Organising on the ground in India

Ravibha Jeyanathan is a revolutionary socialist and Tamil refugee based in Tamil Nadu, India. She spoke to Red Flag’s Alicia Griffiths.

India is having an election. It’s looking like Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will retain power. What are some of the issues in the election?

It does seem like Modi and his alliance are going to hold on. But there has been another formation, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, which has most of the regional parties aligned together as well as the Indian National Congress. So the fight is between these two groups. Unfortunately, both are capitalist, religious and casteist.

The condition of the Indian working class is getting worse—the unemployment rate is 7 percent, and in a country that doesn’t provide welfare support, it’s quite hard to survive that. Even in health, India stands at 134 [of 193 nations] in the UN’s Human Development Index, which is worse than some very underdeveloped countries. On the other hand, the capitalist class holds four times the wealth of 70 percent of the population. So there is an economic crisis and people are also facing oppression in the name of caste and religion.

People have been protesting, but this is swept aside, [with the opposition only willing] to call for removing fascism and bringing back the “good old days”. There is no sizeable revolutionary group to provide an alternative.

Something that’s been in the news lately is the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Can you tell us a little about that?

This bill has been in negotiation since 2019. The Modi government brought it in—it says that whoever seeks asylum here would be able to get citizenship only if they are Hindu or some types of Buddhist. It clearly rejects the Muslim minorities and therefore most of those who come from the neighbouring bordering countries—Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan.

The first people to fight back were the Muslim community because it was very clear that they’ve been targeted.

These attacks are not new to India. It’s been the story for 76 years, even before the BJP took power, and particularly around elections. The attacks are used to grab the attention and, they hope, the support of the Hindu majority voters.

Protests took place [in 2019] and people fought against it so it wasn’t implemented. But during this election, just a couple months before, they announced they are going to bring it back. They believe this kind of anti-Muslim propaganda will help them.

Before COVID-19, there were strong protests against the CAA. People were protesting for 100 days; mostly Muslim women led the protests. But when the announcement came during this electoral period, there was not much of a quarrel, unfortunately.

What are some of the other issues the left are fighting around?

There have been a lot of protests in the last decade, some historical protests since the BJP came into power in 2014.

In February, there was a huge protest, involving millions of workers. It was electoral-focussed, the main motto was to vote out Modi and bring back the old days. People gathered and showed resistance, but because of the union bureaucracy, the struggle was confined within electoral limits.

Even when people try to express that we’re not happy with the system—to say that we want free education, we want free schooling, we want a free healthcare system—the leading forces try to say just one single person is the problem, that is, it’s because of the Modi fascist regime. Unfortunately people can fall for that, and they think “Okay, so let’s replace [the BJP] with the other party”. When we criticise the opposition and argue we need an alternative, the leaders accuse us of helping the BJP in some way, or say “This isn’t the time to talk about this”. So even where struggle is happening, they stop it from going further.

What is the situation for Tamil refugees today in India?

Tamil refugees in India have a history of 40 years without any identity. Most came by boat to India, so they’re not even treated as refugees but illegal immigrants.

The Indian government has allowed refugees to come into the country and has put them into camps. There are around 107 refugee camps in India with 90,000 people in them.

From the 1980s, after Black July [a series of state-sponsored pogroms against Tamils in Sri Lanka in 1983], Tamil people started fleeing to India and gained some access to education and limited ability move outside the camps. But there is still systematic oppression.

As a refugee myself in those days, I could not move outside the camp. We were treated as people who could harm society. We’d have to sign out to leave the camp, and we had very minimal support. Then some refugees got the chance to go outside and work, most in blue-collar jobs, because whatever qualification we have was not recognised because we were refugees.

Still today, if refugees want to leave town to travel, they have to inform their authorities. Over 40 years, many refugees have accepted the situation and started living a life. On the other hand, the authorities have made two generations live without any identity—two generations denied their basic rights.

Slowly, during the CAA protests [in 2019], Tamil refugees came out and asked for their rights. The CAA gives rights to Hindu minorities, but we are a Hindu minority being oppressed by a Buddhist nation like Sri Lanka. So why can’t we get accepted as refugees? This was the initial question. People protested, people organised for the first time in the camps. They didn’t have rights to join the protests so they organised through other means. During the 100 day protests they continuously made a Zoom meeting, because they couldn’t go outside the camps. There were more than 100 Zoom meetings all over the world.

After these struggles the regional party DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) came into power. They saw people questioning things and so they found ways to introduce some reforms. They built a couple of hundred houses for the camps, and now some people think the DMK will help them.

But the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have been facing ongoing, structural violence for more than 40 years. The changes on offer do not go nearly far enough. The situation is just a nightmare.

Answers have been edited for length