By Imran Kamyana
As these lines are being written, Pakistan’s mighty and all-powerful military, through its puppet government, is bracing up for another ‘operation’ against the Islamist insurgency in the North-Western parts of the country. The region, historically the homeland of Pashtuns, was divided in 1893 between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan through the 2,640-kilometer-long Durand Line by British colonialism in the context of the Great Game (the rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia) and its other designs of loot and plunder of South Asia.
The idea of another military operation, which would be the eighteenth of its kind in about two decades, has sent shock waves not only among the common masses, particularly in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhua (the Pashtun population-dominated province in the North-West), but also among the various sections of the bourgeoisie having recently fallen out of the state’s favor or historically having a troubled relation with it—including Imran Khan’s PTI and certain nationalist parties. While these sections of the political elite are reasonably afraid that the operation would be used as a tool of further political repression and engineering, the masses have more serious concerns of their own, as the previous operations have caused far more damage to the common people than the terrorist groups they were targeting, resulting in an endless series of enforced disappearances, gigantic internal displacements, extrajudicial killings, destruction of homes and livelihoods, and other forms of ‘collateral damage’.
This state oppression, violence and the resulting mayhem has been one of the fundamental triggers of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a nationalist movement having popular support among the Pashtun population, mainly in the tribal areas. Among other things, the PTM, along with the various regional movements inspired from it, demand an accountability for the military personnel involved in the crimes against the common people, retrieval of the thousands of ‘missing persons’, and an end to the policy of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Taliban—respectively, the Taliban groups sponsored by the Pakistani state and working under its control, and the ones operating against it, mostly at the behest of rival imperialist powers, including India.
The efforts of the Pakistani state, in line with the official policy of ‘strategic depth’, to establish a ‘friendly’ (read puppet) regime in Kabul have mostly been dashed after the defeat and disgraceful withdrawal of NATO forces. After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the policy of the Pakistan primarily consisted of a double game in which the rogue elements within the military establishment continued to support the Taliban insurgency, while in official terms the country remained a ‘partner’ in the so-called US ‘war on terror’. This rift within the Pakistani deep state has been one of the core factors contributing to a civil war like situation in the country during the last two decades or so. More than 70,000 people, mostly civilians but also security personnel, have been killed so far in this unending mayhem of bloodshed and terrorism. The crimes committed during this imperialist war in Afghanistan both by the NATO forces and the Taliban are no less gruesome with countless fatalities of the common people, and most of an already war-torn country literally turning into rubble. Nevertheless, after coming into power for the second time, the Taliban regime has done next to nothing to bring into line their allied groups involved in terror activities within Pakistan (the so-called Pakistani Taliban, generally referred to as the TTP) including deadly attacks on the security forces.
In recent months, the bilateral relations of the two countries have deteriorated to the extent that Pakistan had to conduct airstrikes within Afghanistan (resulting in the retaliatory firing by the Taliban across the border) and go to the United Nations to force the Taliban to tackle the issue of the TTP, while officials of the Taliban regime have been mocking, humiliating and at times straightaway threatening Pakistan on Twitter and elsewhere. In this regard, the Pakistanis have also tried to exert pressure on the Taliban through China—the biggest investor in Afghanistan, a close ally of the Taliban and the only country in the world recognizing them as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. No doubt, there must still be pro-Pakistan factions within the ‘Taliban’, which is basically an umbrella term for various allied armed fundamentalist groups with a delicate balance of power, at times resulting even in an open infighting.
However, what can be assessed without a doubt is that Pakistan is unable to influence or control them as it used to do in a not-too-distant past. They are not as dependent on Pakistan for arms, money and strategic support as they used to be prior to the withdrawal of the NATO forces. Moreover, after coming to power they have found a far richer and more powerful regional ally in China, which has been investing heavily to exploit the enormous mineral reserves in the unfortunate land being ruled by them. They may also be using groups like the TTP as bargaining chips in dealing not only with Pakistan but also China. In the latter case, certain jihadist groups under the influence of the Taliban may cause headaches for the Chinese regime in its already troublesome Muslim majority regions. Apart from all this, it would simply be problematic for the Taliban to take action against the TTP as it may lead to deeper rifts and disintegration within them. But then the ties of at least some of the groups within the TTP to various factions of the Pakistani deep state owing to common economic and strategic interests have also been an undisputed fact, resulting in the aforementioned categorization of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Taliban.
