The Kashmir Valley was engulfed by mass protests after 22-year-old Burhan Muzaffar Wani was killed in clashes with Indian security forces in July. Wani was a commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, one of several separatist groups demanding self-determination and fighting some 700,000 Indian soldiers deployed throughout Jammu and Kashmir.
More than 300,000 people attended Wani’s funeral in Tral in the Pulwama district. The Indian government, led by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), imposed a media blackout and curfew for 53 days to match the scale of protests from the countryside to the cities. Days after Wani's death, some 35 people were reportedly shot dead.
“The military occupation in Kashmir is spatially organised and underpinned fundamentally by a logic of ordered disorder: constricting political expression and inflicting doses of violence on people on a regular basis”, Kashmiri activist and City University of New York PhD candidate Mohamad Junaid told Red Flag.
“[India] has made violence an endemic reality … Instead of seeing Kashmir as a question of political justice, they see it as a law and order issue. This is the main reason people have taken to [the] streets. They are left with really no choice, as India has launched a full scale assault on the population.”
On 8 October, a 13-year-old boy from Srinagar reportedly died from injuries sustained in clashes with Indian security forces, taking the death toll to 91. In the last three months, more than 7,000 civilians have been injured. Indian security forces have used pellet gun cartridges more than 2,000 times to quash protests, with many protesters subsequently blinded, according to Al Jazeera.
“The series of demonstrations [in Jammu and Kashmir] ... was less about Burhan Wani and more about killings of numerous young Kashmiri youths”, Akbar Chawdhary, an All India Student Association activist and PhD candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), told Red Flag. “We stand in solidarity with youth fighting on the streets and braving the pellets. It’s high time to recognise this as a political problem demanding a political solution, which in our opinion is the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people.”
This is the worst repression since 2010, when 112 civilians were killed by Indian security forces and Jammu and Kashmir police firing live ammunition at youths calling for total demilitarisation of the region.
A contested history
In August 1947, following the end of British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent, partition was enacted: India for Hindus, and an East and West Pakistan for Muslims. More than 1 million people were killed as a result of communal violence, internal displacement and mass migration.
Kashmir was an independent princely state ruled by autocratic Hindu maharajah Hari Singh. Its sovereignty was premised on loyalty to the British Empire. Singh sought to remain independent until October 1947, when armed tribesmen from the Kashmiri western districts and North-West Frontier Province of West Pakistan raided parts of Kashmir with West Pakistani military backing.
With support from the National Conference, the largest secular progressive political party in Kashmir, Singh signed the Instrument of Accession and surrendered control to India in exchange for military aid and ground troops.
Since 1948, Kashmir has been embroiled in the Indo-Pakistan wars of 1947, 1965 and 1999. For Pakistan, a claim to Kashmir lends legitimacy and continuity to the theory that, following partition, Indian Muslims needed a state of their own. Indian control of Jammu and Kashmir means that it controls a water supply to Pakistan, the world’s most water-stressed nation. Control of the region also lends legitimacy to the claim that India is “the world’s largest democracy”, as the Indian ambassador to the UN, Ajit Kumar, put it to Al Jazeera.
India has rejected holding a UN Security Council plebiscite for Kashmiris to decide whether to join India or Pakistan, or to be an independent state. Pakistan has supported a plebiscite but has never supported the possibility of an independent Kashmir. An estimated two-thirds of people in Jammu and Kashmir want independence. 
Political cartoonist and JNU research scholar V. Arun Kumar told Red Flag that Kashmir is “the Palestine of South Asia”. India has bought arms from Israel since the 1960s and is one of the Zionist state’s biggest clients, spending some US$10 billion over the past decade. Indian police have also been receiving training in Israel for “anti-terror” operations. Modi will visit Israel in 2017 to mark the 25th anniversary of full diplomatic relations.
In 2008, non-violent protests were sparked after the Indian government granted land near an ecologically sensitive region in Jammu and Kashmir to a Hindu religious trust that wanted to erect permanent facilities for tens of thousands of pilgrims visiting for two months every year.
Modi’s BJP also advocates population transfers to push Kashmir’s majority Muslim population into Pakistan. It also wants to develop sainik [army] colonies, establish separate cities for Kashmiri Hindus and get rid of legal hurdles that prevent Indians and Indian industrialists from purchasing land in the region.
Two civilians were killed after a curfew was imposed during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha last month. Kashmiri resident Amir told Al Jazeera, “Today India has broken all its records, but we want to tell them that no matter how you oppress us, we will not accept defeat. We will achieve freedom”.

