Alternatives International Journal

Tribute to Our Comrade Youssef Habash…

Forum des Alternatives Maroc — 2026-10-21T19:09:10Z

It is with profound sadness and immense grief that we announce the passing of our comrade and friend, Palestinian activist and journalist Youssef Habash, who left us on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, after a battle with illness.

The passing of our comrade Youssef is an immense loss, not only for the Palestinian cause, which he tirelessly defended by bringing the suffering of the Palestinian people to the attention of the world through his media work, civic engagement and activism, particularly within the framework of the World Social Forum process, but also for all those who stand up for justice, freedom and human dignity.

Youssef was the coordinator of the Palestinian Social Forum and a constant presence at social movement gatherings and events across the five continents. A committed advocate, he was a source of proposals, initiative and mobilisation, contributing with all his strength to their success. His presence was never merely a matter of attendance; it reflected a sincere commitment to activism and a sustained contribution to building spaces of solidarity, bringing struggles closer together and strengthening their convergence in pursuit of a more just and equitable world.

Youssef was a determined activist and a steadfast defender of the Palestinian cause, the rights of the Palestinian people, and their right to their land, freedom and dignity. He was also committed to the struggle for climate justice and firmly believed in the need to ensure justice for the Palestinian people on their own land, in the face of the relentless attacks of the Zionist occupation and the injustice and suffering it inflicts upon them.

The loss of Youssef Habash is irreparable. We have lost a devoted human being and an activist who never ceased defending human causes wherever they arose, standing alongside all those who aspire to freedom, justice and dignity.

Youssef constantly reminded us that defending Palestine means more than defending a people and a land. At its very core, it means defending universal human values and the right of every human being to live a life of freedom and dignity.

Today, we bid you farewell, dear “Zouzo,” as you loved being called by your comrades. Our hearts are heavy with grief, but our conviction remains unshaken: the path of struggle you embodied will live on, and the values of solidarity, resistance and hope that you sowed will remain alive in the hearts of your fellow activists, women and men alike, and of all those with whom you shared the paths of struggle and the dreams of a better world.

We shall live, we shall love, we shall resist, we shall return to be… free!

On behalf of the Executive Office of the Forum des Alternatives Maroc (FMAS) and its Steering Council, we extend our heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathies to your life partner, your children, your family, your comrades, your friends, and all those who shared with you the paths of struggle for Palestine and for humanity.

Peace be upon your soul, dear Youssef. May we all find the strength, patience and courage to face this immense sorrow.

High Schools in France: The Spark That Ignited a National Political Crisis

Enzo Richard — 2026-10-19T19:53:45Z

In May 1968, the occupation of the Sorbonne and the barricades of the Latin Quarter turned the student population into the catalyst for a national political crisis. Fifty-eight years later, it is no longer ideological debates that are driving students into the streets, but material neglect, democratic contempt, and the management of scarcity. Beginning at a school in Créteil on September 21, the movement has spread to more than 400 high schools across the country. Faced with a collapsing education system and a state that refuses to listen, an entire generation has chosen rupture over resignation.

Manufacturing Riots to Conceal a Refusal to Listen

From the very first demonstrations, dominant media coverage locked the debate into an alarmist framework. News cameras flooded reports with images of burned-out trash bins and dramatic clashes, such as the fire in the entrance hall of Nelson Mandela High School in Nantes, reducing a mass protest to a narrative of urban violence.

By playing up the convenient figure of the ‘rioter', these media narratives render invisible the root cause of the anger: years of government deafness. Petitions signed by tens of thousands, repeated union warnings, and peaceful demonstrations in the spring were all ignored by the government leadership. Faced with a government that responds only when its operations are disrupted, blockades are not a violent whim but the last democratic lever available to young people who have been denied a voice.

The Republican Mirage: From Critical Thinking to Civic Indoctrination

This institutional hypocrisy recalls the incisive analysis of philosopher Bertrand Russell, who argued that state education serves less to awaken people's consciences than to produce obedient citizens. The French republican school system embodies this paradox perfectly: it teaches students to read the Enlightenment philosophers, celebrates the Revolution of 1789, and explains that revolt against injustice lies at the heart of the national narrative. Yet it labels those same ideals ‘uncivil behavior' and a threat to public order as soon as they are applied to its own reforms.

In the ultimate irony, the state names certain high schools after Nelson Mandela while watering down his political ideas. Mandela reminded his judges during the Rivonia Trial in 1964:

“It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle. The government left us no other choice.”

Faced with state contempt, high school students are simply putting into practice what official history claims to teach them.

Schools in Ruins

This revolt has its roots in the budgetary austerity that is systematically draining all of France's public services. Within the national education system, the lack of resources has become unbearable: according to parliamentary reports, approximately 7.5% of class hours go untaught because no substitute teachers are available. Classrooms regularly overflow with 30 or 35 students, while thousands of positions in healthcare, social services, and support for students with disabilities remain vacant. School buildings are crumbling, and during heat waves, temperatures in some classrooms reach 39 degrees Celsius.

While the state pours tens of millions of euros into symbols of authority such as the Universal National Service program and school uniforms, essential investments have been frozen-just as they have in overcrowded public hospitals and neglected transportation networks.

Parcoursup and the Locking Down of the Future

This material deterioration is compounded by the constant anxiety of normalized social sorting. On October 5, the inter-union coalition representing high school and university students called for the creation and funding of an additional 250,000 places in higher education to put an end to Parcoursup. This selection system, which allocates places in universities and other higher education institutions, left nearly 120,000 applicants without a place as recently as last July.

It is an opaque algorithm that entrenches social determinism based on geography, disadvantaging schools in the suburbs and working-class communities while favoring the private sector. The ministry's refusal to open up university programs, dismissing the proposal as ‘demagoguery', confirms that the republican promise of social mobility is broken.

Batons Against Minors: The Failure of Rule by Force

In response to these demands, the state has chosen brute force. The figures from October 1 alone illustrate this escalation: 1,948 arrests aimed at clearing the sidewalks. Police violence and misconduct reached a breaking point in Lens, where a high school student's hand was blown off by a GM2L stun and tear-gas grenade, forcing the ministry to hastily suspend the use of these munitions.

But physical trauma does not end there. During several demonstrations, direct shots from LBD 40 rubber-bullet launchers caused jaw fractures and tooth loss among teenagers, while the widespread use of tear gas immediately outside school grounds led to severe respiratory distress.

On the streets, footage filmed by students also documents violent prone restraints, chokeholds, and neck restraints applied to minors. This police brutality is all the more severe because it reproduces patterns of systemic racial profiling: racist insults, targeted humiliation, and abusive identity checks disproportionately affect racialized young people and demonstrators from working-class suburbs.

In response to these assaults, students have been transformed into organizing teams of street medics to treat their classmates. Between abusive police kettling lasting several hours and mass detentions that are subsequently dismissed without further action, the authorities are using judicial intimidation and physical terror to subdue a generation they have abandoned.

An Uprising That Crosses Borders

This anger no longer stops at the borders of metropolitan France. From Rome to Brussels, from Madrid to Athens, and also in Santiago and Montreal, high school and university student committees are expressing solidarity with French youth, both on their campuses and in the streets. Everywhere, the message denounces the same budget cuts, the same sacrifice of public services, and the same authoritarian suppression of young people's futures.

By choosing to answer pens with grenades, the authorities have not extinguished the fire. They have fueled a blaze that can now be seen far beyond France.

Source: https://alter.quebec/les-lycees-en-france-letincelle-dune-crise-politique-nationale/
Photo: Patxi Beltzaitz, Berria, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This Did Not Start in October 2023

Dima Fayad — 2026-10-18T17:33:49Z

Did we really have a good life before October 2023?

I asked myself this question, drowning in grief as I watched a video on social media mourning the beautiful, old Gaza and showing scenes from before the genocide started. My mind took me back to our life at that time - a life I now dream of returning to.

This is a common feeling in Gaza. When we look back on those days, we feel the immense loss caused by a genocide that is still ongoing.

Over the past three years, Israel has killed over 74,000 people, one in every 30 person in Gaza, and injured more than 175,000, one in 13.

Its genocidal violence damaged or destroyed some 82 percent of all buildings in Gaza, or around 200,000 buildings, according to the UN. It attacked nearly all Gaza's hospitals and healthcare facilities, leaving 94 percentof all health facilities damaged or out of operation.

More than 14,000 people from Gaza have been detained, and 60 percent of Gaza's territory is under Israeli military control. Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been quite clear that Israel intends to increase that to 70 percent.

There is no real education, no proper healthcare, no decent transportation, and an entire population is left exhausted, displaced and facing an uncertain future.

In light of this unhinged aggression, returning to the days before October 2023 would be a dream for all of us. We have started to refer to them as "the good old days."

But that's the point: we consider them good only when compared to the current miserable reality, not because they were ever actually good.

Before October 2023, the general sentiment in Gaza was one of frustration with 17 years of a suffocating Israeli blockade. You could barely go anywhere, take any public transportation or join any gathering without hearing people complaining about the blockade and how difficult life was in Gaza.

This sentiment was clearly reflected during the Great March of Return demonstrations, which began in March 2018 and ended in December 2019.

These were a series of peaceful popular protests and demonstrations organized by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip near the boundary fence. Israel responded with its usual brute force, killing over 200 people, including 46 children, and leaving more than 36,000 injured.

The protests mainly had two objectives: first, to demand the right of return for Palestinian refugees to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948, a fundamental right for all refugees stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In the Palestine context, this right is also embodied in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

Some 75 percentof Gaza's population are refugees, most from the Nakba in 1947-48, who were scattered across eight overcrowded camps throughout the Strip, in difficult conditions and suffering a lack of basic resources.

My family is originally from Karatiyya, a small village northeast of the Gaza Strip, which was attacked, depopulated and leveled in 1948.

I lived and grew up in a refugee camp west of Khan Younis, in a small space no larger than 70 meters. It was originally a tent provided by the UN. Over time, it evolved into a single-story concrete house.

Like all the families in the camp, as our numbers grew, we added additional floors on top of this small space. This resulted in tightly packed houses with haphazard architectural layouts, and hardly any space separating them.

Sunlight could barely find its way into our small home which was surrounded on all sides by other buildings.

Water was scarce and only recently was a halfway decent sewage system installed in the camp.

Prison

The second objective of the Return protests was to break the Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip, which affected every aspect of our lives.

The Gaza Strip remained under Israeli occupation despite the unilateral withdrawal of its military and illegal settlers in 2005. Israel retained full control over Gaza's sea and air space, and total control over what goods could enter and leave.

Israel's blockade encaged Palestinians in Gaza for 17 years, and only those fortunate enough to experience life outside could fully grasp how unfree their lives were.

Amal Alkhatib, 27, was supposed to travel to Italy as part of the Erasmus+ program - a European Union initiative to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe - to study during the second semester of the 2017-2018 academic year, starting in February 2018.

But she waited in vain for six months for her name to appear on the Egyptian travel lists of those granted permission to leave Gaza. As a result, she couldn't make it to Italy, and had to start her studies the following semester, in September 2018.

"All my international friends, including those from the West Bank, were able to arrive in Italy to study on time, except for me. I had to start next semester and meet new people," Alkhatib said. "That was the very first difference I noticed as someone from Gaza."

The Rafah land crossing between Egypt and Gaza has been the only gateway for most Gazan residents to travel to the outside world since 2007.

The Egyptian authorities imposed tight restrictions on the number and circumstances of who were allowed to travel, whether they were patients, or students or had prior security coordination.

As a result, many Palestinians in Gaza were forced to pay bribes to secure passage. And those like Alkhatib, who could not afford to pay, were forced to wait, if they were allowed to travel at all.

Once in Italy, however, Alkhatib was later able to travel to Turkey to meet her brother, Abdulrahman, who had studied and worked in the country. She had not seen him in 10 years.

"When I visited my brother in Turkey and returned to Italy, I was amazed at how easy and fast it was to travel from place to place, as long as Gaza wasn't involved in the process."

That also meant that Alkhatib would spend holidays alone, while her international friends returned home to spend time with their families.

"I was the only one who couldn't visit my family, simply because I'm from Gaza."

Freedom of movement wasn't the only discovery Alkhatib made while abroad. She also felt safe for the first time in her life.

