Alternatives International Journal

Student Uprisings in the Age of Hindutva

Chandni Desai — 2026-09-23T03:11:10Z

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

250 Years of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and US Independence

Ingo Schmidt — 2026-09-13T15:51:46Z

In March 1776, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published. Four months later, 13 North American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. Both events were in the air.

Economists before Smith had already pondered how to explain the then-observable increase in manufacturing and global trade, and what its consequences would be. Smith could not have foreseen that his Wealth of Nations would become, not long after his death, a kind of manifesto for the rising industrial bourgeoisie. First in England, soon after in Europe, the United States, and finally in all parts of the world where capitalists were striving for class rule based on industrial production.

The plantation owners, traders, freight forwarders, and shipowners of the North American colonies had long believed that the British Crown, British bankers, and merchants were taking an undue share of the profits from transatlantic business. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 gave spectacular expression to this resentment over economic exploitation and political domination. That the United States would one day replace Great Britain as the leading global power was not foreseeable at its founding.

Smith: Not a Prophet of Unfettered Markets

To justify this power, ideologues of the American bourgeoisie repeatedly invoked Smith. While presenting Smith as the herald of a doctrine of unfettered markets and themselves as the embodiment of this doctrine, they consistently deviated from it in the pursuit of their business interests.

In the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith established a theoretical system of natural liberty. He contrasted this with mercantilist practice, which promoted the export of finished goods from the imperial centers and restricted corresponding imports to stimulate manufacturing production within those centers. Tariffs levied for this purpose, along with taxes imposed on the colonies, filled the coffers of absolutist rule. Slavery and debt bondage on the sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco plantations supplied the wealthy and powerful in the centers with luxury goods. Under pressure from overcapacity and thus declining profits on the one hand, and an abolitionist movement - inspired in no small part by the Enlightenment - on the other, the British Crown considered abolishing slavery. Overcapacity or not, slave labour was indispensable to the plantation owners. They saw freedom from British colonial rule as a guarantee for the continuation of slavery.

Slavery and the Cotton Empire

Among other works, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments also provided abolitionists with arguments against slavery. Addressing soberly calculating businessmen, he explained in the Prosperity of the Nation that slave labour was less productive and profitable than wage labour. The American plantation owners refuted his argument. The shift from producing luxury goods for the wealthy to cotton, which, machine-processed in England, clothed the masses in all parts of the world, was enormously profitable - for the American plantation owners as well as for the English industrialists.

The market seemed limitless. This was largely because the combination of English mass production and forced market liberalization devastated textile production in India. Textile manufacturers in the United States managed to escape the fate of ‘de-industrialization' - if one wants to apply this term to the manufacturing prevalent in India - by imposing tariffs on their own Indian colonies to promote domestic manufacturing. Smith had introduced free trade as an alternative to mercantilism. While the latter, with its promotion of exports and restrictions on imports, benefited manufacturers and absolutist rulers, it did not benefit the nation.

Free trade became the guiding principle of British policy after the Industrial Revolution granted the country's manufacturers a global monopoly. In the United States, the plantation owners of the South championed free trade. They rejected the tariffs demanded by the burgeoning industrialists of the American Northwest to secure their share of the global textile market against superior British competition. The plantation owners feared British retaliatory tariffs that would increase the cost of their cotton shipments to the Northwest's industries, thereby reducing sales and profits. This issue led to the Civil War. The victory of the Northern states paved the way for the United States' rise to industrial power.

Tariffs protected American industry from foreign competition, and the end of slavery opened up a new source of cheap labour. Racial segregation, introduced under the Jim Crow laws, ensured that Black workers were paid significantly less than white workers. This provided a source of continuous extra profits for American industry and a kind of economic compensation for the Southern plantation owners who had lost part of their business assets with their slaves. This was not how Smith had envisioned the prosperity of nations. He considered profit, ground rent, and wages to be distinct sources of income for manufacturers, landowners, and wage labourers. The fact that some enriched themselves at the expense of others contradicted his worldview. Therefore, he also criticized laws that prohibited workers from forming unions, while entrepreneurs seized every opportunity to collude to increase prices and profits. He also believed that the nation's prosperity was measured by the increases in the lowest incomes. In his view, free trade would lead to larger markets and a progressive division of labour. This would increase productivity and incomes. In all income brackets.

American Industrial Power and a Multinational Proletariat

This was far from the case in the United States, even after the end of slavery and the industrial boom. Westward expansion, coupled with another genocide of the indigenous population, supplied the industries of the Northwest with raw materials. The Second Industrial Revolution gave rise to new industries. These were linked to the emergence of large corporations and an enormous concentration of wealth. In contrast, there was the poverty not only of Black workers but also of workers who had recently immigrated from Southern and Eastern Europe. Between this poorly paid, multinational proletariat and the industrial magnates on the other side, the old and new middle classes - farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers or managers - as well as a labour aristocracy recruited from the descendants of Northwest European immigrants, tried to assert themselves.

The promise that everyone, perhaps even every woman, could rise from dishwasher to millionaire created an ideological consensus against which countless appeals to workers' solidarity bounced off. This ëwhere there's a will, there's a way' consensus stems, not least, from the ‘free-trade-individualistic' interpretation of Smith, which ideologues and propagandists of the American bourgeoisie disseminated among the people in ever-new variations.

It took the First World War and the Great Depression to shake this consensus. The United States emerged from the war as the true victor. France and Great Britain had bought their victory with indebtedness to their American ally. Its political elite entered the world stage under the banner of democracy, national self-determination, and capitalism. The ideological alternative to communism, which had become a real power in Russia after the war and revolution, initially proved discredited by reality. It could not halt the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, particularly in Italy and Germany. The Roaring Twenties proved to be a prelude to the Great Depression, which led to a surge in trade union organizing and struggles that overcame nationalist and racist divisions within the working class. This, in turn, became a challenge to capitalist domination, paving the way for a policy of Keynesian class compromise.

Anti-Communism, Free Trade, and Social Reform

This path was only taken, however, after the politically violent nationalism and racism of Europe triggered a second world war, in the aftermath of which communist rule spread as far as East Berlin, Beijing, and Pyongyang, and eventually, Havana and Hanoi. Washington finally got serious about free trade, aiming to create sales and investment opportunities throughout the non-communist world. This applied not only to American companies but also to companies from countries that had united under American leadership to form an anti-communist bloc. This bloc was secured internally through social reforms usually associated with Keynes, but which would certainly fit into Smith's worldview, provided it is not distorted into a stateless market utopia.

The combination of containing communist enemies and free trade among friends didn't last long, because capitalists came to see social reforms within the anti-communist free trade bloc as another road to serfdom. The fight against this ‘Keynesian road to serfdom', begun under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ended with a global victory of free market ideology after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese communists accepted the rules of world trade written in Washington.

When the prosperity promised under the name of globalization failed to materialize, crises and ever-deepening inequality arose, and previously existing social safety nets disappeared, the specters of American history joined the Adam Smith reforms, now reduced to unregulated markets: the racism of the slavery era, the nationalism of the mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the anti-communism of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The Tea Party movement marked the beginning of the shift from a confident globalism to a fearful liberalism that invoked national and racial superiority; with Donald Trump, it entered the White House.

Smith is neither a suitable witness for globalism, nor for the Tea Party or Trump. Leftists who don't misunderstand Smith as an apostle of unfettered markets might find points of connection with his work. This might be a way to engage in conversation with people who fear the Marxist spectre of communism, consider themselves followers of Smith, but are disillusioned by the policies pursued in Smith's name.