Rutaban Yameen

The siege of Kashmir and its struggle for self-determination

The Australian government is negotiating a deal with the Solomon Islands to give the Australian Federal Police (AFP) a permanent presence in its capital city, Honiara, under the umbrella of the Australian high commission. 
The Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) will end in June 2017, after mobilising AFP and police and military personnel from Pacific countries as part of the Participating Police Force (PPF). 
Operating for more than 13 years, RAMSI was ostensibly deployed as a “peacekeeping” mission. In reality, it was an act of neo-colonialism and part of the broader pattern of Australian imperialist intervention into Pacific island nations. As Diane Fieldes wrote in Socialist Alternative magazine in 2006:
“RAMSI began in July 2003 with the arrival of 2,500 police and troops, mostly from Australia. The RAMSI occupation has also taken over all the key posts in the prisons, courts, finance and other key government departments …
“According to Solomon Islands Anglican bishop Terry Brown, the ‘fixing’ has meant more violence, poverty, unemployment and corruption, with millions spent on the Australians who lord it over the country. He described RAMSI as ‘more and more like an occupying army’.”
A 2014 Lowy Institute report calculated that the mission cost Australia $2.6 billion. On 22 July, minister for international development and the Pacific Concetta Fierravanti-Wells told the Australian-Solomon Islands Business Forum in Brisbane: “While RAMSI might be leaving Solomon Islands next year, Australia is not going anywhere”.
The deal will also include “a mechanism that would allow Solomon Islands to seek emergency operational assistance from Australia, if an emergency arose in the future”, according to the minister. By “emergency”, you can include any situation in which the population seeks to install a government hostile to Australian imperialism. 
Police commissioner Frank Prendergast told Solomon Star News, “What is likely to happen is that there will be some forms of continued Police Development Missions in the Solomons which will align with the type of ... missions you see in many countries around the world”. 
Prendergast was national manager of AFP’s International Deployment Group, which managed deployments to countries including Afghanistan, Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
The former governor general of the Solomon Islands, Nathaniel Waena, criticised the negotiations, saying: “The arrangement might undermine the sovereignty of this country”.

Australia to get permanent police presence in Solomon Islands

By 2030, nearly 70 million children under the age of five will have died from preventable causes unless serious steps are taken to narrow the gap between rich and poor, UNICEF’s annual State of the World’s Children report predicts. Up to 167 million children will be living in poverty. More than half the people in low and middle income countries already live on less than US$5 a day.
Nowhere is the situation grimmer than in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2030, nine children out of every 10 children living in poverty will be found here.
Poverty is more than a lack of money, especially when compounded by conflict. Children lack food, health care, sanitation and clean drinking water. There will be 60 million primary school-aged children not studying by 2030.
The problem is not limited to Africa and the Middle East. Across the EU, one child in five lives in poverty. In 2014, the Australian Council of Social Service found that 17.7 percent of all children in Australia were living in poverty.
World governments signed an ambitious blueprint last year to end global inequality. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that the international community would “leave no-one behind”. He added, “The new agenda is a promise by leaders to all people everywhere. It is a universal, integrated and transformative vision for a better world … for people, to end poverty in all its forms”.
In the same year, key targets of the millennium development goals expired unmet.
The lead author of the report, Kevin Watkins, told the Guardian that the findings are “another example of where the gap between the rhetoric of leaving no one behind, and the reality of what … governments do is very, very stark.
“The truth is that governments have signed up to these commitments on leaving no one behind with absolutely no intention, for the most part, of doing anything”, he said.

