We publish an unofficial translation of the article of A Nova Democracia that you can find here.
In a period shorter than five days, 45 people were killed in revenge massacres in the states of São Paulo (16 killed), Bahia (19 killed) and Rio de Janeiro (10 killed), committed by the military and civil police. It was also estimated that the number could be underrated, because there is still missing bodies because of the grade of terrorism against the masses done by the reactionary troops of the genocidal governors Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicanos/SP), Cláudio Castro (PL/JR) y Jerônimo Rodrigues (PT/BA).
In a interview to Agência Pública, the journalist Terine Husek Coelho showed that when a police officer dies in service, the possibility that a civilian dies the same day as retaliation is increased by 1,150%. Next day, it is increased a 350% and next week after the death, an 125%. This is what makes up the so-called revenge operations, that are a truly punitive operations. Publications celebrating the mass extermination were done by military in social media during “Operation Shield” of ROTA [translator’s note: first Shock Police Battalion of the Military Police of São Paulo] in the favelas of Guarujá, coast of SP, showing the level of sadism of those who are part of the repression forces of the old State. The State officials are also not free from as possibility: Tarcísio de Freitas stated in a press conference on 31st July that: “there was no excess, it was a professional actuation” and that he was “extremely satisfied” with the police action.
As we can see, it is a reactionary civil war. The logic of the operations itself are the logic of the reactionary war: the favela is fortified enemy territory that must be invaded by the force of guns; the local population is collaborator or enemies in disguise, to be neutralized by shocks of the terrorist order and interrogated under torture so they admit this condition; the goods of the local population are the enemy’s strategic reserve, they must be looted or destroyed. Is this the dynamic of operations or is it not?
This reactionary civil war promoted by the old State demonstrates, in fact, that for the popular masses, “democracy” does not exist. Democracy presupposes democratic rights and freedoms, such as the right to the presumption of innocence. Did the 16 dead in Guarujá have that right protected? Democracy presupposes the right to come and go: did the residents of Complexo da Penha have this right respected when police troops curtailed social life with their war operation?
Any defense of this old democracy, made by opportunism, is nothing more than a petite-bourgeois illusion or a rotten defense of this old order. So, the reality of the massacres proves to be the continuity of what was applied during the military regime, also because who defines the military doctrine of the Military Police is the Army command, through its body called “Inspetoria Geral das PMs”. The same practices, the same reactionary police, serving the same interests. A brutal reality that the PT governments never changed, but on the contrary, strengthened. Let’s remember that it was Luiz Inácio who authorized, for the first time in the country’s history, that the Armed Forces be activated with the assumption of combating the so-called “crime” with the “Arcanjo” operation, with the invasion of Complexo do Alemão and Penha and then your occupation. Dilma did no different thing and, in 2014, signed the GLO [Translator’s note: Guarantee of the law and order. Police Operation of the Armed Forces to reestablish the normality of the “law” and “public order”] that allowed the military occupation of Maré. It was with the pelego-mor [Translator’s note: a trade union leader who is in the service of the bosses and the State] Luiz Inácio that the UPPs [Translator’s note: Pacifying Police Unit. Project in Rio de Janeiro to institute a communitarian police in the favelas to struggle against those who “control the territory”] began to be implemented in the Rio’s favelas in 2008, with aid and millionaire funds. UPPs, which were strategically conceived by the reactionary Army with its experience in Haiti.
Anyone who wants democracy – not that democracy of massacres, but a true popular democracy – must, in the first place, recognize that today, with or without Bolsonarism, we live in a true dictatorship for the popular masses, while democracy prevails only in small palaces. As long as this situation prevails, the entire base for the extreme right and coupism will be in place. And, faced with this, opportunism is silent and consents.
We publish the article of Counter Currents about the situation on India published here.
The news cycle this week has been taken up with the rapidly escalating violence in Haryana’s Gurugram, Mewat, and Nuh. This is occurring against the backdrop of months of violence in the state of Manipur, where the hill-dwelling Christian Kuki tribals are facing an onslaught by the dominant Hindu Meitei community of the plains. Ever since the BJP assumed power under the leadership of Modi in 2014, such instances of collective violence and terrorization of minorities (especially Muslims) has become commonplace in India. This comes as no surprise given the RSS-BJP’s ideology and the fact that it has been putting ‘fascism with Indian characteristics’ in practice for the past nine years that it has been in power at the Centre and various states.