All this reflects how, thanks to the criminal policies and interventions of US imperialism, especially since 1979, this part of the world has been desperately mired in the bloody marsh of war, terrorism and an associated multi-billion-dollar black economy of narcotics and crime, a primary source of funding for the Taliban and similar terrorist groups, but also having a deep penetration in the Pakistani state, society and politics, fraying the whole social fabric of the country.
Although Islamic fundamentalism is not a new phenomenon, in recent times it has attained a particularly poisonous and reactionary character. With the downfall of the Islamic world and its subsequent occupation by the Western imperialist powers, some newly emerging Islamic revivalist movements offered resistance to colonialism. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 provided a new world outlook and program to the most advanced and genuine elements within these movements. Many of these people were present at the Congress of the Peoples of the East organized by Bolsheviks in Baku in 1920. However, as is the case of the Indian subcontinent, even in those times the colonial masters orchestrated the birth of new Hindu and Islamist sects suitable to their social and political interests. Such reactionary religious tendencies were used to sow the seeds of religious divides and prejudices, to pacify the local populace through diverting their focus and attention to the afterlife, and to disorient the movements against colonialism.
In the post-World War II world, it was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who devised the policy of using modern Islamic fundamentalism in order to sabotage left-leaning movements and regimes in the Muslim world capable of posing a threat to imperialism. In the decades immediately after the War, strong left-wing currents emerged in these countries, and the social discontent seeping into respective armed forces resulted in coups leading to overthrows of lackey bourgeois governments and formation of regimes which can broadly be described as proletarian Bonapartist or deformed workers’ states (Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, etc.). Likewise, Jamal Abdul Nasir and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto came into power riding the waves of left-wing populism in Egypt and Pakistan respectively, initiating a process of nationalization, while the biggest communist party outside the Warsaw Pact countries emerged in Indonesia.
Similar developments in many other Muslim countries sent tremors to imperialist centers in the West. Their response was to nurture and sponsor Islamist groups, whether armed or otherwise, all across the Muslim world as a tool of reaction and counter-revolution, in order to safeguard the imperialist world order. Examples include Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen in Egypt and other Arab countries (later turning into Hamas in Palestine), Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, and Sarekat-e-Islam in Indonesia. Layers of lumpen proletariat and unemployed youth, backwards sections of the working classes and petty bourgeoisie, including small business owners and traders, have been the traditional social base of these currents, which do not hesitate to resort to the most barbaric and fascist methods against their opponents whenever possible. Yet, Islamic fundamentalism has not been able to develop a mass social base and exert itself decisively in most of the Muslim countries, including Pakistan.
In a similar vein, in order to counter the Saur Revolution of April 1978 in Afghanistan, the CIA initiated its Operation Cyclone in June 1979, about six months before any of the Russian troops had entered the country. The revolutionary regime of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had very audaciously undertaken the historic task of bringing Afghanistan out of centuries of backwardness and destitution through measures that included abolition of extremely exploitative, usurious loans on the poor peasants; land reforms; elimination of reactionary norms, traditions and laws that treated women worse than animals; separation of the state from religion; emergency literacy programs; plans for free provision of healthcare and education; fair distribution of water; and the initiation of building an industrial base. These developments set alarm bells ringing in the imperialist centers from Islamabad to Riyadh and from Brussels to Washington.
Operation Cyclone basically consisted of propping up armed Islamic fundamentalist groups against the revolutionary government in Kabul, primarily through the Pakistani and Saudi states. Among other jihadists from Arab countries and elsewhere, Osama bin Laden was also recruited in the same process out of which Al-Qaeda and the Taliban emerged later on. At that time, US President Ronald Reagan described these so called ‘mujahedeen’ as the “moral equals of the founding fathers of the USA”.
The CIA established a vast network of drug manufacture and distribution in the region in order to finance these jihadists. The enterprise only expanded in the following decades, generating massive amounts of black money, which continues to fuel Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the region. Keeping this in view, these terrorist groups, including the Taliban, may be deemed somewhat similar to the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia in terms of their economy, methods and interaction with the state.