Ingo Schmidt teaches Labour Studies at Athabasca University. Recent books include Reading 'Capital' Today: Marx After 150 Years (with Carlo Fanelli) and The Three Worlds of Social Democracy: A Global View.

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/09/250-years-of-wealth-of-nations-us-independence/#more

Photo Caption: In Panmure House, on the east side of this close, Adam Smith lived from 1778 to 1790.

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September 13, 2026

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

Thinking Palestine Editors — 2026-09-05T20:47:57Z

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)

Gloria Steinem's Final Essay

2026-09-05T20:09:45Z

When you're lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role is to remind us how far we have come.

I always say I became a writer so I wouldn't have to talk. But, once I started writing about my own personal experiences, I was surprised to receive invitations to speak on campuses or to women's groups. I knew it was important to do, so I started travelling regularly with speaking partners in America and other countries to help spread the word of a global women's movement.

Eventually, after covering lots of territory and many issues, I realized I had become an itinerant organizer. It's an unlikely profession, but really it is quite simple. Organizers observe the world, see what it could be, and help make it real. As I look back on my own life, I see those experiences that set me on my own course.

I learned about feminism greatly from living in India for a couple of years after I had graduated from college in the nineteen-fifties. My time in that newly independent nation made me realize that most of the world did not live as we did in the United States. I realized there was a terrible monochromatic quality to the people in my life, and that white people were a small minority in the world. In India, I got accustomed to, and began to value, racial diversity.

The people I met in India who were social activists were almost all Gandhians. I worked with them, went to school with them, and walked through villages with them. I found I was very drawn to them as human beings because they were kind, open, nonviolent, and not nationalistic at all. I think culturally women are drawn to nonviolence. Probably because we are the major victims of violence, we become the major movers of peace.

Only later in my life did I realize how much those years had influenced what I now see as my feminism. But maybe we should not call it ìfeminism.î Others have preferred ìwomanistî or ìmujeristaî or ìwomen's liberationist.î Whatever the name, words that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality. Opposition will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born intoówhether that is sex, race, class, or ethnicityórather than on what they do as individuals. This persists because they believe in hierarchy and they fear what might happen if they have no built-in advantage. And this is sad because they may never find out who they really are, and what they would really want to do in life.

For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.

Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don't think it's inclusive enough. Regardless of what we call it, it just means treating each of us as uniquely human. The experiences of race and gender and class are very real and important, but they are also constructed and changeable. Our humanity is consistent and sacred.

Still, for some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious. For starters, females do the majority of work in the world when you account for paid and unpaid labor, yet only receive about a third of total labor income globally, and own less than twenty per cent of land worldwide. Females are also far more likely than males to be illiterate, go hungry, be victims of human trafficking, or be murdered by a family member. And, unlike most of its democratic counterparts, the United States has never had a female head of state.

As I write this, the world seems in a tailspin. Many feel that all the progress we've made is being reversed. When you're lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.

In my own life, women were invisibilized, in public and even by language itself. I remember times when thoughtful male journalists would look at a roomful of women and report, ìThere's no one here.î Or, when I and other women had an idea, the only way we could express it was by having the man next to us state it.

People often ask me: What should we do? No one person could answer that for everyone. I will say that we must work together to make sure that equal laws and customs become normalized. While there are many external gestures, the biggest leaps are those that we make within ourselves. Standing up for your own full humanity is an example you can give to others. Bring equality into your workplace and homeóand follow the sense you probably had as a child, before gender roles took shape, about fairness.

We have seen leaps of progress already, thanks to the millions of women and girlsóand many men and boys, tooówho have stood up for equality. Because of this movement, most people in the world have now seen women who are astronauts, union organizers and farmers, liberators and peacemakers. Thanks to women who gathered to tell the truth at the kitchen table or village well, who acted in local elections or at the United Nations, feminismóor any other word for human equalityóis widely recognized as a precondition of democracy, economic development, spirituality, and peace.

So treat every woman as a full human being, an equal human being, whether that means encouraging your mother to do what she's always dreamed of doing, or not expecting your girlfriend to cook you dinner. Only with actions from each of us will we see equality as a true fact of life. ?

Gloria Steinem , who died in 2026, was an activist, a journalist, and a co-founder of Ms. magazine.

Source:

Photo Caption: Gloria Steinem's signature, from a signed copy of her book "My Life on the Road"
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The Erosion and Possible Demise of Bourgeois Liberal Democracy

Vinod Mubayi — 2026-09-03T17:15:30Z

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
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There's Nothing Left, she said simply. ‘Most of the People are Gone...'

Arjun Poudel in Kathmandu / GLOBAL SOUTHASIA/SAPAN NEWS — 2026-09-02T21:55:28Z

"My eldest aunt was swept away. So was her son, my dai Madhu, and his wife. My other aunt - gone too, they told me. Her grandson Sijan and his wife, caught in the same water. His own son and daughter-in-law, unreachable, unaccounted for. My maternal uncle had gone out that morning to cut grass for the cattle. He never came back." A Kathmandu Post journalist witnessed his childhood village disappear, and with it all his loved ones, through fragments of video and phone calls that stopped connecting.

I was on my way to the Kantipur Publications office in Kathmandu on Wednesday morning when my wife called.

"There's been a flood in Trishuli," she said. "Something's happened to Sole Bazaar and Betrawati - people are saying there's nothing left. Everyone's out on the road. There are videos of them panicking."

I didn't believe her.

Sole is my village. I played in its lanes, worked its fields, walked its road to school every morning for years. If anyone should know that place, it's me - so, surely, I would have known if something like this were possible. I hadn't even heard that the rain had been unusually heavy. And this isn't a settlement the river reaches, not even in a bad monsoon.

I let it go. I had a news meeting at eleven, and I hurried on.

Betrawati Bazaar is where we shop, where the buses stop, where you can get on one and ride straight into Kathmandu. It's where my parents used to wait for me, knowing I was on my way home.

It's the heart of the place: a Ram temple, a Krishna temple, the crowds that gathered for Ram Nawami and Krishna Ashtami. Being an old Newar settlement, it had its Gai Jatra too, and in recent years, bull-fighting at Maghe Sankranti that drew people from as far as Kathmandu.

All of that, I would soon learn, were already gone.

I opened a news site to check what my wife had told me, half expecting nothing. The headline read: Massive flood in the Trishuli.

Something in my chest tightened. I called Niranjan, a journalist, whose family lives in Sole Bazaar - they'd moved down from the village once the bazaar grew, and his uncle lives even closer to the river. He picked up on the first ring.

"I just heard too, dai," he said, the words coming out in one breath. "I can't get through to anyone. Not Mummy, not Buwa, not my uncle, my aunt - nobody's phone is even ringing."

For the rest of my walk to the office, we called each other back and forth, each of us trying every number we had for home. Nothing went through. When I finally reached someone - an elder brother's house - it was his wife who answered. "There's nothing left in the village," she said simply. "Most of the people are gone."

I couldn't make myself believe it. Sole and Tupche sit nearly a hundred metres above the riverbed. No flood in living memory - in centuries, as far as anyone knew - had ever reached that high. I am 44-years-old, and I have never once, in all that time, seen the river come for us.

I have cousins there, neighbours, childhood friends. Everyone I have ever loved outside my own front door is from that village.

I began calling them, one by one. In a place like Sole, everyone is kin to everyone else, one way or another - and where blood doesn't make the connection, age does, and you call the stranger dai or didi anyway, because that's simply how it's done there. Everyone belonged to me, and I belonged to everyone.

Slowly, the videos and photographs started arriving on my phone. Nothing had prepared me for what they showed.