Predictable reproduction of anti-Muslim violence
Haryana is hardly the first state to witness the mobilization of Hindus against Muslims. The saffron-clad mobs going about the streets in tandem with the online mobs have been a constant in public life on one pretext or the other. In context of Haryana, news has it that the violence was set off by a Hindu procession being pelted with stones, allegedly by Muslims. The animosity and violence were then aggravated by social media posts and talk of known lyncher, anti-Muslim bigot, and self-appointed cow vigilante Monu Manesar calling on his ‘followers’ to participate in further mobilizations that target Muslims.
In a systematic collusion to erase Muslim identity and visibility, Hindutva groups in Gurugram have previously campaigned against Muslims offering prayers in public while the administration has capitulated.
The administration’s response and actions in the current violence are all too predictable. Anti-establishment voices online claim that the police are ignoring violence and its incitement. Late-night attacks and looting of homes is being reported, along with arrests of Muslim youth. As expected, “law and order” became the excuse to shut down the internet (but not the right-wing TV channels and their ceaseless anti-Muslim tirades), making you wonder whether social media platforms and not the governments at the city and state level are responsible for maintaining order. One may reasonably believe that the true intent of these internet shutdowns is to prevent any communication and documentation of events that may go against the grain of the official narrative and the political interests of the forces orchestrating the violence.
The Hindutva right-wing is always on the lookout for ways to present Muslims as a threat to the Hindus and the ‘nation’ as a whole, which by virtue of having a common enemy are assumed to be interchangeable in their imagination. The Allegations of attacks by Muslims on Hindu ‘processions’ has a history that goes all the way back to the pre-Independence era and is meant to underscore the fear of Muslims as a threat to Hindus. More recently, this tactic of mobilizing Hindu mobs with hostile intent and then painting them as a religious procession was deployed in 2021 when Muslims and their homes and properties were targeted in the wake of Ram Navami ‘celebrations’ in as many as six states, and the same pattern played out in the state of Tripura that year. What inevitably follows in the destruction of Muslim homes, shops, and mosques, either by Hindutva mobs or more blatantly with the State itself razing their houses with bulldozers.
Victimizers as victims
A cynical ploy by the Bajrang Dal, VHP, and their political protectors is to falsify and invert the historical reality of Brahmanical oppression of oppressed castes, religious minorities, and women and claim instead that it is they who are oppressed. At present, Twitter is awash with posts claiming that these militant groups are the ‘first line of defence’ and calls for unconditional and “unapologetic” support for them. This is very clearly a pushback against a growing rejection of their lawless actions and the illegitimate pressure that they are able to exert on public life thanks to the hands that hold their reins.
This language of ‘Hindus under attack’ being in need of protection and defence is meant to reflexively justify the aims and methods of such groups. The reality, however, is that these militant groups function as the muscle of the Hindutva agenda while its ideologues present their unprovoked aggression against Muslims and minorities as desperate self-defence on behalf of an entire ‘community’. While they may cynically allege that the violence in Nuh, Mewat, and Gurugram is being perpetrated with Hindus as the target, in actuality it is they who instigate and initiate the violence in order to make possible the very spectacles which they use as an example of Hindu victimization.
These appeals to a sense of being constantly under threat by undesirable minorities are calculated to cement their own legitimacy and to allow them to stake claim as the sole representatives of ‘Hindu interests’.
The false category of ‘Hindu’
It must be emphasized that the word ‘Hindu’ is an imaginary category and a rhetorical stand-in to express the political goals of Brahmanism in a religious idiom. The first census of 1831 made it clear that numerical strength would be of great significance the new politics of the subcontinent, prompting the savarna (upper-caste) overlords of this supposed religion to consolidate the greatest possible headcount under the umbrella term of ‘Hindu’. Any attempts to destabilize this consolidation and expose ‘Hinduism’ as an opportunistic unification is met with fierce resistance.
The Brahmanical Hindutva forces know that this concocted Hindu identity is a cornerstone of their ploy to project their interests as the desires of the ‘majority’ and ‘the nation’. This explains why there has not been a Census since 2011: the politically strong OBCs have raised a demand for the enumeration of caste groups that cannot be easily shunted aside. This anxiety to ride atop the poorly-put-together Frankenstein monster of Hinduism is what causes Brahmanism such consternation at the imagined menace of Muslims and Christians going around converting people from their ‘original’ religion into theirs.
Conclusion
In the end, popular resistance under a common banner of socialism, Ambedkarism, and women’s leadership is the only effective counter to the Hindutva onslaught that is backed by nearly unlimited financial resources and muscle. An electoral opposition such as the recently consolidated “INDIA” has no ideological alternative and has only a limited utility.