Similarly, the US supported the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq—which had come to power by overthrowing the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government, after the latter had lost much of its credibility among the working masses in a failed experiment of left-reformism. Zia’s regime established thousands of “madrassahs” (religious seminaries) throughout the 1980s all over Pakistan, especially in the aforementioned Pashtun region bordering Afghanistan, in order to provide children and youth of the poor families as foot soldiers for the counter-revolutionary imperialist war being waged in Afghanistan. The syllabus for these seminaries was designed and printed by the CIA in the US, and basic math in these books was explained by numbers of guns, bullets, grenades, and the communist soldiers killed! This was also the case with grammar, and alphabets were taught as “A for Allah”, “J for Jihad”, etc. Interestingly, the term Taliban literally means “students”, referring to the pupils at these seminaries—which, once again, turning into a profitable enterprise, continue to expand in size and numbers to this day. According to one estimate, there are about 40,000 madrassahs currently in operation only in Pakistan, manufacturing religious extremism, fundamentalism and hatred on an industrial scale. There were only a few hundreds of these when Zia had taken over!
After coming to power in 1978 and hanging Bhutto in 1979 in a sham trial, the US-sponsored Zia regime also initiated a gigantic program of mass oppression and Islamization of Pakistani society in order to curb any class resistance and make sure that the revolutionary events of 1968-69—which, as a tragic result of the stagist policies of the Stalinist parties and an absence of a genuine Marxist party, had put Bhutto into power—did not repeat themselves. Public lashings of progressive journalists and political workers became a norm; military tribunals were initiated in order to jail, torture and at times hang the more radical left activists; students’ unions were banned (and remain illegal to this day); private media was heavily censored while the state media turned into a lethal tool of conservative and Islamist propaganda; the constitution was amended to include reactionary clauses, and laws discriminating against minorities and women were introduced; critical thinking was discouraged at every level and in all spheres of social life; more radical and reactionary Islamic sects, particularly the variants of Salafi/Wahhabi Islam imported from Saudi Arabia, were promoted with a full-fledged state backing; politics and political activities were loathed officially; blasphemy laws from the British colonial era were amended to introduce the sentences ranging from life imprisonment to death; curriculums were heavily revised in order to foster a more conservative, non-scientific mindset among the youth; and people with a fundamentalist outlook were recruited en masse into the state machinery.
Throughout the process, the major Islamist political party of the time, the Jamat-e-Islami, along with its students’ organization, played the role of a B-team to the draconian regime. The Zia dictatorship, in short, entailed everything that a counter-revolution usually does. The jihad it backed in Afghanistan very soon spilled over into Pakistan, poisoning the country with widespread lumpenization, Kalashnikovs, sectarian violence and drug use, suffocating the whole of the society and pulverizing the progressive values in art and culture.
It was also the time when a sizeable part of the countless petrodollars coming from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies to fund the so-called Afghan jihad started finding its ways into the Pakistani military establishment, including the chief spy force of the country, the ISI, which, in a few years, became one of the most powerful and well-funded intelligence agencies in the world. This enormous cash was very soon to be supplemented with an unending supply of black money from the enterprises mentioned earlier, giving ISI a relative financial independence even from the Pakistani state and its military. A portion of this booty also found its way to the pockets of jihadist mullahs, moving them from rags to riches almost overnight, considerably raising their social status and influence. Ironically, whether it be the ‘mujahedeen’ or the ISI, the US imperialism was laying the grounds of its own nemesis in Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dr. Najibullah’s government, a crisis-ridden continuation of the PDPA regime, fell in 1992 as Boris Yeltsin’s government in Moscow stopped the supply of fuel and weapons to it—but also because of the betrayal of its important Stalinist commanders, who started jumping off the sinking ship, deserting and joining forces with the enemy. This led to a new phase of the civil war in which a bitter infighting ensued between formerly allied mujahedeen groups. Involvement of various imperialist powers other than Pakistan through backing different armed groups further complicated the situation. Attempts of mediation by the Pakistani state at the behest of its bosses in Washington and Riyadh failed miserably one after the other. Whatever infrastructure was built during the PDPA years was destroyed in this vicious struggle for power, and the constant barrage of rockets turned Kabul, once known as the Paris of the East, into ruins. In these circumstances, Pakistan decided to raise the Taliban as a new force to put an end to the anarchy and instability in its neighbor once and for all. But it was not that simple, as explained by Lal Khan in one of his many insightful writings on Afghanistan and Islamic fundamentalism,
In 1996 the capture of Kabul was made possible after a secret deal between the US Secretary of State for South Asia, Robin Raphael, the Taliban and the military faction of the former Stalinist general Shahnawaz Tanai. This deal was fostered by the ISI… Ironically, it was patronized in Islamabad by Benazir Bhutto (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s daughter). This sheds some light on her credentials as a “progressive”. The money for this operation to capture Kabul was provided by the US oil giant Unocal. It is not accidental that the former US Secretary of State Robert Oakley is an employee of Unocal.