My eldest aunt was swept away. So was her son, my dai Madhu, and his wife. My other aunt - gone too, they told me. Her grandson Sijan and his wife, caught in the same water. His own son and daughter-in-law, unreachable, unaccounted for. My maternal uncle had gone out that morning to cut grass for the cattle. He never came back.

I called the ward chair, Rabindra Nepal. "Bhai, I came to the municipality office early this morning, and I'm stuck here now," he told me. "There's nothing left in the village. You can imagine the rest yourself."

Each call made it worse.

Some people, he said, had scrambled up the cliff-side and survived that way - by climbing, by a stroke of luck. I reached a teacher at the local school nearby. "I can't find my own family, bhai," he said. "Ninety percent of the houses in Betrawati are gone. The school van was swept off too. There's a boy near me with a broken leg. Another man beside him - broken leg, his eye is hurt badly. If you can get a helicopter here, please, send one."

Then Niranjan's uncle called. Niranjan's father, mother, uncle, aunt, and his little sister Himani - all of them, taken by the water.

"We're finished, Arjun," he said. "I'm hanging up now." And he did.

Betrawati was never just a market town. It's where Nepal and Tibet once signed a peace treaty after their war. It holds Uttar Ganga dham, a site sacred enough that thousands travel there every year on Pushya Amawasya to honour their dead. All of it - the temples, the treaty ground, the pilgrimage site - is rubble now.

There is no road left, no electricity, no phone signal, no internet. Downstream, the flood took the headgate of the Trishuli hydropower station, and then the power station itself. I remember that even during the years of nationwide load-shedding, back in 2010-11, our village never once lost power. Now the whole district sits in the dark.

I saw it myself, travelling with friends toward the district headquarters on Wednesday evening - not just my village, the entire district, swallowed by the dark.

Villagers who'd come down to the headquarters that morning are stranded there now, with nowhere to go. The sick who'd come in for treatment are trapped at the hospital, unable to get home. A neighbour of mine stood near a rescue helicopter bound for the army training centre in Battar, begging to be let aboard. "My uncle and aunt were swept away," he kept saying. "Their phones are dead. I don't even know what's happening to my own house."

My eldest aunt's older son is in Kathmandu, powerless to do anything from that distance. Her younger son had only just returned from working abroad - he hadn't even made it back to the village before the water came.

On the phone, people told me the children who'd survived by running couldn't be brought out, that before anyone could even grieve for the mother and the brother and sister-in - law, who were gone, — the living still trapped in the village would have to be rescued first.

The flood did not only take the village. It took the road to the district headquarters, and with it, the road to the rest of the country. The market that fed us is gone, which means there is nowhere left to buy anything. The fields we planted are gone. And even the grain that families still have stored at home is grain they can no longer mill into rice or flour, because the mills are gone too.

The old bridge over the Trishuli, connecting Dhunge to Trishuli Bazaar, built in 2024- gone. The newer bridge, built only a few years ago - gone. The Bhainse bridge, every suspension bridge across that river - all of it gone, and with it, any way to reach the district headquarters at all.

The district hospital at Baghtar, so close and now so unreachable. Villages further out - Bhairamkot, Samari, Toksar, Deurali, Kispang, Kaule, Bhalche, Salme, and Tharpu across the border in Dhading - cut off entirely. The whole of Rasuwa district is severed from the road network. Looking at what's left, it's hard to imagine any of it being rebuilt soon.

"If someone falls sick now, I suppose they'll just have to die at home," one villager told me, his voice flat with grief. "How would you even get them to a hospital? There's no road. No bridge. No vehicle can move."

People can't even buy salt anymore. So many are displaced. So many are still missing, unaccounted for in the water. What happens now to the ones who survived, I don't know. I set out almost a day-and-a-half ago, meaning to reach the village myself. I have been stuck at the district headquarters in Bidur, unable to go any further.

I keep asking myself how long it will take before my village looks like my village again. Nobody has an answer. None of us has ever seen a flood like this one - a village this green, turned to ruin in the space of a few minutes. The old men keep saying it, over and over, as if saying it enough times might change the answer: "Will this place ever become what it used to be?"

Arjun Poudel is a health reporter for The Kathmandu Post. Before joining the Post, he worked for Sagarmatha Television, Naya Patrika, Republica and The Himalayan Times.
Courtesy of sapannews.com / GLOBAL SOUTHASIA

This piece has been republished courtesy of The Kathmandu Post, from Global Southasia, in solidarity with the people of Nepal.

Source: https://www.independentink.in/post/nepal-floods-there-s-nothing-left-she-said-simply-most-of-the-people-are-gone

Photo caption: Mudslide at Gyirong Port 2 (screenshot)
Photo credit

Ending American Exceptionalism: Common Futures Beyond Empire

Sangeeta Kamat — 2026-09-02T20:39:00Z

"White supremacy, in this sense, has long masqueraded as American exceptionalism, forming the bedrock of U.S. patriotism and national identity."

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.” — Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism, 1955:37.

“To will oneself free is also to will others free.” – Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947.

In Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (Grimonprez, 2024), a brilliant documentary based entirely on archival footage, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez takes us through the 1960-61 years that prove to be formative in the making of the U.S. empire. The long arc of American imperialism is set into motion when President Eisenhower collaborates with the Belgian government to assassinate the first democratically elected leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. The background or rather foreground to the coup d'etat is the electrifying music of America's Jazz Greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and many more unsuspectingly recruited to be the foil in a covert CIA operation to assassinate the young and popular pan-Africanist leader Lumumba and install in his place a corrupt dictator who would rule for the next thirty years, effectively ensuring US control and usurpation of Congo's precious minerals. What we see in the extreme immiseration and internecine violence in Congo today and much of Sub-Saharan Africa is a continuation of the imperialist subjugation initiated in the 1960s by the US and its colonial allies. The film documents in unnerving detail the cold-blooded massacre of the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people by the American state with the unwitting complicity of the American people, in this case through the Jazz Greats as cultural ambassadors of the American state. Their innocence though is not incidental but a corollary to American exceptionalism, an overriding belief in America as a superior nation, a trope that remains ineluctable from then to the present.

What we see in the extreme immiseration and internecine violence in Congo today and much of Sub-Saharan Africa is a continuation of the imperialist subjugation initiated in the 1960s by the US and its colonial allies.

The film also documents how the instrumental use of the Jazz Greats in the making of empire has unintended consequences. The encounter becomes a catalyst for pan-African solidarity between African people asserting independence and an end to colonial rule, and African Americans demanding equal rights and an end to segregation. The film captures a moment in history when African Americans recognize their shared plight and common future with the struggle for freedom and equality on the African continent. A gripping scene in the film is when Maya Angelou and Abbey Lincoln storm the United Nations (UN) General Assembly calling out their government's role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Another thrilling scene in the film is when the streets of Harlem are jammed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the meeting between Malcolm X and President Nkrumah, Prime Minister Nehru, and President Castro who leave the hallowed halls of the UN to declare their solidarity with the civil rights movement of Black Americans – a historic encounter between the former enslaved and the former colonized showing up together in a moment that is poignant and filled with possibility.

As the United States hurtles towards authoritarianism, it is these remarkable scenes in the film –among many others — of internationalism and solidarity between the disenfranchised peoples of the global North and the global South that need recovering and can offer us not only inspiration but also practical pathways to combat the divisive politics that are ascendant today. American exceptionalism has been particularly damaging to global solidarity struggles as it has cultivated a deeply held belief among Americans of all races and backgrounds that America is unique, extraordinary and incomparable and is a shining example for all countries to emulate. It is not simply that American exceptionalism minimizes the prospects for global solidarity but is dangerous for the sense of superiority and condescension it engenders among the American public that in turn animates supremacist thinking and ideology. American exceptionalism results in a profound level of ignorance and disinterest in learning about the Majority world and how our destinies are intertwined, a willful ignorance if you will of ‘Other' worlds and peoples, the luxury to not know that is assiduously promoted by our schools, politicians and the media.