Poverty blights the lives of children

Withering hopes, a report by People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, has detailed ongoing human rights violations against Tamil civilians in the north-east of Sri Lanka, more than a year after the former secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), Maithripala Sirisena, assumed the presidency and ousted Mahinda Rajapaksa from power in January 2015.
The SLFP under Rajapaksa brutally crushed the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, ending the 26-year civil war on 18 May 2009. More than 40,000 Tamils were killed in the final months of the war, and more than a million were displaced.
Since Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, Tamils have suffered systematic discrimination under the Sinhala Buddhist state.
“The continued atrocities are produced by [the] specific arrangement of political power … connected to the unitary Sri Lankan state apparatus, and the political designs of the Sinhala ruling elites in Colombo”, Tamil Diaspora Youth Network member Athithan Jayapalan told Red Flag.
After increasingly authoritarian and Sinhala ultra-nationalist rule under Rajapaksa, Sirisena’s victory raised hopes for change as he promised “transitional justice”.
Voter turnout for the 2015 elections reached 81.5 percent, a record high according to the Election Commission of Sri Lanka. Tamils voted overwhelmingly for the Tamil National Alliance, which endorsed Sirisena for president.
The elections brought to power a coalition including Sirisena and Rajapaksa loyalists of the SLFP and the right wing United National Party led by prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Overt surveillance by security forces decreased in Tamil-dominated areas. But change was limited.
“The anti-terrorist mechanism [under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1978] that was so ferocious under Rajapaksa is still there”, Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka specialist at the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times. “People can complain more freely but the apparatus that watches them closely and harasses people remains.”
Last year, Tamils demanded the release of political prisoners, information on disappeared persons and the return of land forcibly appropriated by the military. Despite government bans, people turned out for the largest and most widespread commemorations of Tamil war dead since the civil war ended.
In October, the Sirisena government co-sponsored resolution 30/1 for the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, proposing a South Africa-style reconciliation commission to investigate war crimes and the adoption of a new constitution to establish a constituent assembly.
Foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera said that reform “may not be as fast as some may want it to be”, but the president and prime minister had “the political will and the courage of their convictions to ensure that we take the country forward”.
Addressing Sri Lankans on Independence Day this year, Sirisena announced that the national unity government would “safeguard the dignity of the country, the people and the soldiers … [and] get international recognition for our military”.
That month, former field marshal Sarath Fonseka was appointed to the cabinet. His forces were implicated in the shelling of civilians and hospitals, sexual violence and summary execution of war prisoners in the final months of the civil war.
This year’s defence expenditures are expected to exceed 2014’s by more than LKR20 billion (A$187 million). Since the end of the civil war, the north-east has been under occupation, and Sri Lanka’s 300,000-strong military has increased its involvement in civilian life, including education, property development and the construction of infrastructure.
“The government will not demilitarise our homeland because they … [want to] forcibly assimilate us into their idea of a Sri Lankan identity”, a 45-year-old Tamil woman from Batticaloa told People for Equality and Relief in Lanka.
The unitary Sri Lankan state and entrenched Sinhala Buddhist nationalism inherent in its policies are rationalised as a necessary defence against the existential threat posed by the Tamil people’s collective identity.
As Jayapalan put it to Red Flag: “How can abuses cease, and Tamils live democratically in liberty, self-determination and with justice, when the very structures of oppression persist?”

