Migrant domestic workers from Southeast Asia occupy a unique, but rather neglected, position in the city’s current struggle. Almost 400,000 migrant workers (more than the size of the general strike), mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, work for extremely low wages in Hong Kong. Most come to the city to seek better jobs, but almost 80% are in debt and beholden to the exploitative practices of recruitment agencies. According to a recent report, migrant workers contribute more than $12 million to Hong Kong’s economy. [1]

Many of these workers are supportive of the protests, and migrant unions, some of which are affiliated with the pro-democracy Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), have strongly encouraged their members to get out on the streets. [2] But various pressures limit their participation and protest demands have not directly addressed their material concerns. Some are compelled not to participate in fear of their work visas being revoked; the Philippines consulate has sent out notices discouraging migrant workers from participating in the protests. [3] Clarisse*, a Filipino migrant worker, says that many employers disapprove of their participation in the protests, and some have even prevented them from taking their legally mandated rest day. In addition, she points out that the areas where migrants usually congregate have become key sites for clashes between the police and the protestors.

One message threatened to attack Nepalis, Indians, and Pakistanis if they participate in the protests.

Fake government notices, and even death threats, have been anonymously circulating in migrant workers’ social media platforms like WeChat and Whatsapp, according to Fish Ip, the regional coordinator for International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF). One message specifically threatened to attack Nepalis, Indians, and Pakistanis if they participate in the protests, many of whom are not even domestic workers, showing how different racial minorities in Hong Kong are conflated and targeted. Reports of the Hong Kong police harassing and arresting a Filipino dancer on the eve of the general strike further exacerbated these fears. [4] Other threats were framed as retaliatory stemming from rumours that some ethnic minorities were involved in the attacks on protestors in Yuen Long. [5] Hope*, a Filipino who has worked in Hong Kong since 1996, fears that the extradition bill would open the way for policies that would further affect both migrants and locals alike. Above all, she worries that the right to unionise and freedom of assembly would be jeopardised. Hope was told by the Philippines consulate that the demonstrations are not a concern for domestic workers. But Clarisse rejects this stance, “We are living and working in Hong Kong, this is our second home and whatever happens we will be affected.”

There is widespread indifference to the plight of migrant workers in Hong Kong, their voices have largely been ignored by both the pro-Democracy movement and the government. In spite of this, interviews with migrant workers demonstrate the complex ways in which migrants do see Hong Kong as a home away from home. [6] And a recent report shows that migrant domestic workers enable more East Asian women (especially mothers) to participate in the workforce. In other words, migrants, despite their limited participation, already play a central role in the demonstrations: their work enables more families to be involved.

“Hong Kong’s woes are deeply tied to a globalised economy of exploitation, and the structural effects of colonisation in new forms.”

While the protests have afforded an opportunity for the general populace to renegotiate their understanding of the city’s structural issues, migrant workers rights have remained a blindspot. For example, the increasing distrust of policing is a new and critical step toward radicalisation. But the silence towards migrant workers’ conditions reveals a persistent weakness in the protestors’ demands: the inability to recognise that Hong Kong’s woes are deeply tied to a globalised economy of exploitation, and the structural effects of colonisation in new forms.

Sring Atin, a domestic worker and member of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Alliance (IMWA) who is generally supportive of the protests, says that the movement’s demands do not concretely address migrants’ issues. The fight against the new extradition policies, which she sees as the prime focus of the mobilisations, must “bring in workers’ demands to ensure quality and decent working conditions for the most marginalised communities.”

The myopia around this issue reveals the exclusionary, xenophobic sentiments that are often constitutive of localist ideologies. A sense of ethnonationalism tied to ‘Hong Kong identity’ has been inseparable from many localist groups such as Hong Kong Indigenous, who promote blatantly uncritical xenophobia against the Mainland Chinese as a whole. This exclusionary sentiment manifests more subtly and variously when it comes to migrant workers, whose issues are seen as auxiliary to Hong Kong’s struggles.