At the heart of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is a beacon of democracy, peace and stability, a myth cultivated in the shadows of imperialist conquest of the Black and Brown worlds (including in the United States itself) and its capacity to terrorize countries around the world with its 877 military bases in 95 countries. The popular sentiment that the United States is a defender of human rights and peace around the world is an illusion that is bolstered by American exceptionalism, an illusion that masks the expropriation of the Global South and the ever present threat of war hanging like a Damocles sword over countries that dare to oppose the political and corporate interests of America – such as claiming sovereignty over their natural resources be it minerals, crude oil or water. The invasion and devastation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – and now Venezuela — are recent examples of America's wars to seize natural resources and subjugate nations in the name of gifting democracy to these countries. In the post-war period, celebrated at home as the “golden era of American capitalism”, middle class Americans benefitted from US covert operations and usurpation of wealth from Black and Brown nations that subsidized the infrastructural projects and manufacturing that made for the “American way of life”. The plunder of resources and exploitation of labor abroad contributed directly to the comforts of life and cheap goods accessed by a broad swath of the population. This “golden era” relied on the trope of the ‘hardworking American' (almost always portrayed as white heterosexual male) while keeping hidden from view American imperialism, its covert operations to install corrupt governments in newly formed nations, and mafia style trade policies that unfairly enriched US corporations with some of the surplus redirected to subsidize the lives of ordinary Americans.

It is imperative that education equips young people with an understanding of how racial inequality, white supremacy, and disenfranchisement in the United States are inextricably linked to inequality and expropriation in the majority Black and Brown nations of the world. These connections are not only rooted in the histories of slavery and settler colonialism, but are continuously reproduced through post–World War II regimes of unequal trade, militarism, and predatory capitalism that extend into the present moment. U.S. foreign policy has consistently been justified in the name of the American people, framed as serving the nation's “security”– a security purchased at the cost of untold misery, displacement, and devastation for much of the world's population.

Decades of U.S. intervention abroad — military adventures that have ruined entire countries and torn apart societies — are routinely explained away through the ideology of American exceptionalism. Within this worldview, the United States is cast as the global icon of democracy and freedom, a model of good governance and civil rights, and therefore uniquely entitled to bestow democracy upon others. This self-appointed role as the world's “policeman” has, in practice, functioned as a form of global extortion — one that has directly contributed to the consolidation of an all-powerful, white supremacist oligarchy at home. Domestically, the costs are increasingly visible, as this oligarchic class turns its rapaciousness inward, systematically stripping away the rights, security, and social protections of ordinary Americans.

White supremacy, in this sense, has long masqueraded as American exceptionalism, forming the bedrock of U.S. patriotism and national identity. If we are to meaningfully oppose a white supremacist oligarchy, we must interrogate and contest its most ordinary and pervasive expression: the deeply embedded belief in American exceptionalism that animates the body politic. This demands, urgently, curricula and pedagogies that challenge this myth — a myth that is thoroughly bipartisan. American exceptionalism is woven into both expert and popular narratives, propagated by media and political elites, embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, and reproduced across racial and ethnic lines.

Nowhere is this more evident than in school curricula, where American exceptionalism appears as seemingly innocuous lessons about the United States as the “oldest democracy,” lessons that over time harden into shallow binaries and prejudicial understandings of the U.S. in contrast to the rest of the world. Increasingly, schools abandon the teaching of world history in its complexity, opting instead for a narrowly framed national history centered on triumph and glory. While all nations engage in some degree of myth-making within their curricula, when such narratives become common sense and serve as ideological cover for imperial violence, the consequences of historical erasure reverberate globally. [1] Educators, therefore, must recognize and actively refuse the narrative of American exceptionalism that depends upon willful ignorance—what Tuck and Yang (2012) describe as “white innocence.” Only through such critical refusal can education contribute to the cultivation of a genuinely internationalist and justice-oriented political imagination.

While all nations engage in some degree of myth-making within their curricula, when such narratives become common sense and serve as ideological cover for imperial violence, the consequences of historical erasure reverberate globally.

In Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat, America's jazz greats are unwitting albeit enthusiastic allies in the US plot to thwart Congo's independence. However, their faith in American exceptionalism is shattered once they recognize the tragic similarities of their situation at home with the Africans whom they have been sent to convince that the United States is their friend and benefactor. The musicians realize that it is the same bullets aimed at the Congolese that are killing their people engaged in non-violent action to end segregation. Upending the myth has explosive consequences, memorialized in the scenes of Abby Lincoln and Maya Angelou storming the UN General Assembly calling out the criminality of the US state. This act of solidarity is possible precisely because they recognize in the Congolese people a mirror of their own struggle and aspirations. It is this internationalism that is desperately needed to combat the ‘Make America Great Again' nationalism, — a nationalism, make no mistake, is sustained only through the ongoing expansion of the American empire, unfolding before us in real time. Just as the Jazz Greats recognize their righteous demand for equality at home is being suppressed even as they are courted by the state to advance its imperial ambitions abroad, this contradiction persists today. An oligarchic class erodes economic and social rights at home while prosecuting wars overseas in the name of defending the American way of life – wars whose material consequence are not freedom and security but the enrichment of corporate elites. Only by renouncing American exceptionalism will we recognize that the violence of the imperial project does not stop at the borders but turns inward on disenfranchized groups within — weaponizing the tools of empire against its own people, from policing and austerity to the criminalization of dissent. When this crisis is reduced to Trump alone, we once again fall prey to American exceptionalism, reassuring ourselves that the problem will be resolved by replacing a single individual rather than confronting the structure that produced him. American exceptionalism encourages us to see Trump as an aberration rather than as a systemic outcome of imperial power — a dynamic that Aimé Césaire famously described as the imperial “boomerang,” whereby the violence and brutality perfected in the colonies returns, with full force, to the metropole. [2]

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État forces us to confront a truth that has been hiding in plain sight: the American empire was never an accident of history, nor the unfortunate byproduct of noble intentions gone awry. It was engineered—through covert operations, economic coercion, and cultural spectacle—to secure resources, discipline the decolonizing world, and preserve the illusion of American innocence at home. The tragedy of Patrice Lumumba's assassination is not an aberration but a blueprint, a founding act in the postwar international order that bound anti-Blackness, extractive capitalism, and imperial violence into the architecture of US power.

American exceptionalism encourages us to see Trump as an aberration rather than as a systemic outcome of imperial power

Yet the film also reminds us that empire is never total. In the cracks of the system, a different story insists on being told. When the Jazz Greats begin to see their reflection in the Congolese struggle, when Maya Angelou and Abbey Lincoln storm the UN, when Malcolm X meets Nkrumah in Harlem, a radical proposition surfaces: that the fight for Black freedom in the United States and the fight against colonial domination in the Global South are not parallel struggles but the same struggle. Internationalism is not an idealistic add-on to liberation movements; it is their historical condition of possibility.

This is the lesson we must recover in our present moment. As the United States edges toward authoritarianism under the banner of restoring a mythic greatness, we are called to reject the ideological glue that holds the project together: American exceptionalism. To refuse exceptionalism is not to despise the country; it is to love its democratic possibilities enough to name the forces that are killing them. It is to insist that democracy cannot be built on the subjugation of others, that peace cannot be built on militarism, that prosperity cannot be built on dispossession.