"I was able to look to tomorrow without fear that a war would break out and turn my life upside down overnight," she told The Electronic Intifada. "That sense of safety was missing in Gaza. Any sudden emergency could put our life on hold."

Over the 17 years prior to October 2023, there were three major attacks by Israel: in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014. Sporadic air and ground attacks occurred in between. In total, these attacks killed some 5,300 people and left nearly 63,000 others injured, with entire families wiped from the civil registry.

Given Israel's restrictions - which could vary at any given moment - on the various goods allowed into Gaza, Alkhatib was also overcome by a sense of wonder at the abundance readily available in Italy.

It was a feeling she tried to hide from those around her, for whom this was simply the norm.

"Anyone who leaves Gaza feels as if they haven't really been living. You can find and get everything easily, whereas in Gaza we waste time trying to procure things."

"Now we have tents"

Mahmoud Alyazji, 25, also traveled on an academic exchange program to study for a semester in the United States. He left in August 2023, just two months before the genocide. Those two months were enough for him to understand all the things lacking in besieged Gaza.

Simple things that people almost everywhere take for granted, like 24 hour electricity and no shortage of running water.

"For at least a few weeks in the United States, I was still not used to the fact that electricity does not cut off here," Alyazji told The Electronic Intifada. "And water here is taken for granted while it's a big issue back home."

In Gaza, electricity and water were two major and interrelated problems. Municipalities supplied water to homes intermittently, prompting residents to install rooftop tanks for storage. To fill these tanks, they needed to run electric pumps.

But with power outages that could last 12-16 hours a day, they had to wait for the water supply to coincide with the electricity supply in order to fill their tanks. During the constant electricity outages, people would regularly run out of water.

According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 30 percent of Gaza's population was deprived of water as a result of ongoing power outages.

In addition, Alyazji noted, there was "a significant difference in water quality" compared to the contaminated water back home.

Before October 2023, the Palestinian Water Authority reported that 97 percent of Gaza's groundwater did not meet international standards for potable water.

Then there is unemployment

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that the unemployment rate reached nearly 50 percent in Gaza by 2023, while 80 percent of the Gazan population depended on aid and grants, leading to a poverty rate of over 61 percent by 2023.

Contrast with the US, where Alyazji remains, which in 2023 had an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent.

"Children here start finding summer jobs in high school," Alyazji said about the US. "In Gaza, it is common to find 30-year-olds with university degrees who are unemployed."

Indeed, at one point, youth graduate unemployment in Gaza reached a scarcely believable 73 percent.

Unemployment and poverty at staggering rates. No freedom of movement or sense of safety. No consistent and reliable supply of basic goods like water and electricity.

Life before October 2023 was not "the good old days."

But it was of course better than the complete deletion of all conditions of life that is the situation in Gaza today.

As Alaa Shaat, 30, put it: life wasn't "paradise" before the genocide, but it doesn't compare with what people are living through today.

"Before October 2023, we were at least able to feel a sense of safety between one attack and the next," Shaat, an engineer, told The Electronic Intifada. "Now we don't feel [safe] for even a single moment."

"We used to have electricity for a few hours every day. Now we've forgotten all about electricity. We used to have homes. Now we have tents."

Dima Fayad is a writer and translator based in Gaza.

10 October 2026

Source: https://electronicintifada.net/content/did-not-start-october-2023/51689

Photo Caption : Damaged in Gaza Strip during the October 2023
Cridit

Kamal Chenoy Taught Me the Art of Losing Gracefully and Living Generously

Rajeev Bhargava — 2026-10-18T16:32:18Z

There was no malice in his wit and no self-righteousness in his politics. He never looked down at others or sanctimoniously assumed a position of superiority. Living as an equal, among equals, was the right way to be for him.

Kamal Chenoy and I first met 50 years ago in 1976, but it was only four years later that we drew closer, while competing for the same job at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

Selections are always uncertain affairs and positions do not always go to those who most deserve them. Many people, and I among them, believed that Kamal was a strong favourite but the job came to me, a pretty unknown aspirant, a dark horse who was not even a student of JNU. Among competitors invariably something lingers: a trace of rancour, a sense of having been wronged, a coolness towards the one who won.

Kamal's response was the very opposite. He congratulated me warmly. It takes a rare largeness of spirit to turn a loss into a gift for the person who vanquished you. It was the first, and definitely not the last lesson, Kamal taught me. Losing well with grace and dignity is an art, one that can evoke admiration.

From August 1980 onwards, we spent more and more time together and developed a growing respect for each other that only flourished with time - mine for his political understanding and extraordinary moral qualities, and his, I think, for whatever ability he saw in me.

Kamal and Anu, and Tani and I, through thick and thin, became participants not merely in each other's political lives, but were also always there for each other at the most crucial moments in every aspect of our personal lives. Together, we learnt that friendship, too, is a moral achievement, built with generosity, honesty and shared joy and sorrow. We are poorer without Kamal and immeasurably richer for having known him.

Kamal was a communist but his communism was never a creed. He was unwavering and committed without being dogmatic. His convictions were held as something precious and alive, kept close, but never gripped so tightly that they lost their breath. A democrat to the core, he was a fierce defender of civil liberties, passionately secular and an unflinching anti-imperialist.

What was most striking was that he did not need to bind all this into a tight, closed system. Sure, these commitments were interdependent, but none had absolute priority over the others. Balancing them, he lived by them all.

He carried his politics lightly

He had a sharp political sense. Incisive and quick, a formidable debater, he mercilessly mocked the powerful and, in the very next moment, could be warm and friendly to the very people he had skewered. Most can manage either the mockery or the friendliness, but seldom both together. That is a rare gift.

Kamal managed it because there was no malice in his wit and no self-righteousness in his politics. He never looked down at others or sanctimoniously assumed a position of superiority. He never lived even as a first among equals. Living as an equal, among equals, was the right way to be for him.

He carried his politics lightly, with style and without the heavy, funereal air that the left once mistook for seriousness. His student-hood carried into his teaching and his qualities as a student leader into his role as the president of the JNU Teachers' Association. He infused a seductive youthfulness into his leadership roles in party politics. I think he was a quintessential Gen-Z politician, a leader before his time, for he did his political activism with wit and charm.

Indeed, with swagger, with dignified insouciance and with unsentimental compassion. Swagger that never turned into vanity, dignity that was never boring or stiff, insouciance that never degenerated into immaturity and compassion that never melted into sentimental pity. He had enough respect for people to not feel sorry for them.

His politics was remarkable for its generosity and he belonged, in a sense, to every party, every faction and splinter of the communist movement, and even to a non-existent, utopian party of the entire progressive left. He was not factional, because his partisanship was to causes, not to cliques or narrow ideologies. His foremost instinct was for solidarity, for a broader progressive alliance.

He had multiple allegiances and attachments, and he saw no contradiction in that. His attitude, if I may put it this way, was: you hold sacred the values as you see them; I hold them sacred as I interpret them, because they are all manifestations of the same cause, of a higher good which we all serve. He did not abandon one commitment in order to take up another. He added, widened and included.

So he stood with several political movements and with all forms of progressive political actors. A resolute defender of the Palestinian cause, a supporter of democracy in Russia and those hungry for freedom in China, he was devoted to anti-imperialisms of every hue. Whether or not you were broadly on his side, he always found a way to engage. He was, in the truest sense, non-sectarian.

I have only once seen him shaken out of his youthfulness, when he set out with many deeply committed civil society activists on a journey of 51 days across this country to discover India. He came back a changed man, more solemn and quieter, never quite the same after those two months on the road. After this experience, he plunged deeper into social movements, making his political world wider still.

An atheist and a fierce anti-Zionist

Let me return to Kamal the individual. He was an unusually public person without an inner fortress to retreat into. What you saw was what he was - a kind of transparency often mistaken for simplicity, but in Kamal it was a hard-won clarity.

Kamal had a way with children, as I saw when he interacted with his own grandchildren as well as with my grandson. He also had a way with dogs - all kinds of dogs, of all ages and sizes, those he had known for a long time and those that had never met him before. They all took to him at once, as if they knew something about him before we did. Children and dogs are the most reliable judges of character. They cannot be argued with and they cannot be charmed by position. They recognised in Kamal what we all came to recognise: an openness, an absence of guile and a heart that did not keep a ledger.

I want to also mention something about his heritage, which he quietly cherished. Marx and Lenin were not part of it. To be a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party of India was a choice he made entirely on his own. But through his mother and grandmother, he was a Baghdadi Jew and he carried that inheritance with pride.

How could an atheist and a fierce anti-Zionist do so? The ‘Aaron' in his complete name was important to him because it had been bequeathed to him by his mother, Shanta, and his grandmother, Hannah. Jewishness was not part of the outward shape of his life, and yet it sat somewhere in him, not as religious doctrine or a political claim, but as a loving bond with them. He loved them, therefore, he was a bit Jewish.

Indeed, if anything, the political inheritance from his mother and grandmother was their association with Gandhi and Nehru, amply established in family albums and photographs on the walls of his home.

The boy in Connaught Place and the man we knew

I conclude with an anecdote. When his mother was remarrying, she was at Connaught Place in Delhi to buy herself a wedding saree, accompanied by an 11-year-old Kamal. When Shanta hesitated over a saree she felt was far too loud or expensive, and picked a rather simple one instead, Kamal encouraged her and quipped, "Come on mom, take the one you liked, the brighter, more expensive one. After all, you only get married once."

The wit, the timing, the cheek, the warmth were all there already. The boy in Connaught Place and the man we knew were the same person.

We have lost a comrade, a teacher, a debater, a leader and a friend. But Kamal would not want us to leave a conversation heavy-hearted. He would want to argue a little, laugh a lot and then return to social and political work.

So we should remember him with seriousness, but without gravity. We should carry on his politics of solidarity over sectarianism and his commitment without dogma. And let us try, if we can, to bring a little of his swagger, humour and dignity to our politics.

Rajeev Bhargava is the director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies' Institute of Indian Thought. He has been a professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi.

13 October 2026

Source: https://m.thewire.in/article/education/how-kamal-chenoy-taught-me-the-art-of-losing-gracefully-and-living-generously/amp

In India, "Cockroaches" Are Leading the Fight for Democracy

Prajwal Bhat — 2026-10-16T23:15:56Z

It started as an online joke after a top judge compared jobless young people to cockroaches. It has become the most serious challenge to Narendra Modi's rule in years.

On October 10, India's capital city, New Delhi, was turned into a fortress as protesters tried to oppose a countrywide exercise to revise the electoral rolls. The protests were called by the Gen Z movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), working with left-wing student groups, which forced the resignation of the minister of education in July.

In response, the Indian government deployed more than twenty thousand police officers and paramilitary personnel, suspended internet access in central Delhi, and barricaded the city center. Thousands of protesters, including the leaders of the CJP and prominent opposition politicians, were detained.

The protests stem from a massive government effort, known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), to revise India's electoral rolls by removing dead, duplicate, and ineligible voters. Concerns intensified in the last month that under the SIR eligible voters are losing their right to vote, with 130 million names left off the draft electoral rolls since the start of the program.

The events of the last year are part of a larger pattern that has cast doubts on the legitimacy of India's elections. There are growing fears the SIR was designed to advance Prime Minister Narendra Modi's goal of a centralized and authoritarian government. Evidence suggests that it handed Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) an electoral advantage in recent state elections by removing voters from marginalized communities, including Muslim voters.

The Gen Z protests have garnered support from a broad spectrum of opposition parties, including those on the Left. But the real energy of the protests is coming from the ingenuity and irreverence of young Indians who have flooded the streets of New Delhi despite the violent crackdown. In a country that has long touted itself as the world's largest democracy, the developments are striking and could prove a turning point for its future.

How Modi Changed India's Elections

While the electoral rolls in India are revised every year to add new voters and remove people who have died or moved away, the SIR, which launched back in June 2025, has inverted the voter registration process for the first time in the country's history. Instead of election officers verifying voters at their homes, the SIR asked voters to fill out a form and prove their eligibility to vote. Voters are matched against records from a previous SIR conducted between 2002 and 2004 and in many cases asked to provide documents showing they are eligible to vote. Critics of the SIR claim that it is stripping eligible voters from the rolls.