After taking over Kabul, one of the first atrocities committed by the Taliban was the gruesome murder of Dr. Najibullah along with his brother. The two had taken refuge in a local UN compound. Their dead bodies were left hanging on a traffic light pole for days to terrify the local population. Among other things, the draconian regime implemented by the Taliban included a total ban on girls’ education; episodic public lashings and at times stoning people to death; requiring women to wear head-to-toe coverings such as the ‘burqa’ and discouraging them from leaving their homes; arbitrary ‘justice’ through the courts headed by horrible mullahs; massacres of the Shia minority population; the prohibition of shaving beards for men; and a complete ban on western-style clothing, music and every other form of art. In other words, once in power they ensured everything conceivable to send the society to the stone age, or maybe even worse. Things have not changed much after they came to power for the second time.
However, relations between the Taliban and the US deteriorated very soon. Zalmay Khalilzad, who had served as a State Department official under Ronald Reagan and later remained the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations, was also working as a consultant for Unocal at the time, and publicly praised the Taliban while they were wreaking havoc on the Afghan people. In an article for Washington Post in 1996 he explicitly wrote,
Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran… it is closer to the Saudi model… The group upholds a mix of traditional Pashtun values and an orthodox interpretation of Islam.
Initially, the Taliban and Unocal were planning to build a $4.5 billion pipeline network to transport oil and gas from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to South Asia. However, Unocal managers later found out that the Taliban were double-crossing them—and beside sending a delegation to Unocal’s head office in Texas, they had sent another one to Buenos Aires to the headquarters of Argentinean oil conglomerate BRIDAS to negotiate an even more profitable deal. At the same time, Al-Qaeda bombed two US embassies in Africa killing 224 people. By then, the terrorist group led by once US favorite Osama bin Laden had moved from Sudan to Afghanistan, where it was offered refuge by the Taliban. All this led to the Taliban falling out of favor with the US, and, as is commonly said, the rest is history.
As the last of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were crossing the Oxus River in 1988 after Geneva Accords, Zia-ul-Haq died under suspicious circumstances in a plane crash, but continued to live in the policies of the subsequent democratic and military governments, including the ones under Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which uninterruptedly continued to shift to the right—to the extent of becoming a coalition partner with its historic rival, the traditional right-wing party of Nawaz Sharif, who was nurtured and introduced into politics by none other than Zia-ul-Haq! Like much of the rest of the world, the public anger and discontent against the two-party system paved the way for a third political force, in this case the right-wing populism of Imran Khan, which shares startling similarities with the phenomena of Trump, Bolsonaro and Milei. As can be imagined, Imran Khan and his party—the so-called Movement for Justice (PTI), mostly having its support base in the educated, white collar sections of the urban petty bourgeoisie—is conservative and reactionary to the degree that many consider it a ‘clean shave’ version of Jamaat-e-Islami.
The unabated introduction and ruthless execution of neo-liberal policies since the late 1980s at the behest of the IMF and World Bank has only exacerbated the historic crisis of Pakistani capitalism, further deteriorating the conditions of an already impoverished population. The miserable failure of the military establishment’s project around Imran Khan—first backing and putting him into power, and then ousting and subsequently incarcerating him after he proved to be a headache by attempting to become more and more independent with his typical arrogant and carefree attitude—has deepened the rifts within the state and further intensified the political chaos. The economy is plagued with historic deficits and debts, and the situation has reached a point where nothing much has been left to privatize. Even the left-over state assets put on sale at discounted prices are unable to fetch any reasonable investment from abroad. Now, the airports and public parks and highways are being mortgaged to get additional loans. Despite the long painful hours of power outages becoming a routine even in the relatively developed urban centers, electricity prices have increased manifold during the last few years.