Class and race: the movement’s blind spots?

Hong Kong is wedged between a geopolitical struggle between China and the US. Wilfred Chan asks in Dissent what it would mean for the city to “reimagine an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian politics of survival from the perspective of this in-between place?” [7] The answer lies in the city’s working-class movements and will require imagining new coalitions. The potential for a transnational anti-capitalist politics is already here, in a city where migrants and locals rub shoulders on every other block contesting Hong Kong’s identity as a global financial hub.

However, ethnic divisions in the protest movement prevent a deeper understanding of the colonial heritage of the city’s labour economy and institutional structures. It is Southeast Asian women domestic laborers who bear many of the effects of Hong Kong’s incomplete process of decolonisation. The city has a long history of gender-specific exploitative labour practices: for example, during the colonial period, affluent families often relied on mui tsais, unpaid or underpaid Chinese female domestic labourers. [8]

Today, diasporic Southeast Asian women, pushed out of their countries because of factors like gender and economic inequality in their home countries, continue to do essential care work. Migration scholar Rhacel Parreñas describes this as the “international division of reproductive labour”. She writes in her book Servants of Globalization:

In both sending and receiving countries, most women have not achieved a gender-egalitarian division of household work; instead, they have used their race and/or class privilege to transfer their reproductive labor with responsibilities to less privileged women.

Despite the fact that migrants and transnational networks have shaped the city’s cultural identity, an uncritical and exclusionary idea of belonging continues to reinforce racial divides. A radical movement that truly can challenge the city’s deep injustices must go beyond demands for universal suffrage, and build links between different marginalised groups.

“To highlight migrant workers’ demands would not be a distraction from Chinese authoritarianism.”

To highlight migrant workers’ demands would not be a distraction from Chinese authoritarianism. On the contrary, it forces us to look at labour in all its complex dynamics – both within and beyond post-colonial Hong Kong. Why are wages so low for Southeast Asian women workers in Hong Kong, and even lower in their home countries? How are the governments of Hong Kong and China complicit or actively facilitating this network of oppression? How accessible are the protests to marginalised identities? These are the questions that the protestors must reckon with if they want liberation and democracy for all of Hong Kong.

Migrant unions and organisations have played an important in foregrounding these issues. But while they have had victories throughout the years, they have not been able to mobilise a mass movement in solidarity against neoliberal globalisation. Their demands to make the current protests more inclusive poses a challenge to the movement. As a recent petition by self-organised housewives in support of the protests suggests, domestic care labour is not only legitimate work, but the kind that establishes the conditions for widespread struggle.

Who is included in the “自己” (myself) of the protestors’ chant: “自己香港自己救” (We alone will save our own Hong Kong)? What happens to our activism and analysis when some of the “自己” include diasporic identities that are as local as they are transnational? These questions are not merely academic and speculative: they determine the concrete limits of Hong Kong’s struggle for liberation.

Combatting all kinds of oppression in Hong Kong under Chinese authoritarian capitalism must entail unpacking Han chauvinism, Hong Kong ethnonationalism, and other exclusionary ideologies. And to combat China’s colonial ambitions, we must look inward: freedom lies not only in the vanguard in the black masks, but also in the many who are absent from the front lines. We need to rethink who is included in the local, and how the local is tied to the transnational. For Hong Kong, a critical link to the global, grassroots fight against capital, are its migrant workers.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Source Open Democracy.

RM: What exactly is Feminism for the 99% — and why launch such a manifesto now?

NF: The manifesto is a short piece of writing that’s intended to be popular and accessible rather than academic. I’ve written it together with the Italian feminist Cinzia Arruzza, who lives in New York, and Tithi Bhattacharya, an Indian-British woman who teaches in the United States.

This is the first time since I was a ‘68er — an activist in the 1960s and 1970s — that I have written a piece of real agitational political writing. I am, after all, mainly a philosophy professor. But the times now are so severe, the crisis of politics so acute, that I really felt that I had to jump in and try and reach a broader audience. So, the manifesto attempts to articulate a new path for the feminist movement, which has been dominated for the last couple of decades by a liberal-corporate wing of feminism, as personified in the United States by Hillary Clinton.