Human rights violations continue against Sri Lankan Tamils

Bangladesh Student Federation activist Jaheen Faruque Amin was one of thousands of volunteers who sorted through wreckage looking for survivors and bodies after the collapse of Rana Plaza on 24 April 2013.
“What else can I say? I have seen films on Auschwitz, and Rana Plaza was our Auschwitz … Injustice is still there for garments workers”, he tells Red Flag.
Located in Savar Upazila, one hour north-west of the capital, Dhaka, Rana Plaza was an eight-storey building containing five ready-made garments (RMG) factories and constructed on swampy ground.
Its owner, Sohel Rana, had fled and was arrested four days after the collapse. A leading member of the Jubo League youth wing of country’s ruling Awami League, Rana is now in prison awaiting trial.
On the day of the collapse, garment workers were forced to continue production despite visible cracks opening in the walls. As a result, 1,138 were killed and more than were 2,000 injured.
If their workers had more of a voice, they might have been able to resist managers who ordered them to work in the doomed building a day after large cracks appeared in it.
Monir Hossain, a firefighter, pulled survivors from beneath the pancaked floors. He told US news outlet NPR, “The memories of those who cried for help … still haunt me … I’ve never seen scenes of carnage like this. I saw workers dying one after another, as they were trapped under fallen pillars or debris. I was so overwhelmed I had to be hospitalised with mental problems”.
On the third anniversary of the disaster, thousands protested in Savar outside a state graveyard where hundreds of unidentified victims are buried. Protesters laid water hyacinth flowers, recited prayers, demanded convictions and called for improved safety standards at Bangladesh’s 4,500 RMG factories.
“Three years have passed and still we don’t see any justice. No one has been held to account for one of history’s worst man-made disasters”, union leader Abul Hossain told the demonstration.
Police arrested 41 officials who allegedly declared the structures safe. Twenty-four of them have since absconded and there have been no convictions.
Last year, authorities compensated 3,000 victims, including injured workers and families of the deceased. But many say it was insufficient. “I got 4,000 [T]aka … (A$67) a month for two years. But now I don’t have anything”, Swapna Bibi told NPR. She had been trapped in the rubble for four days after the collapse.
Across RMG-producing countries, factories scramble to offer the cheapest production prices at the expense of workers’ rights. It is a race to the bottom. And Bangladesh is “winning”. The average RMG worker there is paid US$68 per month compared to US$280 in China.
In 2013-14, the country’s RMG industry – the second largest in the world – was worth US$24.5 billion, accounted for more than 80 percent of export earnings and employed 4.2 million workers, the majority of whom are women.
There have been some small improvements. Spontaneous and coordinated strikes and protests in the aftermath of Rana Plaza led to a 76 percent increase to wages.
European retailers also signed the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which covers more than 1,600 factories subcontracted by retailers such as H&amp;M, Marks &amp; Spencer and Primark. Many US companies joined the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety.
Both agreements set out structural, electrical and fire-safety improvement plans.
Yet 70 percent of plans are behind schedule. “[The] Accord and Alliance are monitoring … buyers’ interests”, volunteer rescuer Moniruzzaman Masum told Red Flag.
In Rampura Thana (“city district”) in Dhaka, journalists reportedly found workers crammed elbow-to-elbow on the floor stitching tags of Western retailers into garments. The fire escape stairwell was blocked by a padlocked iron gate. The few fire extinguishers present had expired.
“Let’s remember that none of the factories operating in Rana Plaza had trade unions,” Human Rights Watch Asia director Phil Robertson recalls. “If their workers had more of a voice, they might have been able to resist managers who ordered them to work in the doomed building a day after large cracks appeared in it.”

Three years since Rana Plaza, garments workers’ demands still not met

Up to 30,000 people rallied on 22 and 23 March at the Australian embassy in Dili to protest Australia’s theft of billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenue from oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea.
The protests coincided with the anniversary of the Australian government’s 2002 decision to withdraw from the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allowed it to strong-arm newly independent East Timor out of its rightful majority share of the reserves.
Under the direction of then foreign minister Alexander Downer, the 2002 decision left East Timor with no legal avenues to negotiate its claim.
Timor-Leste is now demanding that a permanent boundary be set at the median line between the two countries in accordance with the UNCLOS.
Former Timorese president Xanana Gusmão called on protesters to “stand firm and raise one voice” to demand that Australia re-enter negotiations to redraw the maritime boundary.
Protesters shouted slogans including “Negotiations now” and “Hands off Timor oil”. Organisers of the Dili protests included student leaders and veterans of East Timor’s independence movement.
“This is possibly the biggest demonstration we’ve seen since we declared independence”, Movement Against the Occupation of the Timor Sea coordinator Juvinal Dias told AFP. Dias accused Australia of “illegally occupying Timor-Leste’s maritime territory”.
Last week’s protests constitute “a struggle increasingly seen by Timorese people as necessary to complete our independence from foreign domination”, Timor Sea Justice Campaign organiser Tomas Freitas told SBS.
Last month prime minister Malcolm Turnbull offered to hold “frank and open” discussions with Timor-Leste but declined to discuss specifically the maritime boundary issue.
After the 2002 Timor Sea Treaty handed Australia 82 percent of revenues from Greater Sunrise, another treaty, the Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS), was negotiated in 2006. The CMATS gave a partial concession to East Timor by allowing it 50 percent of the revenues. However, it completely excluded East Timor’s government and oil company from participation in the development and required Timor to postpone for 50 years all negotiations for a permanent settlement of the boundary.
It was later revealed by the ABC’s Lateline program in November last year that Canberra spied on Timor-Leste officials during the 2004 negotiations leading up to the ratification of the CMATS Treaty. Listening devices were planted in East Timor’s cabinet office under the guise of refurbishment. 
The Timor-Leste government now demands that the CMATS be torn up and Australia re-enter negotiations for a new maritime border.
In Melbourne hundreds of protesters gathered on 24 March outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as part of a series of protests in the region held in solidarity with the Dili demonstrations.