The SIR is the work of the Election Commission of India (ECI), the country's chief electoral body, which oversees national elections and provincial elections, including in states with populations larger than California's. The commission is led by a three-person panel whose chief, like a Supreme Court judge, can be removed only if the Parliament impeaches them.

For the first time in years many Indians are no longer afraid to openly criticize their government ó they are even prepared to fight back.

In a key development in December 2023, the Indian government passed a law making changes to the selection process for choosing election commissioners. The result is that the executive branch of the government now has the most influence in the process. The same law also quietly inserted a clause giving these commissioners legal immunity. Making matters worse, the election commissioner responsible for introducing the SIR, Gyanesh Kumar, just so happens to be the first chief election commissioner appointed under the new law, raising questions about what's really going on.

How Centralization of Voter Rolls Could Thwart Democracy in India

Criticism of the SIR intensified after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that two of the three election commissioners were sidelined despite raising objections at least fourteen times about the exercise. Among their criticisms were concerns about the process in which new voters were registered, how names were deleted and restored, who had the power to file appeals against restored voters, and who had access to the voter database.

The electoral body has maintained that access to the voters' list is secure and decentralized, meaning that local electoral officers make the judgment on who stays on the voter list. But the revelations in The Indian Express showed that the SIR was relying on ECINET, a digital platform that logs voters. The result is increasing centralization, giving more control over the voter rolls to the commission's headquarters in Delhi. In one instance, the newspaper documented that officials in the state of Goa flagged ninety-seven voters who were mistakenly removed. Despite eight emails from Goa's chief electoral officer to officials in New Delhi, the voters were knocked off the rolls when the deadline passed.

India's principal opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, alleged that the additions and deletions of voters were undertaken as an exercise to disenfranchise a section of voters critical of Modi's BJP. In the state of West Bengal, the exercise removed some nine million names from the electoral rolls in the months before the state elections in April 2026. Modi's BJP won power in the state for the first time in the election. Thirty-four percent of those removed from the rolls were Muslim even though they make up just 27 percent of the state's population. The BJP has maintained that many Muslims eliminated from the lists were "illegal Bangladeshi migrants," even though evidence has shown scores of Indian nationals were also removed. Of the few appeals tribunals have decided ó under 3 percent of some 2.5 million ó about 90 percent ended in restoration.

With the BJP falling short of a majority in the 2024 general election, the stakes are high for Modi. The party was forced to form a coalition with regional allies that do not share a Hindu-nationalist ideology. The opposition alliance led by Gandhi's Congress won 234 seats, thirty-eight seats shy of a majority, despite the Congress having its bank accounts frozen and being comfortably outspent. The result is that for the first time in years many Indians are no longer afraid to openly criticize their government ó they are even prepared to fight back.

The Rise of India's Cockroach Movement

In May, the curiously named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) first made global headlines after it hit roughly fifteen million followers on Instagram in a week ó then again at the end of July after it forced the resignation of India's minister of education, no small feat. Though the CJP appeared to come out of nowhere, it was the result of long-simmering tensions in India. It started as a satirical joke made by Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student in Boston, after India's chief justice, Surya Kant, likened unemployed young Indians questioning the government to "cockroaches" and "parasites." Dipke posted a comment on X, "What if all cockroaches came together?" and millions responded. He returned from Boston to New Delhi on June 6 and headed directly to Jantar Mantar, launching a protest against the government's mishandling of a competitive public exam.

Though he had limited experience in political organizing, Dipke joined hands with left-wing student organizations in New Delhi. Their first protest lasted thirty-six days and attracted people from all over India and from all walks of life including a vast number of students, exam aspirants, schoolteachers, construction laborers, activists working with civil society organizations, Dalits, Muslims, and other social minorities.

By taking up the issue of competitive exams, the movement's leaders tapped into frustration among young people in India who have seen pathways to social mobility fall apart in recent years. Among those with graduate and postgraduate degrees, the rate of unemployment is particularly high. More than twelve million candidates applied for 8,868 openings in the state-owned Indian Railways company in 2025. The unemployment crisis is further compounded by the high cost of living, hikes in petrol prices, and the effects of pollution, which has left a near-permanent industrial haze over many Indian cities. The country has touted 7.7 percent growth in GDP numbers for the last fiscal year while ignoring persistent inequities on the ground.

A Democracy Under Mortal Threat

Despite well-documented inequalities in the country, India has long maintained an orderly and transparent electoral process. But a generation of political observers have now witnessed the erosion of once powerful institutions and the threat of detentions and police action against dissenters.

In 2019, as Modi ran for a second term, the Election Commission cleared him in six separate complaints that he had violated the election code of conduct. In his second term, he further undermined the independence of the selection of election commissioners, seen as a fresh attempt to tip the political playing field in favor of his party and turn India into a one-party state. Then in 2024, Modi led an even more divisive campaign even as his opposition decried inaction from the election commission. The SIR exercise too has invited widespread public anger since it asked citizens to submit multiple documents simply to prove their eligibility to vote. In some cases, it even forced people identified as dead to come forward to prove that they were, in fact, alive.

On September 24, a day after The Indian Express broke the story on the many inefficiencies of the SIR, Abhijeet Dipke and the Cockroach Janta Party called for a protest seeking the removal of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and the rollback of the SIR process. And with that, the "cockroaches" kickstarted an even bigger public outcry.

Mass Protests Are Needed to Protect Voting Rights

As with the summer protests over education reforms, the Gen Z movement hoped to channel the growing anger in India over the undermining of democratic elections. Alongside the Cockroach Janta Party, the left-wing student organization All India Students' Association (AISA) was credited with some of the more robust protest actions in the past week. AISA is the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, and its cadre have had to use all their experience, discipline, and political commitment in organizing mass collective actions in the protests.

"[The protests] have opened democracy's Pandora's box to talk about all the other ways we can ask for accountability," said Neha Bora, the president of AISA, speaking to Jacobin before this month's protests. "The energy from this movement should be put into struggles to build our country anew. . . . We know that every mass protest is the possibility of something new and reinforces the idea there could be an end to this violent period."

The movement's leaders, including Dipke of the CJP and Bora of AISA, announced a united mass protest on October 10. In response, police in India detained over ten thousand people across the country. Then on the day of the protest, the government deployed the overwhelming force of twenty thousand police and paramilitary personnel in order to prevent protesters from gathering in the city.

The unprecedented crackdown has done little to stem the tide, as the opposition parties led by Rahul Gandhi held a protest of their own, marching to the Supreme Court on October 12 along with thousands of people. The sheer number who took to the streets this week was reminiscent of previous mass outcries in the Modi era against the disenfranchisement of India's Muslim community, and against laws that would have left farmers vulnerable. But those protests faced a similar crackdown from the BJP: smear campaigns against the leaders, the use of excessive police force to stop demonstrations, and the eventual arrest of activists under anti-terror laws. Muslim activists and intellectuals like Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have been jailed without trial for six years.

However, the Gen Z movement has posed new questions to the BJP and has made it difficult for the party to control the narrative, despite its influence over mainstream television news channels in India. TV news has tried to paint the protesters as agents of India's supposed external enemies like Pakistan and China. But the arrest of two of the Cockroach Janta Party's leaders, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, while they were holding the Indian national flag has made that charge hard to sustain.

The movement has not only been able to rapidly form a broad coalition on common social interests; it has also mobilized concerns shared by young Indians across religion, caste, and class divides. It has offered Indians the first real sign of lasting political change ó little wonder that Modi is now throwing the full might of the state against them.

Prajwal Bhat is a New York City-based journalist.

Source: https://jacobin.com/2026/10/india-cockroach-protests-elections-democracy

Fifteen Years Later

Javier Moreno Zacarés — 2026-10-11T21:37:57Z

Fifteen years after the indignados occupied the Puerta del Sol, Madrid's central plaza is once again the locus of a mass movement that has brought Spain to a political impasse. How are we back here again? The immediate trigger was the eviction of an elderly tenant. Maricarmen Abascal, who had occupied her rent-capped apartment in central Madrid since 1956, was expelled from her home on 23 September after the investment fund Urbagestión acquired the property and exploited a legal loophole to quintuple her rent. Maricarmen's age and vulnerability - the 87-year-old was removed on a hospital bed and has since died - made it a particularly egregious breach of the moral economy. The case struck a nerve, prompting a political storm; the government has now announced a snap election. As protests spread nationwide, the encampment at Puerta del Sol consolidated under the leadership of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, Madrid's tenant union. Media outlets are reporting on the motions passed at the open-air general assembly. One decision has been of particular public interest: a general strike for the right to housing, announced for 11 November, a few weeks before the election.

The political elite faces a reckoning. At the outset of the current parliamentary term in 2023, the progressive coalition headed by Sánchez's centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) placed housing at the top of the agenda. The promises were ambitious: the provision of mass social housing, the imposition of rent controls, the reassertion of the public interest against rentier logics. Yet these commitments yielded little. This was partly due to the obstruction of the right, both in parliament and in the regional governments under its control. But a share of the blame lies in the ambivalence of the Socialist Party itself, whose ministers have repeatedly expressed discomfort with what they regard as excessive regulation of housing. The junior coalition partner Sumar, a nebulous alliance of progressive parties, has proven feeble in holding the Socialists to account. They are now also a target of the protests, who charge the entire governing alliance of complicity with the rentiers. Amid the fury in the streets, Sumar's cabinet members hastened to pressure the Socialist housing minister, Isabel RodrÌguez - herself a landlord who owns multiple properties - to approve emergency measures to block evictions and institute permanent rolling contracts, both key demands of the tenant unions. Last Friday, both measures were struck down in parliament, to the anger of the masses gathered outside.

That a recalcitrant right-wing opposition - comprising the conservative People's Party (PP) and the far-right Vox - would block the measures was entirely predictable. What was less so was that the deciding vote would be cast by an ally of the government: the centre-right Junts, party of the Catalan-nationalist bourgeoisie. The vote revealed a peculiarity of the Spanish conjuncture. Though the right-wing bloc is the largest in parliament, it is divided along nationalist lines, fractures the government has exploited - drawing support from the Catalan right to keep the Spanish unionist right out of power. It was always an unstable arrangement, premised on nation trumping class. On the housing question, the plurinational right voted in alignment with its shared interests (Junts has the largest proportion of landlords in parliament).

The Spanish right now enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls, which point to a PP-Vox coalition if elections were held tomorrow. But the wind is blowing in an uncomfortable direction for them. Over the past week, public opinion has swung massively in favour of regulating house prices, even among a slim majority of right-wing voters. In a matter of days, the protests have shifted the national conversation away from the right's preferred talking points of crime and migration, overwriting a summer of hysteria around the border crisis in Ceuta. They have also deflected attention from the corruption scandals afflicting PSOE: only last June, a former minister in Sánchez's cabinet was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison for influence-peddling related to substandard Covid-19 face masks. Ever the survivor, Sánchez has seized the moment with a characteristically audacious move. He has framed the election on 29 November as a plebiscite on the housing question, shifting the blame for it onto the right and boldly appealing to the electorate to 'subdue the elites', hoping to ride the wave of unrest that is also aimed against him.

Housing has been a political flashpoint in Spain ever since a giant real estate bubble crashed the economy between 2007-14. The circumstances in many ways paralleled those that led to the Great Recession: financial liberalization; easy credit supercharged by cross-border flows; homeowners mortgaged to the hilt; skyrocketing house prices stoked by reckless speculation. What stood out in the Spanish case was the extent to which growth and employment came to depend on a hypertrophied construction sector, rendering broad sections of the economy highly exposed to the inevitable crash. In the 2000s, as rapid population growth and the arrival of Eurozone capital accelerated house-price increases, Spain built more homes than the UK, Italy and Germany combined. At the peak of the boom in 2006, when annual housing construction reached 700,000 units, reports from the property sector estimated that ‘structural demand' - that is, demand for housing to live in - was only 400,000 homes a year. The resulting surplus, built on a purely self-referential, speculative demand, was the substance of the bubble. When household indebtedness hit its ceiling in 2007 and transactions slowed, it burst: prices stagnated and then plummeted. Speculative developers ceased building, grinding the engine of the economy to a halt and releasing shockwaves of job destruction. At the height of the crisis in 2013, unemployment reached a historic high of 26 per cent (56 per cent among the young). Developers, banks and the state rushed to expel families who could not meet rent or mortgage payments. Between 2008 and 2015 there were roughly half a million evictions, half of them foreclosures. The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

In a series of costly bailouts, the state absorbed the losses of the property-financial complex, bringing it to the edge of insolvency. Successive administrations - of both the PSOE and the PP - passed the cost to the masses, inflicting punitive austerity under the watchful eye of Europe's fiscal hawks. The usual sanctimony about belt-tightening and living beyond one's means fell flat. Political parties were plagued by relentless corruption scandals, the majority involving dealings with developers and builders no less. Bankers, meanwhile, flaunted their rapacity by paying themselves obscene bonuses as their banks were being nationalized, leaving the state to foot the bill.