If a different future is to be won—one beyond oligarchy, beyond endless war, beyond the borders that divide the formerly enslaved from the formerly colonized—it will emerge from the kind of solidarity this film documents and invites: a solidarity grounded not in pity or charity, but in recognition. Recognition that our struggles are entangled. Recognition that freedom is indivisible. Recognition that there can be no liberation at home without decolonization abroad.

The soundtrack of empire is violence. But the soundtrack of resistance—the one that pulses through Congo in 1960 and Harlem in 1961, the one that echoes in our own crisis-filled present—is jazz: improvisational, insurgent, collective. It is time, once again, to learn to hear it.

References:

Cesaire, Aime (1950, 2000) Discourse on Colonialism. English transl. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone (1947, 2018) The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Open Road Integrated Media Inc.
Grimonprez, J. (2024) Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat [film]. Produced by Dean Milius & Remi Grellety.
Erakat, Noura (2025) The Boomerang Comes Back. Boston 50 Review. Retrieved at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012) Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1, 2012, 1-40.

Notes

It is relevant here to note that Colleges of Education too have largely stopped teaching world history and politics, subjects that would offer future teachers a historical framework from which to interpret the crisis and contradictions of our times.
Hannah Arendt in her work on Totalitarianism (1951) written around the same time as Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism makes a similar argument about Nazism being a mirror image of colonial violence put into effect in Europe. For a recent essay that makes the case for the ‘imperial boomerang' see Erakat (2025).

Sangeeta Kamat is a professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Source: https://agitatejournal.org/ending-american-exceptionalism-common-futures-beyond-empire/

Photo Caption: Protest in Cairo, United Arab Republic outside of US Embassy during protests after the killing of Patrice Lumumba

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The Authoritarianism We Carry Within Us

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-09-02T19:53:00Z

For too long, we have reduced our political plight in the Arab world to the figure of the authoritarian ruler: he falls, and dictatorship falls with him, supposedly clearing the way—automatically and effortlessly—for freedom, democracy, and justice. Yet our experiences, both past and recent, suggest that the reality is far more complex. A ruler may fall, a regime may change, enlightened constitutions may be written, and free elections may be held—only for us to discover that authoritarianism has not entirely disappeared. It has merely changed form and found new channels through which to survive.

In the Arab world, authoritarianism is not simply a ruler who monopolizes power; it is also a culture we can carry within us—one that survives the ruler's fall and can even outlive the regime itself. It lives in the ideas, culture, and practices that place power above accountability, treat disagreement as a threat, and turn political opponents into enemies. It is a culture that makes us wait for a “saviour” or a “strong leader” rather than build institutions—a state governed by law, where no one is above accountability and no authority is beyond scrutiny.

A Culture of Authoritarianism

The harder question is: Why do we see disagreement as a threat—and keep looking for a strong ruler to silence those who think differently?

The autocrat does not create this culture from nothing; he draws his power from it, exploits its fears, and reinforces it. He thrives in a political and social environment shaped by fear, distrust, weak institutions, exclusion from public life, and a deeply rooted belief that authority should be obeyed rather than questioned. That is why defeating authoritarianism requires far more than replacing one ruler with another. It requires changing our entire relationship with power: from obedience to accountability, from submission to scrutiny, and from fear of authority to the right to challenge it. It means building institutions strong enough to constrain power—and a political culture in which no ruler is above the law.

But authoritarianism is not sustained by political structures alone. It also takes root in the way we think about power and disagreement. It is not merely a system in which a ruler monopolizes decision-making and suppresses freedoms; it is a mind-set that shapes how we understand authority, obedience, and political difference.

The Double Standard of Principles

More dangerously, this culture does not remain confined to those in power. It can spread through society, opposition movements, political parties, and elites. We begin to apply different standards depending on whose side we are on: we condemn repression when it targets us, but justify it when it targets our opponents.

The judiciary often exposes this double standard clearly. We demand judicial independence when it protects us, then question it when its rulings go against us. We may even remain silent when due process is violated simply because the target is a political opponent.

This is how the law gradually loses its meaning. Rights become selective, defended when they serve us and forgotten when they protect others. If freedom is only for us, justice only for our side, and the law only for our opponents, then we are not truly rejecting authoritarianism. We are only rejecting the possibility of becoming its victims.

The problem becomes even more serious when political convictions harden into closed ideologies.

From there, political disagreement can easily shift from differences over ideas and programs to personal hostility, then to accusations of treason and exclusion. We stop debating ideas and start questioning intentions. We stop responding to arguments and start looking for accusations to attach to those who make them. The dissenter becomes a traitor, the critic a conspirator, the person who disagrees an enemy, and anyone who refuses to fall into line becomes suspect.

Politics then moves from competition between projects to a struggle over legitimacy itself: Who has the right to speak? Who has the right to represent the nation? Who has the authority to decide who is “patriotic” and who is not?

The problem becomes even more serious when political convictions harden into closed ideologies. There is nothing inherently wrong with different religious, nationalist, left-wing, or liberal perspectives; pluralism is one of democracy's foundations. The problem begins when conviction becomes absolute truth—when each side believes it does not merely hold one perspective among many, but possesses the truth itself, and that those who disagree are traitors, conspirators, or enemies.

At that point, disagreement ceases to be a competition between political projects and becomes a conflict between identities. Admitting a mistake becomes a defeat, and compromise is treated as betrayal. Once an idea becomes a closed certainty, questioning it is perceived as an attack, while excluding those who disagree is presented as a defence of the “pure” truth.

The Monopoly on Truth

Here lies one of the most dangerous dilemmas in Tunisia's experience: disagreement does not remain a debate over what the state should be. It quickly becomes a struggle over who has the right to define the state, society, the nation, the economy, and the future.

Admitting a mistake becomes a defeat, and compromise is treated as betrayal.

When every side believes that it alone represents “the truth,” “the people,” or “the national interest,” democracy itself becomes a battlefield for eliminating disagreement rather than a means of managing it. Thus, even when we overthrow political authoritarianism, we may reproduce its logic and methods through other means: monopolizing truth instead of power, and excluding those who disagree instead of engaging them in dialogue.

This helps explain, in part, why democratic transitions have proved so difficult in our societies. At a certain moment, people were able to break through the barrier of fear and rise against authoritarianism. But they were not necessarily prepared to manage the pluralism that emerged once the public sphere opened up.

It was far easier to agree on what we rejected than on what we wanted to build. As trust weakened, institutions remained fragile, and divisions deepened, politics shifted from competition over programs to a struggle over who had the right to represent the state and society.

Yet blaming societies and their elites alone would be an unfair simplification. The culture of authoritarianism was shaped over decades by regimes that weakened institutions, narrowed the public sphere, and taught citizens that silence was safer than speaking out, and that proximity to power was more rewarding than holding it to account.

Democracy Is a Practice, Not a Moment

We cannot expect a society that has lived under fear for generations to become, overnight, a fully democratic society in practice. The fall of an autocrat may liberate society from fear, but it does not automatically liberate it from the prevailing culture of authoritarianism.

Democracy is not granted once a ruler falls. It is built when, through everyday practice, we learn that power is temporary, that disagreement is a right, and that the law stands above everyone.

Democracy does not mean that we all agree. It means accepting that no one owns the nation or the truth alone; that majorities can be wrong; that an opposition can become a majority; and that those who lose elections do not lose their place in the nation.

From Strong Leaders to Strong Institutions

Building democracy therefore requires more than changing who stands at the top of the state. It requires changing our relationship with power itself: moving from a culture that searches for leaders to one that trusts institutions; from loyalty to individuals to loyalty to rules; from obedience and allegiance to citizenship; from treating criticism as treason to recognizing it as a right; and from wanting to silence opponents to having the ability to confront them through dialogue and argument.