Timor-Leste fights Australia’s theft

The biggest nationwide student protests in a quarter of a century have erupted in India.
Organised by New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union (JNUSU), in conjunction with several other left wing student unions and organisations, protests have spread to 18 campuses including in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kerala, Chandigarh, Chennai, Uttar Pradesh, Kolkata and Odisha.
The protests are in response to the arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was charged with sedition for allegedly “raising anti-India slogans” at a 9 February campus rally commemorating the 2013 execution of Afzal Guru from Kashmir.
Guru was convicted for his alleged role in planning the 2001 attack on India’s parliament, despite an admission by the Supreme Court that the evidence was not sufficient to establish his involvement.
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is cranking up Hindu-nationalist rhetoric ahead of elections in India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh next year and the handing down of what is expected to be a corporate-friendly national budget on 29 February.
Supporting Kumar’s arrest, human resource development minister Smriti Irani told reporters: “The nation can never tolerate an insult to Mother India”. Last November, Irani engineered plans to scrap the non-NET fellowship (research scholarships for income-poor postgraduate students at central universities) – an attack that JNU students and staff resisted.
“I think it is more a case of actually criminalising dissent”, All India Students’ Association organiser Om Prasad told US news outlet NPR. “It’s a larger witch hunt for people who don’t agree with the agenda of the government.”
In January, a Dalit student activist at Hyderabad Central University, Rohith Vemula, committed suicide after he and his friends were hounded by the university administration and Hindu nationalists from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of BJP.
“After Rohith’s suicide, campuses across the country erupted in protest, and the BJP government was sent on a back foot”, Prasad told Red Flag.
Vemula was branded an “anti-national”, “casteist” and “extremist”. Government MPs demanded that the university administration take action against him. This was one of many incidents in an increasingly polarised atmosphere. As an academic at Jamia Millia Islamia, Gopinath Ravindran, told AFP TV, “My fellow colleagues and students are in a state of fear. So I think the university’s a space for dissent and that should be respected.”
By 14 February, 3,000 students and striking teachers were regularly attending protests at JNU, and 6,000 to 7,000 students, teachers, activists and intellectuals, in spite of police brutality, formed a 4 km human chain from the main gate of the JNU campus to the Chandrabhaga Hostel chanting, “Free our president Kanhaiya Kumar!”
Protesters across India were galvanised by nationally-televised scenes of Kumar being kicked and punched by Hindu nationalists, including lawyers, while he was escorted to a court hearing on 17 February. A visibly shaken NDTV news correspondent reported that several journalists and students were also beaten.
This culminated in what Prasad described as “a huge movement against the draconian crackdown. This movement is seeing an unprecedented participation by JNU students and teachers”.
On 18 February, 15,000 students, teachers, journalists, lawyers, artists and others marched through the streets of New Delhi. JNUSU vice president Shehla Rashid sarcastically posted on social media, “Arrest them all, they are all seditious”.
There have been regular sit-ins involving thousands at JNU and open-air lectures delivered by striking and supporting teachers and faculty members. Statements of solidarity have also come from MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and students at Oxford University, London School of Economics and Harvard University.
JNU is the first of 39 central universities ordered by the ministry of human resource development to “prominently and proudly” display the Indian national flag atop a 207-foot mast to instil “nationalism and pride” among students, according to Indian Express.
JNU and other academic institutions will continue to be a flashpoint for conflict and resistance in the coming period.