The ensuing crisis of legitimacy set the scene for the rise of the indignados, or the 15-M movement as it is more often referred to in Spain. On 15 May 2011, a series of mass protests descended on city squares, taking aim at austerity measures and the oligarchic bent of the political system. The movement radiated out from Puerta del Sol, where protesters emulated the camp then ongoing in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Though the social composition of the protest was broad, it was led by downwardly mobile middle-class youths, many of whom became politicized for the first time at the movement's assemblies. The memorable yellow T-shirts of the activist group Juventud Sin Futuro captured the feeling with a defiant slogan: ‘no home, no job, no pension, no fear'. Eventually, the 15-M's occupations dispersed into neighbourhood councils, where a wave of radicalized youngsters flooded into a myriad of militant groups. A cycle of mass unrest and civil disobedience followed. The most prominent organization was the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), whose activists acted as the shock troops of the anti-austerity movement. Sabotaging eviction procedures was their staple practice: they confronted bailiffs and their riot police escorts on arrival, barricaded themselves with the families being expelled, occupied repossessed homes, or squatted entire tower blocks to provide accommodation for the dispossessed. The extra-parliamentary struggles of these years proved extremely successful in repoliticizing questions previously regarded as shameful personal failures - unemployment, debt, eviction - turning them into vectors of mass resistance.

Yet they were much less successful in bringing the state to heel. Ironically, the first major electoral outcome of the 15-M protests was a crushing landslide for the right in November 2011. Though the movement had wide public support, its injunction to abstain from voting for the neoliberal uniparty - ‘PPSOE' - was followed more by the left than the right. PSOE's vote collapsed while PP's remained stable, translating into an absolute parliamentary majority for the neoliberal conservatives of Mariano Rajoy, who proceeded to further slash public spending, introduce a draconian labour market reform, and sell off the real estate assets acquired from the banks to global corporate landlords. With its dominance in parliament, the new administration was able to invoke the support of a 'silent majority' to rule by decree while cracking down on protest. At the behest of its Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández DÌaz - an ultra-Catholic in the habit of praying in Franco's mausoleum - the government introduced the notorious 'Gag Law' tailored to the new social movements, which included punitively high fines for blocking evictions. Meanwhile, in a perfect visual metaphor for the dissociation of the elite from the masses, parliament was fenced off from the public and fortified with a permanent detachment of riot police.

After years of being stonewalled, street-fighting fatigue began to set in around 2014. The gigantic March for Dignity that year - demanding 'bread, work and a roof' and culminating in riots in Madrid - was the final flashpoint of this insurrectionary cycle. Seeing the tide turning, activists previously committed to the extra-parliamentary ethos of the 15-M began to form political parties, and probe strategic entry points into the state. One approach was to capitalize on the anti-establishment mood to mount a broad, left-populist offensive aimed at capturing state power 'from above'; the path taken by Podemos, founded in 2014 with the priority of 'storming the heavens' in a general election. Another was the formation of electoral coalitions between urban activists and pre-existing left-wing parties to wrest state power at the local level; a route explored by the multitude of municipalist platforms that in 2015 won office in the country's largest cities, including C·diz, Santiago, Zaragoza, Valencia, Madrid and of course, Barcelona, where PAH's charismatic spokeswoman, Ada Colau, was elected mayor with housing at the top of her agenda.

Both strategies ran into the trouble of operating in the inhospitable terrain of the state. Barcelona's Right to Housing Plan of 2016 was fairly successful in blocking evictions and expanding the social housing stock through a combination of public construction, aggressive acquisition campaigns and the imposition of social housing quotas on developers. But this was the most advanced expression of a municipalist strategy that faced severe challenges from the start. Local reformers ran up against the austerity imposed by the central government; encountered entrenched resistance at all levels of the state bureaucracy; and were forced to water down their policy proposals to navigate the political fragmentation of local councils and/or of their own electoral alliances. Frustration set in among activists and voters as the grinding pace of reform failed to live up to the revolutionary rhetoric. Most of the administrations in the 'cities of change' proved short-lived, voted out of office in 2019. Barcelona followed suit in 2023.

Podemos faced a different set of challenges. Upon its founding, the party quickly drew in hundreds of thousands, swelling new branches in what promised to be a participatory party-movement. However, the leadership - a group of academics sceptical of the potential of grassroots activism - quickly centralized power and reduced internal democracy to a plebiscitary exercise in which the membership merely ratified decisions handed down from above. Such behaviour followed logically from a left-populist strategy that soon became familiar in Europe and North America, one that revolved around charismatic leadership and disciplined media messaging. This strategy did not require a vibrant, independent grassroots layer, but rather the subordination of the whole organization to an 'electoral war machine' commanded from the top. The party's branches withered away as its members were largely reduced to passive clicktivists. What the party gained in short-term agility from this strategy, it lost in long-term resilience: without organized cadres, it became vulnerable to media attacks and personality-driven factionalism.

Meanwhile, Podemos's appeal waned as its electoral assaults on the central state were successively repealed. However, in the general elections of 2019 it was able to clinch enough seats to enter coalition with a reluctant PSOE, locking both parties into a fraught partnership. Podemos's main legislative achievement was the Housing Law of 2023, which introduced a nationwide framework for rent controls. Passed as the municipalist wave died out, it seemed to confirm that the strategic entry point into the state was 'from above'. Yet the gap between law and practice became apparent soon enough. In control of most regional administrations, the People's Party and their far-right allies Vox have simply refused to implement it. To this day, the law is only in force in Catalonia and in areas of the Basque Country. The bill also left a glaring loophole around short-term tourist rentals, letting the hollowing out of cities through platforms like Airbnb continue unabated.

That rent controls have become a burning issue in a society in which 73.3 per cent of households are owner-occupiers reflects the permutations of the Spanish housing system since the crash. When the bubble burst, the state nationalized a huge pool of 'toxic assets'. This devalued property could have been used to create a public housing system, badly needed at a time of rampant evictions. Instead, starting in 2013, the state opted to sell them off at fire-sale prices to investment funds. Blackstone became the country's biggest landlord. In order to relaunch the property market as quickly as possible the state incentivized the business of the 'mega-landlords' with tax advantages and tailored regulations, which also benefited a broader swathe of middle-class landlords. Meanwhile, the share of the tenant population has increased for the first time since the 1950s (+7 per cent of households since 2011). Those homeowners expelled from their homes during the crisis returned to the market as tenants. There, they were joined by a new generation excluded from the mortgage market, more strictly regulated in the wake of the crisis. Credit restrictions have suppressed the leveraged purchases of the 2000s, which allowed many to ride the bubble by borrowing against the rising value of their homes or 'flip' them for profit.

Meanwhile, residential accumulation has reoriented itself around squeezing the growing captive market of tenants or, failing that, the exploitation of tourist rentals. Economically, the new housing regime is more stable than the previous one. Rents rise more or less in line with wages, devouring the disposable income of tenants, but without the debt-fuelled speculative excesses of the bubble. Politically, however, the present arrangement is far more unstable and more prone to social explosions, owing to the greater prominence of rent tenure, where the conflict between the residential and rent-bearing functions of housing is more transparent than in a mass market of 'petty-rentier' speculative homeowners.

Since 2017, Spain has witnessed the emergence of militant tenant unions, which have gained prominence for defeating Blackstone in court and for employing an old tactic of working-class struggle: the rent strike. Although tenants remain a small minority (17 per cent of households), they are demonstrating a capacity to punch far above their weight politically, as their demands mobilize broader strata around the right to housing. A rentier bloc has been taking shape in opposition, headed by large investment funds but sustained by a substantial layer of middle-class landlords, who act as its electoral base. The political frontier of this bloc is difficult to determine, but it clearly runs through the heart of the coalition government. This has been demonstrated by successive PSOE ministers, whose reluctance to regulate rents or openly support the right to housing has repeatedly given them away. With Podemos diminished, since 2023 the Socialists have governed alongside its more cooperative successor, Sumar; an entente cordiale that has failed to bear fruit on housing matters. (Perhaps for this reason Sumar is now floating Colau, former mayor of Barcelona, as a presidential candidate.)

As the left-populist wave recedes, a younger generation of activists is coming to terms with the limits of the electoral experiments of the previous decade - as well as the horizontalism that immediately preceded them. In Puerta del Sol today, formal similarities with 15-M conceal differences of substance. The encampment is once again a plural space - it is populated by three dozen organizations - where successive generations converge and where previously apolitical youngsters are acquiring a new radical consciousness. But in the assemblies there is less blue-sky philosophizing and more strategic discussion; less spontaneity and more coordination of an agreed calendar of escalation. The festive mood of the first iteration has given way to one of discipline, reflecting the maturing of a radical civil society with organizational memory and political experience. The initiative for a general strike came from the Sindicato de Inquilinas; the anarcho-syndicalist unions, which have a presence in the square, promptly joined. The major trade unions - otherwise docile and cooperative with the government - have followed suit. In recent days, the Sindicato has gradually shifted its activity away from the square toward its 'nodes' or neighbourhood councils, in preparation for the strike. The vacuum has been increasingly filled by the Movimiento Socialista, a Marxist youth movement highly sceptical of reformist politics, upon which a number of political currents have converged in recent years.

If Sánchez pulls off a comeback in the November election and manages to cobble together another progressive coalition, the balance of parliamentary forces will likely resemble that of today, as will the pace and scale of reform - which is increasingly intolerable to swathes of the population. But if the election plays out as it did almost fifteen years ago, and the right wins a comfortable majority, we can expect a replay of brutal austerity and police crackdown. Only this time, a government more overt in its fascist sympathies will have to face down a hardened and more disciplined extra-parliamentary left - one that will have to come to terms, sooner or later, with how to influence the state and find a fresh synthesis of the dialectic between revolution and reform. Whether this takes the form of new political vehicles contesting state power directly, or of an antagonistic yet tacit division of labour with reformist forces, remains a critical question.

09 October 2026

Source: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fifteen-years-later?pc=1795

Photo Caption : A cardboard sign hangs from a tent at the housing camp in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Spain, in the afternoon of October 1, 2026. It reads "NI MI CASA ES YA MI CASA" ("Nor is my house now my house") and is marked "F.G. LORCA".
Photo Credit

The Erosion and Possible Demise of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Vinod Mubayi — 2026-10-01T17:15:00Z

At the heart of bourgeois liberal democracy there lay a contradiction. In the political sphere, bourgeois democracy promised equality via the familiar slogan One Man/Woman One Vote. In the economic context, however, the capitalist system, under which all bourgeois democracies so far have existed, presages inequality. The societal tensions inherent in this contradiction, historically, have been manageable as long as the gap created by economic inequality remained within socially acceptable limits. Under global neoliberal capitalism, economic inequality has soared to such heights that its social impact now threatens the demise of democratic functioning itself.

This is being experienced and acknowledged on an almost daily basis in the country that regards itself as the world's oldest democracy, the United States of America. On its 250th anniversary this year, any celebrations of this milestone are muted while apprehensions of its future survival are rife in the media and in society more generally. Too much should not be made, of course, of the US self-image as a land of pristine democracy and a bastion of freedom. Despite the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, the US at its inception was, as a leading liberal writer, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, recently put it: “a liberal democracy founded on slave labor.” To which one may add, founded also on a genocide of the native American population. Thus, tyranny over various sections of the population, like the slaves and former slaves after the Civil War along with native Americans, continued to co-exist with liberal democracy for a large part of US history; after all, it was not until the mid-1960s when laws like the Voting Rights Act were passed that the black minority achieved equality at the voting booth.

