South Asia Citizens Web

We, the undersigned members of civil society, were aghast to learn from newspaper reports that RK Raghavan, the head of the Special Investigative Team (SIT), is planning to file a closure report, and has no intention of filing charges against Narendra Modi and his co-conspirators for being allegedly complicit in the horrific massacre in Gujarat in 2002 which resulted in the death of over a thousand innocent citizens and extensive destruction of private and public property.

Most of its population are still poor. The row over British aid shows how many people confuse rapid growth with wealth. . . . aid – which is about poor people, not poor countries.

The Sangh Parivar is systematically following its “Indianisation reforms” in schools run by its affiliates.

Contrary to the dominant narrative that areas where Naxalites are strong are where the state has been absent, for the last 100-150 years, there has been a gradual expansion of the state in tribal areas regardless of whether the people want it or not. However, the state has been expanding in the wrong areas. You have an extension of the forest department, the bureaucracy, the patwari and the forest guard. But at the same time there is no state presence in the form of school teachers, healthcare workers and other services.

Anti-globalisation activists often called themselves anti-capitalist, and used the terms interchangeably. But if globalisation is capitalism by another name, why not simply call it capitalism? Substituting ‘globalisation’ for ‘capitalism’ implies that the real enemy is international capital: and that is dangerous. Opposition to global capital has been a defining feature of fascism since Hitler wrote, in Mein Kampf, ‘that the hardest battle would have to be fought not against hostile nations but against international capital’. At best, selective opposition to international capital propagates the illusion that capitalism can solve problems of poverty and unemployment so long as it remains national. At worst, it condones barbaric oppression and exploitation by indigenous capitalists, and encourages racism and xenophobia. Globalisation may be a phase of capitalism, but anti-globalisation can never be anti-capitalist, because genuine opposition to capitalism doesn’t distinguish between ‘national’ and ‘international’ capital, or support the former against the latter.