That was the feminism of the professional-managerial class, of relatively privileged women — middle- or upper-middle-class women who are highly educated and mostly white — who are trying to get ahead in the worlds of business or the military or the media. Their project was to climb the corporate hierarchy, to be treated in the same way as the men of their own class, with the same pay and prestige.

This wasn’t a genuinely egalitarian feminism — it wasn’t a feminism with much to offer for the vast majority of women who are poor and working class, who don’t have those privileges, who are migrants, who are women of color, who are trans or non-cis women. And this feminism of the 1 percent or maybe, at best, the 10 percent, has really tarnished the name of feminism. It has associated our cause with elitism, with individualism, with corporate life. It’s given feminism a bad name, associating us with neoliberalism, with financialization, with globalization, with anti–working-class politics.

The three of us thought this was a good moment to jump in and try and create a short, accessible statement of a vision and of a project of a feminism that takes the situation of poor and working-class women as its starting point, and asks what we really need to do to improve women’s lives. Of course, the three of us aren’t alone, in this — there are other left-wing feminists who’ve been trying to develop an alternative.

This is, indeed, emerging in the huge marches and demonstrations around March 8 [International Women’s Day]: these protests have an anti-systemic character, for they protest austerity and the assault on social production. The movement to meet women’s needs can’t be focused only on women’s issues as traditionally defined, like abortion rights — though those are very important. It also has to think more broadly about the larger crisis of society and articulate policies and programs for the benefit of everyone. That’s why we call it a feminism for the 99 percent. That doesn’t just mean 99 percent of women but 99 percent of human beings on the planet.

RM: You mentioned March 8 and the feminist strikes that have been organized since 2017 in many countries, including here in Spain. Indeed, even beyond that, in Spain in recent years most labor protests have been waged by women, for instance domestic workers and nursing-home workers. So, are we facing a new wave within feminism? And to what phase of neoliberal capitalism does it respond?

NF: I do think it’s a new wave, or at least has the potential to become one, if it can make a split with this liberal corporate feminism. And I think it shows lots of signs of doing that.

Neoliberalism has engaged a fierce assault on what we call the sphere of social reproduction. That means all the activities and programs that support people and their reproduction: from birthing and raising children, elder care and the work that goes on inside the private household to things like public education, health care, transportation, retirement income, and housing. Neoliberalism has squeezed all of that. It says that women need to be working full-time in the paid workforce and at the same time that states need to cut spending on social programs as part of austerity and financialization.

So here we have both the withdrawal of public support in these areas, and the insistence that women put their time into producing profits for capital. That means a real crisis of care and of social reproduction. This sphere is where — as you said — the most militant strikes and fightbacks are.

In the crisis of the 1930s, the center of militant revolt was industrial labor — the forming of unions, the struggle for labor rights, and so on. Today the situation is different, partly because of deindustrialization and the relocation of manufacturing to the Global South. Now social reproduction is at the center.

You mentioned some important strikes led by women; I’d add that in the United States we have had a major wave of teachers’ strikes. It’s extraordinary: teachers are paid so little that many of them have to take second jobs working at Walmart in the evening in order to have enough to live on for themselves and their families. But these teachers’ strikes were not only for higher wages — they were also for increased funding for education, to make the schools better. So, they’ve gotten a tremendous amount of support.

That’s an example of the sphere of social reproduction as a major site of struggle. And I understand that the huge March 8 marches and strikes in Spain were also protests against the cutting of social spending in all of these areas. Today struggles over social reproduction are at the cutting edge of left-wing, anti-systemic, anticapitalist struggle, and women are at the forefront. This fact needs to be at the center of a new way of thinking about what feminist politics is.

RM:How would you say this struggle over social reproduction interacts with class struggle and with antiracist and LGBTQ movements?