The survival of such laws, much less their widespread implementation, is uncertain in the current dispensation as the Executive with its MAGA followers reverts to white supremacy, the federal legislature under a Republican majority remains not only dysfunctional but a doormat of the Executive and the conservative Supreme Court harks back to the worst features of the era of the Dred Scott ruling.

The election of a person with distinct fascist impulses like Donald Trump to the Presidency and the actions he has taken both at home and abroad in his close to two years in office certainly contribute to the sense of uneasiness about continued democratic survival but Trump's ascent is as much, if not more, a symptom of the problem rather than its sole cause.

Certainly, the rush of events in the past few years that feature an overturning of the usual practices and guardrails of bourgeois democratic functioning has become too obvious to be passed over despite the attempts of the mainstream media to ignore the elephant in the room. The familiar institutional set up of the executive, legislature and judiciary that was supposed to provide the checks and balances characteristic of bourgeois democracy has been eroded to such a degree that it has been almost rendered dysfunctional.

Consider, for example, the fact that Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury in a New York State court on May 30, 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records. A month later, the US Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump in his first term, rendered its decision on presidential immunity that gave Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court's decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” After Trump won the 2024 election, he has been emboldened to behave as one.

Trump's stupid and buffoonish remarks that he posts almost daily on social media should not blind us to the plans being prepared under his administration that could eventually pave the way for fascism to emerge in the US. Veteran reporter Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, is one of the very few current or former mainstream media personalities who provide critical, informed and honest commentary on political and social issues. The Chris Hedges Report of August 31 deals with the Trump administration's plans to subvert the November 2026 elections, where the Republican party is widely expected to lose at least one chamber of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. In an excerpt from his report worth quoting at length, Hedges states:

“The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections…If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration's demands for voter data. Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records. Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting. The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices. Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters ‘when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.'”

According to Hedges: “Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.”

Whether the doomsday scenario sketched by Hedges comes to pass or not, a number of leading, not necessarily radical, economists have pointed to extreme economic inequality where a handful of billionaires have not only accumulated extreme wealth but excessive political power as a prime cause of the problem. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in a recent YouTube video said bluntly that “10 US billionaires own the US government, the news media and the social media. They have already destroyed democracy,..”

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman's substack post of August 30 describes “the rise of American oligarchy, which I define as the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number of people — not the 1 percent, but the .01 percent or even the .0001 percent, the 300 billionaires who made 19 percent of all reported federal political donations in the 2024 election.” Some of this inequality has been driven by technological and capitalist market forces that have resulted in a small number of extremely profitable “Silicon Valley” companies whose owners command incredible amounts of wealth. But much of it, according to Krugman, “has been driven by deliberate policy rather than technological or market forces. And that deliberate policy has been the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation — a system that had ended the Gilded Age, the last period of great inequality.”

Trump's Big Beautiful Tax Cut enacted last year added considerably to the pockets of the “malefactors of great wealth,” to quote former President Teddy Roosevelt, while eviscerating Medicaid and other social programs further to the great detriment of the poorer sections of the population.

One may add that politicians belonging to both major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have been complicit in this policy facilitated by the US Supreme Court judgment that removed limits on financial contributions to politicians and equated monetary ‘gifts' to the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment. It is only relatively recently that political figures on the democratic left like Bernie Sanders have begun to campaign against oligarchy and call for higher taxes but their numbers are still too few to make a noticeable difference.

Another notable statistic on the staggering extent of wealth inequality comes from a YouTube video on August 30 of Prof. Richard Wolff who quoted Oxfam data that showed 62 wealthy individuals worldwide, most of whom, though not all, are American, control more wealth than 3.6 billion people, approximately the bottom 50% of the entire world population. Prof. Wolff indicates that he can't think of a word strong enough to describe this shocking and obscene figure; a fraction of that wealth could transform the lives of the world's poorest and most vulnerable who suffer from lack of food, clean water, shelter and health care. But that is clearly not going to happen in our liberal capitalist democratic system that only serves to funnel wealth and resources upward not downward, in what economists call K-shaped growth.

One major aspect of the autocracy that we are hurtling towards is the criminal neglect by the administration of global warming and climate change, an issue that poses an existential long-term threat to humanity's survival. The US is widely acknowledged to be the world's largest historical contributor to fossil fuel emissions, global warming and climate change while Trump and his cohort is not only in deep denial of the basic science it is actually encouraging fossil fuel production that will accelerate the problem. Meanwhile, the deleterious impacts are already being felt in the high Himalaya mountains as witnessed by the ongoing disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border. Are the uber-elite bothered by any of this? Elon Musk boasts (or jokes) about settling Mars or making other extra-planetary excursions if the Earth becomes uninhabitable while his fellow elites embark on building immense numbers of data centers powered by natural gas that will surely increase carbon emissions.

The reaction of the uber-wealthy who now increasingly control our political system and certainly constitute the bulwark of the Trump presidency is typified by the Silicon Valley capitalist Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the surveillance technology company, Palantir, and one time mentor of Elon Musk, reputed to be the world's richest individual. In a manifesto published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women…have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.”

So, there we have it, from the horse's mouth itself as it were, of the de-linking of the economic system, capitalism, from liberal democracy. Freedom will only exist for the uber-rich while one-person one-vote electoral democracy will either become a remnant of the past or continue in some restricted version.

A century ago, the great radical Rosa Luxembourg, contemplating the destruction and misery of the First World War, memorably remarked that humanity had a choice: either Socialism or Barbarism.

That choice confronts us even more urgently today as the end-point of the capitalist economic system threatens to extinguish not only the freedom but the very existence of over 99% of the world's people.

Photo Caption: Hands Off! protest, Minnesota State Capitol, April 5, 2025
Photo credit

We'll Take Those Odds: The Left and the Polarization of Options

Benjamin Y. Fong and Sam Gindin — 2026-09-30T15:40:00Z

Sam Gindin is one of the most exacting and capacious thinkers on the socialist Left today. With decades of experience in the labour movement as research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (which merged in 2013 with the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union to form Unifor, today the largest private sector union in Canada), his political orientation is grounded in the reality of the contemporary state of organized labour. His perspective is also informed by a careful study of the current political-economic conjuncture, evident most notably in his important work with Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism. We talk below of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, of the privileged position of organized labour among social movements, and finally, of the importance of the project of organizing Amazon today.

Benjamin Y. Fong (BF): How do you understand the contemporary crisis of capitalism? And what do you mean when you say you oppose "crisis mongering as politics"?

Sam Gindin (SG): There is a crisis today of the legitimacy of political institutions, and a crisis for working families, but not a crisis of American economic decline. People are suffering and insecure, but the US economy is growing, the share of profits is at record levels, overall investment is growing, albeit unevenly, and technology and productivity are advancing. There are conflicts with China, but China has neither the interest nor capacity to take over America's international role. People are frustrated and angry over what the successes of capitalism have wrought but unable to convert the political delegitimation of the US into a crisis of capitalism. So, it's not a crisis of capitalism but really a crisis of the labour movement and the Left.

Crisis mongering subordinates serious economic and political analysis to exaggerated warnings of imminent collapse. The hope is that this will spur people into action. It looks to decline to do the heavy lifting for us. This betrays the actual challenges we face and the need for the kind of deep and long-term organizing we actually need. It also fails even as a populist mobilizing tactic; it could just as easily make people feel like, "Well, what's the point? The world's going to come to an end soon." In the end, it undermines the credibility of the Left in repeatedly presenting overblown declarations that don't come to pass.

BF: The Left today is very electorally focused, and from one angle, that's a direct way of intervening in this crisis of legitimacy. But from another, you could see this electoralism without first rebuilding the base as a kind of quick fix too.

SG: Absolutely. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani deserve credit for affecting political discourse, generating enthusiasm among young people, and moving them from protest to politics. But there is a limit to even "left-ish" politics if there is no solid base on the ground. And while social democratic politics can have some impact on that base, the electoral arena is not conducive to building its depth. Elections look for numbers, not the quality of understanding and commitment. They tend to be about quick door-step exchanges, not the genuine conversations that organizing entails. They also tend to cater to where the polls tell us people are (generally some middle ground) and not to what it might take to change people. It's the building of a genuine base for social transformation that ultimately makes elections relevant; elections by themselves don't build the base.

Socialism will come from many streams and whatever helps is welcome. But what's needed is not just adding up various movements, or making social democrats "better." We need an appreciation of how profound transforming capitalism is, and we also need an organized orientation to building the kind of social force that can eventually replace it. This is especially so because of a polarization of options today. Decades of capitalist restructuring of workplaces, industries, and communities; of globalization, financialization, and neoliberalism - all alongside the stagnation of labour and the Left - have negated middle-of-the-road responses. Capital and the state have made significant reforms near impossible ("There Is No Alternative"), and in this context, radical politics tends to be the only practical politics.

BF: André Gorz once said that the success or failure of a wide variety of progressive causes, from gender equality to immigrant rights, will largely depend on that of the trade union movement. Why does organized labour hold a privileged position here?

SG: About a dozen years before he said this, Gorz's book, Farewell to the Working Class, seemed to write off the radical potential of workers. What you're referencing is his later, changed view in which he came to realize that most movements simply can't - unlike labour - sustain themselves over time. For all the weakness of the American labour movement in the US, it still has some $35-billion in assets and 14 million unionized members. Most movements don't have those kinds of resources, and they regularly look to unions for financial assistance.

In saying this, we should not separate unions from movements that address social needs. Workers obviously have lives outside the workplace and care very much about universal healthcare, affordable shelter, adequate transportation, the environment their kids face, etc. What working-class organizations offer is not just financial resources. They also play a role in uniting the interests of workers as workers and in organizing working people as part of society more broadly.

BF: Many would characterize the key issue here as one of restoring labour's militancy. Is that the key problem?

SG: In the absence of resistance/militancy, the conditions of workers can't be advanced. So yes, restoring militancy is fundamental. But it's not enough to have militancy, and this was graphically demonstrated in the sixties. When the post-war boom ended, workers stubbornly resisted lowering their monetary expectations and the unilateral authority of managers. This blocked the restoration of the status quo at their expense and was a factor in the downturn of profits and the rise of inflation, both of which threatened the status of the US dollar.

The labour movement hung on for nearly a decade after that, but without going beyond workplace-by-workplace militancy to broader politicization along class lines, including demanding the democratization of investment decisions and guaranteed full employment, labour's ultimate defeat was preordained. The eventual response from the state was an engineered recession (near-20% interest rates) that weakened and exhausted the unions. Neoliberalism arrived. Capital's crisis was solved by way of a greater and more long-lasting crisis for the working class. The message of the sixties is, therefore, that workplace militancy is essential but not enough.

BF: You also emphasize the importance of socialist organization outside of unions.

SG: Absolutely. The kind of politicization I raised above is unlikely without the role of organized socialists with one foot in the workplace and unions and one outside. Unions are particularist organizations, not class organizations: they represent a particular group of workers that happen to be working together. The role of organized socialists is to overcome the fragmentation of workers across workplace, unions, economic sectors, and communities. It's also to overcome the separation of individual workers from other dimensions of their lives.

This is all the more important today. In the fifties and sixties, unionized workers in auto and steel could win a great deal on their own, but that period is largely over. Given capital's increased power since then, workers can't win without thinking in larger terms, i.e., in terms of class as a whole. That means making connections across workplaces, sectors, and communities. Unions are limited in doing this, and that's where socialist organizations come in. Building the class into a coherent social force is (or should be) their prime focus.

I'm not making an ideological point. It's a practical issue to be clear about who your enemy is. Employers are the face of the enemy, but they are not the enemy. What constrains improvement in working conditions is the threat of competition. Employers defend the pressure they put on workers with the claim that competition forces them to do so to survive. Moreover, competition is asymmetrical. As stronger capitalists devour weaker ones, capital becomes stronger as a class. However, for workers, competition undermines their primary strength - solidarity - and so weakens them.

It's important to raise these points in educational meetings organized by or outside the union. Some people think of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] as the place to do this. But DSA is also really fractured.

BF: It could be that the very fragmentation of DSA is a kind of virtue right now. I don't think it'll ever be the party organization that some people hope it will be, but it's a place to meet people.

SG: I think that's true. There seem to be distinct groups which are, in essence, mini-parties - each has their own analysis, do their own education, take specific positions. Under the banner of DSA, they meet, discuss, and debate strategy. That's important because premature mergers, even among socialists, can paper over differences, and then the organization disintegrates.

