorities put the number of dead at 379, with more than a thousand injured. The actual number of fatalities will never be known.

After Britain and its Allies had won the war, proclaiming themselves champions of freedom and democracy, the people of its imperial possessions stepped up their democratic demand for some of that freedom for themselves.

India

In its largest colony, India, Britain imposed the Rowlatt Act, extending wartime powers of indefinite imprisonment without trial. It prompted anger and rebellion, against both the Act and continuing British rule.

It is thirty years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, partly based on the life of the founder of Islam, Muhammad, sparked protests across the Muslim world, with riots in India and Pakistan in which dozens of Rushdie's fellow Muslims were shot dead, book burnings on the streets of Britain, and ultimately an Iranian death sentence which sent its author into hiding under armed police guard.

These excerpts from an article by K R Shyam Sundar in the Mumbai Economic and Political Weekly (19 January) give information on the recent general strike in India.

The joint platform of Central Trade Unions comprising 10 unions conducted a general strike on 8 and 9 January 2019.

Since 1991, the CTUs have conducted 18 countrywide work stoppages and multiple forms of protests...
apart from concerted strikes at the industry level, like banks, insurance, etc, against the economic and labour
policies of the central government...

In 1861, during British colonial rule, Section 377 was introduced into the Indian Penal Code: a law with origins in England’s Buggery Act of 1533. This marked, in Victorian language, India’s criminalisation of homosexuality. With the independence of India in 1947, Section 377 survived.

I am grateful to Martin Thomas for his response to my letter (Solidarity 439).Rather than seeking to avoid measures which would invite “a counter revolutionary reaction”, I was attempting to point out the very tight limits of social-democratic reformism, i.e. if you try and raise really serious amounts of revenue from the rich to pay for your reform programme, such a government will very quickly run into serious trouble.

Right-wingers are trumpeting the claimed prosperity of the US economy since Trump’s election, and of the British economy after Brexit. A closer look shows the prosperity as very partial.

Stock market prices in the USA have risen strongly since November 2016, though no more than their general rising trend since they hit bottom in March 2009. The slice of corporate profits in total US income is as high as it was at its pre-2008 peak, which in turn was the highest since 1965.

An Indian socialist presents a view different from Solidarity’s on an attempt to get the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional the practice of triple talaq (where a Muslim man can divorce his wife in minutes by saying the word talaq three times).