NF: First of all, I think we need to rethink what we mean by class struggle. Again, our image of the class struggle is still rooted in the 1930s — the white, male industrial worker with a union. But I would say that these struggles over social reproduction are also class struggles. For you can’t have production and industrial work if you don’t have somebody doing the work of producing and replenishing the workers and caring for the next generation that will replace them. Social reproduction is essential to capitalist production.

The work that produces those people and forms of sociality is every bit as much work as the work that goes on in factories. What makes class is not just the relationship of work in the factory but also the relations of social reproduction that produce the workers. So, this is all part of class struggle.

Our idea of class struggle in the past was too narrow. I don’t think that feminism for the 99 percent is an alternative to class struggle. It’s another front in the class struggle, so it should be allied with more familiar labor movements as well as the other things you mentioned — antiracist struggles, the struggle for migrant rights, and the struggle for LGBTQ rights.

This also matters because of the new class and racial division among women. The educated, upper-middle-class women that beat discrimination and rise to the top in corporations are working sixty hours a week in very demanding jobs. They’re hiring women of color, often migrant women, to pick up the slack of care work, childcare, cleaning their houses, cooking for their children, caring in nursing homes for their parents, and so on. These liberal-feminist women are thus leaning on the labor of racialized women. These latter are vulnerable: they don’t have labor rights, they are paid very little, and they are vulnerable to assault and abuse.

All of this class-race dimension within feminism needs to be put front and center. Feminism for the 99 percent has to be an antiracist movement. It has to take the situation of poor, working-class, and racialized women — the majority of women — and put their needs at the front, not the needs of corporate-climbers who want to crack the glass ceiling.

Similarly, within the LGBTQ movement there is a liberal wing which has been hegemonic and then a broader mass of people whose needs and issues have been marginalized. So, I think there’s a comparable struggle going on within LGBTQ movements over whose issues are going to be front and center. I’d like to see our feminism for the 99 percent speak for trans, queer, and lesbian women, and I’d like to see an LGBTQ movement for the 99 percent, which would be its natural ally.

RM: It’s clear that the struggle over social reproduction could build a bloc against neoliberalism and capitalism. But what about patriarchal relationships — can we fight male violence within the terms of the fight over reproduction? Can we use this front to change our relationships with other women and, above all, with men?

NF: Let me start by mentioning the #MeToo movement. The public image of this movement is focused on Hollywood, highly paid actresses, entertainers, the media, and so on. But the broad mass of much less privileged women is even more vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment at work. I’m talking about agricultural workers, some of whom don’t even have papers, and whose lack of power and resources makes them very vulnerable to the demands of bosses and foremen. The same is true of hotel workers — for example, the case of Dominque Strauss-Kahn — or workers who clean offices. People who work in private homes as domestic workers are notoriously subject to rape and sexual assault.

The #MeToo movement, if you think about it more broadly, is a labor struggle. It’s a struggle for a safe workplace where you are not subject to abuse. That the media focuses only on the top tier is unfortunate, for it makes it look like it’s not a class struggle. But the social reproduction issue also has to do, at bottom, with changing the relations between production and reproduction and, therefore, changing the balance of power within households.

Social reproduction should not be gendered as women’s work only. It’s important work in society, some aspects of which are very pleasurable and creative. Men should have access to that and should feel responsibility to do their share and pull their full weight. This, too, is about changing dynamics within households. And of course, a feminism for the 99 percent is against all violence against women, against trans people, against non-cis people, against racialized people, and so on.

Patriarchy is a word, I should say, that I don’t myself like to use, for it suggests an image of power that is dyadic — you have a master and then a servant who is their subject. Some of that still exists, there is no question. But the really central forms of power in our society exist in a more impersonal and structural way, constraining the options of working-class and poor people.

So, I think it’s important to have a different image of power. It works through the banks and the IMF, through the organization of finance and industry, and through the construction of gendered and racialized labor markets. This is what determines who has access to resources, who can vindicate their claims and function as equals even within families and personal relationships.