The new dummy government under Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, is devoid of any public support and credibility. Its handlers are even more unpopular. Uncertainty and mass discontent is the order of the day. The victorious mass movement in Kashmir demanding affordable electricity has further alarmed the policy makers. In these conditions the regime has turned even more oppressive, conservative and religious. The circumstances reflect a state suffering from an existential crisis, and a society on the verge of collapse in case the belated, crisis-ridden and historically obsolete capitalism is not uprooted in a revolutionary upsurge of the exploited. However, in the present conditions marked with social lull and decay, betrayals of the traditional trade union and party leaderships, and political indifference and numbness among the toiling masses with no respite in sight, it is usual for the common people, particularly the petty bourgeoisie and the backward layers of proletariat, to try to seek solace in reactionary prejudices of the past, religious tales and narratives, and the idea of an afterlife. All of these contribute to religiosity engulfing large sections of the society, expressing itself in the dressing, getup, language, habits and other aspects of social life, but being as superficial as the thin layer of fungus that forms on dead waters.
In the times marked with an inertia in the class struggle and labor movement, religious sects and fundamentalist groups may swell to an extent, and the new ones with more reactionary outlooks may continue to emerge, but because of their utter inability to present a viable program of emancipation for the masses, they are mostly unable to acquire sustainable social and political bases in the vast majority of the population, and, in most cases, are very soon lost into oblivion. In the moments of an apparent domination of reaction and religiosity, the progressive social and political currents may seem to be hopelessly dying down but can come to the fore very quickly under the whip of extraordinary events. In this regard, to the extent the crisis of the state is deepening, and the contradictions of Pakistani capitalism are sharpening, the possibility of an unforeseen social explosion, radically transforming the whole situation overnight, cannot be ruled out.
The Durand Line is just one of the artificial divides in the region drawn by British imperialism and its local lackeys in order to segregate and perpetuate their exploitative rule over the local populations having a common history over thousands of years. The others are the Redcliff Line and the Line of Control (LoC), which respectively split Punjab (and Bengal) and Kashmir in between India and Pakistan, the two rival atomic powers in South Asia emerging out of the bloody partition of 1947—in which 20 million people were uprooted from their ancestral homes while at least a million perished in the resulting religious frenzy of rape and murder. The trauma of the partition still continues to haunt the cultural and social life of the people, and fuels religious bigotry and fundamentalism in both countries, obviously propped up not only by the state and ruling classes of Pakistan—a country apparently founded in the name of Islam—but also the supposedly secular India. Here, once again, it was the British imperialists who, for the obvious reasons, while leaving in 1947 made sure that they didn’t leave behind a united India.
In times of severe internal crises, inevitably resulting from the historically belated and grafted capitalism, the two neighboring states do not refrain from going to the extent of beating the drums of war and taking the war hysteria imbued in the toxic mixture of nationalism and religious fanaticism to the extremes. However, the limited resources and potential consequences—including the possibility of a war getting out of hand and a total annihilation in case of a nuclear conflict—forces restraint upon their policy makers, and sooner or later the arbitration of imperialism for the same reasons helps diffuse the situation leading to another phase of ‘normality’ and ‘peace’, in which the process of dialogue for the sake of dialogue begins. The full-blown wars in 1947, 1965 and 1971—and various limited border conflicts continuing to this day, mostly around the dispute over Kashmir—along with the intermediate durations of peace talks show that the ruling classes of India and Pakistan can neither fight a decisive war nor can they, contrary to the liberal and left-reformist illusions, maintain a long-lasting and durable peace and friendship. Since their inception, the powerful sections within the states and ruling classes of both the countries, taking lesson of ‘divide and rule’ from their British masters, have adopted the policy of nurturing and sponsoring religious extremism and fundamentalism in order to diffuse the class struggle and perpetuate their crisis-ridden rule. In this context, Hindu and Islamic fundamentalisms can be considered two aspects of the same phenomenon and feed upon each other.