But from afar, I don't know how sharp the debates are. Sometimes, in the name of unity, the more difficult debates are avoided, but such debates are important for mutual development. It does seem that certain crucial issues, like how to relate to the Democratic Party and at what scale (local/municipal, state, national) electoral contestation should take place, are coming to a head. Splits are likely necessary, but they can be very destructive. It's worth, in this context, to examine how Syriza [Greece] and Momentum [Britain] went from glory to obliteration, but there's been too little of such investigations on the Left.

The Amazon Project

BF: You've said that unions need a "virtual crusade" to make a dramatic leap forward. Why is that the case, and is the struggle to organize Amazon that crusade?

SG: In the 1930s, the CIO sparked a breakthrough in industrial unionism. John Lewis of the Mineworkers grasped that if steel wasn't also unionized, the miners would be isolated. So, he sent 100 of his organizers out to support the organizing of the steel industry. That kind of sensibility is especially pertinent today, given the expanding imbalance of power between capital and labour, the result of massive economic, social, and political changes over decades that can't be addressed with marginal tactical changes. This imbalance demands the kind of leap forward that brings submerged frustrations to life and transforms working-class expectations, institutional capacities, and confidence. This amounts to a crusade, both organizationally and culturally.

There are any number of struggles that could act as the catalyst for such a crusade. Amazon is only one such catalyst-in-waiting, but Amazon's iconic status - the largest private-sector employer in the US, a leader in high tech and AI that links some two million businesses with some 300 million consumers - would make its unionization the most important breakthrough in generations.

The labour movement has, however, already lost a step in approaching Amazon as a pie to be split between different unions - warehouses for the Teamsters, Whole Foods for UFCW - rather than as a project for the whole labour movement. The catch, of course, is that labour's extended stagnation has profoundly weakened the very capacities needed to rethink and transform it. It's still possible for Amazon workers to win significant footholds, and if Amazon continues to stonewall, as it obviously will, then the challenge to the labour movement as a whole will become more pressing. The key test will not only lie in whether or not labour provides the needed financial support at the requisite moment but also in the readiness of already-unionized workers to disrupt Amazon as needed at ports, in rail and trucking, and in parcel delivery.

BF: Tactically, there's a lot of emphasis today on salting, or taking a job at Amazon and organizing it from the inside. What do you make of this?

SG: Salts are critical. Organizing from a base within the workplace is the most successful way to develop relationships with workers, and also to talk to workers about issues beyond the workplace. But salts also need a supportive structure outside the workplace: trained organizers to follow up on contacts, leaflet, generate support for the struggle across Amazon facilities that don't yet have salts. They also need resources for meeting spaces, socials, sustaining workers laid off or fired, etc. This demands a union that has your back: an institution that can help strengthen confidence and provide staying power among both the organizers and the workers.

BF: Could you say a bit more about how you situate the Amazon organizing project in the present crisis of labour?

SG: Amazon has the possibility of being a spur to the revival of the labour movement. What will labour's role be in this present conjuncture, in the crisis of legitimacy? Amazon is the test that helps us answer this broader question. Will labour stand up to this challenge, which has the potential to revive the movement, or will it remain too particularist to take advantage of it?

Contrary to what many union leaders and also many on the Left assert, the labour movement is not - in spite of some impressive and courageous struggles - about to "turn the corner" and become a powerful social force again. Some union supporters reject such assessments as counter-productive; what workers need, they say, is inspiration. However, being sober about where things are at is never counter-productive. Inspiration is great, but if it isn't based on concrete achievements, it ends up as a rhetorical substitute for actual organizing.

It's an interesting moment in terms of language. A lot of language that used to distinguish us is now common language. So, when you say we need class formation, everybody nods their heads. We say you have to think in class terms, they nod their heads. When you say that social democracy is limited, they nod their heads. But do they really understand the inevitable rupture when it comes time to govern? If they did, they'd understand that we're going to need a really deep base. That we're going to need allies, and that nothing will be easy.

So, the Amazon organizing project could also be a way of injecting some reality back into conversations about what it means to reckon with the present crisis.

BF: What would winning the fight at Amazon mean?

SG: A specific aspect of Amazon's model is that it is regionally rooted. Its massive facilities are concentrated at ports and key transportation hubs, with some regions being of much more strategic importance than others. This regional rootedness means that establishing leverage does not have to wait until all of Amazon is unionized; a strategic number of unionized regional facilities can be effective.

Within regions, the company's fulfillment centers (FCs) are critical. From the perspective of class formation, that's where most of the workers are. For the company to move these facilities to avoid unions would be difficult, given the high investment costs of FCs.

Amazon's determined resistance to avoid unions demands a revisiting of tactics that have largely been mothballed by organized labour over the years, and at great cost to their dynamism. Their successful rediscovery, along with other creative organizing innovations, is so vital because they can potentially have explosive implications beyond Amazon, challenging union approaches throughout the labour movement.

Unannounced disruptive tactics carry a special weight. With Amazon's powerful logistics network, the traditional strike deadlines declared in advance won't work. Given advance warning, Amazon would simply reorganize its distribution network to neutralize a dated work stoppage. Disciplined, creative, and sporadic disruption are therefore key for workers. The labour movement was born out of work disruptions (sit-downs, wild cats, health and safety refusals, rejection of production speed-ups), but its trajectory has moved away from those earlier tactics.

The revival of the tactic of unannounced disruptions is inseparable from the revival of the labour movement. To take advantage of it, it is also crucial to establish a strong everyday workplace presence, one based on prioritizing work standards, health and safety, and interventions in management authority. This, in turn, requires not only union majorities but large majorities and deep commitments; a simple majority of union cards is not enough.

BF: Are you optimistic looking ahead?

SG: Yes, but soberly so. It's a really difficult thing to commit to and believe in socialism, but there's no other option. Is this just pie in the sky? I can see someone doing the same analysis as me and writing it off. The chances of it being pulled off are 1 in 1,000. And I might not disagree about the odds and all the limits. But my response is, "Well, actually, 1 in 1,000 is pretty good. We'll take those odds." What else are you going to do with your life?

This Interview first published on the Damage Magazine website.

Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University. He has a Substack focusing on labour and logistics called On the Seams.

Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974-2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket).

28 September 2026

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/09/well-take-those-odds/#more

Student Uprisings in the Age of Hindutva

Chandni Desai — 2026-09-28T16:11:00Z

Thousands of students filled the streets of India in July 2026 in one of the largest student mobilisations since Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. As students waged their protests, confronting police and the Rapid Action Force (RAF), a paramilitary unit of the Central Reserve Police Force, the youth did not invent a new language of resistance. Leftist students reached for the voices of South Asia's courageous revolutionaries and poets that had long animated the subcontinent's struggles against British colonialism, caste and class oppression, and sectarianism. Students chanted: "Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution)," "Jai Bhim (Hail Dr. B.R. Ambedkar)," "Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai (The desire for self-sacrifice now fills our hearts)," and numerous other chants. People also recited the Punjab-born Pakistani communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's "Bol, ke lab azad hain tere" (Speak, for your lips are free) and "Hum Dekhenge" (We Shall See). These slogans and poetic verses were acts of historical remembrance, situating the student struggle against a corrupt and right-wing, neo-fascist BJP Hindutva regime within a radical tradition of rebellion. They were carried by left student organisations and taken up by many who had never belonged to one.

The student uprising, or Cockroach protests, sits at the intersection of two transnational circulations. One is the long, revolutionary internationalism of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist emancipatory political memory and praxis: a generation that never lived through these moments powerfully invoked Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry, Hasrat Mohani and Bismil Azimabadi's Urdu poetics, Bhagat Singh's revolutionary vocabulary, and B.R. Ambedkar's anti-caste jurisprudence. The left invoked them to position themselves within a historical continuum to reimagine an India free from religious hatreds, inequality, oppressive caste and class relations and patriarchal beliefs, intensified since 2014. The other is the security internationalism of counter-insurgency doctrines: the way policing techniques, surveillance technologies, counter-insurgency training, weapons, and biometric infrastructure move between states through trade fairs, bilateral agreements, and homeland security consultancy, carrying an ideology of population management, as surely as the chants and poetry carry an ideology of freedom. Students in India inherited the first circulation by remembering and invoking it. The extreme state violence that met them in the street was built, in traceable part, by the second circulation.

Student Protests Under BJP Authoritarianism

In May 2026, India's National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled the NEET medical entrance examination, the gateway through which more than 2.2 million students a year seek a medical career, after a paper leak. Over a dozen students committed suicide, turning the exam scandal into a national crisis. Competitive examinations in India for all professions are built on years of hard work and immense family sacrifice. For poor and middle-class families, preparing for them often means investing heavily, taking on debt, selling scarce assets, relocating to coaching centres, and forgoing essential life necessities, all sustained by the unpaid social reproduction of family members who provide emotional support, and domestic labour that falls disproportionately on women. The leaks devalued all of it, and broke the promise that education was a path to employment and a secure future.

"The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. "

Out of that anger came the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), launched in May 2026 by Abhijeet Dipke as a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who had dismissed India's unemployed youth as "cockroaches" and "parasites of society." The cockroach became a powerful symbol because protesters reclaimed an image of disposability and transformed it into one of persistence: the people treated as unwanted would keep returning. By early June a protest encampment was put in place at Jantar Mantar, India's most prominent protest site near Parliament in Delhi, which was joined within days by the All India Students Association (AISA), the Students' Federation of India (SFI), and other left student unions and organisations, turning it into a mass movement demanding reform of the examination system and the resignation of BJP Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By late June the climate and education activist Sonam Wangchuk had joined the sit-in from Ladakh with an indefinite hunger strike, alongside several AISA students. On July 18, on the 21st day of that hunger strike, Delhi police forcibly removed him and took him to Safdarjung Hospital, which ignited the protests further. Two days later, more than 10,000 people were marching on Parliament under the banner "Chalo Sansad" (Let's go to Parliament) and were met with extreme state violence and the shutdown of mobile internet services by the government. This ignited further nationwide protests.

The protesters came from every background: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists; upper-caste and Dalit; middle-class and poor; women, men, and gender-nonconforming folks; high schoolers, farmers, workers, and the parents of protesters. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) opened overnight to shelter and feed the crowds, in keeping with the Sikh tradition of langar (serving free communal food), and mosques did the same. The corporate media, the shouting mouthpieces of the government known as the "godi media," tried to brand the movement as foreign-funded by Pakistan, China, or George Soros; yet the students' control of their own narrative broke the attempt. In an interview with Democracy Now, Arundhati Roy described a large first-time cohort of middle-class and upper-caste Hindu students, many from households that vote BJP. Some were the children and grandchildren of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sympathisers, the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation that popularised Hindutva as a political ideology through a project of transforming India into a Hindu nation. This was the most destabilising development for the government. A movement built from the state's "usual suspects" is easy to dismiss as ideological opposition, a movement that includes the sons and daughters of the BJP's own voter base is a fracture inside the base itself. The protests also exposed the class contradictions of India's education system. What began as a revolt against examination corruption became a struggle over neoliberal capitalism in which education had grown privatised, expensive, and insecure with high unemployment and an economic crisis that has captured the nation since the BJP came to office. In naming the gap between the promise of meritocracy and the lives of millions of students, left student organisations turned an educational grievance into a broader struggle over class, caste, labour, inequality, and fascism.

For 12 years, the BJP's governance has run on a specific architecture: Hindus and Muslims cast as the primary antagonists, with Dalits, Sikhs, and other communities in turn pitted against a Hindu centre, so that any demand to hold the government accountable could be deflected into religious grievance instead. That architecture has been enforced through a climate of sectarian polarisation and fear by Hindutva mob violence aimed at intimidating those who challenge the government or assert their rights; police complicity in violence against non-Hindus; a corporate media apparatus and BJP IT cell that together amplify the state's narrative, producing years of fear and self-censorship. The left student unions refused the deflection, communal hatreds, and Hindutva fascism. Corruption in an exam system is not a Hindu-Muslim question, and the large coalition that formed around it was proof that the divide in Modi's India could be crossed. One chant in particular illustrated this point: "Jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai" (Whenever Modi is afraid, he turns to Hindu-Muslim politics). Neha Bora, AISA's National President, a hunger-striker and a leading organiser of the protests, accused the government of trying to recast the student movement as a communal one.