RM:When you talk about social justice you distinguish among three levels. There is distribution (the economy) but also recognition (culture) and representation (politics). To what extent are these three levels present in the new cycle of feminism?

NF: I think we’re concerned with all these things, and they’re sort of interrelated. You can’t change the economic sphere and distributive relations if you don’t change these other things, too.

What counts as a political issue is often defined in terms of what counts as an economic issue. The forces of capital insist that issues concerning the workplace should be decided by the markets, by the bosses, that these are not issues for democratic, political, collective self-determination. There’s a line between what the private owners of capital decide and what we as democratic majorities decide.

A lot of this has to do with questions of culture — with the languages available to us to understand our situation. Do we have concepts like sexual harassment and date-rape, the terminology with which to talk about what the wrongs in society are, to talk about our experience and to make our claims?

Feminism has done a great deal to create new language and, in that sense, to change culture, to change people’s understanding of what they are entitled to and don’t have to put up with. So, it’s broadened the sphere of political discourse and what is potentially a question for democratic decision-making and not the private decision for the family or the firm.

At present, we’ve made more progress at this cultural level than we have at the level of institutional change and transformation, both in the political sphere and in the economic sphere. But it’s always about the interrelations among these three things.

RM:You’ve pointed out that neoliberalism has appropriated some of the critiques developed and demands raised by second-wave feminism and other 1970s movements, incorporating them to its own benefit. Could this happen again with the emerging forms of feminism — and what can we do to avoid this?

NF: Liberal feminism along with liberal antiracism and liberal LGBTQ movements and what has been called “green capitalism” were hegemonized — incorporated into — a hegemonic ruling bloc which in the United States took the form of what I call “progressive neoliberalism.”

These movements lent their charisma, their ideology, to give these horrible policies — financialization, the precarization of work, and the driving down of wages — the veneer of being pro-gay, pro-women, and so on. That definitely happened, and this is why it is so important that the new wave of feminism should break with that kind of feminism and chart a new path.

It’s always possible to be hegemonized and recuperated by more powerful forces whose ultimate aims are deeply at odds with one’s own. It is always important for emancipatory and left-wing movement to be wary of this.

Today, we are told that we really have only two options — either right-wing authoritarian populisms, which are racist and xenophobic, or else go back to our liberal protectors and progressive neoliberalism. But this is a false choice — we need to refuse both options.

This is a moment of huge crisis in which we have the chance to chart a different path, building a truly anti-systemic movement for the 99 percent in which feminism for the 99 percent is one current along with labor movements, environmentalism for the 99 percent, the fight for migrant rights for the 99 percent, and so on.

RM: You have written that the nation state (in what you call the Westphalian-Keynesian framework) has entered into crisis with neoliberalism and that its borders are now more diffuse. You call this the “deframing” policy. But what is the role of the nation state today. Can we say that it has disappeared?

NF: No, it hasn’t disappeared. Historically the main force that has provided any level of protection and security to working people from capital has been the nation state. And it’s still the case that the nation state remains the principal addressee of claims. When we want protection, when we want social support, who do we ask? We demand that our government respond to us.

This is understandable when politics is still largely organized on a national basis, that national election campaigns are the principal activities for national-level politics. But it remains the case that this is ultimately inadequate.

We can see this when we look at migration, which is a huge point of conflict, indeed a crisis. We have people from all over the world who don’t have states that can protect them or give them anything like what we in the wealthy countries are asking our states to give us. They are living in failed states, in refugee camps, they are forced to leave by political violence, by religious persecution, by the fact that the United States has invaded and destroyed their countries, by climate crisis, by many features of the global crisis that we live in.

When these people come, the right-wing populist movements double down on their politics of nationalism and exclusion. What’s Trump’s slogan? “Make America Great Again” — like it was before all these dark people started showing up and ruining our country. That’s the ideology of this populist movement. So, we need to think in a transnational and global way about how we can ensure social rights for all people in the world. They need those rights, so that they don’t have to get into a boat and risk their lives just to find a decent place to live, somewhere halfway around the planet.

