For many years, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, looked invincible. Yet a movement suddenly arose, labelled the ’cockroach’ movement, which forced him into a major retreat. Can you first explain what Modi’s politics represents?
Modi has often been characterised as a neo-fascist. He is of the same style as Trump, or Erdogan in Turkey or Boris Johnson or Bolsonaro in Brazil. He is malignantly narcissistic and seeks mass appeal by building a base among young men. Yet what is of concern is that he is closely connected to Mukesh Ambani, who is worth about $90 billion and is the managing director of Reliance Industries – the Elon Musk of India.
It is the same combination of tech bros or dude bros, where a financial oligarchy seeks to build a mass popular base.
To achieve this, Modi wants to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra, an exclusive, Hindu state. This can only be done by eliminating minority communities, particularly Muslims. And I mean wiping them out physically, discursively as well as cleansed out of memory.
Between 2014 and 2019, there was a 300% increase in hate crimes against minority communities, and the situation has escalated progressively. Modi was the Chief Minister in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where he allowed a pogrom against Muslims to take place. About 2,000 people were murdered according to official sources, with numbers anticipated to be much higher in real life.
Since becoming Prime Minister, Modi has set about colonising the media. All forms of oppositional discourse face erasure. Instead, Modi dominates through a Fox News-style channel, Republic Television, where Rupert Murdoch-like figures such as Arnab Goswami adopt a verbiage of melodramatic projection to override the glaring lack of reality testing. The saffron colonisation of the mainstream media channels aids in this process further.
His party, the BJP, contains a fascist core, the RSS, and they have set about rewriting Indian history to create an exclusive Hindu state. They have used control of the National Council of Educational Research and Training to rewrite the curriculum of school history books where they downplay British colonialism, contemporary capitalism, resistance movements and instead project an asymmetrical emphasis on a Vedic, glorious India that was bereft of outsiders.
There is often a deep pessimism on the Indian left because of the popularity of Modi, who won recent elections. How did the Cockroach movement suddenly emerge to inflict a defeat on him?
The term “cockroach” comes from a remark by the Chief Justice of India, who called unemployed youth “parasites and cockroaches”. A Gen Z-led movement took over the term and used it in a satirical way.
They demanded the sacking of the education minister over repeated exam leaks.
Yet behind this initial spark, there was a deep worry among youth about unemployment. In 2020, it hit a record rate of over 20%.
Young Indian people study hard for examinations such as the NEET, which offers entry to medical and dental schools. When they heard exams were cancelled due to leaks, they exploded in anger. The police then beat up protesters in Delhi, and mobile phones recorded them shouting to each other, ‘Hit the motherfuckers’. The method of policing resembles models that have recently been witnessed in states like Germany and Israel, or in that of ICE agents in the United States for that matter – brutal, authoritative, hypermasculine, annihilatory.
The movement only grew after this and eventually forced the ‘strongman’ Modi to sack his education minister.
How did the Indian Left respond to the movement?
The cockroach movement was not propelled by the left. It was a very broad anti-Modi movement with different ideas. Some of its supporters used semi-elitist language such as claiming the BJP is not qualified enough to hold power. But overall, it was a rebellion of youth.
It varied according to different states, but in Kolkata, the student organisations of the Communist Party of India (M) and the CPI (ML) were involved in the protests.
The left denounced Modi as anti-constitutional and his attempts to suppress political dissent. They advocate an India that frees itself from the legacy of colonialism.
There were huge strikes in India before the cockroach movement. On February 12th, millions of workers staged a general strike for better labour protections and universal social protection. Were there any parties suggesting a link-up between the cockroach movement and the workers?
The strikes are less visible because of the control over the Indian media. The Congress of Indian Trade Unions is closely linked to the CPI(M). There are local branches of trade unions and workers organisations such as the All India Hawkers Forum amongst countless others that have participated in Pro-Palestine, anti-imperialist, anti-saffronisation movements in the recent past. Even if rendered invisible to the naked eye, as Jim Moore argues in his poem ‘Against Empire’, momentum often builds up in the small things, small steps, small counter-arguments. “We are small, small beings”.
We are not so familiar with the left in India. Can you say something about its politics and the style of the parties?
The two main parties, the CPI (M) and CPI (ML) are dominated by Stalinist politics. The CPI(ML) tends to criticise the former as ‘revisionist’ and gives some support to the Naxalite movement, which has previously engaged in armed struggle. The indigenous communities involved in the Central and Central Eastern regions of India are still involved in spurious manifestations of armed struggles against the central government.
The CPI(M) has been in government in Bengal for 34 years, where they did some good things such as breaking up the semi-feudal ownership of land. But they are also highly bureaucratic and show disdain for spontaneous movements. There is also an internal misogynistic and patriarchal culture. Its leadership is often drawn from the Brahmin caste. They have also used ‘muscle men’ to attack left-wing opponents. However, there is a new generation of leaders who are rooted in materialist, grassroots-level movements.
There is also a new left which is heavily influenced by identity politics and has difficulty relating to the broad mass of workers.
Modi has suffered a major defeat but how do you think he can be removed in the future?
For the moment, the left is not seeking an alliance with the Indian National Congress, an umbrella body of liberal organisations which forms the United Progressive Alliance coalition that has historically dominated Indian politics before the BJP. Its leader, Rahul Gandhi is an interesting figure. One thing that is intriguing about Rahul Gandhi is that he attempts to engage in a “men beyond the machines” sort of politics – it does not, ultimately, not fit into the military-focused, heavily authoritarian and far right populist style that Modi has adopted. It is a stark difference at the end of the day. I am personally not opposed to such an alliance, as Modi needs to be removed through an electoral process.
I don’t know about that – surely, there is a need for an uprising of people power? If you look at the Philippines, a brutal dictator was overthrown by a popular uprising. A people power movement ended the twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
The difference is that India is a federal state with 28 states and about 19,000 mother tongues. There is no universal principle which unites them all into one great movement. So I am a firm believer in Gramsci’s “optimism of the will” model (also we must rescue the guy from the realm of far-right cooptation). If all else ceases to suffice, inclusive of pessimism of the intellect, then through optimism of the will, and will alone.