This does not mean that democracy is impossible in our societies. It means that it is more difficult than we imagined.

Democracy does not require perfect citizens or angelic politicians. It requires institutions that constrain power, rules that protect rights, and citizens willing to accept that disagreement is a normal part of public life. Democracy does not eliminate mistakes, but it prevents mistakes from becoming a permanent fate. Nor does it eliminate conflict, but it prevents conflict from turning into a war against the state and society.

The real question, therefore, is not: Are we ready for democracy? It is: Have we learned from the lessons of the past? And are we prepared to change the culture that made authoritarianism possible?

freedom is incomplete unless we accept the freedom of others

If we continue searching for the “just autocrat,” the “leader who never makes mistakes,” or the ruler who supposedly knows the people's interests better than the people themselves, we will remain trapped in the same vicious circle, no matter how much the faces and slogans change.

But if we learn that freedom is incomplete unless we accept the freedom of others; that power must be subject to the law; that disagreement is not treason; and that institutions matter more than individuals, then democracy becomes possible—even if it remains difficult.

The real challenge, therefore, is not merely to overthrow the autocrat, but to dismantle the culture that gives him legitimacy, the mind-set that searches for him, and the logic that justifies his power.

When we accept disagreement, hold power accountable to the law, and defend the rights of our opponents as fiercely as our own, we do more than change rulers: we begin to dismantle the culture that makes authoritarianism possible.

For authoritarianism is not truly defeated when the autocrat falls; it is defeated when the culture that made his rule possible no longer has a place among us.

Photo caption: A Egyptian football player kicking Hosni Mubarak by Carlos Latuff

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Looking Back at Rock Against Racism-With Hope For the Future

Socialist Worker — 2026-08-31T18:39:55Z

Roger Huddle co-founded the group that helped defeat the fascists, while Geoff Brown was the Manchester organiser of the Anti Nazi League. Both spoke to Frankie Murden

Frank Murden (FM): What was Britain like when you set up Rock Against Racism (RAR) in 1976?

Roger Huddle (RH): There was a swell of racist filth following the expulsion of Asians from Malawi in east Africa. Many of them had British passports and wanted to settle here. The reaction of the press was horrific, and racist MP Enoch Powell resurfaced with talk of repatriation.

In June, 18-year-old student Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered by racists in Southall, outer west London. And in late August, cops viciously attacked the Notting Hill Carnival-and black youth fought back. The Nazi National Front (NF) was using the panic over immigration, and disillusionment with the Labour government, to push racist hate.

Geoff Brown (GB): What seemed like endless prosperity for 30 years had come to a shattering end. There was a global financial crash, and a humiliated Britain had to call on the International Monetary Fund for help.

There was a feeling-particularly among young people-that the future had been taken away. And you had this astonishing explosion of anger that found an expression in music, both punk and reggae, in particular.

And the one thing that all frustrated young people connected with was music.

Why did you decide to bring people into the anti-racist movement with music?

RH: In August, guitarist Eric Clapton had spewed racism from the stage at his gig in Birmingham. He ended it with a call to “Keep Britain white.”

That was what set the ball rolling for RAR. We had already discussed how to use our love of music to combat the NF. The fascists characterised all popular music as "jungle music.”

Red Saunders, co-founder of RAR, and myself had both come through the 1960s counterculture, campaigned against the Vietnam War, cheered the French May '68 events and the workers' upturn in the early 1970s.

Red, who is a photographer, actor and cultural warrior, wrote a letter to the music press about Clapton's racism and asked me to sign it too.

I was working at the Socialist Worker printshop and asked if we could use the paper's PO Box for replies to our call for a movement to fight racism in music.

We had hundreds of replies within days.

RAR was born. Its slogan was, “Reggae, soul, rock ‘n' roll, jazz, funk, punk-our music.”

GB: Nothing captures the explosion of generational anger more strongly than the Sex Pistols' record, "God Save the Queen”.- Complete with its description of the monarchy as a "fascist regime,” it was released during the queen's Silver Jubilee in May 1977.

We launched the Anti Nazi League (ANL) in November as a sister organisation to RAR. It brought together black and Asian youth, socialists, trade unionists, students, school students, members of the women's movement and LGBT+ people for the single task of stopping the NF.

I was the ANL organiser in Manchester. We sent around 40 coaches down to London for the first RAR carnival in 1978.

So, over 2,000 people went down, and they came back to Manchester with such an incredible experience. Everybody, I mean everybody, wanted to organise their own carnival.

In that moment hope and horror combined.

Tell us about organising the carnival in Manchester?

GB: So many people were wowed by the RAR carnival that it was incredibly easy to get volunteers to make one in Manchester.

But anybody who's ever organised anything knows that it's not simple. But the sense of possibility meant that we had the confidence to be bold.

Bernie Wilcox was the main RAR organiser in Manchester. He pinned down the Buzzcocks to headline our carnival just as the band were nearing the height of their fame.

All kinds of people offered to help in the fight against the NF, not just the bands and the fans. We roped in people in the Labour Party and serious figures in the unions too. This was a real united front.

Having people on board who were politically to the right of the Socialist Workers Party, with sufficient political weight, meant we could get things like parks, money and equipment for the carnival.

How did you keep organising people after these big events?

GB: There was a lot going on. Almost everybody thought there was going to be a general election in October 1978, though it was pushed back to 1979.

The NF said it was going to put up 300 candidates. There were lots of local anti-fascist initiatives. But the idea of a national organisation really took off. The ANL could combine the anger of the youth with others in the working class, the labour movement, MPs and so on. It meant everybody could do something.

It starts with having the ability to make things happen on the ground, at a local level, and using that to convince people that we can do something bigger.

There was a similar mood around the massive Together demonstration earlier this year. But the danger anti-racism faces now is not being bold enough.

We've got to use flair, we've got to use imagination.

How does the knowledge that we've beaten the far right in the past help us now?

GB: I think we've got a new generation that can make it happen. That's what gives me confidence. We are clearly aware of how racism is being used in the most vicious way.

And yet, the reaction to Professor Jason Arday's death-the 30,000-strong vigil in London's Trafalgar Square, for example-is inspiring. It showed that we are able to organise for a better future.

Today the bastards will continue to use every dirty trick they can. But we know we have numbers, talent and imagination on our side.

Reminiscences of RAR: Rocking Against Racism 1976-1982, by Roger Huddle and Red Saunders and A People's History of the Anti Nazi League by Geoff Brown are both available at Bookmarks, bookmarksbookshop.co.uk

Photo caption and credit: The Buzzcocks at the Manchester Rock Against Racism carnival in 1978 (Photo: John Sturrock)

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Beneath the 65-Metre Waste Mountain of Ghazipur: The Realities of India's Waste Pickers

Nicolas Auger-Chrétien — 2026-08-25T01:35:02Z

Every day, around 11,000 tonnes of waste ends up in Ghazipur, brought in by the constant flow of roughly 500 trucks. Over the years, this has created a massive garbage mountain the area is known for. Yet Ghazipur isn't only a landfill, dairy farms still exist right beside it. On the site, they use biomining and large excavators to break down old waste and separate it into materials like plastic, sand, and concrete. Nothing is wasted if it can be reused: plastic is sent to cement factories, and sand and debris are used for new roads and construction. But the work is far from easy. The incinerators haven't been running for about three months, and wet waste can't be sorted right away, so more trash is still being piled on top, left to dry for years before anyone can process it. Hidden underneath are machines and teams working from the bottom up, trying to slowly reduce the mountain. Along the seven-level route to the top, initiatives like the Namaste Program show that efforts are being made, but the scale of the problem is still huge.