Biggest student demonstrations in years erupt in India

Australia, which promotes itself as the liberator of the tiny nation of Timor-Leste (East Timor), has been ripping the country off.
Both governments have ratified the temporary resource sharing treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS), which provides for the exploitation of oil and natural gas fields that mostly fall on the Timorese side of the halfway line between the two countries, short-changing Timor-Leste of tens of billions of dollars of government royalties and revenue.
In early October, Timor-Leste prime minister Rui Maria de Araujo announced that his country will seek arbitration.
In an address to the International Peace Institute on 1 October, former president and “father of the nation” Xanana Gusmão said that he was not “very optimistic about Australia”. Citing British politician Lord Palmerston’s maxim, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests”, Gusmão said, “This is the mindset of powerful nations when they deal with small countries like ours”.
One of the fields in question is Greater Sunrise, which is located just 100km from East Timor’s coastline. It is expected to generate approximately $40 billion in government revenues.
If maritime boundaries were established in accordance with international law, Greater Sunrise would lie entirely within East Timor’s jurisdiction.
But two months before Timor-Leste gained formal independence in 2002, Australia withdrew recognition of the maritime boundary jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal of the Laws of the Sea, leaving the fledgling nation with no legal avenues to assert its rights.
The new government signed the Timor Sea Treaty with Australia, which split revenues from Greater Sunrise 18 percent to 82 percent Australia’s way.
It wasn’t the first time an Australian government betrayed the people of Timor.
Indonesian military forces brutally invaded Timor-Leste in 1975. The quarter-century occupation was supported by Australia and resulted in more than 100,000 East Timorese deaths. In 1989, Australia and Indonesia carved up East Timor’s oil reserves, signing contracts with Shell, Phillips and other multinationals.
Opposition in Timor resulted in that government not ratifying the Timor Sea Treaty. The CMATS Treaty, signed in 2007, divides revenue 50-50 – still a rip-off.
As Gusmão noted, speaking with the Monthly’s Mark Aarons last year, the withdrawal of recognition of international jurisdiction was clearly a move to allow the pilfering of resources: “[F]or less than 2 percent of Australia’s maritime boundary, the unmarked part with us, the jurisdiction … is not recognised by Australia”.

How Australian imperialism rips off Timor-Leste

A student campaign has erupted in India over a decision to cut grants for research students.
Demonstrations spread from New Delhi to Gujarat, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Allahabad, Kolkata and Bihar as thousands of students protest the University Grants Commission (UGC) decision on 7 October to scrap the non-NET fellowship for research students entering central universities across India (NET stands for National Eligibility Test).
After negotiations with UGC officials on 21 October failed, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union led a march demanding the decision be overturned.
Protesters used hashtags #OccupyUGC and #SaveNonNetFellowship to build the campaign and to network with the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa. Students at the Film and Television Institute of India pledged their support after ending their own 140-day strike against the appointment of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member Gajendra Chauhan as president of the FTII Society. The Delhi University Teachers’ Association expressed “solidarity with all students … across the country protesting this UGC decision”.
The fellowship provides research scholarships worth 5,000 to 8,000 rupees per month for masters and PhD students enrolling at select institutions but who are ineligible for merit-based fellowships. The UGC claims that awarding both fellowships leads to “double standards” because students are receiving financial aid without merit. This glosses over a sinister agenda.
	The BJP-led government intends to commercialise its higher education sector ahead of the World Trade Organisation conference in Nairobi in December. It hopes to ratify the General Agreement on Trade in Services framework, which will allow unrestricted entry of foreign private investors and corporate partners, further corporatising education.
The All India Student Association (AISA) says that scrapping the scheme “is another step in [the] BJP-led central government’s series of moves to … restructure higher education to make it inaccessible”. Seventy percent of existing fellowships pay for accommodation. Monthly costs for students living off campus in Delhi, Mumbai or Hyderabad are double the value of the fellowship. Basic costs associated with research, such as books, equipment and fieldwork, are borne by families.
The scheme is currently a lifeline for 35,000 students across India. AISA Delhi branch secretary Ashutosh Kumar told Indian news website Scroll.in: “If this [scheme] is discontinued … [the] vast majority of the country’s students [cannot] engage in research”. Om Prasad, AISA organiser and PhD candidate in history at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Red Flag: “More working class children will get excluded from the education system”.
Students are demanding that the UGC increase the value of the fellowship and extend it to state universities.
On 2 November, students in Delhi, Allahabad, Pune, Varanasi, Patna and other cities rallied as part of a national protest day against the newly appointed Review Committee set up by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development.
Akbar Chawdhary, an AISA activist currently pursuing his PhD in philosophy at JNU, pointed out to Red Flag that the review is just cover for “the UGC’s decision to discontinue the fellowship for a large number of students”.
In Kolkata, students were lathi (baton)- charged, and 40 activists have since been detained.
On 23 and 27 October, police attacked thousands of protesters at UGC offices. Fifteen students were hospitalised. Thirty-three were detained, but students, teachers and intellectuals gathered at Kamla Market Police Station to pressure authorities to release them, which they did.
Despite police intimidation, occupations in front of the UGC offices involve hundreds and sometimes up to a thousand protesters at any time. They are electric, with chanting and singing, teach-ins and speeches. UGC chairman Ved Prakash’s no-show at Jamia Millia Islamia University’s foundation day celebrations vindicates the efforts of the #OccupyUGC student protesters, who had planned to disrupt his speech.
Their actions shine a light on what it takes to resist attacks on our universities.