The rise and coming to power of Bhartiya Jannata Party (BJP) in an officially secular state once again proves that a truly secular and democratic society cannot be built upon the basis of a historically belated and crisis-ridden capitalism unable to offer a prosperous life for the vast majority of the population. The BJP may be considered the electoral wing of the hardline extremist Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which—in the conditions of national, regional, linguistic, cultural and religious diversity of India, where tens of thousands of Hindu deities are worshiped, and where a sizeable Muslim minority along with the Christians and Sikhs also reside—strives to construct a unified Hindu religion and a nationalism based on it in the fashion of Italian and German fascism.
Historically speaking, RSS and the organizations spawning from it, collectively called the “RSS Family”, have not been able to achieve any major success in the electoral field. Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the party preceding the BJP, in its lifespan at the most garnered 9.31 percent of the total vote (in the general elections of 1967). In the general elections of 1984, the BJP was able to secure only two seats in Lok Sabha, the Indian parliament. However, it was the onslaught of ruthless capitalist policies by the consecutive Congress governments—particularly after taking a sharp turn towards economic openness and neoliberalism in 1990s in the backdrop of the collapse of Soviet Union—along with the use of erstwhile British policy of manipulating the communal divisions of society for power and prestige which provided the BJP with the social base that it did not take long to translate into electoral victories. But more than Congress, it was the inability of the Stalinist leaderships, including the various Communist Parties, to arm the gigantic Indian proletariat with a Marxist program and illuminate a revolutionary way out of the quagmire of capitalism that ultimately cleared the path for the forces of Hindutva. Like much of the rest of the world, having lost their path in the mazes of class conciliations, two-stageism, nationalism, parliamentarianism and reformism, the CPs—once having a considerable mass base, support and presence in the parliament—are now struggling for their very survival.
As highlighted by Haris Qadeer in one of his recent writings on India, during the last ten years of power, the BJP has become so strong not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of socio-cultural influence that any other political force or even all of the rival political parties combined are virtually unable to offer a serious resistance against it. Like similar phenomena elsewhere, most of its support base is comprised of the professional and mercantile petty bourgeoisie, lumpenized layers of the proletariat and unemployed youth, and, quite curiously, the Indian diaspora in the West. According to a conservative estimate, the BJP now has more than 180 million members. Additionally, its inactive members or close sympathizes also number in the tens of millions. More than 800 NGOs affiliated to the party are active in various spheres. It has 36 wings including the country’s largest trade union federation and students’ federation. Apart from a large women’s wing, the party also controls the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and various arrangements for monitoring cultural and religious affairs at home and abroad. It is estimated that RSS alone has around five million members, and a large number of them are full-timers. It has more than 60 thousand branches across India.
Additionally, like many other recently emerging currents of the populist/far right, including Imran Khan’s PTI in Pakistan, the BJP operates a gigantic social media network through its IT cell employing tens of thousands of people. The cell functions through countless pages and accounts with the names of famous personalities, states, tourist destinations and cities, religious festivals, etc., and uses them for deceptive and malicious propaganda in accordance with the party objectives, which also include portraying a picture of India progressing under BJP rule in front of the world. Many of these accounts or pages even have Muslim names or titles. Through these means, any voices of dissent or opposition are relentlessly trolled and declared as being treacherous, anti-national, pro-Pakistan, etc.
In its essence, the BJP—or for that matter the socio-political project of Hindutva in general—represents an unprecedented onslaught of the dominant sections of India’s bourgeoisie against the toiling masses. It includes severely limiting or altogether abolishing their democratic and civil liberties, including the right to unionize, free political association and freedom of speech. But all that is a preliminary to its prime objective, which consists of a ferocious implementation of the neo-liberal agenda, namely wholescale privatization, union busting, limiting real wages to a bare minimum, austerity, deregulation and downsizing. Once again, it is not a matter of policy choice but that of the essential conditions required to ensure corporate profits or even the very existence of the Indian bourgeoisie. In the final analysis, the BJP and the program it contains can reasonably be deemed as part and parcel of a system in the period of its historic rot and decay.