In the communities surrounding the Ghazipur landfill, the limitations of institutional recognition are felt in very concrete ways. Despite the existence of national schemes such as the Namaste Scheme, which aim to register informal waste workers and extend basic social protections, access to support remains extremely limited on the ground. Many waste pickers living and working around Ghazipur are neither registered nor informed about available schemes, effectively excluding them from social protection mechanisms. In practice, this leaves them dependent on informal and precarious waste work for survival, with little or no interaction with public institutions. Their labour keeps the city functioning, yet they remain absent from official records, excluded from protections, and rarely consulted on decisions that directly affect their lives.

In recent years, the Government of India has taken steps toward formally recognising informal waste workers through the Namaste Scheme, which now explicitly includes waste pickers within the national sanitation and waste management framework [1]. From the 2024-2025 financial year, the scheme has aimed to integrate waste pickers into formal systems through digital registration, occupation-based identification, and linkages to social security programmes. While this represents a significant policy shift on paper, its reach and effectiveness remain uneven, particularly for workers operating in highly marginalised contexts such as those surrounding the Ghazipur landfill.

The Namaste scheme represents one of the most recent national efforts to formally recognise waste pickers as part of India's sanitation workforce. It aims to provide occupational identification, health insurance, protective equipment, and livelihood support, while also promoting the formation of waste picker collectives and digital profiling systems. The initiative targets approximately 2.5 lakh workers across India, signalling a large-scale attempt at formal integration into waste governance systems. However, implementation remains uneven, with only a limited number of workers currently profiled under the scheme, highlighting a gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground reality [2].

Recent announcements offering one-time financial incentives to landfill workers in Delhi, such as the Rs 5,000 Diwali payment, reflect a broader pattern of short-term welfare gestures rather than sustained institutional integration, highlighting the gap between political recognition and structural inclusion of informal waste workers [3]. At the same time, restricted access to waste has led many waste pickers to report declining incomes and increased dependence on hazardous sites such as landfills, where competition, health risks, and environmental exposure are significantly higher.

The growing dependence on sites such as the Ghazipur landfill is not accidental, but the result of policy choices that have progressively excluded informal waste pickers from neighbourhood-level waste collection. Urban cleanliness is not determined by rankings or infrastructure alone, but by the effectiveness of governance systems, civic participation, and the inclusion of sanitation workers within urban decision-making processes. This perspective shifts attention away from surface-level performance indicators toward the deeper structural conditions that shape how waste is managed in cities [4].

The Ghazipur landfill has long exceeded both its intended capacity and its original lifespan, yet it continues to receive vast quantities of waste decades after its planned closure. Initially designed to operate for approximately 25 years, the site now functions less as an engineered landfill than as an open dump, lacking many of the environmental and safety safeguards required under waste management regulations [5]. The accumulation and decomposition of waste have led to the continuous release of toxic gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, contributing significantly to air pollution in surrounding areas. At the same time, the site poses serious risks to water systems: leachate from the landfill has been reported to flow into nearby drains and canals, raising concerns about groundwater and surface water contamination [6]. Structural instability further compounds these hazards, as cracks and slope stress within the waste mound have increased fears of collapse among workers and nearby communities.

Frequent fires, often linked to methane buildup, have become a recurring feature of the site, releasing dense toxic smoke and causing sharp spikes in air pollution that affect both waste workers and nearby communities [7]. With these conditions, Ghazipur has evolved into a chronic environmental hazard, where climate risks, pollution, and informal labour are concentrated in the same urban space.

In response to sustained environmental pressure, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has announced plans to fully clear the Ghazipur landfill by 2027-2028, alongside the establishment of additional waste processing facilities [8]. Authorities have pointed to bio-mining as a central strategy for reducing legacy waste, combined with limited diversion of ongoing waste streams to processing and waste-to-energy facilities. Despite these commitments, progress on the ground remains slow. Large volumes of accumulated waste continue to dominate the site, and only a fraction of the total legacy waste has been processed so far. The clean-up has moved far more slowly than announced.

Communities living around the Ghazipur landfill, including densely populated neighbourhoods and nearby wholesale markets are exposed to multiple environmental risks. Poor air quality, respiratory illnesses, and water contamination are persistent concerns, while contaminated runoff threatens surrounding soil, groundwater, and surface water systems. Beyond these local impacts, the landfill also represents a broader climate challenge, as uncontrolled methane emissions from decomposing waste contribute to greenhouse-gas emissions. Taken together, these conditions reflect deeper failures in urban waste governance in megacities like Delhi, where rapid urbanisation, inadequate planning, and slow remediation have concentrated environmental harm in already marginalised spaces.

Gender, informal labour and climate justice

At sites such as the Ghazipur landfill, environmental degradation and social inequality intersect in deeply gendered ways. Women waste pickers working around the landfill are exposed daily to toxic air, contaminated water, and hazardous materials, while simultaneously facing heightened risks of harassment, theft, and physical violence. Unlike men, women often combine waste picking with unpaid care responsibilities, limiting their mobility and reducing their ability to seek safer or more profitable work opportunities [9]. As a result, their economic vulnerability is compounded by environmental exposure and social insecurity. These conditions are not incidental but reflect broader policy failures that concentrate environmental risk in informal labour spaces while excluding women workers from protection, recognition, and decision-making processes.

The Ghazipur landfill has reached an estimated height of around 65 metres, comparable to the towers of London's Tower Bridge or the height of a city block, and only a few metres shorter than Delhi's Qutub Minar - the world's tallest minaret made of bricks. This physical scale reflects the intensity of waste accumulation in one of the world's most rapidly growing urban regions. As Swati Singh Sambyal, a programme manager at the Center for Science and Environment in Delhi, notes, “Among the metropolitans, Delhi is probably the biggest waste generator. Ideally, only 10 to 15 percent of Delhi's waste should go to dumping sites, but around 70 to 80 percent is still being disposed of there because waste is not segregated at source. Our approach remains collection, dumping, or burning, which is not a sustainable or viable solution.” [10]. This persistent failure of waste segregation and reliance on dumping-based systems continues to shape the conditions in which informal waste pickers, particularly women operate, reinforcing both environmental exposure and economic precarity.

Voices from Ghazipur: Community perspectives

I also had the privilege of going into the slums of Ghazipur myself to conduct some interviews with my work partners. I interviewed Jatin Nasha Bibi, a waste picker living in the Ghazipur community, who has been residing in the area for approximately 25 years and is now 38 years old. She describes her daily routine around night work at the landfill, where she begins collecting waste around 6 p.m. and continues through the night, a pattern shared by many workers operating across the 24-hour cycle. She explains that her household includes three children, aged 20, 22, and 26, who have also participated in waste picking activities at times, reflecting the intergenerational nature of this labour. Despite the demanding conditions, she describes her work as something she has become accustomed to over time, emphasizing familiarity and endurance rather than hardship.

Many people work across 24-hour cycles, and she noted that her monthly income ranges between 10,000 and 12,000 rupees. She described the absence of basic facilities at the landfill, including toilets and shaded areas for rest, which forces workers to rely on conditions available in the surrounding community. There is no formal water supply or pipeline in the area. Water is accessed through tank deliveries and stored in containers for daily use. While electricity is available in the community, access to safe water remains highly constrained. She also described how leachate from the landfill flows into local drainage systems, affecting household water infrastructure. As a result, many homes either lack sinks entirely or avoid using them due to contamination concerns. In these conditions, water is often reused for multiple purposes, including washing, bathing, and drinking, due to limited alternatives.