First published in Viento Sur, translated into English by Jacobin.

From International Viewpoint online

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6210

Solidarity Ecosocialist Working Group

As ecosocialists we see capitalism’s demand for continuous growth and the exploitation of our natural resources creates agricultural and industrial models rooted in profit for the 1%. In destroying the balance that must exist on planet Earth, this economic system also fails to meet the material and social needs of the vast majority. As a result, growing inequality and changing weather conditions have already led to more than 70 million refugees, with more to come.

Youth are demanding an end to subsidizing destructive industries: stopping the construction of pipelines, halting resource extraction on indigenous lands, decommissioning coal, gas and nuclear facilities and building a free and public mass transportation system to replace the individual car. We stand with them in requiring that investors and polluters who bankrolled and built this chaos pay for the transition, not workers and their communities. They recognize that pollution, like other aspects of capitalism, impacts people of color most severely. It is the most vulnerable who have been on the front line.

We need a “just transition,” one that retools and repurposes manufacturing, replaces the inadequate system of food production and builds communities where people have the right to good, healthy and meaningful work. In short, youth are demanding a future for themselves and for the planet!

We believe it is possible for humanity to break with the destructive logic of the capitalist system. The break will come as millions join in the fight to stop fossil fuel emissions and the pollution of land, water and air. September 20 and the actions over the following week represent a new stage in the fight to end the exploitation and inequality capitalism breeds.

Build the Climate Strike

Solidarity National Committee Motion

We encourage members to help build the Friday, September 20 international strike against climate change called by Greta Thunberg, the high school Swedish student calling for students to strike every Friday for climate justice. (See Global Climate Strike.)

The action will take many different forms around the world: striking students, targeting polluters, organizing direct actions, marching in the streets and maybe even some worker strikes. We note that there is a particular role for teachers to support their students.

September 20 is the kickoff of a week of activities that will go through September 27. Environmental justice organizations, 350.org, DSA, Rising Tide and many others will be working to build these actions. We particularly encourage members to assist in building coalitions where possible.

September 20 is just three days before an emergency climate summit being held in New York. Youth in the Fridays For Future network are mobilizing for their largest global climate strike ever. [1] They have invited everyone to join them on September 20 and again the following Friday, September 27 when they will join Earth Strike for a general strike. (See Earth Strike.)

The people of Kashmir were never given the option of having their own state. Since 1947, their land has been fought over by India and Pakistan and divided between the two. At Independence in August 1947, Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state ruled by Maharaja Hari Singh, and was given the choice to join either India or Pakistan. Since J&K was a Muslim-majority state, many expected it to join Pakistan. On the other hand, the party leading the independence struggle, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, was secular and allied to the Indian National Congress.

As the Maharaja dithered over the decision, there was a Pakistan-backed invasion of tribesmen from the west in October 1947, and Hari Singh appealed to India to help fight them. India agreed on condition that J&K accede to India, and the Maharaja signed the instrument of accession which on the Indian side was conditional on approval by the people of the state. As fighting continued, the UN Security Council passed a resolution requiring Pakistan to withdraw its forces, India to withdraw most of its forces, and a plebiscite to be held to decide whether Kashmir should join India or Pakistan. However, neither side withdrew their forces, the plebiscite was never held, and the state has remained divided to this day.

In 1952, on the Indian side, Article 370, which specified the conditions on which the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) had acceded to India, was incorporated into the Constitution of India on the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir. In 1954, Article 35A was added with the agreement of the J&K Constituent Assembly. Since the Constituent Assembly dissolved itself on 25 January 1957 without recommending revocation of Article 370, it has been deemed to be permanent by the Supreme Court of India.

On 5 August 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of India revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which had given the state of J&K a considerable degree of autonomy, including having its own constitution and its own flag.