Humour, memes, masks, ridicule, and profanity punctured the BJP's carefully crafted image and aura of masculine and religious authority that it has spent years and vast resources cultivating. Street art and protest signs caricatured Modi alongside Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, two corporate oligarchs central to the consolidation of Indian monopoly capital. This imagery drew on an iconography of crony capitalism that has circulated in Indian protest culture since Punjab's farmers burned effigies of the same two men in 2020. Protesters traced the education crisis to the corporate influence of these billionaires, and to the pracharaks (RSS organisers) installed across the country's key institutions, particularly educational institutions fully captured by the BJP who are destroying the education system. For the youth, this was evidence that their generation had no future under the present order. The culture of resistance the student protests produced became one of the sharpest challenges the BJP has faced. On July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan, a key party strategist and one of Modi's most reliable cabinet colleagues resigned. Since 2014 the BJP had conceded no ministerial resignation to protest or opposition demand. The student movement generated the people power that forced the regime to bend.

Revolutionary Internationalism: The Poets and Revolutionaries Students Invoked

Several chants and poems recited at the student protests carried a longer, border-crossing history. That history had been quietly edited out of this generation's school curricula. A decade of saffronisation of education and the curriculum through BJP-led textbook revisions has trimmed or removed chapters on: Mughal history, the 2002 Gujarat massacre, the post-independence ban on the RSS following Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the later ban after the Babri Masjid demolition, secularism, democracy, dissent, caste oppression and Dalit movements, and environmental issues, while expanding narratives centred on Hindu civilisational identity and mythology. Combined with privatisation, the expansion of the coaching industry, and repeated examination failures, the curriculum became another site through which the BJP government sought to shape both knowledge and citizenship. In such a context, reaching for B.R. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Hasrat Mohani, Bismil Azimabadi, and Faiz was not only paying homage, it was a revolutionary recovery of praxis.

"Inquilab Zindabad," first coined by the Urdu poet, anti-colonial leader and freedom fighter Hasrat Mohani, was adopted by the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who popularised the slogan in the Central Legislative Assembly of the British Raj in 1929, before he was hanged at 23 for resisting British colonial rule alongside two of his comrades. Singh's own political formation was itself an act of circulation; he was influenced by the Russian Revolution, Marxism, anti-imperialism, socialism, Irish revolutionaries, and corresponded with an international network of anti-colonial radicals, and understood the Indian freedom struggle as one front in a wider world war against empire.

Another revolutionary refrain associated with Singh, "Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna" ("the desire for self sacrifice"), was written around 1921 by the Muslim poet Bismil Azimabadi and later popularised by the revolutionary Ram Prasad Bismil, a leader of the Hindustan Republican Association, which Singh belonged to. Carried into the revolutionary movement by figures executed by the British including Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and Singh, the poem became an anthem of resistance and a shared revolutionary vocabulary that crossed social, political and religious boundaries.

The RSS did not participate in the freedom struggle that produced these anti-colonial revolutionaries; its founding texts, on the contrary, drew admiringly on European fascism, particularly Nazism, and its early leadership counselled cadres to stay out of India's anti-colonial movement because Hindu nationalism's real enemy was internal, not British. What distinguishes the RSS Hindutva fascism and governance from ordinary right-wing authoritarianism is an organised paramilitary movement older than the Indian republic itself that has spent a century building towards state capture rather than merely winning an election.

Within this context, when students recited slogans coined, written, and chanted by some of the subcontinent's most beloved revolutionaries, figures whose anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-caste traditions sit uneasily with the RSS's own historical and ideological inheritance, they exposed a documented rupture in the ruling party's claim to represent the nation. As the government denounced protesting students as "anti-national" and "terrorists," these chants reclaimed the language and memory of India's anti-colonial struggle. Not everyone welcomed that inheritance fully. The CJP's leadership appealed to protesters to hold several approved slogans, dropping "Azaadi" (Freedom)- a historic anti-colonial cry against the British, given renewed political force in the Kashmir Valley - to avoid handing the government material for "negative narratives." The appeal did not hold. Where the CJP's leadership kept its distance from the question of Hindutva, Neha Bora told a public gathering that Hindutva and the RSS had to be uprooted from Indian soil.

Other frequently recited slogans were "Jai Bhim," and "Educate, Agitate, Organize," in doing so the students invoked B.R. Ambedkar, whose own sense of caste oppression was comparative and global. Ambedkar wrote much of India's Constitution which affirmed equality before the law for all people, enshrined fundamental rights, freedom of religion, affirmative action reservations, and universal adult suffrage. He also drafted Article 17 which abolished untouchability and made caste discrimination unconstitutional. In 1946, writing from Bombay, he corresponded with W.E.B. Du Bois about parallels between Dalit and Black American subjugation. Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar that he had "every sympathy with the Untouchables of India." A generation later, a group of Dalit writers and activists named themselves the Dalit Panthers, explicitly modelled on the Black Panther Party, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s own 1959 visit to India left him remarking on parallels between caste oppression and American racial segregation. Ambedkar was also one of the country's foremost advocates for women's legal rights, which is why many women organisers continue to invoke him as an enduring source of political inspiration and a debt owed.

Layered with these slogans were also Faiz Ahmed Faiz's verses, "Bol," first published in 1941 during British colonial rule, and "Hum Dekhenge" (We Shall See) written under Pakistani martial law in 1979 and later banned by General Zia-ul-Haq's regime. Calling on people of the subcontinent to speak while they still could, and promising "a coming reckoning" against authoritarianism, these poems have become enduring anthems of protest movements across South Asia, including the 2019-20 anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and anti-NRC (National Register of Citizens) protests in India. Yet the afterlife of Faiz's poetry cannot be separated from the political life that produced it. His resistance to authoritarianism led to years of imprisonment and exile, eventually taking him to Beirut, Lebanon, where he edited the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's Lotus magazine and worked alongside Palestinian revolutionaries, including poets Muin Bseiso and Mahmoud Darwish, whom Faiz first met in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, as well as the writer Ziad Abdel Fattah and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. In Beirut, Faiz witnessed frequent Israeli incursions into the city and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and wrote elegies for Palestinian fighters and children, making Palestine not a metaphor grafted onto the poems, but part of the very soil from which they emerged.

"Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students. "

The student protests did not happen in a vacuum. Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, two former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) scholar-activists who are Muslim and are India's most prominent political prisoners, have now spent more than six years in Delhi's Tihar jail without trial, denied bail again by the Supreme Court in January even as five of their seven co-accused in the same February 2020 Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom conspiracy case were finally released. They were arrested under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for their alleged role in organising protests against the NRC and CAA, the same movement that also sang Faiz's poetry, popularised the slogan Azaadi and chanted Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar into Delhi's air. Their continued detention is the material referent behind the word anti-national, or terrorist, labels deployed by the BJP and state authorities against a wide range of dissidents including Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, Kashmiris, and leftists, and since the summer protest to all youth, including Hindus.

The word anti-national does specific work. It turns a person with a grievance into an enemy-of-the-state, and once that move is made under a legal architecture built for counter-terrorism rather than crowd control, six years in a prison cell without trial stops being a scandal and becomes state policy and a lesson to intimidate others. Situating the current student protests within the longer history of student resistance, including the anti-CAA and NRC protests, the repression of students at JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Occupy University Grants Commission (UGC), and the movement for Rohith Vemula (a Dalit PhD scholar), points to the way the BJP government has progressively refined its repertoire of surveillance, policing and repression against dissenting students.

The continuity extended beyond domestic struggles: the same left student unions and organisations that were confronting the state apparatus in the cockroach protests had also spent the previous two and a half years mobilising thousands in solidarity with Palestine and against India's deepening alliance with Israel, facing arrests, detention, surveillance and restrictions on assembly. In October 2024, more than 40 organisations collectively gathered at Jantar Mantar to protest one year of Israel's genocide in Gaza which became a site of police surveillance, crackdown and Hindutva mob violence against pro-Palestine protestors. This violence re-emerged during the exam protests. It marked the point where the two circulations of resistance and repression collided at Jantar Mantar.

State Violence against Protesters and Movements

"This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor."

Students faced barricades, police and RAF lathi charges (beatings with batons), tear gas, AK-47 and pellet gun bullets, arrests, detention, harassment, sexual assault, and some sustained severe injuries. Delhi Police also deployed an AI-enabled surveillance van equipped with 360-degree cameras and facial-recognition capacity, called Ikshana. Police officers were seen wearing AjnaLens smart glasses. Police used video feeds and database matching to identify people at the demonstration, later used to witch-hunt protesters specifically Muslims, Dalits and leftists. Digital-rights advocates challenged the absence of clear legal authorisation, retention limits, notification procedures and independent oversight. The use of such technologies transformed these protests into biometric checkpoints, allowing police to record faces, identify participants, and create enduring databases of dissent.

A day after the Delhi crackdown, in Bihar's Siwan district, a constable was filmed opening fire with an AK-47 during the Bihar Bandh, the statewide shutdown. Three people wounded, among them a 15-year-old shop worker named Md Arif, shot in the neck on his way home from work; he survived. In the Bihar crackdown, police arrested hundreds of protestors, including many leaders of left student unions. And in Delhi, Mohammad Junaid, a Muslim volunteer who spent weeks distributing meals to protesters at the Jantar Mantar encampment, said plainclothes police officers blindfolded him, detained him overnight, and abandoned him 250 kilometres away in Mussoorie. At the same time, police in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh and Meerut detained his father, his minor brother and his sister's in-laws, confiscating the family's PAN cards, Aadhaar cards and bank passbooks until Junaid turned himself in. Danish Ali, Joint Secretary of the JNU Students' Union, said police visited her family home and village in an apparent attempt to intimidate her as well. This is what a doctrine of population management looks like: a grammar of suspicion, biometric sorting, shooting at unarmed protesters and bystanders, religious targeting, family harassment, and family-as-hostage detention, normalised over a decade of violence against Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, leftists, the working class and poor.

Gender was a central dimension of both the repression and the public response to the student protests. Women reported that police officers or members of far-right Hindutva mobs struck, verbally abused, groped or molested them, while videos and testimonies described torn clothing during the police crackdown. Such violence carries significance beyond crowd control, as the humiliation or displacement of women's clothing invokes patriarchal ideas of honour and respectability that can discourage future political participation. The government's response also revealed the gendered policing of dissent. Modi's criticism of women and girl protesters for using "abusive language," coupled with his unsolicited paternalistic forgiveness of them in an awkward Instagram reel, reflected a gendered expectation that "respectable" women and girls remain polite and deferential, even as male anger, profanity, and violence are more readily accepted. Following the protests, many women have reported facing doxing, rape threats, and online BJP IT cell harassment, as well as police harassment of their families. This is intended to humiliate them nationally and intimidate them into withdrawing from public life. Yet, in openly expressing rage, women and gender non-conforming folks challenged both political authority and patriarchal gender norms, exposing the BJP's hypocrisy of policing women's speech while repeatedly defending and protecting men convicted of rape, such as the rapists of Bilkis Bano in the Gujarat massacre. The godi media turned its coverage towards character assassinations of student protesters, especially women and girls, the most notorious was the case of Ruchika Singh, a 15-year-old girl who mocked Modi in an online video and was coerced to apologise and forced to flee her home. Modi, Hindutva mobs, and the godi media are making an example out of her, to show the country that ridiculing the Prime Minister is closer to sedition than protected political speech.

Built With Israel: The Counter-Insurgency Doctrine Behind Police Crackdowns

Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of "counter-terrorism" and "national security.

The security doctrine that met the student protesters has a face, and this summer it was put on camera again, as it was in Kashmir in 2019 after the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A, and during the farmers' protests of 2020-21. The extreme state violence and crackdown on student protestors across the country this summer was not freelance brutality by officers improvising under pressure. It was produced by a decade of training exchanges, cybersecurity MOUs, and homeland security seminars. A police force has been retrained to read a protest not as people with grievances exercising their democratic right but as a threat to be sorted, tracked, neutralised and criminalised.