She noted that people do experience illness frequently, although many have become accustomed to the conditions over time. She also described how women in the community manage both paid work and domestic responsibilities. In her case, she works in the evening at the landfill and spends the daytime caring for her children. Sleep remains limited, as work is continuous and survival needs take priority.

Many children also participate in the work and sometimes accompany their parents to the landfill. Workers are required to pay 20 rupees to guards to access the site, as entry is now controlled through a privatised system introduced by the city. What was previously an open informal space has increasingly become restricted and, in practice, semi-illegal for many waste pickers.

The work itself is highly hazardous. Landslides have occurred, and there are reported cases of fatal accidents involving heavy machinery such as excavators. Despite these risks, families continue to depend on the landfill as their primary source of income. Encounters with municipal authorities, including MCD workers, can sometimes further disrupt access, as workers are often instructed to stop collecting waste, though many return regardless due to economic necessity. Protective equipment is virtually absent. Most workers rely only on their hands and plastic bags, with no formal safety gear provided.

When I asked her what she thought about the fact that the government has been saying for years that they will remove the landfill, she said that people do not believe it will ever be removed. The harsh truth, as she put it, is that they do not want to see it gone. Their livelihoods depend on it, and it has become the way of life for so many people. The city is trying to clean it, but at the same time more waste continues to be added. You cannot clean it with more dumping. In her view, the city is also running out of space for another landfill, which makes the situation even more difficult to resolve. The landfill, as she describes it, is what people depend on to make money and survive. What will they do without having the mountain. That is why, they do not believe it will ever be removed, because there is simply too much waste being processed at the same time.

Available estimates suggest that the Ghazipur landfill sustains a significant number of informal waste workers from surrounding communities. While figures vary across reports, earlier studies indicate that approximately 600 waste pickers from the immediate area depend directly on the landfill for their livelihood, while more recent assessments estimate that up to 1,500 workers regularly collect waste at the site [11]. These variations reflect the informal and fluid nature of waste picking, but they nonetheless point to Ghazipur's central role as a survival space for hundreds of families who remain excluded from formal waste collection systems.

I also interviewed Sheikh Akbar Ali, a community leader and organiser with Basti Suraksha Manch in Ghazipur. He explains that he worked for approximately 25 years in the waste sector before transitioning into advocacy for waste pickers' rights. Originally from New Seemapuri, he now works as a community organiser supporting workers in the sector. He previously earned a living through waste selling and collection. He is now 42 years old and lives in Ghazipur with his family. “Waste is the most important aspect of human life because everyone is creating waste, no matter what. But no one is taking care of cleanliness apart from them. Most of these people are cleaning it, but they are not getting proper help from the government.”

According to his account, the introduction of the Namaste scheme, which is specifically designed for waste pickers, represents an important step toward recognising sanitation workers at the national level, as it aims to provide social security and formal acknowledgement of their role in urban cleanliness. “It's the first government scheme for that.” However, he stresses that the lived reality on the ground remains far more precarious, particularly for those working inside the Ghazipur landfill without formal registration, safety equipment, or consistent institutional protection. He describes a fragmented system in which waste pickers operate under different conditions, with some collecting waste from households and others working directly within the landfill environment, often under unsafe and informal arrangements. For him, the central issue remains the lack of effective rights-based implementation, despite the increasing visibility of waste management in policy discourse.

There is a difference in payments. Women are mostly working in segregation, while men are more often involved in loading activities. Women earn around 300 to 500 rupees per day, while men earn approximately 700 to 800 rupees per day. However, income also depends on the quantity of waste collected, as payments are linked to material value rather than fixed wages. As explained, it is ultimately a market-based system: for example, if iron is sold at 30 rupees per kilogram, the price remains the same regardless of gender. Both men and women go to the landfill, not only during the night but also during the day. Income can also be affected during heatwaves, when many workers choose not to go due to extreme conditions.

When asked what the government could do to improve the livelihoods of waste pickers in Ghazipur, particularly through schemes such as Namaste, he returns to a fundamental distinction between two groups of workers: those who collect waste from households and those who depend directly on the landfill itself. He explains that many of those working on the landfill operate during the day or night without protective equipment and often without formal permission, collecting and sorting waste before selling it through informal networks. In his words, in Ghazipur, it remains almost entirely an informal system, lacking help from the government. “This is the game here, and the reality,” he states.

Around 1,000 waste pickers reportedly access the Ghazipur landfill at night for waste picking, reflecting the scale of economic dependency on the site. This activity is closely linked to surrounding informal settlements, where residents continue to face severe infrastructural deprivation, including limited access to sanitation, drinking water, and sewage systems. In one such settlement, shared toilets serve approximately 3,000 people across 550 households, while water is delivered only intermittently through mobile supply vans.

The Ghazipur landfill exposes how urban waste systems rely on the largely invisible labour of informal workers who remain excluded from formal protection and recognition. Their testimonies show that waste picking is not temporary work, but a long-term survival system shaped by family dependence and economic necessity.

While initiatives aim to formally include waste pickers within India's sanitation framework, a significant gap remains between policy and lived reality. Many workers continue to operate without registration, safety equipment, or stable institutional support. Ghazipur also reflects broader patterns of urban inequality, where environmental risks and infrastructural deprivation are concentrated in already marginalised communities. In this sense, the landfill is not only a site of waste disposal, but also a space where labour, survival, and exclusion intersect.

References

1: Global Rights and Environmental Coalition. (2025). India launches NAMASTE scheme to recognize and support waste pickers. https://globalrec.org/2025/04/02/india-launches-namaste-scheme-to-recognize-and-support-waste-pickers/

2: Bandyopadhyay, O. (2025). India's waste pickers: indispensable but invisible. British Safety Council. https://www.britsafe.in/safety-management-news/2025/india-s-waste-pickers-indispensable-but-invisible

3: Times of India. (2025). All landfill workers to get Rs 5,000 each before Diwali: Khattar. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/all-landfill-workers-to-get-rs-5000-each-before-diwali-khattar/articleshow/123953394.cms

4: Singh, S. (2025). Beyond rankings: What truly makes a city clean. Down To Earth. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/waste/beyond-rankings-what-truly-makes-a-city-clean

5: India Today. (2015). Ghazipur landfill site in Delhi is a ticking garbage bomb. https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/ghazipur-landfill-site-in-delhi-is-a-ticking-garbage-bomb-279145-2015-12-27

6: India Environment Portal. (2025, March 29). Report by Court Commissioner on Ghazipur landfill and waste-to-energy plant at the landfill. https://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/in-court/report-by-court-commissioner-on-ghazipur-landfill-and-waste-to-energy-plant-at-the-landfill-29032025/

7: Indian Express. (2024, April 22). Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai seeks detailed report on Ghazipur landfill fire. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-minister-gopal-rai-seeks-detailed-report-on-ghazipur-landfill-fire-9284431/

8: The New Indian Express. (2025, November 5). Ghazipur landfill site to be fully cleared by 2027, MCD to set up 4 processing facilities: Panel chief. https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/delhi/2025/Nov/05/ghazipur-landfill-site-to-be-fully-cleared-by-2027-mcd-to-set-up-4-processing-facilities-panel-chief

9: The Indian Express. (2019). Ghazipur landfill: Delhi's mountain of waste continues to grow. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-has-a-burning-problem-three-garbage-mountains-ghazipur-bhalswa-and-okhla-landfills-7900065/

10: Kuchay, B. (2018, September 10). Ghazipur landfill: Despair over Delhi's deadly rubbish dump. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/9/10/ghazipur-landfill-despair-over-delhis-deadly-rubbish-dump

11: Thilak, N. (2012, May 13). Waste pickers of Ghazipur. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/waste-pickers-of-ghazipur/