The Constitution of India does allow Article 370 to be revoked, but only with the prior approval of the Kashmiri people’s elected representatives in J&K’s constituent assembly. Even the approval of J&K’s legislative assembly was not sought because it had been dissolved in November 2018 by the BJP-appointed governor. On August 5, he fraudulently provided consent on behalf of millions of Kashmiris as they were held in captivity in their homes at gunpoint, while elected political leaders, even those who have been in coalitions with the BJP, were detained and all means of communication, including cellphones, landlines and the internet, were cut off.

The Revocation of Article 370 also involved the scrapping of Article 35A of the Indian constitution, which, crucially, reserved the right to own land and immoveable property, as well as the right to vote and contest elections, to seek government employment and obtain state welfare benefits, to permanent residents of the state. Now, J&K has been carved up into two Union Territories ruled directly from Delhi, a move designed to further humiliate the already subjugated population.

This revocation by the Indian government is the most impressive feat yet achieved in the BJP’s steady demolition of India’s democracy over the past five years. The central government’s unilateral abrogation of the terms on which Kashmir acceded to India means that the state is no longer legally linked to India, and India becomes a foreign occupying power. Previous governments have been guilty of grievous violations of Article 370 as well as human rights violations in Kashmir, but this is the first time that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir has no legal basis whatsoever.

The excuses provided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for making this move – to end separatist violence and develop J&K to the level of the rest of India – make no sense. Separatist violence will not be ended by enraging even those Kashmiris who previously wanted to be part of India by demolishing their democratic rights. The economic arguments the Indian government gives are bogus too.

Far from lagging behind the rest of India, Kashmir is ahead of many states in India, including Modi’s and BJP president and government minister, Amit Shah’s home state of Gujarat. Kashmir has much lower infant and under-five mortality rates, lower percentages of underweight children and women, higher percentages of fully immunised children and girls aged 15-19 with at least 8 years of schooling, and higher life expectancy despite the ongoing conflict. Most strikingly, the poverty ratio in Kashmir is much lower than the national average. This is in large part due to Kashmir’s own constitution, under which extensive land reforms were undertaken in the 1950s, drastically reducing the landlessness and rural poverty which haunt the rest of India. Kashmir’s special status has been responsible for this reduction in poverty, both by allowing for the land reforms and by preventing non-Kashmiris from acquiring land in Kashmir.

This brings us to the real reasons, political, economic and ideological, why this drastic move has been made by India: it opens the door to a land-grab by settlers from the rest of India, which will also make it possible to change the demography of J&K. Muslim-majority Kashmir has always been a thorn in the flesh of Hindu supremacists, who in 1948 had killed and expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Jammu. The abrogation of Article 370 allows them to ‘integrate’ J&K into India by changing its ethnic composition. In other words, the intention is to turn Kashmir into a settler-colony like Palestine. It is not a coincidence that India, which from Independence had been a strong supporter of the Palestinian liberation struggle, has under Modi – the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel and literally embrace Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – become a staunch ally of Israel.

At the same time, Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists (both armed and unarmed) who call for uniting Kashmir with Pakistan offer an ‘alternative’ that would be disastrous for women, religious minorities, and the secular majority. They have acted in tandem with the Hindu supremacists to silence progressive voices and undermine democracy in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the war hysteria whipped up by Hindu supremacists in India and Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan serves to divert attention from the abysmal failure of both these states to satisfy even the most basic needs of their people, and can lead to an escalation of the armed conflict between them. Russia backs India, China backs Pakistan, and the US calls on India and Pakistan to remain calm, while Trump’s overt racism and anti-Muslim bigotry serves to encourage the same attitudes in India.

At this moment of unprecedented trauma and repression, we, the Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists, express our whole-hearted solidarity with the people of Jammu & Kashmir and reaffirm their fundamental right to determine their own future in their own land. At a time when support for Jammu & Kashmir’s freedom is treated as treason in both India and Pakistan, we would especially like to extend our solidarity to socialists and progressives there and their counterparts in India and Pakistan.

August 12, 2019

Alliance of Middle East Socialists