When it comes to the consequences of the policies implemented by the BJP during the last ten years or so, the situation on the ground bears little resemblance to the rosy picture of a rising and ‘shining’ India painted by the apologists of neo-liberal capitalism inside and outside the country, including the imperialist think tanks and financial institutions like the IMF. Official figures of GDP growth can be regarded as outright fudged or at least inflated. In any case, it is mostly a joyless growth for the vast majority of the population, widening the gulf between the rich and the poor to the extent that seven million Indian citizens from the uppermost strata can be included among the richest people in the world, while 700 million from the lowest strata are among the most impoverished on the planet. Accordingly, the rich-poor divide in India is worse now than during British colonial rule, with the richest 1 percent cornering up to 73 percent of the national income and holding more than four times the wealth held by 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70 percent of the country’s population. Moreover, it would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a technology company makes in one year!
The Indian state and society under the BJP is going through a process of reactionary transformation akin to the one initiated by Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan in 1980s. However, the situation has not yet been totally lost. Despite a brutal crackdown on the opposition and an unprecedented control of the media in the backdrop of recent general elections, the BJP has suffered from an unexpected electoral setback, and the hopes of Narendra Modi to win a majority required for the constitutional amendments to turn India into a Hindutva dictatorship have been dashed. It reflects a seething mass discontent under the surface. The BJP will now have to rule through a coalition and consequently as a relatively weak government. It doesn’t necessarily mean that, in the face of a stronger opposition, it would tone down its fundamentalist rhetoric. On the contrary, it would be compelled to adopt a more bigoted approach in an attempt to reassert itself onto the society, further enflaming the majoritarian religious nationalist sentiments not only against a sizeable Muslim minority but also against the historic external foe, Pakistan. At any rate, with the developments in the recent past, it has become exceedingly difficult, if not entirely impossible, to defeat and overthrow the BJP through electoral means alone. Ultimately, the Indian proletariat, in alliance with other exploited and oppressed layers of society, would have to resort to revolutionary methods not only to get rid of the menace of all forms of Hindu fundamentalism but also the system of class oppression and exploitation that is the origin of all such vices.
In conclusion, the roots of religious fundamentalism with all its forms, formations and faces in South Asia should be looked for in the historic evolution of these societies under colonialism, imperialism and subsequently the independent rule of a lackey bourgeoisie. With the uneven and combined pattern of development, the noxious amalgamation of impoverishment, religious prejudices and superstitions of the foregone times, partial modernity, socio-cultural remnants of feudalism and tribalism, finance capital and black money has only complicated the evolution of these countries. The grafted capitalism and its comprador bourgeoisie has not been able to accomplish any of their historic tasks, namely the creation of a truly secular state with a healthy parliamentary democracy; stable and far-reaching industrialization; a solution to the burning national question; formation of a healthy, educated and skilled labor force with a decent work ethic; an end to the economic and cultural remnants of feudalism; and a viable social and material infrastructure upon which a modern bourgeois society could be built. As the historic crisis of capitalism on the global scale has deepened, the conditions in this part of the world have only got more and more bleak. In these times of capitalist decay, when the semi-fascist, far-right tendencies are re-emerging even in the most developed and modern societies in the West, it becomes criminal to even imagine fighting and defeating religious fundamentalism here with a program confined in the boundaries of capitalism. Consequently, liberalism and left reformism cannot offer any serious resistance to far right, whether it be in the form of religious fundamentalism, racism or any other. On the contrary, in a desperate attempt to solve the crisis of capitalism with the policies of austerity, privatization and deregulation, they ultimately pave the way for far right. Only the proletariat, taking the lead of all other oppressed sections of society and armed with a revolutionary socialist program, can fight this peril by eliminating the root cause of all such horrors. In the glorious words of the late Comrade Lal Khan,
Once the working class starts to move… fundamentalism will vanish as a drop of water vanishes from the surface of red hot iron. But if the basic contradictions and crisis of society are not eliminated, it will come back again and again in new periods of reaction. It will keep on ravaging and raping society and human civilization until it is eradicated and the basic cause of its existence, deprivation, is uprooted. It is a peculiar manifestation of the death agony of capitalism. To get rid of this plague will only be possible when the system on which it festers is abolished. This is only possible through a socialist revolution.
This article first appeared in July 2024 edition of Permanent Revolution, the theoretical and political journal of International Socialist League (ISL).