The doctrine decides in advance what kind of thing a crowd is, once that decision has been made in Israeli classrooms and Delhi seminar rooms, the baton and the bullet only enforce it. Occupied Kashmir has been the laboratory: biometric monitoring, facial recognition, internet shutdowns, arrests, disappearances and extra-judicial killings, heavily armed crowd control, all of it justified in the language of "counter-terrorism" and "national security." What was developed through the oppression and control of Palestinians and adapted through India's militarised occupation of Kashmir, has returned to Delhi, Mumbai, Patna and, above all, Manipur as "ordinary policing."

India's diplomatic ties with the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid state opened in 1992, with covert defence purchases going back further, but the relationship changed character after 2014 when the BJP came to power. In 2015, 150 Indian Police Service (IPS) officers visited the Israel National Police Academy to study counter-insurgency, low-intensity conflict and warfare, counter-terrorism, and policing technologies; IPS trainees have gone every year since. Trainees observed Israel's Border Police and airport-security operations, while SIBAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry's international defence-cooperation arm, introduced them to Israeli homeland-security companies and the use of technology in "live situations."

"India became the world's largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India-Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi's push for domestic manufacturing under the "Make in India" initiative."

Modi's 2017 visit to Israel, the first by a sitting Indian prime minister, marked a decisive deepening of the India-Israel alliance, producing roughly $2 billion in Israeli defence and intelligence purchases, a cybersecurity agreement, and, according to a New York Times investigation, India's acquisition of Israel's Pegasus spyware, later used against Indian journalists, academics, activists, and opposition leaders. What began as police training soon became institutionalised: by 2018, an India-Israel Joint Steering Committee on Homeland and Public Security formally committed the two states to sustained cooperation in police "capacity building and modernization" and border management. Israeli security expertise was thus entering India not simply through weapons purchases, but through the training, technologies and institutional practices of the police themselves.

India became the world's largest buyer of Israeli arms, spending upward of a billion dollars annually. Increasingly, those weapons were also made on Indian soil, as the 2022 India-Israel Vision on Defence Cooperation paired Israeli military technology with Modi's push for domestic manufacturing under the "Make in India" initiative. Adani Enterprises and Elbit Systems established a joint venture in 2018 to manufacture the Hermes 900 drone for the Israeli military, the only production line outside Israel, while Bengaluru's Alpha Design Technologies and Elbit produced SkyStriker loitering munitions for the Indian Army. By 2024, Israeli arms companies including ELTA, Rafael, Elbit, and Skylock were using a standing forum in Delhi to develop further defence and dual-use partnerships. But as Azad Essa argues in Hostile Homelands, this convergence is ideological as well as material. RSS ideologues drawing on Savarkar and Golwalkar had long admired Zionism as a model of ethno-religious nationhood. Under Modi, a lifelong RSS member, that affinity increasingly shaped state policy, from suppressing domestic criticism of Israel's genocide in Gaza to attempts at withholding support from UN resolutions calling for its end.

Modi's most recent 2026 visit to Israel, two days before the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, crystallised this transformation at a moment of full-scale regional war in West Asia. Addressing the Knesset, the first Indian leader to do so, Modi told the chamber that Indian-origin Jews in Israel hold that "Israel is their fatherland and India their motherland," that he was born on the day India recognised Israel, and that India stood with Israel with full conviction. He was awarded a medal for strengthening the alliance and embraced Netanyahu, who remains subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The material consequences of this alliance became still clearer in July 2026, when Amnesty International's Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel documented 2,596 shipments of arms, ammunition, and military components from Indian companies to Israel between October 2023 and November 2025, including artillery-shell casings and components for SkyStriker drones. Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice's provisional measures in the genocide case, India could hardly claim ignorance of how these supplies might be used.

For India's left and people of conscience at home and across the diaspora, this marked the culmination of a reversal decades in the making: from a global leader of non-alignment and supporter of Palestine and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to a government supplying the Israeli war machine, integrating Israeli surveillance and security practices at home, and aligning itself ever more closely with Israel and Washington in ways an earlier generation would not have imagined. Yet it was against this architecture of repression and alignment that the students won their immediate concessions.

Reformist Victories, Making Revolution Imaginable

The Cockroach movement's immediate gains were reformist: the education minister's resignation, a signed agreement with the government on compensation for the families of students who died by suicide, a parliamentary commitment to reform the examination system, and assurances that protesters would not face police arrests and detention. These were the terms on which students suspended their hunger strike and called off their mass protest. But the movement never declared the struggle finished. If the protest's achievements were liberal in form, its political significance was far larger. It exposed fractures in the BJP's claim to unquestioned authority, it disrupted the ideological confidence of Hindutva and exposed its inner fascist workings to the country, ruptured over a decade of fear and censorship, revealed the failure of neoliberal capitalism, and sparked the emergence of a generation willing to confront the state through many forms. The threat to the regime posed by this generation was perhaps evident in Modi's 2026 Independence Day address, he branded youth protesters "dimagi Naxals" ("intellectual Naxals"), invoking the language of Maoist insurgency to recast political dissent as an "internal security threat" to be dealt with.

The protests radicalised and awakened millions of young people and have instilled a sense of hope for another India, and protests continue across the country in the present. People have called for the resignation of BJP Home Minister Amit Shah (responsible for the police, RAF, and their brutality) and Modi himself, captured powerfully in the chant "Desh bachao, Modi Hatao" (Save the Country, Get Rid of Modi). The protests also ruptured the borders meant to divide them, as Pakistani students sent moving messages of solidarity to India's students, one blogger specifically identifying them as the "children of divorce," referring to the subcontinent's Partition. Student movements in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also asked what they can do in solidarity with the left student unions who are committed to advancing the struggle further.

The protests also confirmed what the two circulations traced throughout this essay had always implied: internationalism is never politically neutral. Each gives rise to a distinct political world, one producing a generation capable of creative collective resistance, imagining revolution, and cultivating hope (despite internal contradictions); the other produces institutions capable of administering immense state violence and human rights violations.

Revolutions rarely arrive fully formed, they begin by making the existing order appear vulnerable. In that sense, the student uprisings may be remembered not as the revolution itself, but as the moment one became imaginable. The surveillance cameras on the mast are still running, compiling a database for whom the state will target in the days to come. Hum Dekhenge records something else, written in the future tense, it promises that there is still more to be seen: the world it anticipates has not yet arrived, and students continue to organise and struggle for a different future. They are remaking and ushering in a new world in these fascist times.

To them: Inquilab Zindabad!

Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is working on a book tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits: Cadres, Culture, Internationalism and the Palestinian Revolution.

Sep 17, 2026

Source: https://www.jamhoor.org/read/hum-dekhenge-student-uprisings-in-the-age-of-hindutva

Photo caption and credit : Political graffiti, protest slogans and spray-painted messages cover a boundary wall near the site of the students' protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, July 2026. Image: Sayyed Abuzar Ali

‘We Need Convivencia': Haim Bresheeth Envisions Palestine after Zionism

Thinking Palestine Editors — 2026-09-28T16:00:00Z

Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner argues that only a single democratic state-not partition-can deliver justice, equality and decolonization in Palestine.

For decades, the two-state solution has dominated international discussions on Palestine. At the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin, Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner dismissed the framework altogether, arguing that it is neither viable nor desirable.

Instead, he urged audiences to abandon what he described as an obsolete political paradigm and return to a solution that, he argued, Palestinians themselves have advocated since the earliest years of the conflict: a single democratic state across historic Palestine.

"The solution has to come from the Palestinians," Bresheeth-Žabner declared at the outset of his keynote address. "The Palestinians have already worked on that solution in 1947."

For Bresheeth-Žabner, the conversation should no longer revolve around rescuing the two-state formula. Comparing Palestine to other anti-colonial struggles, he argued that liberation movements in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland never accepted permanent political separation as the basis for justice.

"We never talked about a two-state solution in South Africa," he said. "We didn't say, 'Let's have a Black state and a white state.' We didn't, in Northern Ireland, say, ‘Let's have a Catholic state and a Protestant state.'"

He contended that continued discussion of partition ultimately serves to preserve Zionism rather than challenge it.

"Our reason not to talk about it is that it's a way of preserving Zionism," he said. "None of us here is interested in preserving Zionism."

Returning to 1947

Bresheeth-Žabner grounded much of his argument in the debates surrounding the United Nations partition proposal of 1947.

While the UN ultimately endorsed partition, he reminded the audience that another proposal-a unitary democratic state-had also been discussed. "There were two proposals," he explained. "To divide Palestine- or not to divide."

From his perspective, partition represented both a political and moral failure. He argued that it allocated the larger share of the land to the Zionist movement despite Jews constituting roughly one-third of Palestine's population at the time.

"When you have a third and two-thirds," he asked, "you give the third two-thirds of the country?"

He further argued that the violence associated with the Nakba began immediately after the adoption of the UN partition resolution rather than after the formal declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948.

"The war didn't start on the 14th of May," he said. "It started on the first of December 1947."

A Palestinian Proposal

Central to Bresheeth-Žabner's speech was his insistence that Palestinians have consistently offered an inclusive political vision rather than one based on ethnic exclusion.

Rejecting portrayals of Palestinian liberation as incompatible with coexistence, he described Palestinians as having shown extraordinary political generosity.

"It's not normal, and it's not obvious", he said, that a population under colonial control says to the colonizers: “Stay with us. You will be citizens like us in the state of Palestine.'"

To illustrate the point, he drew parallels with Algeria's anti-colonial struggle.

Before the Algerian war reached its bloodiest stages, he noted, the National Liberation Front (FLN) envisioned a democratic Algeria in which French settlers could remain as equal citizens if they accepted the country's independence.

"What happens before a genocide and what happens after a genocide is very different," Bresheeth-Žabner observed, arguing that mass violence fundamentally alters the political possibilities available to an oppressed people.

The One Democratic State

Bresheeth-Žabner also reflected on his own involvement in the One Democratic State Initiative alongside Palestinian intellectuals and fellow Israeli anti-Zionists, including historian Ilan PappÈ and physician and author Ghada Karmi.

The group drafted a model constitution envisioning a secular democratic state where citizenship would be based on equality rather than religion or ethnicity.

"What we wanted," he explained, "was one democratic state, which is basically a secular state. Religions don't have distinct political rights... everyone is an individual in that state."

He acknowledged that this vision remains politically distant but argued that it continues to provide the most coherent framework for a just future.

Gaza Has Changed the Conversation

While reaffirming his long-standing commitment to a single democratic state, Bresheeth-Zabner argued that Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza has fundamentally altered the immediate priorities facing Palestinians.

"We know that the one state is the only democratic, just and practical solution," he recalled hearing from young Palestinians.

"But at the moment... our problem is not to establish one democratic state. Our problem is to survive the colonial attack on us."

He argued that the destruction in Gaza has made discussions about future constitutional arrangements secondary to the immediate struggle against what he repeatedly characterized as genocide and colonial violence.

"We cannot actually, at the moment, even talk about it," he said, "without first resolving the fact that Zionism is in existence."

For that reason, he concluded, "we need to end Zionism. This is my priority."

Decolonization and Accountability

Looking beyond the current war, Bresheeth-Žabner envisioned a future Palestinian state built through decolonization rather than partition.

"Palestine should be liberated," he declared. "Palestine should be decolonized. Palestine should be de-Zionized."

He also argued that accountability for crimes committed during the war must accompany any future political settlement.

"We will not do a Nuremberg," he said. "We will do a Genocide Convention future in Palestine."

A Personal Journey

In his closing remarks, Bresheeth-Žabner moved away from political theory and spoke about his own life. "I was born in a refugee camp in Rome after the Second World War," he told the audience. "My parents were stateless, and so was I."

Recalling his childhood among Palestinian communities, he described growing up in an environment where Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking children lived and played together without perceiving one another as enemies.

"The first thing that happened to me is that I became a Palestinian," he said.

He ended with a historical vision that reached back to medieval Al-Andalus, invoking the concept of convivencia-the coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews-as both a historical precedent and a political aspiration.

"Let no one tell you that we can't live together peacefully," he said.

His final appeal framed Palestinian liberation not only as the liberation of Palestinians themselves, but also as the liberation of Israeli Jews from Zionism.

"We shall achieve it," he concluded, "by liberating Palestine and liberating Jews from Zionism."

Source: https://thinkingpalestine.com/we-need-convivencia-haim-bresheeth-envisions-palestine-after-zionism/

Photo caption and credit: Israeli anti-Zionist scholar Haim Bresheeth-Žabner. (Illustration: Thinking Palestine)