Student occupations spread across India

Thousands of Bangladeshi student protesters were celebrating on the streets of Dhaka and on campuses nationwide after the Bangladeshi government announced that it would withdraw a value added tax (VAT) of 7.5 percent on tuition fees for private universities and medical and engineering colleges.
The peaceful NO VAT ON EDUCATION campaign took off in Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Rajshahi and other cities after the annual budget on 21 June introduced a VAT of 10 percent on private university education. This later was reduced to 7.5 percent but students vowed to continue protests until the VAT was scrapped entirely.
Similar attempts to impose a 4.5 percent VAT on private university education in 2010 failed after angry demonstrations in Dhaka. Jaheen Faruque Amin, coordinating member of the NO VAT ON EDUCATION campaign and a student at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh told Red Flag, “If private university students did not protest back then, it is quite predictable that VAT on education could have increased more than now”.
More than 80 of Bangladesh’s 122 universities are private. The VAT affected almost half a million students, according to the University Grants Committee estimates. Lower-middle class families are increasingly paying for private university admission due to shortages and admission ceilings in public education.
Finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith criticised the student campaign. Speaking to journalists in Sylhet, a city in the country’s north-east, he said: “I don’t support their movement. They can pay Tk 50,000 (A$885), Tk 30,000 (A$530) as tuition fees; why won’t they pay only 7.5 percent VAT?”
These comments added fuel to the fire in a nation with per capita GDP of about A$1,800.
On 9 September, several thousand protesters blocked roads in Dhaka. Hundreds of East West University students blocked Rampura Bridge, causing major traffic congestion. 
Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, injuring 35 people according to Dhaka’s Daily Star. This sparked immediate solidarity and participation by thousands of students from universities including North South University, University of Information Technology and Sciences and Dhaka Medical College. Roads in Dhanmondi and Mirpur were jammed. Students in Chittagong and Sylhet staged sit-ins, blocking roads.
On 13 September, the protesters blocked major thoroughfares of Dhaka to press for their demands. Within days, the capital had come to a standstill. The Bangladeshi government could not withstand the immense pressure that the protests had brought to bear.
Prime minister Sheikh Hasina in a private cabinet meeting reportedly directed finance minister Muhith to withdraw the VAT. Students will be reimbursed for payments made since 4 June, the day the VAT was imposed.
This victory is a reminder that when you fight, you can win.

The siege of Kashmir and its struggle for self-determination

Australia to get permanent police presence in Solomon Islands

Poverty blights the lives of children

Human rights violations continue against Sri Lankan Tamils

Three years since Rana Plaza, garments workers’ demands still not met

Timor-Leste fights Australia’s theft

Biggest student demonstrations in years erupt in India

How Australian imperialism rips off Timor-Leste

Student occupations spread across India

Bangladeshi government forced back by student protests

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us